>> Announcer: Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. (uptempo techno music) >> Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media, this is theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with our guest host inside the community, Keith Townsend who's with CTO advisors, and our next guest is Bask Iyer, who's the SVP and CIO of VMware. Both of you, welcome to theCUBE. Your first host as an analyst here on theCUBE, Keith, thanks for coming on. Bask, great to see you again. >> Thank you, good to see you. >> You're not like just any old CIO. You're at VMware, it's a big company, it's a vendor in the landscape, but you also have been on the other side. You've been a practitioner, you've run for over decades, real infrastructure, really going back through the cycles of innovation. Now you're on this side serving customers on the other in this transformation stage. What a couple years it's been. Since last year when you were on theCUBE, we talked about digital transformation, eating your own dog food. First question is, what's changed this year with VMware? Obviously, a lot going on with the technologies, post-federation world. What's going on technically in the landscape for VMware? 'Cause I know you guys do a lot of early stuff inside VMware. >> Yeah, so, I think we are eating even more dog food. In fact, we are calling it drinking your own champagne because I don't like dog food, even if you make it, I'm not going to eat dog food. I've been drinking a lot of champagne. What that puts you as an IT practitioner is, I mean, you're showcasing private cloud, you're showcasing hybrid, and most of the things that we are talking about we have influence from inside. You can go to the executive staff and say, "I need to go to Amazon, I need to go to Google, "I need to connect, "I cannot be locked into a single cloud strategy "or a device strategy," and so on. I feel like our team is very much part of it. Our team is also getting more into new product development. We've developed a whole line of mobile technologies right now that makes it easier to sell something like AirWatch. It's easier to always talk about applications. Here's what you can do with applications on the mobile side. >> A lot of, certainly VMware as a company has changed, but some big executives have departed. Carl, Bill Fog, among others. Sanjay is still there, but he had the AirWatch, but now, this any cloud, any application, any device. This is not a new messaging, but there's been some product turnover. V sphere has been changing, V cloud air, we're not hearing much about that, more management layer. How has that impacted some of the champagne or your own internal incubation of the technologies? What's new there, what's shifted? >> Yeah, so what you are seeing is the change in technology is even faster, and I keep telling my team is yesterday's news wraps fish. So unless it changes, why are we here? I love the fact that we are pushing technology. The thing I see in my experience is technology always changes, but the last few years, it's faster and faster, and I don't think it's going to slow down. What has changed from last year to this year is we were the leaders in private cloud last time. I came and talked about how VMworld has one of the biggest private clouds. All the hands-on lab is run on our private clouds. But we want to go beyond that, we want to go from private cloud, hook it to the public cloud, or any cloud. I want to come back. And if you think about, when I talk to the CIO friends, while they like every cloud provider, they don't want to necessarily be locked into anybody. It's a big fear everybody has, and for people who don't believe it can happen, I've been here long enough. In the 2000, we had these guys called ASPs, if you remember. >> John: Applicant Service Providers. >> Artifice migrated to the ASP providers, and a lot of them went out of business because they lowered, they were all competing for the bottom line. Not that that's going to happen in the public cloud story, but different workloads have different needs, and you want to provide the maximum flexibility as possible. If you run a private cloud effectively, even as of today, it's definitely more cost-effective than any public cloud, but you may not want to do that. So, what do you go and tell my colleagues to say, you want a public cloud, you got it. You want Amazon, you got it. You want IBM, you got it. >> John: Choice. >> Choice. And I think VMware, if you remember, made our mark by giving the choice for you, so you can in on HP, you can go in Dell, you can go in on NetApp, you can go in on EMC. Even when EMC was the owner, still the owner, we still did not exclude you from running it on a competitive. >> And that built the ecosystem, basically. >> That built the ecosystem, the things that you see here. And Michael reiterated it today, so we are going to be available on every cloud, every platform, that helps, it creates a lot of money for people. And for CIO, just go back into the practitioner, that's what I want. I may stick to a vendor, but don't lock me in. That should be my choice. >> So, talking about fast change, VMware, infrastructure-focused company from the outside, internally, you have to deal with both developers and infrastructure guys. Martin Casedel famously said that developers are much more involved with that purchasing cycle. How has the relationship with your internal developers and your infrastructure folks? >> It's very good. I mean, but I can see Martin's point. I've worked on other companies where the developers actually worked around the infrastructure folks, because you won't get the things provisioned on time. If you run an effective infrastructure, which we do, I actually challenged my developers, developers reporting to me as well, and say, "Do whatever you want, "because I want to know what you like doing." And a lot of them work on our infrastructure because it is effective. If you do a good job, people will want to use somebody who manages (indistinct talking), but it's not true in most of the cases. Most of our infrastructure is still run the old IT way, where people just say, you know, it's going to take me years. I have to fill out the paperwork for me to get the virtual machine, I'm out of here. What I internally see is my developers actually do a lot of development, continuous development. We roll out ASAP, not that it's a big use, everybody seems to do it. But we have zero issues on infrastructure. I mean, we never talked about infrastructure, we never talked about is this going to be available, not available, how does disaster recovery work? That's what developers want. They want to just worry about continuous improvement, continuous development, does it work on mobile. Infrastructure should just handle it, right? We're able to do that internally, but I'm also telling people use Docker. I mean, it's a good one, use Containers. Use Amazon web services, use IBM. 'Cause you don't want to restrict-- >> The freedom of choice is really, >> The freedom of choice is very important. The developers are in charge. >> Bask: Exactly. >> We're pretty much on that whole. >> That's like invisible infrastructure is there to support what developers do. >> Invisible infrastructure is invisible only until it's broken. But your point is well taken, yeah. >> DevOps is great, but you still need five-nines ops, so operational focus we've seen this year, where I'm kind of smelling the theme this year is all about Dev, the operational side of cloud. So I got to ask you, we were in our, last week at a meeting at SiliconANGLE offices, we're talking about, oh, VMware. And I'm like, guys, it's all about the SDDC experience. They're like, what the hell's SDDC? Okay, it's a software defiant data center. But that was the theme a couple years ago, and then, someone else raised their hand, and what the hell does SDDC mean anyway? I want to ask you what does SDDC experience, we heard it on the keynote, actually mean? >> So, I think Ragoud defined it well as in order to react to the needs of today, you cannot hope to put in a hardware and hope that box runs. You need to free the intelligence away from the box. Let me give a practical example. You get attacks from security. Typically, their response is buy my box, put it in, and it'll take care of it. Humans cannot respond to the speed at which these attacks are happening, so you have to write algorithms, so that's software. So, the attacks to be done in software. The configuration has to be done in software. The whole idea is freeing the intelligence from all the boxes you have, and define a software layer on top of it because software will trump hardware. I mean, you need good hardware, let's not, I mean, things have to run some way. >> One experience is the guy gets to go to the beach because everything's automated? That's one experience, automated. >> That's one experience, yeah, I just think you get more work. I always say you should hire smart but lazy people because they will automate what they're doing. But what ends up happening is no good deed goes unpunished, so you just get more to do. But look, in my own case, I did every job in IT. I started in hardware, automated it, people said can you do software? Yeah, I can do it. Well, you automated this. Can you do DSEIO, can you do end-user computing? Can you run real estate, can you run shared services, can you do this? Your job becomes bigger. I don't think I'm going to sit on the beach, but you're doing more-- >> Yeah, but you're freed, essentially. I use that as a metaphor, but the idea of the beach is being excited about not being in the weeds fixing stuff and being, tired all the time. >> See, I get to do this, right? I talk to customers. The only reason I get to do this is because my infrastructure's working. If it's not working, I'm not mistaken, I have to go back and fix it. If you free up your time, then you go talk to your customers, your advisory panel. They've given me internet of things as another business unit to run. It's exciting, you're getting to the front office but I never forget it's because your back office is working. >> Stole a little bit about thunder by mentioning internet of things. Talking to customers and one of the things when I talk to customers is internet of things. What are some of the challenges you've had internally around internet of things and how has VMware solved some of those challenges. >> Yeah, so a lot of internet of things. It's coming out of hype cycle now into reality so a lot of talks where how do you control the home thermostat. Your Amazon Echo device and so and so, but what is happening now is buildings have to be automated and they have to get another 30% more efficiency. You only get 30% more efficiency. It's not just turning the light bulbs off and on when you want. You want to know what's your occupancy and do I really need this bigger building all the time. That requires intelligence. So if you have intelligence, you can really figure out do I need 400 buildings or do you need only 100 buildings. And the reason I picked something Monday as buildings is that's where a lot of people spend a lot of their money in actual buildings. For example, so the thing I tell from the IT standpoint is I think we have gone from kind of pilot stages to now you're going to get go to scale. When you get to scale, it's not fun anymore. It has to work all the time. It has to be secure. So I was talking to a bunch of CIOs a week ago and I told them how many of you have multi printers. Multi scanners and the multi devices. Everybody says that. So how many of you know that they send information on whether the toner is out to the manufacturer? Everybody puts their hands up. How many of you know that it's not sending the whole thing that you're standing over to the manufacturer? And people said, "Does it happen?" I said, I don't know. I don't know if it doesn't happen or it doesn't happen. >> John: It's a question. >> This is where you need to pay attention because your coffee machine is going to say you're out of coffee beans. Are they just sending that information or not? If you take it seriously, manufacturing. The folks actually work around IT sometimes because they don't want IT to slow it down. So if IT doesn't get involved internal things right now. Define the architecture and so on. You're opening a door for shadow IT. >> I want to just drill down that you mention IT going slow but that's exactly the point. Machine learning AI and software. There's been a huge acceleration of things like asking those kinds of questions and the infrastructure has been slowing. Certainly the network has, so for all the CXO out there. Whether it's CIO, chief data officer, chief compliant. There's a lot of CXO's out there. They're trying to figure it out. So what's you're advice to them and looking at the message of multi cloud and inter clouding and all that stuff. They got a job to do. At the end of the day they don't really care what a VMware is doing in the business. They want to know what their business is doing. How do they apply the stuff going on here at VMworld if you had to look at this VMworld this year and talk to the CXOs. What's in it for them? What's your thoughts? >> The first thing I say is have the curiosity. What happens in my job is I hear so many vaperware that you become skeptical. The problem with skeptical and being too pragmatic is your mind becomes close. So when you look at interrupt things you say, ah, is that really going to to happen. I got things to do. I can't worry about it. You can't have that. That's how you let the sass get out of your hand. That's how you come back later on the cloud. That's why BYD happened. Because we started to think Blackberry is good enough. You don't need any other phones. So you need to have this open mindset, so internal things, I tell people. >> John: Be opened. >> Be open. There's a tornado coming here and you better be involved. Now to be involved you have to take a solution for them. You can't go and say stop all projects. Let me look at architectural. Let me review them. So I tell them go with an architecture. So couple of things I tell them is there's so many gateways, so many sensors, you need to go with some ways to manage these gateways. Because like it or not they're coming to you and they're going to expect you to manage it. After the initial set up is done, they're going to say, "Hey, IT guy, you run it for me." You better be there. Go with an architect, so it's a private cloud, public cloud or it's a combination. How you manage Edge? So I tell people to get involved and there's couple of things that we're doing is manage your gateways with software. Go with the cloud in the box for IoTs, so people can give it to our manufacturing guy or your operations guy. You need to take something there. You need to be involved. >> So balancing the hopeful and the optimist. I'm hopeful that this may happen with the pragmatic. I got to make it make it run at scale, which is good. This is all about scale now with cloud. It kind of brings back the kind of looking back at history of IT which you would certainly be involved in. Lived personally is you see a sprawl of something. PCs, LANs whatever and then consolidation. Single throat to choke. Single pane of glass. These are the buzz words. We're seeing that now. We're seeing there's been a sprawl of APIs, a sprawl of microservices. A sprawl of mobile. Now are we getting to that phase where we got to manage it. >> Bask: Yeah. So you're hearing things like single, choke to throat, single pane of glass for management. What's your thoughts on that and this is really mind boggling to the customer because the CXOs are out there going. Hell, I still got to get top line revenue in these new apps for my banking app or my oil and gas application. So right now we're in a really interesting position. How do you describe that environment and what do you prescribe specifically to that CXO? >> It's a challenge or opportunity depending on how you look at it. It's very exciting to me that you have all these things exploring and there's so much more you can do in the business. So if you're an IT practitioner or CTO, this is a good time to be excited and add value to it. If you get too pragmatic, you're going to lose it or if you're a blocker. Say please hang on. Let me define the architecture for you. Let me do this for you. You're going to lose it because people are going to work around you. And my belief is the CIOs I meet right now are a lot more progressive. They realize the mistakes they made by being a little to pragmatic sometimes on technology. Not getting on it and they are jumping onboard. So the hope is I'm at a stage in my career where I want to make sure my community of CIOs do the right thing and I'm telling them this is coming. >> So you're seeing progressive mindset now-- >> I'm seeing very, very progressive minds. I see a ton more CIOs who are acting like the digital guys, pushing it and so on. The other thing to remember is, it's not always about technology. You can do the pilots but to make a change. You need people, process and technology and the CIOs are best equipped to do that. So the best for the company is to make sure you get the right CIOs. The people that are involved in the technology change start going around. >> So from a technology perspective. A lot of great news from, at least exciting news coming from Pat this morning. >> Yeah. Cloud services, cloud foundation. With your team internally, which product or what direction are you most excited to enable your team? >> Anything that makes my development go faster, I'm excited so that's why I'm interested in cloud foundation and cloud services, very much because I don't have to think about where to go and I can do it faster, good, right. The things I'm very excited about is you haven't seen the end user computing announcement which comes tomorrow or the day after. It's fantastic. I believe that enterprise mobility has not really not happened. I mean you've got what two to three million applications on the android store and the app has gone up to three million on the Apple store. But you go to most enterprises, they'll just give the email and calendar. >> John: Right. >> Email and calendar, we give access in 1999 with Blackberrys because for 17 years, You're still getting email and a calendar on your iPhone now instead of the Blackberry. That's not good progress. People haven't been created to look at mobilized enterprise platforms to develop. That's going to change. I think people are going to wake up and say how we make productive on the phone. I challenge my team and we come up the 50 yard at productivity applications. That should take a long time to develop and I can show sometime. When I showed the VCI, they also didn't want it. They wanted to go to one place to approve all the purchase orders. They don't want to go to SAP and Oracle and Sales Force and 40 different places to approve. So the mobile the revolution I think is starting to happen. In enterprise it's very, very light. You'll see that. I mean you don't want to be carrying necessarily these when you're traveling, right. >> I want to ask you, we have about a minute left and more of a personnel kind of conversation we're seeing in the industry. And one of the things that we're very passionate about SiliconANGLE is our new fellowship with the Crown Truth, our partner. We have this new fellowship called the Tech truth where we're funding fellowships in journalism. We're also going to be at the Anita Borg conflict in November for the third year. Where we're funding a special assignment on women in tech. >> Bask: Yeah. >> IT has been one of those areas where it's been mostly male dominated like developers. But yet IT isn't the old stack and rack anymore like it used to be. It's changing, shifting. How has the role of STEM and Women in Tech in science changed IT? Can you share some, I know you're involved with Anita Borg. >> Bask: Yeah. >> Thoughts on that because this is again, it's not just the IT anymore. IT is now at a global stance. Your thoughts on women in tech. >> Yeah, in the sense. We haven't done enough. I mean we are, most companies are talking and I guess compared to where we were. We make progress. It's not good enough. Having 20% in tech when you can go up to 50% is not good. The thing with STEM I say sometimes, we say we support science and sometimes we mislead women. I know a lot of people with science degrees, women with science degrees in biology or something else who are not getting employment like the coders. So we got to get through the language. Are you looking for coders? Are you looking for STEM? >> Coders. >> Right. >> Well now you have different analytics and you sort of. There's new stuff going on that's interesting. Right, I mean like coders. Not to say biology, doctors. >> I think it's really unfair if you tell people we let science possible and women actually go to classes. And they come out, the first question we ask is do you know Python? Do you know this? I'm not saying it's right or wrong that's what the industry is doing. >> John: Yeah. >> And you need to actually respect every science but if not, don't mislead people. So that's one. Silicon Valley has a problem with older gentlemen, older people. >> John: Agism. >> Agism, so that's an issue. There are not too many African Americans in Silicon Valley. So these are the elephants. I think the first steps is we haven't talk about these things. People are afraid to talk about it. That's not a good sign. You got to come back and put it, I mean, Anita Borg, I liked them because they're put the show on the table. Which is the first step and it's like an alcoholic. You are to say I'm basking in alcoholic. If you don't even say that. We're not solving it. >> I got to tell you. I was there last year. This will be our third year. It is 12,000 women and it's a great time. It's the great time-- >> Yeah, my daughter's is going. I wanted to go alone but we have to do more. So I don't want to sound down on the last minute. We've made definite progress but if you go to most Silicon Valley companies, we can't say we've done it. >> Well my wife and I just talked about men from Mars, that whole stick, but the role of IT is a lot. First there is a lot of women that are involved in tech but necessarily coding as you said, because a lot of roles in IT are changing. For instance, the data science role moves to data analyst which by the way is the F ford base. So that's kind of becoming an IT role. >> Right. Very interesting some of these jobs personas per say-- >> Yeah, yeah so last one I'll leave it with you is they could log the help desk. We used outsource the help desk. We used to treat it as not important whatever and then we find that a lot of knowledge workers are struggling for simple stuff. That can fit in my PC so that I can do my job. So we brought it back like how the Apple have genius bars. We have our own things inside but we recruited it from a organization call You're Up. And what they do is there are a lot of kids from under privileged families who don't get to finish high school. So why can't they work on help desk? Why do you need a degree? Why can't they go to a finishing school? I've worked with a lot of them. They're very passionate about what they do, very satisfying so we can talk for hours, 'cause I'm very passionate about this. We should do more with under privileged folks. We should do more with diversity in the true sense of the word. >> We'd love to have you. We're going to recruit you as a volunteer for our theCUBE team in Silicon Valley. We're doing a lot of coverage there. Certainly the fellowship has been great and we're going to be at Anita Borg Grace Hopper celebration in Houston. theCUBE will there. I'm John Furrier here with Keith Townsend. Here live at VMworld breaking it down sharing all the data. CIOs are really interested in the Cloud and certainly got the play book. Bask thanks so much for sharing your insight again. Great, great insight. Thanks for sharing the data. >> Thank you John for sharing-- >> We'll be right back with more live coverage from Las Vegas from VMworld 2012. This is SiliconANGLES theCUBE. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back. (uptempo techno music)