>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The CUBE, covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone, we're live here in Las Vegas. Behind me is the VM Village, this is The CUBE on the ground live at VMworld, I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. Excited to have Sanjay Poonen, Cube VIP new badge that's going out. Five or more times you get a special badge on the website Chief Operating Officer, Chief Customer Operations as well at VMware, Sanjay. >> I think I won one of your hoop madness what do you call those Cube >> John: Yeah, that's right. You did get one of those. >> One of them, so add that to the smallest. >> Came in second to the bot, next year you won. We're going to have to check the algorithm on it that's before we had machine learning, so... Sanjay, great to see you. >> Always a pleasure, John and Dave, thank you for having me here. >> So, you know, in fairness to the VMware management team I got to say, great content program. Usually you can see, kind of, maybe some things that are kind of a little futuristic on the spot big time, on the content. True private cloud, data that Wikibon reported on, you guys are right in line with that. Hybrid-cloud is where its going from multi-cloud. You talk multi-cloud, the Kubernetes orchestration vision for Cloud Native, and even you were doing some interviewing on stage. >> Trying to be Anderson Cooper. >> So, tell us, what's your perspective because you got to balance here you got the reality of the Amazon relationship front and center, delivered big time there, shipping, western region, VMware on-prem, and on-cloud and this new cloud native vector of orchestration and simplicity. >> Yeah, I think, at least from our perspective as I describe in sort of that one chart where I try to put it in Sesame Street simple terms as I like to describe. VMware is one of the most fundamental companies that had a incredible impact in the data center, taking more costs and complexity. We are the defacto backbone of almost everybody's data center, but as the data center moves to the cloud you got to ask yourself, what's the relevance, and we've now shown, same way with the desktop going to mobile, and that's the end-user stuff that we've talked about the last few shows. But let's focus on that cloud part. We really felt as people extended to the public cloud we had to change our strategy to not seek to be a public cloud ourselves, and that's the reason we divested VCloud Air, and focused on significant things we could do with the leading public cloud vendors. As you know, Andy Jassy is a classmate of mine, Pat, Raghu, myself, began the discussions with Andy two years ago, and we announced the deal last year in October. This year having him on stage was, for me, personally a dream come true, and really nice to see that announcement, but we wanted to make sure we were also relevant to some of the other clouds. So earlier this year, in February, we announced Horizon Cloud, the VDI product manager. Today, we announced Kubernetes VMware, Pivotal and Google Form in Kubernetes, IBM Cloud. So all of the top four clouds, AWS, Azure, Google, and IBM have something going with VMware being with Pivotal. That's a big statement to our multi-cloud vision. >> And what a changeover from just two years ago when the ecosystem was, kind of, like a deer in the headlights, not knowing which way to zig or zag, do they cross the street. Where are we going with this? Now the clarity's very clear, cloud, and IoT, and edge with Amazon right there, a lot of the workloads there with multi-cloud. So the question I got to have you is that, as we just talked to the Google guys, is VMware turning into an arms dealer? Because that's a nice position to be at, because you're now driving VMware into multiple clouds. >> I think, you know, when I was on your show last time I described this continent called VMware, and then bridges into them. (John laughs) Let me try another and see if this works. That was good, but it had its 12-month shelf life. Think about the top four public clouds as sort of Mount Rushmore type figures. Each at different heights, AWS, Azure, Google, IBM Cloud, in market share they're the top four. If you want to build a house on top of Mount Rushmore, okay, it could work, but you're going to have to build it on top of one president's head. The moment you want to build it, you need some concrete infrastructure that fills in all the holes between them. That's VMware. It's the infrastructure platform that can sit on top of those varied disparate levels of Mount Rushmore, and make yourself relevant from on. So that's why we fell, whether you want to call that a quintessential platform, an arms provider, whatever it is, for the 4,400 cloud providers, plus the top four or five public cloud players today, VMware has to be relevant. We weren't two or three years ago. Now, for the top three, we're very relevant. >> I call it a binding agent. You're the binding agent across clouds, that's what you're really trying to become. But I wonder if, you know, you're talking about the clarity. I mean, VMware, things are good right now. Two years ago, was looking kind of hmmm, maybe not so good, with license growth down, and now it's up, stock prices double digits, >> Stock prices almost highest >> Okay, so I want to understand the factors behind that. You mentioned the clarity around vCloud Air and the AWS agreement, clearly. The second I want to attest is, the customer reality of cloud, that I can't just ship my business to the cloud, ship my data to the cloud. I got to bring the cloud model to the data. Did that in your conversation with customers, those two factors lead to customers being more comfortable, signing longer term agreements with you guys. Is that a bit part of the tailwind? I wonder if you could discuss that. >> Yeah, Dave I think that's absolutely right. One of the things I've learned in my 25 years of IT is, you want to keep being strategic to your customers. You never want to be in a place where you're in a cul-de-sac. And I started to sense, right, not definitively, but perhaps two years ago, there was a little it of that cul-de-sac perception as our license revenue was growing, particularly on this cloud strategy. Are you trying to be a public cloud, are you not, what's your stance versus AWS as one example, and with vCloud Air, there was a little bit of that hesitation. And if you asked our sales teams, the clarifying of our cloud strategy, which last year was okay but didn't have the substance or the punch. Now you've got an AWS coming on stage, and the other cloud providers where we have substance. I think that clarifying the cloud strategy game the ability for customers to say, even while they were waiting for AWS to be shipped, the last year, three or four quarters are spending of on-premise VMware stuff has gone up, 'cause they see us as strategic. The second aspect I think is our products are now a lot more mature than they were before outside of B sphere. VMware cloud foundation, which consists of storage, networking, VSAN, NSX, and you've talked to those people on your stage, workspace one, end user computing. These have really, really helped, and I think the third factor is, we've really focused on building a very strong team, from Pat, myself, to Raghu, Rajeev, Ray, Mauricio, Robin, I think it's a world-class infrastructure, so we just added Claire Dixon as our Chief Comms Officer on eBay. This is for us now, and everyone in the rest of the organization, we want to continue building a world-class sort of warrior-style strength in numbers. >> Quick follow-up if I may, just a little Jim Kramer moment. And the financial's looking good, you just raised four billion of cheap debt, right the operating cash flow, three billion dollars, and the nice thing about the clarity around vCloud Air is, the capital expenditure, it's just a very capital-efficient model that you guys have now, and I've been saying, you can't say it, but to me the stock's undervalued. When you do the ratios and the multiples on those factors, it looks like a cheap stock to me. >> John: I would love to see you buy it because we have to disclose it, the big position in VMware. >> No, no, no. >> We don't have any stock >> I wish we did. >> We just want to keep growing and the market will fairly value us over time. >> Yeah, it will. >> Well you guys had a good team at VMware, so let's just go back and unpack that. So there was a transformation. Peter Burrows was talking about IBM over the years, had a massive transformation, so really kind of a critical moment for VMware as you're pointing out. We had this great discipline, great technology, great community folks, still there now, as you mentioned, but that transition from saying, we got to post a position, are we in cloud or not, let's make a decision and move on, and as Dave said, it's good economics behind not having a cloud, but I saw a slide that said VMware Cloud, you can still have a cloud strategy using Amazon. Okay, I get that. So the question for you is this. This is the debate that we've been having. Just like in the cryptocurrency market, you're seeing native tokens in cryptography, and then secondary tokens, just one went crazy today. With cloud, we see native cloud, and then new clouds that are going to be specialty clouds. You're seeing a huge increase the long-tail power law of cloud providers that are sitting on other clouds. We think this is a trend. How does VMware help those potential ascensior clouds, the Deloitte clouds, the farming drone cloud that's going to have unique applications? So if applications become clouds, how does VMware help that? >> That's a really good question. So first off, we have 4,400 cloud providers that built their stacks on VMware. And it could be some of these sourced. Probably the best example are companies like Rackspace, OVH, T-Systems. And we're going to continue to empower them, and I think many of them that are in country-specific areas, France, Germany, China, Asia, have laws that require data to be there, and I think they quite frankly have a long existence, and some of them like Rackspace have adapted their model to be partnering with AWS, so we're going to continue to help them, and that's our VMware cloud provider program, that's going to be great. The other phenomenon we see happening is these mini data centers starting to form at what's called the edge. So edge computing is really almost like this mobile device becoming bigger and bigger, it becomes like a refrigerator, it becomes like a mini data center, and it's not sitting in the cloud, it's actually sitting in a branch someplace or somewhere external. VMware Stack could actually become the software that powers that whole thing. So if you believe that basically cloud providers are going to be three or four or five big public clouds, a bunch of cloud providers are country-specific, or vertical-specific, again in these edge computings, VMware becomes quintessentially important to all of those, and we become, whether you call it a platform, a glue, or whatever have you, and our goal is to make sure we're pervasive in all of those. I think it's going to, world is go, going to go from mobile cloud to cloud edge, I mean the whole word of cloud and edge computing is the future. >> So you believe that there potentially could be another second coming of more CSPs exploding big time. >> Especially with edge computing, and country-specific rules. There's some countries that just won't do business with a US public cloud because of whatever reason. >> Well, many of those 4,400 would say, hey, we have to have a niche so we can compete with AWS, so we don't get AWS-ized. So what's your message to those guys now that you're sort of partnered up with AWS? >> Listen, OVH is a good example. Virtuastream's another, I'll give you two good examples. OVH, we sold vCloud Air to them. We are helping those customers be successful. I go to some of those calls jointly with them, they are based in France expending some of their presence to the US, and have got some very specific IP that makes their data centers efficient. We want to help then be successful. Some of the technology that we've built in vCloud Air, we're now licensing to them so we can them be successful. Virtustream, you know Rodney Rogers being on your show. Mission-critical apps is tough for some of the public clouds to get right. They've perfected the art, and I've known them from my SAP days. So there's going to be some of these other clouds that are going to be enormously successful in their niche, and their niche are going to get bigger and bigger. We want to make sure every one of them are successful. And I think there's a big opportunity for multiple vendors to be successful. It won't be just the top three or four public clouds. There will be some boutique usage by country or some horizontal or vertical use case. >> Good for an arms dealer. Well this is my whole point, this is what we've been getting at. We're kind of riffing in real time, little competitive strategy, we got the Harvard MBA and I'm the Babson guy, we'll arm wrestle it out here, maybe do some car karaoke together. But this brings up the question, and I've been saying for a long time on The Cube, and Dave and I have been talking about, we see a long tail, torso neck expanding, where right now it's a knife-edge, long tail, top native clouds and then nobody else. So I think we're going to see this expand out where specialty clouds are going to come out for your reasons. So that is going to open up the door, and those guys they're not going to want their own cloud. >> Sanjay: I agree. >> And that's a channel, an app, who knows? >> You look at an example, one, two other examples of specialty clouds, these are SAS vendors. If you look at two vertical companies, Viva and Guidewire. These are SAS companies that are in the life sciences and insurance space. They've been enormously successful in a space that you're probably maybe a Zapier Salesforce would have done, but they have been focused in a vertical market, insurance and life sciences. And I think there's going to be many providers the same way at the IS level or the PAS level, to also be successful and we welcome, this is going to be a large multi-cloud world. >> Edge cloud. You guys talking about the edge before. Pat had the slide of the pendulum swinging. >> Sanjay: Exactly. >> What is that edge cloud do to the existing business? Is it disruptive or is it evolutionary in your opinion? >> It's disruptive in the sense that, if you've taken a hardware-centric view of that, I think you're going to be disrupted. You take things like software-defined WAN, software-defined networking. So I think the beauty of software is that we're not depending on the size of the hardware that sits underneath it, whether it's a big data center or small edge of the cloud. We're building this to be an all-form factors, and I agree with Marc Andreessen in the sense the software's eating up the world. So given the fact that VMware >> And the edge. >> Yeah, our premise is if there's more computing that's moving to the edge, more software define happening at the edge, we should benefit from that. The hardware vendors will have to adapt, and that's good. But software becomes quintessential. Now I think the edge is showing a little bit of, like, you know, Peter Levine had a story about how cloud computing might be extinct if edge computing takes off. Because what's happening is this machine starts to get bigger and bigger and sits in a branch or in some local place, and it's away from the cloud. So I think it actually is a beautiful world where if you're willing to adapt quickly, which software lets you do, adapt quickly, I think there's a bright future as world moves cloud, mobile, and edge. >> Great stuff, Sanjay, and I was referencing car karaoke, you have on your Twitter >> Oh the carpool karaoke. >> The carpool karaoke. >> It was a fun little thing. Maybe we could do it together, three of us some time. (John laughs) >> I don't do karaoke. Final... >> Just sing, man Just be out there doing your thing. >> I embarrass myself on The Cube enough, I don't need karaoke to help there. >> David: I'm in. (laughs) >> All right, I'll do it. All right, final question for you. >> That's a deal. Let's do it. >> Final question, Michael Dell and we're talking, the world's upside down right now, the computer industry has been thrown up in the air, it's going to be upside down, reconfiguration. You've been in the business for a long time, you've seen many waves. Actually the waves now are pretty clear. What's the fallout going to be from this for customers, for the vendors, for how people buy and build relationships in this new world? >> I think there's a couple of fundamental principles. I talked about one, software, let's not repeat that. I think ecosystems rule. It's really important that you don't look at yourself as having to own the full stack, you know VMware's chosen to be hardware-dependent. Yes, we're owned by Dell, but you've seen us announce a HP partnership here, right? You've seen us do deals with Fujitsu. We had AWS Cloud and Google Cloud. So when you view the world, I love this line by Isaac Newton, he said, "I see clearly because I stand on the shoulders of giants." And to me, that's a very informed strategy to actually guide our ecosystem strategy. Who are the giants in our space? It's the companies that are relevant, with the biggest market caps. Apple, Google, Microsoft, you know, AWS is part of Amazon, and then you know, HP, EMC, Dell, so and so, we list them, by my SAP. If we're relevant to all of them, I'd love to see the momentum of VMworld and the momentum to reinvent start coalescing. Collectively there's probably a hundred thousand people who come to all of our VMware vForums. Andy Jassy told me he expects 40,000 at re:Invent, and maybe across all of his AWS summits, he has a hundred thousand. I was sharing with him an idea. Why don't we have these two amoebas of growing conferences start to coalesce where we mingle, maybe 20% goes to both conferences, but we'll come to your show and be the best software vendor, that hijacks your show, so to speak, (John laughs) I didn't use that word. But we become the best vendor, and we'll roll out the red carpet to you. Now we've got a collection of 200,000, we couldn't have done that on our own. That's an example of AWS and VMware partnering. Now it doesn't have to be exclusively AWS, we could do it with another partner too. Microsoft doesn't show up at the AWS re:Invent conference, we do. Similarly we could maybe do something very specific with Azure and VDI at the Microsoft event, or Kubernetes and Google. So for VMware, our strategy needs to be highly relevant to the power players in the ecosystem, and the guiding our software-defined strategy to make that work, and I think if we do that, you know, you could see this be a 10 billion and bigger company. >> Well it says it's not a zero sum game, >> Sanjay: No, everybody wins. >> And if you can stay in the game, everybody wins, right. >> And I think in the software-defined infrastructure space, we like our odds. We feel we could be the leading player in that software-defined area. >> And it changes and reimagines that relationship between how people consume or procure technology, because the cloud's a mosaic, as Sam Ramji was telling me earlier. >> Oh you had Sam on your show? Wonderful. >> I had him on earlier, and he sees the cloud as a mosaic. >> He's a fantastic thought leader in open source, we were deeply grateful to have him at our event today. >> Andy Jassy, your classmate and friend, collaborator, he was onstage, great performance that he gave. Really talking to your crowd, saying, "We got your back," basically. Not a barney deals, not a optical deal, we are in on it, we're investing, and we got your back. That's interesting. >> We want to be with all of the key leaders that are driving significant parts of the ecosystem, we want to be friends, our tent is large. If everybody. Provided there's, like you said, not a barney announcement, so provided there's value to the customer. If there is, our tent is large, right? We will have point competitors, you know, here and there, and you know me, I'm very competitive. >> John: (laughs) No! >> I've not named competitors too much in this show. >> Really, really. >> But, if anything now, my mind's a lot more focused on the ecosystem, and I want to make this tent large for as many, many players to come here and have a big presence at VMworld. >> And the ecosystem is reforming around this new cloud reality, and the edge is going to change that shape even further. >> Competing on value, competing in a new ecosystem requires a new way to think about relationships. >> If I could give you one other example, then. In the world of mobile, who would have thought that the most important company to mobile security and enterprise to Apple is VMware now, thanks to AirWatch, or to Samsung, whatever it might be, right. This is the world we live in, and we have to constantly adapt ourselves. So maybe next year we'll be talking about IoT or something different, and their ecosystem. >> Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware, good friend inside The Cube, always candid. Thanks for sharing your commentary and color on the industry, VMware and your personal perspective. I'm John Furrier, Cube coverage live in Las Vegas, here on the ground floor in the VM Village. We'll be right back with more live coverage after this short break.