>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World 2019. I'm your host Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host John Furrier. We are joined by Tracey Newell, she is the President Global Field Operations at Informatica. Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, for coming back on theCUBE. >> Coming back on theCUBE, it's great to be here. >> So the last time you were on, you had just taken over as the president of Global Field Operations. Give our viewers a catch up on exactly what you've been doing over these past two years, and what the journey's been like. >> Yeah, no that's great, thanks so much. As a reminder the last time we were together, I had just joined the company. I was literally two weeks in, and yet I actually did join Informatica three years ago. So I joined on the board of directors, and I was on the board for two years, and the company was doing so extremely well that after a couple of years we all agreed that I would step off the board and join the management team. >> I got to get in on this! >> I know, exactly. I've got to get off the sidelines and get into the game. >> Both sides of the table, literally. >> Exactly. >> So that's really interesting that you were on the board watching this growth and seeing, obviously participating in it, too, as a board member, but then you said, "I want to be here, I want to be doing this." What was it about the opportunity that so excited you that you felt that way? >> Well, it's funny, because when I did join the management team I spent two months on a listening tour, and the first question from all the employees and our partners was, "Why'd you do that?" Usually it goes the other way around, you go from the management team to the board. And the answer was really simple in that my hypothesis in joining the board was that digital transformation is an enterprise board of director's decision, that governments and large organizations are trying to figure this out with the CEO, the board, the management team, because it's critical, and yet it's also really hard. It's complicated, the data is everywhere. And so when you have something that's important and really complicated, you need a thought leader. And so my belief was that Informatica should be that thought leader. And two years in we were doing so phenomenally well with the platform play that we had been driving from an R&D standpoint, it just seemed like such an amazing opportunity to literally get off the sidelines and get into the game. And it's just been fabulous. >> And you have experience, obviously, doing field organizations so you've been there, done that. Also you have some public sector experience, so also being on the board was a time when Informatica went private. And that was a good call because they don't have to deal with the shot clock of the public markets and doing all those mandatory filings, and a lot of energy, management energy goes into being public company. >> That's right. >> At the time where they could get the product development and reposition some of the assets, and the thing that was interesting with you guys, they had customers already. So they didn't have to go out and get new customers to test new theses. >> That's right. >> They had existing customers. >> Oh no, we serve the biggest companies and governments on the planet. Globally, a very large percentage of the global 2000, is kind of our sweet spot. And yet thousands and thousands of customers in the mid market. And so to your point, John, exactly we had built out this platform that included all things on-premise, we're almost synonymous, PowerCenter and ETL, that's kind of been our sweet spot. And MDM data quality, but adding in all of the focus on big data, all the area of IPAAS, all the work that everybody's doing with AWS, with Azure, with Salesforce.com, with Google Cloud, and suddenly we've got this platform play, backed by AI and machine learning, and it's a huge differentiator. >> So you've seen a lot of experience, again you worked in the industry for a long time, you know what the field playbook is, VCs say the enterprise playbook. It's changing, though, you're seeing some shifts and Bruce Chizen was talking to me yesterday about this, there's a shift back to technology advantage and openness. It used to be technology advantage, protect it, that's your competitive advantage, hold it, lock in, but it's changing from that to technology, but open. This is the new equation, what's your take on that? >> Our strategy's been really simple, that we want to be best of breed in everything that we do. And Gartner seems to agree with us. In all five categories we play in we are up and to the right. And yet we want you to get a benefit that if you do decide to buy one product, and then add a second, or a third, or a fourth family, you're going to get the benefit of all that being backed by a platform play, and by AI and machine learning. And so this concept of we'll work with everybody, a customer called us Switzerland of Data, and that's certainly true, we partner with everybody. Where you do see synergies to leverage your entire data platform, you're going to get a real advantage that no one else will have. >> You've got a lot of customers, this is a very intimate conference here at Informatica, this is our fourth year covering it, it's been great to watch the journey, but also the evolution and the tailwinds you guys have. What are some of the customer conversations you're having? You're in all the top meetings here, I know you guys are busy running around, I see you doing meetings and the whole team's here. What are some of the top-level priorities and challenges and opportunities that your customers have? >> We literally have thousands of people at the conference here as you know, and it's just been phenomenal. So I've been in back-to-back meetings, meeting with some of the largest companies in retail that are trying to figure out, "How do I serve my customer base online?" "And yet when they walk into one of my stores, "I want to know that. "My salesperson needs to know exactly what that person's "been shopping for, and looking on the Internet for, "if they're on my site, "or perhaps what they've been tweeting about." So they want to know everything about their customer that there is to know. The banks want to know who their high wealth clients are. And hey want to make sure that if they call in on a checking account and have a bad customer service experience, they want to know that. If it's a hospitality company, they want to understand what's going on every time you check into a hotel. If you looked for a quote and you don't actually follow through, they want to understand that. And so there's this theme of understanding everything that there is to know about a customer. And yet at the same time, a huge requirement for governance, in the California Privacy Act, the CCPA and GDPR are changing everything. I had a large bank once say, and this was years ago, "How can I forget you?" Which is what GDPR says I have the right, you have the right to be forgotten in Europe. How can I forget you if I don't know who you are? Again that's because data's everywhere, and again we're enabling that, so it's a pretty exciting time. It literally is about companies transforming themselves. >> I remember the industry when search engines came out, when the web came out, you had Google and those greenfield opportunities, they were excellent, you type in a keyword and you get results. When people tried to do enterprise search, it was like all these different databases, so you had constraints and you had legacy. Similar today, right? So how has that changed? What's different about it now? And again you had compliance and regulation coming over the top. How does an enterprise unlock those constraints? >> It's funny, you say unlock the power of data is one of our catchphrases. I'm meeting with CIOs around the planet who sound like they're CMOs, because they're using these phrases. They're saying things like, "I need to disrupt myself before someone disrupts me." Or there was one, it was a large oil and energy, it was a CIO at this massive company said, "Data's the new goldmine, and I need a shovel." So they're using these phrases, and to your point, how do you do that? Again, we do think it is about getting the right platform that plays both on-premise and ties in everything the customers are doing in cloud. So we see partnerships as being critical here. But at the same time, one of our fastest growing solutions has been our enterprise data catalog, which is operating at the metadata level. My peer in products Amit Walia likes to say, "How come you can ask the Internet anything at all?" You're so used to it, when your kids ask you a question, you just get online, I don't know, and get the answer. But you can't do that in your own enterprise. And suddenly, because of what we're doing at the metadata level working with all of the different companies around the globe through open APIs, you can now do that inside your enterprise, and that is really unlocking the capabilities for companies to run their businesses. >> You're giving us so much great insight into the kinds of conversations you're having about this deep desire to know the customer and understand his wants and needs at every moment. And yet the technology is so often the easy part, and the hard part of the implementation are the people and the processes. Can you talk a little bit about the stumbling blocks and the challenges that you're seeing with customers as they are embarking on their digital transformations? >> That's a great question. Because one of the things that I caution our clients about is companies get so focused on, I've got to pick the right technology. And we agree with that, again, that's why we focus so much, we've got to be best in breed in every decision. We're not going to lock you into something that doesn't make sense. And yet half of the battle, if you would, in these projects, it's not about the technology, it's a people/process issue. So think about to have a comprehensive view of your data, if you're a large CPG company or a large bank, you might have 10 CIOs, 50 CIOs. We have customers that have 10 ERP systems, we have folks that talk about 50 ERP systems. These are very cross functional, complex projects, and so our focus is on customer success and customer for life. I have more people in customer success than I do in sales by design. Literally thousands of people around the world, this is all that we do, that are focused on business outcomes. And so we really give an extra guarantee, if you would, to our customers to make sure they know that we're in this to make sure that they're successful, and when we start running into challenges, we're going to raise those high so that both organizations can make sure that we get to that promise that everybody is committed to. >> Talk about the ecosystem, because you continue to get success with the catalog, which is looking good. Great that, by the way, we covered that on theCUBE, I remember those conversations like it was yesterday. That really enables a lot, so you're seeing some buzz here around obviously the big clouds, the Google announcement, Amazon, and Microsoft are all here, on-premise, you've got that covered. But the ecosystem partners have a huge economic opportunity, because with the value proposition that you guys are putting forth that's rolling out with a huge customer base, the value-to-economic shift has changed, so that the economics are changing for the better for the customer and the value's increasing. That's kind of an Amazon-like effect if you think about that flywheel. That's attracting a lot of people in to your ecosystem because there's a money making opportunity. >> That's right. >> Talk about that dynamic. >> It's been humbling. I'm really pleased with Informatica World and how things are shaping up because we've had some amazing speakers here as you mentioned, from Amazon, Thomas Crane here from Google Cloud, AWS sending their CMO. It's just been a phenomenal event, yet if you go to the show for literally dozens and dozens and dozens of other providers that are critical to our customers that we want to partner with. When we say partner, we actually do deep R&D together so that there's a true value proposition where the customer gets more and a better-together solution when they choose Informatica and their critical partners. There's another category of partners that I think you're hinting at which is the large GSIs. >> The global system integrators, yeah. >> The global systems integrators. >> Accenture, Deloitte. >> Accenture, Deloitte, Cognizant have been phenomenal partners to us. And so again, when you talk about this being a board level discussion, which literally I've met with so many CIOs who say, "I just presented to my board last week, "let me tell you about this journey that we're on." Of course the large global system integrators are in the middle of that and we are very clear, we don't want to compete with those folks that are so good at both the vision and also really good in arms and legs and execution to help drive massive workflow change for our clients. So we work together brilliantly with those folks. >> And these are meaty projects, too, so it's not like they're used to, back in the old days when these projects were massive, rolling out these big ERP systems, the CRMs, back when people were instrumenting their operation of businesses. Similar now with data, these are massive, lucrative, profitable opportunities. >> These are really strategic for the client, the global system integrator, and for us for all of the same reasons. This drives massive change in a good way for our clients to keep ahead of whoever's nipping at their heels, but certainly it's a tremendous services opportunity for the large integrators, there's no question. >> Being humble. >> One of the things that's really coming through here is Informatica's commitment to solving the skills gap, especially with the Next 25 program, and this is something your company's being really thoughtful about. I'm interested from your perspective, particularly as somebody who's been in the technology industry and was on the board for a while, how do you see the skills gap and what the technology industry is doing as a whole to combat it? And then your advice from your vantage point in terms of what you think are the next things that kids should be studying in schools? >> This reminds me, and Furrier, you're talking about the old days, so I'm going to date myself, it reminds me a lot of when the Internet first started to occur. This is a very similar type change. People have been, companies have been trying to make these changes and they're starting to realize that it does start, they've got to have a good grasp of the data in order to run all of these strategic initiatives that they've got. And so it's tremendous opportunity, to your point, for young people. So how do we think about that? Certainly we do our fair share of hiring interns trying to get them early in life, when they're sophomores, juniors coming into senior year and then hiring those folks. So we see an opportunity for our own company to bring in those young people, if you would. And then the GSIs, the global systems integrators, we partner quite a bit with them, because we see them as massive scalers, they have-- >> How about people specialize in majors, any areas of interest that someone might want to specialize in to be a great contributor in the data world? Obviously stats and math are clear on machine learning and that side. But there's affects, there's societal, business outcome challenges that have not yet been figured out. What areas do you see that someone can go after, have a career around? >> So it literally is a business and a technical problem that we're solving, and so there's going to be career opportunities for everyone that's in school. Whether it be on the business side, whether it's business management, marketing, sales, because again think about when you talk about change of management, it is a CMO trying to rethink how do they reach their clients. It is a sales leader thinking, "How do I get better analytics as to what's working "and what's not working?" And then of course it crosses over into computer science and engineering, as well, where you're actually developing these products, and developing these AI applications that are just beginning to take off. But it's in the early days, so for young folks coming out of schools this is a tremendous opportunity. >> Well, next you'll have to find what's up with the field, and your customers, and then next year, next event. >> Yeah, I can't wait, it's great. I've really enjoyed spending time with you all, and we look forward to seeing you soon. >> Indeed, well thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Tracey. >> Okay, thank you. >> Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight, for John Furrier, you've been watching theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World, stay tuned. (upbeat music)

(futuristic music) >> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're having a CUBE conversation in our Palo Alto studios, we're waiting for the crazy madness of the second half conference season to begin but before that it's nice to get a little bit of a break in the action and we can have people into our studio in Palo Alto. We're really excited to have our next guest really adding to this journey that we've been kind of watching over a course of many years with Informatica, she's Tracey Newell she's the newly announced President, global field operations from Informatica, Tracey great to meet you. >> Yeah nice to meet you. >> Absolutely. So we've following Informatica for a long time, I think our first visit to Informatica world was 2015 back when it was still a public company, I think it was Info which still has this legacy, that's the hashtag for this show. >> It certainly does. >> Which is kind of funny cause it's not really a stock ticker anymore. So it's been quite a journey and really well timed with kind of the big data revolution. You joined the board a couple years ago. >> I did in 2016. >> But you just decided to leave Mahogany Row and take off the board outfit and jump in and get on the field and get dirty. So why did you decide to get into the nitty gritty? >> Yeah so I joined the board because I really believed in the mission so. Digital transformation is something that's real, it's a boardroom discussion. Every enterprise and government around the world's trying to figure this out and so I wanted to be part of that and I've had a front row seat for a couple of years. >> Right right. >> I'm not one to sit on the sidelines for very long and I thought this is just too much fun and I want to get in the game so I asked to step down and I've recently joined as a president of Global Field ops. >> Great so your background is a little bit of confusion due to history, a lot of sales, you've been running sales for lot different companies, been in the valley for a while. But sales is really under you so you haven't really left your sales hat, that's just part of now a bigger role that you're going to be doing with Informatica. >> Yeah that's right, it's a bigger and broader role, but my favorite thing is running sales organizations. So I've done other things too, I've run operations, and customer success, but I was thrilled to join and also run professional services as well cause that's so important to the delivery and for our customers. >> So you'll write the digital transformation, it's the hop topic, it's what everybody is talking about, and it's true and as Informatica is in the middle of it, data is such a big piece of the digital transformation as everybody, we used to joke, there are no companies except software companies. I think we're taking it to the next step, now there are no software companies, really everybody should be a data company, and Informatica is sitting right in the middle of that world. No that's right, yeah data is the new currency, it's become of the most important assets for enterprises, everyone's trying to transform, they're trying to disrupt, they're trying to take on the leader or they're trying to keep their lead. And they need all their information throughout their organization in order to do that and so you know one of the stories hat I really like, Graham Thompson's our CIO and he talks to lots of CIOs and he'll use this analogy in that you know he'll say does your CFO have good containment strategy around their most important asset, and that's revenue. Does your CFO, does he or she know what the data is and inevitably the CIO will say of course. Well that's great does he know or she know how they're spending the money and who's spending the money? Do they have controls and compliance and security around that and of course the answer is yes yes yes and yes. And it inevitably turns to the CIO to say well if data is your most important asset, if that truly is the currency in your organization, do you know where all of your data is? And the answers always no. And there's lots of reasons for that, it's most enterprises have hundreds if not thousands of databases and shadow IT projects everywhere. But if the answers no then how do take advantage and leverage that information to the companies advantage? How do you control it, how do you have compliance and that's where we come in. >> So what's the Informatica special sauce? What's the secret sauce that you guys can bring to the party that nobody else can? >> Yeah so I think inevitably that it would be the platform so our intelligent data platform is really important to the enterprise. The CIOs that I've been meeting with for the last decade have said you know I can't have ten widgets that are all solving a similar problem cause it's just too expensive. I need the bet with the leader in the space and so what we're doing to provide that for enterprises is really important and yet at the same time, you've got to be the best at what you do, you can't just be comprehensive but you have to have best debris technology. We're spending 17 cents of every dollar in r&d and we're so focused on just this one thing, our mission is to lead in digital transformation for the large enterprise and we've been doing this for 25 years so we've spent billions of dollars at making sure our customers are invested in us and that we protect that investment. >> Right. So what is your charge is as you're starting your new role I think the press release just came out a couple days ago. You know what does O'Neil say to you, you know we want you, here's where we want you to go take down that next mountain, what are some of your short term priorities, what are some of your longer term priorities? >> Yeah so we have a great opportunity in front of us. So stating the obvious I'm here to drive growth and expansion both in market share opportunities, we have over nine thousand customers globally and yet we all know that there's a tremendous opportunity to continue direct market shares. This is a global phenomena and yet our largest customers we have 85 of the Fortune 100, they certainly need a lot of support and we're here to help provide that leadership. And we do a lot of best practice sharing, we do a lot around helping customers on their journeys cause we see these themes given that we do work with the largest companies around the world. >> And I'm sure you're going to be getting on a plane and meeting with a whole bunch of customers over the next, over the next several weeks and months but was there something from your board position that you could see was a consistent pattern that you really see an opportunity for growth, kind of an unexploited opportunity as people are going through this digital transformation cause we talk all the time, it's how do I get started and you know I have small projects to give me early success and kind of those types of conversations but clearly we're kind of beyond the beginning and we should be starting to move down the field a little bit. >> Yeah certainly. So we work with all the global SIs and we won't ever try to take their place you know Insentrum, Delite, Capgemeni, Cottonsmith, they're tremendous at what they do and we partner with them very well. But we've absolutely seen consistent themes as we work with these big enterprises, I mean we've seen Coca Cola work on delivering new packaging for the World Cup where they drove exponential sales and they wanted to use the power of all of their data. The data in the Cloud, the data that they have on premise, the data in all the SAS applications and that's where we come in and really help them, helping them to leverage all of their information and to do that in an intelligent way and so we've seen several patterns emerge how customers can get started and we've created a series of workshops and summits and specialists that we we can sell on a pro forma basis in helping customers figure out where those quick fixes are. There's a couple of key big buckets, we see most large enterprise moving from on premise to Cloud and they're trying to figure out a a migration strategy so we help a lot there. Most customers are trying to figure out how to get closer to their customers so we do a lot of work around customer intimacy. Intimacy could be driving the top line, cross sale, up sale, or even customer retention. B&P Paraboss did a lot of work with us there around getting closer to you know in their wealth practice. And then we do quite a bit around governance as you would expect. That's a hot topic with GDPR again if you can't say you know where all your data is well then how can you be compliant? >> Right how can you delete me? >> How can you delete me if you don't know where your data is. There's a number of practices that we've set up and we'll do some not for fee consulting work to help customers try and figure this out. >> Yeah clearly when we first met Informatica in 2015, you know the Cloud was moving, the public Cloud, but it wasn't near what it is today. And I guess you guys just had a recent announcement, Google Cloud Next is coming up in a couple of weeks and so you guys are now doing some stuff with Google Cloud? We are yeah so we're pretty good listeners I think that's important if you're going to be a business partner to your clients you got to know what they want and one of the things that clients have said to us is we need you to partner with our partners. You know the days of proprietary and sole source, you know we're going to be everything to you without working with anyone you know those days are over. And so the key Cloud partners our customers have asked us to work with include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Azure, so you're right last week we did make an announcement that we've done deep integration and we're spending our r&d dollars for customers that are investing with Google to make those investments more valuable and we announced API management and integration with Google make that easy for customers so. Informatica world we announced native integration in our Ipass platform for Microsoft so over and over again you'll hear us continue to do more with the the partners that our customers want us to and that's a win win for everybody. >> Its just so funny too because when people talk about a company like say Coca Cola which you brought up they talk about it like it's a company. No it's like not a company, it's many many companies, many many projects, many many challenges you know it's not just one entity that has a relationship with one other entity. >> That's right. >> But the other thing I think is interesting times and Coke's a good example or Ford or pick many old line industrial companies that used to have distribution right and what was the purpose of distribution is to break bulk is to communicate information and to get the product close to the customer. But the manufacturer never knew what happened once they shipped that stuff off into their distribution. Now it's a whole different world, they have a direct connection with their in customer, they're collecting data from their in customer, and so they have a relationship and an opportunity and a challenge with that they never had before. They just sent it off to the distributor and off it went and hopefully it doesn't come back for repair. (laughing) >> No that's right but you're exactly right, and that's the challenge that customers are facing. I don't care if it's a customer in the mid market or it's a customer in large enterprise or if it's a government organization. They need to know all aspects of their customer partner supplier information and how to communicate globally if they're going to drive disruption. And one of the CIOs of a Fortune 500 made a comment that we decided that we were going to disrupt ourselves before someone else disrupted us. And that's, that's my comment on why this is a board level discussion, it's super important, and we can help solve those problems. >> It's funny Dave Potrick one of my favorite executives used to be the number two guy at Charles Schwab and I remember him speaking when they went to fix price trading back in the day, I'm aging myself unfortunately but you know he said the same thing, we have to disrupt ourselves before somebody else disrupts us. And if you're not thinking that way you're going to get disrupted so better it be you than someone that you don't even see and usually it's not your side competitor, it's the one coming from a completely different direction that you weren't even paying attention to. >> That's right. And we see that over and over again and you made the right comment in that it's not always easy, some of these Fortune 500s through consolidation, even the Global 2000. They've done all these acquisitions and so you've got hundreds of BUs that don't have any systems tied together and how do you start to create a common connection in so that you can build your brand and you can try differentiation and that's the key, that's back to the intelligent data platform. >> Right and as you said and there's not single systems and now we got API economy, things are all connected so you don't necessarily even have that much direct control over a lot of these opportunities and you said that first I think it's just like okay where's your data? Can you start with the very simple question and a lot of people aren't really sure and can't even start from there. >> That's right. >> So good opportunities. >> Absolutely, there's no question. >> Alright Tracey, well thank you for stopping by, congratulations on your, on your new position and moving from Mahogany Row down into, down into the trenches. >> Down on the field. >> I'm sure they're going to be happy to have you down there on the field. >> Yeah no thanks Jeff I'm happy to be here and thanks for the time today. >> Thank you and we'll see you in Informatica world if not sooner. >> That's right. >> Alright she's Tracey Newell I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCube from Palo Alto, thanks for watching. (futuristic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering the AWS re:Invent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host, Keith Townsend, and this is one of the interviews we've been really excited. Of course, we've got about 60 interviews. We love all of them. Lots of good excitement. Lots going on at this ecosystem. Over 43 thousand in attendance here in Las Vegas, but happy to welcome back to the program, Chris Wolf, who's the Vice President and CTO of Global Field and Industry at VMware. Chris, great to see you. >> Thanks Stu, thanks Keith. Great to see you guys. >> So for the year, the whole VMware on AWS has been a hot buzz discussion. We've all been arguing internally and on theCUBE about you know, partnering and how does that work and who gets the most benefit out of it, but let's start, Chris I'd love to hear your viewpoint, you know. You talk to a lot of customers. I've talked to some customers that are really excited about it, especially at VMWorld, that were there testing it and doing it. Give us the customer viewpoint. What's really exciting them? What's interesting them? And I know there's a lot of new news we're wanna gonna get into. >> Yeah, you know, there's so much that I think is exciting to customers because you know, they're struggling with being more agile, being more software defined, being able to have more flexibility in their environments. And to be able to leverage VMware Cloud on AWS allows them to go through data center consolidation easier. It allows them to get applications to the Cloud to take advantage of Cloud services. One of the things people, I think kind of falls between the cracks in VMware Cloud on AWS is the fact that if I want to modernize an application or a traditional application, refactoring an application is enormously expensive. It's very hard to do. It's very time consuming. If I can start to move an application into the VMware Cloud on AWS and then start to integrate that with other native AWS services, I get the benefit of modernizing that application without having to touch any of the application code, which is a huge benefit to customers. >> Yeah, we've spent the last couple of years at this show, which well, do I lift and shift? Do I just re-platform it? Do I refactor it? Do I totally rewrite it? You know, the number of customers that I've talked to at this show, their advice that they give to their peers is like well, go faster. And how do we go faster? Do I just take my VMware stuff that I was doing in my own data center, stick it in VMware on AWS, start using all the cool stuff. Is that kind of the path that you see? >> That's part of it. You know, I think there's a couple threads here. There's the notion that you know, I wanna go faster, but to go faster, I have to slay some old demons in IT. Where I have to change my mindset. You know, I can't say I want to be more software defined and more agile and then have specific hardware requirements in my architecture. Of course, that's not for all applications, but that's part of that shift in mindset is how can I go faster? And if it's harder to transform some of my data centers, if I can get into that operational model by getting on Amazon quicker, then that's good for my business. >> Yeah, let me just poke on one more thing on that and I know Keith wants to jump in here, but one of the great things, I think back to 15 years ago. It was like, you know my Windows operating system going end to life. I'm gonna stick it in VM and keep it there forever. But, boy that application was all the technical data. My users hated it and everything like that. How does VMware go from I managed what you had to enabling your future? >> The thing that we're really focused on here in terms of enabling the future, when you think about programmatic compute and networking and storage and security, all applications need them. I can abstract all that away with a Lambda function or whatever, but at the end of the day, somebody has to do it and that part of the fabric becomes really important for things like having a security auto-trell. The other thread there is where VMware's strategic to customers is that they say, "You know I might wanna start this in the Cloud, "but I wanna maintain full control "of all of the intellectual property, "so I wanna use Kubernetes, I wanna use containers, "I wanna use a variety of open source projects. "I wanna use their native API's for my software engineers, "but I wanna have flexibility to build these applications "without pre-destining their future." Maybe it runs in a Cloud today, maybe it runs in a data center tomorrow, maybe it runs out at the edge. Maybe I do an acquisition and it has to run in that facility. The bottom line is, I don't always know what the future holds for my apps. And for the aspect of the apps that are core to your business, there's a lot value in running them on VMware because we can allow you to maintain that flexibility and independence, just like we've done way back in the past with your traditional enterprise applications. >> So Chris, that's a great setup for the next set of questions, which is, VMware has been known to move at the speed of the CIO. We're at AWS re:Invent. These folks move much faster than the speed of the CIO. The question is around, what's VMware's focus? You know, there's VMware Cloud on AWS, there's PKS, there's VIG. You guys came out with Openstack, VMware integrated Openstack 4.0, and then even VMware Cloud on AWS, the promised innovation three and a half months after the release. Iteration on that. That's much faster than what the CIO used to have. How are those conversations balanced between the CIO and the new business user here at AWS? >> Yeah, way to sugarcoat Keith. That's a good question. Look at CIOs today. There's very innovative CIOs. We had the NFL CIO up on stage in the morning Keynote, right? And I thought that was highly dynamic, really talking about how you have to transform business. What we're really focused on in terms of helping customers is making sure that that fabric that runs their business applications is just as fluid and dynamic as their businesses. The security has to be as fluid and dynamic or more dynamic than the threats that you face. So, these are areas that we're focused on, but your point is: how can VMware continue to deliver quick innovation? I think VMware integrated Openstack actually is an example of VMware integration or innovation, so I'm glad you brought it up. We don't talk about Openstack that much now, but VMware was the very first Openstack distro-vendor to make upgrades of Openstack versions they feature as software. Where our competitors in that space were making it a professional services engagement. You look at us, what we've done in terms of supporting containers natively on vSphere. We announced PKS and we were very quick to embrace Kubernetes. We announced Greengrass preview that we're bringing to market as well on vSphere. So, you're absolutely right to give us the feedback that in the past, you could say Vmware was a bit conservative of a company. We were slow and deliberate in some of our innovations. They were important and we were deliberate because we had a reputation to uphold for product quality. That's what our customers expect, but at the same time, it's very good feedback to say that we have to work quicker, and that's the model that we're in. I think that the AWS partnership for Vmware is one example of how we've had a couple of companies learning from each other in terms of AWS and interacting with the enterprise and VMware in terms of innovating a Cloud space, and you're staring to see the benefits and the fruits of that labor now. >> So, ironically I ran into the VMUG president, Ben Clayton doing a show floor. It's amazing to see the crossover between the VMware community and the AWS community. I think VMware Cloud on AWS has been a boom, a realizing that Cloud is coming into the enterprise in a great way. Let's talk about the community and the users. How do you help move that traditional community of, I think VMUG is 200,000 users. How do you help move that membership forward to this new speed of IT? >> It's a terrific question. There's definitely some challenges with getting folks. Part of it is IT folks, we're builders at heart. We love building everything. We love the pieces and parts. We can understand how they matter, but even if they matter like this much, it doesn't necessarily mean that I should build a snowflake for my business because some of the problems that VMware solves, you could say that every business in the world has to solve the same problems. So why focus on some of those smaller nuisances? What we've been really after is providing much more content into the VMUG communities around transformation, around how more modular IT architectures are important. Even beyond the VMUG community, if you think about some traditional VMware channel partners, where their core focus was on some very tightly integrated hardware-based solutions. Those partners, the more innovative ones, are now building hybrid applications across VMware and AWS components and modernizing enterprises that way. We're trying to encourage our VMUG community to do the same thing. I've had talks with VMUG events this year talking to them about Edge Compute and how VMware is investing there and what R&D looks like. Part of this is, I think all of us in IT, we have to have that point in time where we say "I have to let go, "I know the market's shifting, "I know I have to do something different." If I didn't let go in my past, I would still be known for being a Certified Novell Engineer, right? Times change and we have to change too, so it's really important to be prescriptive and give our community all the tools they need to evolve with us. >> Chris, you mention the Greengrass thing that you have in preview for a bit. I want you talk about that a little bit and when I heard Andy Jassy this morning, he talked about the continuum. Instances, which underneath, that's virtualization from VMware. There's containers and there's serverless. Andy says if he was to build IWBS today, he'd build it all serverless. We know it's not a zero sum game and nothing changes overnight, but virtualization is not decimated by containers overnight and containers doesn't go away now that serverless comes out. I want you to talk about the Greengrass and how that spectrum fits into the customers you're talked to in the VMware journey. >> I think it's really, really exciting and certainly I'm a huge proponent of serverless. My 14 year old son has an Echo Dot in his bedroom and he likes to program it to do really fun things. My favorite example is he had it talking about who the ugliest person in the world is and wanted Alexa to name his sister. There's a part of me that's like "No don't do that, son" but then the other part's like "I'm so proud of you." >> That's awesome. But if we step back, there's this huge press to start doing more in terms of getting the analytics and the intelligence to either where the data's being created or where the data's being consumed. We've had a lot of customers come to us jointly, saying "Look, I can't move the data to the Cloud "to do deep analytics or machine learning. "It defies the laws of physics "or the networking costs are just too much. "Or there's latency considerations. "I need a faster transaction execution time." We have a customer, a joint customer, where they're monitoring the heat of the brake pad on a train and they're trying to understand in real time, how that impacts the train's maintenance schedule and when they should take it out of service. They need to get the intelligence of the Cloud closer to where these things are occurring. Let's bring that all back to Greengrass on vSphere. You heard an announcement of machine learning on Greengrass today. To do machine learning, I need some considerable compute horsepower to really make it effective. Most of our customers already have a lot of that horsepower already out at the edge. One of our customers has six to 10 servers. This is very common of a lot of retail organizations, six to 10 servers per stores times 10,000 stores. They're trying to do more with IOT and more analytics. They want to leverage the investments that they already have an infrastructure. The other part that's strategically important to VMware is this: we want to have Cloud services be able to execute where the data's being created and that's a natural use case for virtualization. Then second, we want to have a platform that can allow the most popular opensource technologies to also run there to give customers all of that choice. So for us, it's all about promoting heterogeneity at the edge. We see those Cloud services as really that new generation of application platforms that customers, they don't want some artificial constraint of a Cloud data center to say "this is where it has to run." I want it to run wherever the business requirements say it needs to run and that's what's important and that's what we're doing with this announcement. >> Chris, we talk to a lot of CTOs, senior architects, CIOs and even looking at VMware, trust that part of it has been very stable in the environment for years, the product selection can be overwhelming. CIOs, CTOs need to focus their investment and their strategies in a certain area. Conversations, where are you telling CTOs, CIOs to focus their investment? >> It's a really good question. You definitely have to have a focus area and for us, it's about a platform for rapid agility and innovation. That's really key. We don't know what the future's gonna be. We can guess and you are both two very visionary guys and you have a general idea of what's gonna happen over the next 12, 18 months, but there's things that are just unexpected, especially in the business context. We can understand technology, but business dynamics change very quickly. Helping CTOs and CIOs understand how to build a fabric that can make them more agile and flexible is really key. That's one. So, greater automation, greater efficiencies, rapid innovation, but even more importantly for a lot that's really top of mind is security. Giving them a way to do rapid recovery, being able to start to segment some of their resources, being able to dynamically offer and adjust security and understand threats in real time and combat them in real time is key. The traditional model of security is: I have a dynamic threat so I'm gonna have increased layers of static security to combat it and I'll just add more layers. Doesn't work. We've had customers have massive outages that we've worked with because they've had ransomware attacks and things like that, so they want to be more agile and more dynamic. Their VMware environments, they've been able to get up very quickly, but these lessons are teaching organizations that they have to think differently. So really, that security and agility I see is really top of line for a lot of folks. >> Chris, I've seen lots of traffic at the VMware booth, talked to a lot of customers that are interested. The elephant in the room when I talk to all of them is cost. We've looked at Big Bear Metal, Amazon released that instance. That's a big hunking instance, a lot of memory, a lot of networking. I've talked to a couple customers that said, "I did the analysis on VMware over AWS "versus heck, just buying a rack "and stick it in my environment." You get a significant difference in there. One customer is like "Hey, it was 3x the cost "for me to just buy it and do it myself, "and I didn't feel I was gonna get any "operational efficiencies even doing it "'cause I know VMware and I know how to run it." What do you say to those customers? What are they missing? I'd love any misconceptions that you're hearing out there. >> I'll give ya an example. Let's use the cost analogy. My daughter wants a new radio for Christmas. I can go to Best Buy and buy a really nice stereo, but that's actually 3x the cost of me buying the circuit board kit, say on Amazon, and soldering in the components myself. When you think about that in a practical, real world example, we used to buy motherboards and build PCs and servers back in the day. We don't even think about doing it anymore and even if I could save 25 dollars doing it, I still wouldn't do it because there's more important things I can be doing with my time to differentiate my business. Look, we are-- >> I wanna poke at that. Because you're partners at Delium Sig and I buy one of the VX whatever family from their team. It's pretty easy to ploy, I do that. I understand how to do VMware. It's not gonna take me months to deploy. I know how to a VMware environment and it's that type of configuration. They're saying it's not building versus buying and I understand there's a spectrum there, but just the raw VMware and AWS. They said "I'm gonna get two bills. "I'm gonna get one from VMware and one from Amazon" and the price of it does seem pretty massive compared to what they were doing. So, are they wrong about that? >> I'm really surprised at that. We're not hearing that from our customers We're seeing them have very solid in terms of cost saving, in terms of running on AWS because unlike a traditional Cloud environment, I can oversubscribe physical hosts, I can run more workloads because it is native VMware. You're also getting additional benefits. I'm getting V-SAN storage, I'm getting NSX for networking and security. To say I'm just gonna take vSphere and compare, I would say that that's probably not the closest comparison. There's other aspects that we're providing that operate in a Cloud environment. And, listen, we had this before. Five years ago, people were saying, "Well, Cloud's too expensive so I'm gonna stay on premises." We don't even think that way anymore. There's other benefits that you're getting in the Cloud model that you have to weigh into consideration and we've seen VMware Cloud on AWS is as price competitive as a lot of the native public Cloud services are without all the added benefits of networking and security and management and other things that we throw in. >> Chris, wanna give you the final word. What's exciting you these days? You used to sit on kind of this side of the table, look at the environment. You're deep in some of the emerging pieces. What's getting you excited? I'd love to hear any final insights on partnering between VMware and Amazon, which a lot of us on the outside are like cats and dogs living together. >> Okay, let's hit a couple of them. First, certainly for me, the innovation that's occurring at the edge, I think is extremely exciting. Driving new use cases around augmented reality, more machine learning. How we're looking in terms of moving services to where data's being generated instead of moving the data, which is always problematic. That's a new wave of innovation that I think is really exciting. So that's the certainly the area I'd say that's most exciting for me, is how we can innovate there. It's also around hybrid applications. It's the integration of things like Lambda functions in a traditional file system. I was with a major global financial services organization yesterday and we were not talking about traditional Lambda function use cases. We were talking about integrating Lambda with database and file system events and VM's running on vSphere. So, there's this whole new way to modernize applications that we're just at the cusp of. That pace of innovation's happening faster and faster. I'll say this about Amazon: we are really committed to working together and I think what you're seeing in the industry in general, it's not just VMware with AWS, but it's with our partners in the container spaces. An example is containers as a service and platform as a service, is we're being very pragmatic about focusing on what we're really, really good at. And there's areas where VMware is fantastic at it, in terms of reliability and heterogeneity at the edge and there's natural synergies where we can work together with Amazon web services. In my opinion, they've been a fantastic partner. All of the work that we've done with the Greengrass team and the IOT team, in terms of bringing Greengrass to market on vSphere, has been an enormously positive experience. We share lessons learned, we share engineering, work together. It's extremely collaborative because just like all of our technology partners, there's always areas where we're going to compete a little bit and there can be some overlap, but there's a lot more areas where we get to work together and that's what we're really focused on with VMware and AWS. >> Well, Chris, I know Keith and I always appreciate your perspectives, the VMware community engagement, know you're always open to having some good, real discussions here, so really appreciate you coming sharing all our viewpoints. Congratulations on all the progress here. We're certainly excited to see where it goes. >> I appreciate the opportunity. >> Alright, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)