>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my two guest hosts that have spent a bunch of time with us this week. John Mark Troyer and Justin Warren. Thank you, gentlemen for joining us for the wrap. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> We get to have a lot of fun. We get to hang out with community people, geek out on a lot of stuff. This is also a really good checkpoint for a lot of the IT industry. VMware, 800-pound gorilla in the data center. I put out one tweet that was like the 800-pound gorilla in the data center or the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud. The partnerships matured quite a bit, in my mind, for the last year. That was one of the big things that I've seen. RDS on-premises is definitely the thing that sticks out to me the most. John, let's start with you as to, checkpoint from last year. What impressed you? What are they making progress with? Let's start there. >> I think the RDS announcement was maybe even undersold here. We'll see in the coming months what actually happens and if everything works the way it's supposed to work. I think a lot of people who are putting chips down on various outcomes and scenarios in cloud world did not cover that one space in the roulette wheel. Cause that's actually pretty interesting. Stu, I kind of see this as a year of promises kept. Some promises that were made in years past are starting to come out. This multi-cloud world seems more real. VMware's relationships with various clouds and the hints that were thrown are there's more to come. It seems real. The cloud starting to come back on-prem. Both EBS on-prem and now Project Dimension with VMware being a service provider. I've talked to a number of vendors and you and I, Stu. Some are here on theCUBE. People starting to do more managed services from the cloud back into your data center. I see the multi-cloud world working and then this kind of blurring of on-prem and cloud even more. That's kind of what I'm seeing. >> Yeah, I've got to agree. It's that idea that cloud is a state of mind. It's not a location. >> We say it's an operating model at it's core, right? >> Right, yeah, and I think we're seeing a lot of those ideas come to fruition now that you can operate like a cloud on-site. It's how you run things, it's not where exactly you put it. With the multi-cloud world, like you said, we can have, some of it can be on-site, some of it can be in one cloud, another cloud, lots of different clouds. Some of it will be at the edge. We're seeing a lot of growth in edge computing, which is essentially just another way of doing on-site. Being able to use the same tools, and that, for me, is the idea around the RDS announcement. It's the same thing that you're used to in public cloud. Now I can do that on-site. We're seeing a real cross-pollination. You can take VMware and run that in cloud. You can take things from the cloud and now run it back on site. It's pretty exciting. >> This is awesome. We have an easy button. Customers just push a button. Any data, anywhere, moves all over the place. Laws of physics, throw them out. Come on, guys. I need some critical analysis here. The trope that I would have, always, when I became an analyst an eight years ago was like well, if it wasn't for management and security we would have this all sorted out. The multi-cloud world is made progress, but when I still look at it. RDS, super exciting. The thing that's most exciting about it? That's on-premises, it's doesn't have connection to Amazon, but I'm doing cool things with the exact same kind of bits there so I can do it here or there. Doesn't mean, necessarily here and there, or spread between there, because petabytes of data don't just float across the ether. We're still using things like the AWS Snowballs when we have to move a lot of data. Yes, it's matured, but when I look at the management of multi-cloud and how simple, there was a great comment from a company that's been around for a couple of decades on theCUBE and he said look, the new companies all say we're going to make this super easy. It's like well, because you don't have the trusted brand to set beside, simple would be nice but cloud isn't simple. Multi-cloud sure isn't simple. >> There was, probably, a surfeit of single panes of glass here at the show. Any app, any cloud, any whatever. Single pane of glass. We'll blueprint it, we'll manage it, we'll do it. That does seem like that probably isn't that real world. >> Multiple single panes of glass. >> Please, Justin, give me a touchpoint. When you talk to an administrator, how do they spell single pane of glass? >> Oh yes, P-A-I-N, yes, a single glass of pain. That's generally what it is. I think that the manageability and the operational side of things, that is where there's a lot more development required. Cloud is, yes it's a state of mind. It's a very different way of operating and a lot of the tools, particularly in the VMware community, a lot of what people are used to here is very much point and click. It's not really as automated as it would be in, say, developer land. I spend a lot of time with developers and a lot of what they're used to is all programmatic, it's driven from the API. We're seeing movement with things like PowerShell and VMware administrators are getting more comfortable with the idea of scripting and so on. But they're not programmers. They still need GUI tools. They still need things that are able to do point and click. Some things are better in that environment. I think we still have a long way to go with things around automation. The other thing that still has a long way to go, I think, is security. Security particularly around the networking of how you inter-connect with all of these things and do so securely at scale. There is a lot of invasion and work that's required to actually make that happen. >> Absolutely. John, do you have some comment there? >> I was going to say I think you're right. Especially on all those points. The community booth back here behind us this year had a VMware code section, which was jam-packed the whole time. For the first time. VMware's been trying to speak to developers for 10 years and not quite connecting. Now, these weren't developers back there, these were admins, and they're not going to ever be programmers, but they're going to start to learn more programmatic paradigms, automation, things like that. It was super popular this year. >> Luckily, we don't actually need programmers anymore, John, cause it's coding, which means you're really just coping, pasting, and modifying things and everything. Heck, I've even interviewed marketing people that are like oh, server-less, I can build with that stuff. Super easy. I don't think we need everybody to learn to even code, as it were. We bridged that gap. It's matured, it's become easier. They pulled over some of the, it was the EMC code team. It's half that team over there. They had some good gamification. >> Stu, I am an optimist and I think the glass is half full or 40% full at least. We've done some CUBE stuff, theCUBE's been all over the world here this spring, all through 2018. I've done a couple shows with you. The difference that I saw this year was that the use cases were real and the time to value was real. People are implementing cloud projects, multi-cloud projects, and they're getting to a good milestone within weeks or months. Admittedly, these are big, multi-national companies, so it's really at the top level where they have the army of people to do it, but sometimes these projects were very small and they were real. They weren't just marketing hokum up on stage. Of course, they're not the full enterprise in a couple of weeks, but that's the difference this year, I see, Stu. I'm 40% full. >> Absolutely, I'd say look. Energy level was up. Two years ago it kind of hit a nadir. It was doom and gloom. We were all over at the eye candy bar saluting the great run that VMware had and wondering who the next CEO was been. Now, energy level's back up. Investment in the ecosystem, oh my gosh. I don't think I've seen this many parties ever at a VMworld. We got to talk about something other than cloud so give me your non-cloud takeaways from the show. Areas that people should learn more about, things you saw in the ecosystem or from VMware or the community. >> I think that's one of the things I've noticed here at the show. Wandering around the show floor, unlike some of the other shows where it's we will have a storage show or we'll have a backup show. There's a lot more balance this year. There seems to be a good mix of some of everything. I think that it shows that in order to run a successful IT shop, you actually need to have a balance of, you need some backup, you need some data recovery, you need to have some software, you need some monitoring, you need to have security options. Go and have a look at all of the different vendors that are at a show like this to be able to make sure you have a portfolio approach to how you run things. >> Totally. I remember there were a couple of years, four or five years ago, it was like oh, it's VM storage world. >> Yeah. >> OK, yeah. John? >> There is a lot of storage here, but the storage is all connected to the cloud now. I think if you look at some of the big booths and some of the start-ups who have gotten funding recently. Large rounds. Cohesity, Datrium, Rubrik, folks like that, they're delivering on promises made in earlier years. Not particularly like oh wow, I never thought of, but this was the vision that we laid out and now we're delivering it this year. Big rounds of funding, big customer movement, connection to the cloud and solid, interesting DR as a service and data, as opposed to storage, ideas. I thought that was one of the more interesting aisles this year over there in the booths. >> To riff on what you said about developers and the bridge to the code idea, we see Puppet is here at the show, HashiCorp is here for the first time. >> Docker's there, of course. >> Docker's here. >> C & CF had a booth. >> Yep, C & CF had a booth. These are people that you wouldn't have expected to see at a VMware show in years past. >> One thing that struck me is companies with a mission for good. Pat Gelsinger kind of sets the bar. Talked about it in his keynote. Do better, do good, sets that example. He climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro for charity earlier this year. They had Malala up on stage with Sanjay Poonen. I did a couple of interviews here which were inspiring. Mission-driven companies and great to see the infrastructure in software companies being like hey, we're enabling and helping it. That was one to me. Takeaways from the community? Other things as we get to our wrap? >> I do wonder about that point. Just to add a little, slightly critical note on that. I think that there has been a bit of a tech lash, a bit of a backlash against tech companies. I wonder whether, I would like to see more from tech companies to show that this is real. That that social conscience is a real thing and it isn't just a bit of marketing that they've spray painted on to the front of the company. The fact that we had Malala here giving a keynote indicates that there is a commitment to it. I would want to see that carry through for the next couple of years, at least, to show that that sort of thing is real. And certainly, from the rest of the ecosystem, I expect that we're going to see a lot more. >> Diversity in the community, absolutely. I do realize we have three white guys of a certain age sitting here. We try to add diversity. I had my first European host on the program. Lisa's been on a lot this week. We're building out our bench, we're looking to add diversity. John, yeah, the community. >> Community, again, yeah, community was good this year. A lot of old faces have stayed around, which is really interesting but also people have left and come back. You saw people who have gone into the AWS and Microsoft ecosystems coming back in here. Again, some of those old faces. Also, new faces. Global diversity from the southern hemisphere and from other countries that you wouldn't expect are here today. That was super interesting. I do see a lot of energy, a lot of excitement about their careers going forward. I do see that tech needs to be, there was some symbolic do-good things here. But I mean, Justin is a little bit involved in your own home country about how the government has the power with technology to do good or bad. I think that may be an emerging thing that we see here now as you get a layer down of not only charity work but the impacts of technology. I bet we'll end up talking about that next year, Stu. >> Guys, we could start talking for a lot longer. The good news is I know how to get in touch with you. For our audience, by the way, you can hit us all up on Twitter, through various social channels. Jtroyer, jpwarren, I'm of course @stu. That's just S-T-U. Blue Cow is on Instagram. Follow the adventures of Blue Cow, showing where Justin's going all over the place. Thanks so much for joining us. Great coverage here. This community's where I get a lot of my guest hosts and still, it's like homecoming coming to this place. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (electronic tones)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas. I'm Stu Miniman joined by my two guest hosts that have spent a bunch of time with us this week. John Mark Troyer and Justin Warren. Thank you, gentlemen for joining us for the wrap. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> We get to have a lot of fun. We get to hang out with community people, geek out on a lot of stuff. This is also a really good checkpoint for a lot of the IT industry. VMware, 800-pound gorilla in the data center. I put out one tweet that was like the 800-pound gorilla in the data center or the 800-pound gorilla in the cloud. The partnerships matured quite a bit, in my mind, for the last year. That was one of the big things that I've seen. RDS on-premises is definitely the thing that sticks out to me the most. John, let's start with you as to, checkpoint from last year. What impressed you? What are they making progress with? Let's start there. >> I think the RDS announcement was maybe even undersold here. We'll see in the coming months what actually happens and if everything works the way it's supposed to work. I think a lot of people who are putting chips down on various outcomes and scenarios in cloud world did not cover that one space in the roulette wheel. Cause that's actually pretty interesting. Stu, I kind of see this as a year of promises kept. Some promises that were made in years past are starting to come out. This multi-cloud world seems more real. VMware's relationships with various clouds and the hints that were thrown are there's more to come. It seems real. The cloud starting to come back on-prem. Both EBS on-prem and now Project Dimension with VMware being a service provider. I've talked to a number of vendors and you and I, Stu. Some are here on theCUBE. People starting to do more managed services from the cloud back into your data center. I see the multi-cloud world working and then this kind of blurring of on-prem and cloud even more. That's kind of what I'm seeing. >> Yeah, I've got to agree. It's that idea that cloud is a state of mind. It's not a location. >> We say it's an operating model at it's core, right? >> Right, yeah, and I think we're seeing a lot of those ideas come to fruition now that you can operate like a cloud on-site. It's how you run things, it's not where exactly you put it. With the multi-cloud world, like you said, we can have, some of it can be on-site, some of it can be in one cloud, another cloud, lots of different clouds. Some of it will be at the edge. We're seeing a lot of growth in edge computing, which is essentially just another way of doing on-site. Being able to use the same tools, and that, for me, is the idea around the RDS announcement. It's the same thing that you're used to in public cloud. Now I can do that on-site. We're seeing a real cross-pollination. You can take VMware and run that in cloud. You can take things from the cloud and now run it back on site. It's pretty exciting. >> This is awesome. We have an easy button. Customers just push a button. Any data, anywhere, moves all over the place. Laws of physics, throw them out. Come on, guys. I need some critical analysis here. The trope that I would have, always, when I became an analyst an eight years ago was like well, if it wasn't for management and security we would have this all sorted out. The multi-cloud world is made progress, but when I still look at it. RDS, super exciting. The thing that's most exciting about it? That's on-premises, it's doesn't have connection to Amazon, but I'm doing cool things with the exact same kind of bits there so I can do it here or there. Doesn't mean, necessarily here and there, or spread between there, because petabytes of data don't just float across the ether. We're still using things like the AWS Snowballs when we have to move a lot of data. Yes, it's matured, but when I look at the management of multi-cloud and how simple, there was a great comment from a company that's been around for a couple of decades on theCUBE and he said look, the new companies all say we're going to make this super easy. It's like well, because you don't have the trusted brand to set beside, simple would be nice but cloud isn't simple. Multi-cloud sure isn't simple. >> There was, probably, a surfeit of single panes of glass here at the show. Any app, any cloud, any whatever. Single pane of glass. We'll blueprint it, we'll manage it, we'll do it. That does seem like that probably isn't that real world. >> Multiple single panes of glass. >> Please, Justin, give me a touchpoint. When you talk to an administrator, how do they spell single pane of glass? >> Oh yes, P-A-I-N, yes, a single glass of pain. That's generally what it is. I think that the manageability and the operational side of things, that is where there's a lot more development required. Cloud is, yes it's a state of mind. It's a very different way of operating and a lot of the tools, particularly in the VMware community, a lot of what people are used to here is very much point and click. It's not really as automated as it would be in, say, developer land. I spend a lot of time with developers and a lot of what they're used to is all programmatic, it's driven from the API. We're seeing movement with things like PowerShell and VMware administrators are getting more comfortable with the idea of scripting and so on. But they're not programmers. They still need GUI tools. They still need things that are able to do point and click. Some things are better in that environment. I think we still have a long way to go with things around automation. The other thing that still has a long way to go, I think, is security. Security particularly around the networking of how you inter-connect with all of these things and do so securely at scale. There is a lot of invasion and work that's required to actually make that happen. >> Absolutely. John, do you have some comment there? >> I was going to say I think you're right. Especially on all those points. The community booth back here behind us this year had a VMware code section, which was jam-packed the whole time. For the first time. VMware's been trying to speak to developers for 10 years and not quite connecting. Now, these weren't developers back there, these were admins, and they're not going to ever be programmers, but they're going to start to learn more programmatic paradigms, automation, things like that. It was super popular this year. >> Luckily, we don't actually need programmers anymore, John, cause it's coding, which means you're really just coping, pasting, and modifying things and everything. Heck, I've even interviewed marketing people that are like oh, server-less, I can build with that stuff. Super easy. I don't think we need everybody to learn to even code, as it were. We bridged that gap. It's matured, it's become easier. They pulled over some of the, it was the EMC code team. It's half that team over there. They had some good gamification. >> Stu, I am an optimist and I think the glass is half full or 40% full at least. We've done some CUBE stuff, theCUBE's been all over the world here this spring, all through 2018. I've done a couple shows with you. The difference that I saw this year was that the use cases were real and the time to value was real. People are implementing cloud projects, multi-cloud projects, and they're getting to a good milestone within weeks or months. Admittedly, these are big, multi-national companies, so it's really at the top level where they have the army of people to do it, but sometimes these projects were very small and they were real. They weren't just marketing hokum up on stage. Of course, they're not the full enterprise in a couple of weeks, but that's the difference this year, I see, Stu. I'm 40% full. >> Absolutely, I'd say look. Energy level was up. Two years ago it kind of hit a nadir. It was doom and gloom. We were all over at the eye candy bar saluting the great run that VMware had and wondering who the next CEO was been. Now, energy level's back up. Investment in the ecosystem, oh my gosh. I don't think I've seen this many parties ever at a VMworld. We got to talk about something other than cloud so give me your non-cloud takeaways from the show. Areas that people should learn more about, things you saw in the ecosystem or from VMware or the community. >> I think that's one of the things I've noticed here at the show. Wandering around the show floor, unlike some of the other shows where it's we will have a storage show or we'll have a backup show. There's a lot more balance this year. There seems to be a good mix of some of everything. I think that it shows that in order to run a successful IT shop, you actually need to have a balance of, you need some backup, you need some data recovery, you need to have some software, you need some monitoring, you need to have security options. Go and have a look at all of the different vendors that are at a show like this to be able to make sure you have a portfolio approach to how you run things. >> Totally. I remember there were a couple of years, four or five years ago, it was like oh, it's VM storage world. >> Yeah. >> OK, yeah. John? >> There is a lot of storage here, but the storage is all connected to the cloud now. I think if you look at some of the big booths and some of the start-ups who have gotten funding recently. Large rounds. Cohesity, Datrium, Rubrik, folks like that, they're delivering on promises made in earlier years. Not particularly like oh wow, I never thought of, but this was the vision that we laid out and now we're delivering it this year. Big rounds of funding, big customer movement, connection to the cloud and solid, interesting DR as a service and data, as opposed to storage, ideas. I thought that was one of the more interesting aisles this year over there in the booths. >> To riff on what you said about developers and the bridge to the code idea, we see Puppet is here at the show, HashiCorp is here for the first time. >> Docker's there, of course. >> Docker's here. >> C & CF had a booth. >> Yep, C & CF had a booth. These are people that you wouldn't have expected to see at a VMware show in years past. >> One thing that struck me is companies with a mission for good. Pat Gelsinger kind of sets the bar. Talked about it in his keynote. Do better, do good, sets that example. He climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro for charity earlier this year. They had Malala up on stage with Sanjay Poonen. I did a couple of interviews here which were inspiring. Mission-driven companies and great to see the infrastructure in software companies being like hey, we're enabling and helping it. That was one to me. Takeaways from the community? Other things as we get to our wrap? >> I do wonder about that point. Just to add a little, slightly critical note on that. I think that there has been a bit of a tech lash, a bit of a backlash against tech companies. I wonder whether, I would like to see more from tech companies to show that this is real. That that social conscience is a real thing and it isn't just a bit of marketing that they've spray painted on to the front of the company. The fact that we had Malala here giving a keynote indicates that there is a commitment to it. I would want to see that carry through for the next couple of years, at least, to show that that sort of thing is real. And certainly, from the rest of the ecosystem, I expect that we're going to see a lot more. >> Diversity in the community, absolutely. I do realize we have three white guys of a certain age sitting here. We try to add diversity. I had my first European host on the program. Lisa's been on a lot this week. We're building out our bench, we're looking to add diversity. John, yeah, the community. >> Community, again, yeah, community was good this year. A lot of old faces have stayed around, which is really interesting but also people have left and come back. You saw people who have gone into the AWS and Microsoft ecosystems coming back in here. Again, some of those old faces. Also, new faces. Global diversity from the southern hemisphere and from other countries that you wouldn't expect are here today. That was super interesting. I do see a lot of energy, a lot of excitement about their careers going forward. I do see that tech needs to be, there was some symbolic do-good things here. But I mean, Justin is a little bit involved in your own home country about how the government has the power with technology to do good or bad. I think that may be an emerging thing that we see here now as you get a layer down of not only charity work but the impacts of technology. I bet we'll end up talking about that next year, Stu. >> Guys, we could start talking for a lot longer. The good news is I know how to get in touch with you. For our audience, by the way, you can hit us all up on Twitter, through various social channels. Jtroyer, jpwarren, I'm of course @stu. That's just S-T-U. Blue Cow is on Instagram. Follow the adventures of Blue Cow, showing where Justin's going all over the place. Thanks so much for joining us. Great coverage here. This community's where I get a lot of my guest hosts and still, it's like homecoming coming to this place. Thank you for watching theCUBE. (electronic tones)