>>Welcome back everyone to the cubes, live coverage here at VMware Explorer, 22. We're here on the ground on the floor of Mosco. I'm John for David ante. We're at kit Goldberg, CTO of VMware, the star of the show, the headliner@supercloud.world. The event we had just a few weeks ago, kit. Great to see you super excited to, to chat with you. Thanks for coming on. Oh >>Yeah. Happy to be here, man. It's been a wild week. Tons of excitement. We are jazzed. We're jacked, like to look at things >>For both, of course, jacked up and jazzed. Ready to go. So you got UN stage loved your keynote, you know, very CTO oriented, hit the, all your marks cloud native, the vSphere eight intro. Yep. More performance, more power. Yeah, more efficiency. And now the cloud native over the top, you shipped a white paper a few weeks ago, which we discussed at our super cloud event. Yep. You know, really laying out the narrative of cloud native. This is the priority for you. Is that true? Is that your only priority? What are the things going on right now for you that are your top priorities, >>Top priorities. So absolutely at a high level, it's flushing out this vision that, that we're talking about in terms of what we call cross cloud services. Other people call multi-cloud, you guys have super cloud, but the point is, I think what we see is that there's these different sort of vertical silos, the different public clouds they're on-prem data center edge. And what we're looking at is trying to create a new type of cloud something that's more horizontal in architecture. And I think this is something that we realize we've been doing at VMware for a while, and we gave it a name, we call it cross cloud. But what's important is that while we do bring a lot of value there, we can't possibly do everything. This has to be an industrywide movement. And so I think what we're really excited about is figuring out, okay, how do we actually build an architecture and a framework such that there's clear sort of lines of responsibility. Here's what one company does. Here's what another one does make sure that there's clean sort of APIs between that basically an overall architecture and structure. So that's probably one of the, the high level things that we're doing as an organization right now. >>What's been the feedback here at VMware Explorer, obviously the new name, Explorer rag laid that out in the keynote. Yep. It's about moving forward. Not replacing the community. Yep. Extending the world core and exploring new frontiers multicloud. Obviously one of them key. Yeah. Very clever actually names dig into it. It's nuanced. What's been the reaction. Yep. You're right. Yep. You're crazy. I love it. I need it. It's it's too early. It's perfect timing. No, it's a bit of, what's the feedback always a little >>Bit of everything, you know, I think one of us firstno people didn't really understand it. I think people were confused about what it was, but now that we're here in person, I think generally speaking, I'm hearing a lot of positive things about it. We've been gone or been apart for three years now, right? Since the last in person one, and this is an interesting opportunity for recreation sort of rebirth, right? We've certainly lost some traditions during the COVID pandemic, but also gives us the opportunity to build new ones. And to your point, world was always associated with virtualization. And of course, we're still doing that. We're still doing cloud infrastructure, but we're doing so much more. And given this focus on multi-cloud that I just mentioned and how it is the go forward focus for VMware, we wanted to evolve the conference to have that focus. And so I've been actually really pleased to see how many folks for it's their first time here. Right? They haven't been Tom worlds before and you know, this broader sort of conference that we're creating to, to apply to the support, more disciplines, different focus areas, you know, application development, developers, platform teams, you got cloud management things with aria, public cloud management, networking security, and user computing, all in addition to the core infrastructure bits. >>So John all week's been paying homage to, to Andy Grove talking about, let chaos rain and then rain in the chaos. Right. And so when you talk to customers, that chaos message cloud chaos, how is it resonating? Are they aware of that chaos? Are they saying, yes, we have cloud chaos or some saying, eh, yeah. It's okay. Everything's good. And they just maybe have some blind spots. What do >>You think? Yeah. I'm actually surprised at how strongly it's resonating. I mean, I think we knew that we were onto something, but people even love the specific term. They're like cloud chaos. I never thought about it that way, but you're like, you're absolutely right. It was a movie. It's a great, yeah. I know. Sounds like a thriller, but, but what we sort of, the picture we paint there about these silos across clouds, the duplication of technologies, duplication of teams and training, all this stuff. People realize that's where they're at. And it's one of those things where there's this headlong rush to cloud for good reasons. People wanted to be in the agility, but now they're dealing with some of that complexity that, that gets built up there and it absolutely is chaos. And while speed is great, you need to somehow balance that speed with control things like security compliance. These are sort of enterprise requirements that are sort of getting left out. And I think that's the realization, that's the sort of chaos that we're hitting on. >>It's almost like when in bus, in business school, you had the economic lines when break even hits, you know, cloud had a lot of great goodness to it. Yep. A lot of great value. It still does on the CapEx side, but as distributed computing architectures become reality. Yep. Private cloud instantiation of hybrid cloud operations. Now you've got edge and opening up all these new, new net new applications. Yep. What are you seeing there? And it's a question we've been asked some of the folks in the partner network, what are some of those new next gen apps that are gonna be enabled by, by this next wave edge specifically? Yeah. More performance, more application development, more software. Yeah. More faster, cheaper going on here. Kind of a Moore's law vibe there. What's next. >>Yeah. So, you know, when we look at edge, so, okay. Take today. Today. Edge is oftentimes highly customized software and hardware. It's not general purpose or to cloud technologies. And while edge is certainly gonna be limited. You can't just infinitely scale. Like you can in the cloud and the network bandwidth might be a little bit limited. You still wanna imagine it or manage it as if it were another cloud location, right. That like, I wanna be able to address it. Just like I addressed a certain availabilities done within AWS. I wanna be able to say the specific edge location at, you know, wherever somewhere here in San Francisco, let's say right now there's a few different things though. The first of which is that you got to manage at scale. Cause you don't have with cloud, you got a small number of very large locations with edge. >>You got a large number of very small locations. And so it's the scale is inverted there. So what this means is that you probably can't exactly specify which edge you want to go to. What instead you wanna say is more relational. Like I've got an IOT device out there. I want my app to be in data to be near it. And the system needs to figure out, okay, where do I put that thing? And how do I get it near it? And there may be some different constraints. You have cost security, privacy, it may be your edge or maybe telco edge location, you know, one, one of these sorts of things. Right? And so I think where we're going there is to enable the movement of applications and data to the right place. And this again goes back to the whole cross cloud architecture, right? >>You don't wanna be limited in terms of where you put an app, you wanna have that flexibility. This is the whole, you know, we use the term cloud smart. Right. And that's what it means. It's like put the, the app where it needs to be sort of the right tool for the right job. And so I think the innovation though, it's gonna be huge. You're gonna see new application architectures that the app can be placed near a user near a device near like a, an iPhone or near an IOT device, like a video camera. And the way that you manage that is gonna be much kind of infrastructure is code base. Yeah. So I think there's huge possibilities there. And it's really amazing to see just real quick on the telco side, what's happening there as well. The move to 5g, the move to open ran telco is now starting to adopt these data center and cloud technologies kinda standard building blocks that we use now out at the edge. So I think, you know, the amount of innovation that we're gonna see, >>It's really the first time on telco, they actually have a viable, scalable opportunity to, to put real gear data center, liked capabilities yep. At a location for specific purpose. Yeah. The edge function. >>Yeah. And well, and what we, without >>Building a, a monster >>Facility. Exactly. Yeah. It's like the base of a cell tower or something telephone closet. But what we've been able to do is improve these general purpose technologies. Like you look at vSphere in our hypervisor today. We are great at real time workloads, right? Like as a matter of fact, you look at performance on vSphere versus bare metal. Oftentimes an app runs faster on vSphere now because of all the efficiency and scale and so forth we can bring. So it means that these telecom applications that are very latency sensitive can now run fun on there. But Hey, guess what? Once you have a general purpose server that can run some of the telecom apps, well, Hey, you got extra space to run other apps. Maybe you could sell that space to customers or partners. And you know, then you have this new architecture >>Is the dev skill, a, a barrier for the, for the telcos, where are we at >>With that? It, it, it is. I think the barriers are really, how do you provide, I dunno if it's a skill set. I mean, there's probably some skill set aspects. I think in my mind, it's more about giving them the APIs to get access to that. Like, as I said, you're not gonna have developers knowing, okay, here are the specific geographic locations of all the cell towers in San Francisco and set what you're gonna say again, I need to be near this thing. And so you used geolocation and figure out, just put it some, put it in the right place. I don't really care. Right. So again, I think it's an evolution of management evolution of the APIs that developers use to access. Like today, I'm gonna say, okay, I know my app needs to be on the east coast so I can use us east one. I know the specific AZs at a, at a cloud level. That makes sense at an edge level. It doesn't, you're not gonna know. Okay. Like the specific cross streets or whatever, you gotta let the system figure that >>Out kid. I know you gotta go on. Times's tight, real quick. You got a session here on web three. Yeah. The Cube's got the, you know, the cube versus coming soon. We might be heavy. The cube versus coming powered by arm token, we had all kinds of stuff going on. Yep. You saw the preview a couple years ago. We did with the Cuban. Anyway, you did a session on web three and DM. VMware's rolling real quick. What was that about? Yeah, what's the purpose? >>What's the direction. That was a fascinating conversation. So I was talking about web three. It was talking about why enterprises haven't really started even to scratch the surface of the potential of web three. So part of it was like, okay, what is web three? It's a buzz words. We talked through that. We talked through the use of blockchain, how that sits with the core of a lot of web three. We talked about the use of cryptocurrency and how that makes sense. We talked about the consumerization, continuing consumerization of it. We've seen it with end user devices. We may well see it with some of the web three changes around ownership, individual ownership of data, of assets, et cetera. That's gonna have a downstream impact on enterprises, how they go to market their commercial models. So it was a fascinating discussion that unfortunately it's hard to summarize, but gotten to a lot of the nuances of this and some of the, are >>You bullish on >>It? Very bullish, a hundred percent. Like I think blockchain is a hugely enabling technology and not from a cryptocurrency standpoint, put that aside. All the enterprise use cases, we have customers like broad bridge financial today leveraging VMware blockchain, doing a hundred billion in transactions a day with the sort of repo market >>You think defi is booming >>Defi. So I, I think we're just starting to get there. But what you find is oftentimes these trends start on the consumer side and then all of a sudden they surprise enterprises. >>They call it a tri tried tread five traditional fi finance >>Versus okay. >>Any >>Other way around? No, no, no. But I'm saying is that it's, these consumer trends will start to impact enterprises. But what I'm saying is that enterprises need to be ready now or start preparing now for those comings. >>And what's the preparation for that? Just education learning. Yeah. >>Education learning, looking at blockchain, use cases, looking at what will this enable consumers to do that they couldn't do before there is gonna be a democratization of access to data. You're still gonna wanna have gatekeepers. You're still gonna wanna have enterprises or services that add value on top of that, but it's gonna be a bit more of an open ecosystem now, and that's gonna change some of the market dynamics in subtle ways. >>Okay. So we got one minute left. I want to ask you, what's your impression of the super cloud event we had also, you were headlining and you guys were a big part of bringing the, a large C of great people together. Are you happy with the outcome? What do you think's next for? >>Absolutely. No. I was super excited to see how much reception and engagement it got from across the industry. Right? So many different entry participants, so many different customers, partners, et cetera, viewing it online have had a lot of conversations here at explore already. As you know, you know, VMware, we put out a white paper, our point of view on what is a multi-cloud service. What is the taxonomy of those services? Again, as I mentioned before, we need to get as an industry to a place where we have alignment about this overall architecture to enable interoperability. And I think that's really the key thing. If we're gonna make this industry architectural shift, which is what I see coming, this is what we got. >>And you're gonna be jumping all in with this and helping out if we need you >>Hundred percent. All right. >>All in. I really love your transparency on the, on your white paper. Check out the white paper online on vmware.com. It's the cross cloud cloud native. I, I call the, the mission statement. It's not a Jerry McGuire memo. It's more me than that. It's the, it's the direction of cloud native. Yep. And multi-cloud thanks for coming on and, and thanks for doing that too. >>No, of course. And thanks for having me. Thanks. Love the discussion. >>Okay. More live coverage here at world Explorer, VMware Explorer, after the short break.

>> Welcome back to the cubes, ongoing coverage of VMworld 2021 the second year in a row. We've done this virtually. My name is Dave Volante and long time VMware technologist and new CTO kit Colbert is here. Kit welcome good to see you again. >> Thanks Dave, super excited to be here. >> So let's talk about your new role, you've been at VMware. You've touched all the bases, so to speak and, you know, love the career evolution, you're ready for this job. So tell us about that role. >> Well, I hope so. I don't know. It's definitely a big step up been here at VMware for 18 years now, which if you're not Silicon valley, you know, that's a long time. It's probably like four or five normal Silicon valley lifetime in terms of stints at a company. But I love it. I love the company, I love the culture. I love the technology and I'm super passionate, super excited about it. And so, you know, the, the new role previously, I was CTO for one of our business groups and focused on a specific set of our products and services. But now as the corporate CTO, I really am overseeing all of VMware, R and D. In the sense of really trying to drive a whole bunch of core engineering transformations, right? Where we've talked a lot about our shift toward becoming a SAS company. So, you know, a cloud services company. And so there's a lot of changes. We got to make internally, technologies, platform services we need to build out, you know, the, the sort of culture aspects of it again. And so, you know, I'm kind of sitting at the center of that and it's, I'll be honest, it's big, there's a lot of stuff to go and do, but I am just super excited about it. Wake up every day, really excited to meet a whole bunch of new people across the organization and to learn all the cool things we're doing, it's just, well, you know, I'll say it again, like the level of innovation happening inside of VMware is just insane. And it's really cool now that I get kind of more of a front and center road to see everything that's happening. >> Well and when I was preparing for the interview with Ragu, I was thinking about, you know, I've been following VMware for a long time, and I sort of noted that it's like the fourth wave of executive management and sort of went back and said, okay, yes, we know it started with, you know, workstation. Okay, fine. But then really quickly went into really changing the way in which we think about servers, server utilization and driving. I remember the first time I ever saw a demo, I said, wow, this is going to be completely game changing. And really, and then, and then thought about the era of the software defined data center, fine tuning the cloud strategy. And then this explosion of innovation, whether it was the sort of NSX piece, the acquisitions you've made around security, again, more cloud expansion. And now you're laying out sort of this Switzerland from multi-cloud combined with this as you're pointing out this as a service model. So when you think about the technical vision of the company transforming into a cloud and subscription model, what does that mean from a sort of architectural standpoint or a mindset perspective? >> Oh yeah. Both great questions, both sort of key focus areas for me. And by the way, it's something I've been thinking about for quite a while, right? Yeah so you're right. Like we are on our third or fourth lap of the track depending on, on how you count. But I also think that this one that this notion of getting into multicloud of becoming a real cloud services company is going to be probably the biggest one for us. And the biggest transformation that we're going to have to make. You know, we, we did extend from core compute virtualization to network and storage, but the software defined data center. But now these things I think are a bit more fundamental. So, you know, how are we thinking about it? But we're thinking about it in a few different ways. I do think, as you mentioned, the mindset is definitely the most important thing. This notion that, you know, we no longer really have product teams purely. They should be thinking of themselves as service teams and the idea being that they are operating and accountable for the availability of their cloud service. And so this means we really need to step up our game. We have in terms of the types of tooling that we built, but really it's about getting these developers engaged with that, to know that, hey, like what matters most of all right now is that service availability. In addition to things like security compliance, et cetera, but we have monitoring systems to tell you, hey, there's a problem. And that you need to go jump on those things immediately. This is not like, you know, a normal bug that comes in, oh, I'll get to it tomorrow or whatever. It's like, no, no, no, you got to step up and really get there immediately. And so there is that big mindset shift. That's something we've been driving the past few years, but we need to continue to push there. And as part of that, you know, the other thing we're doing is that what we've seen is that a lot of our individual teams have gone out and build like really great cloud services. But what we really want to build to enable us to accelerate that is a platform, a true SaaS platform and leveraging all these great capabilities that we have to help all of our teams go faster. So it gets to things like standardization and really raising the bar across the board to allow all these teams to focus on what makes their products or services unique and differentiated rather than, you know, just doing the basic blocking and tackling. So those are a couple of things I'm really focused on both driving the mindset shift. You know, I think when I, you know, as I was taking on this role, I did a lot of reading on other CTOs and, you know, how do they view their roles within their companies? And one of the things I did hear there was that the CTO is kind of the I dunno, the keeper is the right word, but the keeper of the engineering culture, right. That you want to really be a steward for that to help take it forward in the right sort of directions that align with the strategic direction of the business. And so that's a big aspect for what I'm thinking about. And the second one, the SAS platform, one of the really interesting things about this reorg that we've done internally is that traditionally CTO has kind of focused, you know, outbound, maybe a little bit inbound, but typically don't have large engineering organizations, but here what we want to do, because this, this SAS platform is so important to us. We did centralize it within the office of the CTO. And so now, you know, my customers from an engineering standpoint are all the internal business units. So a lot of really big changes inside VMware, but I think this is the sort of stuff we need to do to help us really accelerate toward the multi-cloud vision that we're painting. >> Well, VMware has always had a super strong engineering culture. And I like the way you phrase that the steward of the engineering culture, when you think about a product mindset, when, of course correct me, if I'm off here, but when you're building a product and you're making that thing rock solid, you want more rich to talk about the hardened top, and so it seems to me that the services mindset expands the mind a little bit in terms of what other services can I integrate to make my service better. Whether that's a machine intelligence service or a security service, or, you know, the dozens of other services that you guys are now building the combination of that innovation is, has like a step function and a lever on top of the sort of traditional product mindset. >> Yeah, there is, I think you're absolutely right. There's a ton of like really fundamental mental mindset shifts, right? That are a part of that. And the integration piece, you mentioned super critical, but I also think it's, it's actually taking a step back and looking at the life cycle more holistically when you're thinking about a product you're thinking about, okay, I get the bits together, I'm going to ship it out, but then it's really up to the customer to go deploy that, to operate it and, you know, deal with problems and bugs that come up. And when you're delivering a cloud service, those are all problems that you, as the application creator have to deal with. And so you got to be on top of all those things. And, you know, if you design something in such a way that it becomes kind of hard to bug it runtime, well, that's going to directly impact your availability that might have, you know, contractual obligations with an SLA impact to a customer. So there's some really big implications there that I think traditionally product teams didn't always fully think through, but now that they sort of have to with a cloud service. The other point, I think that's really important, there is the notion of simplicity and ease of use experience is always important, right? Customer experience, user experience, but it gets even more magnified in a SaaS type of environment because the idea is that you shouldn't have to talk to anybody view, you as a user, should be able to go and call an API and start using this thing right and swipe a credit card and you're good to go. And so, you know, that sort of maniacal focus on how you just remove roadblocks, remove any unnecessary things between that customer and getting the value that they're looking for. So in general, the thing that I really love about SaaS and cloud services is that they really align incentives very well. What you want to do as an application builder, as a solution builder really aligns well with what customers are looking for. And you can get that feedback very, very rapidly, which allows for much quicker evolution of the underlying product and application. >> So one of the other things I learned from my interview with Ragu and I couldn't go deep into it. I did a little bit with summit, but I want to get your perspectives as well as I always talk about this obstruction layer across clouds, hybrid, multicloud edge extract, extracting, the complexity of the, you know, the underlying complexity, and Ragu was sort of it's nuance, but he said, okay, but the thing is, we're not trying to limit access to the primitives. We want to allow developers to go there to the extent they want to and my takeaway was okay, but the, the abstraction is you want to be that single management layer with access to the deep primitives and APIs of the respective clouds. But simplify to your point across those estates at the management layer, and maybe you could add some color to that. >> Yeah you know, it's a really interesting question. And but let me tell you about how we think about it because you're right. And that the, you know, the abstractions can sometimes find the underlying primitives and capabilities. And so Ragu is getting at, hey, like we don't necessarily force you one way or the other. And here's the way to think about it is that it's really about delivering optionality. And we do that through offering these abstractions at different layers. So to your point, Dave, like we have a management capabilities that can enable you to manage consistently across all types of clouds, public, private, edge, et cetera, irrespective of what that underlying infrastructure is. And so you look at things that are like our V realize suite of products or cloud health or tons, and tons of mission control is really focused on that one as well. But then we also have our infrastructure layer. That's what we're doing with VMware cloud and this notion of delivering consistent infrastructure. Now, even though, the core sort of IS layer is more consistent, you still get great flexibility in terms of the higher level services. If you want to use a database from one of the public clouds or messaging system or streaming services, you know, AI, whatever it is, you still got that sort of optionality as well. And so the reason that we offer these different things is because customers are just in different places. As a matter of fact, a single customer may have all of those different use cases, right? They may have some apps where they're moving from on-prem and the cloud, they want to do that very quickly. So, boom, we can just do it really fast with VMware cloud consistent infrastructure, we can vMotion that thing up in the cloud. Great. But for other ones, maybe a modern app they're building and maybe a team has chosen to use native AWS for that, but they want to leverage Kubernetes. So there you could put in a ton of mission control to give them that, you know, consistent management across sites or leverage cloud health to understand costs and to really enable the application teams to manage costs on their own. So I think, you know, I always go back to that concept of optionality, like we offer sort of these different levels of abstraction. And it really depends on what the use case is because the reality is especially for a complex enterprise, they're likely going to have all those use cases. >> You know. I want to stay on optionality for a moment because you're essentially becoming a cloud company. I'm expanding the definition of cloud and that's, which I think is appropriate because the cloud is expanding. It's going on, prem, it's going out to the edge hybrid connections across clouds, et cetera. And when you look at the public cloud players there, they all are deep into what I'll call data management. I'm not even sure what that term means anymore sometimes, but certainly they all own own databases, but they also offer databases from folks. You I go back to something Moritz said with the software mainframe that we want to be able to run any workload, you know, anywhere and, and have high reliability recovery, you know, lowest costs, et cetera. It doesn't seem as though you're going to run those, those workloads project Monterey is about supporting new workloads, but it doesn't seem like you have aspirations to, own sort of the database layer, for example, what's your philosophy around that? >> Not generally I mean, we do have some solutions like Greenplum, for instance, that play in that space, more of a data warehouse solution. But generally speaking, you're absolutely right. You know, VMware success was built through tight partnerships. We have a very, very broad partner network. And of course we see hyperscalers as great partners as well. And so, you know, I think if we get back to like, what's the core of VMware, it really is providing those powerful abstractions in the right places, at the infrastructure level, at the management level and so forth. But yeah, we're not trying to necessarily compete with everyone reinvent the world, what we're trying to do is, and by the way, if I just take a step back when we talk to customers, what really drives them toward multi clouds toward using multiple clouds is the fact that they want to get after these, what we call best of breed cloud services, that many of the different public clouds offer databases and AI and ML systems. And for each app team, the exact one that perfectly meets their needs, maybe different, right? Maybe on one cloud versus another cloud. And so that is really the optionality that we want to optimize for when we talk to those customers that they want the easiest way of getting that app onto that cloud. So we can take advantage of that cloud service, but what they worry about is the lack of consistency there. And that goes across the board. You know, if something fails at two AM, you have to wake up and go fix it. Do you have like the right sort of tooling in place, if it's fails on one cloud versus another, do you have to like, you know, scramble to figure out which tools to go use, how to go, you know, which dashboard to look at? I was like, no, they want kind of a consistent one. When you think about, from a security perspective, how do you drive a secure software supply chain? How do you prevent the types of attacks that we've seen in the past few years where people insert malicious code into your supply chain, and now you're running with hack code out there. And if you have different teams doing different things across different clouds, well, that's going to just open up sort of a can of worm, of different possibilities there for hackers to get in. So that's why this consistency is so important. And so, you know, if, I guess if we refine, the optionality a little bit, that point it's about getting optionality around cloud services and that those, like, those are the things that really differentiate. And so that, you know, we're not trying to compete with that. We're saying, hey, like we want to bring customers to those and give them the best experience that they can irrespective of whether that's in the public cloud or on prem or even at the edge. >> That's a huge technical challenge and amazing value for customers, I want to ask you, there's a lot of talk about ESG today. How does that fit into the CTO mindset? Is it a bolt-on, is it as it is fundamental component? >> Yeah the idea there is that if we look at the core values for VMware, this is something that's hugely important and something that we've actually been focused on for quite a while. We now have a whole team focused on this really being a force multiplier to help keep us honest across VMware, to help ensure equity and in many different ways that we have an air continue to increase. For instance, the amount of female representation within our organization or underrepresented minorities or communities ensuring that, you know, pay is equal across the company. You know, these different sorts of things, but also around sustainability. They actually have a number of folks working very closely with our teams to drive sustainability into our products. You know, vSphere is great because it reduces the amount of physical servers you need. So by definition reduces the carbon footprint there, but now, you know, I'm taking a step further. We have cloud partners that we're working with to ensure that they have net zero carbon emissions, you know, using a hundred percent renewables by 2030. And in fact, that's something that we ourselves have signed up for. As you know, today we are carbon neutral, but what we want to get to is to be net carbon zero by 2030, which is an absolutely huge lift. And that's, by the way, not just for VMware, our operations, our offices, but also for our supply chain as well. And so, you know, when you look across this, you know, as well as efforts around diversity and inclusion, this is something that is very core to what we do as a company, but it's also a personal passion of mine. The ESG office actually lives within my organization. And it does that because what I view the office of the CTO as being as really a force multiplier, as I said before, like, yes, the team is located here, but their purview is across all of engineering. And in fact, all of VMware. So I think, you know, when we look at this, it's about getting the best talent we have, very diverse talent increasing our ability to deliver innovative products, but also doing so in a way that's good for the planet that is sustainable and that is giving back to the community. But I think, you know, I'm looking at measuring success in a few different ways. First of all, as I said before, the ESG component and in diversity equity inclusion in particular, in terms of our workforce, extraordinarily important to me and something we're going to be really pushing hard on, you know, as we all know, you know, women, underrepresented minorities, not very well represented in general in Silicon valley. So something that we all need to step up on. And so we're going to be putting a lot of effort in there and that will actually help drive as I said before, all of these innovations, this fundamental shift in mindset, I mean that requires diverse perspectives. It requires pushing us out of our comfort zone, but the net result of that is, so what you're going to see is a much faster cadence of releases of innovation coming from VMware. So there's some just insanely exciting things that are happening in the labs right now that we're cooking up. But, you know, as we start making this shift, we're going to be delivering those faster and faster to our customers and our partners. >> You know, I'm interested to hear that it's a passion of yours. There was an article, I think it was last week in the wall street journal was this, it was an insert section on, on women in the workforce. And there was a stat in there, which I thought was pretty interesting. I'll run it by you see what you think it said that, you know, it's talking about COVID and post COVID and the stresses. And it's interesting to me because a lot of executives are, and you know, I'm, I'm with them is, hey, work from home. This is some beautiful thing. It's good for business too, because you know, everybody's more productive, but then you have this perpetual workday now it's like we never sleep. And then it goes bleeds in the weekends. And the stat from Qualtrics, which was published in the journal, said that, I think it said 30% of working women said that they, their mental health has declined since COVID. And that number was only 15% for working men, still notable but half. And so, you know, one has to question maybe that perpetual work week, and, you know, maybe there's a benefit from business productivity, but then there's the other side of that as well. And a lot of women have left the workforce, a lot of working previously working moms. And so there's a, there's an untapped labor pool there, and there's this huge labor shortage. And so these are important issues, but they're not easy ones to solve, are they? >> No, no, no. It's something we've been putting a lot of thought into at VMware. So we do have a flexible program that we're rolling out in terms of work. People can come into the office if they want to, of course, you know, where we have offices, where it's safe to do so where the government is allowed that our people can and people can have an actual desk there, or sometimes they can say, hey, I only want to come in once or twice a week. And then we say, okay, we'll have some floating desks that you can take. And others are saying, I want to be fully remote. So we give people a pretty broad range in terms of how they want to address that. But I do think to your point though, and this is something I've been really trying to do already is to create a more inclusive environment by doing a number of different things. And so it's being thoughtful around when you're sending emails 'cause like I do like the, my sort of schedule as I do tend to like fire off a lot of emails late at night after the kids are in bed and get a little quiet time, some thinking time, but I make it very clear that I'm not expecting an immediate response don't worry about it. I'm just, this is my work time. Doesn't have to be your work time. And so really setting those, I guess, boundaries very well explicitly and kind of the, the expectations name is a better term setting that explicitly trying to schedule meetings, not at times where you're going to have to drop the kids off at school or pick them to take over your life. And so we really try to emphasize boundaries and, and really studying those things appropriately. But honestly, it's something that we're still working on and I'm still learning and so I'd love to get feedback from folks, but those are some of the early thinkings. But I would say that we at VMware are taking it very, very seriously and really supporting our employees in terms of navigating that work-life balance. >> Well, okay. Congratulations on the new role and it's great to see you again I hope I hope next year we could be face-to-face always a pleasure to have you on the cube. >> Thanks, Dave. Appreciate it being here. >> Alright and thank you for watching the cubes continuous coverage of VMworld 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more right after this.

(slow music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's ongoing coverage of VMworld 2021, the second year in a row we've done this virtually. My name is Dave Vellante and long-time VMware technologist and new CTO Kit Colbert is here. Kit, welcome. Good to see you again. >> Thanks, Dave. Super excited to be here. >> So let's talk about your new role. You've been at VMware. You've touched all the bases so to speak (Kit chuckles) and, you know, love the career evolution. You're ready for this job. So tell us about that role. >> Well, I hope so. I don't know. It's definitely a big step up. Been here at VMware for 18 years now, which, if know Silicon Valley, you know that's a long time. It's probably like four or five normal Silicon Valley lifetime's in terms of stints at a company. But I love it. I love the company. I love the culture. I love the technology and I'm super passionate, super excited about it. And so, you know, previously I was CTO for one of our business groups and focused on a specific set of our products and services. But now, as the corporate CTO, I really am overseeing all of VMware R&D. In the sense of really trying to drive a whole bunch of core engineering transformations, right, where we've talked a lot about our shift toward becoming a SaaS company. So, you know, a cloud services company. And so there's a lot of changes we got to make internally. Technologies, platform services we need to build out, you know, the sort of culture aspects of it again. And so, you know, I'm kind of sitting at the center of that and, I'll be honest, it's big, there's a lot of stuff to go and do, but I am just super excited about it. Wake up every day, really excited to meet a whole bunch of new people across the organization and to learn all the cool things we're doing. Well, you know, I'll say it again, like the level of innovation happening inside VMware is just insane. And it's really cool now that I get kind of more of a front and center row to see everything that's happening. >> And when I was preparing for the interview with Raghu, you know, I've been following VMware for a long time, and I sort of noted that it's like the fourth, you know, wave of executive management and I sort of went back and said, okay, yes, we know it started with, you know, Workstation. Okay, fine. But then really quickly went into really changing the way in which we think about servers, and server utilization, and driving. I remember the first time I ever saw a demo, I said, "Wow, this is going to be completely game-changing." And then thought about the era of the software-defined data center, fine-tuning the cloud strategy, and then this explosion of innovation, whether it was this sort of NSX piece, the acquisitions you've made around security, again, more cloud expansion. And now you're laying out sort of this Switzerland from Multi-Cloud combined with, as you're pointing out, this as a service model. So when you think about the technical vision of the company transforming into a cloud and subscription model, what does that mean from a sort of architectural standpoint >> Yeah. >> Or a mindset perspective? >> Oh yeah. Both great questions and both sort of key focus areas for me, and by the way, it's something I've been thinking about for quite a while, right? Yeah, so you're right. Like we are on our third or fourth lap of the track depending on how you count. But I also think that this notion of getting into Multi-Cloud, of becoming a real cloud services company is going to be probably the biggest one for us. And the biggest transformation that we're going to have to make, you know, we did extend from core compute virtualization to network and storage with the software-defined data center. But now these things I think are a bit more fundamental. So, you know, how are we thinking about it? Well, we're thinking about it in a few different ways. I do think, as you mentioned, the mindset is definitely the most important thing. This notion that, you know, we no longer really have product teams purely, they should be thinking of themselves as service teams and the idea being that they are operating and accountable for the availability of their cloud service. And so this means we really needed to step up our game, and we have in terms of the types of tooling that we built, but really it's about getting these developers engaged with that, to know that, hey, like what matters most of all right now is that service availability, in addition to things like security, compliance, et cetera. But we have monitoring systems to tell you, hey, like there's a problem. And that you need to go jump on those things immediately. This is not like, you know, a normal bug that comes in, oh, I'll get to it tomorrow or whatever. It's like, no, no, you got to step up and really get there immediately. And so there is that big mindset shift and that's something we've been driving for the past few years, but we need to continue to push there. And as part of that, you know, what we've seen is that a lot of our individual teams have gone out and build like really great cloud services, but what we really want to build to enable us to accelerate that, is a platform, a true, you know, SaaS platform and leveraging all these great capabilities that we have to help all of our teams go faster. And so it gets to things like standardization and really raising the bar across the board to allow all these teams to focus on what makes their products or services unique and differentiated rather than, you know, just doing the basic blocking and tackling. So those are couple of things I'm really focused on. Both driving the mindset shift. You know, as I was taking on this role, I did a lot of reading on other CTOs and, you know, how do they view their roles within their companies? And one of the things I did hear there was that the CTO is kind of the, I don't know if the keeper is the right word, but the keeper of the engineering culture, right, that you want to really be a steward for that to help take it forward in the right sort of directions that aligned with the strategic direction of the business. And so that's a big aspect for what I'm thinking about. And the second one in the SaaS platform, one of the really interesting things about this reorg that we've done internally is, that traditionally CTO is kind of focused, you know, outbound, maybe a little bit inbound, but typically don't have large engineering organizations, but here, what we want to do, because the SaaS platform is so important to us. We did centralize it within the office of the CTO. And so now, you know, my customers, from an engineering standpoint, are all the internal business units. So a lot of really big changes inside VMware, but I think this is the sort of stuff we need to do to help us really accelerate toward the multi-cloud vision that we're painting. >> Well, VMware has always had a superstrong engineering culture, and I liked the way you phrase that, "The steward of the engineering culture," when you think about a product mindset, 'course correct me, if I'm off here, but when you're building a product and you're making that thing rock-solid, you know, Maritz used to talk about the hardened top. And so it seems to me that the services mindset expands the mind a little bit in terms of what other services can I integrate to make my service better, whether that's a machine, intelligence service, or a security service or, you know, the dozens of other services that you guys are now building, the combination of that innovation has like a step function and a lever on top of the sort of traditional product mindset. >> Yeah, I think you're absolutely right there's a ton of like really fundamental mental mindset shifts, right? That are a part of that. And the integration piece you mentioned, super critical, but I also think it's actually taking a step back and looking at the life cycle more holistically. When you're thinking about a product, you're thinking about, okay, I'ma get the bits together, I'm going to ship it out. But then it's really up to the customer to go deploy that, to operate it, to, you know, deal with problems and bugs that come up. And when you're delivering a cloud service, those are all problems that you, as the application creator, have to deal with. And so you've got to be on top of all those things. And, you know, if you design something in such a way that it becomes kind of hard to debug at runtime, well, that's going to directly impact your availability, that might have, you know, contractual obligations with an SLA impact to a customer. So there's some really big implications there that I think traditionally product teams didn't always fully think through, but now that they sort of have to with like a cloud service. The other point, I think that's really important there, is the notion of simplicity and ease of use. Experience is always important, right? Customer experience, user experience, but it gets even more magnified in a SaaS type of environment because the idea is that you shouldn't have to talk to anybody. You, as a user, should be able to go and call an API and start using this thing, right, and swipe a credit card and you're good to go. And so, you know, that sort of maniacal focus on how you just remove roadblocks, remove any unnecessary things between that customer and getting the value that they're looking for. So in general, the thing that I really love about SaaS and cloud services is that they really align incentives very well. What you want to do, as an application builder, as a solution builder, really aligns well with what customers are looking for. And you can get that feedback very, very rapidly, which allows for much quicker evolution of the underlying product and application. >> So one of the other things I learned from my interview with Raghu, and I couldn't go deep into it, I did a little bit with Sumit, but I wonder if I get your perspectives as well. I always talk about this abstraction layer across clouds, hybrid, multi-cloud, edge, abstracting, you know, the underlying complexity, and Raghu, it's nuance, but he said, "Okay, but the thing is, we're not trying to limit access to the primitives. We want to allow developers to go there to the extent." And my takeaway was okay, but the abstraction is you want to be that single management layer with access to the deep primitives and APIs of the respective clouds. But simplify, to your point, across those estates at the management layer, maybe you could add some color to that. >> Yeah, you know, it's a really interesting question. But let me tell you about how we think about it because you're right. In that, you know, the abstractions can sometimes find the underlying primitives and capabilities. And so Raghu getting at, hey, like we don't necessarily force you one way or the other. And here's the way to think about it, is that it's really about delivering optionality. And we do that through offering these abstractions at different layers. So to your point, Dave, like we have a management capabilities that can enable you to manage consistently across all types of clouds, public, private, edge, et cetera, irrespective of what that underlying infrastructure is. And so you'll look at things that are like our vRealize suite of products, or CloudHealth, or Tanzu, Tanzu Mission Control is really focused on that one as well. But then we also have our infrastructure layer. That's what we're doing with VMware Cloud. And this notion of delivering consistent infrastructure. Now, even though the core, sort of IIS layer, is more consistent, you still get great flexibility in terms of the higher-level services. If you want to use a database from one of the public clouds, or a messaging system, or streaming service, or, you know, AI, whatever it is, you still got that sort of optionality as well. And so the reason that we offer these different things is because customers are just in different places. As a matter of fact, a single customer may have all of those different use cases, right? They may have some apps where they're moving from on-prem into the cloud. They want to do that very quickly. So, boom, we can just do it really fast with VMware Cloud, consistent infrastructure. We can VMotion that thing up in the Cloud, great. But for other ones, maybe a modern app they're building, and maybe a team has chosen to use native AWS for that, but they want to leverage Kubernetes. So there you could put in a Tanzu Mission Control to give them that, you know, consistent management across sites, or leverage CloudHealth to understand costs and to really enable the application teams to manage costs on their own. So, you know, I always go back to that concept of optionality, like we offer sort of these different levels of abstraction, and it really depends on what the use case is because the reality is, especially for a complex enterprise, they're likely going to have all of those use cases. >> You know, I want to stay on optionality for a moment because you're essentially becoming a cloud company. I'm expanding the definition of cloud, which I think is appropriate 'cause the cloud is expanding. It's going on-prem, it's going out to the edge, there's hybrid connections, across clouds, et cetera. And when you look at the public cloud players, they all are deep into what I'll call data management. I'm not even sure what that term means anymore sometimes, but certainly they all own, own, databases, but they also offer databases from folks. I go back to something Maritz said with the software mainframe that we want to be able to run any workload, you know, anywhere and have high reliability, recovery, you know, lowest costs, et cetera. So you're going to run those workloads. Project Monterey is about supporting new workloads, but it doesn't seem like you have aspirations to own sort of the database layer, for example, what's your philosophy around that? >> Yeah. Not generally. I mean, we do have some solutions like Greenplum, for instance, that play in that space, more of a data warehouse solution, but generally speaking, you're absolutely right. You know, VMware success was built through tight partnerships. We have a very, very broad partner network. And of course, we see hyperscalers as great partners as well. And so, I think if we get back to like, what's the core of VMware, it really is providing those powerful abstractions in the right places, at the infrastructure level, at the management level, and so forth. But yeah, we're not trying to necessarily compete with everyone, reinvent the world. And by the way, if I just take a step back, when we talk to customers, what really drives them toward using multiple clouds is the fact that they want to get after these, what we call, best of breed cloud services, that many of the different public clouds offer databases and AI and ML systems. And for each app team, the exact one that perfectly meets their needs may be different, right? Maybe on one conference is another cloud. And so that is really the optionality that we want to optimize for when we talk to those customers. They want the easiest way of getting that app onto that cloud, so we can take advantage of that cloud service, but what they worry about is the lack of consistency there. And that goes across the board. You know, if something fails at 2:00 am, and you have to wake up and go fix it. Do you have like the right sort of tooling in place, if it's fails on one cloud versus another, do you have to like, you know, scramble to figure out which tools to go use, you know, which dashboard to look at? It's like, no, that you want kind of a consistent one. When you think about, from a security perspective, how do you drive a secure software supply chain? How do you prevent the types of attacks that we've seen in the past few years? Where people insert malicious code into your supply chain and now you're running with hack code out there. And if you have different teams doing different things across different clouds, well, that's going to just open up sort of a can of worm of different possibilities there for hackers to get in. So that's why this consistency is so important. And so, you know, I guess, if we refine the optionality a little bit, that point, it's about getting optionality around cloud services and then like those are the things that really differentiate. And so, you know, we're not trynna compete with that. We're saying, hey, like we want to bring customers to those and give them the best experience that they can, irrespective of whether that's in the public cloud, or on-prem, or even at the edge. >> And that's a huge technical challenge and amazing value for customers. I want to ask you, there's a lot of talk about ESG today. How does that fit into the CTO mindset? >> Yeah. >> Is it a bolt-on, is it a fundamental component? >> Yeah. Yeah, so ESG is talking about environment, sustainability, and governance. And so, you know, it's not an environment, excuse me, equity, (Kit chuckles) equity, sustainability, and governance. Getting my acronyms wrong, which as the technologist, really a faux pas, but any case, equity, sustainability, and governance. And the idea there is that if we look at the core values for VMware, this is something that's hugely important. And something that we've actually been focused on for quite a while. We now have a whole team focused on this, really being a force multiplier to help keep us honest across VMware, to help ensure equity, and in many different ways, that we have or continue to increase, for instance, the amount of female representation within our organization, or underrepresented minorities or communities, ensuring that, you know, pay is equal across the company. You know, these different sorts of things, but also around sustainability. They actually have a number of folks working very closely with our teams to drive sustainability into our products. You know, vSphere is great because it reduces the amount of physical servers you need. So by definition reduces the carbon footprint there. But now, you know, taking a step further. We have cloud partners that we're working with to ensure that they have net-zero carbon emissions, you know, using 100% renewables by 2030. And in fact, that's something that, we ourselves, have signed up for, you know, today we are carbon-neutral, but what we want to get to is to be net carbon zero by 2030, which is an absolutely huge lift. And that's, by the way, not just for VMware, our operations, our offices, but also for our supply chain as well. And so, you know, when you look across, you know, as well as efforts around diversity and inclusion, this is something that is very core to what we do as a company, but it's also a personal passion of mine. The ESG office actually lives within my organization. And it does that because what I view the office of the CTO as being is really a force multiplier, as I said before, like, yes, the team is located here, but their purview is across all of engineering. And in fact, all of VMware. So I think, you know, when we look at this, it's about getting the best talent we have, very diverse talent, increasing our ability to deliver innovative products, but also doing so in a way that's good for the planet, that is sustainable. And that is giving back to the community. >> You know, by the way, I don't think that was faux pas. (Kit laughs) 'Cause a lot of times, people use environmental, social, and governance, and your equity piece would fall into the S in that equation, the social responsibility, you know, components. So I think you've just done an interesting twist on the acronym. So no mistake there. (Dave chuckles) Just another way to look at it. >> Yup, yup, yup. >> So you're now deep into the CTO role. What should we look for in the, you know, coming months and years? How should we >> Hmm. >> Kind of evaluate progress? What are those sort of milestones that we should be looking at? >> Yeah, so about a month or so into the job now, and so still getting my arms wrapped around, but, you know, I'm looking at measuring success in a few different ways. First of all, as I said before, the ESG component and in diversity, equity inclusion in particular, in terms of our workforce, extraordinarily important to me and something we're going to be really pushing hard on, you know, as we all know, you know, women, underrepresented minorities, not very well represented, in general, in Silicon Valley. So something that we all need to step up on. And so we're going to be putting a lot of effort in there, and that will actually help drive, as I said before, all of these innovations, this fundamental shift in mindset, I mean, that requires diverse perspectives. It requires pushing us out of our comfort zone, but the net result of that, so that what you're going to see, is a much faster cadence of releases of innovation coming from VMware. So there's some just insanely exciting things (Kit laughs) that are happening in the labs right now that we're cooking up. But, you know, as we start making this shift, we're going to be delivering those faster and faster to our customers and our partners. >> You know, I'm interested to hear that it's a passion of yours. There was an article, I think it was last week, in "The Wall Street Journal," it was an insert section on "Women in the Workforce," and there was a stat in there, which I thought was pretty interesting. I'll run it by and you see what you think, you know, it was talking about COVID, and post COVID,and the stresses. And it's interesting to me because a lot of executives, and pfft, you know, I'm with them, said, "Hey, work from home. This a beautiful thing. It's good for business too, because, you know, everybody's more productive," but you have this perpetual workday now. It's like we never sleep. It bleeds in the weekends. And the stat from Qualtrics, which was published in the journal, I think it said, "30% of working women said that their mental health has declined since COVID." And that number was only 15% for working men, is still notable, but half. And so, you know, one has to question maybe that perpetual work week and, you know, maybe there's a benefit from business productivity, but then there's the other side of that as well. And a lot of women have left the workforce, a lot of previously working moms. And so there's an untapped labor pool there, and there's this huge labor shortage. And so these are important issues, but they're not easy ones to solve, are they? >> No, no, no. It's something we've been putting a lot of thought into at VMware. So we do have a flexible program that we're rolling out in terms of work. People can come into the office if they want to, of course, you know, where we have offices where it's safe to do so, where the government has allowed that, and people can have an actual desk there, or sometimes they can say, "Hey, I only want to come in once or twice a week." And then we say, "Okay, we'll have some floating desks that you can take." And others are saying, "I want to be fully remote." So we give people a pretty broad range in terms of how they want to address that. But I do think, to your point though, and this is something I've been really trying to do already is to create a more inclusive environment by doing a number of different things. And so it's being thoughtful around when you're sending emails. 'Cause like my sort of schedule is, I do tend to like fire off emails late at night after the kids are in bed, I get a little quiet time, some thinking time, but I make it very clear that I'm not expecting an immediate response. Don't worry about it. This is my work time. Doesn't have to be your work time. And so really setting those, I guess, boundaries, if you will, explicitly and kind of the expectations maybe is a better term, setting that explicitly, trying to schedule meetings, not at times where you're going to have to drop the kids off at school or pick them (indistinct) and to take over your life. And so we really try to emphasize boundaries and really setting those things appropriately. But honestly, it's something that we're still working on and I'm still learning. And so I'd love to get feedback from folks, but those are some of the early thinkings. But I would say that we at VMware are taking it very, very seriously and really supporting our employees in terms of navigating that work-life balance. >> Well Kit, congratulations on the new role and it's great to see you again. I hope next year we can be face-to-face, always a pleasure to have you on theCUBE. >> Thanks, Dave. Appreciated being here. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more right after this. (slow music)

[Music] welcome to thecube's coverage of vmworld 2021 i'm lisa martin pleased to welcome back to the program the cto of vmware kit kohlberg welcome back to the program and congrats on your new role thank you yeah i'm really excited to be here so you've been at vmware for a long time you started as an intern i read yeah yeah it's been uh 18 years as a full-timer but i guess 19 if you count my internship so quite a while it's many lifetimes in silicon valley right many lifetimes in silicon valley well we've seen a lot of innovation from vmware in its 23 years you've been there the vast majority of that we've seen a lot of successful big tech waves ridden by vmware in april vmware pulled tanzu and vmware cloud foundation together vmware cloud you've got some exciting news with respect to that what are you announcing today well we got a lot of exciting announcements happening at vmworld this week but one of the ones i'm really excited about is vmware cloud with tons of services so let me talk about what these things are so we have vmware cloud which is really us taking our vmware cloud foundation technology and delivering that as a service in partnership with our public cloud providers but in particular this one with aws vmware cloud on aws we're combining that with our tanzu portfolio of technologies and these are really technologies focused at developers at folks driving devops building and operating modern applications and what we're doing is really bringing them together to simplify customers moving from their data centers into the cloud and then modernizing their applications it's a pattern that we see very very often this notion of migrate and then modernize right once you're on a modern cloud infrastructure makes it much easier to modernize your applications talk to me about some of the catalysts for this change and this offering of services was it you know catalyzed by some of the events we've seen in the world in the last 18 months and this acceleration of digital adoption yeah absolutely and we saw this across our customer base across many many different industries although as you can imagine those industries that that were really considered essential uh were the ones where we saw the biggest sorts of accelerations we saw a tremendous amount of people needing to support remote workers overnight right and cloud is a perfect use case for that but the challenge a lot of customers had was that they couldn't take the time to retool that they had to use what they already had and so something like vmware cloud was perfect for that because it allowed them to take what they were doing on-prem and seamlessly extend it into the cloud without any changes able to do that you know almost overnight right but at the same time what we also saw was the acceleration of their digital transformation people are now online they're needing to interact with an app over their phone to get something you know remotely delivered or to schedule maybe um an appointment for their pet because you know a lot of people got pets during the pandemic and so you just saw this rush toward digitization and these new applications need to be created and so as customers move their application estate into the cloud with vmware cloud and aws they then had this need to modernize those applications to be able to deliver them faster to respond fast to the very dynamic nature of what was happening during the pandemic so let's talk about uh some of the opportunities and the advantages that vmware cloud with tanzania service is going to deliver to those it admins who have to deliver things even faster yep so let me talk a bit about the tech and then talk about how that fits into uh what the users will experience so vmware cloud with tons of services is really two key components uh the first of which is the tanzu kubernetes grid service the tkg service as we call it so what this is is actually a deep integration of tonsil kubernetes grid with vmware cloud and and the kubernetes we've actually integrated into vmware cloud foundation folks who are familiar with vmware may remember that a couple of years ago we announced project pacific which was a deep integration of kubernetes into vsphere essentially enabling vsphere to have a kubernetes interface to be natively kubernetes and what that did was it enabled the i.t admins to have direct insight inside of kubernetes clusters to understand what was happening in terms of the containers and pods that that their developers were running it also allowed them to leverage uh their existing vsphere and vmware cloud foundation tooling on those workloads so fast forward today we we have this built in now and what we're doing is actually offering that as a service so that the customer doesn't need to deal with managing it installing it updating any of that stuff instead they can just leverage it they can start creating kubernetes clusters and upstream conformant kubernetes clusters to allow their developers to take advantage of those capabilities but also be able to use their native tooling on it so i think that's really really important is that the it admin really can enable their developers to seamlessly start to build and operate modern applications on top of vmware cloud got it and talk to me about how this is going to empower those it admins to become kubernetes operators yeah well i think that's exactly it you know we talk to a lot of these admins and and they're seeing the desire for kubernetes uh from their lines of business from you know from the app teams and the idea is that when you look start looking at the kubernetes ecosystem there's a whole bunch of new tooling and technology out there we find that people have to spend a lot of time figuring out what the right thing to use is and for a lot of these folks they say hey i've already figured out how to operate applications in production i've got the tooling i've got the standardization i got things like security figured out right super important and so the real benefit of this approach and this deep integration is it allows them to take those those tools those operational best practices that they already have and now apply them to these new workloads fairly seamlessly and so this is really about the power of leveraging all the investments they've made to take those forward with modern applications and the total adjustable market here is pretty big i heard your cto referring to that in an interview in september and i was looking at some recent vmware survey numbers where 80 of customers say they're deploying applications in highly distributed environments that include their own data center multiple clouds uh edge and also customers said hey 90 of our application initiatives are focused on modernization so vmware clearly sees the big tam here yeah it's absolutely massive um you know we see uh many customers the vast majority something like 75 percent are using multiple clouds or on-prem in the cloud we have some customers using even more than that and you see this very large application estate that's spread out across this and so you know i think what we're really looking at is how do we enable uh the right sorts of consistency both from an infrastructure perspective enabling things like security but also management across all these environments and by the way it's another exciting thing neglected to mention about this announcement vmware cloud with tonsil services not only includes the tonsil kubernetes grid service giving you that sort of kubernetes uh cluster as a service if you will but it also includes tons of mission control essentials and this is really the next generation of management when you start looking at modern applications and what tons of mission control focuses on is enabling managing kubernetes consistently across clouds and so this is the other really important point is that yes we want to make vmware cloud vmware cloud infrastructure the best place to build and operate applications especially modern ones but we also realize that you know customers are doing all sorts of things right they're in the native cloud whether that's aws or azure or google and they want ways of managing more consistently across all these environments in addition to their vmware environments both in the cloud and on-prem and so tons of mission control really enables that as well and that's another really powerful aspect of this is that it's built in to enable that next level of administration and management that consistency is critical right i mean that's probably one of the biggest benefits that customers are getting is that familiarity with the console the consistency of being able to manage so that they can deploy apps faster um that as businesses are still pivoting and changing direction in light of the pandemics i imagine that that is a huge uh from a business outcomes perspective the workforce productivity there is probably pretty pretty big yeah and i think it's also about managing risk as well you know one of the the biggest worries that we hear from many of the cios uh ctos executives that we talk to at our customers is this uh software supply chain risk like what is it exactly like what are the exact bits that they're running out there right in their applications because the reality is that um those apps are composed of many open source technologies and you know as we saw with solarwinds it's very possible for someone to get in and you know plant malicious code into their source repository such that as it gets built and flows out it'll you know just go out and customers will start using it and it's a huge huge security vulnerability and one thing on that note that customers are particularly worried about is the lack of consistency across their cloud environments that because things are done different ways and the different teams have different processes across different clouds it's easy for small mistakes to creep in there for little openings right that a hacker might be able to go and exploit and so i think this gets back to that notion of consistency and that you're right it's great for productivity but the one i think that's almost in some ways you might say uh for many of these folks more important for is from a security standpoint that they can validate and ensure they're in compliance with their security standards and by the way you know this is uh for most companies a board level discussion right the board is saying hey like do we have the right controls in place because it is um such an important thing and such a critical risk factor it is a critical risk factor we saw you mentioned solar winds but just in the last 18 months the the massive changes to the threat landscape the huge rise in ransomware and ddos attacks you know we had this scatterer everybody went home and you've got you know the edge is booming and you've got folks using uh you know not using their vpns and things when they should be so that the fact that that's a board level discussion and that this is going to help from a risk mitigation perspective that consistency that you talked about is huge i think for a customer in any industry yep yeah and it's pretty interesting as well like you mentioned ransomware so we're doing some work on that one as well actually not specifically with this announcement but it's another vmware cloud service that plugs into this uh seamlessly vmware cloud disaster recovery and one of the really cool features that we're announcing at vmworld this week is the ability to actually support and and maybe uh handle ransomware attacks and so the idea there is that if you do get compromised and what typically happens is that the hackers come in and they encrypt you know some of your data and they say hey if you want to get access to it you got to pay us and we'll decrypt it for you but if you have the right dr solution um that's backing up on a fairly continuous basis it means that whatever data might be encrypted you know would only be a small delta like the last let's say hour or two of data right and so what we're looking at is leveraging that dr solution to be able to very rapidly restore specific individual files uh that may have been compromised and so this is like one way that we're helping customers deal with that like obviously we want to put a whole bunch of other security protections in place and we do when we enable them to do that but one thing when you think about security is that it's very much defense in depth that you have multiple layers of the fail-safes there and so this one being kind of like the end result that hackers do get in they do manage to compromise it they do manage to get a hold of it and encrypt it well you still got unencrypted backups that you control and that you have um a very clean delineation and separation from just like kind of an architectural standpoint that the hackers won't be able to get at right so that you can control that and restore it so again you know this is something very top of mind for us and it's funny because we don't always lead with the security angle maybe we should as i'm saying it here but uh but it's something that's very very top of mind for a lot of our customers it's something that's also top of mind for us and that we're focused on it is because it's no longer if we get attacked it's one and they've got to be able to have the right recovery strategy so that they don't have to pay those ransoms and of course we only hear about the big ones like the solar winds and the colonial pipelines and there's many more going on when i get back to vmware cloud with tanzania services talk to me about how this fits into vmware's bigger picture yeah yeah yeah great question thanks for bringing me back i'd love to geek out on some of these things so um but when you take a step back so what we're really doing uh with vmware cloud is trying to provide this really powerful infrastructure layer uh that is available anywhere customers want to run applications and that could be in the public cloud it could be in the data center it could be at the edge it could be at all those locations and you know you mentioned edge earlier and i think we're seeing explosive growth there as well and so what we're really doing is driving uh broad optionality in terms of how customers want to adopt these technologies and then as i said we're sort of you know we're kind of going broad many locations we're also building up in each of those locations this notion of ponzu services being seamlessly integrated in doing that uh you know starting now with vmware cloud aws but expanding that to every every location that we have in addition you know we're also really excited another thing we're announcing this week called project arctic now the idea with arctic is really to start driving more choice and flexibility into how customers consume vmware cloud do they consume it as software or as a service and where do they do that so traditionally the only way to get it delivered as a service would be in the public cloud right vmware cloud aws you can click a few buttons and you get a software defined data center set up for you automatically now traditionally on-prem we haven't had that we we did do something pretty powerful uh a year or two back with the release of vmware cloud on dell emc we can deliver a service there but that often required new hardware you know new setup for customers and customers are coming back to us and saying hey like we've got these really large vsphere deployments how do we enable them to take advantage of all this great vmware cloud functionality from where they are today right they say hey we can't rebuild all these overnight but we want to take advantage of vmware cloud today so that's what really what project arctic is focused on it's focused on connecting into these brownfield existing vsphere environments and delivering some of the vmware cloud benefits there things like being able to easily well first of all be able to manage those environments through the vmware cloud console so now you have one place where you can see your on-prem deployments your cloud deployments everything being able to really easily move uh applications between on-prem and the cloud leveraging some of the vmware cloud disaster recovery capabilities i just mentioned like the ransomware example you can now do that even on prem as well because keep in mind it's people aren't attacking you know the hackers aren't attacking just the public cloud they're attacking data centers or anywhere else where these applications might be running and so arctic's a great example of where we're saying hey there's a bunch of cool stuff happening here but let's really meet customers where they're at and many of our customers still have a very large data center footprint still want to maintain that that's really strategic for them or as i said may even want to be extending to the edge so it's really about giving them more of that flexibility so in terms of meeting customers where they are i know vmware has been focused on that for probably its entire history we talk about that on the cube in every vmworld where can customers go like what's the right starting point is this targeted for vmware cloud on aws current customers what's kind of the next steps for customers to learn more about this yeah absolutely so there's a bunch of different ways so first of all there's a tremendous amount of activity happening here at vmworld um just all sorts of breakout sessions like you know detailed demos like all sorts of really cool stuff just a ton of content i'm actually kind of i'm in this new role i'm super excited about it but one thing i'm kind of bummed out about is i don't have as much time to go look at all these cool sessions so i highly recommend going and checking those out um you know we have hands-on labs as well which is another great way to test out and try vmware products so hold.vmware.com uh you can go and spin those things up and just kind of take them for a test drive see what they're all about and then if you go to vmc.vmware.com that is vmware cloud right we want to make it very easy to get started whether you're in just a vsphere on-prem customer or whether you already have vmware cloud and aws what you can see is that it's really easy to get started in that there's a ton of value-add services on top of our core infrastructure so it's all about making it accessible making it easy and simple to consume and get started with so there's a ton of options out there and i highly recommend folks go and check out all the things i just mentioned excellent kit thank you for joining me today talking about vmware cloud with tons of services what's new what's exciting the opportunities in it for customers from the i.t admin folks to be empowered to be kubernetes operators to those businesses being able to do essential services in a changing environment and again congratulations on your promotion that's very exciting awesome thank you lisa thank you for having me our pleasure for kit colbert i'm lisa martin you're watching thecube's coverage of vmworld 2021 [Music] you

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCUBE! With digital coverage of Dell Technologies World Digital Experience. Brought to you by Dell Technologies. >> Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeffrey here with theCUBE coming to you from our Palo Altos studios with continuing coverage of the Dell Technology World 2020, The Digital Experience. We've been covering this for over 10 years. It's virtual this year, but still have a lot of great content, a lot of great announcements, and a lot of technology that's being released and talked about. So we're excited. We're going to dig a little deep with our next two guests. First of all we have Paul Perez. He is the SVP and CTO of infrastructure solutions group for Dell technologies. Paul's great to see you. Where are you coming in from today? >> Austin, Texas. >> Austin Texas Awesome. And joining him returning to theCUBE on many times, Kit Colbert. He is the Vice President and CTO of VMware cloud for VMware Kit great to see you as well. Where are you joining us from? >> Yeah, thanks for having me again. I'm here in San Francisco. >> Awesome. So let's jump into it and talk about project Monterrey. You know, it's funny I was at Intel back in the day and all of our passwords used to go out and they became like the product names. It's funny how these little internal project names get a life of their own and this is a big one. And, you know, we had Pat Gelsinger on a few weeks back at VM-ware talking about how significant this is and kind of this evolution within the VMware cloud development. And, you know, it's kind of past Kubernetes and past Tanzu and past project Pacific and now we're into project Monterey. So first off, let's start with Kit, give us kind of the basic overview of what is project Monterey. >> Yep. Yeah, well, you're absolutely right. What we did last year, we announced project Pacific, which was really a fundamental rethinking of VMware cloud foundation with Kubernetes built in right. Kubernetes is still a core to core part of the architecture and the idea there was really to better support modern applications to enable developers and IT operations to come together to work collaboratively toward modernizing a company's application fleet. And as you look at companies starting to be successful, they're starting to run these modern applications. What you found is that the hardware architecture itself needed to evolve, needed to update, to support all the new requirements brought on by these modern apps. And so when you're looking at project Monterey, it's exactly that it's a rethinking of the VMware cloud foundation, underlying hardware architecture. And so you think about a project model or excuse me, product Pacific is really kind of the top half if you will, Kubernetes consumption experiences great for applications. Project Monterey comes along as the second step in that journey, really being the bottom half, fundamentally rethinking the hardware architecture and leveraging SmartNic technology to do that. >> It's pretty interesting, Paul, you know, there's a great shift in this whole move from, you know, infrastructure driving applications to applications driving infrastructure. And then we're seeing, you know, obviously the big move with big data. And again, I think as Pat talked about in his interview with NVIDIA being at the right time, at the right place with the right technology and this, you know, kind of groundswell of GPU, now DPU, you know, helping to move those workloads beyond just kind of where the CPU used to do all the work, this is even, you know, kind of taking it another level you guys are the hardware guys and the solutions guys, as you look at this kind of continuing evolution, both of workloads as well as their infrastructure, how does this fit in? >> Yeah, well, how all this fit it in is modern applications and modern workloads, require a modern infrastructure, right? And a Kit was talking about the infrastructure overlay. That VMware is awesome at that all being, I was coming at this from the emerging data centric workloads, and some of the implications for that, including Phillip and diversity has ever been used for computing. The need to this faculty could be able to combine maybe resources together, as opposed to trying to shoehorn something into a mechanical chassis. And, and if you do segregate, you have to be able to compose on demand. And when you start comparing those, we realized that we were humping it up on our conversion trajectory and we started to team up and partner. >> So it's interesting because part of the composable philosophy, if you will, is to, you know, just to break the components of compute store and networking down to a small pieces as possible, and then you can assemble the right amount when you need it to attack a particular problem. But when you're talking about it's a whole different level of, of bringing the right hardware to bear for the solution. When you talk about SmartNics and you talk about GPS in DPS data processing units, you're now starting to offload and even FPG is that some of these other things offload a lot of work from the core CPU to some of these more appropriate devices that said, how do people make sure that the right application ends up on the right infrastructure? This is that I'm, if it's appropriate using more of a, of a Monterey based solution versus more of a traditional one, depending on the workload, how is that going to get all kind of sorted out and, and routed within the actual cloud infrastructure itself? That was probably back to you a Kit? >> Yeah, sure. So I think it's important to understand kind of what a smart NIC is and how it works in order to answer that question, because what we're really doing is to kind of jump right to it. I guess it's, you know, giving an API into the infrastructure and this is how we're able to do all the things that you just mentioned, but what does a SmartNic? Well, SmartNic is essentially a NIC with a general purpose CPU on it, really a whole CPU complex, in fact, kind of a whole system on server right there on that, on that Nic. And so what that enables is a bunch of great things. So first of all, to your point, we can do a lot of offload. We can actually run ESX. >> SXI on that. Nic, we can take a lot of the functionality that we were doing before on the main server CPU, things like network virtualization, storage, virtualization, security functionality, we can move that all off on the Nic. And it makes a lot of sense because really what we're doing when we're doing all those things is really looking at different sort of IO data paths. You know, as, as the network traffic comes through looking at doing automatic load balancing firewall and for security, delivering storage, perhaps remotely. And so the NIC is actually a perfect place to place all of these functionalities, right? You can not only move it off the core server CPU, but you can get a lot better performance cause you're now right there on the data path. So I think that's the first really key point is that you can get that offload, but then once you have all of that functionality there, then you can start doing some really amazing things. And this ability to expose additional virtual devices onto the PCI bus, this is another great capability of a SmartNic. So when you plug it in physically into the motherboard, it's a Nic, right. You can see that. And when it starts up, it looks like a Nic to the motherboard, to the system, but then via software, you can have it expose additional devices. It could look like a storage controller, or it could look like an FPGA look really any sort of device. And you can do that. Not only for the local machine where it's plugged in, but potentially remote machines as well with the right sorts of interconnects. So what this creates is a whole new sort of cluster architecture. And that's why we're really so excited about it because you got all these great benefits in terms of offload performance improvement, security improvement, but then you get this great ability to get very dynamic, just aggregation. And composability. >> So Kit, how much of it is the routing of the workload to the right place, right? That's got the right amount of say, it's a super data intensive once a lot of GPU versus actually better executing the operation. Once it gets to the place where it's going to run. >> Yeah. It's a bit of a combination actually. So the powerful thing about it is that in a traditional world, where are you want an application? You know, the server that you run it, that app can really only use the local devices there. Yes, there is some newer stuff like NVMe over fabric where you can remote certain types of storage capabilities, but there's no real general purpose solution to that. Yet that generally speaking, that application is limited to the local hardware devices. Well, the great part about what we're doing with Monterey and with the SmartNic technology is that we can now dynamically remote or expose remote devices from other hosts. And so wherever that application runs matters a little bit less now, in a sense that we can give it the right sorts of hardware it needs in order to operate. You know, if you have, let's say a few machines with a FPGA is normally if you have needed that a Fiji had to run locally, but now can actually run remotely and you can better balance out things like compute requirements versus, you know, specialized Accella Requirements. And so I think what we're looking at is, especially in the context of VMware cloud foundation, is bringing that all together. We can look through the scheduling, figure out what the best host for it to let run on based on all these considerations. And that's it, we are missing, let's say a physical device that needs, well, we can remote that and sort of a deal at that, a missing gap there. >> Right, right. That's great. Paul, I want to go back to you. You just talked about, you know, kind of coming at this problem from a data centric point of view, and you're running infrastructure and you're the poor guy that's got to catch all the ASAM Todd i the giant exponential curves up into the right on the data flow and the data quantity. How is that impacting the way you think about infrastructure and designing infrastructure and changing infrastructure and kind of future proofing infrastructure when, you know, just around the corners, 5g and IOT and, Oh, you ain't seen nothing yet in terms of the data flow. >> Yeah. So I come at this from two angles. One that we talked about briefly is the evolution of the workloads themselves. The other angle, which is just as important is the operating model that customers are wanting to evolve to. And in that context, we thought a lot about how cloud, if an operating model, not necessarily a destination, right? So what I, and when way we laid out, what Kit was talking about is that in data center computing, you have operational control and data plane. Where did data plane run from the optimized solution? GPU's, PGA's, offload engines? And the control plane can run on stuff like it could be safe and are then I'm thinking about SmartNic is back codes have arm boards, so you can implement some data plane and some control plane, and they can also be the gateway. Cause, you know, you've talked about composability, what has been done up until now is early for sprint, right? We're carving out software defined infrastructure out of predefined hardware blocks. What we're talking about is making, you know, a GPUs residents in our fabric consistent memory residence of a fabric NVME over fabric and being able to tile computing topologies on demand to realize and applications intent. And we call that intent based computer. >> Right. Well, just, and to follow up on that too, as the, you know, cloud is an attitude or as an operating model or whatever you want to say, you know, not necessarily a place or a thing has changed. I mean, how has that had to get you to shift your infrastructure approach? Cause you've got to support, you know, old school, good old data centers. We've got, you know, some stuff running on public clouds. And then now you've got hybrid clouds and you have multi clouds, right. So we know, you know, you're out in the field that people have workloads running all over the place. So, but they got to control it and they've got compliance issues and they got a whole bunch of other stuff. So from your point of view, as you see the desire for more flexibility, the desire for more infrastructure centric support for the workloads that I want to buy and the increasing amount of those that are more data centric, as we move to hopefully more data driven decisions, how's it changed your strategy. And what does it mean to partner and have a real nice formal relationship with the folks over at VMR or excuse me, VMware? >> Well, I think that regardless of how big a company is, it's always prudent. As I say, when I approached my job, right, architecture is about balance and efficiency and it's about reducing contention. And we like to leverage industry R and D, especially in cases where one plus one equals two, right? In the case of, project Monterey for example, one of the collaboration areas is in improving the security model and being able to provide more air gap isolation, especially when you consider that enterprise wants to behave as service providers is concerned or to their companies. And therefore this is important. And because of that, I think that there's a lot of things that we can do between VMware and Dell lending hardware, and for example, assets like NSX and a different way that will give customers higher scalability and performance and more control, you know, beyond VMware and Dell EMC i think that we're partnering with obviously the SmartNic vendors, cause they're smart interprets and the gateway to those that are clean. They're not really analysis, but also companies that are innovating in data center computing, for example, NVIDIA. >> Right. Right. >> And I think that what we're seeing is while, you know, ambivalent has done an awesome job of targeting their capability, AIML type of workloads, what we realized this applications today depend on platform services, right. And up until recently, those platform services have been debases messaging PI active directory, moving forward. I think that within five years, most applications will depend on some form of AIML service. So I can see an opportunity to go mainstream with this >> Right. Right. Well, it's great. You bring up in NVIDIA and I'm just going to quote one of Pat's lines from, from his interview. And he talked about Jensen from NVIDIA actually telling Pat, Hey Pat, I think you're thinking too small. I love it. You know, let's do the entire AI landscape together and make AI and enterprise class workloads from being more in TANZU, you know, first class citizens. So I, I love the fact, you know, Pat's been around a long time industry veteran, but still, kind of accepted the challenge from Jensen to really elevate AI and machine learning via GPS to first class citizen status. And the other piece, obviously this coming up is ed. So I, you know, it's a nice shot of a, of adrenaline and Kit I wonder if you can share your thoughts on that, you know, in kind of saying, Hey, let's take it up a notch, a significant notch by leveraging a whole another class of compute power within these solutions. >> Yeah. So, I mean, I'll, I'll go real quick. I mean, I, it's funny cause like not many people really ever challenged Pat to say he doesn't think big enough, cause usually he's always blown us away with what he wants to do next, but I think it's, I think it's a, you know, it's good though. It's good to keep us on our toes and push us a bit. Right. All of us within the industry. And so I think a couple of things you have to go back to your previous point around this is like cloud as a model. I think that's exactly what we're doing is trying to bring cloud as a model, even on prem. And it's a lot of these kinds of core hardware architecture capabilities that we do enable the biggest one in my mind, just being enabling an API into the hardware. So the applications can get what they need. And going back to Paul's point, this notion of these AI and ML services, you know, they have to be rooted in the hardware, right? We know that in order for them to be performing for them to run, to support what our customers want to do, we need to have that deeply integrated into the hardware all the way up. But that also becomes a software problem. Once we got the hardware solved, once we get that architecture locked in, how can we as easy as possible, as seamlessly as possible, deliver all those great capabilities, software capabilities. And so, you know, you look at what we've done with the NVIDIA partnership, things around the NVIDIA GPU cloud, and really bringing that to bear. And so then you start having this, this really great full stack integration all the way from the hardware, very powerful hardware architecture that, you know, again, driven by API, the infrastructure software on top of that. And then all these great AI tools, tool chains, capabilities with things like the NVIDIA NGC. So that's really, I think where the vision's going. And we got a lot of the basic parts there, but obviously a lot more work to do going forward. >> I would say that, you know, initially we had dream, we wanted this journey to happen very fast and initially we're baiting infrastructure services. So there's no contention with applications, customer full workload applications, and also in enabling how productive it is to get the data over time, have to have sufficient control over a wide area. there's an opportunity to do something like that to make sure that you think about the probation from bare metal vms (conversation fading) environments are way more dynamic and more spreadable. Right. And they expect hardware. It could be as dynamic and compostable to suit their needs. And I think that's where we're headed. >> Right. So let me, so let me throw a monkey wrench in, in terms of security, right? So now this thing is much more flexible. It's much more software defined. How is that changing the way you think about security and basic security and throughout the stack go to you first, Paul. >> Yeah. Yeah. So like it's actually enables a lot of really powerful things. So first of all, from an architecture and implementation standpoint, you have to understand that we're really running two copies of VXI on each physical server. Now we've got the one running on the X86 side, just like normal, and now we've got one running on the SmartNIC as well. And so, as I mentioned before, we can move a lot of that networking security, et cetera, capabilities off to the SmartNic. And so what does this going toward as what we call a zero trust security architecture, this notion of having really defense in depth at many different layers and many different areas while obviously the hypervisor and the virtualization layer provides a really strong level of security. even when we were doing it completely on the X86 side, now that we're running on a SmartNic that's additional defense in depth because the X86 ESX doesn't really know it doesn't have direct access to the ESX. I run it on the SmartNic So the ESXI running on the SmartNic, it can be this kind of more well defended position. Moreover, now that we're running the security functionality is directly on the data path. In the SmartNic. We can do a lot more with that. We can run a lot deeper analysis, can talk about AI and ML, bring a lot of those capabilities to bear here to actually improve the security profile. And so finally I'd say this notion of kind of distributed security as well, that you don't, that's what I want to have these individual points on the physical network, but I actually distribute the security policies and enforcement to everywhere where a server's running, I everywhere where a SmartNic is, and that's what we can do here. And so it really takes a lot of what we've been doing with things like NSX, but now connects it much more deeply into hardware, allowing for better performance and security. >> A common attack method is to intercept the boot of the server physical server. And, you know, I'm actually very proud of our team because the us national security agency recently published a white paper on best practices for secure group. And they take our implementation across and secure boot as the reference standard. >> Right? Moving forward, imagine an environment that even if you gain control of the server, that doesn't allow you to change bios or update it. So we're moving the root of trust to be in that air gap, domain that Kit talked about. And that gives us a way more capability for zero across the operations. Right. >> Right, right. Paul, I got to ask you, I had Sam bird on the other day, your peer who runs the P the PC group. >> I'm telling you, he is not a peer He's a little bit higher up. >> Higher than you. Okay. Well, I just promoted you so that's okay. But, but it's really interesting. Cause we were talking about, it was literally like 10 years ago, the death of the PC article that came out when, when Apple introduced the tablet and, you know, he's talked about what phenomenal devices that PCs continue to be and evolve. And then it's just funny how, now that dovetails with this whole edge conversation, when people don't necessarily think of a PC as a piece of the edge, but it is a great piece of the edge. So from an infrastructure point of view, you know, to have that kind of presence within the PCs and kind of potentially that intelligence and again, this kind of whole another layer of interaction with the users and an opportunity to define how they work with applications and prioritize applications. I just wonder if you can share how nice it is to have that kind of in your back pocket to know that you've got a whole another, you know, kind of layer of visibility and connection with the users beyond just simply the infrastructure. >> So I actually, within the company we've developed within a framework that we call four edge multicloud, right. Core data centers and enterprise edge IOP, and then off premise. it is a multicloud world. And, and within that framework, we consider our client solutions group products to be part of the yes. And we see a lot of benefit. I'll give an example about a healthcare company that wants to develop real time analytics, regardless of whether it's on a laptop or maybe move into a backend data center, right? Whether it's at a hospital clinic or a patient's home, it gives us a broader innovation surface and a little sooner to get actually the, a lot of people may not appreciate that the most important function within Centene, I considered to be the experienced design thing. So being able to design user flows and customer experience looked at all of use is a variable. >> That's great. That's great. So we're running out of time. I want to give you each the last word you both been in this business for a long time. This is brand new stuff, right? Container aren't new, Kubernetes is still relatively new and exciting. And project Pacific was relatively new and now project Monterrey, but you guys are, you know, you're, multi-decade veterans in this thing. as you look forward, what does this moment represent compared to some of the other shifts that we've seen in IT? You know, generally, but you know, kind of consumption of compute and you know, kind of this application centric world that just continues to grow. I mean, as a software is eating everything, we know it, you guys live it every day. What is, where are we now? And you know, what do you see? Maybe I don't want to go too far out, but the next couple of years within the Monterey framework. And then if you have something else, generally you can add as well. Paul, why don't we start with you? >> Well, I think on a personal level, ingenuity aside I have a long string of very successful endeavor in my career when I came back couple years ago, one of the things that I told Jeff, our vice chairman is a big canvas and I intend to paint my masterpiece and I think, you know, Monterey and what we're doing in support of Monterey is also part of that. I think that you will see, you will see our initial approach focus on, on coordinator. I can tell you that you know how to express it. And we know also how to express even in a multicloud world. So I'm very excited and I know that I'm going to be busy for the next few years. (giggling) >> A Kit to you. >> Yeah. So, you know, it's funny you talk to people about SmartNic and especially those folks that have been around for awhile. And what you hear is like, Hey, you know, people were talking about SmartNic 10 years ago, 20 years ago, that sort of thing. Then they kind of died off. So what's different now. And I think the big difference now is a few things, you know, first of all, it's the core technology of sworn and has dramatically improved. We now have a powerful software infrastructure layer that can take advantage of it. And, you know, finally, you know, applications have a really strong need for it, again, with all the things we've talked about, the need for offload. So I think there's some real sort of fundamental shifts that have happened over the past. Let's say decade that have driven the need for this. And so this is something that I believe strongly as here to last, you know, both ourselves at VMware, as well as Dell are making a huge bet on this, but not only that, and not only is it good for customers, it's actually good for all the operators as well. So whether this is part of VCF that we deliver to customers for them to operate themselves, just like they always have, or if it's part of our own cloud solutions, things like being more caught on Dell, this is going to be a core part about how we deliver our cloud services and infrastructure going forward. So we really do believe this is kind of a foundational transition that's taking place. And as we talked about, there is a ton of additional innovation that's going to come out of it. So I'm really, really excited for the next few years, because I think we're just at the start of a very long and very exciting journey. >> Awesome. Well, thank you both for spending some time with us and sharing the story and congratulations. I'm sure a whole bunch of work for, from a whole bunch of people in, into getting to getting where you are now. And, and as you said, Paul, the work is barely just begun. So thanks again. All right. He's Paul's He's Kit. I'm Jeff. You're watching the cubes, continuing coverage of Dell tech world 2020, that digital experience. Thanks for watching. We'll see you next time. (Upbeat music)

(soft music) >> Narrator: From theCUBE studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is theCUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. And we're digging in with VMware with the latest update of the VMware cloud, on AWS definitely technology solution set that the ecosystem has been very interesting into. And to help us do that deep dive happy to welcome back to the program, Kit Colbert. He is the Vice President and CTO of the cloud platform business unit with VMware. Kit, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me Stu. >> All right, so you brought along some slides said if people want to watch we've done an executive interview to give kind of the general business update, but when it comes to the technology, you know I guess we start with VMware, Amazon partnership is a deep integration we've heard both from Andy Jassy and for Pat Gelsinger, on how much engineering work and how critically important it is. Anybody from the technical side understand that one of the interesting things in cloud is that Amazon created bare metal instances to support this solution. So one of the items here is that there is a new bare metal instance. So why don't you bring us inside, you know What the updates are and what this means to the user base? >> Yeah, absolutely. Yeah so the bare metal support is something that we worked very closely with AWS on when we were first launching VMware cloud on AWS. And the idea there was that bare metal support is that it very similarly models, EC2 virtual machines, in the sense of each of these Vms VM types or instance types, as they say, are various kinds of T short sizes, right? And so they have a lot of these different instance types. And so similarly speaking, on the bare metal side, we're also seeing a lot of different instance types there. So we started out with an i3.metal instance, and we added an r5.metal instance and now we're really excited to add what we're we're calling i3en.metal. And so lets bring about slide to talk more about all the new capabilities there with i3en. You know, we have found when we talk to customers is that they love the simplicity of the hyper converged model that i3 brings. What they said was, hey, we've got a lot of workloads that are storage capacity battle. And so that meant that, you know they had the issue there is workloads, they use some amount usually a good amount of CPU memory, but they have a lot of storage capacity requirements. What that meant with i3, is they had to get a lot of these i3 hosts to get enough storage capacity to support those workloads. And obviously, they have some extra compute capacity lying around. And so you know what we've done here with i3en, is dramatically increase the amount of storage capacity. So we can see here, what is it about 45 terabytes or so so much, much larger than what you can get about four x larger than we can get on i3en. metal today. So this is again, very targeted to those very large workloads that needed beefy underlying server and, just trying to better align the customer needs and workload needs with the underlying physical capabilities. And so this is just going to be one of many that we'll bring out. We've got, a whole pipeline of these actually. And, you know, again, you can imagine all the different types of VM instance types, right? There's GPU ones, there's FPGA based ones, you know, so there's all sorts of different shapes and sizes. And, you know as we get more and more feedback from customers, as they're running more and more applications, we'll get more and more of these instance types out there as well. >> Yeah, it's really interesting Kit it give, it gives me flashbacks. I'm thinking back to your 10 or even 15 years ago, when you talked in the early days of, did I just deploy VMware on the servers I had? Or did I buy servers that had the configuration, so I could optimize and take advantage of the feature functionality that's needed? All right, when I heard some of the things you talked about there, about the, you know, being able to use certain workloads and the like, one of the feedbacks I've gotten from users is, you know, the overall price of this, let's just say it's not the least expensive solution to start with. So, so, what, what are, what are some of the new entry level options that you have with the VMC on AWS? How does this update help? >> Yeah, yeah, first of all on the price side what we have found is that this is actually extremely price efficient price competitive. if you're able to utilize all the underlying physical and variable capacity. But you know, as you just mentioned, Stu, you know, the default configuration is three nodes of those i3 hosts, and that those three hosts aren't small either, right? They're pretty beefy and if you just want to get started, just try something small. Well, today, we do have actually a OneNote instance. But that OneNote instance, is just a temporary is kind of a testbed, if you will a proof of concept type of environment. It's not a long term, long running a production environment. And so customers kind of have this OneNote on the one hand or three notes on other and, you know, obviously they're saying, "Hey, why can't we just start with two nodes, "make it super simple, "reduce that price point again "for a very small footprint deployment, "and then allow us to scale up." So we bring up the next slide, what you can see is that that's exactly what we've done here as well, supporting two nodes now. And the idea here is this is a full production environment. You get all the great VMware technology, you can do motion stuff, HA, you get availability, and so forth, stores policies, as you see here. So again, this is meant to be a long lived, fully supported production environment that can also scale up if need be, right? You might start out with two nodes, but then find, "Hey, I want to add three or four or more." And you can certainly fully do that and fully support that. So again, this is just giving customers more optionality, more flexibility for where they want to to come in. What we've been doing thus far is talking with a lot of customers that had, you know, pretty large footprints and saying, "Hey, I want to move a good chunk of my data center, "or I've got a lot of workloads I want to burst." And of those cases, three or more nodes made a lot of sense. What we're finding now is that a lot of customers do want that flexibility to start smaller, just with two nodes really simple, kind of put their toe in the water, if you will and get a feel for the service and then expand from there. >> Yeah, okay, Kit, one, one quick follow up on this, you mentioned that if customers are maximizing, you know, leveraging the full environment they I have there, it's very cost competitive. You know, how are we hearing from data from from customers? What is their, their growth pattern? Are they getting good utilization? Do, do they have a good feel for, how to manage that economics in the AWS space, a lot of talk about things like FinOps these days, and how to make sure that the technical group and the Financial Group are working close together. >> Yeah, such a great question, actually. And the whole notion of the economics around this is a huge focus area for us. We have a whole Cloud Economics group, as a matter of fact, that we frequently bring in to talk with customers to help them think through all these different things. There's, there's a number of different considerations there. You know, a lot of look from, going from on-prem into the Cloud to the VMC on AWS. And, you know, with VMC on AWS, our prices are just public cloud in general, it's very easy to understand the price 'cause it's right up front, you're getting charged, right? On Premise a bit more difficult to understand that you've got a lot of capital expenses, you got a lot of other sort of operational expenses, you know, power electricity, people, and how do you, how do you make all the right computations there? So we have whole teams to help people think through that. But usually, what we have found is that price is not the main thing, right? Price is kind of a secondary or tertiary type of consideration. The main thing is always one of our primary use cases, it's like, man, I need to get out of my data centers, or my data center is that capacity, I want to keep it but I really need to be able to burst to the cloud, maybe some sort of test dev* like test in the cloud and production on pram or vice versa. Those are the key use cases that bring customers in, and then it's really a question of, okay, now that you know, you want to do this, how do we do this as effectively, efficiently from a cost perspective as well as possible, right? And that's where that sort of economic discussion starts to happen. And then you get into more of the details like, okay, which kind of instance type do I want? What are the cost metrics of that? Can I actually fill it to capacity? That's where we start getting into those more specific situations for each customer. >> Excellent, we have that. That really tees up for me kit, when, when I think about the, you know early customers that I've talked to that are using VMC on AWS, they tend to be your enterprise customers, they're big VMware customers, they've enterprise license agreements, and the like. VMware has got a strong history working across the board. And you talk about Cloud in previous solutions. You've had close partnerships with the, with the managed service providers. >> Yeah. >> So my understanding is you're actually looking to help connect between what you've done with a managed service project in the past and this VMware on AWS solution. So bring us inside, you know this, this, this option >> Sure. Yeah, let me let me break it down for you 'cause we do work with a lot of partners. You know, obviously from VMware, its inception partners have been, you know, core to our strategy and core to our success, right? What we've actually been doing, actually somewhat kind of quietly over the past 15 years anyway, isn't really building out, what we call our VMware Cloud Provider Partner Program, and the VCPP program. And, you know, the idea there is that we do have a lot of these managed service providers that can take our software and run it on behalf of their customers, essentially, delivering our software as a service to their customers. And that's been great. We've seen a lot of success stories there. And we have about 4200 of these folks now, like a tremendous amount spread all around the world, all sorts of different geographies, and also all sorts of different industry verticals. And so you see a lot of these folks getting really specific, you know, let's say to the finance, vertical, you know, in and around Wall Street, running all sorts of great services for the financial services firms. Well, these folks are looking to evolve as well and what they're saying and seeing is like, hey, you know, just this basic idea of running infrastructure. Well, I can do that. But it doesn't necessarily differentiate me right? I need to move up the stack and start offering more services, and really trying to be a very, you know, sort of boutique and targeted solution for their customers. And so a lot of these customers, you know, obviously want to run on VMC on AWS. And so what we've been doing is enabling these partners to, you know, sell through essentially VMC on AWS that to sell these servers to their customers. But one of the challenges there is that they're only able to sell the full sort of bare-metal server, they weren't able to break that up or split that across customers as they can do today within their own environments. In fact, today, within their environments, they use something called VMware Cloud Director. And this is software that we give them. And you know, it's really nice that you can take a vSphere environment, software-defined data center and break it apart or kind of carve it up, if you will, into multiple smaller tenants, then, the, you know, each of these customers can, can take part of. And so but we didn't have that functionality for VMware Cloud on AWS. And so that's for the announcements all about, so let's pull up the slide to talk about that. The basic idea here is we can now enable the same software defined data centers that are running inside of AWS as part of VMware Cloud on AWS to be accessed by VMware Cloud Director. And so what we've done is actually made, we call it VCD, for short made VCD, a service that we now operate, and it runs there alongside VMC on AWS. And so now these managed service providers can leverage the VCD as a service to rule out access and, and carve up these SDDC that they get. And, you know, the takeaway here is that we're just giving these partners much greater flexibility and optionality in terms of how they consume, the underlying bare-metal infrastructure on VMC on AWS, and then give that out to their own customers again, giving greater customer choice and options, those customers. >> All right kit, so the other big thing that we've covered this year with VMware, of course, is the launch of vSphere 7. What that means the cloud native-space, the whole Tanzu portfolio line. So help us understand how all the application modernization Kubernetes and like ties into now the solution that we're talking about. >> Yeah, absolutely. It's about a huge focus for us, as you know. Yeah, we launched Tanzu last year at Vmworld. And have, then launched the product set earlier this year, it's finally ready to GA. It's in great customer interest and has customer traction there. And obviously, one of the big questions people had was like, "Hey, how can I get this for VMC on AWS?" And so the specific product they were looking at there was called Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. And so the idea with Tanzu Kubernetes Grid is that it enables a customer to provision and manage Kubernetes clusters across any cloud, right? And you can do this on AWS, you can do this on-prem, on vSphere, or other clouds and so forth. And, so obviously, this technology needed to come to BMC. You know, the thing we talk about with customers, when it comes to VMC on AWS is this notion of migrate the modernize, that we can migrate you off of your on-prem infrastructure to this modernized cloud infrastructure that is VMC on AWS. And once you have that modernized infrastructure, it makes it much easier to modernize your applications, you've got all sorts of great AWS services sitting there. So now the application itself can start taking advantage of all these things, as well as these new type of capabilities. So let's pull up the slide for this one. So what we're announcing here is Tanzu Kubernetes Grid plus on VMC on AWS. And what this gives you is all that great functionality, the ability to get Kubernetes seamlessly running on top of your VMC environment right next to all of your existing apps. So it's not one of those situations where you need, you know, separate clusters or different environments. You can have a single environment, they can have both your traditional applications and your more modern ones. And Tanzu Kubernetes Grid takes care of all the management of that Kubernetes environment. It ensures that it's up to date, properly lifecycle manage, manage local security, you get a Container Registry there, can elastically scale based on demand. And of course, you get all that great consistency as well. And we do a lot of customers that are multicloud that, that are doing things across different environments. And so TKG can replicate itself and give you that consistent management across any of those environments on-prem and the cloud between clouds. So that's really what the power of this is. And again, it's really taking VMC from just being a platform from migrating your existing workloads to really being a platform for modernizing those workloads as well. >> Yeah, it's interesting Kit, you know if when I think about traditionally, VMware, it was, you know, let me take my app and I'm going to shove it into the end and I'll never think about it again. So what's the change in mindset? How do you make sure that it's not just, you know, stick it in there and forget about it, but, you know, can move in change which is, you know, really the, the call for today is that I need to be more agile, I need to be able to respond to change? >> That's a great question. And we actually spend a lot of time talking about this with customers. So if we take a step back, you know, it's important to understand the traditional journey most customers are looking at when they're moving to the cloud. I talked about this notion of migrating then modernizing. Oftentimes, you know, before the advent of VMC on AWS, you didn't have the ability to take those two apart, you had to migrate and modernize simultaneously. In order to move to the cloud, you actually had to do a bunch of refactoring and retooling and so forth to your application. And obviously, that created a lot of challenges because it slowed how quickly customers can move up to the cloud. And so what we've done, which I think is really, really powerful is kind of broken those two apart. To say, you know what, you may have a business imperative to get out of the data center, we can help you do that, we can move, you know, some customers moved hundreds of workloads a week, up to VMC on AWS. And then once you've done that, you're now a little bit more breathing room, right? You've gotten out of your immediate business problem, and let's say in this case, closed-ended data center. And now you can sort of focus on okay, how do I think about modernizing these applications? How do I think about the interior points to opening them up and actually getting inside of them? And so I think, you know, the most valuable aspect of the approach that we've taken here is that ability to, to separate out those two to get the quick business wins that you need. And then to take the time to think about, okay, how do I actually modernize this? How do I want to? What sort of technologies do I want to use? How should I do this right, rather than just need to do this quickly? And so I think that's a really, really powerful aspect of our approach, and that we can give customers more optionality in terms of how they approach their modernization efforts. >> Yeah, so, so Kit, the final question I have for you, the VMware AWS partnership has been around for a couple years now. >> Yeah. >> What would you say is the biggest change technically, from when the solution was first announced, just to where we are today with all the new updates that you've talked about? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Look, it's hard to pick one, right? I think the biggest thing in general, is just the increasing maturity of this offering. And that goes really across the board, technical maturity, operational maturity, compliance, certification maturity, right? Getting more and more of those under our belt, global reach maturity, right? We started off in one region, but now we're all over the world, pretty much every region that AWS has. You see more and more features, you know, we're constantly releasing new features, new hardware types. And so I think that's really the biggest thing. It's not been like one singular thing, what has been is just a lot of work by the team across 1000 different areas, and moving all those in parallel. And that's really been the heavy lift that we've had to do with the past few years. You know, as we talked about, it was a lot of work just to get this thing out in the first place, right? We had to do a lot of technical work with AWS to enable this bare metal-capability. And so we got that one out, we got it out and had that initial service. There have been a lot of limitations, right? We just had one instance type, only one region, you know, didn't have as many compliance certifications. So obviously that limited the number of customers initially, right? Just because there are some restrictions around that. So our goal has really been to open this up to as many customers, in fact, every customer, all of our 500,000 odd vSphere customers to be able to move to VMS on AWS. And so we're slow, you know, slowly but surely, every month knocking down more and more barricades to that, right? And so what you're seeing is just a tremendous explosion of innovation and effort across the entire team. And so it's really it's kudos to the team for their continued effort day in day out of these past three years or so, to get VMC on AWS to where it is today. >> Excellent, well, thank you so much, Kit. Great to talk to you. Congratulation to the VMware and AWS team. And of course, looking forward to talking to more of the customers down the road, as they take advantage of this, hopefully at Vmworld, and some of the Amazon shows too. Thanks so much for joining us Kit. >> Thank yous Stu. >> All right, stay with us for lots more coverage, of course VMware Cloud on AWS really exciting and interesting topic we've been covering since day one. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

from the cube studios in Palo Alto in Boston connecting with thought leaders all around the world this is a cube conversation hey welcome back to ready Jeff Rick here with the cube we're on Apollo Alto studios today for a cute conversation with some of our friends from VMware big announcement today and we're excited to have a kick Kolbert come on he is the VP at CTO of cloud platform business unit kid great to see you again I'm gonna be here absolutely so big announcement it's the second generation of the VMware cloud on Dell EMC now you guys just brought this to market barely a year ago tell us about about the new announcement and some of the excitement around the changes that you guys put in place yeah absolutely yeah so this has been a project that's been in the making for a few years now we first announced the product version of this in April of last year and then we announced the general availability of it in August at our VMworld conference and so as we've been engaging with customers since we went GA what we've seen and heard from them was that you know they're looking for more data center style options traditionally when we first started this project you may remember it was called project dimension before in the product of VMware Colin Dell AMC beccarose project dimension we had more of an edge computing focus we were focused on how can we get compute in our VMware infrastructure out to factories and retail settings and so on and so forth and so we designed the system for those types of environments a half rack configuration smaller number of servers things like a power supply and UPS built in but as we heard back from customers what they said was hey this is great but we have a lot of needs in our data center today and so the idea there was let's rethink this offering for the data center and actually produced the types of rack architectures and server types that customers are looking for just goes to show you try to give them yin and they want yang right it's yeah so so it's a very different kind of challenge than going into the data center environment and you know one of the promises of cloud is is obviously provisioning right and spinning things up so that's a really important piece of the puzzle how are you guys addressing you know letting people add capacity and kind of changes configuration if it's actually you know in my data center yeah yeah so you seen a number of different things that we're doing here really yeah enhancing the maturity across the board of this offering so it's important to realize that this is a cloud service yes even though the physical servers in the rack reside on premises for a customer again in their data center at a retail location it is a cloud service and that we are running this and managing this like cloud service and so like any good cloud service merge have to interact with any human being right they can just call any guy and indeed that's the way it works either through an API or through our UI workflow today a customer can come on and order a new esidisi rack for their environment and that initial provisioning you know we fully automated that we had a dell service technician coming out you know actually figure the hardware on on-site but then after that and you know we didn't have many options for customers let's say that they started out with maybe four nodes on-site but then they realize Oh Ashley needs six or eight nodes right they're getting more applications on there greater usage and they just need more capacity and so what we support now is this ability to actually again use an API using the UI request additional servers or their existing racks and this is again something very simple to do in just a few weeks that those things will arrive the the service ignition will be there to install them and get that customer up right so I was gonna say you know typically it's order and then you got you got to put the stuff in and deploy it right and then support it so you just touched a little bit on the deployment did you basically take that order and then just with your existing process get into the data center and and light up that additional hardware yeah so we're doing a lot to really automate this whole process and the powerful thing here is that you know this partnership that we have between VMware and difficult runs really deep so we've actually engaged and integrated into their manufacturing process so that as we get that order through the API through the UI from a user we can ship that over to Dell tell them specifics of what that customer ordered and Dell can get started manufacturing that we actually again as for that manufacturing process integration we can get the latest version of our cloud software onto those servers we can install unique cryptographic keys on those servers so we can identify them and then we work with the Dell shipping and the Dell service technicians to actually meet those physical servers when they arrive and properly set them up and configure them taking the customer it's a completely hands-off experience I think that's a really powerful they're not you know they don't need to give the nitty-gritty of hardware configuration and installing our software and managing the lifecycle of it it's much much simpler than that and so you know I think we've really taken that and extended it here both with the additional rack type scene we have for a full rack now for the data center new host types a new host type that's much beefier better for datacenter workloads and finally for that expanded capacity that we just talked about as well right and then on the support side I assume you know even though it's it's VMware cloud on Dell EMC that probably the first line of support is still VMware it's still the software on top of the infrastructure yeah that's a good question and yeah you're right it is it's a VMware on VMware operated service and absolutely VMware provides that first line of support so it's not one of these situations where you've got two different vendors pointing the finger at each other and the customer has to figure all that out now it's on VMware and we need to figure it out we obviously work with Dell on the backend we've also integrated with their telemetry systems so we can pull all the different sort of hardware telemetry monitoring data that they that they're getting so we can understand the health of those servers that are running and when we detect a problem is that something that we can fix remotely by just accessing it with our engineers or do we need a service technician to actually go out there and it's this whole issue right right so it's just interesting you guys launched this really thinking more edge and you're getting drawn into more of a data center so why are you getting drawn in what are some of the advantages you know that the sky O's and the CTOs are seeing with this type of a deployment yeah so the data center part is really interesting and again sir processing they thought we thought there would be more need at the edge initially just because hey these edge environments are really difficult to manage and they're kind of distributed and people don't have IT staff there but we're surprised to hear about is the very urgent need customers have their data centers now again they have servers in the data centers that they're running these things today but what they find is that it just doesn't work that well and that they're spending a lot of time and resources on just keeping the lights on and it's you know these things don't differentiate them as a business you know one of things I talk to customers a lot about is that no customer has ever differentiated itself by how well they run VMware infrastructure and that might sound kind of crazy at first right but yeah it's true I can differentiate themselves negatively by how poorly and they run an infrastructure and then you know their apps don't work very well but some degrees have been working VMware infrastructure is just table sticks right and then what they do in an app level is what differentiates them and so this idea that we can come in with VMware cloud on Dell EMC just take care of all of that operational overhead is really really powerful and so as you see folks and customers and companies going through these digital transformation cycles modernizing their applications they're like oh man I need to actually modernize my infrastructure as well and so that's a compelling event that we say it's like oh there's gonna be think this right as are we thinking that they're like well why am i doing all this work in the first place let's actually rethink the whole thing and take them better fundamentally better approach ie a cloud approach and so that's where VM were caught in delians he comes in again I think that's why we're seeing so much interest from customers and again we're CIA knows and CTOs can really see a lot of benefits right I'm just curious you're taking from kind of a product development a product release point of view right is this kind of a typical VMware you know kind of speed and pacing or is this really you know getting to the second gen and this shift you know kind of in your data market has really more of a response to the market because again as as I was preparing and looking up when the initial launch was it really wasn't that long ago - so - to kind of pivot and call it second gen and include features and functions that are coming back from the market would you say that's kind of typical or you guys get it a little bit more agile in your own you know kind of product development cycle and getting away from those massive PR d's and mr d's and actually you know trying to respond more quickly to the to the pace of the marketplace yeah that's a great point and yeah you're right we are going through our own digital transformation here at VMware all right now we are shifting from a company that primarily sold shrink-wrapped software to a company that sells all services and so you know as you look at that it actually changes a lot of what we can do we can respond much much more quickly much quicker to this sort of customer feedback now we can ship new updates much more frequently and so you know if you look at our traditional vSphere release cycles those were what every 12 months 18 months may be at most but what we can do now with our con releases is actually update and do major updates every three months and so we call this kind of the second you know major advance of VMware kondalian see but in reality it's our third our fourth actual release of our underlying software and so we're actually doing these underlying releases much much quicker I think the reason that we're focusing on this launch in particular is because of the fact that again customers have been asking for this data center level support and really optimizing this solution for the data center and so now we've gone and done that and again I think we're gonna see a lot more interest from the customers on the data center side because of it great well okay thanks for giving us the quick update congratulations on the release and just keep rolling it let's listen to those customers and they'll tell you what they want definitely yeah we're excited - thank you alright kit thanks again he's kid I'm Jeff you're watching the cube thanks for watching we'll see you next time you [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are having a very special Cube conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil, if you will, of the new VMware vSphere seven dot O. We're going to get a little bit more of a technical deep-dive here today and we're excited to have a longtime CUBE alumni. Kit Colbert here is the VP and CTO of Cloud platform at VMware. Kit, great to see you. >> Yeah, happy to be here. And new to theCUBE, Jared Rosoff. He's a Senior Director of Product Management of VMware and I'm guessing had a whole lot to do with this build. So Jared, first off, congratulations for birthing this new release and great to have you on board. >> Thanks, feels pretty great, great to be here. >> All right, so let's just jump into it. From kind of a technical aspect, what is so different about vSphere 7? >> Yeah, great. So vSphere 7 bakes Kubernetes right into the virtualization platform. And so this means that as a developer, I can now use Kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment. And it means as an IT admin, I'm actually able to deliver Kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run. >> So I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that that might be coming with the acquisition of the Heptio team. So really exciting news, and I think Kit, you teased it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments, regardless of whether that's on-prem, public cloud, this public cloud, that public cloud, so this really is the realization of that vision. >> It is, yeah. So we talked at VMworld about Project Pacific, right, this technology preview. And as Jared mentioned of what that was, was how do we take Kubernetes and really build it into vSphere? As you know, we had a hybrid cloud vision for quite a while now. How do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible? Now part of the broader VMware cloud foundation portfolio. And you know, as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud, on premises, at the edge, with service providers, there's a secondary question of how do we actually evolve that platform so it can support not just the existing workloads, but also modern workloads as well. >> Right. All right, so I think he brought some pictures for us, a little demo. So why don't we, >> Yeah. Why don't we jump over >> Yeah, let's dive into it. to there and let's see what it looks like? You guys can cue up the demo. >> Jared: Yeah, so we're going to start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation four and vSphere 7. So what you're seeing here is the developer's actually using Kubernetes to deploy Kubernetes. The self-eating watermelon, right? So the developer uses this Kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole Kubernetes cluster. And the whole developer experience now is driven by Kubernetes. They can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of Kubernetes API's and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere. And so, that's not just provisioning workloads though, this is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed. So go look at, hey, what's the IP address that got allocated to that? Or what's the CPU load on this workload I just deployed? On top of Kubernetes, we've integrated a Container Registry into vSphere. So here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images. And you know, one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as code standpoint, now, the developer's infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control. I can check in not just my code, but also the description of the Kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app. So now we're looking at a sort of a side-by-side view, where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application. And on the left hand side, we see vCenter. And what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through Kubernetes, those are showing up right inside of the vCenter console. And so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names. And so this means when a developer calls, their IT department says, hey, I got a problem with my database. We don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about. They got the same name, they see the same information. So what we're going to do is that, you know, we're going to push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience. And you know, what you'll see here is that vCenter is the vCenter you've already known and love, but what's different is that now it's much more application focused. So here we see a new screen inside of vCenter, vSphere namespaces. And so, these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications, like the whole distributed system now is a single object inside of vCenter. And when I click into one of these apps, this is a managed object inside of vSphere. I can click on permissions, and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces. I can hook this into my Active Directory infrastructure. So I can use the same corporate credentials to access the system. I tap into all my existing storage. So this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers. I can use storage policy based management to provide storage for Kubernetes. And it's hooked in with things like DRS, right? So I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory, and all of that's going to be enforced by DRS inside the cluster. And again, as an admin, I'm just using vSphere. But to the developer, they're getting a whole Kubernetes experience out of this platform. Now, vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the Kubernetes environment. So besides seeing the VMs and things the developers have deployed, I can see all of the desired state specifications, all the different Kubernetes objects that the developers have created. The compute, network and storage objects, they're all integrated right inside the vCenter console. And so once again from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective, this data's invaluable. It often saves hours just in trying to figure out what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue. So as you can see, this is all baked right into vCenter. The vCenter experience isn't transformed a lot. We get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say, where's the Kubernetes? And they're surprised, they like, they've been managing Kubernetes all this time, it just looks like the vSphere experience they've already got. But all those Kubernetes objects, the pods and containers, Kubernetes clusters, load balancer, storage, they're all represented right there natively in the vCenter UI. And so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins. >> Well that's a, that's pretty wild, you know. It really builds off the vision that again, I think you kind of outlined, Kit, teased out it at VMworld which was the IT still sees vSphere, which is what they want to see, what they're used to seeing, but devs see Kubernetes. And really bringing those together in a unified environment so that, depending on what your job is, and what you're working on, that's what you're going to see and that's kind of unified environment. >> Yep. Yeah, as the demo showed, it is still vSphere at the center, but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere. The Kubernetes based one, which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks, as well as a traditional vSphere interface, APIs, which is great for VI admins and IT operations. >> Right. And then, and really, it was interesting too. You teased out a lot. That was a good little preview if people knew what they were watching, but you talked about really cloud journey, and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are running in their classic VMs and then kind of the modern, you know, cloud native applications built on Kubernetes. And you outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum and getting from one to the other but not really about kind of the messy middle, if you will. And this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum they can move their workloads or move their apps. >> Yeah, no. I think we think a lot about it like that. That we look at, we talk to customers and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go. Their future state architecture. And that involves embracing cloud, it involves modernizing applications. And you know, as you mentioned, it's challenging for them because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of, these two extremes. Either you're here where you are, with kind of the old current world, and you got the bright nirvana future on the far end there. And they believe that the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other. That you have to kind of change everything out from underneath you. And that's obviously very expensive, very time consuming and very error-prone as well. There's a lot of things that can go wrong there. And so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really, to your point, is you call it the messy middle, I would say it's more like how do we offer stepping stones along that journey? Rather than making this one giant leap, we had to invest all this time and resources. How can we enable people to make smaller incremental steps each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost? >> Right. And it's really enabling kind of this next gen application where there's a lot of things that are different about it but one of the fundamental things is where now the application defines the resources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities of what the application can do and that's where everybody is moving as quickly as makes sense, as you said, not all applications need to make that move but most of them should and most of them are and most of them are at least making that journey. So you see that? >> Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from looking historically at how we managed infrastructure, one of the things we enable in vSphere 7 is how we manage applications, right? So a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know, your resource allocation, you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure. You talk about it in terms of this VM is going to be encrypted or this VM is going to have this Firewall rule. And what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management. So you actually look at an application and say I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU. Or I want this application to have these security rules on it. And so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level. >> Jeff: Right. >> Yeah, and like, I would kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say, you know, if you look back, one thing we did with something like VSAN, before that, people had to put policies on a LUN, you know, an actual storage LUN and a storage array. And then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array, it inherited certain policies, right? And so VSAN really turned that around and allows you to put the policy on the VM. But what Jared's talking about now is that for a modern workload, a modern workload's not a single VM, it's a collection of different things. We got some containers in there, some VMs, probably distributed, maybe even some on-prem, some in the cloud, and so how do you start managing that more holistically? And this notion of really having an application as a first-class entity that you can now manage inside of vSphere, it's a really powerful and very simplifying one. >> Right. And why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time. That's a nice big word, but the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications, and more importantly, how do you continue to evolve them and change them based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace? >> Yeah, well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance, right? So today, if I want to check if this app is compliant, I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down, and hardened, and secured the right way. But now instead, what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of vCenter, set the right security settings on that, and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are going to inherit that stuff. So it really simplifies that. It also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications. You know, if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory. When you log in with vSphere 7, what you see is a few dozen applications. So a single admin can manage a much larger pool of infrastructure, many more applications than they could before because we automate so much of that operation. >> And it's not just the scale part, which is obviously really important, but it's also the rate of change. And this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done, done, i.e., building applications, while at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security, performance concerns, these sorts of elements. And so by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level and then have the developer be able to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction, it actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better. They're not stepping over each other but in fact now, they can both get what they need to get done, done, and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe and in compliance and so forth. >> Right. So there's a lot more to this. This is a very significant release, right? Again, lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves, it's a pretty significant, you know, kind of re-architecture of many parts of vSphere. So beyond the Kubernetes, you know, kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out in this very significant release? >> Yeah, that's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about Kubernetes, what was Project Pacific but is now just part of vSphere, and certainly that is a very large aspect of it but to your point, vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features. And so instead of a demo here, let's pull up some slides and we'll take a look at what's there. So outside of Kubernetes, there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere 7. So the first one is simplified lifecycle management. And then really focus on security is the second one, and then applications as well, but both including the cloud native apps that couldn't fit in the Kubernetes bucket as well as others. And so we go on the first one, the first column there, there's a ton of stuff that we're doing around simplifying lifecycle. So let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics. So we have this new technology, vSphere life cycle management, vLCM, and the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades, life cycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts? How do we make them more declarative with a single image that you can now specify for an entire cluster. We find that a lot of our vSphere admins, especially at larger scales, have a really tough time doing this. There's a lot of in and outs today, it's somewhat tricky to do. And so we want to make it really really simple and really easy to automate as well. >> Right. So if you're doing Kubernetes on Kubernetes, I suppose you're going to have automation on automation, right? Because upgrading to the seven is probably not an inconsequential task. >> And yeah, and going forward and allowing, you know, as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great vSphere functionality at a more rapid clip, how do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well? >> Right. Next big thing you talk about is security. >> Yep. >> And we just got back from RSA, thank goodness we got that show in before all the madness started. >> Yep. >> But everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top. So talk about kind of the changes in the security. >> So, done a lot of things around security. Things around identity federation, things around simplifying certificate management, you know, dramatic simplifications there across the board. One I want to focus on here on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere trust authority. And so with that one what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces and really ensure there's a trusted computing base? When we talk to customers, what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats including even internal ones, right? How do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted? And obviously if you're hiring someone, you somewhat trust them but you know, how do you implement the concept of lease privilege? Right? >> Right. >> Jeff: Or zero trust, right, is a very hot topic >> Yeah, exactly. in security. >> So the idea with trust authority is that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and ensure are fully secure. Those can be managed by a special vCenter server which is in turn very locked down, only a few people have access to it. And then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that okay, this untrusted host haven't been modified, we know they're okay so they're okay to actually run workloads on they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing. So it's this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment. >> Right. And then the third kind of leg of the stool is, you know, just better leveraging, you know, kind of a more complex asset ecosystem, if you will, with things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know, >> Yeah. kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application can draw the appropriate resources as needed, so you've done a lot of work there as well. >> Yeah, there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space. As you mentioned, all sorts of accelerateds coming out. We all know about GPUs, and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases, not to mention 3-D rendering. But you know, FPGAs and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there. And so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out, they have a lot of the same problems that we saw on the very early days of virtualization. I.e., silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using. And you know, what you find is all things we found before. You find very low utilization rates, inability to automate that, inability to manage that well, put in security and compliance and so forth. And so this is really the reality that we see at most customers. And it's funny because, and so much you think, well wow, shouldn't we be past this? As an industry, shouldn't we have solved this already? You know, we did this with virtualization. But as it turns out, the virtualization we did was for compute, and then storage and network, but now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators. And so that's where this Bitfusion technology that we're including now with vSphere really comes to the forefront. So if you see in the current slide we're showing here, the challenges that just these separate pools of infrastructure, how do you manage all that? And so if you go to the, if we go to the next slide what we see is that with Bitfusion, you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization. You can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together so they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use. We can, you know, have multiple people sharing a GPU. We can do it very dynamically. And the great part of it is is that it's really easy for these folks to use. They don't even need to think about it. In fact, integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows. >> So it's pretty interesting 'cause of the classifications of the assets now are much larger, much varied, and much more workload specific, right? That's really the opportunity slash challenge that you guys are addressing. >> They are. >> A lot more diverse, yep. And so like, you know, a couple other things just, now, I don't have a slide on it, but just things we're doing to our base capabilities. Things around DRS and VMotion. Really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads, right? So you look at some of the massive SAP HANA, or Oracle Databases. And how do we ensure that VMotion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else there. Making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth. >> Jeff: Right. >> So a lot of the stuff is not just kind of brand new, cool new accelerator stuff, but it's also how do we ensure the core apps people have already been running for many years, we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well. >> Right. All right, so Jared, I give you the last word. You've been working on this for a while, there's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys. What do you tell them, what should they be excited about, what are you excited for them in this new release? >> I think what I'm excited about is how, you know, IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps, right? I think today you look at a lot of these organizations and what ends up happening is the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT's infrastructure, right? And so now I think we can shift that story around. I think that there's, you know, there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and app dev teams are going to be having over the next couple years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team, make you more productive, give you better performance, availability, disaster recovery, and these kinds of capabilities. >> Awesome. Well, Jared, congratulation, again both of you, for you getting the release out. I'm sure it was a heavy lift and it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it and thanks for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep-dive. I'm sure there's a ton more resources for people that even want to go down into the weeds. So thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, he's Jared, he's Kit, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in the Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are having a very special CUBE conversation and kind of the the ongoing unveil, if you will, of the new VMware vSphere 7.0. We're going to get a little bit more of a technical deep-dive here today and we're excited to have a longtime CUBE alumni. Kit Colbert here is the VP and CTO of Cloud platform at VMware. Kit, great to see you. >> Yeah, happy to be here. And new to theCUBE, Jared Rosoff. He's a Senior Director of Product Management of VMware and I'm guessing had a whole lot to do with this build. So Jared, first off, congratulations for birthing this new release and great to have you on board. >> Thanks, feels pretty great, great to be here. >> All right, so let's just jump into it. From kind of a technical aspect, what is so different about vSphere 7? >> Yeah, great. So vSphere 7 bakes Kubernetes right into the virtualization platform. And so this means that as a developer, I can now use Kubernetes to actually provision and control workloads inside of my vSphere environment. And it means as an IT admin, I'm actually able to deliver Kubernetes and containers to my developers really easily right on top of the platform I already run. >> So I think we had kind of a sneaking suspicion that that might be coming with the acquisition of the Heptio team. So really exciting news, and I think Kit, you teased it out quite a bit at VMware last year about really enabling customers to deploy workloads across environments, regardless of whether that's on-prem, public cloud, this public cloud, that public cloud, so this really is the realization of that vision. >> It is, yeah. So we talked at VMworld about Project Pacific, right, this technology preview. And as Jared mentioned of what that was, was how do we take Kubernetes and really build it into vSphere? As you know, we had a hybrid cloud vision for quite a while now. How do we proliferate vSphere to as many different locations as possible? Now part of the broader VMware cloud foundation portfolio. And you know, as we've gotten more and more of these instances in the cloud, on premises, at the edge, with service providers, there's a secondary question of how do we actually evolve that platform so it can support not just the existing workloads, but also modern workloads as well. >> Right. All right, so I think he brought some pictures for us, a little demo. So why don't we, >> Yeah. Why don't we jump over >> Yeah, let's dive into it. to there and let's see what it looks like? You guys can cue up the demo. >> Jared: Yeah, so we're going to start off looking at a developer actually working with the new VMware cloud foundation four and vSphere 7. So what you're seeing here is the developer's actually using Kubernetes to deploy Kubernetes. The self-eating watermelon, right? So the developer uses this Kubernetes declarative syntax where they can describe a whole Kubernetes cluster. And the whole developer experience now is driven by Kubernetes. They can use the coop control tool and all of the ecosystem of Kubernetes API's and tool chains to provision workloads right into vSphere. And so, that's not just provisioning workloads though, this is also key to the developer being able to explore the things they've already deployed. So go look at, hey, what's the IP address that got allocated to that? Or what's the CPU load on this workload I just deployed? On top of Kubernetes, we've integrated a Container Registry into vSphere. So here we see a developer pushing and pulling container images. And you know, one of the amazing things about this is from an infrastructure as code standpoint, now, the developer's infrastructure as well as their software is all unified in source control. I can check in not just my code, but also the description of the Kubernetes environment and storage and networking and all the things that are required to run that app. So now we're looking at a sort of a side-by-side view, where on the right hand side is the developer continuing to deploy some pieces of their application. And on the left hand side, we see vCenter. And what's key here is that as the developer deploys new things through Kubernetes, those are showing up right inside of the vCenter console. And so the developer and IT are seeing exactly the same things with the same names. And so this means when a developer calls, their IT department says, hey, I got a problem with my database. We don't spend the next hour trying to figure out which VM they're talking about. They got the same name, they see the same information. So what we're going to do is that, you know, we're going to push the the developer screen aside and start digging into the vSphere experience. And you know, what you'll see here is that vCenter is the vCenter you've already known and love, but what's different is that now it's much more application focused. So here we see a new screen inside of vCenter, vSphere namespaces. And so, these vSphere namespaces represent whole logical applications, like the whole distributed system now is a single object inside of vCenter. And when I click into one of these apps, this is a managed object inside of vSphere. I can click on permissions, and I can decide which developers have the permission to deploy or read the configuration of one of these namespaces. I can hook this into my Active Directory infrastructure. So I can use the same corporate credentials to access the system. I tap into all my existing storage. So this platform works with all of the existing vSphere storage providers. I can use storage policy based management to provide storage for Kubernetes. And it's hooked in with things like DRS, right? So I can define quotas and limits for CPU and memory, and all of that's going to be enforced by DRS inside the cluster. And again, as an admin, I'm just using vSphere. But to the developer, they're getting a whole Kubernetes experience out of this platform. Now, vSphere also now sucks in all this information from the Kubernetes environment. So besides seeing the VMs and things the developers have deployed, I can see all of the desired state specifications, all the different Kubernetes objects that the developers have created. The compute, network and storage objects, they're all integrated right inside the vCenter console. And so once again from a diagnostics and troubleshooting perspective, this data's invaluable. It often saves hours just in trying to figure out what we're even talking about when we're trying to resolve an issue. So as you can see, this is all baked right into vCenter. The vCenter experience isn't transformed a lot. We get a lot of VI admins who look at this and say, where's the Kubernetes? And they're surprised, they like, they've been managing Kubernetes all this time, it just looks like the vSphere experience they've already got. But all those Kubernetes objects, the pods and containers, Kubernetes clusters, load balancer, storage, they're all represented right there natively in the vCenter UI. And so we're able to take all of that and make it work for your existing VI admins. >> Well that's a, that's pretty wild, you know. It really builds off the vision that again, I think you kind of outlined, Kit, teased out it at VMworld which was the IT still sees vSphere, which is what they want to see, what they're used to seeing, but devs see Kubernetes. And really bringing those together in a unified environment so that, depending on what your job is, and what you're working on, that's what you're going to see and that's kind of unified environment. >> Yep. Yeah, as the demo showed, it is still vSphere at the center, but now there's two different experiences that you can have interacting with vSphere. The Kubernetes based one, which is of course great for developers and DevOps type folks, as well as a traditional vSphere interface, APIs, which is great for VI admins and IT operations. >> Right. And then, and really, it was interesting too. You teased out a lot. That was a good little preview if people knew what they were watching, but you talked about really cloud journey, and kind of this bifurcation of kind of classical school apps that are running in their classic VMs and then kind of the modern, you know, cloud native applications built on Kubernetes. And you outlined a really interesting thing that people often talk about the two ends of the spectrum and getting from one to the other but not really about kind of the messy middle, if you will. And this is really enabling people to pick where along that spectrum they can move their workloads or move their apps. >> Yeah, no. I think we think a lot about it like that. That we look at, we talk to customers and all of them have very clear visions on where they want to go. Their future state architecture. And that involves embracing cloud, it involves modernizing applications. And you know, as you mentioned, it's challenging for them because I think what a lot of customers see is this kind of, these two extremes. Either you're here where you are, with kind of the old current world, and you got the bright nirvana future on the far end there. And they believe that the only way to get there is to kind of make a leap from one side to the other. That you have to kind of change everything out from underneath you. And that's obviously very expensive, very time consuming and very error-prone as well. There's a lot of things that can go wrong there. And so I think what we're doing differently at VMware is really, to your point, is you call it the messy middle, I would say it's more like how do we offer stepping stones along that journey? Rather than making this one giant leap, we had to invest all this time and resources. How can we enable people to make smaller incremental steps each of which have a lot of business value but don't have a huge amount of cost? >> Right. And it's really enabling kind of this next gen application where there's a lot of things that are different about it but one of the fundamental things is where now the application defines the resources that it needs to operate versus the resources defining kind of the capabilities of what the application can do and that's where everybody is moving as quickly as makes sense, as you said, not all applications need to make that move but most of them should and most of them are and most of them are at least making that journey. So you see that? >> Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that certainly this is one of the big evolutions we're making in vSphere from looking historically at how we managed infrastructure, one of the things we enable in vSphere 7 is how we manage applications, right? So a lot of the things you would do in infrastructure management of setting up security rules or encryption settings or you know, your resource allocation, you would do this in terms of your physical and virtual infrastructure. You talk about it in terms of this VM is going to be encrypted or this VM is going to have this Firewall rule. And what we do in vSphere 7 is elevate all of that to application centric management. So you actually look at an application and say I want this application to be constrained to this much CPU. Or I want this application to have these security rules on it. And so that shifts the focus of management really up to the application level. >> Jeff: Right. >> Yeah, and like, I would kind of even zoom back a little bit there and say, you know, if you look back, one thing we did with something like VSAN, before that, people had to put policies on a LUN, you know, an actual storage LUN and a storage array. And then by virtue of a workload being placed on that array, it inherited certain policies, right? And so VSAN really turned that around and allows you to put the policy on the VM. But what Jared's talking about now is that for a modern workload, a modern workload's not a single VM, it's a collection of different things. We got some containers in there, some VMs, probably distributed, maybe even some on-prem, some in the cloud, and so how do you start managing that more holistically? And this notion of really having an application as a first-class entity that you can now manage inside of vSphere, it's a really powerful and very simplifying one. >> Right. And why this is important is because it's this application centric point of view which enables the digital transformation that people are talking about all the time. That's a nice big word, but the rubber hits the road is how do you execute and deliver applications, and more importantly, how do you continue to evolve them and change them based on either customer demands or competitive demands or just changes in the marketplace? >> Yeah, well you look at something like a modern app that maybe has a hundred VMs that are part of it and you take something like compliance, right? So today, if I want to check if this app is compliant, I got to go look at every individual VM and make sure it's locked down, and hardened, and secured the right way. But now instead, what I can do is I can just look at that one application object inside of vCenter, set the right security settings on that, and I can be assured that all the different objects inside of it are going to inherit that stuff. So it really simplifies that. It also makes it so that that admin can handle much larger applications. You know, if you think about vCenter today you might log in and see a thousand VMs in your inventory. When you log in with vSphere 7, what you see is a few dozen applications. So a single admin can manage a much larger pool of infrastructure, many more applications than they could before because we automate so much of that operation. >> And it's not just the scale part, which is obviously really important, but it's also the rate of change. And this notion of how do we enable developers to get what they want to get done, done, i.e., building applications, while at the same time enabling the IT operations teams to put the right sort of guardrails in place around compliance and security, performance concerns, these sorts of elements. And so by being able to have the IT operations team really manage that logical application at that more abstract level and then have the developer be able to push in new containers or new VMs or whatever they need inside of that abstraction, it actually allows those two teams to work actually together and work together better. They're not stepping over each other but in fact now, they can both get what they need to get done, done, and do so as quickly as possible but while also being safe and in compliance and so forth. >> Right. So there's a lot more to this. This is a very significant release, right? Again, lot of foreshadowing if you go out and read the tea leaves, it's a pretty significant, you know, kind of re-architecture of many parts of vSphere. So beyond the Kubernetes, you know, kind of what are some of the other things that are coming out in this very significant release? >> Yeah, that's a great question because we tend to talk a lot about Kubernetes, what was Project Pacific but is now just part of vSphere, and certainly that is a very large aspect of it but to your point, vSphere 7 is a massive release with all sorts of other features. And so instead of a demo here, let's pull up some slides and we'll take a look at >> Already? what's there. So outside of Kubernetes, there's kind of three main categories that we think about when we look at vSphere 7. So the first one is simplified lifecycle management. And then really focused on security is the second one, and then applications as well, but both including the cloud native apps that couldn't fit in the Kubernetes bucket as well as others. And so we go on the first one, the first column there, there's a ton of stuff that we're doing around simplifying lifecycle. So let's go to the next slide here where we can dive in a little bit more to the specifics. So we have this new technology, vSphere life cycle management, vLCM, and the idea here is how do we dramatically simplify upgrades, life cycle management of the ESX clusters and ESX hosts? How do we make them more declarative with a single image that you can now specify for an entire cluster. We find that a lot of our vSphere admins, especially at larger scales, have a really tough time doing this. There's a lot of in and outs today, it's somewhat tricky to do. And so we want to make it really really simple and really easy to automate as well. >> Right. So if you're doing Kubernetes on Kubernetes, I suppose you're going to have automation on automation, right? Because upgrading to the seven is probably not an inconsequential task. >> And yeah, and going forward and allowing, you know, as we start moving to deliver a lot of this great vSphere functionality at a more rapid clip, how do we enable our customers to take advantage of all those great things we're putting out there as well? >> Right. Next big thing you talk about is security. >> Yep. >> And we just got back from RSA, thank goodness we got that show in before all the madness started. >> Yep. >> But everyone always talked about security's got to be baked in from the bottom to the top. So talk about kind of the changes in the security. >> So, done a lot of things around security. Things around identity federation, things around simplifying certificate management, you know, dramatic simplifications there across the board. One I want to focus on here on the next slide is actually what we call vSphere trust authority. And so with that one what we're looking at here is how do we reduce the potential attack surfaces and really ensure there's a trusted computing base? When we talk to customers, what we find is that they're nervous about a lot of different threats including even internal ones, right? How do they know all the folks that work for them can be fully trusted? And obviously if you're hiring someone, you somewhat trust them but you know, how do you implement the concept of lease privilege? Right? >> Right. >> Jeff: Or zero trust, right, is a very hot topic >> Yeah, exactly. in security. >> So the idea with trust authority is that we can specify a small number of physical ESX hosts that you can really lock down and ensure are fully secure. Those can be managed by a special vCenter server which is in turn very locked down, only a few people have access to it. And then those hosts and that vCenter can then manage other hosts that are untrusted and can use attestation to actually prove that okay, this untrusted host haven't been modified, we know they're okay so they're okay to actually run workloads on they're okay to put data on and that sort of thing. So it's this kind of like building block approach to ensure that businesses can have a very small trust base off of which they can build to include their entire vSphere environment. >> Right. And then the third kind of leg of the stool is, you know, just better leveraging, you know, kind of a more complex asset ecosystem, if you will, with things like FPGAs and GPUs and you know, >> Yeah. kind of all of the various components that power these different applications which now the application can draw the appropriate resources as needed, so you've done a lot of work there as well. >> Yeah, there's a ton of innovation happening in the hardware space. As you mentioned, all sorts of accelerateds coming out. We all know about GPUs, and obviously what they can do for machine learning and AI type use cases, not to mention 3-D rendering. But you know, FPGAs and all sorts of other things coming down the pike as well there. And so what we found is that as customers try to roll these out, they have a lot of the same problems that we saw on the very early days of virtualization. I.e., silos of specialized hardware that different teams were using. And you know, what you find is all things we found before. You find very low utilization rates, inability to automate that, inability to manage that well, put in security and compliance and so forth. And so this is really the reality that we see at most customers. And it's funny because, and so much you think, well wow, shouldn't we be past this? As an industry, shouldn't we have solved this already? You know, we did this with virtualization. But as it turns out, the virtualization we did was for compute, and then storage and network, but now we really need to virtualize all these accelerators. And so that's where this Bitfusion technology that we're including now with vSphere really comes to the forefront. So if you see in the current slide we're showing here, the challenges that just these separate pools of infrastructure, how do you manage all that? And so if you go to the, if we go to the next slide what we see is that with Bitfusion, you can do the same thing that we saw with compute virtualization. You can now pool all these different silos infrastructure together so they become one big pool of GPUs of infrastructure that anyone in an organization can use. We can, you know, have multiple people sharing a GPU. We can do it very dynamically. And the great part of it is is that it's really easy for these folks to use. They don't even need to think about it. In fact, integrates seamlessly with their existing workflows. >> So it's pretty interesting 'cause of the classifications of the assets now are much larger, much varied, and much more workload specific, right? That's really the opportunity / challenge that you guys are addressing. >> They are. >> A lot more diverse, yep. And so like, you know, a couple other things just, now, I don't have a slide on it, but just things we're doing to our base capabilities. Things around DRS and vMotion. Really massive evolutions there as well to support a lot of these bigger workloads, right? So you look at some of the massive SAP HANA, or Oracle Databases. And how do we ensure that vMotion can scale to handle those without impacting their performance or anything else there. Making DRS smarter about how it does load balancing and so forth. >> Jeff: Right. >> So a lot of the stuff is not just kind of brand new, cool new accelerator stuff, but it's also how do we ensure the core apps people have already been running for many years, we continue to keep up with the innovation and scale there as well. >> Right. All right, so Jared, I give you the last word. You've been working on this for a while, there's a whole bunch of admins that have to sit and punch keys. What do you tell them, what should they be excited about, what are you excited for them in this new release? >> I think what I'm excited about is how, you know, IT can really be an enabler of the transformation of modern apps, right? I think today you look at a lot of these organizations and what ends up happening is the app team ends up sort of building their own infrastructure on top of IT's infrastructure, right? And so now I think we can shift that story around. I think that there's, you know, there's an interesting conversation that a lot of IT departments and app dev teams are going to be having over the next couple years about how do we really offload some of these infrastructure tasks from the dev team, make you more productive, give you better performance, availability, disaster recovery, and these kinds of capabilities. >> Awesome. Well, Jared, congratulation, again both of you, for you getting the release out. I'm sure it was a heavy lift and it's always good to get it out in the world and let people play with it and thanks for sharing a little bit more of a technical deep-dive. I'm sure there's a ton more resources for people that even want to go down into the weeds. So thanks for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> All right, he's Jared, he's Kit, I'm Jeff. You're watching theCUBE. We're in the Palo Alto studios. Thanks for watching and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum, World 2019 brought to you by the M Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, Welcome back, everyone to the Cubes Live coverage of the Emerald 2019. I'm John Career with Lycos Day, Volante Dave. 10 years covering the Q Weird Mosconi and 2010 boy Lots changed, but >> it's still the >> platform that Palmer Ritz laid out. But the stuff filling in 10 years later. >> Okay, you call that software mainframe and Robin came in so I can't call Mainframe Way >> Have leaders from PM Wears Largest business unit. The Cloud Platform Business Kid Colbert to CTO and Christmas R S v P and General Manager Guys, Thanks for coming on The key. Appreciate. >> Yeah, that's for having us. The >> world's your business units smoking hot. It's very popular, like you run around doing meetings. Cloud platform is the software model that's 10 years later actually happening at scale. Congratulations. What's the What's the big news? What's the big conversation for you guys? >> Yeah, the biggest news this week is the announcement of project specific, and, um, it's about taking the platform a Jess, um, hundreds of thousands of customers on it and bringing together communities were just now very popular with the developers and that black form together so that operators, on the one hand, can just deal with the platform they love. And the developers can deal with the kubernetes layer that they love. >> It's interesting to watch because, you know, the whole end user computing stack that was laid out 10 years ago is actually happening now, Assassin see, sass business models. We all see the and half of them is on the success of Cloud. But interesting to see kubernetes, which we've been following since the report started. Open stack days. You saw that emerging. Everyone kind of saw that. And it really became a nice layer. And the industry just create as a de facto. Yeah, you guys were actually driving that more forward. So congratulations on that. >> That's sitting it >> natively in V sphere is interesting because you guys spend a ton of time. This is a core product for you guys. So you're bringing something native into V sphere? I'm sure there's a lot of debates internally how to do that, kid. What's that? What is the relevance workers. You guys have a lot of efficiencies and be severe, but bring in kubernetes is gonna give you some new things. What, >> So the thinking is really you know, it's Christmas mentioning. How do we take this proven platform? Move it forward. Customers have moved millions of work clothes on top of the sphere, operate them in production, the Prussian great capabilities, and so they'd be able to be very successful in that. And so the question is, how do we help them move forward in the kubernetes? You know, you mentioned Crew readies is still fairly young, the ecosystem around. It's still somewhat immature, still growing right, and it's a very different environment than what folks are used to who used the sphere. So there's a big challenge that customers have around managing multiple environments. All the training that's different, all the tools that are different so we can actually take their investments. They've already made into V sphere leverage and extend those into the kubernetes world that's really powerful. We'll help our customers take all these millions of workloads and move them forward. It's >> interesting because we were always speculating about being where I started Jerry Chan when he was on yesterday. He's been of'em where since early days, you know, but looking at VM where when they went to their you guys went back to your core When we be cloud air kind of win its way and then you deal them is on since the stock price has been going great, So great chair older takeover value there. But you got clarity around what cloud was. And as you look at the operator target audience, you guys have the operators and the devil and ops is critical. So you guys have been operating a lot of work, Liz and I think this is fascinating. So the role of containers is super relevant because you got V EMS and containers. So again, the debate continues. >> Well, I think >> Tainer is wrong. Where Bond, It's interesting conversation because kubernetes is orchestrating all that >> while the snarky treat tweet Oh day and you guys feel free to come. It was Oh, I thought we started launch pivotal. So we didn't have to run containers on virtual machines. Yeah, we know that people run containers on bare metal. They run containers and virtual machines, but >> yeah, It's a debate that that we hear pop up on the on the snarky Twitter feeds and so forth. We'll talk to customers about it. You know, this whole VM versus container debate, I think, really misses the point because it's not really about that. What it's about is how do I actually operate? These were close in production, right? This kind of this three pillows we talk about build, run, manage. Custer's want to accelerate that They won't do that with enterprise, great capabilities with security. And so that's where it really gets challenging. And I think you know, we've built this amazing ecosystem around desire to achieve that. And so that's what we're taking forward here. And, yes, the fact that we're using fertilization of the covers, that's an implementation detail. Almost. What's more, valuables? All the stuff above that the manageability, the operational capabilities. That's a real problem. It seems to >> me, to the business impact because, okay, people going to go to the cloud, they're gonna build cloud native acts. But you've got all these incumbent companies trying not to get disrupted to trying to find new opportunities, playing offense and defense at the same time, they need tooling to be able to do that. They don't want to take their e r p ap and stick it in the cloud, right? They want to modernize it. And you know you're not gonna build that overnight in the cloud anyway, so they need help. >> That's the the key move that we made here. If you if you think about it, customers don't have kubernetes experts right today and most of them in their journey to the mortar naps. They're saying, Hey, we need to set up two stacks. At least we are if we immerse stack that we love. And now communities are developers laws. So we have to stand up and they don't have any in house experts to do that right? And with this one move, we have actually collapsed it back to one stack. >> Yeah, I think it's a brilliant move. Actually, it's brilliant because the Dev ops ethos has proven everyone wants to be there, all right. And the question is, who's leading? Who is lagging? So ops has traditionally lagged. If you look at it from the developer standpoint, you guys have not been lagging on the we certainly have tons of'em virtualization been standardized. Its unifying. Yeah, the two worlds together, and it really as we've been calling it cloud two point. Oh, because if you look at what hybrid really is, it's cloud two point. Oh, yeah. Cloud one data was Dev Ops Storage and compute Amazon. You're born in the cloud. We we have no I t department 50 people. Why would we ever and developers are the operators? Yeah, so we shall. Enterprise scale. It's not that easy. So I love to get your thoughts on how you guys would frame the cloud two point. Oh, Visa vi. If cloud one does storage and compute and Amazon like scale, what is cloud to point out to you? >> Yeah, well, I think so. Let's talk about the cloud journey. I think that's what you're getting at here. So here's how it discuss it with customers. You are where you are today. You have your existing apse. A lot of them are monolithic. You're slow to update. Um, you know, so forthright. And then you have some of the cloud NATO nirvana over here. We're like everything's re architected. It's Micro Service's got all these containers off, so >> it doesn't run my business >> well, yeah, well, that's what I want to get to. I think the challenge, the challenge is it's a huge amount of effort to get there, right, All the training we're talking about, all the tooling and the all the changes there, and people tend to look at. This is a very binary thing, right that you're there. Here where you are, you're in the club, New Nirvana. People don't often talk about what's in the middle and the fact that it's a spectrum. And I think what we used to get a V M, where is like, let's meet customers where they are, You know, I think one of the big realizations we had, it's not. Everyone needs to get every single application on this far side over here. Some halfs, your pieces, whatever you know, it's fine to get them a little bit of the way there, and so one of the things that we saw with the M A coordinated us, for example, was that people there was a pent up demand to move to the public cloud. But it was challenging because to go from a visa environment on Prem to an eight of US native environment to change a bunch of things that tooling changes like the environment a little bit different, but with a mark, our native us, there's no modifications at all. You just little evey motion it. And some people have you motioning things like insanely fast now, without modifying the half you can't get you know something you have to suddenly better scalable. But you get other cloud benefits. You get things like, Oh, my infrastructure is dynamic. I can add host dynamically only pay for what I need. Aiken consume this as a service. And so we help moving. We have to move there. There were clothes a little bit in the middle of the spectrum there, and I think what we're doing with Project Pacific and could realise is the same thing. They start taking advantage of these great kubernetes capabilities for their existing APs without modification. So again, kind of moving them further in that middle spectrum and then, you know, for the absolute really make a difference to their business. They can put in the effort to get all the way over there, >> and we saw that some of the evidence of some challenges of that shiny new trend within the dupe ecosystem. Big data objects to army. Who doesn't love that concept, right? Yeah, map produced. But what happened was is that the infrastructure costs on the personnel human capital cost was so massive that and then cloud cloud came along and >> just go out. There is also the other point about just just just a bespoke tooling that >> technology, right, Then the disruptions to create, you know to that, then the investments that it takes. Two >> you had a skill and you had a skills gap in terms of people have been. So that brings us back to So how do you address that problem? Because most of the audience out here, not developers. Yeah. Yeah. Total has the developers connection. So >> this is one of the really cool things about Pacific that what we've done with Pacific when you look at it from an I T. Operations, one of you that person sees v sphere the tool they already know and use understand it. Well, when a developer looks at it, they see kubernetes. And so this is two different viewpoints. Got like, you know, the blind men around the elephant. But, um but the thing is is actually a singular thing in the back end, right? You know, they have these two different views. And so the cool thing about us, we can actually bring items and developers together that they can use their own language tools process. But there's a common thing that they're talking about. They have common visibility into that, and that's super, super powerful. And when you look at, it also is happening on the kubernetes side is fully visible in the V's here side. So all these tools that already work against the sphere suddenly light up and support kubernetes automatically. So again, without any work, we suddenly get so much more benefit. >> And the category Buster's, they're going on to that. You're changing your taking software approach that your guys No, you're taking it to the software developer world. It's kind of changing the game. One of things. I want to get your thoughts on Cloud to point out because, you know, if computing storage was cloud one dato, we're seeing networking and security and data becoming critical ingredients that are problems statement areas people are working on. Certainly networking you guys are in that. So as cloud chip one is gonna take into the fact that messy middle between, you know, I'm on here and then I want the Nirvana, as always, the origination story and the outcomes and stories. Always great. But the missing messy middle. As you were pointing out, it's hard. How do you guys? >> And if you look at the moves that we made in the Do You know about the big fusion acquisition that remained right, which happened, like a month ago, and it was about preparing the platform, our foray I animal or clothes? So really, what we're trying to do is really make sure that the history of platform is ready for the modern applications, right? I am along one side communities applications, you know, service oriented applications. All of them can land on the same platform and more and more. Whether it's the I am l or other application, they're being written on top of communities that structures code. Yeah, nothing like Jenna's well, so enable incriminating will help us land all the modern applications on top of the same platform that our customers are used to. So it's a huge kind of a inflection point in the industry from my >> wealthy earlier point, every CEO I talked to said, I want to get from point A to point B and I wanna spend a billion dollars to get there. I don't wanna have to hire some systems integrator and outsource to get any there. Show me how I get without, you know, destroying my >> business. How did we meet the customers where they're at, right? Like what? The problem with this, the kind of either or model you're here you're there is that there's a huge opportunity costs. And again, Well, if you will just need a little bit of goodness, they don't need the full crazy nirvana Goodness right? And so we enable them to get that very easily in automated way, right? If you'd just been any time re factoring or thinking through this app that takes months or even a year or more, and so you know that this the speed that we can unleash her The velocity for these customers is >> the benefit of that. Nirvana is always taken out of context because people look at the outcome over over generations and saying, Well, I want to be there but it all starts with a very variable basis in shadow. I used to call it, but don't go in the cloud and do something really small, simple. And then why? This is much more official. I like this stack or this approach. That's ultimately how it gets there. So I got to get I got to get that point for infrastructures code because this is what you're enabling. Envies, fearful when I see I want to get your reaction. This because the world used to be. And I ask Elsa on this years ago, and he kind of validated it. But because he's old school, Intel infrastructure dictated to the applications what it could do based on what it could do. Now it's flipped upside down with cloud platform platform and implies enabling something enabling platform. Whatever you call the APs are dictating for the infrastructure. I need this. That's infrastructure is code. That's kind of what you're saying is that >> I mean, look kubernetes broader pattern time. It said, Hey, I can declare what I want, right, and then the system will take care of it and made in that state. I decided state execution is what it brought to the table, and the container based abs, um, have already been working that way. What this announcement does with Project Pacific is that the BM applications that our customers built in the past they are going to be able to take advantage of the same pattern, just the infrastructure escort declarative and decide state execution That that's going to happen even for the old workload, said our customer service >> and they still do viens. I mean, they're scaled 1000 the way >> they operate the same pattern. I >> mean, Paul Morris doesn't get enough credit for the comedy made in 2010. He called it the hardened top. Do you really care what's underneath if it's working effectively? >> Well, I mean, I think you know the reality today is that even though containers that get all get a lot of coverage and attention, most were close to being provisioned. New workloads even are being provisioning v EMS, right? If you look at AWS, the public clouds, I mean, is the E c to our ah go compute engine. Those service's those VM so once they're getting heavily used. And so the way we look at it, if we want to support everything. And it's just going to give customers a bunch of tools in their tool box. And let's put on used the right tool for the right job. Right? That's what the mentality >> that's really clouds. You know, Chris, I want to get your you know, I want to nail you down on the definition of two point. Uh, what is your version? Come on. We keep dodging around, get it out. Come on. >> I think we touched on all aspects of it. Which one is the interesting, less court allowing the consumer of the cloud to be able to dictate the environment in which the applications will operate and the consumer is defining it or the developers to defining it. In this case, that, to me, is the biggest shift that we have gone through in the Colorado. Yeah, and we're just making our platform come to life to support >> that. We're taking the cube serving. We'll put all together, and we want the community to define it, not us. What does it explain? The honest what it means to be a project and has a project Get into it. An offering? >> I mean, so Project Pacific is vey sphere, right? I mean, this is a massive, rethinking re architecture of Easter. Like pretty much every major subsystem component within Visa has been updated with this effort. Um, what we're doing here is what we've technically announced is actually what we call a technical preview. So saying, Hey, this is technology we're working on. We think it's really interesting We want to share with the public, get the public's feedback, you know, figure out a way on the right direction or not. We're not making any commitment, releasing it or any time frames yet. Um, but so part of that needed a name, right? And so because it is easier, but it's a specific thing. We're doing the feast here, so that's where the project comes from. I think it also gives that, you know, this thing has been a huge effort internally, right? There's a lot of work that's gone into it. So you know, it has some heft and deserves a name Min itself. >> It's Dev Ops to pointed. Your reds bring in. You making your infrastructure truly enable program out from amble for perhaps a tsunami. >> The one thing I would say is we wouldn't announce it as a project if it was not coming soon. I mean, we still are in the process. Getting feedback will turn it on or not. But it it's not something that is way out. Then it's It is going to come. >> It's a clear direction. It's a statement of putting investment into his code and going on to course correct. Get some feedback at exactly. But it's pretty obvious you can go a lot of pain. Oh, yeah, isn't easy button for combat. He's >> easy on the >> future. I think it's a great move. Congratulations. We're big fans of kubernetes. So the guys last night having a little meeting Marriott thinking up the next battle plans for game plan for you guys. So, yeah, I >> thought this is just the tip of the iceberg. We had a lot of really, really cool stuff we're doing. >> We're gonna be following the cloud platform. Your progress? Certainly. Recovering. Cloud two point. Oh, looking at these new categories that are emerging again. The end state is Dev Ops Program ability. Apple cases, the Cube coverage, 10th year covering VM world. We're in the lobby of Mosconi in San Francisco. I'm John Favorite Day Volonte. Thanks for watching

>> Announcer: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman with my co-host, Justin Warren, and this is theCUBE, live from the lobby of Moscone North here in San Francisco. The 10th year we've had theCUBE and happy to bring back two CUBE alums. Which, of course, in 2010 we didn't even have the idea of a CUBE alum, we were just gathering some friends, some industry experts. To my right is Jaspreet Singh, who's the founder and CEO of Druva. Sitting next to him is Kit Colbert, who's the Vice President CTO of the Cloud Platform Business Unit at VMware. Gentleman, thanks so much for joining us. >> Good morning. >> Thanks for having us. >> All right, so Jaspreet, I remember talking to you when Druva was a new company and cloud native wasn't the thing that came to mind when we were talking about it. We've known for a long time how important data is, and protecting that and managing that, of course, is something the industry's been looking at a long time. But give us the update on kind of Druva and you brought along Kit, so we're going to be talking about some of the cool, cloud native multi-cloud modernization type things, how that fits in your world. >> Absolutely. If you think about the world, right? In 1998, say for a start, they would create a whole notion of size and no software and the whole picture, right? Since then applications went in size, then came developer tools which were in size, and now it's all about infrastructure and first your management which is getting to be a cloud native, public cloud orientated size world. To where Druva comes in. As the world gets more and more fragmented, the data gets more and more fragmented. The multiple versions of cloud are different parts of strategy. Data management has to get more and more centralized. Which is where Druva comes in and which is where me and Kit are together. I think as VMware build a strategy for multi-cloud. Pulling the whole VMC approach to multiple versions of public cloud. Druva is a great partner, to sort of bring the data management together. A single control plane to manage multiple versions of cloud deployment on a single plane. >> All right, great so Kit it sounds like VMC is the kind of key component work together. 'cause when I think at Druva, a lot of what I think of is SaaS. And SaaS isn't necessarily the first thing that I think of when I think of VMware, so... >> We're tryin' to get there, tryin' to get there Stu. >> Yeah, no but pull it together as to where your customers intersect. >> Yeah absolutely, so it's a great partnership and definitely really focused on rallying around VMware Cloud and native AWS. And the core idea there was that we could deliver a cloud service to our customers of our VMware infrastructure, right? And we'll become a SaaS company, transforming into that. And that's something that we've been very focused on strategically, right? And so VMware Cloud and AWS is really the first offering. But there's many more coming. So just earlier today we announced the availability of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. This idea of bringing our cloud service, STDC as a service on premises, to customer data centers, to customer edge locations. And the cool part about it, as Jaspreet mentioned, is that this world is becoming more and more distributed and we're seeing that with just the number of STDCs and how they're proliferating everywhere and you do need that centralization in terms, from a management perspective in order to handle all that diversity. And so, that's the big focus for us, in terms of the infrastructure, kind of just the core compute, source, network but you then have to up-level and say, how do you think about the data? And that's really where this partnership comes in. >> Right, so Jaspreet so if I understand that correctly, what you're trying to do here is to provide one data management method, no matter where the data lives. So, I don't have to go and find one tiny thing for, oh okay, I've got this other weird bit in the corner here, that I need a special, dedicated data protection thing for, 'cause that's always difficult. Data protection is hard enough. I really don't need to have, oh how am I going to deal out of this particular thing? Oh, now I've got to go and get another tool. And learn how to use it, maintain it, keep everyone skilled in it. Well actually, I can just pick Druva and then I've solved that problem. >> That's right. I think we are more forward-looking, than backward-looking. So, what we're doing is, any new application comes into an enterprise. Think about, from a point of view of a new cloud, like a VMC, AWS deployment. If you're deploying, you know, a lot of new edge location or data centers or new cloud services, Druva's a perfect partner to bring data management, along with it. For a legacy application that you always had, you can keep your legacy vendor with you. Where it has a con wall, you can keep them as they remain in your enterprise. Bring Druva for the new applications at hence. All the new workload that are more cloud bound workload, is our core focus, hence the VMC partnership. >> Right, so does that mean I'll be able to use Druva wherever VMC is available? >> That's right. >> Yeah. >> Because you're expanding how many places I can get VMC now, I've noticed. >> Yeah, very exciting. >> That's very interesting >> It is, yeah, and I think that's again, the beauty of the partnership, is that we're doing a ton of work to deliver VMC to more and more locations. We've partnered with AWS, and now we've got global coverage, almost all the regions by the end of this calendar year. And now with VMware Cloud on Dell EMC , we can go wherever the customer is. They essentially give us a street address, and we can deliver hardware there and then operate it remotely and they can take advantage of that. And the cool thing about it, that all comes up to this control plan that we have running in the cloud and this is how we can interact with Druva. They can have a few simple APIs they can manage via us to access all those workloads that are distributed all over the place. >> Think of public cloud. Public cloud is nothing but Amazon's, initially was a concept of Amazon applying retail to IT. You can buy a resource anywhere in the globe at a fixed price point at certain SLA. That's the promise of, public cloud promise of VMC to get same VMware experience wherever you go across the world same price point. Same promise with Druva . The same data you put anywhere, can be managed, predicted end-to-end, same policy, same price point across the globe. >> And people often forget that part of it, that we're technologists. So people like to look at that the speeds and feeds and what does the technology do but there's, when you're running a business is actually a lot more to it and pricing models and things that technologists sometimes find boring. I love a good spreadsheet but something as, a simple pricing model where I can understand it and I know what it's going to do for me, was when I spin up a brand new application and I understand how am I going to manage this over the long term, how am I going to protect it, and what's it going to do for the the ROI on that? And what's that going to look like in three years' time? Not just turning up the brand new project. What is the operational cost of that going to look like? These are the kinds of things that people, I think are starting to get a lot more used to now that they particularly with cloud it's a much more operational model. It's not a build model. It's, yes build is one part of it, but you also need to be able to run and manage it >> And think of what we call the world of two ransomwares. There is a ransomware when you're worried about a data breach or data loss and there's another ransomware we have to, your data production vendor or your hardware vendors say is, you know, give me five years of money up front with the promise to manage the data eventually. So in the public cloud world, it's pay-as-you-go on demand. You need a new application you spin up a new workload in VMC in AWS. You need data protection spin up right there and then, no pre-planning, pre-positioning, architecture reviews needed. >> And I think like, the great thing about Druva and what we're talking about here in this consistency of operations. How you're managing data, really goes into the whole strategy that VMware has around driving consistency across infrastructure as well. I think one of the big value propositions that we can help with is taking a lot of this very heterogeneous infrastructure with different capabilities, different hardware form factors and layering on our virtual infrastructure which simplifies a lot of that and delivering that consistent experience. And of course data management as we said is a key part of that experience. >> Yeah, you mentioned kind of the move of VMware towards being more of a SaaS player and working in those environments. One of the flags along that journey is VMware's always had a robust ecosystem. But in the cloud my understanding is you've released now a VMware Cloud Marketplace. Reminds me a little bit of a certain cloud provider that has a very well-known marketplace. Give us a little bit about it, and Jaspreet'll, of course tell us about the Druva piece of that. >> Yeah, absolutely. We're kind of really evolving our strategic aims. Historically we've looked at how do we really virtualize an entire data center? This concept of the software-defined data center. Really automating all that and driving great speed efficiency increases. And now as we've been talking about, we're in this world where you kind of have STDCs everywhere. On Prem, in the cloud, different public clouds. And so how do you really manage across all those? These are things we've been talking about. So the cloud marketplace fits into that whole concept in the sense that now we can give people one place to go to get easy access to both software and solutions from our partners as well as open source solutions, and these are things that come from the Bitnami acquisition that we recently did. So, the idea here is that we cannot make it super simple for customers to become aware of the different solutions to draw those consistent operations that exists on top of our platform and with our partners and then make it really easy for them to consume those as well >> And Druva's part of it. We were day one launch partner on the marketplace. Marketplace serves predominantly two purposes. One is, the ease of E-commerce, you can drive through a marketplace. Second, is the ease of integration. You have a prepackaged solution, which comes along with it. It's a whole beauty of cloud, exactly as I mentioned. We see cloud beyond technology. It's an E-commerce model most companies should adapt to. And as the part of the progress, our commitment is to be in marketplace day one. Druva is right now number one ISP globabally for AWS. So we understand the whole landscape of how E-commerce gets done on public cloud very very well, and we are super thrilled to be a partnership with VMC on the marketplace, the VMC Marketplace. >> It's another one of those important indicators. I think about VMware's Cloud journey. Cloud isn't a destination, it's not a location. It's a way of doing things-- >> Kit: It's a model, yep. >> So having this this marketplace way of consuming software and becoming far more like as you say, it's STDC, but with that software as a service on Earth. You can have STDC as a service. That's probably too many letters in that. >> We use that internally, yes the STDC, AAS (laughs). >> Seeing those features coming to VMware and the partners that you bring in to that ecosystem. And Stu and I we spoke before, it's like VMware is always been a great partner for everyone in that ecosystem and it does have a real ecosystem and we see it again this year at the show. That you have these partners who come in, and you're finding ways to make it easier for those integrations to happen in a nice, easy to consume way and customers like that. So the enterprise is a heterogeneous environment. If you just do one acquisition and all of a sudden, I've got two different ways of doing the same thing. So being able to have known trusted solutions to do that, where I don't have to spend ages and ages figuring out how to, how do I configure this? I don't actually make this do what I need it to do. It's like I'm trying to solve a customer problem. I'm not trying to build technology for its own sake for most of the customers. I just want something that works, and particular with data protection, I just want it to work. >> The owners aren't producing more back abutments. >> No, which, I don't think it should. it's kind of a shame. I used to be a back out man but we don't need anymore of those >> I think this is the idea. You talked in the beginning about this notion of service delivery and how can we take all these STDC's that we have out there that customers are running, and enhance their value and enhance the value to the customer's business by adding on these value-added services. So, I think that's one of the beauties of cloud marketplace is that they can very easily extend what they, customers can extend what they already have with these additional services. >> Jaspreet, VMware's been going through a lot of change. They've made acquisitions. I saw a number of announcements today, that I don't think I would have seen back in the EMC days of you know, some of the data protection solutions being baked into the platform. Tell us what it means to be a VMware partner today. >> I think it's great to see VMware innovating and making strong progress. I think in this world of constant change it can either be in the front end of, you can never never over-innovate. You can be in the front end of, being in the edge, driving change, driving Innovation, driving chain industry or taking a back seat and then be in HPE. So I think I love to see VMware what they're doing and making all the progress and great to be a partner in this change, in this journey to see as a strong partner. >> Yeah, I mean, we're not standing still and it's funny like. So one of the biggest announcements today in my mind is Project Pacific, this re-architecture of vSphere to building Kubernetes into the fabric of what vSphere is. And it's funny when you start looking at that because I think folks have a concept in their mind, of what vSphere is, right? It's VM-based and I have worked with it in certain ways. It's got a certain API or interface and we're fundamentally changing all that. We're rethinking, as I mentioned how we deliver our STDC's, our customers consume them. And so I think that notion of being at the forefront, we're very committed to that >> Kit, I'm glad you broke it up 'cause I'm still having a little trouble thinking through it. Now on the one hand, every company is going through this, we're going to containerize everything, we're going to make it microservices, every infrastructure component, now has that fundamental building block. Docker had a ripple effect on what happens, similar to what VMware had a decade before. But I look at Project Pacific and I'm like well, when Cloud Foundry was originally created, it was, we want back then we called it Paz, but I want a thin layer, and I don't want to pull VMware along for that necessarily. It might fit underneath it, but it might not. So help us understand as to like, how is this not like, a lock into what, you're going to use vSphere and you're going to have your license agreement with us every year and now you're going to be locked into this because this is your Kubernetes platform. >> Yeah, that's a good question. So look, I actually think it drives more openness because Kubernetes is an open platform and we're integrating that in, and we're leveraging the Kubernetes API. And so, the vSphere will have two northbound APIs, one of which is based on the existing VM-based one and the other one which is Kubernetes. And so partially, it's we're actually opening it up. The cool thing about what we can do with Pacific is that we have what, 300, 400000 customers running vSphere. They have an aggregate around 70 million workloads. We're able to take that massive footprint and move it forward almost overnight by building Kubernetes into vSphere. And so the way I look at it, is this is a huge force multiplier for our customers, this ability to move their fleet of applications forward at basically, zero cost, very little cost. And while leveraging all the tools and technologies, they already have. This is another good thing, that our partnership with Druva as well, is that because the way we've architected this, all the tools that use vSphere today and the vSphere's APIs, those APIs will see the Kubernetes pods and things that are provisioned and those tools can operate on those pods just like they can on VMs. And those things just work out of the box. So like if a customer gets specific and uses Druva, and they start provisioning some pods, into Kubernetes on vSphere, Druva will see those they can manage the data, it's all automatic. And of course, Druva can do extra cool things, like even get deeper integration there. But the point is that we've got, you know thousands of partners again who's out of the box that stuff will work. Now is that lock in? No, I actually think that because people are switching over to Kubernetes, they now have the ability to move that to a different Kubernetes environment if they so see fit. Anyway, so that's my quick answer >> Think about the world. Virtualization is practically free right now. What you pay for is the enterprise, once you pay for abstraction level, remove complexity, make my scale happen, and this is where you pay for the whole VMware stack. When the customer start deploying containers, they haven't seen the complexity they would see at scale. When you see the complexity in management and data plane and insecurity plane, then they would need the ecosystem of providers to solve those complexities at scale but as we're a think if Kubernetes takes off and production application, right now it's mostly dev and test, it goes to a production application, the world would need something which is a much more robust sort of control planes to manage it end-to-end >> Yeah, I mean, we solved a lot of the hard problems around running applications in production. And I think what we're doing with Pacific, is enabling all those cool innovations to work not just for existing apps but for new Kubernetes-based apps as well. >> All right, well Kit and Jaspreet, thank you so much. A lot of new things for everybody to dig into and I always appreciate both of you and your teams are very responsive and dig in. Be looking forward to more blog posts and more podcasts from your team and the like, to go into it more. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. We have tons more coverage here at VMworld 2019. Thank you so much for watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat melody) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to Supercloud2. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, here at theCUBE in Palo Alto, California, for our live stage performance all day for Supercloud2. Unpacking this next generation movement in cloud computing. Dave, Supercloud1 was in August. We had great response and acceleration of that momentum. We had some haters too. We had some folks out there throwing shade on this. But at the same time, a lot of leaders came out of the woodwork, a lot of practitioners. And this Supercloud2 event I think will expose and illustrate some of the examples of what's happening in the industry and more importantly, kind of where it's going. >> Well it's great to be back in our studios in Palo Alto, John. Seems like just yesterday was August 9th, where the community was really refining the definition of Super Cloud. We were identifying the essential characteristics, with some of the leading technologists in Silicon Valley. We were digging into the deployment models. Whereas this Supercloud, Supercloud2 is really taking a practitioner view. We're going to hear from Walmart today. They've built a Supercloud. They called it the Walmart Cloud native platform. We're going to hear from other data practitioners, like Saks. We're going to hear from Western Union. They've got 200 locations around the world, how they're dealing with data sovereignty. And of course we've got some local technologists and practitioners coming in, analysts, consultants, theCUBE community. I'm really excited to be here. >> And we've got some great keynotes from executives at VMware. We're going to expose some of the things that they're working on around cross cloud services, which leads into multicloud. I think the practitioner angle highlights my favorite part of this program, 'cause you're starting to see the builders, a term coined by Andy Jassy, early days of AWS. That builder movement has been continuing to go. And you're seeing the enterprise, global enterprises adopt this builder mentality with Cloud Native. This is going to power the next generation global economy. And I think the role of the cloud computing vendors like AWS, Azure, Google, Alibaba are going to be the source engine of innovation. And what gets built on top of and with the clouds will be a big significant market value for all businesses and their business models. So I think the market wants the supercloud, the business models are pointing to Supercloud. The technology needs supercloud. And society, from an economic standpoint and from a use case standpoint, needs supercloud. You're seeing it today. Everyone's talking about chat GPT. This is an example of what will come out of this next generation and it's just getting started. So to me, you're either on the supercloud side of the camp or you're on the old school, hugging onto the old school mentality of wait a minute, that's cloud computing. So I think if you're not on the super cloud wave, you're going to be driftwood. And that's a term coined by Pat Gelsinger. And this is really the reality. Are you on the super cloud side? Or are you on the old huggin' the old model? And that's going to be a determinant. And you're going to see who's going to be the players on that, Dave. This is going to be a real big year. >> Everybody's heard the phrase follow the money. Well, my philosophy is follow the data. And that's a big part of what Supercloud2 is, because the data is where the money is across the clouds. And people want more simplicity, or greater simplicity across the clouds. So it's really, there's two forces here. You've got the ecosystem that's saying, hey the hyperscalers, they've done a great job but there's problems that they're not solving. So we're going to lean in and solve those problems. At the same time, you have the practitioners saying we have multicloud, we have to deal with this, help us. It's got to be simpler. Because we want to share data across clouds. We want to build data products, we want to monetize and drive revenue and cut costs. >> This is the key thing. The builder movement is hitting a wall, and that wall will be broken down because the business models of the companies themselves are demanding that the value from the data with security has to be embedded. So I think you're going to see a big year this next year or so where the builders will accelerate through this next generation, supercloud wave, will be a builder's wave for business. And I think that's going to be the nuance here. And all the people that are on the side of Supercloud are all pro-business, pro-technology. The ones that aren't are like, wait a minute I used to do things differently. They're stuck. And so I think this is going to be a question of are we stuck? Are builders accelerating? Will the business models develop around it? That's digital transformation. At the end of the day, the market's speaking, Dave. The market wants more. Chat GPT, you're seeing AI starting to flourish, powered by data. It's unstoppable, supercloud's unstoppable. >> One of our headliners today is Zhamak Dehghani, the creator of Data Mesh. We've got some news around her. She's going to be live in studio. Super excited about that. Kit Colbert in Supercloud, the first Supercloud in last August, laid out an initial architecture for Supercloud. He's going to advance that today, tell us what's changed, and really dig into and really talk about the meat on the bone, if you will. And we've got some other technologists that are coming in saying, Hey, is it a platform? Is it an architecture? What's the right model here? So we're going to debate that a little bit today. >> And before we close, I'll just say look at the guests, look at the talk tracks. You're seeing a diversity of startups doing cloud networking, you're seeing big practitioners building their own thing, being builders for business value and business model advantages. And you got companies like VMware, who have been on the wave of virtualization. So the, everyone who's involved in super cloud, they're seeing it, they're on the front lines. They're seeing the trend. They are riding that wave. And they have, they're bringing data to the table. So to me, you look at who's involved and you judge it that way. To me, that's the way I look at this. And because we're making it open, Supercloud is going to continue to be debated. But more importantly, the results are going to come in. The market supports it, the business needs it, tech's there, and will it happen? So I think the builders movement, Dave, is going to be big to watch. And then ultimately how that business transformation kicks in, and I think those are the two variables that I would watch on Supercloud. >> Our mission has always been around free content, giving back to the community. So I really want to thank our sponsors today. We've had a great partnership with VMware, who's not only contributed some financial support, but also great content. Alkira, ChaosSearch, prosimo, all phenomenal, allowing us to achieve our mission of serving our audiences and really trying to give more than we take from. >> Free content, that's our mission. Dave, great to kick it off. Kickin' off Supercloud2 all day, we've got some great programs here. We've got VMware coming up next. We have Victoria Viering, who's been on before. He's got a great vision for cross cloud service. We're getting also a keynote with Kit Colbert, who's going to lay out the fragmentation and the benefits that that solves, from solvent fragmentation and silos, breaking down the silos and bringing multicloud future to the table via Super Cloud. So stay with us. We'll be right back after this short break. (bright upbeat music) (music fades)

(gentle music) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto, California for our live stage performance. Supercloud 2 is our second Supercloud event. We're going to get these out as fast as we can every couple months. It's our second one, you'll see two and three this year. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Dave Vellante. A panel here to break down the Supercloud momentum, the wave, and the developer impact that we bringing back Vittorio Viarengo, who's a VP for Cross-Cloud Services at VMware. Sarbjeet Johal, industry influencer and Analyst at StackPayne, his company, Cube alumni and Influencer. Sarbjeet, great to see you. Vittorio, thanks for coming back. >> Nice to be here. >> My pleasure. >> Vittorio, you just gave a keynote where we unpacked the cross-cloud services, what VMware is doing, how you guys see it, not just from VMware's perspective, but VMware looking out broadly at the industry and developers came up and you were like, "Developers, developer, developers", kind of a goof on the Steve Ballmer famous meme that everyone's seen. This is a huge star, sorry, I mean a big piece of it. The developers are the canary in the coal mines. They're the ones who are being asked to code the digital transformation, which is fully business transformation and with the market the way it is right now in terms of the accelerated technology, every enterprise grade business model's changing. The technology is evolving, the builders are kind of, they want go faster. I'm saying they're stuck in a way, but that's my opinion, but there's a lot of growth. >> Yeah. >> The impact, they got to get released up and let it go. Those developers need to accelerate faster. It's been a big part of productivity, and the conversations we've had. So developer impact is huge in Supercloud. What's your, what do you guys think about this? We'll start with you, Sarbjeet. >> Yeah, actually, developers are the masons of the digital empires I call 'em, right? They lay every brick and build all these big empires. On the left side of the SDLC, or the, you know, when you look at the system operations, developer is number one cost from economic side of things, and from technology side of things, they are tech hungry people. They are developers for that reason because developer nights are long, hours are long, they forget about when to eat, you know, like, I've been a developer, I still code. So you want to keep them happy, you want to hug your developers. We always say that, right? Vittorio said that right earlier. The key is to, in this context, in the Supercloud context, is that developers don't mind mucking around with platforms or APIs or new languages, but they hate the infrastructure part. That's a fact. They don't want to muck around with servers. It's friction for them, it is like they don't want to muck around even with the VMs. So they want the programmability to the nth degree. They want to automate everything, so that's how they think and cloud is the programmable infrastructure, industrialization of infrastructure in many ways. So they are happy with where we are going, and we need more abstraction layers for some developers. By the way, I have this sort of thinking frame for last year or so, not all developers are same, right? So if you are a developer at an ISV, you behave differently. If you are a developer at a typical enterprise, you behave differently or you are forced to behave differently because you're not writing software.- >> Well, developers, developers have changed, I mean, Vittorio, you and I were talking earlier on the keynote, and this is kind of the key point is what is a developer these days? If everything is software enabled, I mean, even hardware interviews we do with Nvidia, and Amazon and other people building silicon, they all say the same thing, "It's software on a chip." So you're seeing the role of software up and down the stack and the role of the stack is changing. The old days of full stack developer, what does that even mean? I mean, the cloud is a half a stack kind of right there. So, you know, developers are certainly more agile, but cloud native, I mean VMware is epitome of operations, IT operations, and the Tan Zoo initiative, you guys started, you went after the developers to look at them, and ask them questions, "What do you need?", "How do you transform the Ops from virtualization?" Again, back to your point, so this hardware abstraction, what is software, what is cloud native? It's kind of messy equation these days. How do you guys grokel with that? >> I would argue that developers don't want the Supercloud. I dropped that up there, so, >> Dave: Why not? >> Because developers, they, once they get comfortable in AWS or Google, because they're doing some AI stuff, which is, you know, very trendy right now, or they are in IBM, any of the IPA scaler, professional developers, system developers, they love that stuff, right? Yeah, they don't, the infrastructure gets in the way, but they're just, the problem is, and I think the Supercloud should be driven by the operators because as we discussed, the operators have been left behind because they're busy with day-to-day jobs, and in most cases IT is centralized, developers are in the business units. >> John: Yeah. >> Right? So they get the mandate from the top, say, "Our bank, they're competing against". They gave teenagers or like young people the ability to do all these new things online, and Venmo and all this integration, where are we? "Oh yeah, we can do it", and then build it, and then deploy it, "Okay, we caught up." but now the operators are back in the private cloud trying to keep the backend system running and so I think the Supercloud is needed for the primarily, initially, for the operators to get in front of the developers, fit in the workflow, but lay the foundation so it is secure.- >> So, so I love this thinking because I love the rift, because the rift points to what is the target audience for the value proposition and if you're a developer, Supercloud enables you so you shouldn't have to deal with Supercloud. >> Exactly. >> What you're saying is get the operating environment or operating system done properly, whether it's architecture, building the platform, this comes back to architecture platform conversations. What is the future platform? Is it a vendor supplied or is it customer created platform? >> Dave: So developers want best to breed, is what you just said. >> Vittorio: Yeah. >> Right and operators, they, 'cause developers don't want to deal with governance, they don't want to deal with security, >> No. >> They don't want to deal with spinning up infrastructure. That's the role of the operator, but that's where Supercloud enables, to John's point, the developer, so to your question, is it a platform where the platform vendor is responsible for the architecture, or there is it an architectural standard that spans multiple clouds that has to emerge? Based on what you just presented earlier, Vittorio, you are the determinant of the architecture. It's got to be open, but you guys determine that, whereas the nirvana is, "Oh no, it's all open, and it just kind of works." >> Yeah, so first of all, let's all level set on one thing. You cannot tell developers what to do. >> Dave: Right, great >> At least great developers, right? Cannot tell them what to do. >> Dave: So that's what, that's the way I want to sort of, >> You can tell 'em what's possible. >> There's a bottle on that >> If you tell 'em what's possible, they'll test it, they'll look at it, but if you try to jam it down their throat, >> Yeah. >> Dave: You can't tell 'em how to do it, just like your point >> Let me answer your answer the question. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So I think we need to build an architect, help them build an architecture, but it cannot be proprietary, has to be built on what works in the cloud and so what works in the cloud today is Kubernetes, is you know, number of different open source project that you need to enable and then provide, use this, but when I first got exposed to Kubernetes, I said, "Hallelujah!" We had a runtime that works the same everywhere only to realize there are 12 different distributions. So that's where we come in, right? And other vendors come in to say, "Hey, no, we can make them all look the same. So you still use Kubernetes, but we give you a place to build, to set those operation policy once so that you don't create friction for the developers because that's the last thing you want to do." >> Yeah, actually, coming back to the same point, not all developers are same, right? So if you're ISV developer, you want to go to the lowest sort of level of the infrastructure and you want to shave off the milliseconds from to get that performance, right? If you're working at AWS, you are doing that. If you're working at scale at Facebook, you're doing that. At Twitter, you're doing that, but when you go to DMV and Kansas City, you're not doing that, right? So your developers are different in nature. They are given certain parameters to work with, certain sort of constraints on the budget side. They are educated at a different level as well. Like they don't go to that end of the degree of sort of automation, if you will. So you cannot have the broad stroking of developers. We are talking about a citizen developer these days. That's a extreme low, >> You mean Low-Code. >> Yeah, Low-Code, No-code, yeah, on the extreme side. On one side, that's citizen developers. On the left side is the professional developers, when you say developers, your mind goes to the professional developers, like the hardcore developers, they love the flexibility, you know, >> John: Well app, developers too, I mean. >> App developers, yeah. >> You're right a lot of, >> Sarbjeet: Infrastructure platform developers, app developers, yes. >> But there are a lot of customers, its a spectrum, you're saying. >> Yes, it's a spectrum >> There's a lot of customers don't want deal with that muck. >> Yeah. >> You know, like you said, AWS, Twitter, the sophisticated developers do, but there's a whole suite of developers out there >> Yeah >> That just want tools that are abstracted. >> Within a company, within a company. Like how I see the Supercloud is there shouldn't be anything which blocks the developers, like their view of the world, of the future. Like if you're blocked as a developer, like something comes in front of you, you are not developer anymore, believe me, (John laughing) so you'll go somewhere else >> John: First of all, I'm, >> You'll leave the company by the way. >> Dave: Yeah, you got to quit >> Yeah, you will quit, you will go where the action is, where there's no sort of blockage there. So like if you put in front of them like a huge amount of a distraction, they don't like it, so they don't, >> Well, the idea of a developer, >> Coming back to that >> Let's get into 'cause you mentioned platform. Get year in the term platform engineering now. >> Yeah. >> Platform developer. You know, I remember back in, and I think there's still a term used today, but when I graduated my computer science degree, we were called "Software engineers," right? Do people use that term "Software engineering", or is it "Software development", or they the same, are they different? >> Well, >> I think there's a, >> So, who's engineering what? Are they engineering or are they developing? Or both? Well, I think it the, you made a great point. There is a factor of, I had the, I was blessed to work with Adam Bosworth, that is the guy that created some of the abstraction layer, like Visual Basic and Microsoft Access and he had so, he made his whole career thinking about this layer, and he always talk about the professional developers, the developers that, you know, give him a user manual, maybe just go at the APIs, he'll build anything, right, from system engine, go down there, and then through obstruction, you get the more the procedural logic type of engineers, the people that used to be able to write procedural logic and visual basic and so on and so forth. I think those developers right now are a little cut out of the picture. There's some No-code, Low-Code environment that are maybe gain some traction, I caught up with Adam Bosworth two weeks ago in New York and I asked him "What's happening to this higher level developers?" and you know what he is told me, and he is always a little bit out there, so I'm going to use his thought process here. He says, "ChapGPT", I mean, they will get to a point where this high level procedural logic will be written by, >> John: Computers. >> Computers, and so we may not need as many at the high level, but we still need the engineers down there. The point is the operation needs to get in front of them >> But, wait, wait, you seen the ChatGPT meme, I dunno if it's a Dilbert thing where it's like, "Time to tic" >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, I did that >> "Time to develop the code >> Five minutes, time to decode", you know, to debug the codes like five hours. So you know, the whole equation >> Well, this ChatGPT is a hot wave, everyone's been talking about it because I think it illustrates something that's NextGen, feels NextGen, and it's just getting started so it's going to get better. I mean people are throwing stones at it, but I think it's amazing. It's the equivalent of me seeing the browser for the first time, you know, like, "Wow, this is really compelling." This is game-changing, it's not just keyword chat bots. It's like this is real, this is next level, and I think the Supercloud wave that people are getting behind points to that and I think the question of Ops and Dev comes up because I think if you limit the infrastructure opportunity for a developer, I think they're going to be handicapped. I mean that's a general, my opinion, the thesis is you give more aperture to developers, more choice, more capabilities, more good things could happen, policy, and that's why you're seeing the convergence of networking people, virtualization talent, operational talent, get into the conversation because I think it's an infrastructure engineering opportunity. I think this is a seminal moment in a new stack that's emerging from an infrastructure, software virtualization, low-code, no-code layer that will be completely programmable by things like the next Chat GPT or something different, but yet still the mechanics and the plumbing will still need engineering. >> Sarbjeet: Oh yeah. >> So there's still going to be more stuff coming on. >> Yeah, we have, with the cloud, we have made the infrastructure programmable and you give the programmability to the programmer, they will be very creative with that and so we are being very creative with our infrastructure now and on top of that, we are being very creative with the silicone now, right? So we talk about that. That's part of it, by the way. So you write the code to the particle's silicone now, and on the flip side, the silicone is built for certain use cases for AI Inference and all that. >> You saw this at CES? >> Yeah, I saw at CES, the scenario is this, the Bosch, I spoke to Bosch, I spoke to John Deere, I spoke to AWS guys, >> Yeah. >> They were showcasing their technology there and I was spoke to Azure guys as well. So the Bosch is a good example. So they are building, they are right now using AWS. I have that interview on camera, I will put it some sometime later on there online. So they're using AWS on the back end now, but Bosch is the number one, number one or number two depending on what day it is of the year, supplier of the componentry to the auto industry, and they are creating a platform for our auto industry, so is Qualcomm actually by the way, with the Snapdragon. So they told me that customers, their customers, BMW, Audi, all the manufacturers, they demand the diversity of the backend. Like they don't want all, they, all of them don't want to go to AWS. So they want the choice on the backend. So whatever they cook in the middle has to work, they have to sprinkle the data for the data sovereign side because they have Chinese car makers as well, and for, you know, for other reasons, competitive reasons and like use. >> People don't go to, aw, people don't go to AWS either for political reasons or like competitive reasons or specific use cases, but for the most part, generally, I haven't met anyone who hasn't gone first choice with either, but that's me personally. >> No, but they're building. >> Point is the developer wants choice at the back end is what I'm hearing, but then finish that thought. >> Their developers want the choice, they want the choice on the back end, number one, because the customers are asking for, in this case, the customers are asking for it, right? But the customers requirements actually drive, their economics drives that decision making, right? So in the middle they have to, they're forced to cook up some solution which is vendor neutral on the backend or multicloud in nature. So >> Yeah, >> Every >> I mean I think that's nirvana. I don't think, I personally don't see that happening right now. I mean, I don't see the parody with clouds. So I think that's a challenge. I mean, >> Yeah, true. >> I mean the fact of the matter is if the development teams get fragmented, we had this chat with Kit Colbert last time, I think he's going to come on and I think he's going to talk about his keynote in a few, in an hour or so, development teams is this, the cloud is heterogenous, which is great. It's complex, which is challenging. You need skilled engineering to manage these clouds. So if you're a CIO and you go all in on AWS, it's hard. Then to then go out and say, "I want to be completely multi-vendor neutral" that's a tall order on many levels and this is the multicloud challenge, right? So, the question is, what's the strategy for me, the CIO or CISO, what do I do? I mean, to me, I would go all in on one and start getting hedges and start playing and then look at some >> Crystal clear. Crystal clear to me. >> Go ahead. >> If you're a CIO today, you have to build a platform engineering team, no question. 'Cause if we agree that we cannot tell the great developers what to do, we have to create a platform engineering team that using pieces of the Supercloud can build, and let's make this very pragmatic and give examples. First you need to be able to lay down the run time, okay? So you need a way to deploy multiple different Kubernetes environment in depending on the cloud. Okay, now we got that. The second part >> That's like table stakes. >> That are table stake, right? But now what is the advantage of having a Supercloud service to do that is that now you can put a policy in one place and it gets distributed everywhere consistently. So for example, you want to say, "If anybody in this organization across all these different buildings, all these developers don't even know, build a PCI compliant microservice, They can only talk to PCI compliant microservice." Now, I sleep tight. The developers still do that. Of course they're going to get their hands slapped if they don't encrypt some messages and say, "Oh, that should have been encrypted." So number one. The second thing I want to be able to say, "This service that this developer built over there better satisfy this SLA." So if the SLA is not satisfied, boom, I automatically spin up multiple instances to certify the SLA. Developers unencumbered, they don't even know. So this for me is like, CIO build a platform engineering team using one of the many Supercloud services that allow you to do that and lay down. >> And part of that is that the vendor behavior is such, 'cause the incentive is that they don't necessarily always work together. (John chuckling) I'll give you an example, we're going to hear today from Western Union. They're AWS shop, but they want to go to Google, they want to use some of Google's AI tools 'cause they're good and maybe they're even arguably better, but they're also a Snowflake customer and what you'll hear from them is Amazon and Snowflake are working together so that SageMaker can be integrated with Snowflake but Google said, "No, you want to use our AI tools, you got to use BigQuery." >> Yeah. >> Okay. So they say, "Ah, forget it." So if you have a platform engineering team, you can maybe solve some of that vendor friction and get competitive advantage. >> I think that the future proximity concept that I talk about is like, when you're doing one thing, you want to do another thing. Where do you go to get that thing, right? So that is very important. Like your question, John, is that your point is that AWS is ahead of the pack, which is true, right? They have the >> breadth of >> Infrastructure by a lot >> infrastructure service, right? They breadth of services, right? So, how do you, When do you bring in other cloud providers, right? So I believe that you should standardize on one cloud provider, like that's your primary, and for others, bring them in on as needed basis, in the subsection or sub portfolio of your applications or your platforms, what ever you can. >> So yeah, the Google AI example >> Yeah, I mean, >> Or the Microsoft collaboration software example. I mean there's always or the M and A. >> Yeah, but- >> You're going to get to run Windows, you can run Windows on Amazon, so. >> By the way, Supercloud doesn't mean that you cannot do that. So the perfect example is say that you're using Azure because you have a SQL server intensive workload. >> Yep >> And you're using Google for ML, great. If you are using some differentiated feature of this cloud, you'll have to go somewhere and configure this widget, but what you can abstract with the Supercloud is the lifecycle manage of the service that runs on top, right? So how does the service get deployed, right? How do you monitor performance? How do you lifecycle it? How you secure it that you can abstract and that's the value and eventually value will win. So the customers will find what is the values, obstructing in making it uniform or going deeper? >> How about identity? Like take identity for instance, you know, that's an opportunity to abstract. Whether I use Microsoft Identity or Okta, and I can abstract that. >> Yeah, and then we have APIs and standards that we can use so eventually I think where there is enough pain, the right open source will emerge to solve that problem. >> Dave: Yeah, I can use abstract things like object store, right? That's pretty simple. >> But back to the engineering question though, is that developers, developers, developers, one thing about developers psychology is if something's not right, they say, "Go get fixing. I'm not touching it until you fix it." They're very sticky about, if something's not working, they're not going to do it again, right? So you got to get it right for developers. I mean, they'll maybe tolerate something new, but is the "juice worth the squeeze" as they say, right? So you can't go to direct say, "Hey, it's, what's a work in progress? We're going to get our infrastructure together and the world's going to be great for you, but just hang tight." They're going to be like, "Get your shit together then talk to me." So I think that to me is the question. It's an Ops question, but where's that value for the developer in Supercloud where the capabilities are there, there's less friction, it's simpler, it solves the complexity problem. I don't need these high skilled labor to manage Amazon. I got services exposed. >> That's what we talked about earlier. It's like the Walmart example. They basically, they took away from the developer the need to spin up infrastructure and worry about all the governance. I mean, it's not completely there yet. So the developer could focus on what he or she wanted to do. >> But there's a big, like in our industry, there's a big sort of flaw or the contention between developers and operators. Developers want to be on the cutting edge, right? And operators want to be on the stability, you know, like we want governance. >> Yeah, totally. >> Right, so they want to control, developers are like these little bratty kids, right? And they want Legos, like they want toys, right? Some of them want toys by way. They want Legos, they want to build there and they want make a mess out of it. So you got to make sure. My number one advice in this context is that do it up your application portfolio and, or your platform portfolio if you are an ISV, right? So if you are ISV you most probably, you're building a platform these days, do it up in a way that you can say this portion of our applications and our platform will adhere to what you are saying, standardization, you know, like Kubernetes, like slam dunk, you know, it works across clouds and in your data center hybrid, you know, whole nine yards, but there is some subset on the next door systems of innovation. Everybody has, it doesn't matter if you're DMV of Kansas or you are, you know, metaverse, right? Or Meta company, right, which is Facebook, they have it, they are building something new. For that, give them some freedom to choose different things like play with non-standard things. So that is the mantra for moving forward, for any enterprise. >> Do you think developers are happy with the infrastructure now or are they wanting people to get their act together? I mean, what's your reaction, or you think. >> Developers are happy as long as they can do their stuff, which is running code. They want to write code and innovate. So to me, when Ballmer said, "Developer, develop, Developer, what he meant was, all you other people get your act together so these developers can do their thing, and to me the Supercloud is the way for IT to get there and let developer be creative and go fast. Why not, without getting in trouble. >> Okay, let's wrap up this segment with a super clip. Okay, we're going to do a sound bite that we're going to make into a short video for each of you >> All right >> On you guys summarizing why Supercloud's important, why this next wave is relevant for the practitioners, for the industry and we'll turn this into an Instagram reel, YouTube short. So we'll call it a "Super clip. >> Alright, >> Sarbjeet, you want, you want some time to think about it? You want to go first? Vittorio, you want. >> I just didn't mind. (all laughing) >> No, okay, okay. >> I'll do it again. >> Go back. No, we got a fresh one. We'll going to already got that one in the can. >> I'll go. >> Sarbjeet, you go first. >> I'll go >> What's your super clip? >> In software systems, abstraction is your friend. I always say that. Abstraction is your friend, even if you're super professional developer, abstraction is your friend. We saw from the MFC library from C++ days till today. Abstract, use abstraction. Do not try to reinvent what's already being invented. Leverage cloud, leverage the platform side of the cloud. Not just infrastructure service, but platform as a service side of the cloud as well, and Supercloud is a meta platform built on top of these infrastructure services from three or four or five cloud providers. So use that and embrace the programmability, embrace the abstraction layer. That's the key actually, and developers who are true developers or professional developers as you said, they know that. >> Awesome. Great super clip. Vittorio, another shot at the plate here for super clip. Go. >> Multicloud is awesome. There's a reason why multicloud happened, is because gave our developers the ability to innovate fast and ever before. So if you are embarking on a digital transformation journey, which I call a survival journey, if you're not innovating and transforming, you're not going to be around in business three, five years from now. You have to adopt the Supercloud so the developer can be developer and keep building great, innovating digital experiences for your customers and IT can get in front of it and not get in trouble together. >> Building those super apps with Supercloud. That was a great super clip. Vittorio, thank you for sharing. >> Thanks guys. >> Sarbjeet, thanks for coming on talking about the developer impact Supercloud 2. On our next segment, coming up right now, we're going to hear from Walmart enterprise architect, how they are building and they are continuing to innovate, to build their own Supercloud. Really informative, instructive from a practitioner doing it in real time. Be right back with Walmart here in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(intro music plays) >> Okay, welcome back to Supercloud 2. I'm John Furrier with my co-host, Dave Vellante, here in our Palo Alto Studio, with a live performance all day unpacking the wave of Supercloud. This is our second edition. Back for keynote review here is Vittorio Viarengo, talking about the hype and the reality of the Supercloud momentum. Vittorio, great to see you. You got a presentation. Looking forward to hearing the update. >> It's always great to be here on this stage with you guys. >> John Furrier: (chuckles) So the business imperative for cloud right now is clear and the Supercloud wave points to the builders and they want to break through. VMware, you guys have a lot of builders in the ecosystem. Where do you guys see multicloud today? What's going on? >> So, what we see is, when we talk with our customers is that customers are in a state of cloud chaos. Raghu Raghuram, our CEO, introduced this term at our user conference and it really resonated with our customers. And the chaos comes from the fact that most enterprises have applications spread across private cloud, multiple hyperscalers, and the edge increasingly. And so with that, every hyperscaler brings their own vertical integrated stack of infrastructure development, platform security, and so on and so forth. And so our customers are left with a ballooning cost because they have to train their employees across multiple stacks. And the costs are only going up. >> John Furrier: Have you talked about the Supercloud with your customers? What are they looking for when they look at the business value of Cross-Cloud Services? Why are they digging into it? What are some of the reasons? >> First of all, let's put this in perspective. 90, 87% of customers use two or more cloud including the private cloud. And 55%, get this, 55% use three or more clouds, right? And so, when you talk to these customers they're all asking for two things. One, they find that managing the multicloud is more difficult than the private cloud. And that goes without saying because it's new, they don't have the skills, and they have many of these. And pretty much everybody, 87% of them, are seeing their cost getting out of control. And so they need a new approach. We believe that the industry needs a new approach to solving the multicloud problem, which you guys have introduced and you call it the Supercloud. We call it Cross-Cloud Services. But the idea is that- and the parallel goes back to the private cloud. In the private cloud, if you remember the old days, before we called it the private cloud, we would install SAP. And the CIO would go, "Oh, I hear SAP works great on HP hardware. Oh, let's buy the HP stack", right? (hosts laugh) And then you go, "Oh, oh, Oracle databases. They run phenomenally on Sun Stack." That's another stack. And it wasn't sustainable, right? And so, VMware came in with virtualization and made everything look the same. And we unleashed a tremendous era of growth and speed and cost saving for our customers. So we believe, and I think the industry also believes, if you look at the success of Supercloud, first instance and today, that we need to create a new level of abstraction in the cloud. And this abstraction needs to be at a higher level. It needs to be built around the lingua franca of the cloud, which is Kubernetes, APIs, open source stacks. And by doing so, we're going to allow our customers to have a more unified way of building, managing, running, connecting, and securing applications across cloud. >> So where should that standardization occur? 'Cause we're going to hear from some customers today. When I ask them about cloud chaos, they're like, "Well, the way we deal with cloud chaos is MonoCloud". They sort of put on the blinders, right? But of course, they may be risking not being able to take advantage of best-of-breed. So where should that standardization layer occur across clouds? >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Well, I also hear that from some customers. "Oh, we are one cloud". They are in denial. There's no question about it. In fact, when I met at our user conference with a number of CIOs, and I went around the room and I asked them, I saw the entire spectrum. (laughs) The person is in denial. "Oh, we're using AWS." I said, "Great." "And the private cloud, so we're all set." "Okay, thank you. Next." "Oh, the business units are using AWS." "Ah, okay. So you have three." "Oh, and we just bought a company that is using Google back in Europe." So, okay, so you got four right there. So that person in denial. Then, you have the second category of customers that are seeing the problem, they're ahead of the pack, and they're building their solution. We're going to hear from Walmart later today. >> Dave Vellante: Yeah. >> So they're building their own. Not everybody has the skills and the scale of Walmart to build their own. >> Dave Vellante: Right. >> So, eventually, then you get to the third category of customers. They're actually buying solutions from one of the many ISVs that you are going to talk with today. You know, whether it is Azure Corp or Snowflake or all this. I will argue, any new company, any new ISV, is by definition a multicloud service company, right? And so these people... Or they're buying our Cross-Cloud Services to solve this problem. So that's the spectrum of customers out there. >> What's the stack you're focusing on specifically? What is VMware? Because virtualization is not going away. You're seeing a lot more in the cloud with networking, for example, this abstraction layer. What specifically are you guys focusing on? >> [Vittorio Viarengo] So, I like to talk about this beyond what VMware does, just 'cause I think this is an industry movement. A market is forming around multicloud services. And so it's an approach that pretty much a whole industry is taking of building this abstraction layer. In our approach, it is to bring these services together to simplify things even further. So, initially, we were the first to see multicloud happening. You know, Raghu and Sanjay, back in what, like 2016, 17, saw this coming and our first foray in multicloud was to take this sphere and our hypervisor and port it natively on all the hyperscaling, which is a phenomenal solution to get your enterprise application in the cloud and modernize them. But then we realized that customers were already in the cloud natively. And so we had to have (all chuckle) a religion discussion internally and drop that hypervisor religion and say, "Hey, we need to go and help our customers where they are, in a native cloud". And that's where we brought back Pivotal. We built tons around it. We shifted. And then Aria. And so basically, our evolution was to go from, you know, our hypervisor to cloud native. And then eventually we ended up at what we believe is the most comprehensive multicloud services solution that covers Application Development with Tanzu, Management with Aria, and then you have NSX for security and user computing for connectivity. And so we believe that we have the most comprehensive set of integrated services to solve the challenges of multicloud, bringing excess simplicity into the picture. >> John Furrier: As some would say, multicloud and multi environment, when you get to the distributed computing with the edge, you're going to need that capability. And you guys have been very successful with private cloud. But to be devil's advocate, you guys have been great with private cloud, but some are saying like, you guys don't get public cloud yet. How do you answer that? Because there's a lot of work that you guys have done in public cloud and it seems like private cloud successes are moving up into public cloud. Like networking. You're seeing a lot of that being configured in. So the enterprise-grade solutions are moving into the cloud. So what would you say to the skeptics out there that say, "Oh, I think you got private cloud nailed down, but you don't really have public cloud." (chuckles) >> [Vittorio Viarengo] First of all, we love skeptics. Our engineering team love skeptics and love to prove them wrong. (John laughs) And I would never ever bet against our engineering team. So I believe that VMware has been so successful in building a private cloud and the technology that actually became the foundation for the public cloud. But that is always hard, to be known in a new environment, right? There's always that period where you have to prove yourself. But what I love about VMware is that VMware has what I believe, what I like to call "enterprise pragmatism". The private cloud is not going away. So we're going to help our customers there, and then, as they move to the cloud, we are going to give them an option to adopt the cloud at their own pace, with VMware cloud, to allow them to move to the cloud and be able to rely on the enterprise-class capabilities we built on-prem in the cloud. But then with Tanzu and Aria and the rest of the Cross-Cloud Service portfolio, being able to meet them where they are. If they're already in the cloud, have them have a single place to build application, a single place to manage application, and so on and so forth. >> John Furrier: You know, Dave, we were talking in the opening. Vittorio, I want to get your reaction to this because we were saying in the opening that the market's obviously pushing this next gen. You see ChatGPT and the success of these new apps that are coming out. The business models are demanding kind of a digital transformation. The tech, the builders, are out there, and you guys have a interesting view because your customer base is almost the canary in the coal mine because this is an Operations challenge as well as just enabling the cloud native. So, I want to get your thoughts on, you know, your customer base, VMware customers. They've been in IT Ops for generations. And now, as that crowd moves and sees this Supercloud environment, it's IT again, but it's everywhere. It's not just IT in a data center. It's on-premises, it's cloud, it's edge. So, almost, your customer base is like a canary in the coal mine for this movement of how do you operationalize multiple environments? Which includes clouds, which includes apps. I mean, this is the core question. >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Yeah. And I want to make this an industry conversation. Forget about VMware for a second. We believe that there are like four or five major pillars that you need to implement to create this level of abstraction. It starts from observability. If you don't know- You need to know where your apps are, where your data is, how the the applications are performing, what is the security posture, what is their performance? So then, you can do something about it. We call that the observability part of this, creating this abstraction. The second one is security. So you need to be- Sorry. Infrastructure. An infrastructure. Creating an abstraction layer for infrastructure means to be able to give the applications, and the developer who builds application, the right infrastructure for the application at the right time. Whether it is a VM, whether it's a Kubernetes cluster, or whether it's microservices, and so on and so forth. And so, that allows our developers to think about infrastructure just as code. If it is available, whatever application needs, whatever the cost makes sense for my application, right? The third part of security, and I can give you a very, very simple example. Say that I was talking to a CIO of a major insurance company in Europe and he is saying to me, "The developers went wild, built all these great front office applications. Now the business is coming to me and says, 'What is my compliance report?'" And the guy is saying, "Say that I want to implement the policy that says, 'I want to encrypt all my data no matter where it resides.' How does it do it? It needs to have somebody logging in into Amazon and configure it, then go to Google, configure it, go to the private cloud." That's time and cost, right? >> Yeah. >> So, you need to have a way to enforce security policy from the infrastructure to the app to the firewall in one place and distribute it across. And finally, the developer experience, right? Developers, developers, developers. (all laugh) We're always trying to keep up with... >> Host: You can dance if you want to do... >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Yeah, let's not make a fool of ourselves. More than usual. Developers are the kings and queens of the hill. They are. Why? Because they build the application. They're making us money and saving us money. And so we need- And right now, they have to go into these different stacks. So, you need to give developers two things. One, a common development experience across this different Kubernetes distribution. And two, a way for the operators. To your point. The operators have fallen behind the developers. And they cannot go to the developer there and tell them, "This is how you're going to do things." They have to see how they're doing things and figure out how to bring the gallery underneath so that developers can be developers, but the operators can lay down the tracks and the infrastructure there is secure and compliant. >> Dave Vellante: So two big inferences from that. One is self-serve infrastructure. You got- In a decentralized cloud, a Supercloud world, you got to have self-serve infrastructure, you got to be simple. And the second is governance. You mentioned security, but it's also governance. You know, data sovereignty as we talked about. So the question I have, Vittorio, is where does the customer start? >> [Vittorio Viarengo] So I, it always depends on the business need, but to me, the foundational layer is observability. If you don't know where your staff is, you cannot manage, you cannot secure it, you cannot manage its cost, right? So I think observability is the bar to entry. And then it depends on the business needs, right? So, we go back to the CIO that I talked to. He is clearly struggling with compliance and security. >> Hosts: Mm hmm. >> And so, like many customers. And so, that's maybe where they start. There are other customers that are a little behind the head of the pack in terms of building applications, right? And so they're looking at these, you know, innovative companies that have the developers that get the cloud and build all these application. They are leader in the industry. They're saying, "How do I get some of that?" Well, the way you get some of that is by adopting modern application development and platform operational capabilities. So, that's maybe, that's where they should start. And so on and so forth. It really depends on the business. To me, observability is the foundational part of this. >> John Furrier: Vittorio, we've been on this conversation with you for over a year and a half now with Supercloud. You've been a leader in seeing the wave, you and Raghu and the team at VMware, among other industry leaders. This is our second event. If you're- In the minute and a half that we have left, when you get asked, "what is this Supercloud multicloud Cross-Cloud thing? What's it mean?" I mean, I mentioned earlier, the market, the business models are changing, tech's changing, society needs more economic value out of the cloud. Builders are out there. If someone says, "Hey, Vittorio, what's the bottom line? What's really going on? Why should I pay attention to this wave? What's going on?" How would you describe the relevance of Supercloud? >> I think that this industry is full of smart vendors and smart customers. And if we are smart about it, we look at the history of IT and the history of IT repeats itself over and over again. You follow the- He said, "Follow the money." I say, "Follow the developers." That's how I made my career. I follow great developers. I look at, you know, Kit Colbert. I say, "Okay. I'm going to get behind that guy wherever he is going." And I try to add value to that person. I look at Raghu and all the great engineers that I was blessed to work with. And so the engineers go and explore new territories and then the rest of the stacks moves around. The developers have gone multicloud. And just like in any iteration of IT, at some point, the way you get the right scales at the right cost is with abstractions. And you can see it everywhere from, you know, bits and bytes, integration, to SOA, to APIs and microservices. You can see it now from best-of-breed hyperscaler across multiple clouds to creating an abstraction layer, a Supercloud, that creates a unified way of building, managing, running, securing, and accessing applications. So if you're a customer- (laughs) A minute and a half. (hosts chuckle) If you are customers that are out there and feeling the pain, you got to adopt this. If you are customers that is behind and saying, "Maybe you're in denial" look at the customers that are solving the problems today, and we're going to have some today. See what they're doing and learn from them so you don't make the same mistakes and you can get there ahead of it. >> Dave Vellante: Gracely's Law, John. Brian Gracely. That history repeats itself and- >> John Furrier: And I think one of these, "follow the developers" is interesting. And the other big wave, I want to get your comment real quick, is that developers aren't just application developers. They're network developers. The stack has completely been software-enabled so that you have software-defined networking, you have all kinds of software at all aspects of observability, infrastructure, security. The developers are everywhere. It's not just software. Software is everywhere. >> [Vittorio Viarengo] Yeah. Developers, developers, developers. The other thing that we can tell, I can tell, and we know, because we live in Silicon Valley. We worship developers but if you are out there in manufacturing, healthcare... If you have developers that understand this stuff, pamper them, keep them happy. (hosts laugh) If you don't have them, figure out where they hang out and go recruit them because developers indeed make the IT world go round. >> John Furrier: Vittorio, thank you for coming on with that opening keynote here for Supercloud 2. We're going to unpack what Supercloud is all about in our second edition of our live performance here in Palo Alto. Virtual event. We're going to talk to customers, experts, leaders, investors, everyone who's looking at the future, what's being enabled by this new big wave coming on called Supercloud. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break. (ambient theme music plays)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to Supercloud 2, live here in Palo Alto, our studio, where we're doing a live stage performance and virtually syndicating out around the world. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, my co-host with the The Cube here. We've got Kit Colbert, the CTO of VM. We're doing a keynote on Cloud Chaos, the evolution of SuperCloud Architecture Kit. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Yeah, thanks for having me back. It's great to be here for Supercloud 2. >> And so we're going to dig into it. We're going to do a Q&A. We're going to let you present. You got some slides. I really want to get this out there, it's really compelling story. Do the presentation and then we'll come back and discuss. Take it away. >> Yeah, well thank you. So, we had a great time at the original Supercloud event, since then, been talking to a lot of customers, and started to better formulate some of the thinking that we talked about last time So, let's jump into it. Just a few quick slides to sort of set the tone here. So, if we go to the the next slide, what that shows is the journey that we see customers on today, going from what we call Cloud First into this phase that many customers are stuck in, called Cloud Chaos, and where they want to get to, and this is the term customers actually use, we didn't make this up, we heard it from customers. This notion of Cloud Smart, right? How do they use cloud more effectively, more intelligently? Now, if you walk through this journey, customers start with Cloud First. They usually select a single cloud that they're going to standardize on, and when they do that, they have to build out a whole bunch of functionality around that cloud. Things you can see there on the screen, disaster recovery, security, how do they monitor it or govern it? Like, these are things that are non-negotiable, you've got to figure it out, and typically what they do is, they leverage solutions that are specific for that cloud, and that's fine when you have just one cloud. But if we build out here, what we see is that most customers are using more than just one, they're actually using multiple, not necessarily 10 or however many on the screen, but this is just as an example. And so what happens is, they have to essentially duplicate or replicate that stack they've built for each different cloud, and they do so in a kind of a siloed manner. This results in the Cloud Chaos term that that we talked about before. And this is where most businesses out there are, they're using two, maybe three public clouds. They've got some stuff on-prem and they've also got some stuff out at the edge. This is apps, data, et cetera. So, this is the situation, this is sort of that Cloud Chaos. So, the question is, how do we move from this phase to Cloud Smart? And this is where the architecture comes in. This is why architecture, I think, is so important. It's really about moving away from these single cloud services that just solve a problem for one cloud, to something we call a Cross-Cloud service. Something that can support a set of functionality across all clouds, and that means not just public clouds, but also private clouds, edge, et cetera, and when you evolve that across the board, what you get is this sort of Supercloud. This notion that we're talking about here, where you combine these cross-cloud services in many different categories. You can see some examples there on the screen. This is not meant to be a complete set of things, but just examples of what can be done. So, this is sort of the transition and transformation that we're talking about here, and I think the architecture piece comes in both for the individual cloud services as well as that Supercloud concept of how all those services come together. >> Great presentation., thanks for sharing. If you could pop back to that slide, on the Cloud Chaos one. I just want to get your thoughts on something there. This is like the layout of the stack. So, this slide here that I'm showing on the screen, that you presented, okay, take us through that complexity. This is the one where I wanted though, that looks like a spaghetti code mix. >> Yes. >> So, do you turn this into a Supercloud stack, right? Is that? >> well, I think it's, it's an evolving state that like, let's take one of these examples, like security. So, instead of implementing security individually in different ways, using different technologies, different tooling for each cloud, what you would do is say, "Hey, I want a single security solution that works across all clouds", right? A concrete example of this would be secure software supply chain. This is probably one of the top ones that I hear when I talk to customers. How do I know that the software I'm building is truly what I expect it to be, and not something that some hacker has gotten into, and polluted with malicious code? And what they do is that, typically today, their teams have gone off and created individual secure software supply chain solutions for each cloud. So, now they could say, "Hey, I can take a single implementation and just have different endpoints." It could go to Google, or AWS, or on-prem, or wherever have you, right? So, that's the sort of architectural evolution that we're talking about. >> You know, one of the things we hear, Dave, you've been on theCUBE all the time, and we, when we talk privately with customers who are asking us like, what's, what's going on? They have the same complaint, "I don't want to build a team, a dev team, for that stack." So, if you go back to that slide again, you'll see that, that illustrates the tech stack for the clouds and the clouds at the bottom. So, the number one complaint we hear, and I want to get your reaction to that, "I don't want to have a team to have to work on that. So, I'm going to pick one and then have a hedge secondary one, as a backup." Here, that's one, that's four, five, eight, ten, ten environments. >> Yeah, I got a lot. >> That's going to be the reality, so, what's the technical answer to that? >> Yeah, well first of all, let me just say, this picture is again not totally representative of reality oftentimes, because while that picture shows a solution for every cloud, oftentimes that's not the case. Oftentimes it's a line of business going off, starting to use a new cloud. They might solve one or two things, but usually not security, usually not some of these other things, right? So, I think from a technical standpoint, where you want to get to is, yes, that sort of common service, with a common operational team behind it, that is trained on that, that can work across clouds. And that's really I think the important evolution here, is that you don't need to replicate these operational teams, one for each cloud. You can actually have them more focused across all those clouds. >> Yeah, in fact, we were commenting on the opening today. Dave and I were talking about the benefits of the cloud. It's heterogeneous, which is a good thing, but it's complex. There's skill gaps and skill required, but at the end of the day, self-service of the cloud, and the elastic nature of it makes it the benefit. So, if you try to create too many common services, you lose the value of the cloud. So, what's the trade off, in your mind right now as customers start to look at okay, identity, maybe I'll have one single sign on, that's an obvious one. Other ones? What are the areas people are looking at from a combination, common set of services? Where do they start? What's the choices? What are some of the trade offs? 'Cause you can't do it everything. >> No, it's a great question. So, that's actually a really good point and as I answer your question, before I answer your question, the important point about that, as you saw here, you know, across cloud services or these set of Cross-Cloud services, the things that comprise the Supercloud, at least in my view, the point is not necessarily to completely abstract the underlying cloud. The point is to give a business optionality and choice, in terms of what it wants to abstract, and I think that gets to your question, is how much do you actually want to abstract from the underlying cloud? Now, what I find, is that typically speaking, cloud choice is driven at least from a developer or app team perspective, by the best of breed services. What higher level application type services do you need? A database or AI, you know, ML systems, for your application, and that's going to drive your choice of the cloud. So oftentimes, businesses I talk to, want to allow those services to shine through, but for other things that are not necessarily highly differentiated and yet are absolutely critical to creating a successful application, those are things that you want to standardize. Again, like things like security, the supply chain piece, cost management, like these things you need to, and you know, things like cogs become really, really important when you start operating at scale. So, those are the things in it that I see people wanting to focus on. >> So, there's a majority model. >> Yes. >> All right, and we heard of earlier from Walmart, who's fairly, you know, advanced, but at the same time their supercloud is pretty immature. So, what are you seeing in terms of supercloud momentum, crosscloud momentum? What's the starting point for customers? >> Yeah, so it's interesting, right, on that that three-tiered journey that I talked about, this Cloud Smart notion is, that is adoption of what you might call a supercloud or architecture, and most folks aren't there yet. Even the really advanced ones, even the really large ones, and I think it's because of the fact that, we as an industry are still figuring this out. We as an industry did not realize this sort of Cloud Chaos state could happen, right? We didn't, I think most folks thought they could standardize on one cloud and that'd be it, but as time has shown, that's simply not the case. As much as one might try to do that, that's not where you end up. So, I think there's two, there's two things here. Number one, for folks that are early in to the cloud, and are in this Cloud Chaos phase, we see the path out through standardization of these cross-cloud services through adoption of this sort of supercloud architecture, but the other thing I think is particularly exciting, 'cause I talked to a number of of businesses who are not yet in the Cloud Chaos phase. They're earlier on in the cloud journey, and I think the opportunity there is that they don't have to go through Cloud Chaos. They can actually skip that whole phase if they adopt this supercloud architecture from the beginning, and I think being thoughtful around that is really the key here. >> It's interesting, 'cause we're going to hear from Ionis Pharmaceuticals later, and they, yes there are multiple clouds, but the multiple clouds are largely separate, and so it's a business unit using that. So, they're not in Cloud Chaos, but they're not tapping the advantages that you could get for best of breed across those business units. So, to your point, they have an opportunity to actually build that architecture or take advantage of those cross-cloud services, prior to reaching cloud chaos. >> Well, I, actually, you know, I'd love to hear from them if, 'cause you say they're not in Cloud Chaos, but are they, I mean oftentimes I find that each BU, each line of business may feel like they're fine, in of themselves. >> Yes, exactly right, yes. >> But when you look at it from an overall company perspective, they're like, okay, things are pretty chaotic here. We don't have standardization, I don't, you know, like, again, security compliance, these things, especially in many regulated industries, become huge problems when you're trying to run applications across multiple clouds, but you don't have any of those company-wide standardizations. >> Well, this is a point. So, they have a big deal with AstraZeneca, who's got this huge ecosystem, they want to start sharing data across those ecosystem, and that's when they will, you know, that Cloud Chaos will, you know, come, come to fore, you would think. I want to get your take on something that Bob Muglia said earlier, which is, he kind of said, "Hey Dave, you guys got to tighten up your definition a little bit." So, he said a supercloud is a platform that provides programmatically consistent services hosted on heterogeneous cloud providers. So, you know, thank you, that was nice and simple. However others in the community, we're going to hear from Dr. Nelu Mihai later, says, no, no, wait a minute, it's got to be an architecture, not a platform. Where do you land on this architecture v. platform thing? >> I look at it as, I dunno if it's, you call it maturity or just kind of a time horizon thing, but for me when I hear the word platform, I typically think of a single vendor. A single vendor provides this platform. That's kind of the beauty of a platform, is that there is a simplicity usually consistency to it. >> They did the architecture. (laughing) >> Yeah, exactly but I mean, well, there's obviously architecture behind it, has to be, but you as a customer don't necessarily need to deal with that. Now, I think one of the opportunities with Supercloud is that it's not going to be, or there is no single vendor that can solve all these problems. It's got to be the industry coming together as a community, inter-operating, working together, and so, that's why, for me, I think about it as an architecture, that there's got to be these sort of, well-defined categories of functionality. There's got to be well-defined interfaces between those categories of functionality to enable modularity, to enable businesses to be able to pick and choose the right sorts of services, and then weave those together into an overall supercloud. >> Okay, so you're not pitching, necessarily the platform, you're saying, hey, we have an architecture that's open. I go back to something that Vittorio said on August 9th, with the first Supercloud, because as well, remember we talked about abstracting, but at the same time giving developers access to those primitives. So he said, and this, I think your answer sort of confirms this. "I want to have my cake eat it too and not gain weight." >> (laughing) Right. Well and I think that's where the platform aspect can eventually come, after we've gotten aligned architecture, you're going to start to naturally see some vendors step up to take on some of the remaining complexity there. So, I do see platforms eventually emerging here, but I think where we have to start as an industry is around aligning, okay, what does this definition mean? What does that architecture look like? How do we enable interoperability? And then we can take the next step. >> Because it depends too, 'cause I would say Snowflake has a platform, and they've just defined the architecture, but we're not talking about infrastructure here, obviously, we're talking about something else. >> Well, I think that the Snowflake talks about, what he talks about, security and data, you're going to start to see the early movement around areas that are very spanning oriented, and I think that's the beginning of the trend and I think there's going to be a lot more, I think on the infrastructure side. And to your point about the platform architecture, that's actually a really good thought exercise because it actually makes you think about what you're designing in the first place, and that's why I want to get your reaction. >> Quote from- >> Well I just have to interrupt since, later on, you're going to hear from near Nir Zuk of Palo Alto Network. He says architecture and security historically, they don't go hand in hand, 'cause it's a big mess. >> It depends if you're whacking the mole or you actually proactively building something. Well Kit, I want to get your reaction from a quote from someone in our community who said about Supercloud, you know, "The Supercloud's great, there are issues around computer science rigors, and customer requirements." So, there's some issues around the science itself as well as not just listen to the customer, 'cause if that's the case, we'd have a better database, a better Oracle, right, so, but there's other, this tech involved, new tech. We need an open architecture with universal data modeling interconnecting among them, connectivity is a part of security, and then, once we get through that gate, figuring out the technical, the data, and the customer requirements, they say "Supercloud should be a loosely coupled platform with open architecture, plug and play, specialized services, ready for optimization, automation that can stand the test of time." What's your reaction to that sentiment? You like it, is that, does that sound good? >> Yeah, no, broadly aligns with my thinking, I think, and what I see from talking with customers as well. I mean, I like the, again, the, you know, listening to customer needs, prioritizing those things, focusing on some of the connective tissue networking, and data and some of these aspects talking about the open architecture, the interoperability, those are all things I think are absolutely critical. And then, yeah, like I think at the end. >> On the computer science side, do you see some science and engineering things that need to be engineered differently? We heard databases are radically going to change and that are inadequate for the new architecture. What are some of the things like that, from a science standpoint? >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some of the more academic research type things. >> More tech, or more better tech or is it? >> Yeah, look, absolutely. I mean I think that there's a bunch around, certainly around the data piece, around, you know, there's issues of data gravity, data mobility. How do you want to do that in a way that's performant? There's definitely issues around security as well. Like how do you enable like trust in these environments, there's got to be some sort of hardware rooted trusts, and you know, a whole bunch of various types of aspects there. >> So, a lot of work still be done. >> Yes, I think so. And that's why I look at this as, this is not a one year thing, or you know, it's going to be multi-years, and I think again, it's about all of us in the industry working together to come to an aligned picture of what that looks like. >> So, as the world's moved from private cloud to public cloud and now Cross-cloud services, supercloud, metacloud, whatever you want to call it, how have you sort of changed the way engineering's organized, developers sort of approached the problem? Has it changed and how? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, it's funny, we at VMware, going through the same challenges as our customers and you know, any business, right? We use multiple clouds, we got a big, of course, on-prem footprint. You know, what we're doing is similar to what I see in many other customers, which, you see the evolution of a platform team, and so the platform team is really in charge of trying to develop a lot of these underlying services to allow our lines of business, our product teams, to be able to move as quickly as possible, to focus on the building, while we help with a lot of the operational overheads, right? We maintain security, compliance, all these other things. We also deal with, yeah, just making the developer's life as simple as possible. So, they do need to know some stuff about, you know, each public cloud they're using, those public cloud services, but at the same, time we can abstract a lot of the details they don't need to be in. So, I think this sort of delineation or separation, I should say, between the underlying platform team and the product teams is a very, very common pattern. >> You know, I noticed the four layers you talked about were observability, infrastructure, security and developers, on that slide, the last slide you had at the top, that was kind of the abstraction key areas that you guys at VMware are working? >> Those were just some groupings that we've come up with, but we like to debate them. >> I noticed data's in every one of them. >> Yeah, yep, data is key. >> It's not like, so, back to the data questions that security is called out as a pillar. Observability is just kind of watching everything, but it's all pretty much data driven. Of the four layers that you see, I take that as areas that you can. >> Standardize. >> Consistently rely on to have standard services. >> Yes. >> Which one do you start with? What's the, is there order of operations? >> Well, that's, I mean. >> 'Cause I think infrastructure's number one, but you had observability, you need to know what's going on. >> Yeah, well it really, it's highly dependent. Again, it depends on the business that we talk to and what, I mean, it really goes back to, what are your business priorities, right? And we have some customers who may want to get out of a data center, they want to evacuate the data center, and so what they want is then, consistent infrastructure, so they can just move those applications up to the cloud. They don't want to have to refactor them and we'll do it later, but there's an immediate and sort of urgent problem that they have. Other customers I talk to, you know, security becomes top of mind, or maybe compliance, because they're in a regulated industry. So, those are the sort of services they want to prioritize. So, I would say there is no single right answer, no one size fits all. The point about this architecture is really around the optionality of it, as it allows you as a business to decide what's most important and where you want to prioritize. >> How about the deployment models kit? Do, does a customer have that flexibility from a deployment model standpoint or do I have to, you know, approach it a specific way? Can you address that? >> Yeah, I mean deployment models, you're talking about how they how they consume? >> So, for instance, yeah, running a control plane in the cloud. >> Got it, got it. >> And communicating elsewhere or having a single global instance or instantiating that instance, and? >> So, that's a good point actually, and you know, the white paper that we released back in August, around this sort of concept, the Cross-cloud service. This is some of the stuff we need to figure out as an industry. So, you know when we talk about a Cross-cloud service, we can mean actually any of the things you just talked about. It could be a single instance that runs, let's say in one public cloud, but it supports all of 'em. Or it could be one that's multi-instance and that runs in each of the clouds, and that customers can take dependencies on whichever one, depending on what their use cases are or the, even going further than that, there's a type of Cross-cloud service that could actually be instantiated even in an air gapped or offline environment, and we have many, many businesses, especially heavily regulated ones that have that requirement, so I think, you know. >> Global don't forget global, regions, locales. >> Yeah, there's all sorts of performance latency issues that can be concerned about. So, most services today are the former, there are single sort of instance or set of instances within a single cloud that support multiple clouds, but I think what we're doing and where we're going with, you know, things like what we see with Kubernetes and service meshes and all these things, will better enable folks to hit these different types of cross-cloud service architectures. So, today, you as a customer probably wouldn't have too much choice, but where we're going, you'll see a lot more choice in the future. >> If you had to summarize for folks watching the importance of Supercloud movement, multi-cloud, cross-cloud services, as an industry in flexible, 'cause I'm always riffing on the whole old school network protocol stacks that got disrupted by TCP/IP, that's a little bit dated, we got people on the chat that are like, you know, 20 years old that weren't even born then. So, but this is a, one of those inflection points that's once in a generation inflection point, I'm sure you agree. What scoped the order of magnitude of the change and the opportunity around the marketplace, the business models, the technology, and ultimately benefits the society. >> Yeah. Wow. Getting bigger. >> You have 10 seconds, go. >> I know. Yeah. (laughing) No, look, so I think it is what we're seeing is really the next phase of what you might call cloud, right? This notion of delivering services, the way they've been packaged together, traditionally by the hyperscalers is now being challenged. and what we're seeing is really opening that up to new levels of innovation, and I think that will be huge for businesses because it'll help meet them where they are. Instead of needing to contort the businesses to, you know, make it work with the technology, the technology will support the business and where it's going. Give people more optionality, more flexibility in order to get there, and I think in the end, for us as individuals, it will just make for better experiences, right? You can get better performance, better interactivity, given that devices are so much of what we do, and so much of what we interact with all the time. This sort of flexibility and optionality will fundamentally better for us as individuals in our experiences. >> And we're seeing that with ChatGPT, everyone's talking about, just early days. There'll be more and more of things like that, that are next gen, like obviously like, wow, that's a fall out of your chair moment. >> It'll be the next wave of innovation that's unleashed. >> All right, Kit Colbert, thanks for coming on and sharing and exploring the Supercloud architecture, Cloud Chaos, the Cloud Smart, there's a transition progression happening and it's happening fast. This is the supercloud wave. If you're not on this wave, you'll be driftwood. That's a Pat Gelsinger quote on theCUBE. This is theCUBE Be right back with more Supercloud coverage, here in Palo Alto after this break. (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues)

>> Welcome back everyone to the closing remarks here before we kick off our ecosystem portion of the program. We're live in Palo Alto for theCUBE special presentation of Supercloud 2. It's the second edition, the first one was in August. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Here to wrap up with our special guest analyst George Gilbert, investor and industry legend former colleague of ours, analyst at Wikibon. George great to see you. Dave, you know, wrapping up this day what in a phenomenal program. We had a contribution from industry vendors, industry experts, practitioners and customers building and redefining their company's business model. Rolling out technology for Supercloud and multicloud and ultimately changing how they do data. And data was the theme today. So very, very great program. Before we jump into our favorite parts let's give a shout out to the folks who make this possible. Free contents our mission. We'll always stay true to that mission. We want to thank VMware, alkira, ChaosSearch, prosimo for being sponsors of this great program. We will have Supercloud 3 coming up in a month or so, or two months. We'll see. Or sooner, we don't know. But it'll be more about security, but a lot more momentum. Okay, so that's... >> And don't forget too that this program not going to end now. We've got a whole ecosystem speaks track so stay tuned for that. >> John: Yeah, we got another 20 interviews. Feels like it. >> Well, you're going to hear from Saks, Veronika Durgin. You're going to hear from Western Union, Harveer Singh. You're going to hear from Ionis Pharmaceuticals, Nick Taylor. Brian Gracely chimes in on Supecloud. So he's the man behind the cloud cast. >> Yeah, and you know, the practitioners again, pay attention to also to the cloud networking interviews. Lot of change going on there that's going to be disruptive and actually change the landscape as well. Again, as Supercloud progresses to be the next big thing. If you're not on this next wave, you'll drift what, as Pat Gelsinger says. >> Yep. >> To kick off the closing segments, George, Dave, this is a wave that's been identified. Again, people debate the word all you want Supercloud. It is a gateway to multicloud eventually it is the standard for new applications, new ways to do data. There's new computer science being generated and customer requirements being addressed. So it's the confluence of, you know, tectonic plates shifting in the industry, new computer science seeing things like AI and machine learning and data at the center of it and new infrastructure all kind of coming together. So, to me, that's my takeaway so far. That is the big story and it's going to change society and ultimately the business models of these companies. >> Well, we've had 10, you know, you think about it we came out of the financial crisis. We've had 10, 12 years despite the Covid of tech success, right? And just now CIOs are starting to hit the brakes. And so my point is you've had all this innovation building up for a decade and you've got this massive ecosystem that is running on the cloud and the ecosystem is saying, hey, we can have even more value by tapping best of of breed across clouds. And you've got customers saying, hey, we need help. We want to do more and we want to point our business and our intellectual property, our software tooling at our customers and monetize our data. So you have all these forces coming together and it's sort of entering a new era. >> George, I want to go to you for a second because you are big contributor to this event. Your interview with Bob Moglia with Dave was I thought a watershed moment for me to hear that the data apps, how databases are being rethought because we've been seeing a diversity of databases with Amazon Web services, you know, promoting no one database rules of the world. Now it's not one database kind of architecture that's puling these new apps. What's your takeaway from this event? >> So if you keep your eye on this North Star where instead of building apps that are based on code you're building apps that are defined by data coming off of things that are linked to the real world like people, places, things and activities. Then the idea is, and the example we use is, you know, Uber but it could be, you know, amazon.com is defined by stuff coming off data in the Amazon ecosystem or marketplace. And then the question is, and everyone was talking at different angles on this, which was, where's the data live? How much do you hide from the developer? You know, and when can you offer that? You know, and you started with Walmart which was describing apps, traditional apps that are just code. And frankly that's easier to make that cross cloud and you know, essentially location independent. As soon as you have data you need data management technology that a customer does not have the sophistication to build. And then the argument was like, so how much can you hide from the developer who's building data apps? Tristan's version was you take the modern data stack and you start adding these APIs that define business concepts like bookings, billings and revenue, you know, or in the Uber example like drivers and riders, you know, and ETA's and prices. But those things execute still on the data warehouse or data lakehouse. Then Bob Muglia was saying you're not really hiding enough from the developer because you still got to say how to do all that. And his vision is not only do you hide where the data is but you hide how to sort of get at all that code by just saying what you want. You define how a car and how a driver and how a rider works. And then those things automatically figure out underneath the cover. >> So huge challenges, right? There's governance, there's security, they could be big blockers to, you know, the Supercloud but the industry's going to be attacking that problem. >> Well, what's your take? What's your favorite segment? Zhamak Dehghani came on, she's starting in that company, exclusive news. That was big notable moment for theCUBE. She launched her company. She pioneered the data mesh concept. And I think what George is saying and what data mesh points to is something that we've been saying for a long time. That data is now going to flip the script on how apps behave. And the Uber example I think is illustrated 'cause people can relate to Uber. But imagine that for every business whether it's a manufacturing business or retail or oil and gas or FinTech, they can look at their business like a game almost gamify it with data, riders, cars you know, moving data around the value of data. This is something that Adam Selipsky teased out at AWS, Dave. So what's your takeaway from this Supercloud? Where are we in your mind? Well big thing is data products and decentralizing your data architecture, but putting data in the hands of domain experts who can actually monetize the data. And I think that's, to me that's really exciting. Because look, data products financial industry has always been doing building data products. Mortgage backed securities is a data product. But why should the financial industry have all the fun? I mean virtually every organization can tap its ecosystem build data products, take its internal IP and processes and software and point it to the world and actually begin to make money out of it. >> Okay, so let's go around the horn. I'll start, I'll get you guys some time to think. Next question, what did you learn today? I learned that I think it's an infrastructure game and talking to Kit Colbert at VMware, I think it's all about infrastructure refactoring and I think the data's going to be an ingredient that's going to be operating system like. I think you're going to see the infrastructure influencing operations that will enable Superclouds to be real. And developers won't even know what a Supercloud is because they'll be using it. It's the operations focus is going to be very critical. Just like DevOps movements started Cloud native I think you're going to see a data native movement and I think infrastructure is critical as people go to the next level. That's my big takeaway today. And I'll say the data conversation is at the center. I think security, data are going to be always active horizontally scalable concepts, but every company's going to reset their infrastructure, how it looks and if it's not set up for data and or things that there need to be agile on, it's going to be a non-starter. So I think that's the cloud NextGen, distributed computing. >> I mean, what came into focus for me was I think the hyperscaler is going to continue to do their thing, you know, and be very, very successful and they're each coming at it from different approaches. We talk about this all the time in theCUBE. Amazon the best infrastructure, you know, Google's got its you know, data and AI thing and it's playing catch up and Microsoft's got this massive estate. Okay, cool. Check. The next wave of innovation which is coming from data, I've always said follow the data. That's where the where the money's going to be is going to come from other places. People want to be able to, organizations want to be able to share data across clouds across their organization, outside of their ecosystem and make money with that data sharing. They don't want to FTP it anymore. I got it. You take it. They want to work with live data in real time and I think the edge, we didn't talk much about the edge today is going to even take that to a new level real time inferencing at the edge, AI and and being able to do new things with data that we haven't even seen. But playing around with ChatGPT, it's blowing our mind. And I think you're right, it's like when we first saw the browser, holy crap, this is going to change the world. >> Yeah. And the ChatGPT by the way is going to create a wave of machine learning and data refactoring for sure. But also Howie Liu had an interesting comment, he was asked by a VC how much to replicate that and he said it's in the hundreds of millions, not billions. Now if you asked that same question how much does it cost to replicate AWS? The CapEx alone is unstoppable, they're already done. So, you know, the hyperscalers are going to continue to boom. I think they're going to drive the infrastructure. I think Amazon's going to be really strong at silicon and physics and squeeze every ounce atom out of every physical thing and then get latency as your bottleneck and the rest is all going to be... >> That never blew me away, a hundred million to create kind of an open AI, you know, competitor. Look at companies like Lacework. >> John: Some people have that much cash on the balance sheet. >> These are security companies that have raised a billion dollars, right? To compete. You know, so... >> If you're not shifting left what do you do with data, shift up? >> But, you know. >> What did you learn, George? >> I'm listening to you and I think you're helping me crystallize something which is the software infrastructure to enable the data apps is wide open. The way Zhamak described it is like if you want a data product like a sales and operation plan, that is built on other data products, like a sales plan which has a forecast in it, it has a production plan, it has a procurement plan and then a sales and operation plan is actually a composition of all those and they call each other. Now in her current platform, you need to expose to the developer a certain amount of mechanics on how to move all that data, when to move it. Like what happens if something fails. Now Muglia is saying I can hide that completely. So all you have to say is what you want and the underlying machinery takes care of everything. The problem is Muglia stuff is still a few years off. And Tristan is saying, I can give you much of that today but it's got to run in the data warehouse. So this trade offs all different ways. But again, I agree with you that the Cloud platform vendors or the ecosystem participants who can run across Cloud platforms and private infrastructure will be the next platform. And then the cloud platform is sort of where you run the big honking centralized stuff where someone else manages the operations. >> Sounds like middleware to me, Dave >> And key is, I'll just end with this. The key is being able to get to the data, whether it's in a data warehouse or a data lake or a S3 bucket or an object store, Oracle database, whatever. It's got to be inclusive that is critical to execute on the vision that you just talked about 'cause that data's in different systems and you're not going to put it all into some new system. >> So creating middleware in the cloud that sounds what it sounds like to me. >> It's like, you discovered PaaS >> It's a super PaaS. >> But it's platform services 'cause PaaS connotes like a tightly integrated platform. >> Well this is the real thing that's going on. We're going to see how this evolves. George, great to have you on, Dave. Thanks for the summary. I enjoyed this segment a lot today. This ends our stage performance live here in Palo Alto. As you know, we're live stage performance and syndicate out virtually. Our afternoon program's going to kick in now you're going to hear some great interviews. We got ChaosSearch. Defining the network Supercloud from prosimo. Future of Cloud Network, alkira. We got Saks, a retail company here, Veronika Durgin. We got Dave with Western Union. So a lot of customers, a pharmaceutical company Warner Brothers, Discovery, media company. And then you know, what is really needed for Supercloud, good panels. So stay with us for the afternoon program. That's part two of Supercloud 2. This is a wrap up for our stage live performance. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante and George Gilbert here wrapping up. Thanks for watching and enjoy the program. (bright music)