>> from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering the em. Where Radio twenty nineteen brought to you by the PM where >> hi. Welcome to the Cube. Lisa Martin with John Furrier way are in the middle of the excitement and the action at the, um where Radio twenty nineteen in San Francisco. Please welcome back to the Cube. David Tennant House, the chief research officer at the end. Where. David Welcome back. >> Thank you. It's always great to have the Cube here radio, >> and it's we had in a really exciting day. And then suddenly this whole space opens up and you can imagine all the innovation and the collaboration that's going on in here. This is the fifteenth radio. This is just one of several big programs that the M where does that really inspires and fosters this really collaborative, innovative culture? You've been here for five years. You came from Microsoft tells a little bit about what makes not just radio, but the emir's culture of innovation unique and really gives it some competitive advantage in the market. >> Yeah, well, so that you know, I think there's a number of different things there. People are super passionate about technology I think there's also this shared thing at P m. Where which is, you know, we're a little understated, right? We're not a big consumer brand. And, you know, we almost pride ourselves in creating technology that goes under the covers, right? So whether it's inside the data center, you know, can we make, you know, with virtual ization, right, Khun? Oui. Make it so that you can run ten times as many virtual machines as you had physical machines and the applications never have to know, right? So that's kind of, you know, for us, it's perfect, technically hard problem and, you know, a little understated. So that kind of, you know, fits with our culture. I think another thing that we found, you know, having a research group often a challenge. His researchers will go to people in the product teams, and they sort of want to start the discussion. I've got this new idea, and maybe it could really help you with your product. And, you know, meanwhile, of course, the product people are, you know, they're working against deadlines. They want to get stuff out. They don't want people derailing their, you know, their agenda and their work. So something we find at PM where which is really I find unique, is let's say we goto a product team in many other companies environments, and I'm really not naming anyone. What happens is you gotta have a discussion with somebody who sort of, you know, is the expert on whatever name your technology and you say the reason starting point isn't Hey, I've got this whole new way of doing your stuff, right? Starting point is can you tell me how your stuff works? And usually the response that other companies is. Why do you want to know? Right. It's a really pointed defense of we find it. The m where is really people are incredibly open. I don't, you know, know exactly how this got embedded in the culture. Maybe because it was a spin off from the university, but deeply embedded in this culture is Oh, yeah, let me tell you how this stuff works. And, uh, you know, maybe you'LL have a better idea. We don't even have to start with, You know, we have a better idea. It's like, you know, and then from there way can have ongoing discussions about >> Oh, that prints and improve it. That Cruz, why you have a community? Yeah, transparent creates openness that creates solidarity around open >> concept. Exactly. And and that's kind of what you see here. Radio. I don't know if people can see in the background is This is, you know, already day for in the Expo Hall and people don't want to leave and they're walking around. They're looking at each other's posters, they're talking to each other, making connections, and then they're going to build on those connections in the coming, you know, week. It's months and over the next year. And, you know, this is they said, you know, this has been going on for four days. You think that by now people have seen all the posters, they talked about everything there is still finding things that they want to talk to the kid. >> The candy store is a lot to taste here and learn ivory engaged graphic contents good and congratulations and thank you. And I just want to add, >> like something I love is, uh, getting here. Actually, before people arrive on the first day each year because when they come in, it's like greeting old friends right. It's sort of like a reunion except nobody's worried about, you know, like school reunion. You know, people are just playing happy to see each other, so that fits with that community thing, you know, because sometimes they're there in their teams and they don't necessarily get what you're being humble. We've talked last year about some of the content you put together in the team, so it's not. It's a hive mind, but you're the chief researcher, >> So you've gotta figure out on at least some canvas to start shaping framing sets of agendas to go after that. So if you can. So Lisa and I were just talking about this here today about how if you have a tech canvas, you don't want to create barriers of thinking. You want to open it up but not make it two restricted. That's your job. What can you tell us about the research agenda that's here and way out there and how how do you see that aperture range >> of yeah topics? Well, I think you know, I want to re first before even getting into that agenda, reaffirm a key point you made right, which is don't constrain people too much. So radio, by the way, is really very, you know, bottoms up. This is not about saying, you know, here's the four topics people really submit. It's a very competitive process people want to be. Not every engineering BM where gets to come to radio, right? It's it's eighteen hundred developers, which is an incredible commitment by the company. He's still a small fraction of our community, so they're actually submitting, you know, bottoms up, uh, to you know, see you and then we have a program committee that reviews it. So that's Ah, bottoms up part of the process from where I sit, You know what I think happens is whether it's our research team or filtering. You know, we'LL look at what comes. Bottoms up and say, Well, what's the signal to noise? For example, there's you know, we've had this year a tremendous amount of machine learning activity, and you see this in the posters here and in the presentations. However, you know that it wasn't too hard to detect a rising signal a couple years ago. So in that case a couple years ago, we said, OK, this is important. We see it in the external community way see it in the developer community. We see it within our own teams and developers. Clearly important. So starting a few years ago, we pulled together some of the senior most technologists, the principal engineers, a subset of them, and said, Hey, we want you guys to dio what we call a of a test study for tests are going faster, but also Veum, Where? Technology Study. We want you to actually do a strategy, but not a business strategy. Technology strategy. Look at the landscape of this. Look at where we are. Look at where we need to be and start charting a course. So in that sense, what we you know, coming out of that was, for example, information of an internal machine Learning program office? Who? One of them gold. It's billed the ML community. You talked about that before. Inside the company. It's not just a technical goal, it's an organizational on community goal. And that's just sort of, you know, kind of one example that wasn't the only output of that. But it's it's one example and what you see a big surprise, you know, kind of ten x, the engagement in the space so that that would be, you know, one case. I think one of the key things is, well, pick up on different topics. And then the thing that we do that I think it's different from some other companies to stop and say what our enterprise is going to need to do because at the end of the war in enterprise company and our customers, our enterprises and their needs her actually, although they're in different verticals, for example, let me just use machine learning. But it could be blockchain. It could be I ot. Actually, what they need is different from, say, the machine learning that that the hyper scale er's needs. So we realised that actually, there's a very interesting needs for us to explore the underserved parts of machine learning because all of these companies, if you look at them, they have a larger number of machine learning problems to work on the hyper scaler. You know, Facebook, Google, love them. They're actually working on a very focused set of problems, right? It's you know it's at serving. It's the social network graph. It's, you know, cat photo recognition, and I don't mean to knock those and they've got a great business is built around them. But notice it's a small number of problems. They do it it immense scale. Okay, given Enterprise probably wants to apply machine learning to a large number of problems, they're not going to run each of those problems on a million servers there, actually, probably running those problems on tens or hundreds of the EMS, right? And so what's the technology they need to address those problems and you can go through way looked at, you know, machine learning That way. We looked at I ot that when he said, You know, look, we think the analytics and the M L. That's a really cool things. We want to play in that space, too. But you know what everybody's trying to do. That, and not a lot of attention being paid to our enterprise is going to secure right and and managed all these I O T devices and the gateways to the devices. So we chartered a strategy for both research and business in that space, watching same thing, really exciting technology Now for enterprises, it's not about big point. It's not about currency, right? It's a money decentralized trust. It's an infrastructure for decentralized trust and effectively think of this is, you know, a database like thing. Except now it's going to be shared across many different organizations. And it's going to change how organizations work with each other and how they work with their auditors on how they work with their regulators. So this is great. >> But, you know, let's focus on what am I the way I just retweeted while you were talking? I just got a clip from last year. I asked you that question about Blockchain. You nailed it Way talked about how all the hype and fraud and i CEOs and confusing it. Yeah, but the world kept moving along. A lot of progress on the supply chain side, lots of interest, rafters trust. He sat realized that it's not about >> the eye. Indio. Yeah, so wave you, that is, You know that there's the high poker and, you know, they'LL be a deflation after the hiker passes. But there's real signal under there and so, you know, and we just turn our strategy and we keep marching down that path, and we're, you know, building up more partners, more people to work with. So it's it's that sort of thing. Quantum computing, right? We're not, you know, developing our own quantum computers. I can tell you that right now, and we're not even doing quantum algorithms. I have some albums researchers, but they're not doing quantum algorithm. You know, I kind of wish we were doing some of that stuff, but what we did do, and we looked at this and we said, Okay, hold on a key challenges. Uh, when the quantum computers do show up, we're going to need to transition to new cryptography to quantum resistant. You know, our post quantum there. Two terms, they're used. Cryptography enterprise customers are going to need to do that. Well, one second, they can't wait till this shows up. It takes ten years. Change your crypto. And by the way, you know if you've encrypted data and other people got a copy of your encrypted data, if it's long living data like, you know, health care records, you don't want them decrypting that in five or ten years. So you got a sort of start now and again, this goes back to what oh enterprise customers need to do Well, okay. The new crypto standards for miffed and others aren't quite ready, Okay, but But by the time they're ready, it's going to be too late to get started. Okay, But we could start working with our customers to work on crypto agility to change how they handle their cryptography. First off, get a good inventory of it, and then get set up so that they're using essentially plug mobile libraries so that it's easier for them to change their cryptography as soon as the standard shows up. And by the way, even if quantum computing takes a lot longer than we all think, this is good hygiene anyway. In other words, it's just a no regrets move for our customers and Khun. We sort of help them go down that path. And this is an example where we can actually also partner with our colleagues that are, say, other parts of Del technologies to help make that work for We're working with others in the industry, you know, intel, and we've kind of convened a form of players within the industry. You know, start working in that direction again. What do enterprise you know, what's the cool new technology. What oh enterprises need. >> So you talked about this event being open in terms of like the agenda and the topics being driven from the bottom of it, That gets really cool. So in the spirit of talking about customers and, like you were saying designing for what enterprises need and all of the variations that encompasses where is customer influence not just a radio, but within the em wears research and innovation programs and strategy. What's that? I mean, I just Advisors don't like that. It's >> a great question. So, like many companies, you know, we do have various advisory body's right, so we bring them in and, well, we'Ll sort of half like, you know, the sea tabs are customer technical advisory body. So the more technical people in some of our kind of more leading customers and we'LL show them things that we're working on, you know, under any kind of India arrangement, and get their feedback, you know, sort of OK, Does this make sense? You know? If not, why not? If it does, you know often it's not that finery, right? It's how would you use it? And we really sort of them give that feedback backto our teams. Now many people do this kind of thing, so we have lots of other customer engagements. We bring customers into forms like radio to be on panels, breakouts, things like that to give presentation so that basically, let's face it in one or two events, that's not going to convey much signal to our engineers. It's a madam, a six storey engineers way want you to be out talking to customers, right? So getting our engineers to be at PM world but way have programmes to actually allow engineers and encourage them to get out, make customer visits above and beyond. And by the way, if you look at it again, our principal engineers in our fellows I think what you find is the vast bulk of them are distinguished because they love engaging with customers. They don't just do it because it's part of the job. They love getting that feedback, so it actually helps them in their career, and we try to sort of essentially teach that to folks. One of the programs we have that in the CTO office, but I love it's not him. It's not in my part, So you know this is a case of I love all the things that we have that just my own, You know, uh, is it's like it's like loving your nieces and nephews, right? Not just your own children way. You were going to ask you your favorite child so way have, like, the CTO ambassadors program, Uh, which basically is coming from the field. So we have, you know, field engineers. They're not on the development side, but these air super technical people that are out in the field touching our customers all the time in any company, there's always a subset of those folks that just have a really good intuitions for where the customers are going and are good at raising their hands about that. So way actually have a program with CTO Ambassador Program CTO way where, you know, literally we give them a pin right way, give them a bad on DH. So we've tried to identify that subset of the field engineers and way regularly bring them in, you know, to pollo alter or bring them together. Whether it's a V m world or radio or whatever again, same thing. We're going to let them know what we've got cooking. We're going to get their feedback. We're gonna hear from them on. And this is not just on research right away. This is on the product pipe lines. You know what's going on in the road map and everything else now to me again. That's just actually a starting point. Because when I put my people in front of Seo is its telling my people, this is the group of folks. When you have a new idea, don't just talk to the product people go find CTO is because, you know, one of the best ways and I'm gonna be a little selfish. One of the best ways for us to influence the customers it influence the company is to get customers excited about something you were doing right. So you know Helen Lawson talk about technology push. And if you really want to be a success, we'LL get innovating it. In a large company, you need to create whole absolutely, and so the CDOs are great. They help us find people to do posies with, because you have to find just the right. You have to find a customer that has a need for this new stuff, but they also have to be somebody that understands this isn't yet a product. This is a journey, right? We're going to jointly try something out. You're gonna learn about whether this new tech can help you and how it could help you. We're going to learn what the product ultimately means, but, you know, you're not gonna be able to actually take out your checkbook at the end and get it right away. So you have toe, you know, be comfortable investing the time and energy, and then they have >> a spy in three that is really one of the core elements that's essential to drive innovation. >> Absolutely. And you need that. As I said, you need that customer partnership to help fine tune things. It's, you know, one of the things more broadly I try to do with research team is, you know, on the one, and give them the freedom to say, Hey, I have a new idea and I want to explore that new idea. That's great. Now, if you think about it right, then they're running open. Luke, they're running based on, you know, kind of their guesses. What educated guess. Right? And their intuition what people might want in the future. So that's good. What a then do it say. Okay, that's great. Uh, you know, you did a little bit. You wrote a paper build a prototype. Okay, so now they get a prototype bill. Okay, That starts getting this idea little more concrete. They're okay with that. The next step, it sort of is. Okay. Now, >> you got to >> get somebody to use that prototype, because I need you to get. And you need you to get feedback and create a feedback loop. Because otherwise, what's gonna happen is they made that first intuitive guests. So let's say they had their really phenomenal and they have a seventy five percent chance of getting it right. Okay, that that. But if they now continue to make a series of educated guesses and they have, ah, you know, seventy eighty percent chance on each educated guests and they make a siri's of four or five of those they have almost, you know, very quickly, close to zero chance of being in the right spot if you just multiply out the probabilities. But if they make that first big league and they start getting customer feedback That actually helps them right get more and more focused on where the bull's eye is. You have a really great chance of changing, >> so they don't build this great technology with no customers. Crichton second >> don't want somebody for a problem, right? But if you want to, you know, kind of have >> some really big ball change. You've >> got to be. >> Well, you've got to be willing to make that first big step without the feedback because the customers don't wear right. And if you just went to the customers said if you had this, what would you do? And they probably say, No, no, no. Instead of that, I want another feature over here. So you got to go and build that first prototype and take the leap of faith. The issue is, if you compound the leap of faith, your odds of being successful slope. If you quickly get into the hands of the customers, get feedback and start focusing in on where the value is, your chance goes up dramatically. >> Awesome. I wish we had more time with you, David. We're gonna let you get back to all of the amazing innovation that I have no doubt it's going on right behind us. Thank you. Something, Johnny on the Cube today. >> Look forward to seeing you again soon. >> Absolutely. For John Ferrier, I'm least Martin. You're watching the cubes. Exclusive coverage of the young Where? Radio twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching.

>> [Narrator] From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Radio 2018. Brought to you by VMware. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back everyone. We're here with theCUBE in San Francisco for exclusive coverage for VMware's Radio 2018. I'm John Furrier, your host. This is the event where everyone comes together in the R&D and the organic engineering organization of VMware to flex their technical muscles, stretch their minds, compete for the papers, and also get to know each other. And the key person behind this is the chief research officer David Tennenhouse. Thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you John. Really glad to be here. >> So you're the chief research officer. You got to look at the company-wide agenda. But this event is more of a special event, organically. Talk about for the folks out there watching what's different about this event that goes outside the scope of kind of the top-down research. >> Yeah this is really, you know, for the developers by the developers. So when you said I'm in charge, I'm definitely not in charge. And you know, we have a program committee. There's a programming committee chair. It's much like the way an academic conference might be organized, where you know, there's kind of a group of academics that sort of watch over the content. In this case, we have many hundreds of folks that submit proposals into radio. They can't all get selected. It's very competitive because in addition, if you get accepted, you get a ticket to radio. You get to attend. So everybody really wants to do that. >> Talk about the organic nature. 'Cause this is one of the things that I've seen that's been part of a world-class organization. Like Amazon has their own process for it called the big idea. They have certain working documents that process to foster any idea across the organization. How important is that as part of Radio? I mean literally it's anyone right? >> Well it's not just Radio. It's important to the whole company. So I think of this as when you're working on innovation, you're gonna have sort of a breadth component. You want everybody doing a little. And some of that's gonna be incremental. One thing I learned in a prior role at a different company is you know if you add up a lot of two percenters, that's how you can double things and keep on Moore's law every year. So you're gonna get some of that. And you're gonna get some really disruptive ideas. So you know, from a top-down point of view, we try to drive some disruptions. Some disruptions show up organically from the troops. And a ton of that breadth stuff shows up. >> I'm honored to be here. It's the 14th year, and some T-shirts commemorating the key milestones from way back in the day. This is the first year press was allowed in. I noticed a handful of folks came in to kind of document this. A lot of the brightest minds in VMware here. Again, great to have us. We're super excited. But share with us. Like, what's happened over the years. Give some examples of where people were coming together, where there's a collision of ideas, and just that combustion that happens. Can you share some stories around key notable, or potentially as Raghu pointed out, there's been some misses too. (laughing) >> Yeah, you're gonna get some of that. I mean you've gotta take risks. Not everything's gonna work. You know and just to speak to misses. What I've learned in the innovation and research space is as much as anything, it's about timing. It's pretty rare that you completely technically miss. Usually engineers have an idea. They'll figure out a way to make it happen. Then the question is, is it the right time? Are the customers ready? Is the market ready to go in that direction? So, that's just to talk to that. >> Timing's everything. >> Timing is a big deal. >> Well there's never a miss too in R&D because if you, like Pat Yelson said, understand when it's gotta be re-casted. Know if it works or not. >> Yeah just understanding. So those are the ones actually you know I feel, what I really hate is if for some reason we have to end a project and we haven't actually gotten to the bottom of it. And so you don't know yes or no. And sometimes that can be the kind of time's run out, right. You've decided well, even if it works, it's too late. But you know, getting back to some of the examples, I'll focus on some more recent ones. We had some really interesting work come together on containers. And there were some folks that, and this is going back like four years ago. Containers aren't a new story, and certainly not for VMware. But around four years ago, there was a proposal at Radio that had to do with hey let's make containers a first class citizen on VMware's platform. Okay, so top level that makes great sense. Let's go do it. Containers are great for developers. The IT folks still want the isolation they get form VMs. Let's put these together really effectively. So that was top level. There was a next level, the idea that said gee at Radio, a couple years before, there'd been this idea of being able to do something called VM fork, or being able to clone a VM. And saying you know... And this came out of our end user computing group, the VDI folks. And if you think about it, if you've got a virtualized PC, you want to be able to clone that so you can start these up really fast. And the container folks said hey, we've got the same problem. Could we actually try to make use of that technology and use that as part of our bigger container push? So you know, those are examples of things that came together at Radio. And there are also examples of things where the market timing may not have quite been there. So we went out with the container work. That was actually post-Radio. It was funded. We incubated it. You've got vSphere Integrated Containers hit the market exactly the right time. >> Timing right there. >> Right, timing right there. But what we learned as we actually started doing trials with customers was that they didn't actually need the instant clone on the containers. What they needed is throughput. They wanted to know that they could do large numbers per second as opposed to you'll get that container really quickly. So as the team went along, they actually shifted away from that fork idea. We'll probably come back to it when the time's right for it. >> Well you have a nice little positioning there. I like the timing. 'Cause by the way, entrepreneurial timing is the same way. You go outside... >> I was a VC. (laughing) >> Okay, so you know okay. Timing's everything. How many times you seen that entrepreneur wicked early on it going... And they keep scratching that itch and finally they get it. The art of the timing. But also the art of knowing when to, what to keep in inventory. Pat mentioned vCloud Air as an interesting example. Recognizing abandonment there. Okay hey, let's just stop, take pause. Let's use what we have. >> Do something else. >> Do something else. >> Gotta do something else. And by the way along the way, in parallel with vCloud Air, we had built up these vCloud partners. And that's phenomenal right. So we have you know, people think in terms of a couple of very large public clouds. But we've got literally thousands of people running public clouds in either specialized markets, or particular countries, that are running on our platform. And you know that whole vCloud Air effort helped push that forward. >> So where were you a VC? Just curious. >> I was actually in a company that fits with sort of my role in research and innovation. I was in a specialized firm, boutique firm, new venture partners, that specialized in spin outs from large companies. This goes to the timing, right. I'd previously been at another large company. You know, and whenever you have a research portfolio, you're gonna have some projects that you started. They were technically successful. That's your first notch. Then you go look and say hey, can I find a business model for it. Some of these are both technically successful. You find a business model, but you had anticipated that the company strategically was gonna zig. The company zagged. Now this is a great opportunity that doesn't quite fit. So you know, we did those as spin outs. >> Well I love the perspective too of you said earlier, David, around not getting to the bottom of it. And that's the most frustrating part. Because you just gotta get some closure you know. Like okay, this thing, we took it to the end, completion, this is not gonna... Good try guys. >> And we know why. >> And you know why. Now let's take it to the next level. Now the market we're living in now I heard with Ray O'Farrell, I was talking with earlier. We talked about the confluence of these big markets coming together. Infrastructure market, which is kinda declining on paper. But cloud is filling the void. Big data's becoming AI, and blockchain over the top. These are four major markets. And at the center of them, intersecting all these nuances, security, data, IoT. >> Governance. >> Governance. So there's some sticky areas that are evolving based upon these moving markets. Opportunity recognition's another one. So this is what you're kind of doing now with the research. Talk about opportunity recognition. >> We definitely do that. And I do want to say on the infrastructure side, you know something to recall is that as people, you know they've got their private clouds. Those are individually getting actually bigger as they consolidate. But now with IoT, you're seeing edge computing pop up. Right, so the private infrastructure doesn't go away, it moves around. It's like a liquid. And you pour it from place to place in some sense. >> Moving computer around. Sound like what Ray O'Farrell was talking about in his keynote, early days of VMware. Again, Compute's the center of this. >> Right, Compute, but you know I'm a networking guy so you know, we've grown that. And I think that in fact, you know more and more as we make progress with software defined network, and network virtualization. And if you think about that, so you know let's look at that. So Compute's definitely at the center of what happens in the data center, in the cloud, right. You're gonna want to be able to string those piece together. So today we've got AirWatch. I think that's strategically really key. Because it gives us a little bit of presence on the edge devices that touch people. That's one of the ways information gets from the physical world to the virtual world is through people. >> It's an edge device. People are things too. >> IoT, right. So we're you know, working hard. And that's one of the projects that we incubated, and researched, and is now become a business at Vmware. It's to get that presence right at the edge of the gateways that bridge between the things that are connected to the physical world, and bringing it into the virtual world. Now if we can put our software defined network between all that, so you got it between the public cloud, the private cloud, the mobile devices in people's hands. >> And on premise, data center. >> Exactly, all of 'em. >> All right, so here's a question for you. This is one of those trick questions. Is the cell phone an edge device or an IoT device? >> Well I think it's in many ways both. And what I think of it is is more of a gateway. If you think about the IoT world, you have the things. >> IoT is a strict definition though in your mind, right. People refer to IoT as more of a sensor thing to a physical device. >> I tend to think of it as it's got some connection to some physical device. It's able to bring information in from the physical world. Okay, so now you look at your cell phone. It can bring information. It's got that microphone. It's got that camera, right. It can bring information in. >> [John] Connect it to a physical person. >> It can put information back out. Yeah, through a physical person. I've been in the space for a long time. Going back to my time at DARPA, we set out to create the IoT world. This wasn't an accident, right. We looked at this and said, okay the main way information gets between these two worlds today is through human beings. The way I used to explain this to the generals is you know, we can't keep putting human beings in the direct line of fire of information technology. So we've gotta get these devices, gotta get all these sensors. It's taken a long time. This is you know again, timing. But if you look at the research world. >> By the way, incredible work you've done by the way from there to here, it's been amazing. >> You know pull this along. But you know so when you look at that cell phone, it's got some of those sensors. It's got actually a whole pile of sensors in the phones today. It's got actuation, the ability to put the information back out. It's also a gateway. Because typically you know, particularly through its Bluetooth functionality, and as we get Bluetooth low power now. So it's also acting as a gateway to connect up other devices around your body, network etc. >> Personal networking, whatever comes on your physical presence. >> So you know, turn that around and it says in the IoT world, we've gotta manage gateways. We've gotta make sure gateways stay secure. Because they're really gonna be the sort of main perimeter, the line of defense. If you think about all these things that are gonna be out there, as an industry, we're gonna collectively try very hard to secure all those things. But let's be realistic. They're gonna be supplied from a wide variety of companies, and they're gonna last longer than people might think. >> How much of those devices are operationally, operation technology is non IP, versus not IP. Internet Protocol. >> Non Internet Protocol. Yeah, yeah. >> Internet Protocol now. >> [David] Non Internet, you had it right. >> Got the VC in the brain there. The VC, IP, I'm like get that IP right. So internet protocol devices, which has some challenges but that's getting fixed, versus OT just sensors proprietary. >> Yeah well either proprietary or let's say, you know it may be an industry standard, but an industrial standard. So today, a very large fraction, particularly you asked about how we focused at Vmware. Well one of our foci is we're about what are our enterprise customers gonna need. So when we think IoT, we're not really thinking that much about the consumer devices. We're thinking about those enterprise devices. So a lot of those will use... >> That's where AirWatch might come in. So employees still have phones though. >> Employees still have phones. So that's why I said, so there's the human interface. We want to be there. And there's the other enterprise interfaces to all these sensors. That could be in a factory. It could be in a smart city, any number of places. So as we pull information in from those, we're gonna find that they come from a lot of different suppliers and they're gonna last a long time. You know, even if you buy a device that's got a three to four year lifetime, probably 10 to 20% of those still gonna be around 10 years later, right. You're smiling because you know that in your home you have some wifi connected devices that are a little older than they probably should be. >> And they have full processing capability threaded processes on it, which could be running malware as we speak. >> So as I said, as an industry, we'll try to secure those really edge things. But the reality is we're gonna have to draw the line at the gateway. >> It's a lot more security work. I totally hear you. I mean the light bulb could have a full thread on there. The surface area is so huge now. >> And there have been attacks on light bulbs. >> Yeah I know. So I gotta ask you a question. 'Cause you bring up this networking edge, which by the way I love anything that's network. 'Cause I think this is the future of work. How is the future of work impacting some of the R&D you're doing. Because you talked about AirWatch them having more mobility. The human impact, society, whether it's mission driven and or just human collaboration going digital. You're gonna need to have policies. You need to have a networked society. This is super relevant. But it brings back that future work. >> It does. And so couple different aspects. You know, one you know, which just relates to a point you raised is if you look at something like our Workspace ONE product, if you've had a chance to do that. It's kind of a win win, because you get one portal. So you know, an employee for an enterprise, they've got one portal. They get access, it doesn't matter whether they're getting to a web app, they're getting to a you know, a DVI supported application. They're getting to something that's on a server, something on a SAS player, right. They get through that portal. So for them it's convenient. I mean for me as a manager, I love this, right. Because whether I'm on my cell phone, I'm on a laptop, doesn't matter, I can get to the same expense app. I can approve things. >> You don't need to carry two phones. My work phone and my... >> And I can do all these approvals really easily, right. So I also don't worry. I don't see the difference between which device I'm on. At the same time that you're delivering that convenience to the user, you're delivering governance because the IT team can be deciding how that portal's populated, how things are connected, right, and how the wiring works. All the authorization, you've got a common identification system and all of that. So that's kind of very specific to you know, let's say near term changing the user interface. In terms of the broader future of work, clearly machine learning is the big story here, right. And I think that what we're gonna see is, particularly again in enterprise, more and more need for data analysts to be able to look at the big data. We're gonna see sort of more and more use of machine-learning technologies. It's gonna you know basically creep in everywhere. And we're getting this at just the right time. So if you want to think about future work in the big national and international scale, what you really sort of stop to look at is say, gee, okay, these machines are gonna do all this work. What about the people? And you know a lot of people therefore get concerned. Gee, the computers are gonna take away all the jobs. Right, you get these sound bytes. >> I think right now we're worried about fake news and real content. (laughing) >> Well let's come back to that one later. But there is a sense of gee, you know, the computers will take on all the jobs. And you know what I think people are not doing carefully is looking at the demographics. Because if you look at basically all the developed economies for practical purposes, we actually have a demographic problem. Our problem is actually not a surplus of workers. It's gonna be a shortage of workers. In fact, actually in the US right now, you're starting to feel this. Now that's at the peak of the economic cycle. So of course you feel it, you know, a bit. >> They need trained workers too. Also people who qualify. >> Right. So I think the thing we really need to look at is how do we do a much better job at matching, you know, sort of workers, both folks coming into the workplace, people with existing skills, to available opportunities. Because actually we're gonna have a shortage of workers. And it's not just sort of the US and Europe. I mean China, Japan. Well Japan for a long time. China, headed to a shortage of workers. I was out in Singapore not too long ago and was surprised to find out not just that they're concerned. But they went and looked at the Southeast Asian countries around them that are their markets. They're looking at a shortage of workers. So you know, if we didn't have something like machine-learning and AI coming along, we'd be sitting there saying, how are we gonna keep our economies growing? >> We need augmentation for sure. >> We need this augmentation. And it's coming at just, you know, you talked about timing. You know, it's coming at just the right time. Now, there definitely are gonna be some tough transitions along the way, right. So we definitely, you know, for example, as autonomous vehicles come along, we've gotta figure out, okay, all those people that are driving vehicles, what are they gonna do going forward? But let's not kid ourselves too, you know. If you've got trucks moving around with high-value cargoes, you're not gonna leave those unattended, right. We're gonna have to figure all this out. So there's gonna be a lot of interesting opportunities. >> What's your take on blockchain? Well first of all, GDPR, real quick. Train wreck, useful? >> I think it's you know, if you backed up and asked me four or five years ago, I'd have said train wreck. And largely because we still don't have the sort of kind of international consensus on what the rules should be. >> But you mentioned governance earlier. That certainly needs to be at the center of the action. >> Right, but you know, if we take a look now, it seems like it's showing up at just the right time, right. You know, in that sense. I think part of what's happened is over the intervening years, a lot of countries outside of Europe, because they realize these regulations would apply to them, they've worked with European regulators to help the regulators understand the technology, you know, help the companies understand. >> That's a good politically correct answer. I'll just say I think it's a shit-show personally. But you know. I mean it's gonna force people... It's like Y2K in money making, but Y2 never happened. It's forcing people to really, I think the value of GDPR is the big companies are gonna get hit hard on some suits. Just the trolling thing bothers me. Just the trolls that come out of the woodwork. But I think the positive that puts the center of the value proposition, making data, not a one off, like backup and recovery. It has to be core to technical operations. >> And making privacy something that's really in that first class category. You know, as I said. >> Great first step, but... There's a big but. >> There is more to be done. >> Hopefully they don't go after us little guys. All right, final question, blockchain. We are super excited about blockchain. You have teams working on this. >> [David] I am super excited about blockchain. >> Talk about your view on blockchain. Why are you excited about it? Obviously we feel it's very efficient, makes inefficiencies efficient across all industries. Your thoughts. >> Okay so again, we look at things through this prism. What are enterprise customers gonna be looking at? What do they want? And you know, so we're not you know... I think you're in the same place. We're not looking at the crypto currencies, right. That's not the thing. And in fact, we're not even looking at cohabiting on the Bitcoin blockchain. Because do you really want to run your business in the same place that a whole bunch of other people are running illegal businesses and the whole thing. >> And by the way, there's some technical issues. (laughing) >> We'll get to that. We're gonna get there. But just even as a starting point. So we pretty quickly looking even you know, three, four years ago said, okay enterprise is not gonna want to go that way. But this idea of a federated ledger, right. So if you can make federated ledgers and we can have reusable technology, that means now, if I want to federate with other companies or other organizations, or you know, or you need companies federating with governments, or governments federating with each other. Anywhere you want to pull together essentially a club for the exchange of data, with a persistent record of what happened, you've now got a common way of doing it, right. Or we can drive towards that. You know there'll be a standardization process to get there. But so it's not to me, federated ledgers means lowering the barrier to federation. And I think that's pretty exciting. Whole bunch of places. You know, supply chain, clearly one. Financial technology, but... >> David, we gotta spend some time, have you come in the studio. I'd love to explore some of these great topics with you. But I gotta ask you one final question. You know, with your history going back to ARPA, D-ARPA days, and looking at really the beginning of the information super highway, IP, connecting some universities together, to today, the waves that have gone through. We've talked about standards. The OSI stack, you had all these grandiose standard plans. Not all of them have happened exactly as planned. But defacto standards play a really important role. It galvanizes community, gives people guiding principles, a north star, whatever metaphor you want to use. The key is the enabling disrupting technologies, a defacto standard. What's happening now in your mind that you see out there that's starting to emerge as defacto? 'Cause certainly there's a lot of standard things going, open sources for tier one citizen growing, rapidly, which is greatness. Cloud is booming, unlimited resources, Compute, fingertip compute... All this is good. >> Yeah. >> All these new standards, I got Kubernetes, I got this going on, what's emerging? >> Well again, they're defacto, right. Kubernetes is an interesting example of basically open source meets defacto. And that's pretty exciting right. I mean, we're excited about it. I think people are often surprised we're a fan of open source. And I guess really, I just like to sort of back up a notch. Because you know what you touched on is defacto standards, whether it's open source or not, have suddenly become a lot easier. When I say suddenly, over like a 10 year period. And I think what's going on there is this is part of the change to software. So you know, if you're talking about hardware, and you got screws, you know, and you got threads, these physical things have to match, and they have to match exactly, right. Say when you travel overseas, you need to carry converters, physical converters to convert from one thing to another. So if you want to interoperate, if you and I want to have stuff that interoperates, we needed to build like either, do the same thing, or have a physical adapter. There was a cost to not having a standard. If you think about in the software world, we can build software converters, right. So if I've got you know, say we've got two, or three, or four, or even 50 defacto standards in the software world. You know, blockchain. So there's 50 new things. Everybody launches their own. Pretty quickly, the market will drive that down to a small number. And then you can put software converters in place. So we no longer actually have to get to one. >> [John] That's the software economic model. >> It's a big change. >> And that is huge. So by the way, we had Dirk Hohndel on at CubeCon. Love his open source mission, just a shout out to you guys, doing a great job. You guys at VMware certainly that we know, love you over on the East Coast. Final prediction. Final question. Give us a prediction. >> Give you a prediction. >> 2018, second half of the year, what's gonna happen? What's gonna be a notable thing that you see out on the horizon that might happen in the marketplace that might be notable for people to stand up and pay attention to? >> I think we're gonna see some significant developments in the blockchain space. And it's gonna be in the category of people starting to announce real deployments. And you know, if you're sort of looking at that time frame, you know you've had a lot of different enterprises try things. We've had people kind of dabble at things. I think you're gonna start seeing some people really move significantly in that space. >> And do you think like, just to follow up on that, do you think like in the database world now, where by the way, it's okay to have a zillion databases now. 'Cause you talk about databases. >> But it consolidated down to a few players. >> You get some extraction layers. It's okay to have a few variety of blockchains. I mean, there's no one blockchain. >> Correct, so that's where I think as I said, you're gonna see actually a bunch of these deployments. They'll be using different technologies. And then the fun really starts right. As people consolidate, especially with open source, they swap ideas. We boil it down to what's the best of the best. We've got you know, stuff we're doing certainly to knock the throughput down, sorry throughput up, latency down. (John laughing) And you know, we think we've got a very scalable approach. And most important, you know something that's really... I don't know if you talked to people about our sustainability. You know, it's a key value for VMware. >> [John] Yeah, lot of great standards there, yeah. >> So you can imagine we looked at blockchain. We looked at proof of work. And we said that's proof of energy wasted. We're not going there. >> Gotta make it more efficient. >> I think you're gonna see more and more folks focusing on things like Byzantine fault tolerant. Ours is scalable. You know SBFT. >> Yeah performance is key. And the energy's a huge problem. >> But performance and at acceptable energy. You can't you know, just waste. It's immoral to just waste energy. And it really goes against what a lot of the whole IT industry's built up. You know, I think we've, over the decades, we've done a lot of things for the good of society. And we gotta stay the mission. >> I think as the more, I won't say mature, but big world-class organizations join in, I think that'll straighten itself out. And certainly, as any evolution would see, the web. I remember dial-up and AOL. It can't go as fast as this minicomputer. Well you don't get it, it's the web okay. David, thanks so much for coming on, appreciate it. Great conversation here at Radio 2018. I'm John Furrier, Cube coverage of VMware's annual 14th year conference, at Radio 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> Woman: From San Fransisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware Radio 2019. Brought to you by VMware. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware's Radio 2019, Lisa Martin with John Furrier, John, we started really bright and early this morning with a very excited Pat Gelsinger. VMware, this is the fifteenth Radio, Radio is R&D innovation offsite. There's about 1800 VMware engineers from lots of B.U.s, very competitive event, very passion driven event, and really just is a... what a great manifestation of the VMware culture and the spirit of innovation. >> This is the best of the best event, and the story around Radio 2019 is really a cumulation of multiple years, as you pointed out, of cultural innovation, engineering. VMware has always been an engineering culture, coming out of Stanford, and from day one they've had that guiding principle. They've also been open and transparent, as we heard on theCUBE interviews today, that has created the culture of community. Open Source dives beautifully into it. And so radio is about that cumulation of the talent. It's the best of the best internally, they submit papers, it's a bottoms-up process, so it's truly a meritocracy from an engineering standpoint. But it's a culture of engineering, and their job is to come up with the future, and what's notable about this event is it's the second year now theCUBE's been here. Last year was the first year they've invited press, so three outlets from the media were allowed, were one of them. And we get exposed, we get to look under the hood, and look at the engine of innovation coming down the road for VMware and their partners. So, it's a super exciting event, Radio is a community within VMware that's now global, 50% outside of North America and the United States, all a bottoms-up, a hive mind, we heard that here. Really successful for VMware to continue this, bringing the press in, get the stories out there, take that transparency and open message from the content. We can share it, we get access to the data, it's a beautiful co-creation formula with theCUBE and VMware. It's a success, and their challenge is can they take it global and extend it. >> And this is day four of Radio19 and you can hear the amount of people that are still here, still passionate, these are projects that they're doing outside of their day jobs. So, the transparency that you talked about, I loved when we were talking with David Tennenhouse about the bottoms-up approach, that this is not a set agenda, we're going to talk about Blockchain, and IOT, and security, this is driven as you said, from thousand-plus submissions of people who want to have papers presented here. >> People don't want to leave, because this is like a kid in the candy store, it's like being intoxicated with technology and there's so much content here. Now that's also a bellwether and a barometer of the company. If R&D is weak, you don't have the innovation. There's companies that don't really invest in R&D, they wouldn't have this kind of mojo or this kind of excitement. But VMware prides themselves on doing 15% R&D, that's way outside the box. The rest is all done within the constraints of what they're doing in the market, so relevance is high, but still room to play and dream the future. And again, I've always believed that you can't dream it up, you can't build it. >> Now of course, VMware, all about, as every business should be, we needed to be developing products and solutions and services that the market needs to solve real-world problems. One of the cool things we learned about today, John, is, from the EMEA CTO John Bagley, is the CTO Ambassador program, the CTOA program, where there are folks, and this is also a competitive program, it's a couple, I think you said a four year tenure to get folks through the program, but being out in the field, in customer sights, learning about all these enterprise organizations, what they actually need, so in that spirit of openness that you talked about, they're bringing in customer information, building and fostering relationships, so that what they're investing in from an R&D standpoint, is going to be able to solve customer problems that they don't even know they have today. >> Yeah, that Champion program, that Ambassador CTO program, that Joe mentioned, what's interesting about VMware, and this is what I love, I admire about the company, as well as companies like AWS and Amazon web services, the people are smart and they think about scaling. So, that's kind of a cliché these days, how does it scale, makes you look smarter if you ask that question, but VMware actually thinks about how to scale, and so, the problem that they had was, they had these field CTOs that were out evangelizing with customers half the time, and doing internal real CTO work around architecture with the teams to build great stuff and move that to market, they couldn't scale. So they used their community of their own ecosystem to find people to come in and replicate. You heard Joe Bagley, "I had to be Steve Herrod," cause he can't be everywhere. That's the mindset of this culture, and I think they have real opportunity to crush it at Open Source, they have a real opportunity to take the Radio culture, and superimpose that in as a new way to do work, new way to create distributed, decentralized teams, and ultimately better software, and at the end of the day, they have to attract great engineers and keep them, work on hard problems, because, Pat's ambitious. And we know Pat. What he says, and what's real, they're all catching up to Pat. Pat has this great vision and he's nailing it, but the engineers got to build what Pat says they got to do. When he says "I'm abstracting away Kubernetes, as an abstraction layer," yeah that sounds simple, but it's really hard to do. >> Absolutely, and I want to get your perspective too, on this, not just the culture of innovation, that you talked about, that VMware has had for a very long time, but also in the spirit of VMware leveraging their innovation programs like Radio, to attract and retain this high quality talent, from your perspective, how does a conference like this, which is kind of academic in nature, it's kind of like a science fair for engineers, how does it differ from some of the other companies, like a Google that say "we have innovation programs." In your perspective, how is this different? >> Well, Google actually is fairly similar in the sense that they came out of Stanford, they have that kind of ethos of academic. Facebook is exactly the opposite, he wants to be Bill Gates, and be like Microsoft, as I was saying the other day. Google's internal stuff is pretty strong, they don't externalize it, and that's why Google Cloud's having such a hard time gaining market shares, that they're not good on the external game. Their thing is the SAS offering, it's all programmable. They're awesome at technology, but they're not good at externalizing it. So, I think Google's struggle is not a lot of internal to external translation. What Radio has done successfully, and we heard a little bit here, was they took it from the Palo Alto bubble, which Google lives in, and they've extended it beyond to the rest of the world, so 50% of the Radio attendees here are from outside the United States. So what they got right is, they've actually externalized it better, they're allowing press to come in, the storytelling that we're doing, that's going on, the collaboration here, is about people collaborating, that's why this successful. And it a world where everything's open, and information's freely available, there's a an audience for "high end," tech nerd activity. This is, this meets the high bar of the geeks of the best of the best, and so why isn't it being covered? Well, it is. We are here. >> You're right, we are here. And also, if you look at, it's one thing for companies to have innovative cultures, but it's another thing, some of the key elements that really can catalyze innovation are partnerships, diversity, that come to mind, both of which VMware does very, very well. Big foci on partnerships, which we've seen and heard about here as well, as well as, not just diversity and gender and things, but also thought diversity, and how groups from completely disparate business units can come together, either organically, before Radio, or even probably, can you imagine the hallway conversations that are going on here? Where suddenly, these different ideas are coming together. Partnerships and diversity are really catalysts for VMware's innovation- >> Well that's a great point, one of the first, on the partnership side, clearly a catalyst, because of multi-cloud and cloud native, seeing that. Diversity is a homerun for them, because they are a diverse culture, but look, how many women are here? Not many, I mean still, more than some, still a lot more work to do. But diversity of opinion, the inclusion that VMware has, they're a very inclusive company. So, it's not like, I just don't think there's enough population of women, in my opinion, that are in the community. But they're inclusive, there's different people with different backgrounds, different technical backgrounds, so from so from a quote "diversity" skill set, it's a melting pot. You've got people talking about carbon fiber, sustainability, to kubernetes, all kind of coming together. So I think diversity's a real strength for them. >> So we heard, I know you had a really, really intriguing Blockchain conversation today. We talked a lot about some of those emerging technologies, Vmworld 2019, which theCUBE will be at, for, I believe the tenth year, it's just around the corner. What excites you about some of the things you heard today that you think we might hear more about in August? >> What excited me about VMworld is what Pat Gelsinger said off camera, that it's going to be a ton of news, a ton of activity, and I think if you look at what VMware's doing, again, like I said, Pat Gelsinger's got an amazing vision, and I think he's cleared the runway, or sailed away from the icebergs. VMware's in a really good market position right now. They have great growth going on, and, look, the organic innovation here at Radio, amazing. Content's solid, people are still buzzing for it, they could probably stay here for a week, two weeks. Acquisitions, CloudHealth, Bitnami, again, two smart acquisitions, they're making smart deals, the ecosystem's evolving, it's a new VMware. So I think Vmworld is going to be, have a spring to its step this year, I think you'll see a lot of action, they'll be two CUBE sets again this year, it's going to be a different company next ten years, VMWare, than it was the past ten years. >> Well, I'm excited to be there with theCUBE, two sets as you mentioned, my interest is certainly heightened after some of the things we heard today. John, as always, I had a blast co-hosting with you. You got some awesome swag to go home with. Until next time, right? >> Yeah. >> All right, for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you've been watching our exclusive coverage of VMware Radio2019 from San Fransisco. Thanks for watching.

>> Female Voice: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware RADIO 2019, brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware RADIO 2019, Lisa Martin with John Furrier in San Francisco, talking all sorts of innovation in this innovation long history culture at VMware, welcoming back to theCUBE, Mornay Van Der Walt, VP of R&D in the Explorer Group. Mornay, thank you for joining John and me on theCUBE today. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, I got to start with Explorer Group. Super cool name. >> Yeah. >> What is that within R&D? >> So the origins of the Explorer Group. I've had many roles at VMware, and I've been fortunate enough to do a little bit of everything. Technical marketing; product development; business development; one of the big things I did before the Explorer group was created was actually EVO:RAIL. I was the founder of that, pitched that idea. Raghu and Ray and Pat were very supportive. We took that to market, took it to (inaudible), handed that off to Dell EMC, the rest is history, right? And then was, "what's next?" So Ray and me look at some special projects, go and look at IoT, go and look at Telemetry, and did some orders for them, and then said "Alright, why don't you look at all our innovation programs." Because beyond RADIO, we actually have four other programs. And everyone, was -- RADIO gets a lot of airtime and press, but it's really the collective. It's the power of those other four programs that support RADIO that allow us to take an idea from inception to an impactful outcome. So hence the name, the Explorer Group. We're going out there, we're exploring for new ideas, new technologies, what's happening in the market. >> Talk about the R&D management style. You've actually got all these-- RADIO's one-- kind of a celebration, it's kind of the best of the best come together, with papers and submissions. Kind of a symposium meets kind of a, you know, successive end for all the top engineers. There's more, as you've mentioned. How does all of it work? Because, in this modern era of distributed teams, decentralization, decisions around business, decisions on allocating to the portfolio, what gets invested, money, spend, how do you organize? Give a quick minute to explain how R&D is structured. >> So, obviously, we have the BUs structured-- well there's PCS, Raghu and Rajeev head that up. And then we've got the OCTO organization, which Ray O'Farrell heads up. And the business, you know, it's innovating every day to get products out the door, right, and that's something that we've got to be mindful of because, I mean, that's ultimately what's allowing us to get products into the hands of our customers, solving tough problems. But then in addition to that, we want to give our engineers an avenue to go and explore, and, you know, tinker on something that's maybe related to their day job, or completely off, unrelated to their day job. The other thing that's important is, we also want to give, because we're such a global R&D, you know, our setup globally, we want to give teams the opportunity to work together, collaborate together, get that diversity of thought going, and so a lot of times, if we do a Hackathon, which we call a Borathon, we actually give bonus points if teams pull from outside of their business units. So you've got an idea, well, let's make it a diverse idea in terms of thought and perspective. If you're from the storage business unit, bring in folks from the network business unit. Bring in folks from the cloud business unit. Maybe you've partnered with some folks that are in IT. It's very, you know, sometimes engineers will go, "Ah, it's just R&D that's innovating." But in reality, there's great innovation coming out of our IT department. There's great innovation coming out of our global support organization. Our SEs that are on the front lines, sometimes are seeing the customers' pain points firsthand, and then they bring that back, and some of that makes it into the product. >> How much of R&D is applied R&D, which is kind of business unit aligned, or somewhat aligned, versus the wacky, crazy ideas: "Go solve a big, hairy problem", that's out there, that's not, kind of, related to the current product sets? >> Ah, that's tough to put an actual number on it, >> John: Well ballpark, I mean. >> But if I just say, like, if I had to just think about budgets and that, it's probably ten to fifteen percent is the wacky stuff, that's, you know, not tied to a roadmap, that's why we call it "off-road innovation", and the five programs that my Explorer Group ultimately leads is all about driving that off-road innovation. And eventually you want to find an on-ramp, >> Yeah. >> to a roadmap, you know, that's aligned to a business unit, or a new emerging, you know, technology. >> How does someone come up with an idea and say, "Hey, you know, I want to do this"? Do they submit, like, a form? Is there a proposal? Who approves it? I mean, do you get involved? How does that process work? >> So that's a good question. It really depends on the engineer, right? You take someone who's just a new college grad, straight out of, you know, college. That's why we have these five programs. Because some of these folks, they've got a good idea, but they don't really know how to frame it, pitch it. And so if you've got a good idea, and let's say, this is your first rodeo, so to speak, We have a program called TechTalks where it allows you to actually go and pitch your idea; get some feedback. And that's sometimes where you get the best feedback, because you go and, you know, present your idea, and somebody will come back and say, "Well, you know, have you met, you know, Johnny and Sue over there, in this group? They're actually working on something similar. You should go and talk to them, maybe you guys can bring your ideas together." Folks that are, you know, more seasoned, you know, longer tenure, sometimes they just come up, and-- "I'm going to pitch an idea to xLabs," and for xLabs, for example --that's an internal incubator-- there is, like, a submissions process. We want to obviously make sure, that, you know, your idea's timing in the market's correct, we've got limited funding there so we're going to make sure we're really investing on the right, you know, type of ideas. But if you don't want to go and pitch your idea and get feedback, go and do a Borathon. Turn an idea into a little prototype. And we see a lot of that happening, and some of the greatest ideas are coming from our Borathons, you know? And it's also about tracking the journey. So, we have RADIO here today, we have mentioned xLabs, TechTalks, we have another program called Flings. Some of our engineers are shipping product, and they've got an idea to augment the product. They put it out as a Fling, and our customers and the ecosystem download these, and it augments the product. And then we get great feedback. And then that makes it back into the product roadmap. So there's a lot of different ways to do it, and RADIO, the process for RADIO, there's a lot of rigor in it. It's, like, it's run as a research program. >> Lisa: It's a call for papers, right? >> Call for papers, you know, there's a strict format, it's got to be, you know, this many pages; if you go over about one line, you're sort of, disqualified, so to speak. And then once you've got those papers, like this year we had 560 papers be submitted, out of those 560, 31 made it onto mainstage, and another 61 made it as posters, as you can see in the room we're sitting in. >> I have an idea. Machine learning should get all those papers. (laughs) I mean, that's-- >> Funny you say that. We actually have, one of our engineers, Josh Simons, is actually using machine learning to go back in time and look at all the submissions. So idea harvesting is something we're paying a lot of attention to, because you submit an idea, >> Interesting. >> the market may not be right for it, or reality is, I just don't have a budget to fund it if it's an xLab. >> John: So it's like a Google search for your, kind of, the indexing all those workers. >> Internally, yeah, and sometimes it's-- there's a great idea here, you merge that with another idea from another group or another geo, and then you can actually go and fund something. >> Well, that's important because timing is critical, in these early-- most stuff can be early in just incubation, gestation period for that tech or concept, could be in play because the computer-- all the new things, right? >> Correct. And, do you actually have the time? You're an engineer working on a release, the priority is getting that release out the door, right? >> (laughs) >> So, put the idea on the back burner, come off the release, and then, you know, get a couple of colleagues together and maybe there's a Borathon being held and you go and move that idea forward that way. Or, it's time for RADIO submissions, get a couple of colleagues together and submit a RADIO paper. So we want to have different platforms for our engineers to submit ideas outside of their day job. >> And it sounds like, the different programs that you're talking about: Flings, xLab, Borathon, RADIO, what it sounds like is, there isn't necessarily a hierarchy that ideas have to go through. It really depends on the teams that have the ideas, that are collaborating, and they can put them forward to any of these programs, >> Correct, yeah. >> and one might get, say, rejected for RADIO, but might be great for a Borathon or a Fling? >> Correct. >> So they've got options there, and there's multiple committees, I imagine? Is that spearheaded out of Ray's OCTO group, >> Yep. >> that's helping to make the selections? Tell us a little bit about that process. >> Sure, so. That's a great point, right? To get an idea out the door, you don't always have to take the same pathway. And so one thing we started tracking was these innovation journeys that all take different pathways. We just published an impact report on innovation for FY19, and we've got the vSAN story in there, right? It was an idea. A group of engineers had an idea, like, in 2009, and they worked on their idea a little bit-- it first made it to RADIO in 2011. And then they came back in 2013, and, sort of, the rest is history, you know. vSAN launched in 2014. We had a press release this week for Carbon Avoidance Meter. It was an idea that actually started as a calculator many years ago. Was used, and then sort of died on the vine, so to speak? One of our SEs said, "You know, this is a good idea. I want to evolve this a little bit further." Came and pitched an xLabs idea, and we said, "Alright, we're going to fund this as an xLabs Lite. Three to six months project, limited funding, work on one objective --you're still doing your day job-- move the project forward a little bit." Then Nicola Acutt, our Sustainability VP, got involved, wanted to move the idea a little bit further along, came back for another round of funding through an xLabs Lite, and then GSS, with their Skyline platform, picked it up, and that's going to be integrated in the coming months into Skyline, and we're going to be able to give our customers a carbon, sort of, readout of their data center. And then they'll be able to, you know, map that, and get a bigger picture, because obviously, it's not just the servers that are virtualized, there's cooling in the data center plants, and all these other factors that you've got to, you know, take into account when you want to look at your carbon footprint for your facility. So, we have lots of examples of how these innovation pathways take different turns, and sometimes it's Team A starting with an idea, Team B joins in, and then there's this convergence at a particular point, and then it goes nowhere for a couple of months, and then, a business unit picks it up. >> One of the things that's come out-- Pat Gelsinger mentioned that a theme outside of the normal product stuff is how people do work. There's been some actual R&D around it, because you guys have a lot of distributed, decentralized operations in R&D because of the global nature. >> Yeah. >> How should companies and R&D be run when the reality is that developers could be anywhere? They could be at a coffee shop, they could be overseas, they could be in any geography, how do you create an environment where you have that kind of innovation? Can you just share some of the best practices that you guys have found? >> I'm not sure if there's 'best practices', per se, but to make sure that the programs are open and inclusive to everybody on the planet. So, I'll give you some stats. For example, when RADIO started in the early days, we were founded in Palo Alto. It was a very Palo Alto-centric company. And for the first few years, if you looked at the percentage of attendees, it was probably over 75% were coming from Palo Alto. We've now over the years shifted that, to where Palo Alto probably represents about 44%, 16% is the rest of North America, and then the balance is from across the globe. And so that shift has been deliberate, obviously that impacts the budget a little bit, but in our programs, like a Borathon, you can hack from anywhere. We've got a lot of folks that are remote office workers, using, you know, collaborative tools, they can be part of a team. If the Borathon's happening in China, it doesn't stop somebody in Palo Alto or in Israel or in Bulgaria, participating. And, you know, that's the beautiful nature of being global, right? If you think about how products get out of the door, sometimes you've got teams and you are literally following the sun, and you're doing handoff, you know, from Team A to B to C, but at the end of the day you're delivering one product. And so that's just part of our culture, I mean, everybody's open to that, we don't say, "Oh, we can't work with those guys because they're in that geo-location." It's pretty open. >> This is also, really, an essential driver, and I think I saw last year's RADIO, there were participants from 25+ countries. But this is an essential-- not only is VMware a global company, but many of your customers are as well, and they have very similar operating models. So that thought diversity, to be able to build that into the R&D process is critical. >> Absolutely. And also, think about, you know, when you're going to Europe. Smaller borders, countries, you deploy technology differently. And so, you want to have that diversity in thought as well, because you don't just want to be thinking, "Alright, we're going to deploy a disaster recovery product in North America where they can fail over from, you know, East Coast to West Coast. You go to Europe, and typically you're failing over from, you know, site A to site B, and they're literally three or four miles apart. And so, just having that perspective as well, is very important. And we see that, you know, when we release certain products, you'll get, you know, better uptick in a certain geo, and then, "Why is it stalling over here?" well it's, sometimes it's cultural, right? How do you deploy that technology? Just because it works in the US, doesn't mean it's going to work in Europe or in APJ. >> How was your team involved in the commercialization? You mentioned vSAN and the history of that, but I'm just wondering, looking at it from an investment standpoint of deciding which projects to invest in, and then there's also the-- if they're ready to go to market, the balance of "How much do we need to invest in sales and marketing to be able to get this great idea-- because if we can't market it and sell it, you know, then there's obviously no point." So what's that balance like, within your organization, about, "how do we commercialize this effectively, at scale"? >> So that is ultimately not the responsibility of my group. We'll incubate ideas, like, for example, through an xLabs project. And, you know, sometimes we'll get to a point and we'll work, collaborate with a business unit, and we'll say, "Alright, we feel this project's probably a 24 months project", if it's an xLabs Full. So these folks are truly giving up their day job. But at the end of the day, you want to have an exit and when we say exit, what does that exit mean? Is that an exit into a business unit? Are you exiting the xLabs project because we're now out of funding? You know, think about a VC, I'm going to fund you to, you know, to a particular point; if there is no market traction, >> Right. >> we may, you know, sunset the project. And, you know, so our goal is to get these ideas, select which ones we want to invest in, and then find a sort of off-ramp into a business unit. And sometimes there'll be an off-ramp into a business unit, and the project goes on for a couple of months, and then we make a decision, right? And it's not a personal decision, it's like, "Well we funded that as an xLabs; we're now going to shut it down because, you know, we're going to go and make an acquisition in this space. And with the talent that's going to come onboard, the talent that was working on this xLab project, we can push the agenda forward." >> John: You have a lot of action going on so you move people around. >> Exactly. >> Kind of like the cloud, elastic resource, yeah? (laughs) >> So, then, some of these things, because xLabs is only a two-year-old, you know, we haven't had things exit yet that are, you know, running within a business unit that we're seeing this material impact. You know, from a revenue point of view. So that's why tracking the journeys is very important. And, you know, stay tuned, maybe in about three or four years we'll have this, similar, you know, interview, and I'll be able to say, "Yeah, you know, that started as an xLab, and now it's three years into the market, and look at the run rate. >> So there's 31-- last question for you-- there's 31 projects that were presented on mainstage. Are there any that you could kind of see, early on, "ooh", you know, those top five? Anything that really kind of sticks out-- you don't have to explain it in detail, but I'm just curious, can you see some of that opportunity in advance? >> Absolutely. There's been some great papers up on mainstage. And covering, you know, things on the networking side, there's a lot of innovation going in on the storage side. If you think about data, right, the explosion of data because of edge computing, how are you going to manage that data? How are you going to take, you know, make informed decisions on that data? How can you manipulate that data? What are you going to have to do from a dedupe point of view, or a replication point of view, because you want to get that to many locations, quickly? So, I saw some really good papers on data orchestration, manipulation, get it out to many places, it can take an informed decision. I saw great-- there was a great paper on, you know, you want to go and put something in AWS. There's a bull that you get at the end of the month, right? Sometimes those bulls can be a little bit frightening, right? You know, what can you do to make sure that you manage those bulls correctly? And sometimes, the innovation has got nothing to do with the product per se, but it has to do with how we're going to develop. So we have some innovation on the floor here where an engineer has looked at a different way of, basically, creating an application. And so, there's a ton of these ideas, so after RADIO, it doesn't stop there. Now the idea harvesting starts, right? So yes, there were 31 papers that made it onto mainstage, 61 that are posters here. During that review process, and you asked that question earlier and I apologize, I didn't answer it-- you know, when we look at the papers, there's a team of over 100 folks from across the globe that are reviewing these papers. During that review process, they'll flag things like "This is not going to make it onto mainstage, but the idea here is very novel; we should send this off to our IP team," you know. So this year at RADIO, there were 250 papers that were flagged for further followup with our IP team, so, do we go and then file an IDF, Invention Disclosure Form, do those then become patents, you know? So if we look at the data last year, it was 210. Out of those 210, 74 patents were filed. So there's a lot of work that now will happen post-RADIO. Some of these papers come in, they don't make it onto mainstage; they might become a poster. But at the same time they're getting flagged for a business unit. So from last year, there were 39 ideas that were submitted that are now being mapped to roadmap across the BUs. Some of these papers are great for academic research programs, so David Tennenhouse's research group will take these papers and then, you know, evolve them a little bit more, and then go and present them at academic conferences around the world. So there's a lot of, like, the "what's next?" aspect of RADIO has become a really big deal for us. >> The potential is massive. Well, Mornay, thank you so much for joining John and me, >> Thank you. >> and I've got to follow xLabs, there's just a lot of >> (laughs) >> really, really, innovative things that are so collaborative, coming forward. We thank you for your time. >> Thank you. >> For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin; you're watching theCUBE, exclusive coverage of VMware RADIO 2019, from San Francisco. Thanks for watching.

>> Host: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware Radio 2019! Brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin in San Francisco, at VMware Radio 2019. This is a really cool internal R&D innovation off-site with about 1800 engineers across many business units at VMware, and we're pleased to welcome back to theCUBE the VP of the sustainability strategy at VMware, Nicola Acutt. Nicola, it's great to have you back on theCUBE! >> Thank you, Lisa, it's wonderful to be here and welcome back to Radio! >> This is only the second year that press has been allowed so this is an exclusive for theCUBE, we appreciate being here. So, sustainability. It's a word that is talked about so globally in so many industries, but it has different meanings. When I think of sustainability, the first thing that comes to my mind is energy, but it's more than that. What is sustainability to VMware? >> Great, thank you Lisa. And you're right, sustainability means a lot of things to different people. In its holistic sense, we think of sustainability as the capacity to endure, the ability to endure over time, and it has environmental dimensions, it has social dimensions and of course it has economic dimensions. The way we think about sustainability at VMware is through the lens of innovation, because we really do believe that solving many of the sustainability challenges in the world today is about innovation, and so we're really excited to be able to do that work and to pursue that mission in the office of the CTO. >> So talk a little bit more about that, with the sustainability strategy being within the office of the CTO. What sort of superpowers does that give VMware to amplify what it's doing and really also, in the eyes of your customers and partners, leverage sustainability as a differentiator? >> Yeah, I love that you used the word superpowers. I think of it exactly that. For me, it's about how do we connect our tech superpowers with this vision and foresight around solving really challenging problems? So for us, how we approach that problem, is really in three dimensions. So we think about sustainability and innovation around our operation, so that's walking the talk, first and foremost, right, getting things right internally, and from an innovation perspective, that's not just about innovation in terms of energy management, you used the energy example, right, but it's also about processes. How do we think about our engineering processes, to make sure that our engineering productivity is as efficient as possible. Yesterday our chief research officer David Tennenhouse made a comment to our 18,000 engineers that it's two sides of the same coin when we're talking about innovation for good, we also have to talk about good engineering so it's both, right? So that's one. Innovation in our operations. The second lens that we think about is innovation in terms of what we do, our products and how our products serve our customers and help them achieve their sustainability goals. Also at Radio we were really pleased this year to announce a new product initiative called CAM, the Carbon Awareness Meter, and this is a product feature in Skyline which will be available to our customers later on this year, which will allow them, through the Skyline platform, to derive almost real-time carbon scores and provide them with more information, more transparency into what's happening in their infrastructure, and then serve up information that can make choices around whether it's virtual machine density or opportunities to optimize their hardware, and then also even provide them information about the grid that their data center is operating on, and that then, we hope, will empower them, our huge customer base, to think about what they can do possibly as a result. >> Oh absolutely, I can't imagine what having that insight into their own grid will allow them to do in terms of resource optimization, to be able to use resources better, to identify new products and services. I'm curious about CAM, though, being announced at Radio 2019. Was this a product, or an idea that spun out of a past Radio event, since this is the 15th annual? >> I'm so glad you asked that question. Exactly why I think this is such an exciting announcement, not only is it a really cool product feature, but it tells the story of innovation at VMware and the path that an idea can track through from an idea in someone's head to a product in our customer's system. So that journey at VMware started with this idea going back, gosh, more than three years. In fact it was round about the time that we introduced sustainability to the office of the CTO and this was a challenge we put out to engineers around how can we innovate around sustainability? It first was discussed as a tech talk and then the idea came to Radio, here, as one of these poster papers. It was then also a birds of a feather, a talk, a breakout talk. Later on, the idea then gained more momentum, it was funded as part of X-Labs which is one of our innovation programs. In fact it was so popular it got funded a second time and developed, and now it has graduated from the office of the CTO and the innovation programs into the BU. So that's a great example of this journey that our innovators, our engineers, can take with an idea, from concept to impact. >> One of the things Ray O'Farrell mentioned to John Furrier and me this morning was that this year's Radio, he said, it's kind of surprising that there's a lot of projects around proposals around collaboration. So talk about how CAM was developed, I mean, the spirit of different BUs collaborating, different minds, different engineering minds coming together with ideas that really over time and through not just Radio but the other innovation programs, you mentioned X-Labs, that this idea became something that is now enabling your customers to make big decisions and save a considerable amount of resources. How does collaboration between BUs really get VMware's innovation culture dialed way up? >> That's actually really important, this concept of collaboration. The way I think about it is connecting dots, and a key role that the office of the CTO plays is to do just that, to create the spaces like this event, which you increase the probability that people are going to have a conversation or people are thinking about something and you give them a platform to share that idea and that's where the spark comes from. You hear it in the conversations, you hear it in the energy, but that is critical. I don't think you can create a culture of innovation without creating a culture of collaboration. >> Absolutely, they're hand-in-hand. So you talked about CAM. What are some of the technological changes, improvements that VMware has made to its technologies to become, to really deliver on your sustainability goals? >> Yeah, I think it goes back to our roots, right? The very beginning of VMware, and the legacy of our core product and our core innovation has been a massive contribution to the computing field of course, and to industry and to the world, but it's also been a great, what I call one of the greatest positive externalities in terms of saving energy and resources. So that was a great start to build on, and the announcement of the CAM project today was another step in that journey to now be really intentional about connecting sustainability with innovation, just like we do with quality and with security, and really thinking about this as part of what we do. So what that journey looks like is continuing to invest in, I talked about operational innovation, I talked about our product, the third area of our strategy is really around future bets and the products that are currently off road map but on our radar. You've probably heard, a great example of that is our work on blockchain, and so we're being intentional about developing that software to be energy efficient, number one. You'll hear more about that, I hope, later in the year. We have an intern coming in the summer to help the team work on the sustainability dimensions of our blockchain approach. We just did a demo actually at Radio this week, there was a live demo on stage with our blockchain team testing out a use case in sustainability and sustainable supply to our supply chain custody, with the example of ocean plastics and making sure that we were able to really track that supply chain and blockchain was a really powerful application for a solution like that. So that's just an example of where we're thinking about applying this lens of sustainability and innovation to our future products, as well as to some of the big challenges we face as a global society. >> Right, globally and environmentally, we look at within the data center, outside the data center from the core to the edge. Where does code sustainability fit in, and how does that facilitate reducing carbon footprint at VMware, enabling that for your customers, how does that factor into becoming more efficient and more aware globally and societally as well? >> Right, well it starts with what you do, right? For us, writing code is the core of all of the applications, everything, all of the powerful things that we can do starts with the integrity of the code, and so at Radio we have one of our sessions with principal engineers and the sustainability team is working on a project to define what does that mean for us? So, it's about efficiency, it's about really thinking about how do we optimize? How do we design and pay attention to the very core of what we do? From the get-go, as a priority. >> Last question, from the customer's perspective, what is one of the many VMware customer stories that comes to mind when you think about VMware as an enabler, as a catalyst for helping an organization really dramatically reduce carbon footprint, leverage your technology for their sustainability? >> Such a great question, and y'know something interesting, I'll tell you a story. We recently looked at some of the companies that are making very serious commitments to sustainability, putting their money where their mouth is and, for example, organizations that are committing to being carbon neutral, to being RE100 which is renewable energy 100 powering their organizations through clean power, as well as committing to science-based targets around their operations, and when we looked at the data it was absolutely fascinating to see that many of VMware's best and biggest customers are in that category of leaders and so for us that represents a billion dollars of revenue so this is important, not just to us but to our customers, and so this is a journey. We're working within the office of the CTO with our field teams to really help connect the dots more intentionally and to drive additional value for our customers through their use of our products and their relationship with VMware as a solution provider. >> And it just shows and speaks to the great synergies that VMware has developed over its history with its customers. Nicola, thank you so much for joining me at Radio 2019, and sharing with our audience the massive impact, both internally and externally, that VMware's sustainability strategy is having on the world. Thank you! >> Thank you, Lisa, absolute pleasure. >> Likewise! I'm Lisa Martin, with John Furrier joining me at VMware Radio 2019 in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(energetic music) >> [Narrator] From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Radio 2018. Brought to you by VMware. >> Hello everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE coverage here in San Francisco, California for VMware's Radio 2018 event. This is their R&D big event kickoff. It's like a sales kickoff for engineers, as Steve Herrod said on stage. Out next guest is Mornay Van Der Walt, VP of the Explore Group, Office of the CTO. Also, program chair of the Event Today Conference, working for the collective of people within VMware on a rigorous selection committee for a high bar here at your event. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you. >> Talk about the event, because I know a lot of work went into it. Congratulations, the talks were amazing. I see the schedule. We have Pat Gelsinger coming on later today. We just had Ray O'Farrell on. This is like the, I don't want to say, Burning Man of Vmware, but this is really a recognition, but also really important innovation. Take a minute to talk about the process that you go through to put this together. It's a fantastic event. The smartest minds, the cream rises to the top. It's hard, it's challenging, it's a team effort, but yet you gotta ride the right waves. >> Right. So, RADIO: R&D Innovation Offsite. And as you said, it is tough because we've got this huge R&D community and they've all got amazing ideas. So they get the opportunity to submit ideas. I think this this year we have over 1,700 ideas submitted, and at the end of the day we're only going to showcase 226 of those ideas across research programs, posters, breakout sessions, Just-In-Time BOFs, Birds Of a Feather. You know, so, the bar is high. we've got a finite amount of time, but what's amazing is we take these ideas, and we don't just showcase them at RADIO. We have four other programs that give us the ability to take those ideas to the next level. So when we think about the innovation programs that come out of OCTO, this is really to drive what we call "Off-Road Map Innovation." So Raghu and Rajiv, with our Product Cloud Services Division, are driving road map, zero to three years out the stuff that you can buy from sales, >> [Furrier] Customer centric? >> Customer centric, yeah. OCTO is providing an innovation program structure, these five programs: Tech Talks, Flings, Borathons, RADIO, and xLabs, and as a collective, they are focused on off-road map innovation. Maybe something that's-- >> Give me an example of what that means, Off-Road Map. >> Sure. So last year at RADIO we did a paper that was showcased on functions as a service. So you think of AWS Lambda, right. [Furrier] Yep, yep >> VM was uniquely positioned, with the substrate, to manage and orchestrate VM's containers and whynot functions. So this radio paper was submitted, I then, as the xLabs group, said we're going to fund this, but given where we are in this market, we said, "Alright, we'll fund this for 12 months." So, we're incubating functions as a service. In July/August time frame, that'll actually exit xLabs into the Cloud Native business. >> It's a real rapid innovation. >> Very rapid. >> Within a 12 month period, we're gonna get something into a BU that they can take it to market. >> Yeah, and also I would say that this also I've seen from the talks here, there's also off-road map hard problems that need to kind of get the concepts, building blocks, or architecture... >> [Van Der Walt] Correct. >> With the confluence of hitting, whatever, its IOT or whatever, blockchains, seeing things like that. >> [Van Der Walt] Yeah. Correct. >> Is that also accurate too? >> Very true. And, you know, Ray had a great slide in his keynote this morning, you know, we spoke about how we started in 2003, when he joined the company, it was all about computer virtualization. Fast-forward 15 years, and you look at our strategy today, it's any Cloud, any device, any app, right? Then, you gotta look to the future, beyond there, what we're doing today, what are the next twenty years going to look like? Obviously, there's things like, you know, blockchain, VR, edge computing, you know, AIML... >> [Furrier] Service meshes? >> Services meshes, adaptive security. And, you know, people say, "Oh, AIML, that's a hot topic right now, but if you look back at VM ware, we've been doing that since 2006. Distributed resource scheduler: a great example of something that, at the core of the product, was already using ML techniques, you know, to load-balance a data center. And now, you can load-balance across Clouds. >> It's interesting how buzzwords can become industry verticals. We saw that with Hadoop; it didn't really happen, although it became important in big data as it integrates in. I mean, I find that you guys, really from the ecosystem we look at, you guys have a really interesting challenge. You started out as "inside the box," if you will. I saw your old t-shirt there from the 14 year history you guys have been doing this event. Great collection of t-shirts behind me if you can't see it. It's really cool. But infrastructures, on premise, you buy, it's data center, growth, all that stuff happened. Cloud comes in. Big data comes in. Now you got blockchain. These are big markers now, but the intersection of all these are all kind of touching each other. >> [Van Der Walt] Correct. >> IOT...so it's really that integration. I also find that you guys do a great job of fostering innovation, and always amazed at the VM world with some great either bechmarks or labs that show the good stuff. How do you do it? Walk me through the steps because you have this Explorer program, which is working. >> [Van Der Walt] Yeah >> It's almost a ladder, or a reverse ladder. Start with tech talks, get it out to the marketplace... >> [Van Der Walt] Do a hackathon. >> Hackathon. Take us through the process. So there's four things: tech talks, borathons, which is the meaning behind the name, flings, and xLabs. >> Correct >> Take us through that progression. >> ... and RADIO, of course. >> And RADIO, of course, the big tent event. Bring it all together. >> So, I'm an engineer. I have a great idea. I wanna socialize it; I wanna get some feedback. So, at VMWare, we offer a tech talk platform. You come, you present your idea. It's live. There'll be engineers in the audience. We also record those, and then those get replayed, and engineers will say, "You know, have you thought about this?" or "Have you met up with Johnny and Mary?" They're actually working on something very similar. Why don't you go and, you know, compare ideas? I can actually make that very real. I was in India in November, and we were doing a shark tank for our xLabs incubator, and this one team presented an idea on an augmented reality desktop. We went over to another office, actually the air watch office, and we did another shark tank there. Another team pitched the exact same idea, so I looked at my host, and I said, "Do these two teams know each other?" and the guy goes, "Absolutely not," so what did we do? We made the connection point. Their ideas were virtually identical. They were 25 kilometers apart. Never met. >> [Furrier] Wow. >> You know, so when, that's one of the challenges when your company becomes so big, you've got this vast R&D organization that's truly global, in one country 25 kilometers apart, you had two teams with the same idea that had never met. So part of the challenge is also bringing these ideas together because, you know, the sum of the parts makes for a greater whole. >> And they can then collectively come together then present to RADIO one single paper or idea. >> [Van Der Walt] Absolutely, or go ahead and say, you know what, let's take this to the next step, which would be a borathon, so borathons are heckathons. >> Explain the name because borathon sounds like heckathon, so it is, but there's a meaning behind the name borathon. What is the meaning? >> Sure. So, our very first build repository was named after Bora Bora, and so we paid homage to that, and so, instead of saying a heckathon, we called it a borathon. And one of our senior engineers apparently came up with that name, and it stuck, and it's great. >> So it's got history, okay. So, borathons is like ... okay, so you do tech talks, you collaborate, you socialize the idea via verbal or presentation that gets the seeds of innovation kinda planted. Borathon is okay, lets attack it. >> Turn it into a prototype. >> Prototype. >> And it gets judged, so then you get even more feedback from your most senior engineers. In fact ... >> And there's a process for all this that you guys run? >> Yeah, so the Explorer groups run these five innovation programs. We just recently, in Palo Alto, did a theme borathon. Our fellows and PE's came together. Decided the theme should be sustainability, and we mixed it up a little bit. So, normally, at a borathon, teams come with ideas that they've already been developing. For this one, the teams had no idea what the theme was going to be, so we announced the theme. Then, they showed up on the day to learn what the five challenges were going to be, and some of those challenges, one of them was quite interesting. It was using distributed ledger to manage microgrids, and that's a ... >> A blockchain limitation >> Well, it's a project that's, you know, is near and dear to us at VMWare. We're actually going to be setting up a microgrid on campus, and if you think about microgrids, and Nicola Acutt can talk more to this, we're gonna be looking at, you know, how can we give power back to the city of Palo Alto? Well, imagine that becoming a mesh network. >> [Furrier] With token economics. >> How do you start tracking this, right? A blockchain would be a perfect way to do this, right? So, then, you take your ideas at a borathon, get them into a prototype, get some more feedback, and now you might have enough critical mass to say, "Alright, I'm going to present a RADIO paper next year." So, then, you work as a team; get that into the system. >> [Furrier] And, certainly, in India and these third-world countries now becoming large, growing middle-class, these are important technologies to build on top of, say, mobile... >> [Van Der Walt] Absolutely. >> And with solar and power coming in, it's a natural evolution, so that's good use case. Okay, so, now I do the borathon. I've got a product. Flings? >> It's a prototype, right, so now ... >> You can socialize it, you have a fling, you throw it out there, you fling it out there What happens? >> Yeah, so, I've done something at a borathon. It's like, I want to get some actual feedback from the ecosystem: our customers and partners. That example I used with vSAN. You know, vSAN launched. We wanted to get some health analytics. The release managers were doing their job. The products got a ship on the state. Senior engineers on the team got a health analytics tool out as a fling. It got incredible feedback from the community. Made it into the next release. We did the same with the HTML clients, right? And that's been in the press lately because, you know, we've got Rotoflex. Now, there's HTML, but that actually started - two teams started working on that. One team just did HTML >> a very small portion of the HTML client, presented a RADIO paper. Two years later, another team, started the work, and now we have a full-fledged HTML client that's embedded into the VIS via product. >> [Furrier] So, the fling brings in a community dynamic, it brings in new ideas, or diversity, if you will. All kinds of diverse ideas melting together. Now, xLabs, I'm assuming that's an incubator. That brings it together. What is xLabs? Is that an incubator? You fund it? What happens there? >> So with an xLabs, the real way to think about it, it's truly an incubator. I don't want to use the word "start-up" there because you've clearly got the protection of the larger VMware organization, so you're not being a scrappy start-up, but you've got a great idea, we see there's merit ... >> [Furrier] Go build a real product. >> We see it more being on the disruptive side, and so we offer two tracks in the xLabs. There's a light track, which typically runs three to six months, and you're still doing your day job. You know, so you're basically doing two jobs. You know, we fund you with a level of funding that allows you to bring on extra contracting, resources, developers, etc., and you're typically delivering one objective. The larger xLab is the full-track, so functions as a service. Full-track, we showcased it as a RADIO paper last year. We said, "Alright, we're going to fund this. We're going to give it 12 months worth of funding, and then it needs to exit into a business unit," and we got lucky with that one because we were already doing a lot of work with containers, the PKS, the pivotal. >> [Furrier] Do the people have to quit their day job, not quit their day job, but move their resource over? >> [Van Der Walt] Absolutely. >> The full-track is go for it, green light >> Yep >> Run as fast as you can, take it to this business unit. Is the business unit known as the end point in time? Is it kind of tracked there, or is it more flexible still. >> Not all the time. You know so sometimes, with functions it was easier, right? So, we know we've got pull for zone heading up Cloud native apps. The Cloud native business unit is doing all the partnerships with PKS. That one makes sense. >> [Furrier] Yeah. >> We're actually doing one right now, another xLabs full, called network slicing, and it's going to play into the Telco space. We've obviously got NFV being led by Shekar and team, but we don't know if network slicing, when it exits, and this one is probably going to have a longer time arise and probably 24-36 months. Does it go into the NFV business unit, or does it become its own business unit. >> [Furrier] That's awesome. So, you got great tracks, end to end, so you have a good process. I gotta ask you the question that's on my mind. I think everyone would look at this, and some people might look at Vmware as, and most people do, at least I do, as kind of a cutting-edge tier one company. You guys always are a great place to work. Voted as, get awards for that, but you take seriously innovation and organic growth in community and engineering. Engineering and community are two really important things. How do you bring the foster culture because engineers can be really pissed off. "Oh my god! They're idiots that make the selection!" because you don't want engineers to be pissed cuz they're proud, and they're inventing. >> Yep, yep. >> So, how to manage the team approach? What's the cultural secret in the DNA that makes this so successful over 14 years? >> So, before I answer that question, I think it's important to take a step back. So, when we think about innovation, we call this thing the Vmware "innovation engine." It's really three parts to it, right? If you think about innovation at its core: sustaining, disruptive, internal, external, And, so, we've got product Cloud Services group, Raghu and Rajiv, we've got OCTO, headed up by Ray, we've got corp dev headed up by Shekar. Think of it as it's a three-legged stool. You take one of those legs away, the stool falls over. So, it's a balancing act, right? And we need to be collaborating. >> [Furrier] And they're talking to each other all the time. >> We're talking to each other all the time, right? Build or buy? Are we gonna do something internal, or we gonna go external, right? You think something about acquisitions like Nicira, right? We didn't build that; we bought it. You think about Airwatch, right? Airwatch put us into the top right quadrant from Gartner, right? So, these are very strategic decision that get made. Petchist presented at Dell emc world, Dell Technologies world. He had a slide on there that showed, it was the Nicira acquisition, and then it sort of was this arc leading all the way up to VeloCloud, and when you saw it on one slide, it made perfect sense. As an outsider looking in, you might have thought, "Why were they doing all these things? Why was that acquisition made? But there's always a plan, and that plan involves us all talking across. >> [Furrier] Strategic plan around what to move faster on. >> Correct >> Because there's always the challenge on M&A, if they're not talking to each other, is the buy/build is, you kinda, may miss a core competency. They always ... what's the core competency of the company? And should you outsource a core competency, or should you build it internally? Sometimes, you might even accelerate that, so I think Airwatch and Nicira, I would say, was kinda on the edges of core competency, but together with the synergies ... >> [Van Der Walt] Helped us accelerate. >> And I think that's your message. >> [Van Der Walt] Yep. >> Okay, so that's the culture. How do you make, what's the secret sauce of making all this work? I mean, cuz you have to kinda create an open, collaborative, but it's competitive. >> [Van Der Walt] Absolutely. >> So how do you balance that? >> You know, so clearly, there's a ton of innovation going on within the prior Cloud services division. The stuff that's on the truck that our customers can buy today, alright? We also know we gotta look ahead, and we gotta start looking at solving problems that aren't on the truck today, alright? And, so, having these five programs and the collective is really what allows us to do that. But at the same time, we need to have open channels of communication back into corp dev as well. I can give you examples of, you know, Shekar and his team might be looking at Company X. We're doing some exploratory work, IOT, I did an ordered foray. IOT is gonna be massive; everybody knows that, but you know what's going to be even more massive is all the data at the edge, and what do you do with that data? How do you turn that data into something actionable, right? So, if you think about a jet engine on a big plane, right? When it's operating correctly, you know what all the good levels are, the metrics, the telemetry coming off it. Why do I need to collect that and throw it away? You're interested in the anomalies, right? As we start thinking about IOT, and we start thinking all this data at the edge, we're going to need a different type of analytics engine that can do real-time analytics but not looking at the norm, looking at the deviations, and report back on that, so you can take action on that, you know? So, we started identifying some companies like PubNub, Mulesoft, too, just got acquired, right? Shekar and his team were looking at the same companies, and was like, "These companies are interesting because they're starting to attack the problem in a different way. We do that at Vmware all the time. You think about Appdefense. We've taken a completely different approach to security. You know what the good state is, but if you have a deviation, attack that, you know? And then you can use things like ... >> It's re-imagining, almost flipping everything upside-down. >> Yeah, challenging the status quo. >> Yeah, great stuff, great program. I gotta ask you a final question since it's your show here. Great content program, by the way. Got the competition, got the papers, which is deep, technical coolness, but the show is great content, great event. Thanks for inviting us. What's trending? What's rising up? Have you heard or kind of point at something you see getting some buzz, that you thought might get buzz, or it didn't get buzz? What's rising of the topics of interest here? What's kind of popping out for you; what's trending if I had to a Twitter feed, not Twitter feed, but like top three trending items here. >> Well, I'll take it back to that last borathon that we did on sustainability. We set out the five challenges. The challenge that got the most attention was the blockchain microgrid. So, blockchain is definitely trending, and, you know, the challenge we have with blockchain today is it's not ready for the enterprise. So, David Tennenhouse and his research group is actually looking at how do you make blockchain enterprise ready? And that is a difficult problem to solve. So, there's a ton of interest in watching ... >> [Furrier] Well, we have an opinion. Don't use the public block chain. (both laugh) >> So, you know, that's one that's definitely trending. We have a great program called Propel, where we basically attract the brightest of the brightest, you know, new college grads coming into the company, and they actually come through OCTO first and do a sort of onboarding process. What are they interested in? They're not really interested in working for a particular BU, but, you know, when we share with them, "You're gonna have the ability to work on blockchain, AI, VR, augmented reality, distributed systems, new ways of doing analytics >> that's what attracts them. >> [Furrier] And they have the options to go test and put the toe in the water or jump in deep with xLabs. >> Absolutely >> So, I mean, this is like catnip for engineers. It draws a lot of people in. >> Absolutely, and, you know, we need to do that to be competitive in the valley. I mean, it's a very hard marketplace. >> Great place to work. >> You guys have a great engineering team. >> Congratulations for a great event, Mornay, and thanks for coming on theCUBE. We're here in San Francisco for theCUBE coverage of RADIO 2018. I'm John Furrier. Be back with more coverage after this break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)