>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of VM World 2020 Virtual I'm John for your host of the Cube, our 11th year covering V emeralds. Not in person. It's virtual. I'm with my coast, Dave. A lot, of course. Ah, guest has been on every year since the cubes existed. Sanjay Putin, who is now the chief operating officer for VM Ware Sanjay, Great to see you. It's our 11th years. Virtual. We're not in person. Usually high five are going around. But hey, virtual fist pump, >>virtual pissed bump to you, John and Dave, always a pleasure to talk to you. I give you more than a virtual pistol. Here's a virtual hug. >>Well, so >>great. Back at great. >>Great to have you on. First of all, a lot more people attending the emerald this year because it's virtual again, it doesn't have the face to face. It is a community and technical events, so people do value that face to face. Um, but it is virtually a ton of content, great guests. You guys have a great program here, Very customer centric. Kind of. The theme is, you know, unpredictable future eyes is really what it's all about. We've talked about covert you've been on before. What's going on in your perspective? What's the theme of your main talks? >>Ah, yeah. Thank you, John. It's always a pleasure to talk to you folks. We we felt as we thought, about how we could make this content dynamic. We always want to make it fresh. You know, a virtual show of this kind and program of this kind. We all are becoming experts at many Ted talks or ESPN. Whatever your favorite program is 60 minutes on becoming digital producers of content. So it has to be crisp, and everybody I think was doing this has found ways by which you reduce the content. You know, Pat and I would have normally given 90 minute keynotes on day one and then 90 minutes again on day two. So 180 minutes worth of content were reduced that now into something that is that entire 180 minutes in something that is but 60 minutes. You you get a chance to use as you've seen from the keynote an incredible, incredible, you know, packed array of both announcements from Pat myself. So we really thought about how we could organize this in a way where the content was clear, crisp and compelling. Thekla's piece of it needed also be concise, but then supplemented with hundreds of sessions that were as often as possible, made it a goal that if you're gonna do a break out session that has to be incorporate or lead with the customer, so you'll see not just that we have some incredible sea level speakers from customers that have featured in in our pattern, Mikey notes like John Donahoe, CEO of Nike or Lorry beer C I, a global sea of JPMorgan Chase partner Baba, who is CEO of Zuma Jensen Wang, who is CEO of video. Incredible people. Then we also had some luminaries. We're gonna be talking in our vision track people like in the annuity. I mean, one of the most powerful women the world many years ranked by Fortune magazine, chairman, CEO Pepsi or Bryan Stevenson, the person who start in just mercy. If you watch that movie, he's a really key fighter for social justice and criminal. You know, reform and jails and the incarceration systems. And Malala made an appearance. Do I asked her personally, I got to know her and her dad's and she spoke two years ago. I asked her toe making appearance with us. So it's a really, really exciting until we get to do some creative stuff in terms of digital content this year. >>So on the product side and the momentum side, you have great decisions you guys have made in the past. We covered that with Pat Gelsinger, but the business performance has been very strong with VM. Where, uh, props to you guys, Where does this all tie together for in your mind? Because you have the transformation going on in a highly accelerated rate. You know, cov were not in person, but Cove in 19 has proven, uh, customers that they have to move faster. It's a highly accelerated world, a lot. Lots changing. Multi cloud has been on the radar. You got security. All the things you guys are doing, you got the AI announcements that have been pumping. Thean video thing was pretty solid. That project Monterey. What does the customer walk away from this year and and with VM where? What is the main theme? What what's their call to action? What's what do they need to be doing? >>I think there's sort of three things we would encourage customers to really think about. Number one is, as they think about everything in infrastructure, serves APS as they think about their APS. We want them to really push the frontier of how they modernize their athletic applications. And we think that whole initiative off how you modernized applications driven by containers. You know, 20 years ago when I was a developer coming out of college C, C plus, plus Java and then emerge, these companies have worked on J two ee frameworks. Web Logic, Be Aware logic and IBM Web Street. It made the development off. Whatever is e commerce applications of portals? Whatever was in the late nineties, early two thousands much, much easier. That entire world has gotten even easier and much more Micro service based now with containers. We've been talking about kubernetes for a while, but now we've become the leading enterprise, contain a platform making some incredible investments, but we want to not just broaden this platform. We simplified. It is You've heard everything in the end. What works in threes, right? It's sort of like almost t shirt sizing small, medium, large. So we now have tens Ooh, in the standard. The advanced the enterprise editions with lots of packaging behind that. That makes it a very broad and deep platform. We also have a basic version of it. So in some sense it's sort of like an extra small. In addition to the small medium large so tends to and everything around at modernization, I think would be message number one number two alongside modernization. You're also thinking about migration of your workloads and the breadth and depth of, um, er Cloud Foundation now of being able to really solve, not just use cases, you are traditionally done, but also new ai use cases. Was the reason Jensen and us kind of partner that, and I mean what a great company and video has become. You know, the king maker of these ai driven applications? Why not run those AI applications on the best infrastructure on the planet? Remember, that's a coming together of both of our platforms to help customers. You know automotive banking fraud detection is a number of AI use cases that now get our best and we want it. And the same thing then applies to Project Monterey, which takes the B c f e m A Cloud Foundation proposition to smart Knicks on Dell, HP Lenovo are embracing the in video Intel's and Pen Sandoz in that smart make architectural, however, that so that entire world of multi cloud being operative Phobia Macleod Foundation on Prem and all of its extended use cases like AI or Smart Knicks or Edge, but then also into the AWS Azure, Google Multi Cloud world. We obviously had a preferred relationship with Amazon that's going incredibly well, but you also saw some announcements last week from, uh, Microsoft Azure about azure BMR solutions at their conference ignite. So we feel very good about the migration opportunity alongside of modernization on the third priority, gentlemen would be security. It's obviously a topic that I most recently taken uninterested in my day job is CEO of the company running the front office customer facing revenue functions by night job by Joe Coffin has been driving. The security strategy for the company has been incredibly enlightening to talk, to see SOS and drive this intrinsic security or zero trust from the network to end point and workload and cloud security. And we made some exciting announcements there around bringing together MAWR capabilities with NSX and Z scaler and a problem black and workload security. And of course, Lassiter wouldn't cover all of this. But I would say if I was a attendee of the conference those the three things I want them to take away what BMR is doing in the future of APS what you're doing, the future of a multi cloud world and how we're making security relevant for distributed workforce. >>I know David >>so much to talk about here, Sanjay. So, uh, talk about modern APS? That's one of the five franchise platforms VM Ware has a history of going from, you know, Challenger toe dominant player. You saw that with end user computing, and there's many, many other examples, so you are clearly one of the top, you know. Let's call it five or six platforms out there. We know what those are, uh, and but critical to that modern APS. Focus is developers, and I think it's fair to say that that's not your wheelhouse today, but you're making moves there. You agree that that is, that is a critical part of modern APS, and you update us on what you're doing for that community to really take a leadership position there. >>Yeah, no, I think it's a very good point, David. We way seek to constantly say humble and hungry. There's never any assumption from us that VM Ware is completely earned anyplace off rightful leadership until we get thousands, tens of thousands. You know, we have a half a million customers running on our virtualization sets of products that have made us successful for 20 years 70 million virtual machines. But we have toe earn that right and containers, and I think there will be probably 10 times as many containers is their virtual machines. So if it took us 20 years to not just become the leader in in virtual machines but have 70 million virtual machines, I don't think it will be 20 years before there's a billion containers and we seek to be the leader in that platform. Now, why, Why VM Where and why do you think we can win in their long term. What are we doing with developers Number one? We do think there is a container capability independent of virtual machine. And that's what you know, this entire world of what hefty on pivotal brought to us on. You know, many of the hundreds of customers that are using what was formerly pivotal and FDR now what's called Tan Xue have I mean the the case. Studies of what those customers are doing are absolutely incredible. When I listen to them, you take Dick's sporting goods. I mean, they are building curbside, pick up a lot of the world. Now the pandemic is doing e commerce and curbside pick up people are going to the store, That's all based on Tan Xue. We've had companies within this sort of world of pandemic working on contact, tracing app. Some of the diagnostic tools built without they were the lab services and on the 10 zoo platform banks. Large banks are increasingly standardizing on a lot of their consumer facing or wealth management type of applications, anything that they're building rapidly on this container platform. So it's incredible the use cases I'm hearing public sector. The U. S. Air Force was talking about how they've done this. Many of them are not public about how they're modernizing dams, and I tend to learn the best from these vertical use case studies. I mean, I spend a significant part of my life is you know, it s a P and increasingly I want to help the company become a lot more vertical. Use case in banking, public sector, telco manufacturing, CPG retail top four or five where we're seeing a lot of recurrence of these. The Tan Xue portfolio actually brings us closest to almost that s a P type of dialogue because we're having an apse dialogue in the in the speak of an industry as opposed to bits and bytes Notice I haven't talked at all about kubernetes or containers. I'm talking about the business problem being solved in a retailer or a bank or public sector or whatever have you now from a developer audience, which was the second part of your question? Dave, you know, we talked about this, I think a year or two ago. We have five million developers today that we've been able to, you know, as bringing these acquisitions earn some audience with about two or three million from from the spring community and two or three million from the economic community. So think of those five million people who don't know us because of two acquisitions we don't. Obviously spring was inside Vienna where went out of pivotal and then came back. So we really have spent a lot of time with that community. A few weeks ago, we had spring one. You guys are aware of that? That conference record number of attendees okay, Registered, I think of all 40 or 50,000, which is, you know, much bigger than the physical event. And then a substantial number of them attended live physical. So we saw a great momentum out of spring one, and we're really going to take care of that, That that community base of developers as they care about Java Manami also doing really, really well. But then I think the rial audience it now has to come from us becoming part of the conversation. That coupon at AWS re invent at ignite not just the world, I mean via world is not gonna be the only place where infrastructure and developers come to. We're gonna have to be at other events which are very prominent and then have a developer marketplace. So it's gonna be a multiyear effort. We're okay with that. To grow that group of about five million developers that we today Kate or two on then I think there will be three or four other companies that also play very prominently to developers AWS, Microsoft and Google. And if we're one among those three or four companies and remembers including that list, we feel very good about our ability to be in a place where this is a shared community, takes a village to approach and an appeal to those developers. I think there will be one of those four companies that's doing this for many years to >>come. Santa, I got to get your take on. I love your reference to the Web days and how the development environment change and how the simplicity came along very relevant to how we're seeing this digital transformation. But I want to get your thoughts on how you guys were doing pre and now during and Post Cove it. You already had a complicated thing coming on. You had multi cloud. You guys were expanding your into end you had acquisitions, you mentioned a few of them. And then cove it hit. Okay, so now you have Everything is changing you got. He's got more complex city. You have more solutions, and then the customer psychology is change. You got to spectrums of customers, people trying to save their business because it's changed, their customer behavior has changed. And you have other customers that are doubling down because they have a tailwind from Cove it, whether it's a modern app, you know, coming like Zoom and others are doing well because of the environment. So you got your customers air in this in this in this, in this storm, you know, they're trying to save down, modernized or or or go faster. How are you guys changing? Because it's impacted how you sell. People are selling differently, how you implement and how you support customers, because you already had kind of the whole multi cloud going on with the modern APS. I get that, but Cove, it has changed things. How are you guys adopting and changing to meet the customer needs who are just trying to save their business on re factor or double down and continue >>John. Great question. I think I also talked about some of this in one of your previous digital events that you and I talked about. I mean, you go back to the last week of February 1st week of March, actually back up, even in January, my last trip on a plane. Ah, major trip outside this country was the World Economic Forum in Davos. And, you know, there were thousands of us packed into the small digits in Switzerland. I was sitting having dinner with Andy Jassy in a restaurant one night that day. Little did we know. A month later, everything would change on DWhite. We began to do in late February. Early March was first. Take care of employees. You always wanna have the pulse, check employees and be in touch with them. Because the health and safety of employees is much more important than the profits of, um, where you know. So we took care of that. Make sure that folks were taking care of older parents were in good place. We fortunately not lost anyone to death. Covert. We had some covert cases, but they've recovered on. This is an incredible pandemic that connects all of us in the human fabric. It has no separation off skin color or ethnicity or gender, a little bit of difference in people who are older, who might be more affected or prone to it. But we just have to, and it's taught me to be a significantly more empathetic. I began to do certain things that I didn't do before, but I felt was the right thing to do. For example, I've begun to do 25 30 minute calls with every one of my key countries. You know, as I know you, I run customer operations, all of the go to market field teams reporting to me on. I felt it was important for me to be showing up, not just in the big company meetings. We do that and big town halls where you know, some fractions. 30,000 people of VM ware attend, but, you know, go on, do a town hall for everybody in a virtual zoom session in Japan. But in their time zone. So 10 o'clock my time in the night, uh, then do one in China and Australia kind of almost travel around the world virtually, and it's not long calls 25 30 minutes, where 1st 10 or 15 minutes I'm sharing with them what I'm seeing across other countries, the world encouraging them to focus on a few priorities, which I'll talk about in a second and then listening to them for 10 15 minutes and be, uh and then the call on time or maybe even a little earlier, because every one of us is going to resume button going from call to call the call. We're tired of T. There's also mental, you know, fatigue that we've gotta worry about. Mental well, being long term. So that's one that I personally began to change. I began to also get energy because in the past, you know, I would travel to Europe or Asia. You know, 40 50%. My life has travel. It takes a day out of your life on either end, your jet lag. And then even when you get to a Tokyo or Beijing or to Bangalore or the London, getting between sites of these customers is like a 45 minute, sometimes in our commute. Now I'm able to do many of these 25 30 minute call, so I set myself a goal to talk to 1000 chief security officers. I know a lot of CEOs and CFOs from my times at S A P and VM ware, but I didn't know many security officers who often either work for a CEO or report directly to the legal counsel on accountable to the audit committee of the board. And I got a list of these 1,002,000 people we called email them. Man, I gotta tell you, people willing to talk to me just coming, you know, into this I'm about 500 into that. And it was role modeling to my teams that the top of the company is willing to spend as much time as possible. And I have probably gotten a lot more productive in customer conversations now than ever before. And then the final piece of your question, which is what do we tell the customer in terms about portfolio? So these were just more the practices that I was able to adapt during this time that have given me energy on dial, kind of get scared of two things from the portfolio perspective. I think we began to don't notice two things. One is Theo entire move of migration and modernization around the cloud. I describe that as you know, for example, moving to Amazon is a migration opportunity to azure modernization. Is that whole Tan Xue Eminem? Migration of modernization is highly relevant right now. In fact, taking more speed data center spending might be on hold on freeze as people kind of holding till depend, emmick or the GDP recovers. But migration of modernization is accelerating, so we wanna accelerate that part of our portfolio. One of the products we have a cloud on Amazon or Cloud Health or Tan Xue and maybe the other offerings for the other public dog. The second part about portfolio that we're seeing acceleration around is distributed workforce security work from home work from anywhere. And that's that combination off workspace, one for both endpoint management, virtual desktops, common black envelope loud and the announcements we've now made with Z scaler for, uh, distributed work for security or what the analysts called secure access. So message. That's beautiful because everyone working from home, even if they come back to the office, needs a very different model of security and were now becoming a leader in that area. of security. So these two parts of the portfolio you take the five franchise pillars and put them into these two buckets. We began to see momentum. And the final thing, I would say, Guys, just on a soft note. You know, I've had to just think about ways in which I balance work and family. It's just really easy. You know what, 67 months into this pandemic to burn out? Ah, now I've encouraged my team. We've got to think about this as a marathon, not a sprint. Do the personal things that you wanna do that will make your life better through this pandemic. That in practice is that you keep after it. I'll give you one example. I began biking with my kids and during the summer months were able to bike later. Even now in the fall, we're able to do that often, and I hope that's a practice I'm able to do much more often, even after the pandemic. So develop some activities with your family or with the people that you love the most that are seeing you a lot more and hopefully enjoying that time with them that you will keep even after this pandemic ends. >>So, Sanjay, I love that you're spending all this time with CSOs. I mean, I have a Well, maybe not not 1000 but dozens. And they're such smart people. They're really, you know, in the thick of things you mentioned, you know, your partnership with the scale ahead. Scott Stricklin on who is the C. C so of Wyndham? He was talking about the security club. But since the pandemic, there's really three waves. There's the cloud security, the identity, access management and endpoint security. And one of the things that CSOs will tell you is the lack of talent is their biggest challenge. And they're drowning in all these products. And so how should we think about your approach to security and potentially simplifying their lives? >>Yeah. You know, Dave, we talked about this, I think last year, maybe the year before, and what we were trying to do in security was really simplified because the security industry is like 5000 vendors, and it's like, you know, going to a doctor and she tells you to stay healthy. You gotta have 5000 tablets. You just cannot eat that many tablets you take you days, weeks, maybe a month to eat that many tablets. So ah, grand simplification has to happen where that health becomes part of your diet. You eat your proteins and vegetables, you drink your water, do your exercise. And the analogy and security is we cannot deploy dozens of agents and hundreds of alerts and many, many consoles. Uh, infrastructure players like us that have control points. We have 70 million virtual machines. We have 75 million virtual switches. We have, you know, tens of million's off workspace, one of carbon black endpoints that we manage and secure its incumbent enough to take security and making a lot more part of the infrastructure. Reduce the need for dozens and dozens of point tools. And with that comes a grand simplification of both the labor involved in learning all these tools. Andi, eventually also the cost of ownership off those particular tool. So that's one other thing we're seeking to do is increasingly be apart off that education off security professionals were both investing in ah, lot of off, you know, kind of threat protection research on many of our folks you know who are in a threat. Behavioral analytics, you know, kind of thread research. And people have come out of deep hacking experience with the government and others give back to the community and teaching classes. Um, in universities, there are a couple of non profits that are really investing in security, transfer education off CSOs and their teams were contributing to that from the standpoint off the ways in which we can give back both in time talent and also a treasure. So I think is we think about this. You're going to see us making this a long term play. We have a billion dollar security business today. There's not many companies that have, you know, a billion dollar plus of security is probably just two or three, and some of them have hit a wall in terms of their progress sport. We want to be one of the leaders in cybersecurity, and we think we need to do this both in building great product satisfying customers. But then also investing in the learning, the training enable remember, one of the things of B M worlds bright is thes hands on labs and all the training enable that happened at this event. So we will use both our platform. We in world in a variety of about the virtual environments to ensure that we get the best education of security to professional. >>So >>that's gonna be exciting, Because if you look at some of the evaluations of some of the pure plays I mean, you're a cloud security business growing a triple digits and, you know, you see some of these guys with, you know, $30 billion valuations, But I wanted to ask you about the market, E v m. Where used to be so simple Right now, you guys have expanded your tam dramatically. How are you thinking about, you know, the market opportunity? You've got your five franchise platforms. I know you're very disciplined about identifying markets, and then, you know, saying, Okay, now we're gonna go compete. But how do you look at the market and the market data? Give us the update there. >>Yeah, I think. Dave, listen, you know, I like davinci statement. You know, simplicity is the greatest form of sophistication, and I think you've touched on something that which is cos we get bigger. You know, I've had the great privilege of working for two great companies. s a P and B M where the bulk of my last 15 plus years And if something I've learned, you know, it's very easy. Both companies was to throw these TLS three letter acronyms, okay? And I use an acronym and describing the three letter acronyms like er or s ex. I mean, they're all acronyms and a new employee who comes to this company. You know, Carol Property, for example. We just hired her from Google. Is our CMO her first comments like, My goodness, there is a lot of off acronyms here. I've gotta you need a glossary? I had the same reaction when I joined B. M or seven years ago and had the same reaction when I joined the S A. P 15 years ago. Now, of course, two or three years into it, you learn everything and it becomes part of your speed. We have toe constantly. It's like an accordion like you expanded by making it mawr of luminous and deep. But as you do that it gets complex, you then have to simplify it. And that's the job of all of us leaders and I this year, just exemplifying that I don't have it perfect. One of the gifts I do have this communication being able to simplify things. I recorded a five minute video off our five franchise pill. It's just so that the casual person didn't know VM where it could understand on. Then, when I'm on your shore and when on with Jim Cramer and CNBC, I try to simplify, simplify, simplify, simplify because the more you can talk and analogies and pictures, the more the casual user. I mean, of course, and some other audiences. I'm talking to investors. Get it on. Then, Of course, as you go deeper, it should be like progressive layers or feeling of an onion. You can get deeper. It's not like the entire discussion with Sanjay Putin on my team is like, you know, empty suit. It's a superficial discussion. We could go deeper, but you don't have to begin the discussion in the bowels off that, and that's really what we don't do. And then the other part of your question was, how do we think about new markets? You know, we always start with Listen, you sort of core in contact our borough come sort of Jeffrey Moore, Andi in the Jeffrey more context. You think about things that you do really well and then ask yourself outside of that what the Jason sees that are closest to you, that your customers are asking you to advance into on that, either organically to partnerships or through acquisitions. I think John and I talked about in the previous dialogue about the framework of build partner and by, and we always think about it in that order. Where do we advance and any of the moves we've made six years ago, seven years ago and I joined the I felt VM are needed to make a move into mobile to really cement opposition in end user computing. And it took me some time to convince my peers and then the board that we should by Air One, which at that time was the biggest acquisition we've ever done. Okay. Similarly, I'm sure prior to me about Joe Tucci, Pat Nelson. We're thinking about nice here, and I'm moving to networking. Those were too big, inorganic moves. +78 years of Raghu was very involved in that. The decisions we moved to the make the move in the public cloud myself. Rgu pack very involved in the decision. Their toe partner with Amazon, the change and divest be cloud air and then invested in organic effort around what's become the Claudia. That's an organic effort that was an acquisition fast forward to last year. It took me a while to really Are you internally convinced people and then make the move off the second biggest acquisition we made in carbon black and endpoint security cement the security story that we're talking about? Rgu did a similar piece of good work around ad monetization to justify that pivotal needed to come back in. So but you could see all these pieces being adjacent to the core, right? And then you ask yourself, Is that context meaning we could leave it to a partner like you don't see us get into the hardware game we're partnering with. Obviously, the players like Dell and HP, Lenovo and the smart Knick players like Intel in video. In Pensando, you see that as part of the Project Monterey announcement. But the adjacent seas, for example, last year into app modernization up the stack and into security, which I'd say Maura's adjacent horizontal to us. We're now made a lot more logical. And as we then convince ourselves that we could do it, convince our board, make the move, We then have to go and tell our customers. Right? And this entire effort of talking to CSOs What am I doing is doing the same thing that I did to my board last year, simplified to 15 minutes and get thousands of them to understand it. Received feedback, improve it, invest further. And actually, some of the moves were now making this year around our partnership in distributed Workforce Security and Cloud Security and Z scaler. What we're announcing an XDR and Security Analytics. All of the big announcements of security of this conference came from what we heard last year between the last 12 months of my last year. Well, you know, keynote around security, and now, and I predict next year it'll be even further. That's how you advance the puck every year. >>Sanjay, I want to get your thoughts. So now we have a couple minutes left. But we did pull the audience and the community to get some questions for you, since it's virtually wanted to get some representation there. So I got three questions for you. First question, what comes after Cloud and number two is VM Ware security company. And three. What company had you wish you had acquired? >>Oh, my goodness. Okay, the third one eyes gonna be the turkey is one, I think. Listen, because I'm gonna give you my personal opinion, and some of it was probably predates me, so I could probably safely So do that. And maybe put the blame on Joe Tucci or somebody else is no longer here. But let me kind of give you the first two. What comes after cloud? I think clouds gonna be with us for a long time. First off this multi cloud world, you just look at the moment, um, that AWS and azure and the other clouds all have. It's incredible on I think this that multi cloud from phenomenon. But if there's an adapt ation of it, it's gonna be three forms of cloud. People are really only focus today in private public cloud. You have to remember the edge and Telco Cloud and this pendulum off the right balance of workloads between the data center called it a private cloud. The public cloud on one end and the telco edge on the other end. I think we're in a really good position for workloads to really swing between all three of those locations. Three other part that I think comes as a sequel to Cloud is cloud native. All of the capabilities a serverless functions but also containers that you know. Obviously the one could think of that a sister topics to cloud but the entire world of containers. The other seat, uh, then cloud a cloud native will also be topics, but these were all fairly connected. That's how I'd answer the first question. A security company? Absolutely. We you know, we aspire to be one of the leading companies in cyber security. I don't think they will be only one. We have to show this by the wealth on breath of our customers. The revenue momentum we have Gartner ranking us or the analysts ranking us in top rights of magic quadrants being viewed as an innovator simplifying the stack. But listen, we weren't even on the radar. We weren't speaking of the security conferences years ago. Now we are. We have a billion dollar security business, 20,000 plus customers, really strong presences and network endpoint and workload and Cloud Security. The three Coppola's a lot more coming in Security analytics, Cloud Security distributed workforce Security. So we're here to stay. And if anything, BMR persist through this, we're planning for multi your five or 10 year timeframe. And in that course I mean, the competition is smaller. Companies that don't have the breadth and depth of the n words are Andy muscle and are going market. We just have to keep building great products and serving customer on the third man. There's so many. But I mean, I think Listen, when I was looking back, I always wondered this is before I joined so I could say the summit speculatively on. Don't you know, make this This is BMR. Sorry. This is Sanjay one's opinion. Not VM. I gotta make very, very clear. Well, listen, I would have if I was at BMO in 2012 or 2013. I would love to about service now then service. It was a great company. I don't even know maybe the company's talk, but then talk about a very successful company at that time now. Maybe their priorities were different. I wasn't at the company at the time, but I can speculate if that had happened, that would have been an interesting Now I think that was during the time of Paul Maritz here and and so on. So for them, maybe there were other priorities the company need to get done. But at that time, of course, today s so it's not as big of a even slightly bigger market cap than us. So that's not happening. But that's a great example of a good company that I think would have at that time fit very well with VM Ware. And then there's probably we don't look back and regret we move forward. I mean, I think about the acquisitions we have made the big ones. Okay, Nice era air watch pop in black. Pivotal. The big moves we've made in terms of partnership. Amazon. What? We're announcing this This, you know, this week within video and Z scaler. So you never look back and regret. You always look for >>follow up on that To follow up on that from a developer, entrepreneurial or partner Perspective. Can you share where the white spaces for people to innovate around vm Where where where can people partner and play. Whether I'm an entrepreneur in a garage or venture back, funded or say a partner pivoting and or resetting with Govind, where's the white spaces with them? >>I think that, you know, there's gonna be a number off places where the Tan Xue platform develops, as it kind of makes it relevant to developers. I mean, there's, I think the first way we think about this is to make ourselves relevant toe all of that ecosystem around the C I. C. D type apply platform. They're really good partners of ours. They're like, get lab, You know, all of the ways in which open source communities, you know will play alongside that Hash E Corp. Jay frog there number of these companies that are partnering with us and we're excited about all of their relevancy to tend to, and it's our job to go and make that marketplace better and better. You're going to hear more about that coming up from us on. Then there's the set of data companies, you know, con fluent. You know, of course, you've seen a big I p o of a snowflake. All of those data companies, we'll need a very natural synergy. If you think about the old days of middleware, middleware is always sort of separate from the database. I think that's starting to kind of coalesce. And Data and analytics placed on top of the modern day middleware, which is containers I think it's gonna be now does VM or play physically is a data company. We don't know today we're gonna partner very heavily. But picking the right set of partners been fluent is a good example of one on. There's many of the next generation database companies that you're going to see us partner with that will become part of that marketplace influence. And I think, as you see us certainly produce out the VM Ware marketplace for developers. I think this is gonna be a game changing opportunity for us to really take those five million developers and work with the leading companies. You know, I use the example of get Lab is an example get help there. Others that appeal to developers tie them into our developer framework. The one thing you learn about developers, you can't have a mindset. With that, you all come to just us. It's a very mingled village off multiple ecosystems and Venn diagrams that are coalescing. If you try to take over the world, the developer community just basically shuns you. You have to have a very vibrant way in which you are mingling, which is why I described. It's like, Listen, we want our developers to come to our conferences and reinvent and ignite and get the best experience of all those provide tools that coincide with everybody. You have to take a holistic view of this on if you do that over many years, just like the security topic. This is a multi year pursuit for us to be relevant. Developers. We feel good about the future being bright. >>David got five minutes e. >>I thought you were gonna say Zoom, Sanjay, that was That was my wildcard. >>Well, listen, you know, I think it was more recently and very fast catapult Thio success, and I don't know that that's clearly in the complete, you know, sweet spot of the anywhere. I mean, you know, unified collaboration would have probably put us in much more competition with teams and, well, back someone you always have to think about what's in the in the bailiwick of what's closest to us, but zooms a great partner. Uh, I mean, obviously you love to acquire anybody that's hot, but Eric's doing really well. I mean, Erica, I'm sure he had many people try to come to buy him. I'm just so proud of him as a friend of all that he was named to Time magazine Top 100. But what he's done is phenomenon. I think he could build a company that's just his important, his Facebook. So, you know, I encourage him. Don't sell, keep building the company and you'll build a company that's going to be, you know, the enterprise version of Facebook. And I think that's a tremendous opportunity to do this better than anybody else is doing. And you know, I'm as an immigrant. He's, you know, China. Born now American, I'm Indian born, American, assim immigrants. We both have a similar story. I learned a lot from him. I learned a lot from him, from on speed on speed and how to move fast, he tells me he learns a thing to do for me on scale. We teach each other. It's a beautiful friendship. >>We'll make sure you put in a good word for the Kiwi. One more zoom integration >>for a final word or the zoom that is the future Facebook of the enterprise. Whatever, Sanjay, Thank >>you for connecting with us. Virtually. It is a digital foundation. It is an unpredictable world. Um, it's gonna change. It could be software to find the operating models or changing you guys. We're changing how you serve customers with new chief up commercial customer officer you have in place, which is a new hire. Congratulations. And you guys were flexing with the market and you got a tailwind. So congratulations, >>John and Dave. Always a pleasure. We couldn't do this without the partnership. Also with you. Congratulations of Successful Cube. And in its new digital format, Thank you for being with us With VM world here on. Do you know all that you're doing to get the story out? The guests that you have on the show, they look forward, including the nonviable people like, Hey, can I get on the Cuban like, Absolutely. Because they look at your platform is away. I'm telling this story. Thanks for all you're doing. I wish you health and safety. >>I'm gonna bring more community. And Dave is, you know, and Sanjay, and it's easier without the travel. Get more interviews, tell more stories and tell the most important stories. And thank you for telling your story and VM World story here of the emerald 2020. Sanjay Poon in the chief operating officer here on the Cube I'm John for a day Volonte. Thanks for watching Cube Virtual. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto and Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world. This is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello everybody, welcome to this special CUBE conversation. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. We're here with Sanjay Poonen who's the COO of VMware and a good friend of theCUBE. Sanjay great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Dave it's a pleasure. In these new circumstances, shelter at home and remote working. I hope you and your family are doing well. >> Yeah, and back at you Sanjay. Of course I saw you on Kramer Mad Money the other night. I was jealous. I said, "I need Sanjay on to get an optimism injection." You're a great leader And I think, a role model for all of us. And of course the "Go Niners" in the background really incented me to get-- I got my Red Sox cap and we have a lack of sports, but, and we miss it, But hey, we're making the best. >> Okay Red Sox is better than the Patriots. Although I love the Patriots. If i was in the east coast, especially now that Brady's gone. I guess you guys are probably ruing a little bit that Jimmy G came to us. >> I am a huge Tampa Bay fan all of a sudden. I be honest with you. Tom Brady can become a Yankee and I would root for them. I tell you that's how much I love the guy. But anyway, I'm really excited to have you on. It's obviously as you mentioned, these times are tough, but we're making the best do and it's great to see you. You are a huge optimist, but I want to ask you, I want to start with Narendra Modi just announced, basically a lockdown for 21 days. 1.3 billion people in your native country. I wonder if you could give us some, some thoughts on that. >> I'm, my parents live half their time in Bangalore and half here. They happen to be right now in the US, and they're doing well. My dad's 80 and my mom's 77. I go to India a lot. I spent about 18 years of my life there, and the last 32 odd years here and I still go there a lot. Have a lots friends and my family there. And , it's I'm glad that the situation is kind of , as best as they can serve it. It's weird, I was watching some of the social media photos of Bangalore. I tweeted this out last night. The roads look so clean and beautiful. I mean, it looks like 40 years ago when I was growing up. When I would take a bicycle to school. I mean Bangalore's one of the most beautiful cities in India, very green and you can kind of see it all again. And I think, as I've been watching some of the satellite photos of the various big cities to just watch sort of Mother Nature. Obviously, we're in a tough time and, I open my empathy and thoughts and prayers go to every family that's affected by this. And certainly ones who have lost loved ones, but it's sort of, I think it's neat, that we're starting to see some of the beautiful aspects of nature. Even as we deal with the tough aspects of sheltered home. And the incredible tough impacts of this pandemic across the world. >> Yeah, I think you're right. There is a silver lining as much as, our hearts go out to those that are that are suffering. You're seeing the canals in Venice run clear. As you mentioned, the nitrous oxide levels over China. what's going on in Bangalore. So, there is a little bit of light in the end of the tunnel for the environment, I hope. and at least there's an indication that we maybe, need to be more sensitized to this. Okay, let's get into it. I want to ask you, so last week in our breaking analysis. We worked with a data company called ETR down in New York City. They do constant surveys of CIO's. I want to read you something that they came out with just on Monday and get your reaction. Basically, their annual growth and IT spend they're saying, is showing a slight decline for 2020. As a significant number of organizations plan to cut and/or delay IT expenditures due to the coronavirus. Though the current climate may suggest worse many organizations are accelerating spending for 2020 as they ramp up their work-from-home infrastructure. These organizations are offsetting what would otherwise be a notable decline in global IT spend versus last year. Now we've gone from the 4% consensus at the beginning of the year. ETR brought it down to zero percent and then just on Monday, they went to slight negative. But, what's not been reported widely is the somewhat offsetting factor of work-from-home infrastructure. VMware obviously plays there. So I wonder if you could comment on what you're seeing. >> Yeah, Dave, I think , we'll have to see . I'm not an economic pundit. So we're going to have to see what the, IT landscape looks like in the overall sense and we'll probably play off GDP. Certain industries: travel, hospitality, I mean, it's brutal for them. I mean, and I hope that, what I really hope, that's going to happen to that industry, especially there's an infusion through recovery type of bill. Is that no real big company goes under, and goes bankrupt. I mean kind of the situation in 2008. I mean, people wondering what will happen to the Airlines. Boeing, hospital-- these are ic-- some of them like Boeing are iconic brands of the United States and of the world. There's only two real companies that make planes. So we've got to make sure that those industries stay afloat and stay good for the health of the world. Health of the US economy, jobs, and so on. That's always one end. Listen, health and safety of our employees always comes first. Before we even think about that. I always tell people the profits of VMware will wait if you are not well, if your loved ones not well, if your going to take care of people, take care of that first. We will be fine. This too shall pass. But if you're healthy, let's turn our attention because we're not going to just sit at home and play games. We're going to serve our customers. How do we do that? A lot of our customers are adjusting to this new normal. As a result, they have to either order devices with a laptop, screens, things of those kinds, to allow a work-from-home environment to be as close to productive as they work environment. So I expect that there will be a surge in the, sort of, end points that people need. I will have to see how Dell and HP and Lenovo, but I expect that they will probably see some surge in their laptops. As people, kind of, want those in the home and hopefully their supply chains are able to respond. But then with every one of those endpoints and screens that we need now for these types of organizations. You need to manage them, end point management. Often, you need virtual desktops on them. You need to end point security and then in some cases you will probably need, if it's a remote office, branch office, and into the home office, network security and app acceleration. So those Solutions, end point management, Workspace ONE, inclusive of a full-fledged virtual desktop capability That's our product Workspace ONE. Endpoint Securities, Carbon Black and the Network Platform NSX being software-defined was relegated for things like, load balancers and SDWAN capabilities and it's kind of almost feels like good, that we got those solutions, the last three, four years through acquisitions, in many cases. I mean, of course, Airwatch and Nicira were six, seven, eight years ago. But even SD-WAN, we acquired Velocloud three and a half years ago, Carbon Black just four months ago, and Avi in the last year. Those are all parts of that kind of portfolio now, and I feel we were able to, as customers come to us we're not going in ambulance-chasing. But as customers come to us and say, "What do you have as a work-at-home "for business continuity?" We're able to offer them a solution. So we did a webcast earlier this week. Where we talked about, we're calling it work in home with business continuity. It's led with our EUC offerings Workspace ONE. Accompanied by Carbon Black to secure that, and then underneath it, will obviously be the cloud foundation and our Network capabilities of NSX. >> Yeah, so I want to double down on that because it was not, the survey results, showed it was not just collaboration tools. Like Zoom and WebEx and gotomeeting Etc. It was, as you're pointing out, it was other infrastructure that was of VPN's. It was Network bandwidth. It was virtualization, security because they need to secure that work-from-home infrastructure. So a lot of sort of, ancillary activity. It was surprising to me, when I saw the data, that 21% of the CIO's that we surveyed, said that they actually plan on spending more in 2020 because of these factors. And so now we're tracking that daily. And the sentiment changes daily. I showed some other data that showed the CIO sentiment through March. Every day of the survey it dropped. Okay, so it's prudent to be cautious. But nonetheless, people to your point aren't just sitting on their hands. They're not standing still. They're moving to support this new work-from-home normal. >> Yeah, I mean listen, I forgot to say that, Yeah, we are using the video collaboration tools. Zoom a lot. We use Slack. We'll use Teams. So we are, those are accompanied. We were actually one of the first customers to use Zoom. I'm a big fan of my friend Eric Yuan and what they're doing there in modernizing, making it available on a mobile device. Just really fast. They've been very responsive and they reciprocated by using Workspace ONE there. We've been doing ads joined to VMware and zoom in the market for the last several years. So we're a big fan of their technology. So far be it from me to proclaim that the only thing you need here's VMware. There's a lot of other things on the stack. I think the best way, Dave, for us that we've sought to do this is again, I'm very sensitive to not ambulance-chase, which is, kind of go after this. To do it authentically, and the way that authentically is to be, I think Satya Nadella put this pretty well in an interview he did yesterday. Be a first responder to the first responder. A digital first responder, if I could. So when the, our biggest customers are hospital and school and universities and retailers and pharmacies. These are some of our biggest customers. They are looking, in some cases, actually hire more people to serve their communities and customers. And every one of them, as they , hire new people and so and so on, will I just naturally coming to us and when they come to us, serve them. And it's been really gratifying Dave. If I could read you the emails I've been getting the last few days. I got one from a very prominent City, the United States, the mayor's office, the CTO, just thanking us and our people. For being available who are being careful not to, we're being very sensitive to the pricing. To making sure customers don't feel like, in any way, that we're looking at the economics of it will always come just serve your customer. I got an email yesterday from a very large pharmacy. Routinely we were talking to folks in the, in the healthcare industry. University, a president of a school. In fact, Southern New Hampshire University, who I mentioned Jim Cramer. Sent me a note saying, "hey, we're really grateful you even mentioned our name." and I'm not doing this because, Southern New Hampshire University is doing an incredible job of moving a lot of their platform to online to help tens of thousands. And they were one of the early customers to adopt virtual desktops, and the cloud desktops, and the services. So, as we call. So in any of these use cases, I just tell our employees, "Be authentic. "First off take care of your families. "It's really important to take care of your own health and safety. But once you've done that, be authentic in serving our customers." That's what VR has always done. From the days of dying green, to bombers, to Pat, and all of us here now. Take care of our customers and we'll be fine. >> Yeah, and I perfectly understand your sensitivity to that notion of ambulance-chasing and I'm by no means trying to bait you into doing that. But I would stress, the industry needs you and the tech it-- many in the tech industry, like VMware, have very strong balance sheets. They're extremely viable companies and we as a community, as an industry, need companies like VMware to step up, be flexible on pricing, and terms, and payment, and things like that nature. Which it sounds like you're doing. Because the heroes that are on the front lines, they're fighting a battle every day, every hour, every minute and they need infrastructure to be able to work remotely with the stay-at-home mandates. >> I think that's right. And listen, let me talk a little bit of one of the things you talked about. Which is financing and we moved a lot of our business to increasingly, to the cloud. And SaaS and subscription services are a lot more radical than offer license and maintenance. We make that choice available to customers, in many cases we lead with cloud-first solutions. And then we also have financing services from our partners like Dell financial services that really allow a more gradual, radibal payment. Do people want financing? And , I think if there are other scenarios. Jim asked me on his show, "What will you do if one of your companies go bankrupt?" I don't know, that's an unprecedented, we didn't have, we had obviously, the financial crisis. I wasn't here at VMware during the dot-com blow up where companies just went bankrupt in 2000. I was at Informatica at the time. So, I'm sure we will see some unprecedented-- but I will tell you, we have a very fortunate to be profitable, have a good balance sheet. Whatever scenario, if we take care of our customers, I mean, we have been very fortunate to be one of the highest NPS, Net promoter scorer, companies in the industry. And , I've been reaching out to many of our top customers. Just a courtesy, without any agenda other than, we're just checking in. A friend in need is a friend indeed. It's a line that I remembered. And just reach out your customers. Hey listen. Checking in. No, other than can we help you, if there's anything and thank you, especially for ones who are retailers, pharmacies, hospitals, first responders. Thank them for what they're doing to serve many of their people. Especially people in retail. Think about the people who have to go into warehouses to service us, to deliver the stuff that comes to our home. I mean, these people are potentially at risk, but they do it. Put on masks. Braving health situations. That often need the paycheck. We're very grateful for that, and our hope is that this world situation, listen, I mentioned it on on TV as a kind of a little bit of a traffic jam. I love to ski and when I go off and to Tahoe, I tell my family, "I don't know how long it's going to take." with check up on Waze or Google Maps and usually takes four hours, no traffic. Every now and then it'll take five, six, seven. Worst case eight. I had some situation, never happen to me but some of my friends would just got stuck there and had to sleep in their car. But it's pretty much the case, you will eventually get there. I was talking to my dad, who is 80, and he's doing well. And he said, this feels a little bit like World War Two because you're kind of, in many places there. They had a bunker, shelter. Not just shelter in place, but bunker shelter in that time. But that lasted, whatever five, six years. I don't think this is going to last five, six years. It may be five, six months. It might be a whole year. I don't know. I can guarantee it's not going to be six years. So it won't be as bad as World War two. It certainly won't be as bad as the Spanish Flu. Which took 39 people and two percent of the world. Including five percent of my country, India in the 1918 to 1920 period, a hundred years ago. So we will get through this. I like, we shall overcome. I'm not going to sing it for you. It's one of my favorite Louis Armstrong songs, but find ways by which you encourage, uplift people. Making sure, it is tough, it is very tough times and we have to make sure that we get through this. That jobs are preserved as best as we can because that's the part I'm really, really concerned about. The loss of jobs and how we're going to recover as US economy, but we will make it through this. >> Yeah, and I want to sort of second what you're saying. That look, I know there are a lot of people at home that going a little bit stir crazy and this, the maybe a little bit of depression setting in. But to your point, we have to be empathic for those that are suffering. The elderly, who are in intensive care and also those frontline workers. And then I love your optimism. We will get through this. This is not the Spanish Flu. We have, it's a different world, a different technology world. Our focus, like many other small businesses is, we obviously want to survive. We want to maintain our full employment. We want to serve our customers and we, as you, believe that that is the recipe for getting through this. And so, I love the optimism. >> And listen, and we can help be a part of my the moment you texted me and said, "Hey, can I be in your show?" If it helps you drive, whatever you need, sponsorship revenue, advertising. I'm here and the same thing for all of our friends who have to adjust the way in which the wo-- we want to be there to help them. And I've chosen as best as I can, in terms of how I can support my family, the sort of five, five of us at home now. All fighting over bandwidth, the three kids, and my wife, and I. To be positive with them, to be in my social media presence, as best as possible. Every day to be positive in what I tweet out to the world And point people to a hope of what's going to come. I don't know how long this is going to last. But I can tell you. I mean, just the fact that you and I are talking over video interview. High fidelity, reasonably high fidelity, high bandwidth. The ability to connect. I mean it is a whole lot better than a lot of what happened in World War 2 or the Spanish flu. And I hope at the end of it, some of us, some of this will forever change our life. I hope for for example in a lot of our profession. We have to travel to visit customers. And now that I'm building some of these relationships virtually. I hope that maybe my travel percentage will drop. It's actually good for the environment, good for my family life. But if we can lower that percentage, still get things done through Zoom calls, and Workspace ONE, and things of those kinds, that would be awesome. So that's how I think about the way in which I'm adapting my life. And then I set certain personal goals. This year, for example, we're expanding a lot of our focus in security. We have a billion dollar security business and we're looking to grow that NSX, Common Black, Workspace ONE, and accompanying tools and I made it a goal to try and meet at all my sales teams. A thousand C-ISOs. I mean off I know a lot of CIO's in the 25 years, I've had, maybe five, six thousand of them in the world. And blessed to build that relationship over the years of my SAP and VMware experience, but I don't know. I mean, I knew probably 50 or 100. Maybe a few hundred CISO's. And now that we have a portfolio it's relevant to grant them and I think very compelling across network security and End Point security. We own the companies with such a strong portfolio in both those areas. I'm reaching out to them and I'm happy to tell you, I connected, I've got the names of 1,000 of the top CISO's in the Fortune 1000, Global 2000, and connecting with many of them through LinkedIn and other mixers. I hope I talked to many of them through the course of the year. And many of them will be virtual conversations. Again, just to talk to them about being a trusted advisor to us. Seeing if we can help them. And then of course, there will be a product pitch for NSX and Carbon Black and how we're different from whoever it is, Palo Alto and F5 and Netscaler and the SD line players or semantic McAfee Crowdstrike. We're differentiated so I want to certainly earn some of the business. But these are ways in which you adjust to a virtual kind of economy. Where I'm not having to physically go and meet them. >> Yeah, and we share your optimism and those CISO's are, they're heroes, superheroes on the front line. I'll tell ya a quick aside. So John Furrier and I, we're in Barcelona. When really, the coronavirus came to our heightened awareness and John looked at me and said, "Dave we've been doing digital for 10 years. "We have to take all of the software that we've developed, "all these assets and help our customers pivot." So we share that optimism and we're actually lucky to be able to have the studios and be able to have these conversations with you guys. So again, we share that, that optimism. I want to ask you, just on guidance. A lot of companies have come out and said we're not giving guidance anymore. I didn't see anything relative to VMware. Have you guys announced anything on guidance in terms of how you're going to communicate? Where are you at with that? >> No, I think we're just, I mean listen, we take this very carefully because of reg FD and the regulations of public company. So we just allow the normal quarterly ins. And of outside of that, if our CFO decides they may. But right now we're just continuing business as usual. We're in the middle of our, kind of, whatever, middle of our quarter. Quarter ends April. So work hard do the best we can in all the regions, be available for all of our teams. Pat, myself, and others we're, to the extent that we're healthy and we're doing well, but thank God, is reach out to CISO's and CIO's and CTO's and CEOs and help them. And I believe people will spend money. The questions we have to go over. And I think the stronger will survive. The companies with better balance sheet and unfortunately, some of the weaker companies won't. And I think quite frankly, if you do your job well. I don't mean this in any negative sense. The stronger companies will take share in these environments. I was watching a segment for John Chambers. He has been through a number of different, when I know him, so an I have, I've talked to him about some of the stuff. He will tell you that he, advises is a lot of his companies now. From the experiences he saw in 2008, 2001, in many of the crisis and supply chain issues. This is a time where leadership counts. The strong get stronger. Never waste a good crisis, as Winston Churchill said. And as you do that, the strong will come strong because you figure out ways by which, if you're going to make changes that were planned for one or two years from now. Maybe a good time to make them is now. And as you do that you communicate a vision for where you're going. Very clearly to your employees. Again incessantly over and over again. They, hopefully, are able to repeat it in their own words in a simple fashion, and then you get all of your employees in our case 30,000 plus employees of VMware lined up. So one of the things that we've been doing a lot of these days is communicate, communicate, communicate, internally. I've talked a lot about our communication with customer. But inside, our employees, we do calls with our top leaders over Zoom. Calls, intimate calls, and many, often we're adjusting to where I'll say a few words. I have a mandatory every two week goal with all of my senior most leaders. I'll speak for about five minutes and then for the next 25 minutes, the top 12, 15 of them I listen. To things, I want all of them to speak up. There's nobody who should stay silent, because I want to hear what's going on in that corner of the world. >> But fantastic Sanjay. Well, I mean, Boeing, I heard this morning's going to get some support from the government. And strategically that's very important for our country. Congress finally passed, looks like they're passing that bill, and support which is awesome. It's been, especially for all these small businesses that are struggling and want to maintain full employment. I heard Steve Mnuchin the other day saying, "Look, we're talking about two months of payroll "for people if they agree to keep people employed. "or hire them back." I mean the Fed. people say, oh the FED is out of arrows. The Feds, not out of arrows. I mean, I'm not an economist either. But the Fed. has a lot of bullets in their gun, as they say. So Sanjay, thanks so much. You're an awesome leader and really an inspirational executive and a good friend so thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Dave, always a pleasure. Please say hi to all of my friends, your co-anchors, and the staff at CUBE. Thank them for all their hard work. It's a pleasure to talk to you this morning. I wish you, your family, and your friends and all of our community, stay safe and be well. >> Thank you Sanjay and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for the cube and we'll see you next time. (soft music)

>> live from Anaheim, California. It's the queue covering nutanix dot next twenty nineteen Brought to you by nutanix. >> Hello, everyone. You are watching the Cube and we are live at nutanix dot Next here in Anaheim. I'm your host, Rebecca Night, along with my co host, John Farrier. We're joined by Michael Bushong. He is the vice president Enterprise marketing at Juniper Networks. Thank you so much for returning to the Cube, Your Cuba Lem. >> So thank you for this is this is awesome and you can't see it on the cameras. But this is a, like, just amazing. >> It's very We are in the clouds up here. It's a very high stage. Everything's coming full circle. >> Jim Cramer. Ask a little bit >> serious. Okay. >> Of course. I'm going to ask the tough questions >> going on. He's going to start slamming everything very soon, >> But we've known each other for a long time, Jennifer Going back ten years ago. So look, a tangle started. We're in our tenth year. You know, if you've seen the journey, I am a juniper. You left juniper startup brocade, then back to juniper. So you've seen that circle? You've seen the couple waves? I mean one of the things we were talking about before we came on camera was saw. Network fabrics to Dover had Juno's and then be anywhere. But you know, So this arrow, which became the ESPN Wave, are now suffer to find data center. So you've been in that journey is a product person. And now marking juniper, it's actually goes back about a decade. This whole esti n stuff networking. So what's What's the role now that you're doing? What's juniper doing? Why Nutanix? What's your story year? >> Sure. So I run enterprise marketing at Juniper, so my goal is effectively toe to make some of the hype makes sense, right? It goes back a decade. Actually, the early days of the only ESPN movement we didn't call it s tiene right. Juniper started with open flow and PC and alto and all these acronyms, and we actually, we're a great engineering company. Maybe not so great marketing company. And we actually call it network program ability. That didn't take off. But the technology's kind of endured. And I think what we saw was this lengthy incubation period to the point that now, as we sit here dot next in twenty nineteen. We're starting to see now some of the attraction of the last couple of years. That's a junipers general position. So we wantto dr Adoption. Certainly there's products and technology that underpins that, but But fundamentally, we're looking at a huge operational shift. And if that operational shift doesn't happen, then that's to the detriment of everyone in the industry. >> What's the relationship with NUTANIX? Can you talk about how you guys work together? What's the connection? >> Sure. So nutanix obviously does the whole hyper converge space. We provide the networking components to that. So whether that's the top Iraq connectivity, how do you get your traffic into the rest of the network? We've done some security stuff which we can talk more about. And then, if you look at the overall management piece, we've got integrations at the management policy layer as well. >> So your relationship you both got a very similar world view. How you see technology, you're both taken on VM. Where to? Can you talk a little bit about the relationships there and and why it works? >> Sure, fundamentally, if you look at what Nutanix is trying to do, it's this whole idea of one click. It ties ing everything right. They talk a lot in their keynote sessions. You hear the executives talk, You look at their collateral, the messages they take, the customers. It's about making things simple. Junipers Strategy is this idea of engineering simplicity. So just a top level? What's our purpose? What's our role in this industry at large? I think we have a very common worldview. Of course, driving simplicity is going to happen in the context of real architectural change on the change That's kind of everywhere is cloud and increasingly multi cloud. And so both Nutanix and Juniper about really driving simplicity in the context of Cloud multi cloud, giving customers the opportunity, toe run workloads wherever they need Teo without taking on additional operational burden. That's kind of cesarean unwanted in enterprises networking. >> So the Big Tran, this multi cloud you guys. That's a key part of the strategy. Dave along tonight and Stew Minutemen were arguing on the cute couple events ago. There are not one of our sessions about the hype around multi cloud. The reality of it. The reality is, is that everyone kind of has multiple clouds. It's not like that the clouds aren't talking to each other, and then we're just kind of riffing on the cloud is just big. One big distributed network, different computing, distributed networks. These air knew these aren't new paradigms. These are existing things that have computer science behind them. Engineering behind it. So juniper, you have been around for a long time. Connecting networks. The cloud is like some of the same concert on premise Hybrid Cloud and multiplied it basically a distributed network. It's all cloud operations. We get that, but the technology issue is not that hard, but I won't say that that hard, but it's similar to what you guys have done in the past. Just differently. How are you guys looking at that? Because multiple clouds, just like Internet working the switches routers, you move from packet that point A and point B get storage. His store stuff So concepts are all the same. How do you guys seeing the multi cloud opportunity within juniper? >> So I would make the distinction between multiple clouds and multi cloud? I agree with you. If you look at most enterprises, they have a workload in Amazon. They're using sales force, and so you know, they're multi cloud, right? They have multiple clouds, multi clouds, more of an operational condition. It's about taking disparate pools of resource is and managing. That is one thing. So think of it more about how you do stuff and less about where you host an application. If you look it even like describing Amazon, some people say, Well, Amazon is just, you know, Cloud is just using other people servers. It's not. You're not renting their servers. What you're leveraging is their operations. That's the transformation. That's this kind of underfoot. And so while some of the technology bits are common, the ability to do abstracted control moving to declare it over intent based management, right, these air right technology building blocks. What you're seeing now is the operational models are coming along, and that's really that's the change we have to drive on. I'll just kind of close with when you change technology. If it's just about deploying a piece of software, if it's just about deploying a piece of hardware like candidly, that challenge isn't that it's not that hard, right? We know how to deploy stuff when you start talking about changing how people fundamentally do their jobs. When you started talking about changing, you know how businesses operate. That's that's the piece that takes some time and I would venture. That's why you know, you look a decade ago why we're where we started. If you look at what's taking a decade, it's the operational change, not the technology piece >> and the cultural jobs movement. Certainly forcing function on that, which is awesome. And that's the tale when I think. And then again, Gene Came was on yesterday Who wrote The Devil's Handbook and also does that death. The Devil Enterprise. Someone said, We're three percent in. I would agree with him. I think it's so early, but But the challenge. I want to get your thoughts, Michael. And this is that Connecting multiple on disparity environments is great, but late in C kills now. So now late and see these air old school concepts, you know, get a time can't change the laws of physics. Right? So Leighton sees matters s l A's matter. So these air network challenges these air software challenges. What's your view on that piece of the puzzle? >> We leave when we say cloud, you know a lot of people probably think, um, you know, G C P Azure. They might think a WSB probably picture in your head, you know, some logically central cloud. First, we need to disavow people of the notion that cloud is this thing that somehow sits at the center of everything. It's not. There are centralized clouds. If you're optimizing for economics, that makes perfect sense. Tow To do that. There's distributed clouds. The whole rise of multi axis edge computing is about changing the paradigm from moving data to the application. Right. If your applications in Amazon and you're going to send your data there, that's one model Teo. Sometimes you might want to move the application to the data. If you have a lot of data like an i o t. Use case as an example, I was used oil platforms is a really good example. I don't know if you know, but you know how they get all their. They have all these mining and manufacturing bits. They've got lots of data. How did they get that data off the oil platforms? Snowball. So what they do is the helicopters come in, they take the drives off and they they they leave right. The reason they do that because if your reliance on satellite links just too much data, you can't statue >> is going to get a helicopter to ransom helicopter to come in, >> we'LL know when they're swapping the crew out every fourteen days, that's what happens. So here's the thing, right? If in that kind of model than the cloud, the data center exists on premises. And if that's the case, then when we think about you know kind of what the cloud is, cloud is, it's It's a lot. It's a lot more than what we most of us probably think about. Certainly, we see it with Outpost as a WS is starting to move on premises versions, and there's a lot of reasons you might wanna have a distributed cloud. Certainly it could be, you know, your comfort and security and control. There's real privacy implications, country of origin, so subpoenas can access your information depending on where it resides. >> What you're saying is, basically, it's all cloud. It's operational is the new definition. So you figured from an operational standpoint, Ops and Dev's That's it. The rest is just all connected somehow through the text, >> and then you need to have it. Yes. So we we understand the connectivity, bitch, you've gotta have the right, you know, elements. But if it's operational, it's about how do you do policy management? So part of the whole nutanix thing and kind of what drove us together was this idea that if I want a one click everything. If you could do that within the hyper converge space, you still have to do that over the connected environment, which means managing policy from a single location, regardless of where it is. And of course, using that policy to Dr Security >> and their strategy is to take what that worked for. The CIA and the data center move that into this new operator operating model, which spans multiple quote, disparity, environments or clouds or edges. It's similar similar concept, but different environmental. Yeah, >> that's exactly right. And so then what Nutanix needs that is a strong networking partner because they have tto do the bits that they do. They need other people to do the bits that that you know that we can do. We pull those things together and then you can provide essentially a secure environment for hybrid workload. >> So you guys embed it into their product? You guys joined cell together. Is it more of a partnership? How deep is the partnership with you With Nutanix >> s all just They'LL say yes, we get along s o and it kind of the most surface level you know, you need to have top Iraq switches. You gotta connect to the network and so we do qualification there. So if you deploy nutanix, you can deploy juniper alongside and that looks more like a kind of a co selling meat in the channel type model. Beyond that, if you look at how we provide security over like a workload environment, the question is, then you know what's the security element? So we've taken our virtual firewall. We cut our V s are axe, which essentially runs in the V M. And we can run it on a V, and so that gives them a segmentation strategies. So if you look it workloads that air distributed across the cluster by having a firewall element that we can enforce policy. Of course, that firewall element is then integrated with prism. So if I want to deploy these things when I spin up a new V M. What I want to do is spin up the security with it, and so you see management integration. Then if we continue this too, it's kind of full conclusion. We have, ah, product suite We call contrail in the enterprise version Contra Enterprise Multi Cloud, which is all about policy management and underlay management. And so, as we extend the partnership, it gives us additional opportunity to take um to provide routed elements which provide policy enforcement points and then to give us a way of managing policy over a diverse environment. >> And you guys can bring in that platform element for nutanix. Is there now a platform? They have a full stack of software on Lee. So you guys, you cannot take their stuff, put it there and vice versa. >> That's exactly right. So whether the workload resides in a ws on two or whether it resides kind of on premises in a jiffy, weaken one, we're kind of co managed and then to it gives us the security elements toe play across that >> one of the things that we're talking a lot about at this rinse it and at a lot of other events like it, it's sort of or the dark side of technology. We're at a time where major presidential candidates are talking about breaking up. Big tech were becoming much more aware of the privacy concerns. The biases that are built into algorithms. Exactly. I want to hear your thoughts as a technology veteran. Do you? Are you still a technology optimist or do you did? Does this stuff keep you up at night? I mean, how where do you fit your personal views? I was >> somewhat of a technology optimists, but I'm a skeptic when it comes to the people. I think if the technology existed in a vacuum, I think some of the problems go away. I think privacy is a major concern. I think it's going to shape regulatory action, especially in Europe. Well, so I think we'LL see similar actions in the US I don't have quite a strong connection to what's happening in Asia. Um, I think that the regulatory, the challenge I have from a technology perspective is that if the regulations come in the absence of understanding how the technology works, then you end up with some really terrifying outcomes on DSO I'm Sam. I'm a fan of the technology. I'm nervous of the people on that in terms of like, our overall Ruelas is cos here, I think, you know, we need to do a candidate a better job of, of making sure things land before we move on to the next big thing on DH. You know, we're talking cloud. We're ten years into cloud and people were always talking about the next frontier. To some extent, I think the world doesn't move as fast as we like to think it does. I don't think that the even like the mark, I'm in a marketing role. I don't think that the marketing hype necessary. I don't think it serves us by moving too far ahead because I will tell you when the gap between the promise and the reality becomes insurmountable e wide. I think it's Ah, I think I think everyone loses Andi. You run the risk of stranding an entire generation of people who who gets stuck behind it, and I don't you know, I'm nervous about about what that means, and I think it's you asked the question that you're the dark side. I think it's Certainly it plays out in our industry. I think it plays out. You know, there's a digital divide that's growing in the U. S. Based on broadband access. By the way, that's gonna widen with five G. I think it plays out between different nation states. So I Yeah, I don't know. I'm an optimist. Maybe I'm a pragmatist. >> Realist. >> Yeah, I'm I'm I'm I'm a little scared. >> Little cloud definitely happened, and that's a good point. And we took a lot of heat at looking ankle. Keep on the cube. Was too many Men in the team put out the first private cloud report People like this is nonsense. Well, well. And our thesis was clouds grade if you want. If you're in the cloud as a cloud native or, you know, new startup, why wouldn't you go on Amazon? Everyone, we did that. But if once you taste cloud operations, you go Wow. This is so much awesome. Right? Then go into a modern and enterprise. It's not going to be overnight. Change over. I mean, we might say it's going to take about a decade. We fell from the beginning that cloud operations once you taste cloud you realize this is a new operating model. There's a lot of benefits to that, but to change it over in the enterprise, and that turned out to be what everyone's now do it. But that was three years ago. >> Well, there's implications. So if its operations then operations is inherently an end end proposition, you can't have operations in a silo. Things like you're monitoring tools. How do you do cloud monitoring it on premises monitoring. How do you do workflow Execution? How do you do? You know, automation, whether that's event driven or even just scripted. If you have wildly different environments that require you to buy for Kate, your investment, then there's a very real There's a complexity that comes with that your people have tto do more than one thing that's that's hard. There's a cost that comes with that because you have different teams for different things. There's a lack of coordination. I don't think you unlock the value of cloud in that in that environment. And I think that operational pieces really around converging on >> Michael your point about people in technology. It's so right on. We see that all the time where I'm a technology Optimus. I love technology, but I totally agree that people can really destroy it looked fake news. It's just, you know, it's infrastructure network effect with bad content policy because Facebook's immediate company not a platform >> well, technology's only is good on our end are >> gonna run. The government don't even have the Internet work. So you know when you when you go to the cloud, same >> knowledge just also want the government to come away with that we do it >> where the government just doesn't know how the Internet works. Some people that do but like the good hearings, it's ridiculous. But you know, there's a real D o. D project going on future military Jet I contract. We've been reporting on where modern data driven application workloads. I could use a soul, cloud or multi class so that the dogma of what multi vendor was in the old days is changing. >> I don't I actually don't know if you look at multi cloud. If it's an end end proposition, then by definition it's also going to be multi vendor like there's no future where it's like end in all one vendor. I think we have to come to grips with that is an industry. But I think if you're clinging to your you know, kind of I want my single procurement vehicle. I want my single certification. By the way, I think if you believe fundamentally that incumbency is going to be that your path forward, I think it's a dangerous place to be. That's not to say that. I think the incumbents all go away. I don't There's a there's a heavy rule to play but certainly were going to open things up. And >> you see procurement modernized. I mean, I mean, government goes back to nineteen ninety five procurement standards, but either the enterprise procurement moving So the text moves so fast. Procurement still has rules from >> so no, I don't think all >> of the second right. >> Then there's a whole A procurement in our industry is driven by our peace. Our peace tend to be derivative. I take my last r p. I had some new lines. If you want Esti n so you take the cup copy and paste five hundred seventy four lines at the five hundred seventy fifth line. S T n. You're gonna end up in the same solution because the first five seventy four of the same I do think we should learn a little bit from what the big public cloud cos they're doing, which is, you know, tightening refreshed cycles, retiring things with as much passion as they introduced new things tightening up. Ultimately, what gets deployed? Maintaining diversity of underlying components so you could maintain economic leverage when you're doing procurement. But then solidifying on operationally streamlined model, That's I think that's the future. That's certainly what we've been on as a company. I think that's what we're betting on with Nutanix From a partnership point of view, I think we'LL be on the right side of change on that, and I think it's going to, you know, it may take some time to play out. That's where I think things go >> well. Michael Bushong. Always a pleasure having you on the Cube. Thank you for coming on. >> Thank you very much. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching the Cube

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube, covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewlett Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back everyone. Live here in Las Vegas is SiliconANGLE's CUBE, our flight ship program. We go out to the event ... I'm John Furrier, My co-host David Vellante. Been watching 3 days of wall to wall exclusive coverage of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Discover 2017. Our seventh year covering HP Discover, now called HPE Discover. Dave, we've covered them all. Now we're doing some European versions. I missed the last one in London, but you were there. But you and I have covered HP Discover, Now HPE Discover, for now our 7th year. Interesting times as they say. >> Dave: I'll say. >> We live in interesting times. HP's been getting hammered. Certainly the competitions been slamming them, The press has not been kind to them, People think they're irrelevant. Wall Street just slammed them, so Jim Cramer on CNBC, really taking Meg to task, But we always come back and we feel differently when we're actually at the event. When you actually talk to the people in the company. They got a lot of cash on the books. They've got a lot of customers. They got technology. They're doing the vendor R&D that you guys have pointed out in your recent, ground-breaking, true private cloud research market sizing you put out there. Astonishing change. And I think, my gut is, yeah, certainly HP's had some changes in corporate development, but the reality is that they now have set that up and the market is exploding. It's got the cloud market that's coming on premise. The private cloud business is taking off. >> Yeah, you know, John, we have documented this over the last seven years, and it's like the Band-Aid is coming off slowly, and it finally feels like this Discover (ripping noise) is finally almost there, right? Because you remember the split, and then the spin merge, and then the software business, okay. This has been the cleanest Hewlett-Packard Enterprise Discover that we've been to. There wasn't a lot of noise about software, they had a little separate event going on. Not a lot of talk about the spin merge, a lot of talk about Pointnext, I think that's good, I like their branding. >> It's like they cleaned up all the rooms in the house, and the outside's got a new fresh coat of paint. I got to say, last year- noticeably, the branding, which we were kind of originally critical on two and a half, three years ago; the show was beautiful, the branding's amazing this year, again, they're going to that next level, you're starting to see the clean messaging, it's as if the ship has been kind of re-readied. And we said that last year, but to be fair, we did say last year that they got to prove it to you, They got to show the results. And we were talking with Alain, who runs their data center infrastructure group, he agrees; the metrics that all the other analyst firms are using out there are irrelevant, and he believes that new metrics have to be redefined. This to me is the biggest story of this show, is that HP is eyeing a new sea change and I don't think people understand it. That's my personal opinion. >> I think you're right, I mean, the narrative on HP is, oh, they're just a hardware company, hardware's dying, what are they doing, et cetera. Well the reality is, people have been telling me the hardware business is dying since I've been in the business. The good trend for them is, the hardware business is consolidating. Of course, the tough news is, a lot of it's going to the public cloud. But as you've been pointing out all week, there's plenty of growth, on prem, in what we call the true private cloud. >> That's the biggest discussion of the show here, is the impact of the Wikibon research, the true private cloud report that you guys put out, I want to spend some time with you on that and ask you some really pointed questions. What is the true private cloud report that Wikibon put out, and what does it mean, why are people talking about this research so much here? >> So three years ago, the team at Wikibon started to quantify this notion of private cloud, and we looked at it and said, ah, this is cloud-washing. Really this is just virtualization. What we really want to see is, on prem, mimicking,to a substantial degree, the public cloud. Orchestration, certainly, >> Agility, >> Management, agility, pay-as-you-go, those types of things. Okay, so, the genesis of the market move is something that we heard from Alan Nance, our friend, several years ago at the Vertica user conference. He said- he was, at the time, CIO of Philips- he said, "my CEO said 75% of our spend in infrastructure "is non-differentiated, so we're going to eliminate it, "and everything we're going to do is going to be as a service." That was three years ago. So, massive change, and Philips went out to all of its suppliers and said, this is what were doing, if you can't do business with us this way, you're out. And remember, we wrote a bunch of stuff about it, and Alain came back, okay. So they were one of the early folks making that move. Everybody is now doing that. So what's happening is, there's going to be $150 billion that is going to vaporize out of non-differentiated heavy lifting. And it's going to go in two places: it's going to go into the public cloud, and it's going to go to what we call true private cloud, and that true private cloud business is going to grow to be about $250 billion within the next 10 years, okay? So that's a long term market forecast. >> So the addressable market for true private cloud is what, 260, or 250 plus- >> 250, just under $250 billion. Which is growing faster than infrastructure as a service, public cloud, and it will ultimately, we believe, be larger than that IAAS business. Not as large as SASS, that's going to be the biggest public cloud market, but it's a huge opportunity for companies, and it's a land grab, and it's a dogfight. >> So, I want you to explain this, 'cause I think this is important, and it took me a couple minutes to click on this. You had mentioned that- there's a point in your slide on that deck, the size of the market is huge, it's $250 billion, that's a lot of cash. But the TAM component of labor costs, now, this is the big fear, everyone thinks, "oh, my job is going away, AIs and auto ate my job away", but yet you're saying $150 billion of cash costs are going to shift. >> To where? >> Absolutely. Okay, so a couple of things. What is going to shift? Today, there's so much IT labor spent on provisioning servers, provisioning storage, tuning systems, tuning databases, all this stuff that can be now hyper-automated, as the CEO of Wipro said, so that's happening today, as we speak. So, vendor R&D, i.e., R&D money that goes into appliances, boxes, new systems, new software, is going to replace and automate out those non-differentiated tasks. So if your job is provisioning LUNs, you really want to re-skill. >> So what's that mean for the customer in HP, and why is that important to this show, why are people talking about this report, what's the relevance? >> Because everybody's talking about their digital transformation. And how do you fund a digital transformation, right? You've got to spend all this money to become a digital, data driven company. Well, where do I get that money? >> John: Real cash involved, basically. >> Yeah, there's cash involved, so how do I do that? Well, I have to shift away from things that aren't driving value for my business, and eliminate that, and put the resources in things that are driving value. Application development, new development paradigms, digital transformations, new partnerships, and that's where the money's going. And so again, if you're an IT infrastructure patch management pro, you either have to re-skill, or you're going to be out of a job. >> Did you see Kate Swanborg light up when we talked about the private cloud, 'cause that's exactly what was her point. >> Yeah, well they're seeing it at DreamWorks, because essentially what they're doing, they're changing the game in animation. My prediction is, they're going to be able to pump out many more movies within a year now, and that's going to make them more competitive. I think that's part of the reason why she didn't want to dig too deep into what they're doing, 'cause I think they see it as a competitive advantage. >> Yeah, and she did tease a little bit out by saying that the creative people are so much more productive, she mentioned the dragon. Alright, other impact: Wall Street. We see a lot of analysts kind of taking HP to town. We know the competition, we talked to Michael Dell, he came on The Cube; Meg stopped by but she did not come in, that's notable for the folks out there, Michael certainly sits down with us; Michael says, "hey, I got plenty of cash", when I bring up the debt thing, he thinks bigger is better, HP thinks smaller and nimbler is better- >> This is going to be really interesting- >> Your thoughts on that as we move forward? >> Look, there's two, sort of, bromides, right, with Wall Street. First disappointment is never the last; uh oh, that would be bad news for HP, but Meg said, "we have bottomed in terms of margins, margins will improve." And a big thing's going to happen next month, HP's gets the cash from the spin merges, right, that's going to happen, and that's a big deal because their balance sheet- they're going to have $12 billion in cash on the balance sheet, which will match their debt, and they're going to start to be acquisitive. Dell EMC can't be acquisitive right now. They got to retire that debt and delever. >> We saw SimpliVity and Nimble, front and center, a lot of good success with the software there. >> Yep, so this will be really interesting to see, is this the last disappointment, is this a buying opportunity? >> Yeah, we're going to watch it, and- >> So if I had to bet, if I had to bet I'd say it is a buying opportunity, based on what I'm seeing here. It's much cleaner, leaner, and they've also restructured the sales organization to a great extent, so hopefully the execution's going to be better. >> Well, I'm not that generous, I think I want to see more results, I think- >> I know, but if you see more results, you're going to miss the upturn. (laughs) >> Well the question, to me, is- I do believe that they have an advantage with the true private cloud report you guys put out, I think that validates the shift of spend in IT, which validates the fact that it's growing, not shrinking, and yes, people might not be buying boxes but they're going to be buying IT. >> And the big thing is, well you know, John, the street right now wants growth. That's why Amazon can make no money and still crank, right? But if HPE can eke out any growth and start throwing off cash again, I think the stock is going to do just fine. >> Other notable things; obviously, the outsource business is gone, Pointnext is the solution, we had Ana on from Pointnext, she was the leader; other notable thing is the absence of Chris Hsu with Micro Focus, we had a chance to ... saw him at the Foundation Room at the Mandalay Bay the other night, had a great conversation. Apparently, they're not included in HPE Discover because they're a separate company. They're apparently doing really well. >> Well Micro Focus is killing it, right? I mean, their stock price increased faster than Facebook last year (laughs) so, that's an interesting play. I think it's a new private equity play, John. You know, the private equity play used to be, suck as much cash out and then leave the carcass. I think the new private equity play is, invest, and then take it to market again, and try to get that value from the market, so increase the value. >> I think you're onto something, and this is why I've always been complimentary of HP's corporate governance game, because I think that private equity is all about taking things private, and being nimble, and then going public again, so- >> And Micro Focus, in my opinion, picked up those assets for short money. >> Yeah; well, HP owns a big part of the company, so- >> Yeah, of course, but that's why they did the deal, it's short money, and they wanted the cash, and that's why they had to put the security piece in there. >> Alright- Dave Vellante, I'm John Furrier here breaking it down, ending our three days of exclusive coverage, at HPE 2017. Look for us at Madrid, the show there; I won't be there, Dave will be there; and again, HPE Discover, enjoy the rest of the conference, thanks for watching; this is The Cube out, thanks to the team and everyone here for a great job, see you next time.

(electronic music) >> Narrator: Live, from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE! Covering ServiceNOW Knowledge17. Brought to you by ServiceNOW. >> Welcome back to Orlando, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Jeff Frick, Link Alander is here as the Chief Information Officer at Lone Star College. Cubealom, Link, great to see you again. >> Good seeing you again too. >> Another ServiceNOW Knowledge, although, not like the other ones, I mean, things changing, we're in a different venue, we got a new leader, new topics, is it old wine, same wine new bottle, or is it all sort of new stuff? What's going on in your world? >> Well you know, it's early on in the conference to see what the changes are, and it was kind of interesting as the change transformed, I didn't make his 100 day visits, 100 customers, he had an event in Houston, I was actually out of town at the time, so I was really looking forward to going to that event. But when you think about it, you know, Frank took it to a certain level, and now, we're looking at a total different change and transformation again, to where, what is next? And when you start talking about the A.I., the predictive analytics, proactive vs. reactive, and those types of shifts, that's really what we have to have. So, yeah, it is a change. It's a significant change, and you know I liked earlier in the segment, I was listening to him and talking about the fact that, you know, where are your trusted partners at, where do you invest and where will you align your strategy to, and that makes a big difference for us. >> So from a customer standpoint, it's sounds like you're embracing that change, I mean, you know, Wall Street's been a little reticent, I mean obviously they're happy with ServiceNOW and the stock's up, but I thought Jim Cramer was going to cry when Frank Slootman told him he was leaving. And some of the analysts yesterday said, "Oh, the stock will be at 102 if Frank were still here." and so, that's fine, you know, whatever. The stock market's going to do what it does. But from a customer perspective, you seem pretty comfortable with the changes. >> You know, it's really interesting, 'cause Frank and I had a relationship that went back to Data Domain. So I'd worked with Frank in different roles and different times, so when I first heard it, I was kind of like, what's going to happen? Immediately I started looking at what happened with Pat, and I talked to a bunch of my friends at ServiceNOW, and they're like, "Oh, no, "this was probably the smoothest transition ever." You know, it's like, "Yeah I'm leaving, "and guess what, here's my successor." So it was a different approach that you don't see often in technology companies. And you think about technology right now, how disruptive everything is. I mean, what do you take the split of HP, you take EMC and Dell, and all these other shifts that are happening in the technology, everything's shaking up. This is not really shaking up, this is just a new direction, and where ServiceNOW wants to head in the future. >> You know, that's interesting. You're right, I mean, transitions in big tech are not really ever this, apparently it was pretty smooth. I mean look at EMC, for example. I mean they couldn't find a successor. I mean it was, "Well, it's not Gelsinger, "well, it's not Gould, I don't really know." So Michael Dell had to come in, a pretty good successor, I guess. So that's maybe, I dunno, maybe a testament to Frank, maybe it's the culture of ServiceNOW, but from a customer standpoint again, you're seeing huge opportunities, you mentioned machine learning. What are you doing with those types of things, and how are you applying them? >> Well, we see these are the newer opportunities. So, from the IT service management and the enterprise service management has taken us to a new direction. And when you look at the customer service platform and what can we do differently and how can we help our customers out, and I have a 100,000 students out there that are expecting good support and need to navigate educational systems, which, it doesn't matter, we're just not easy to navigate. It's not like going out shopping. We have our own challenges that are out there. So, you know as we look at the next generation we're looking at how much more automation can I put into play so that the technicians and the practitioners can actually focus on the real challenges that are out there. Because a lot of times they are dealing with small issues that, they bog them down, and they don't get to focus on the bigger direction. So that's what we see on that side. You know, predictive analytics and A.I. in education have been a big item. We've been doing predictive analytics with students trying to figure out, you know, what's their likelihood of success, and how can we intervene to help a student out. And so when you look at things in that different direction, now all of a sudden you apply it in the IT space, which machine learning, it's a lot easier than understanding human behavior. >> So talk a little more about that. I mean, I remember when we were in college, you know, the professors that would look around and bunch of you aren't going to make it. >> Now we have a dashboard that shows that, by the way. (chuckles) >> Now you've got the data. >> Red. >> So, okay, so you've had years of data you've been collecting, what kind of things can you do proactively to help students? >> Well some of the interesting things for us, so you know, in our industry, from the community college perspective we're very dynamic. We can address change in the industry, needs of the community, so we're able to introduce programs and activities very quickly. Now when it comes down to students, you're sitting here looking at them going, okay, why are we losing these students? Why are students leaving us early? Why are they not completing? And, it was really interesting when we ran the data out, and we started seeing that it was our high achievers that were leaving us early. So actually our chancellor at the time really thought about this a lot, and looked at some different pieces of the data, and boosted our honors college, which then improved our retention of these 3.3, 3.4 GPA students. On the other spectrum we were all thinking, okay, well we need to focus on, where's that other student at, how do we save that student? And they've always had those interventions. So now they're enhanced. Now you have the opportunity for a dean or a chair to say, okay if I reach this one little group of students, maybe I can make a difference in their lives and their careers. So they're able to look at the data, look at the data sets, and then actually just reach out and touch 'em. And see what they can make a difference of. >> I wonder if we can talk a little bit about some of the practical things about ServiceNOW generally and IT service management, when we first, our first Knowledge was in 2013 and Jeff and I were talking in our open, when we talked to customers about, well, did you adopt a single CMDB? Have you adopted aggressively a service catalog? A lot of times the answer was, "Well, kind of." But it kind of gets political, we have our own little silo, but not across the organization. That seems to have changed. What was your experience in that regard, and how about, can you share with us what you're seeing with your peers with regard to those two items and then we can talk a little bit further. >> Okay, sure, you know, from the start we actually went all in. We're long term customer, late 2009, 2010, we adopted ServiceNOW, and we immediately looked at it as IT service management. How do we transform the way we do business and what do we do? So the service catalog was very basic at first, now our service catalog is pretty amazing. Our knowledge bases were primitive, now customer service, they can address their items. So that made a significant enhancement but really what it brought forward is our enterprise service management. So for example, while I was waiting here, I was actually approving a legal certification for a contract I have going across in ServiceNOW. So it's really handy, I'm sitting in a conference, and I have a legal matter to deal with, and a couple clicks and I'm taken care of. The same goes now for our HR side. So HR adopted in two years ago now, and you're seeing that workflow, all the power of the workflow coming in to help employees out. We've got a long way to go to get to that, whatever you want to consider utopia of service management is, but we're far along that journey. And we're just constantly looking for new ways to improve that. From the peers' perspective it's also very interesting, so I talk to, I deal with a lot of our peers, especially in the state of Texas, but then also nationally in different groups, and their movements are a little slower in the process because of that decentralization where from our perspective we're 100% centralized, so it's a lot easier to implement and not have those verticals to knock down. And they're knocking IT verticals down, they're not knocking other verticals down. So, it's a little more challenging, but I've seen some pretty impressive successes. Even in those areas where they have different verticals of IT across their organization, they've done a phenomenal job about bringing them into the fold and trying to consolidate those services and show those services better to the customer. The consumerization part is the harder part. It's trying to deliver services now like consumer IT but still maintaining that enterprise level. And that's probably the biggest challenges we're facing right now, is trying to create that consumer look and feel. >> Is that a UX challenge that ServiceNOW needs to address, or is that something that you guys have control over? >> Well, actually they've done a great job, as far as changing the dynamics of how things are working, so they've done a great job there, it's more on our perspective of using a customer-centric approach and looking at how does our customer view these services, what happens, how do they engage those services? It's very similar when we're dealing with students and we're trying to understand how they use our systems. Well they have their own way, we know how they're supposed to be used, but they have their own way they use the system. And so it's looking for that customer-centric approach, it's trying to understand their behaviors and work from those directions. >> And how much of that do you do with good old-fashioned sitting down and watching people interact with the application? I mean, that was a great thing that LinkedIn, or excuse me, Intuit used to always do with their early QuickBook days, right, a lot of just sit down and watch people interact with the application versus using machine learning and using kind of more aggregated data with your, like you said your huge client set to start to figure out how they're actually engaging with the application. >> It's really a combination of both, it really is. I mean, one of the things is, doesn't matter what the machine can tell us, they can give us a pattern and a history, but we don't understand the why sometimes. Why, what did we do? We saw that recently as we were reviewing some of our registration processes. And we were watching it because we use another product that monitors customer experience on the registration cycle. And we were watching something strange and we couldn't figure out why they were going in a certain direction. We looked at it, we didn't see it, but the students did, and there was actually a navigation on that page that sent them in a different direction, it was never meant to be there to do. It was for certain situations, not all situations. So you have to take a combination. You need the data from the machine, the machines can tell you all kinds of patterns on what's happening, but you do need that human part. That's also where IT, when you start talking about the C-Suite and having those discussions, that's where IT always failed, you know, we always talk ones and zeroes, everybody else is trying to have a conversation. So now all of a sudden it's about having that conversation. How can we talk about, here are the challenges, here's what you see, here's what you'd like to do, and how do we address that and move forward with it? So that makes a difference. >> It's just funny, the impact of again, a registration, what feels from the outside like a very mundane process, and yet, it impacts every single person that you guys do business with. It's their direct connection into your much bigger process, and education and professors, and the resources of the school. >> It's everything. >> It's everything. And that, from the outside looking in, someone might think, "Oh, registration, you know, "it's simple, we've got that defined. "We've been doing that for years." But it's not at all. >> And it has to change and it has to adapt quickly. So we're going through a process now where we're really re-evaluating the entire cycle because higher education, we already throw all these other things out at you, you know, what's a bursar, do you know what a bursar is? (Dave and Jeff laugh) How do you understand that? One of you take care of this problem. And then you deal with federal government changes, the state, you throw all those complexities in there, and now we're going through a process where we're, we've already started through some of the initial prospecting parts, but how do we simplify it even further? How do we knock down those barriers, or at least make it easier transitioning. We've done a lot of great stuff in the past. And we use a combination of things to get there, it's not just one set of tools that solves a problem. It's a bit of everything. >> And then the, sort of, post, coming out of Y2K, there was a lot of discussion, and then when the market crashed, there was a lot of discussion about IT value. You know, Nick Carr wrote the thing, Does IT Matter, et cetera, et cetera. What's the value discussion like today? I'm particularly interested as somebody who's implemented ServiceNOW, with the single CMDB, and the service catalog that's evolved. What is the value discussion that you have with your so-called line of business folks at the college? >> Well, the key to it is that we always act as an enabler. You know, we're there to support them and help them walk through the business process changes, look at things from different directions. They don't come to us and say, we want this tool, they come to say, this is my business problem. Now help us figure out how to solve that. That's where the IT value comes in. Yes, I have a bunch of very experienced practitioners. We're constantly understanding what trends and changes are happening. But what's the right tool for that problem? And by doing it this way, one, we're understanding the business problems we're trying to solve, but it also gives us a, it improves our agility, which you've heard me talk about probably a dozen times about this agility because that's what it is. Old IT was locked step stuck, and you were always there. Now when you start talking about agility and the ability to address business needs quickly, but yet still keep that same trajectory. I have legacy systems, I have to have those. But what can I put on the top of that, items like platforms as a service, what can I address things differently on? Probably one of the better ones recently we had a faculty recruiting team going out and they wanted, all of a sudden they were like doing Excel spreadsheet, okay, I'm interested in teaching for you in the future, I'm taking this and they're doing an Excel spreadsheet, and we sat down with them and I was in one of their big meetings and I'm like, okay, would you like to do that on an iPad? >> Dave: There's a better way. >> There's an easier way to skin this cat. So we actually turned around, we built a nice app, and ServiceNOW just to collect, hey, I'm taking classes at this university, I'm interested in teaching for Lone Star in the future, I'm in Mathematics, now that same group can turn around and send out a notification every time we're hiring that says, oh hey, we're hiring right now, we're hiring Math professors, so if you're interested, come on and join us. >> So you're observing how the business is approaching solving problems and identifying areas where you can use, for example, in this case, ServiceNOW, to dramatically improve their experience, is that fair? >> I mean, that's the ultimate goal. The ultimate goal is, what is the problem, let us work on the tool, and then make sure we align things directly. 'Cause that's the harder part. I feel I failed my job if they come into me and say, "You know what, I want you to buy this, "because this is going to solve my problem." Well what's your problem? >> Well, what's interesting is, you know, you've been in IT a long time, and I've observed a lot of interactions between business and IT, when the business people try to tell IT people how to do it, it never works. But what you're saying is, you have enough visibility on the business and understanding of how technology can able, you can actually tell the business people, "Hey, there's a better way." >> That's the perfect way to approach it is, what is the best way we can do this for you. Whether that is in our legacy ERP, and I mean ours is not really a legacy, but in our ERP, or do I put this in the ServiceNOW platform, or do I put it in another platform? And how do we address that problem quickly and easily? >> How about another question, I always like to pick your brain, 'cause you know this stuff so well. How about custom mods? We've probably talked about this before a little bit, but you sort of have a philosophy of trying to avoid them at all costs? >> Absolutely. >> And you've succeeded at that? >> Ah yes, yeah. On the ERP side, we're still less than 10% customized on that platform, and you know, we've held that line. Because we can address the business problems, there's ways to address it without doing all these massive customizations. Sometimes it's just about really understanding the true business process. It's walking back to the old days of understanding what the process is, and then how does the technology adapt to that process. There's things that you can switch on and switch off that is not a custom mod, so your upgrades will process faster. Then there's other times when, like you said, we come in and we could have gone with that recruiting team, we could have gone and put it in our ERP, but we're like, well why? We're just picking up context, we're looking for these things. We need something quick and agile. So ServiceNOW was the perfect jump for it. A quick app. >> And are they coming to you earlier and earlier in the process? Do they get it, that you are an enabler of problem-solving, not necessarily and implementer of what I think I need? >> Absolutely. I mean, and the team we have is phenomenal, so, you know every once in a while, they're like, "Hey, we need this." Well, do you really need that or what do you need? And then we start that conversation. But it comes down to, it's not just myself. And I think that's really the key for any IT leader, is it's about the whole team's perspective. It's not going in with a technology solution as much as it is trying to understand the business problem first. Work through the technology solution. Find out what adapts and what will meet their needs. >> So single CMDB, adopt service catalog, avoid custom mods, anything else you'd tell folks that are just getting started with ServiceNOW? >> I mean, always be proactive. You're always out there trying to have that discussion with people to understand that you're there to help them and there to move it forward, it's just engage in that conversation. And that's the hard part, sometimes IT people don't want to jump into that conversation. What about that business side? I'm lucky, I have a passion for higher ed. This is why I've stayed in higher ed. To me, I get the reward this week when I get back from Orlando, it's graduation time, and you get to see your success walk across the stage. And each one of those students, whether they're moving on to another degree, whether they're moving into the workforce, I mean, that's something that you get out of this that is so impressive when in my field. So the same goes for how you treat your customers. Your employees, or your students, it's about how they feel at the end of the day. Did I do my best to help them out? >> That's got to be really gratifying. You know, in this day of man versus machine, the answer is education, so Link congratulations, and thanks very much for coming back on theCUBE. I love the conversations, we always ask you anything we want, but it's good to see you again. >> Good seeing you. >> Good seeing you Link. >> Alright, keep right there everybody, we'll be right back with our next guest, this is theCUBE, we're live from Knowledge17, #Know17. We'll be right back. (electronic music)