(light corporate music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to VMware Explore 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante. Our 12th year covering VMware's User Conference, formerly known as VMworld, now rebranded as VMware Explore. Two great cube alumnus coming down the cube. Ricky Cooper, SVP, Worldwide Partner Commercials VMware, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> We just had a great chat- >> Good to see you again. >> With the Discovery and, of course, Joseph George, vice president of Compute Industry Alliances. Great to have you on. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> So guys this year is very curious in VMware. A lot goin' on, the name change, the event. Big, big move. Bold move. And then they changed the name of the event. Then Broadcom buys them. A lot of speculation, but at the end of the day, this conference kind of, people were wondering what would be the barometer of the event. We're reporting this morning on the keynote analysis. Very good mojo in the keynote. Very transparent about the Broadcom relationship. The expo floor last night was buzzing. >> Mhm. >> I mean, this is not a show that's lookin' like it's going to be, ya' know, going down. >> Yeah. >> This is clearly a wave. We're calling it Super Cloud. Multi-Cloud's their theme. Clearly the cloud's happenin'. We not to date ourselves, but 2013 we were discussing on theCUBE- >> We talked about that. Yeah. Yeah. >> Discover about DevOps infrastructure as code- >> Mhm. >> We're full realization now of that. >> Yep. >> This is where we're at. You guys had a great partnership with VMware and HPE. Talk about where you guys see this coming together because customers are refactoring. They are lookin' at Cloud Native. The whole Broadcom visibility to the VMware customer bases activated them. They're here and they're leaning in. >> Yeah. >> What's going on? >> Yeah. Absolutely. We're seeing a renewed interest now as customers are looking at their entire infrastructure, bottoms up, all the way up the stack, and the notion of a hybrid cloud, where you've got some visibility and control of your data and your infrastructure and your applications, customers want to live in that sort of a cloud environment and so we're seeing a renewed interest. A lot of conversations we're having with customers now, a lot of customers committing to that model where they have applications and workloads running at the Edge, in their data center, and in the public cloud in a lot of cases, but having that mobility, having that control, being able to have security in their own, you know, in their control. There's a lot that you can do there and, obviously, partnering with VMware. We've been partners for so long. >> 20 years about. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. At least 20 years, back when they invented stuff, they were inventing way- >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> VMware's got a very technical culture, but Ricky, I got to say that, you know, we commented earlier when Raghu was on, the CEO, now CEO, I mean, legendary product. I sent the trajectory to VMware. Everyone knows that. VMware, I can't know whether to tell it was VMware or HP, HP before HPE, coined hybrid- >> Yeah. >> 'Cause you guys were both on. I can't recall, Dave, which company coined it first, but it was either one of you guys. Nobody else was there. >> It was the partnership. >> Yes. I- (cross talking) >> They had a big thing with Pat Gelsinger. Dave, remember when he said, you know, he got in my grill on theCUBE live? But now you see- >> But if you focus on that Multi-Cloud aspect, right? So you've got a situation where our customers are looking at Multi-Cloud and they're looking at it not just as a flash in the pan. This is here for five years, 10 years, 20 years. Okay. So what does that mean then to our partners and to our distributors? You're seeing a whole seed change. You're seeing partners now looking at this. So, look at the OEMs, you know, the ones that have historically been vSphere customers are now saying, they're coming in droves saying, okay, what is the next step? Well, how can I be a Multi-Cloud partner with you? >> Yep. Right. >> How can I look at other aspects that we're driving here together? So, you know, GreenLake is a great example. We keep going back to GreenLake and we are partaking in GreenLake at the moment. The real big thing for us is going to be, right, let's make sure that we've got the agreements in place that support this SaaS and subscription motion going forward and then the sky's the limit for us. >> You're pluggin' that right into GreenLake, right? >> Well, here's why. Here's why. So customers are loving the fact that they can go to a public cloud and they can get an SLA. They come to a, you know, an On-Premise. You've got the hardware, you've got the software, you've got the, you know, the guys on board to maintain this through its life cycle. >> Right. I mean, this is complicated stuff. >> Yeah. >> Now we've got a situation where you can say, hey, we can get an SLA On-Premise. >> Yeah. And I think what you're seeing is it's very analogous to having a financial advisor just manage your portfolio. You're taking care of just submitting money. That's really a lot of what the customers have done with the public cloud, but now, a lot of these customers are getting savvy and they have been working with VMware Technologies and HPE for so long. They've got expertise. They know how they want their workloads architected. Now, we've given them a model where they can leverage the Cloud platform to be able to do this, whether it's On-Premise, The Edge, or in the public cloud, leveraging HPE GreenLake and VMware. >> Is it predominantly or exclusively a managed service or do you find some customers saying, hey, we want to manage ourself? How, what are you seeing is the mix there? >> It is not predominantly managed services right now. We're actually, as we are growing, last time we talked to HPE Discover we talked about a whole bunch of new services that we've added to our catalog. It's growing by leaps and bounds. A lot of folks are definitely interested in the pay as you go, obviously, the financial model, but are now getting exposed to all the other management that can happen. There are managed services capabilities, but actually running it as a service with your systems On-Prem is a phenomenal idea for all these customers and they're opening their eyes to some new ways to service their customers better. >> And another phenomenon we're seeing there is where partners, such as HPA, using other partners for various areas of their services implementation as well. So that's another phenomenon, you know? You're seeing the resale motion now going into a lot more of the services motion. >> It's interesting too, you know, I mean, the digital modernization that's goin' on. The transformation, whatever you want to call it, is complicated. >> Yeah. >> That's clear. One of the things I liked about the keynote today was the concept of cloud chaos. >> Yeah. >> Because we've been saying, you know, quoting Andy Grove at Intel, "Let chaos rain and rain in the chaos." >> Mhm. >> And when you have inflection points, complexity, which is the chaos, needs to be solved and whoever solves it kicks the inflection point, that's up into the right. So- >> Prime idea right here. Yeah. >> So GreenLake is- >> Well, also look at the distribution model and how that's changed. A couple of points on a deal. Now they're saying, "I'll be your aggregator. I'll take the strain and I'll give you scale." You know? "I'll give you VMware Scale for all, you know, for all of the various different partners, et cetera." >> Yeah. So let's break this down because this is, I think, a key point. So complexity is good, but the old model in the Enterprise market was- >> Sure. >> You solve complexity with more complexity. >> Yeah. >> And everybody wins. Oh, yeah! We're locked in! That's not what the market wants. They want some self-service. They want, as a service, they want easy. Developer first security data ops, DevOps, is already in the cycle, so they're going to want simpler. >> Yeah. >> Easier. Faster. >> And this is kind of why I'll say, for the big announcement today here at VMware Explore, around the VMware vSphere Distributed Services Engine, Project Monterey- >> Yeah. >> That we've talked about for so long, HPE and VMware and AMD, with the Pensando DPU, actually work together to engineer a solution for exactly that. The capabilities are fairly straightforward in terms of the technologies, but actually doing the work to do integration, joint engineering, make sure that this is simple and easy and able to be running HPE GreenLake, that's- >> That's invested in Pensando, right? >> We are. >> We're all investors. Yeah. >> What's the benefit of that? What's, that's a great point you made. What's the value to the customer, bottom line? That deep co-engineering, co-partnering, what does it deliver that others don't do? >> Yeah. Well, I think one example would be, you know, a lot of vendors can say we support it. >> Yep. >> That's great. That's actually a really good move, supporting it. It can be resold. That's another great move. I'm not mechanically inclined to where I would go build my own car. I'll go to a dealership and actually buy one that I can press the button and I can start it and I can do what I need to do with my car and that's really what this does is the engineering work that's gone on between our two companies and AMD Pensando, as well as the business work to make that simple and easy, that transaction to work, and then to be able to make it available as a service, is really what made, it's, that's why it's such a winner winner with our- >> But it's also a lower cost out of the box. >> Yep. >> Right. >> So you get in whatever. Let's call it 20%. Okay? But there's, it's nuanced because you're also on a new technology curve- >> Right. >> And you're able to absorb modern apps, like, you know, we use that term as a bromide, but when I say modern apps, I mean data-rich apps, you know, things that are more AI-driven not the conventional, not that people aren't doing, you know, SAP and CRM, they are, but there's a whole slew of new apps that are coming in that, you know, traditional architectures aren't well-suited to handle from a price performance standpoint. This changes that doesn't it? >> Well, you think also of, you know, going to the next stage, which is to go to market between the two organizations that before. At the moment, you know, HPE's running off doing various different things. We were running off to it again, it's that chaos that you're talking about. In cloud chaos, you got to go to market chaos. >> Yeah. >> But by simplifying four or five things, what are we going to do really well together? How do we embed those in GreenLake- >> Mhm. >> And be known in the marketplace for these solutions? Then you get a, you know, an organization that's really behind the go to market. You can help with sales activation the enablement, you know, and then we benefit from the scale of HPE. >> Yeah. >> What are those solutions I mean? Is it just, is it I.S.? Is it, you know, compute storage? >> Yeah. >> Is it, you know, specific, you know, SAP? Is it VDI? What are you seeing out there? >> So right now, for this specific technology, we're educating our customers on what that could be and, at its core, this solution allows customers to take services that normally and traditionally run on the compute system and run on a DPU now with Project Monterey, and this is now allowing customers to think about, okay, where are their use cases. So I'm, rather than going and, say, use it for this, we're allowing our customers to explore and say, okay, here's where it makes sense. Where do I have workloads that are using a lot of compute cycles on services at the compute level that could be somewhere else like networking as a great example, right? And allowing more of those compute cycles to be available. So where there are performance requirements for an application, where there is timely response that's needed for, you know, for results to be able to take action on, to be able to get insight from data really quick, those are places where we're starting to see those services moving onto something like a DPU and that's where this makes a whole lot more sense. >> Okay. So, to get this right, you got the hybrid cloud, right? >> [Ricky And Joseph] Yes. >> You got GreenLake and you got the distributed engine. What's that called the- >> For, it's HPE ProLiant- >> ProLiant with- >> The VMware- >> With vSphere. >> That's the compute- >> Distributed. >> Okay. So does the customer, how do you guys implement that with the customer? All three at the same time or they mix and match? What's that? How does that work? >> All three of those components. Yeah. So the beauty of the HP ProLiant with VMware vSphere-distributed services engine- >> Mhm. >> Also known as Project Monterey for those that are keeping notes at home- >> Mhm. >> It's, again, already pre-engineered. So we've already worked through all the mechanics of how you would have to do this. So it's not something you have to go figure out how you build, get deployment, you know, work through those details. That's already done. It is available through HPE GreenLake. So you can go and actually get it as a service in partnership with our customer, our friends here at VMware, and because, if you're familiar and comfortable with all the things that HP ProLiant has done from a security perspective, from a reliability perspective, trusted supply chain, all those sorts of things, you're getting all of that with this particular (indistinct). >> Sumit Dhawan had a great quote on theCUBE just an hour or so ago. He said you have to be early to be first. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> I love that quote. Okay. So you were- >> I fought the urge. >> You were first. You were probably a little early, but do you have a lead? I know you're going to say yes, okay. Let's just- >> Okay. >> Let's just assume that. >> Okay. Yeah. >> Relative to the competition, how do you know? How do you determine that? >> If we have a lead or not? >> Yeah. If you lead. If you're the best. >> We go to the source of the truth which is our customers. >> And what do they tell you? What do you look at and say, okay, now, I mean, when you have that honest conversation and say, okay, we are, we're first, we're early. We're keeping our lead. What are the things that you- >> I'll say it this way. I'll say it this way. We've been in a lot of businesses where there, where we do compete head-to-head in a lot of places. >> Mhm. >> And we know how that sales process normally works. We're seeing a different motion from our customers. When we talk about HPE GreenLake, there's not a lot of back and forth on, okay, well, let me go shop around. It is HP Green. Let's talk about how we actually build this solution. >> And I can tell you, from a VMware perspective, our customers are asking us for this the other way around. So that's a great sign is that, hey, we need to see this partnership come together in GreenLake. >> Yeah. >> It's the old adage that Amazon used to coin and Andy Jassy, you know, they do the undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> [Ricky And Joseph] Yeah. >> A lot of that's now Cloud operations. >> Mhm. >> Underneath it is infrastructure's code to the developer. >> That's right. >> That's at scale. >> That's right. >> And so you got a lot of heavy lifting being done with GreenLake- >> Right. >> Which is why there's no objections probably. >> Right. >> What's the choice? What are you going to shop? >> Yeah. >> There's nothing to shop around. >> Yeah, exactly. And then we've got, you know, that is really icing on the cake that we've, you know, that we've been building for quite some time and there is an understanding in the market that what we do with our infrastructure is hardened from a reliability and quality perspective. Like, times are tough right now. Supply chain issues, all that stuff. We've talked, all talked about it, but at HPE, we don't skimp on quality. We're going to spend the dollars and time on making sure we got reliability and security built in. It's really important to us. >> We had a great use case. The storage team, they were provisioning with containers. >> Yes. >> Storage is a service instantly we're seeing with you guys with VMware. Your customers' bringing in a lot of that into the mix as well. I got to ask 'cause every event we talk about AI and machine learning- >> Mhm. >> Automation and DevOps are now infiltrating in with the CICD pipeline. Security and data become a big conversation. >> [Ricky And Joseph] Agreed. >> Okay. So how do you guys look at that? Okay. You sold me on Green. Like, I've been a big fan from day one. Now, it's got maturity on it. I know it's going to get a lot more headroom to do. There's still a lot of work to do, but directionally it's pretty accurate, you know? It's going to be a success. There's still concern about security, the data layer. That's agnostic of environment, private cloud, hybrid, public, and Edge. So that's important and security- >> Great. >> Has got a huge service area. >> Yeah. >> These are on working progress. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> How do you guys view those? >> I think you've just hit the net on the head. I mean, I was in the press and journalist meetings yesterday and our answer was exactly the same. There is still so much work that can be done here and, you know, I don't think anybody is really emerging as a true leader. It's just a continuation of, you know, tryin' to get that right because it is what is the most important thing to our customers. >> Right. >> And the industry is really sort of catching up to that. >> And, you know, when you start talking about privacy and when you, it's not just about company information. It's about individuals' information. It's about, you know, information that, if exposed, actually could have real impact on people. >> Mhm. >> So it's more than just an I.T. problem. It is actually, and from HPE's perspective, security starts from when we're picking our suppliers for our components. Like, there are processes that we put into our entire trusted supply chain from the factory on the way up. I liken it to my golf swing. My golf swing. I slice right like you wouldn't believe. (John laughing) But when I go to the golf pros, they start me back at the mechanics, the foundational pieces. Here's where the problems are and start workin' on that. So my view is, our view is, if your infrastructure is not secure, you're goin' to have troubles with security as you go further up. >> Stay in the sandbox. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So to speak, you know, they're driving range on the golf analogy there. I love that. Talk about supply chain security real quick because you mentioned supply chain on the hardware side. You're seeing a lot of open source and supply chain in software, trusted software. >> Yep. >> How does GreenLake look at that? How do you guys view that piece of it? That's an important part. >> Yeah. Security is one of the key pillars that we're actually driving as a company right now. As I said, it's important to our customers as they're making purchasing decisions and we're looking at it from the infrastructure all the way up to the actual service itself and that's the beauty of having something like HPE GreenLake. We don't have to pick, is the infrastructure or the middle where, or the top of stack application- >> It's (indistinct), right? >> It's all of it. >> Yeah. >> It's all of it. That matters. >> Quick question on the ecosystem posture. So- >> Sure. >> I remember when HP was, you know, one company and then the GSIs were a little weird with HP because of EDS, you know? You had data protector so we weren't really chatting up Veeam at the time, right? And as soon as the split happened, ecosystem exploded. Now you have a situation where you, Broadcom, is acquiring VMware. You guys, big Broadcom customer. Has your attitude changed or has it not because, oh, we meet with the customers already. Well, you've always said that, but have you have leaned in more? I mean, culturally, is HPE now saying, hmm, now we have some real opportunities to partner in new ways that we don't have to sleep with one eye open, maybe. (John laughing) >> So first of all, VMware and HPE, we've got a variety of different partners. We always have. >> Mhm. >> Well before any Broadcom announcement came along. >> Yeah, sure. >> We've been working with a variety of partners. >> And that hasn't changed. >> And that hasn't changed. And, if your question is, has our posture toward VMware changed at all, the answer's absolutely not. We believe in what VMware is doing. We believe in what our customers are doing with VMware and we're going to continue to work with VMware and partner with the (indistinct). >> And of course, you know, we had to spin out ourselves in November of last year, which I worked on, you know, the whole Dell thing. >> Yeah. We still had the same chairman. >> Yeah. There- (Dave chuckling) >> Yeah, but since then, I think what's really become very apparent and not, it's not just with HPE, but with many of our partners, many of the OEM partners, the opportunity in front of us is vast and we need to rely on each other to help us as, you know, solve the customer problems that are out there. So there's a willingness to overlook some things that, in the past, may have been, you know, barriers. >> But it's important to note also that it's not that we have not had history- >> Yeah. >> Right? Over, we've got over 200,000 customers join- >> Hundreds of millions of dollars of business- >> 100,000, over 10,000, or 100,000 channel partners that we all have in common. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yep. >> There's numerous- >> And independent of the whole Broadcom overhang there. >> Yeah. >> There's the ecosystem floor. >> Yeah. >> The expo floor. >> Right. >> I mean, it's vibrant. I mean, there's clearly a wave coming, Ricky. We talked about this briefly at HPE Discover. I want to get an update from your perspectives, both of you, if you don't mind weighing in on this. Clearly, the wave, we're calling it the Super Cloud, 'cause it's not just Multi-Cloud. It's completely different looking successes- >> Smart Cloud. >> It's not just vendors. It's also the customers turning into clouds themselves. You look at Goldman Sachs and- >> Yep. >> You know, I think every vertical will have its own power law of Cloud players in the future. We believe that to be true. We're still testing that assumption, but it's trending in when you got OPEX- >> [Ricky And Joseph] Right. >> Has to go to in-fund statement- >> Yeah. >> CapEx goes too. Thanks for the Cloud. All that's good, but there's a wave coming- >> Yeah. >> And we're trying to identify it. What do you guys see as this wave 'cause beyond Multi-Cloud and the obvious nature of that will end up happening as a state and what happens beyond that interoperability piece, that's a whole other story, and that's what everyone's fighting for, but everyone out in that ecosystem, it's a big wave coming. They've got their surfboards. They're ready to go. So what do you guys see? What is the next wave that everyone's jacked up about here? >> Well, I think that the Multi-Cloud is obviously at the epicenter. You know, if you look at the results that are coming in, a lot of our customers, this is what's leading the discussion and now we're in a position where, you know, we've brought many companies over the last few years. They're starting to come to fruition. They're starting to play a role in, you know, how we're moving forward. >> Yeah. >> Some of those are a bit more applicable to the commercial space. We're finding commercial customers that never bought from us before. Never. Hundreds and hundreds are coming through our partner networks every single quarter, you know? So brand new to VMware. The trick then is how do you nurture them? How do you encourage them? >> So new logos are comin' in. >> New logos are coming in all the time, all the time, from, you know, from across the ecosystem. It's not just the OEMs. It's all the way back- >> So the ecosystem's back of VMware. >> Unbelievably. So what are we doing to help that? There's two big things that we've announced in the recent weeks is that Partner Connect 2.0. When I talked to you about Multi-Cloud and what the (indistinct), you know, the customers are doing, you see that trend. Four, five different separate clouds that we've got here. The next piece is that they're changing their business models with the partners. Their services is becoming more and more apparent, et cetera, you know? And the use of other partners to do other services, deployment, or this stuff is becoming prevalent. Then you've got the distributors that I talked about with their, you know, their, then you route to market, then you route to business. So how do you encapsulate all of that and ensure your rewarding partners on all aspects of that? Whether it's deployment, whether it's test and depth, it's a points-based system we've put in place now- >> It's a big pie that's developing. The market's getting bigger. >> It's getting so much bigger. And then you help- >> I know you agree, obviously, with that. >> Yeah. Absolutely. In fact, I think for a long time we were asking the question of, is it going to be there or is it going to be here? Which was the wrong question. (indistinct cross talking) Now it's everything. >> Yeah. >> And what I think that, what we're seeing in the ecosystem, is that people are finding the spots that, where they're going to play. Am I going to be on the Edge? >> Yeah. >> Am I going to be on Analytics Play? Am I going to be, you know, Cloud Transition Play? There's a lot of players are now emerging and saying, we're- >> Yeah. >> We're, we now have a place, a part to play. And having that industry view not just of, you know, a commercial customer at that level, but the two of us are lookin' at Teleco, are looking at financial services, at healthcare, at manufacturing. How do these new ecosystem players fit into the- >> (indistinct) lifting. Everyone can see their position there. >> Right. >> We're now being asked for simplicity and talk to me about partner profitability. >> Yes. >> How do I know where to focus my efforts? Am I spread too thin? And, you know, that's, and my advice that the partner ecosystem out there is, hey, let's pick out spots together. Let's really go to, and then strategic solutions that we were talking about is a good example of that. >> Yeah. >> Sounds like composability to me, but not to go back- (laughing) Guys, thanks for comin' on. I think there's a big market there. I think the fog is lifted. People seeing their spot. There's value there. Value creation equals reward. >> Yeah. >> Simplicity. Ease of use. This is the new normal. Great job. Thanks for coming on and sharing. (cross talking) Okay. Back to live coverage after this short break with more day one coverage here from the blue set here in Moscone. (light corporate music)

(bright music) >> Welcome back everyone. theCube's live coverage here. Day two, of two sets, three days of theCube coverage here at VMware Explore. This is our 12th year covering VMware's annual conference, formerly called VM World. I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. We'd love seeing the progress and we've got great security comes Tom Gill, senior vices, president general manager, networking and advanced security business group at VMware. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. for having me. >> Yeah, really happy we could have you on. >> I think this is my sixth edition on the theCube. Do I get frequent flyer points or anything? >> Yeah. >> You first get the VIP badge. We'll make that happen. You can start getting credits. >> Okay, there we go. >> We won't interrupt you. Seriously, you got a great story in security here. The security story is kind of embedded everywhere, so it's not called out and blown up and talked specifically about on stage. It's kind of in all the narratives in the VM World for this year. But you guys have an amazing security story. So let's just step back and to set context. Tell us the security story for what's going on here at VMware and what that means to this supercloud, multi-cloud and ongoing innovation with VMware. >> Yeah, sure thing. So probably the first thing I'll point out is that security's not just built in at VMware. It's built differently. So, we're not just taking existing security controls and cut and pasting them into our software. But we can do things because of our platform, because of the virtualization layer that you really can't do with other security tools. And where we're very, very focused is what we call lateral security or East-West movement of an attacker. 'Cause frankly, that's the name of the game these days. Attackers, you've got to assume that they're already in your network. Already assume that they're there. Then how do we make it hard for them to get to the stuff that you really want? Which is the data that they're going after. And that's where we really should. >> All right. So we've been talking a lot, coming into VMware Explore, and here, the event. About two things. Security, as a state. >> Yeah. >> I'm secure right now. >> Yeah. >> Or I think I'm secure right now, even though someone might be in my network or in my environment. To the notion of being defensible. >> Yeah. >> Meaning I have to defend and be ready at a moment's notice to attack, fight, push back, red team, blue team. Whatever you're going to call it. But something's happening. I got to be able to defend. >> Yeah. So what you're talking about is the principle of Zero Trust. When I first started doing security, the model was we have a perimeter. And everything on one side of the perimeter is dirty, ugly, old internet. And everything on this side, known good, trusted. What could possibly go wrong. And I think we've seen that no matter how good you make that perimeter, bad guys find a way in. So Zero Trust says, you know what? Let's just assume they're already in. Let's assume they're there. How do we make it hard for them to move around within the infrastructure and get to the really valuable assets? 'Cause for example, if they bust into your laptop, you click on a link and they get code running on your machine. They might find some interesting things on your machine. But they're not going to find 250 million credit cards. >> Right. >> Or the script of a new movie or the super secret aircraft plans. That lives in a database somewhere. And so it's that movement from your laptop to that database. That's where the damage is done and that's where VMware shines. >> So if they don't have the right to get to that database, they're not in. >> And it's not even just the right. So they're so clever and so sneaky that they'll steal a credential off your machine, go to another machine, steal a credential off of that. So, it's like they have the key to unlock each one of these doors. And we've gotten good enough where we can look at that lateral movement, even though it has a credential and a key, we're like wait a minute. That's not a real CIS Admin making a change. That's ransomware. And that's where you. >> You have to earn your way in. >> That's right. That's right. Yeah. >> And we're all kinds of configuration errors. But also some user problems. I've heard one story where there's so many passwords and username and passwords and systems that the bad guys scour, the dark web for passwords that have been exposed. >> Correct. >> And go test them against different accounts. Oh one hit over here. >> Correct. >> And people don't change their passwords all the time. >> Correct. >> That's a known vector. >> Just the idea that users are going to be perfect and never make a mistake. How long have we been doing this? Humans are the weakest link. So people are going to make mistakes. Attackers are going to be in. Here's another way of thinking about it. Remember log4j? Remember that whole fiasco? Remember that was at Christmas time. That was nine months ago. And whoever came up with that vulnerability, they basically had a skeleton key that could access every network on the planet. I don't know if a single customer that said, "Oh yeah, I wasn't impacted by log4j." So here's some organized entity had access to every network on the planet. What was the big breach? What was that movie script that got stolen? So there wasn't one, right? We haven't heard anything. So the point is, the goal of attackers is to get in and stay in. Imagine someone breaks into your house, steals your laptop and runs. That's a breach. Imagine someone breaks into your house and stays for nine months. It's untenable, in the real world, right? >> Right. >> We don't know in there, hiding in the closet. >> They're still in. >> They're watching everything. >> Hiding in your closet, exactly. >> Moving around, nibbling on your cookies. >> Drinking your beer. >> Yeah. >> So let's talk about how this translates into the new reality of cloud-native. Because now you hear about automated pentesting is a new hot thing right now. You got antivirus on data is hot within APIs, for instance. >> Yeah. >> API security. So all kinds of new hot areas. Cloud-native is very iterative. You know, you can't do a pentest every week. >> Right. >> You got to do it every second. >> So this is where it's going. It's not so much simulation. It's actually real testing. >> Right. Right. >> How do you view that? How does that fit into this? 'cause that seems like a good direction to me. >> Yeah. If it's right in, and you were talking to my buddy, Ahjay, earlier about what VMware can do to help our customers build cloud native applications with Tanzu. My team is focused on how do we secure those applications? So where VMware wants to be the best in the world is securing these applications from within. Looking at the individual piece parts and how they talk to each other and figuring out, wait a minute, that should never happen. By almost having an x-ray machine on the innards of the application. So we do it for both for VMs and for container based applications. So traditional apps are VM based. Modern apps are container based. And we have a slightly different insertion mechanism. It's the same idea. So for VMs, we do it with a hypervisor with NSX. We see all the inner workings. In a container world we have this thing called a service mesh that lets us look at each little snippet of code and how they talk to each other. And once you can see that stuff, then you can actually apply. It's almost like common sense logic of like, wait a minute. This API is giving back credit card numbers and it gives five an hour. All of a sudden, it's now asking for 20,000 or a million credit cards. That doesn't make any sense. The anomalies stick out like a sore thumb. If you can see them. At VMware, our unique focus in the infrastructure is that we can see each one of these little transactions and understand the conversation. That's what makes us so good at that East-West or lateral security. >> You don't belong in this room, get out or that that's some weird call from an in memory database, something over here. >> Exactly. Where other security solutions won't even see that. It's not like there algorithms aren't as good as ours or better or worse. It's the access to the data. We see the inner plumbing of the app and therefore we can protect the app from. >> And there's another dimension that I want to get in the table here. 'Cause to my knowledge only AWS, Google, I believe Microsoft and Alibaba and VMware have this. >> Correct >> It's Nitro. The equivalent of a Nitro. >> Yes. >> Project Monterey. >> Yeah. >> That's unique. It's the future of computing architectures. Everybody needs a Nitro. I've written about this. >> Yeah. >> Right. So explain your version. >> Yeah. >> It's now real. >> Yeah. >> It's now in the market, right? >> Yeah. >> Or soon will be. >> Here's our mission. >> Salient aspects. >> Yeah. Here's our mission of VMware. Is that we want to make every one of our enterprise customers. We want their private cloud to be as nimble, as agile, as efficient as the public cloud. >> And secure. >> And secure. In fact, I'll argue, we can make it actually more secure because we're thinking about putting security everywhere in this infrastructure. Not just on the edges of it. Okay. How do we go on that journey? As you pointed out, the public cloud providers realized five years ago that the right way to build computers was not just a CPU and a graphics process unit, GPU. But there's this third thing that the industry's calling a DPU, data processing unit. And so there's kind of three pieces of a computer. And the DPU is sometimes called a Smartnic. It's the network interface card. It does all that network handling and analytics and it takes it off the CPU. So they've been building and deploying those systems themselves. That's what Nitro is. And so we have been working with the major Silicon vendors to bring that architecture to everybody. So with vSphere 8, we have the ability to take the network processing, that East-West inspection I talked about, take it off of the CPU and put it into this dedicated processing element called the DPU and free up the CPU to run the applications that Ahjay and team are building. >> So no performance degradation at all? >> Correct. To CPU offload. >> So even the opposite, right? I mean you're running it basically Bare Metal speeds. >> Yes, yes and yes. >> And you're also isolating the storage from the security, the management, and. >> There's an isolation angle to this, which is that firewall, that we're putting everywhere. Not just that the perimeter, but we put it in each little piece of the server is running when it runs on one of these DPUs it's a different memory space. So even if an attacker gets to root in the OS, they it's very, very, never say never, but it's very difficult. >> So who has access to that resource? >> Pretty much just the infrastructure layer, the cloud provider. So it's Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the enterprise. >> Application can't get in. >> Can't get in there. Cause you would've to literally bridge from one memory space to another. Never say never, but it would be very. >> But it hasn't earned the trust to get. >> It's more than barbwire. It's multiple walls. >> Yes. And it's like an air gap. It puts an air gap in the server itself so that if the server is compromised, it's not going to get into the network. Really powerful. >> What's the big thing that you're seeing with this supercloud transition. We're seeing multi-cloud and this new, not just SaaS hosted on the cloud. >> Yeah. >> You're seeing a much different dynamic of, combination of large scale CapEx, cloud-native, and then now cloud-native drills on premises and edge. Kind of changing what a cloud looks like if the cloud's on a cloud. >> Yeah. >> So we're the customer, I'm building on a cloud and I have on premise stuff. So, I'm getting scale CapEx relief from the hyperscalers. >> I think there's an important nuance on what you're talking about. Which is in the early days of the cloud customers. Remember those first skepticism? Oh, it'll never work. Oh, that's consumer grade. Oh, that's not really going to work. Oh some people realize. >> It's not secure. >> Yeah. It's not secure. >> That one's like, no, no, no it's secure. It works. And it's good. So then there was this sort of over rush. Let's put everything on the cloud. And I had a lot of customers that took VM based applications said, I'm going to move those onto the cloud. You got to take them all apart, put them on the cloud and put them all back together again. And little tiny details like changing an IP address. It's actually much harder than it looks. So my argument is, for existing workloads for VM based workloads, we are VMware. We're so good at running VM based workloads. And now we run them on anybody's cloud. So whether it's your east coast data center, your west coast data center, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, IBM keep going. We pretty much every. >> And the benefit of the customer is what. >> You can literally VMotion and just pick it up and move it from private to public, public to private, private to public, Back and forth. >> Remember when we called Vmotion BS, years ago? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> VMotion is powerful. >> We were very skeptical. We're like, that'll never happen. I mean we were. This supposed to be pat ourselves on the back. >> Well because alchemy. It seems like what you can't possibly do that. And now we do it across clouds. So it's not quite VMotion, but it's the same idea. You can just move these things over. I have one customer that had a production data center in the Ukraine. Things got super tense, super fast and they had to go from their private cloud data center in the Ukraine, to a public cloud data center out of harm's way. They did it over a weekend. 48 hours. If you've ever migrated a data center, that's usually six months. Right. And a lot of heartburn and a lot of angst. Boop. They just drag and dropped and moved it on over. That's the power of what we call the cloud operating model. And you can only do this when all your infrastructures defined in software. If you're relying on hardware, load balancers, hardware, firewalls, you can't move those. They're like a boat anchor. You're stuck with them. And by the way, they're really, really expensive. And by the way, they eat a lot of power. So that was an architecture from the 90's. In the cloud operating model your data center. And this comes back to what you were talking about is just racks and racks of X86 with these magic DPUs, or smart nics, to make any individual node go blisteringly fast and do all the functions that you used to do in network appliances. >> We just had Ahjay taking us to school, and everyone else to school on applications, middleware, abstraction layer. And Kit Culbert was also talking about this across cloud. We're talking supercloud, super pass. If this continues to happen, which we would think it will happen. What does the security posture look like? It feels to me, and again, this is your wheelhouse. If supercloud happens with this kind of past layer where there's vMotioning going on. All kinds of spanning applications and data across environments. >> Yeah. Assume there's an operating system working on behind the scenes. >> Right. >> What's the security posture in all this? >> Yeah. So remember my narrative about the bad guys are getting in and they're moving around and they're so sneaky that they're using legitimate pathways. The only way to stop that stuff, is you've got to understand it at what we call Layer 7. At the application layer. Trying to do security to the infrastructure layer. It was interesting 20 years ago, kind of less interesting 10 years ago. And now it's becoming irrelevant because the infrastructure is oftentimes not even visible. It's buried in some cloud provider. So Layer 7 understanding, application awareness, understanding the APIs and reading the content. That's the name of the game in security. That's what we've been focused on. Nothing to do with the infrastructure. >> And where's the progress bar on that paradigm. One to ten. Ten being everyone's doing it. >> Right now. Well, okay. So we as a vendor can do this today. All the stuff I talked about, reading APIs, understanding the individual services looking at, Hey, wait a minute this credit card anomalies, that's all shipping production code. Where is it in customer adoption life cycle? Early days 10%. So there's a whole lot of headroom for people to understand, Hey, I can put these controls in place. They're software based. They don't require appliances. It's Layer 7, so it has contextual awareness and it's works on every single cloud. >> We talked about the pandemic being an accelerator. It really was a catalyst to really rethink. Remember we used to talk about Pat as a security do over. He's like, yes, if it's the last thing I do, I'm going to fix security. Well, he decided to go try to fix Intel instead. >> He's getting some help from the government. >> But it seems like CISOs have totally rethought their security strategy. And at least in part, as a function of the pandemic. >> When I started at VMware four years ago, Pat sat me down in his office and he said to me what he said to you, which is like, "Tom," he said, "I feel like we have fundamentally changed servers. We fundamentally change storage. We fundamentally change networking. The last piece of the puzzle of security. I want you to go fundamentally change it." And I'll argue that the work that we're doing with this horizontal security, understanding the lateral movement. East- West inspection. It fundamentally changes how security works. It's got nothing to do with firewalls. It's got nothing to do with Endpoint. It's a unique capability that VMware is uniquely suited to deliver on. And so Pat, thanks for the mission. We delivered it and it's available now. >> Those WET web applications firewall for instance are around, I mean. But to your point, the perimeter's gone. >> Exactly. >> And so you got to get, there's no perimeter. so it's a surface area problem. >> Correct. And access. And entry. >> Correct. >> They're entering here easy from some manual error, or misconfiguration or bad password that shouldn't be there. They're in. >> Think about it this way. You put the front door of your house, you put a big strong door and a big lock. That's a firewall. Bad guys come in the window. >> And then the windows open. With a ladder. >> Oh my God. Cause it's hot, bad user behavior trumps good security every time. >> And then they move around room to room. We're the room to room people. We see each little piece of the thing. Wait, that shouldn't happen. Right. >> I want to get you a question that we've been seeing and maybe we're early on this or it might be just a false data point. A lot of CSOs and we're talking to are, and people in industry in the customer environment are looking at CISOs and CSOs, two roles. Chief information security officer, and then chief security officer. Amazon, actually Steven Schmidt is now CSO at Reinforce. They actually called that out. And the interesting point that he made, we had some other situations that verified this, is that physical security is now tied to online, to your point about the service area. If I get a password, I still got the keys to the physical goods too. >> Right. So physical security, whether it's warehouse for them or store or retail. Digital is coming in there. >> Yeah. So is there a CISO anymore? Is it just CSO? What's the role? Or are there two roles you see that evolving? Or is that just circumstance. >> I think it's just one. And I think that the stakes are incredibly high in security. Just look at the impact that these security attacks are having on. Companies get taken down. Equifax market cap was cut 80% with a security breach. So security's gone from being sort of a nuisance to being something that can impact your whole kind of business operation. And then there's a whole nother domain where politics get involved. It determines the fate of nations. I know that sounds grand, but it's true. And so companies care so much about it they're looking for one leader, one throat to choke. One person that's going to lead security in the virtual domain, in the physical domain, in the cyber domain, in the actual. >> I mean, you mention that, but I mean, you look at Ukraine. I mean that cyber is a component of that war. I mean, it's very clear. I mean, that's new. We've never seen. this. >> And in my opinion, the stuff that we see happening in the Ukraine is small potatoes compared to what could happen. >> Yeah. >> So the US, we have a policy of strategic deterrence. Where we develop some of the most sophisticated cyber weapons in the world. We don't use them. And we hope never to use them. Because our adversaries, who could do stuff like, I don't know, wipe out every bank account in North America. Or turn off the lights in New York City. They know that if they were to do something like that, we could do something back. >> This is the red line conversation I want to go there. So, I had this discussion with Robert Gates in 2016 and he said, "We have a lot more to lose." Which is really your point. >> So this brand. >> I agree that there's to have freedom and liberty, you got to strike back with divorce. And that's been our way to balance things out. But with cyber, the red line, people are already in banks. So they're are operating below the red line line. Red line meaning before we know you're in there. So do we move the red line down because, hey, Sony got hacked. The movie. Because they don't have their own militia. >> Yeah. >> If their were physical troops on the shores of LA breaking into the file cabinets. The government would've intervened. >> I agree with you that it creates tension for us in the US because our adversaries don't have the clear delineation between public and private sector. Here you're very, very clear if you're working for the government. Or you work for an private entity. There's no ambiguity on that. >> Collaboration, Tom, and the vendor community. I mean, we've seen efforts to try to. >> That's a good question. >> Monetize private data and private reports. >> So at VMware, I'm very proud of the security capabilities we've built. But we also partner with people that I think of as direct competitors. We've got firewall vendors and Endpoint vendors that we work with and integrate. And so coopetition is something that exists. It's hard. Because when you have these kind of competing. So, could we do more? Of course we probably could. But I do think we've done a fair amount of cooperation, data sharing, product integration, et cetera. And as the threats get worse, you'll probably see us continue to do more. >> And the government is going to trying to force that too. >> And the government also drives standards. So let's talk about crypto. Okay. So there's a new form of encryption coming out called processing quantum. >> Quantum. Quantum computers have the potential to crack any crypto cipher we have today. That's bad. Okay. That's not good at all because our whole system is built around these private communications. So the industry is having conversations about crypto agility. How can we put in place the ability to rapidly iterate the ciphers in encryption. So, when the day quantum becomes available, we can change them and stay ahead of these quantum people. >> Well, didn't NIST just put out a quantum proof algo that's being tested right now by the community? >> There's a lot of work around that. Correct. And NIST is taking the lead on this, but Google's working on it. VMware's working on it. We're very, very active in how do we keep ahead of the attackers and the bad guys? Because this quantum thing is a, it's an x-ray machine. It's like a dilithium crystal that can power a whole ship. It's a really, really, really powerful tool. >> Bad things will happen. >> Bad things could happen. >> Well, Tom, great to have you on the theCube. Thanks for coming on. Take the last minute to just give a plug for what's going on for you here at VMWorld this year, just VMware Explore this year. >> Yeah. We announced a bunch of exciting things. We announced enhancements to our NSX family, with our advanced load balancer. With our edge firewall. And they're all in service of one thing, which is helping our customers make their private cloud like the public cloud. So I like to say 0, 0, 0. If you are in the cloud operating model, you have zero proprietary appliances. You have zero tickets to launch a workload. You have zero network taps and Zero Trust built into everything you do. And that's what we're working on. Pushing that further and further. >> Tom Gill, senior vices president, head of the networking at VMware. Thanks for coming on. We do appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Always getting the security data. That's killer data and security of the two ops that get the most conversations around DevOps and Cloud Native. This is The theCube bringing you all the action here in San Francisco for VMware Explore 2022. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>Hey guys. Good morning. And welcome back to the cube. Lisa Martin here with John furrier. This is the Cube's third day of Wal Dal coverage of VMware Explorer. We're very pleased to welcome one of our alumni back to the program. Chris Wolf joins us chief research and innovation officer at VMware. Chris, welcome back to the >>Cube. Yeah. Thanks Lisa. It's always a pleasure. >>This has been a great event. We, we, the key note was standing room only on Tuesday morning. We've had great conversations with VMware's ecosystem and VMware of course, what are some of the, the hot things going on from an R and D perspective? >>Yeah, there's, there's a lot. I mean, we're, we have about four or five different priorities. And these look at this is looking at sovereign clouds and multi-cloud edge computing, modern applications and data services. We're doing quite a bit of work in machine learning as well as insecurity. So we're, we're relatively large organization, but at the same time, we really look to pick our bets. So when we're doing something in ML or security, then we wanna make sure that it's high quality and it's differentiated and adds value for VMware, our partners and our customers. >>Where are our customers in the mix in terms of being influential in the roadmap? >>Very, very much in the mix. What we, what we like to do is in early stage R and D, we want to have five to 10 customers as design partners. And that really helps. And in addition to that, as we get closer to go to market, we look to a lineup between one and three of our SI partners as well, to really help us, you know, in a large company, sometimes your organic innovations can get lost in the shuffle. Yeah. And when we have passionate SI that are like, yes, we want to take this forward with you together. That's just awesome. And it also helps us to understand at a very early stage, what are the integration requirements? So we're not just thinking about the, the core product itself, but how would it play in the ecosystem equally important? >>We had hit Culbert on CTO, great work. He's dealing with the white paper and cross cloud, obviously vSphere, big release, lot of this stuff. Dave ante had mentioned that in the analyst session, you had a lot of good stuff you were talking about. That's coming around the corner. That's shipping coming outta the oven and a big theme this year is multi-cloud cloud native. The relationship what's one's ahead. Bleed dog. No one, you kinda get a feel for multi-cloud. It's kind of out front right now, but now cloud native's got the most history what's coming out of the oven right now in terms of hitting the market. That's not yet in this, in the, in the, in the numbers, in terms of sales, like there's, there's some key cloud native stuff coming out. Where's the action. Can you share what you've shared at the analyst meeting? >>Yeah. So at the analyst meeting, what I was going through was a number of our new innovation projects or projects. And, and these are things that are typically close to being product or service at VMware, you know, somewhere in the year out timeframe. Some, some of these are just a few months out. So let me just go through some of them, I'll start with project keek. So keek is super exciting because when you think about edge, what we're hearing from customers is the, the notion of a single platform, a single piece of hardware that can run their cloud services, their containers, their VMs, their network, and security functions. Doing all of this on one platform, gives them the flexibility that as changes happen, it's a software update. They don't have to buy another piece of hardware, but if we step back, what's the management experience you want, right? >>Simple get ops oriented, simple life cycle and configuration management, very low touch. I don't need technical skills to deploy these types of devices. So this is where keek comes in. So what keek is doing is exposing a Kubernetes API above the ESXi hypervisor and taking a complete, get op style of management. So imagine now, when you need to do an update for infrastructure, you're logging into GitHub, you're editing a YAML file and pushing the update. We're doing the same thing for the applications that reside. I can do all of this through GitHub. So this is very, I would say, even internally disruptive to VMware, but super exciting for our customers and partners that we've shared this with. >>What else is happening? What else on the cloud native side Tansu Monterey those lot areas. >>Oh, there's so much. So if we look at project Monterey, I had a presentation within Invidia yesterday. We're really talking through this. And what I'm seeing now is there's a couple of really interesting inflection points with DPU. The first thing is the performance that you're getting and the number of cores that you can save on an X 86 host is actually providing a very strong business case now to bring DPU into the servers, into the data center. So that's one. So now you have a positive ROI. Number two, you start to decouple core services now from the X 86 host itself. So think about a distributed firewall that I can run on a PCI adapter. Now that's DEC coupled, physically from the server, and it really allows me to scale out east west security in a way that I could not do before. So again, I think that's really exciting and that's where we're seeing a lot of buzz from customers. >>So that DPU, which got a lot of buzz, by the way, Lisa, I never, you had trouble interviews on this. I had to the Dell folks too, V X RS taking the advantage of it, the performances, I see the performance angle on that and deep user hot. Can you talk about that security east west thing? Cuz Tom Gillis was on yesterday talking about that's a killer advantage for the security side. Can you touch on that real >>Quick? Yeah. A hundred percent. So what I can now do is take a, a firewall and run it isolated from the X 86 host that it's trying to protect. So it's right next to the host. I can get line rate speeds in terms of analytics and processing of my network and security traffic. So that's also huge. So I'm running line rate on the host and I'm able to run one of these firewall instances on every host in my data center, you cannot do that. You can never afford it with physical appliances. So to me, this is an inflection point because this is the start of network and security functions moving off of hardware appliances and onto DPU. And if you're the ecosystem vendors, this is how they're going to be able to scale some of their services and offerings into the public >>Cloud. So a lot of good stuff happening within the VMware kind of the hardware, low level atoms and the bits as well as the software. The other thing I wanna get your thoughts on relative to the next question is that takes to the next level is the super cloud world we're living in is about cloud native developers, which is DevOps dev security ops and data ops are now big parts of the, the challenges that the people are reigning in the chaos that that's being reigned in. How does VMware look at the relationship to the cloud providers? Cause we heard cloud universal. We had the cloud. If you believe in multi-cloud, which you guys are saying, people are agreeing with, then you gotta have good tight couple coupled relationships with the cloud services, >>A hundred percent. >>We can be decoupled, but highly cohesive, but you gotta connect in via APIs. What's the vision for the VMware customers who want to connect say AWS, for instance, is that seamless? What makes that happen? What's that roadmap look like for taking that VMware on premises hybrid and making it like turbo charging it to be like public cloud hybrid together? >>Yeah, I think there's some lessons that can be learned here. You know, an analogy I've been using lately is look at the early days of virtualization when VMware had vCenter, right? What was happening was you saw the enterprise management vendors try to do this overlay above virtualization management and say, we can manage all hypervisors. And at the end of the day, these multi hypervisor managers, no one bought 'em because they can do 20% of the functionality of a tool from VMware or Microsoft. And that's the lesson that we have to take to multi-cloud. We don't have to overlay every functionality. There's really good capabilities that the cloud providers are offering through their own tooling and APIs. Right? But you, you, if you step back, you say, well, what do I wanna centralize? I wanna have a centralized, secure software supply chain and I can get that through VMware tan zoo and, and where we're going with Kubernetes. When you're going with native cloud services, you might say, you know what, I wanna have a central view of, of visibility for compliance. So that's what we're doing with secure state or a central view of cost management. And we're doing that with cloud health. So you can have some brokering and governance, but then you also have to look from a surgical perspective as to what are the things that I really need to centralize versus what do I not need to centralize? >>One of the themes that we heard on the keynote on Tuesday was the, the different phases and that a lot of customers are still in the cloud chaos phase. We talked a lot about that in the last couple days with VMware, with its partner ecosystem. And, but the goal of getting to cloud smart, how does the R and D organization, how do, how are you helping customers really navigate that journey from the chaos that they're in, maybe they've inherited multi-cloud environment to getting to cloud smart. And what does cloud smart mean from your perspective >>Cloud? Smartt from my perspective means pragmatism. It means really thinking about what should I do here first, right? I don't want to just go somewhere because I can, right. I want to be really mindful of the steps I'm going to take. So one ex one example of this is I've met with a customer this morning and we were talking about using our vRealize network insight tool, because what that allows 'em to do is get a map of all of their application dependencies in their data center. And they can learn like, well, I can move this to the cloud or maybe I can't move this cuz it has all these other dependencies and it would be really difficult. So that's that's one example. It also means really thinking through issues around data sovereignty, you know, what do I wanna hold onto a customer? I just met with yesterday. They were talking about how valuable their data is and their services that they want to use via SA in the cloud. But then there's also services, which is their core research. They wanna make sure that they can maintain that in their data centers and maintain full control because they see researchers will leave. And now all of a sudden, so that intellectual property has actually gone with the person and they need to, they need to have, you know, better accountability there. >>Yeah. One of the things about that we discovered at our super cloud event was is that, you know, we kind didn't really kind of put too much structure on other than our, our vision. It's, it's not just SaaS on cloud and it's not just, multi-cloud, it's a new kind of application end state or reality that if you believe in digital transformation, then technology is everywhere. And like it in the old days, it powered the back office and then terminals and PCs and whatnot, wasn't powering the boardroom obviously or other business. But if, if it happens like that digital transformation, the company is the app, the app is the company. So you're all digital. So that means the operating expenses has to drive an income statement and the CapEx handled by the cloud provides a lot of goodness. So I think everyone's gonna realize that AWS and the hyperscalers are providing great CapEx gifts. They do all the work and you only pay when you've made your success. So that's a great business model. >>Absolutely >>That's and then combine that with open source, which is now growing so fast, going next level, the software industry's open source. That's not even a debate Mo in some circles, maybe like telco, cloud's got the CapEx. The new operating model is this cloud layer. That's going to transform the companies finally in a hundred percent. Okay. That's super cloud. If that's the case, does it really matter who provides the electricity or the power? It's the coders that are in charge. It's the developers that have to make the calls because if the application is the core, the developers are, are not only the front lines, they are the company. This is really kind of where the sea change is. So if, if we believe that, I'm sure you, you agree with that generally? >>Yeah, of >>Course. Okay. So then what's the VMware customer roadmap here. So to me, that's the big story here at the show is that we're at this point in time where the VMware customers are, have to go there >>A hundred percent, >>What's that path. What is the path for the VMware customer to go from here to there? And what's this order of operations or is there a roadmap? Can, can you share your thoughts on >>That? Yeah, I think part of it is, is with these disruptive technologies, you have to start small, you know, whether it's in your data center, into cloud, you have to build the own institutional knowledge of your team members in the organization. It's much easier than trying to attract outside talent, for least for many of our customers. So I think that's important. The other part of this when with the developer and control, like in my organization, I want my innovators to innovate any other noise around them. I don't want them to have to worry about it. And it's the same thing with our customers. So if your developers are building the technologies that is really differentiating your company, then things like security and cryptography shouldn't have to be things they worry about. So we've been doing a lot of work. Like one of the projects we announced this week was around being able to decouple cryptography from the applications themselves. And we can expose that through a proxy through service mesh. And that's really exciting because now it ops can make these changes. Our SecOps teams can make these changes without having to impact the application. So that's really key is focusing the developers on innovation and then really being mindful about how you can build the right automation around everything else. And certainly open source is key to all >>That. So that's so, so then if you, if that's happening, which I'm, I'm not gonna debate that then in essence, what's really going on here is that the companies are decomposing their entire businesses down to levels that are manageable completely different than the way they did them 20, 30 years ago. >>Absolutely. You, you, you could take a modular approach to how you're solving business problems. And we do the same thing with technology, where there might be a ML algorithms that we've developed that we're exposing as SA service, but then all of the interconnects around that service are open source and very flexible so that the businesses and the customers and the VMware partners can decide what's the right way to build a puzzle for a given problem. >>We were talking on day one, I was riffing with an executives. It was Ragu and Victoria. And the concept around cross cloud was if you get to this Nirvana state, which is we, people want to get to this or composability mode, you're not coding, you're composing cuz coding's kinda happening open source and not the old classic, write some code and write that app. It's more orchestrate, compose and orchestrate. Do you, what's your thoughts on >>That? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I, I agree. And it's it's I would add one more part to it too, which is scope. You know, I think sometimes we see projects fail because the, the initial scope is just too big. You know, what is the problem that you need to solve, scope it properly and then continuously calibrate. So even like our customers have to listen to their customers and we have to be thinking about our customers' customers, right? Because that's really how we innovate because then we can really be mindful of a holistic solution for them. >>You know, Lisa, when we had a super cloud event, you know, one of the panels was called the innovators dilemma with a question mark. And of course everyone kinds of quotes that book innovators dilemma, but one of the panelists, Chris ho beaker on Twitter said, let's change the name from the innovator's dilemma to the integrator's dilemma. And we all kind of got chuckled. We all kind of paused and said, Hey, that's actually a good point. Yeah. If you're now in a cloud and you're seeing some of the ecosystem floor vendors out there talking in this game too, they're all kind of fitting in snapping in almost like modular, like you said, so this is a Lego game. Now it feels like, it feels like, you know, let's compose, let's orchestrate, let's integrate. Now I integrations API driven. Now you're seeing a lot more about API security in the news and we've been covering at least I've probably interviewed six companies in the past, you know, six months that are doing API security, who would've thought API, that's the link, frankly, with the web. Now that's now a target area for hackers. >>Oh. And that's such an innovation area for VMware, John. Okay. >>There it is. So, I mean, this is, again, this means the connected tissue is being attacked yet. We need it to grow. No one's debating that is wrong, but it's under siege. >>Yes. Yes. So something else we introduced this week was a project. We called project Trinidad. And the way, the way you can think about it is a lot of the anomaly detection software today is looking at point based anomalies. Like this API header looks funny where we, where we've gone further is we can look at full sequence based anomalies so we can learn the sequences of transactions at an application takes and really understand what is expected behavior within those API calls within the headers, within the payloads. And we can model legitimate application behavior based on what those expectations are. So like a, like a common sequence might be doing an e-commerce checkout, right? There's lots of operations that happen logging into the site, searching, finding a product, going through the cart. Right. All of those things. Right. So if something's out of sequence, like all of a sudden somebody's just trying to do a checkout, but they haven't actually added to the cart. Right. This just seems odd. Right. So we can start to, and that's a simplistic example, but we're able now to use our algorithms to model legitimate application behavior through the entire sequence of how applications behave and then we can start to trap on anomalies. That's very differentiating IP and, and we think it's gonna be really important for the industry. Yeah. >>Because a lot of the hacks, sometimes on the API side, even as a example, are not necessarily on the API, it's the business logic in them. That's what you're getting at here. Yes. The APIs are hard. Oh our APIs are secure. Right. Well, yeah, but you're not actually securing the business logic internally. That's what you're getting at. If I read >>That right. Or exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And it, it's the thing it's right. It's great that you can, you can look at a header, but what's the payload, right? What is what's, what's the actual data flow, right. That's associated with the call and that's what we want to really hone in on. And that's just a, it's, it's a, it's a far different level of sophistication in being able to understand east west vulnerabilities, you know, log for JX voice and these kind of things. So we have some real, it's interesting technology >>There. Security conversations now are not about security there about defense ability because security's a state of time, your secure here, you're not secure or someone might be in the network or in the app, but can you defend yourself from, and in >>That's it, you know, our, our, our malware software, right. That we're building to prevent and respond has to be more dynamic than the threats we face. Right. And this is why machine learning is so essential in, in these types of applications. >>Let me ask you a question. So just now zooming out riffing here since day, three's our conversational day where we debate and just riff more like a podcast style. If you had to do a super cloud or build a NextGen cloud multi-cloud with abstraction layer, that's, you know, all singing and dancing and open everyone's happy hardware below it's working ISAs and then apps are killed. Can ass what's in that. What does it look like to you if you had to architect the, the ultimate super cloud enabler, that something that would disrupt the next 10 years, what would it look like and how does, and assuming, and trying to do where everybody wins go, you have 10 seconds. No, >>Yeah, yeah. So the, you know, first of all, there has to be open source at all of the intersections. I think that's really important. And, and this is, this goes from networking constructs to our database, as a service layers, you know, everything in between, you know, the, the, the participants should be able to win on merit there. The other part of super cloud though, that hasn't happened that I probably is the most important area of innovation is going to be decoupled control planes. We have a number of organizations building sovereign cloud initiatives. They wanna have flexibility in where their services physically run. And you're not going to have that with a limited number of control planes that live in very specific public cloud data centers. So that's an area, give >>An example of what a, a, a, a narrowly defined control plane is. >>Yeah, sure. So my database as a service layer, so the, the, the actual portal that the customer is going into to provision databases, right. Rep managed replication, et cetera. Right. I should be able to run that in a colo. I should be able to run that somewhere in region that is guaranteed, that I'm going to have data stay physically in region. You know, we still have some of these challenges in networking in terms of being able to constrain traffic flows and be able to predict and audit them within a particular region as well. >>It's interesting. You bring up region again, more complexity. You know, you got catalogs here, catalogs different. I mean, this is where the chaos really comes down. I mean, it's, it's advancing, but it's advancing the state of functionality, but making it hella complex, I mean, come on. Don't you think it's like pretty amazingly hard to reign in that? Well, or is it maybe you guys making it easier? I just think I just, my mind just went, oh my God, I gotta, I gotta provision to that region, but then it's gotta be the same over there. And >>When you go back to modular architecture constructs, it gets far easier. This has been really key for how VMware is even building our own clouds internally is so that we have a, a shared services platform for the different apps and services that we're building, so that you do have that modularized approach. Like I said, the, the examples of innovation projects I've shared have been really driven by the fact that, you know, what, I don't know how customers are gonna consume it, and I don't have to know. And if you have the right modular architecture, the right APIs around it, you don't have to limit a particular project or technology's future at the time you build >>It. Okay. So your super would have multiple control planes that you can move, manage with that within one place. I get that. What about the data control plane? That seems to be something that used to be the land grab in, in conversations from vendors. But that seems to be much more of a customer side, cuz if I'm a customer, I want my control plane data plane to be, you know, mine. Like I don't want to have anyone cuz data's gotta move around, gotta be secure. >>Oh exactly. >>And that's gonna be complicated. How does, how do you see the data planes emerging? >>Yeah. Yeah. We, we see an opportunity really around having a, a centralized view that can give me consistent indexing and consistent awareness of data, no matter where it resides. And then being able to have that level of integration now between my data services and my applications, because you're right, you know, right now we have data in different places, but we could have a future where data's more perpetually in motion. You know, we're already looking at time sensitive fabrics where we're expecting microservices to sometimes run in different cell towers depending on the SLA that they need to achieve. So then you have data parts that's going to follow, right? That may not always be in the same cloud data center. So there's, this is enormously complicated, not just in terms of meeting application SLAs, but auditing and security. Right. That makes it even further. So having these types of data layers that can give me a consistent purview of data, regardless of where it is, allow me to manage and life cycle data globally, that's going to be super important, I believe going forward. >>Yeah. Awesome. Well, my one last question, Lisa, gonna get a question in here. It's hard. Went for her. I'm getting all the, all the questions in, sorry, Lisa that's okay. What's your favorite, most exciting thing that you think's going on right now that people should pay attention to of all the things you're looking at, the most important thing that that's happening and maybe something that's super important that people aren't talking about or it could be the same thing. So the, the most important thing that you think that's happening in the industry for cloud next today and, and maybe something that you think people should look at and pay more attention to. >>Okay. Yeah, those are good questions. And that's hard to answer because there's, there's probably so much happening. I I've been on here before I've talked about edge. I still think that's really important. I think the value of edge soft of edge velocity being defined by software updates, I think is quite powerful. And that's, that's what we're building towards. And I would say the industry is as well. If you look at AWS and Azure, when they're packaging a service to go out to the edge it's package as a container. So it's already quite flexible and being able to think about how can I have a single platform that can give me all of this flexibility, I think is really, really essential. We're building these capabilities into cars. We have a version of our Velo cloud edge device. That's able to run on a ruggedized hardware in a police car today. We're piloting that with a customer. So there is a shift happening where you can have a core platform that can now allow you to layer on applications that you're not thinking about in the future. So I think that's probably obvious. A lot of people are like, yeah. Okay. Yes. Let's talk about edge, big deal. >>Oh it's, it's, it's big. Yes. It's >>Exploding, but >>It's complicated too. It's not easy. It's not obvious. Right. And it's merging >>There's new things coming every day. Yeah. Yeah. And related to that though, there is this kind of tension that's existing between machine learning and privacy and that's really important. So an area of investment that I don't think enough people are paying attention to today is federated machine learning. There's really good projects in open source that are having tangible impact on, in a lot of industries in VMware. We are, we're investing in a, in a couple of those projects, namely fate in the Linux foundation and open FFL. And in these use cases like the security product I mentioned to you that is looking at analyzing API sequence API call sequences. We architected that originally so that it can run in public cloud, but we're also leveraging now federated machine learning so that we can ensure that those API calls and metadata associated with that is staying on premises for the customers to ensure privacy. So I think those intersections are really important. Federated learning, I think is a, an area not getting enough attention. All right. All >>Right, Chris, thanks so much for coming on. Unfortunately we are out of time. I know you guys could keep going. Yeah. Good stuff. But thank you for sharing. What's going on in R and D the customer impact the outcomes that you're enabling customers to achieve. We appreciate your >>Insights. We're just getting started >>In, in early innings, right? Yeah. Awesome. Good stuff for guest and John furrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022. Our next guest joins us momentarily. >>Okay.

>>Welcome back everyone Cube's live coverage here. Day two, two sets, three days of cube coverage here at VMware Explorer. This is our 12th year covering VMware's annual conference, formally called world I'm Jean Dave ante. We'd love seeing the progress and we've got great security comes Tom Gill, senior rights, president general manager, networking and advanced security business group at VMware. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Thanks >>For having me. Yeah, really happy we could have you on, you know, I think, I think this is my sixth edition on the cube. Like, do I get freaking flyer points or anything? >>Yeah, you get first get the VIP badge. We'll make that happen. You can start getting credits. >>Okay. There we go. >>We won't interrupt you. No, seriously, you got a great story in security here. The security story is kind of embedded everywhere, so it's not like called out and, and blown up and talked specifically about on stage. It's kind of in all the narratives in, in the VM world for this year. Yeah. But you guys have an amazing security story. So let's just step back into set context. Tell us the security story for what's going on here at VMware and what that means to this super cloud multi-cloud and ongoing innovation with VMware. Yeah, >>Sure thing. So, so probably the first thing I'll point out is that, that security's not just built in at VMware it's built differently, right? So we're not just taking existing security controls and cut and pasting them into, into our software. But we can do things because of our platform because of the virtualization layer that you really can't do with other security tools and where we're very, very focused is what we call lateral security or east west movement of an attacker. Cuz frankly, that's the name of the game these days. Right? Attackers, you gotta assume that they're already in your network. Okay. Already assume that they're there, then how do we make it hard for them to get to what the, the stuff that you really want, which is the data that they're, they're going after. Right. And that's where we, >>We really should. All right. So we've been talking a lot coming into world VMware Explorer and here the event about two things security as a state. Yeah. I'm secure right now. Yeah. Or I, I think I'm secure right now, even though someone might be in my network or in my environment to the notion of being defensible. Yeah. Meaning I have to defend and be ready at a moment's notice to attack, fight, push back red team, blue team, whatever you're gonna call it, but something's happening. I gotta be a to defend. Yeah. >>So you, what you're talking about is the principle of zero trust. So the, the, when we, when I first started doing security, the model was we have a perimeter and everything on one side of the perimeter is dirty, ugly, old internet and everything on this side known good, trusted what could possibly go wrong. And I think we've seen that no matter how good you make that perimeter, bad guys find a way in. So zero trust says, you know what? Let's just assume they're already in. Let's assume they're there. How do we make it hard for them to move around within the infrastructure and get to the really valuable assets? Cuz for example, if they bust into your laptop, you click on a link and they get code running on your machine. They might find some interesting things on your machine, but they're not gonna find 250 million credit cards. Right. Or the, the script of a new movie or the super secret aircraft plans, right. That lives in a database somewhere. And so it's that movement from your laptop to that database. That's where the damage is done. Yeah. And that's where VMware shines. If they don't >>Have the right to get to that database, they're >>Not >>In and it's not even just the right, like, so they're so clever. And so sneaky that they'll steal a credential off your machine, go to another machine, steal a credential off of that. So it's like they have the key to unlock each one of these doors and we've gotten good enough where we can look at that lateral movement, even though it has a credential and a key where like, wait a minute, that's not a real CIS admin making a change. That's ransomware. Yeah. Right. And that's, that's where we, you have to earn your way in. That's right. That's >>Right. Yeah. And we're all, there's all kinds of configuration errors. But also some, some I'll just user problems. I've heard one story where there's so many passwords and username and passwords and systems that the bad guy's scour, the dark web for passwords that have been exposed. Correct. And go test them against different accounts. Oh one hit over here. Correct. And people don't change their passwords all the time. Correct? Correct. That's a known, known vector. We, >>We just, the idea that users are gonna be perfect and never make mistake. Like how long have we been doing this? Like humans with the weakest link. Right. So, so, so people are gonna make mistakes. Attackers are gonna be in here's another way of thinking about it. Remember log for J. Remember that whole ago, remember that was a Christmas time. That was nine months ago. And whoever came up with that, that vulnerability, they basically had a skeleton key that could access every network on the planet. I don't know if a single customer that was said, oh yeah, I wasn't impacted by log for J. So seers, some organized entity had access to every network on the planet. What was the big breach? What was that movie script that got stolen? So there wasn't one. Right? We haven't heard anything. So the point is the goal of attackers is to get in and stay in. Imagine someone breaks into your house, steals your laptop and runs. That's a breach. Imagine someone breaks into your house and stays for nine months. Like it's untenable, the real world. Right, right. >>We don't even go in there. They're still in there >>Watching your closet. Exactly. Moving around, nibbling on your ni line, your cookies. You know what I mean? Drinking your beer. >>Yeah. So, so let's talk about how this translates into the new reality of cloud native, because now know you hear about, you know, automated pen testing is a, a new hot thing right now you got antivirus on data. Yeah. Is hot is hot within APIs, for instance. Yeah. API security. So all kinds of new hot areas, cloud native is very iterative. You know, you, you can't do a pen test every week. Right. You gotta do it every second. Right. So this is where it's going. It's not so much simulation. It's actually real testing. Right. Right. How do you view that? How does that fit into this? Cuz that seems like a good direction to me. >>Yeah. It, it, it fits right in. And you were talking to my buddy AJ earlier about what VMware can do to help our customers build cloud native applications with, with Zu, my team is focused on how do we secure those applications? So where VMware wants to be the best in the world is securing these applications from within looking at the individual piece parts and how they talk to each other and figuring out, wait a minute. That, that, that, that, that should never happen by like almost having an x-ray machine on the ins of the application. So we do it for both for VMs and for container based applications. So traditional apps are VM based. Modern apps are container based and we, and we have a slightly different insertion mechanism. It's the same idea. So for VMs, we do it with the hypervisor, with NSX, we see all the inner workings in a container world. >>We have this thing called a service me that lets us look at each little snippet of code and how they talk to each other. And once you can see that stuff, then you can actually apply. It's almost like common sense logic of like, wait a minute. You know, this API is giving back credit card numbers and it gives five an hour. All of a sudden, it's now asking for 20,000 or a million credit card that doesn't make any sense. Right? The anomalies stick out like a sore thumb. If you can see them. And VMware, our unique focus in the infrastructure is that we can see each one of these little transactions and understand the conversation. That's what makes us so good at that east west or lateral >>Security. Yeah. You don't belong in this room, get out or that that's right. Some weird call from an in-memory database, something over >>Here. Exactly. Where other, other security solutions won't even see that. Right. It's not like there algorithms aren't as good as ours or, or better or worse. It's that, it's the access to the data. We see the, the, the, the inner plumbing of the app. And therefore we can protect >>The app from, and there's another dimension that I wanna get in the table here, cuz to my knowledge only AWS, Google, I, I believe Microsoft and Alibaba and VMware have this, it nitro the equivalent of a nitro. Yes. Project Monterey. Yeah. That's unique. It's the future of computing architectures. Everybody needs a nitro. I've I've written about this. Yeah. Right. So explain your version. Yeah. Project. It's now real. It's now in the market right. Or soon will be. Yeah. Here. Here's our mission salient aspects. Yeah. >>Here's our mission of VMware is that we wanna make every one of our enterprise customers. We want their private cloud to be as nimble, as agile, as efficient as the public cloud >>And secure >>And secure. In fact, I'll argue, we can make it actually more secure because we're thinking about putting security everywhere in this infrastructure. Right. Not just on the edges of it. So, so, so, okay. How do we go on that journey? As you pointed out, the public cloud providers realized, you know, five years ago that the right way to build computers was not just a CPU and a GPU graphics process, unit GPU, but there's this third thing that the industry's calling a DPU data processing unit. So there's kind of three pieces of a computer. And the DPU is sometimes called a smart Nick it's the network interface card. It does all that network handling and analytics and it takes it off the CPU. So they've been building and deploying those systems themselves. That's what nitro is. And so we have been working with the major Silicon vendors to bring that architecture to everybody. So, so with vSphere eight, we have the ability to take the network processing that east west inspection. I talked about, take it off of the CPU and put it into this dedicated processing element called the DPU and free up the CPU to run the applications that AJ and team are building. >>So no performance degradation at all, correct. >>To CPU >>Offload. So even the opposite, right? I mean you're running it basically bare metal speeds. >>Yes, yes. And yes. >>And, and, and you're also isolating the, the storage right from the, from the, the, the security, the management. And >>There's an isolation angle to this, which is that firewall that we're putting everywhere. Not just that the perimeter, we put it in each little piece of the server is running when it runs on one of these DPU, it's a different memory space. So even if, if an attacker gets to root in the OS, they it's very, very, never say never, but it's very difficult. >>So who has access to that? That, that resource >>Pretty much just the infrastructure layer, the cloud provider. So it's Google Microsoft, you know, and the enterprise, the >>Application can't get in, >>Can't get in there. Cause it, you would've to literally bridge from one memory space to another, never say never, but it would be very, very, >>It hasn't earned the trust >>To get it's more than Bob wire. It's, it's, it's multiple walls and, and >>It's like an air gap. It puts an air gap in the server itself so that if the server's compromised, it's not gonna get into the network really powerful. >>What's the big thing that you're seeing with this super cloud transition we're seeing, we're seeing, you know, multicloud and this new, not just SAS hosted on the cloud. Yeah. You're seeing a much different dynamic of combination of large scale CapEx, cloud native. And then now cloud native develops on premises and edge kind of changing what a cloud looks like if the cloud's on a cloud. So rubber customer, I'm building on a cloud and I have on-prem stuff. So I'm getting scale CapEx relief from the, from the cap, from the hyperscalers. >>I, I think there's an important nuance on what you're talking about, which is, is in the early days of the cloud customers. Remember those first skepticism? Oh, it'll never work. Oh, that's consumer grade. Oh, that's not really gonna work. And some people realize >>It's not secure. Yeah. >>It, it's not secure that one's like, no, no, no, it's secure. It works. And it, and it's good. So then there was this sort of over rush. Like let's put everything on the cloud. And I had a lot of customers that took VM based applications said, I'm gonna move those onto the cloud. You gotta take 'em all apart, put 'em on the cloud and put 'em all back together again. And little tiny details, like changing an IP address. It's actually much harder than it looks. So my argument is for existing workloads for VM based workloads, we are VMware. We're so good at running VM based workloads. And now we run them on anybody's cloud. So whether it's your east coast data center, your west coast data center, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, IBM keep going. Right. We pretty much every, and >>The benefit of the customer is what you >>Can literally vMotion and just pick it up and move it from private to public public, to private, private, to public, public, back and forth. >>Remember when we called VMO BS years ago. Yeah, yeah, yeah. >>We were really, skeptic is >>Powerful. We were very skeptical. We're like, that'll never happen. I mean, we were, I mean, it's supposed to be pat ourselves on the back. We, well, >>Because it's alchemy, it seems like what you can't possibly do that. Right. And so, so, so, and now we do it across clouds, right? So we can, you know, it's not quite VMO, but it's the same idea. You can just move these things over. I have one customer that had a production data center in the Ukraine, things got super tense, super fast, and they had to go from their private cloud data center in the Ukraine to a public cloud data center outta harm's way. They did it over a weekend, 48 hours. If you've ever migrated data, that's usually six months, right? And a lot of heartburn and a lot of angst, boom. They just drag and drop, moved it on over. That's the power of what we call the cloud operating model. And you can only do this when all your infrastructure's defined in software. >>If you're relying on hardware, load, balancers, hardware, firewalls, you can't move those. They're like a boat anchor. You're stuck with them. And by the way, really, really expensive. And by the way, they eat a lot of power, right? So that was an architecture from the nineties in the cloud operating model, your data center. And this goes back to what you were talking about is just racks and racks of X 86 with these magic DPU or smart necks to make any individual node go blisteringly fast and do all the functions that you used to do in network appliances. >>We just said, AJ taking us to school and everyone else to school on applications, middleware abstraction layer. Yeah. And kit Culver was also talking about this across cloud. We're talking super cloud, super pass. If this continues to happen, which we would think it will happen. What does the security posture look like? It has. It feels to me. And again, this is, this is your wheelhouse. If super cloud happens with this kind of past layer where there's B motioning going on, all kinds of yeah. Spanning applications and data. Yeah. Across environments. Yeah. Assume there's an operating system working on behind the scenes. Right. What's the security posture in all this. Yeah. >>So remember my narrative about like VA guys are getting in and they're moving around and they're so sneaky that they're using legitimate pathways. The only way to stop that stuff is you've gotta understand it at what, you know, we call layer seven at the application layer the in, you know, trying to do security, the infrastructure layer. It was interesting 20 years ago, kind of less interesting 10 years ago. And now it's becoming irrelevant because the infrastructure is oftentimes not even visible, right. It's buried in some cloud provider. So layer seven, understanding, application awareness, understanding the APIs and reading the content. That's the name of the game in security. That's what we've been focused on. Right. Nothing to do with >>The infras. And where's the progress bar on that, that paradigm early one at the 10, 10 being everyone's doing it >>Right now. Well, okay. So we, as a vendor can do this today. All the stuff I talked about about reading APIs, understanding the, the individual services looking at, Hey, wait a minute. This credit card anomalies, that's all shipping production code. Where is it in customer adoption life cycle, early days, 10%. So, so there's a whole lot of headroom. We, for people to understand, Hey, I can put these controls in place. There's software based. They don't require appliances. It's layer seven. So it has contextual awareness and it's works on every single cloud. >>You know, we talk about the pandemic. Being an accelerator really was a catalyst to really rethink. Remember we used to talk about pat his security a do over. He's like, yes, if it's the last thing I'm due, I'm gonna fix security. Well, he decided to go try to fix Intel instead, but, >>But, but he's getting some help from the government, >>But it seems like, you know, CISOs have totally rethought, you know, their security strategy. And, and at least in part is a function of the pandemic. >>When I started at VMware four years ago, pat sat me down in his office and he said to me what he said to you, which is like Tom, he said, I feel like we have fundamentally changed servers. We fundamentally changed storage. We fundamentally changed networking. The last piece of the puzzle of security. I want you to go fundamentally change it. And I'll argue that the work that we're doing with this, this horizontal security understanding the lateral movement east west inspection, it fundamentally changes how security works. It's got nothing to do with firewalls. It's got nothing to do with endpoint. It's a unique capability that VMware is uniquely suited to deliver on. And so pat, thanks for the mission. We delivered it and available >>Those, those wet like web applications firewall for instance are, are around. I mean, but to your point, the perimeter's gone. Exactly. And so you gotta get, there's no perimeter. So it's a surface area problem. Correct. And access and entry, correct. They're entering here easy from some manual error or misconfiguration or bad password that shouldn't be there. They're >>In. Think about it this way. You put the front door of your house, you put a big strong door and a big lock. That's a firewall bad guys, come in the window. Right. And >>Then the window's open and the window with a ladder room. Oh my >>God. Cause it's hot, bad user behavior. Trump's good security >>Every time. And then they move around room to room. We're the room to room people. Yeah. We see each little piece of the thing. Wait, that shouldn't happen. Right. >>I wanna get you a question that we've been seeing and maybe we're early on this, or it might be just a, a false data point. A lot of CSOs and we're talking to are, and people in industry in the customer environment are looking at CSOs and CSOs, two roles, chief information security officer, and then chief security officer Amazon, actually, Steven Schmidt is now CSO at reinforced. They actually called that out. Yeah. And the, and the interesting point that he made, we've had some other situations that verified. This is that physical security is now tied to online to your point about the service area. If I get a password, I still at the keys to the physical goods too. Right. Right. So physical security, whether it's warehouse for them is, or store or retail digital is coming in there. Yeah. So is there a CSO anymore? Is it just CSO? What's the role or are there two roles you see that evolving or is that just, >>Well, >>I circumstance, >>I, I think it's just one. And I think that, that, you know, the stakes are incredibly high in security. Just look at the impact that these security attacks are having on it. It, you know, companies get taken down, Equifax market cap was cut, you know, 80% with a security breach. So security's gone from being sort of a nuisance to being something that can impact your whole kind of business operation. And then there's a whole nother domain where politics get involved. Right. It determines the fate of nations. I know that sounds grand, but it's true. Yeah. And so, so, so companies care so much about it. They're looking for one liter, one throat to choke, you know, one person that's gonna lead security in the virtual domain, in the physical domain, in the cyber domain, in, in, you know, in the actual, well, it is, >>I mean, you mentioned that, but I mean, mean you look at Ukraine. I mean the, the, that, that, that cyber is a component of that war. I mean, that's very clear. I mean, that's, that's new, we've never seen >>This. And in my opinion, the stuff that we see happening in the Ukraine is small potatoes compared to what could happen. Yeah, yeah. Right. So the us, we have a policy of, of strategic deterrents where we develop some of the most sophisticated cyber weapons in the world. We don't use them and we hope never to use them because the, the, our adversaries who could do stuff like, oh, I don't know, wipe out every bank account in north America, or turn off the lights in New York city. They know that if they were to do something like that, we could do something back. >>I, this discuss, >>This is the red line conversation I wanna go there. So >>I had this discussion with Robert Gates in 2016 and he said, we have a lot more to lose, which is really >>Your point. So this brand, so I agree that there's the, to have freedom and Liberty, you gotta strike back with divorce and that's been our way to, to balance things out. Yeah. But with cyber, the red line, people are already in banks. So they're addresses are operating below the red line, red line, meaning before we know you're in there. So do we move the red line down because Hey, Sony got hacked the movie because they don't have their own militia. Yeah. If they were physical troops on the shores of LA breaking into the file cabinets. Yeah. The government would've intervened. >>I, I, I agree with you that it creates, it creates tension for us in the us because our, our adversaries don't have the clear delineation between public and private sector here. You're very, very clear if you're working for the government or you work for an private entity, there's no ambiguity on that. And so, so we have different missions in each department. Other countries will use the same cyber capabilities to steal intellectual, you know, a car design as they would to, you know, penetrate a military network. And that creates a huge hazard for us on the us. Cause we don't know how to respond. Yeah. Is that a civil issue? Is that a, a, a military issue? And so, so it creates policy ambiguity. I still love the clarity of separation of, you know, sort of the various branches of government separation of government from, >>But that, but, but bureau on multinational corporation, you then have to, your cyber is a defensible. You have to build the defenses >>A hundred percent. And I will also say that even though there's a clear D mark between government and private sector, there's an awful lot of cooperation. So, so our CSO, Alex toshe is actively involved in the whole intelligence community. He's on boards and standards and we're sharing because we have a common objective, right? We're all working together to fight these bad guys. And that's one of the things I love about cyber is that that even direct competitors, two big banks that are rivals on the street are working together to share security information and, and private, is >>There enough? Is collaboration Tom in the vendor community? I mean, we've seen efforts to try to, that's a good question, monetize private data, you know? Yeah. And private reports and, >>And, you know, like, so at VMware, we, we, I'm very proud of the security capabilities we've built, but we also partner with people that I think of as direct competitors, we've got firewall vendors and endpoint vendors that we work with and integrate. And so cooperation is something that exists. It's hard, you know, because when you have these kind of competing, you know, so could we do more? Of course we probably could, but I do think we've done a fair amount of cooperation, data sharing, product integration, et cetera, you know, and, you know, as the threats get worse, you'll probably see us continue to do more. >>And the governments is gonna trying to force that too. >>And, and the government also drives standards. So let's talk about crypto. Okay. So there's a new form of encryption coming out called quantum processing, calling out. Yeah. Yeah. Quantum, quantum computers have the potential to crack any crypto cipher we have today. That's bad. Okay. Right. That's not good at all because our whole system is built around these private communications. So, so the industry is having conversations about crypto agility. How can we put in place the ability to rapidly iterate the ciphers in encryption? So when the day quantum becomes available, we can change them and stay ahead of these quantum people. Well, >>Didn't this just put out a quantum proof algo that's being tested right now by the, the community. >>There's a lot of work around that. Correct. And, and, and this is taking the lead on this, but you know, Google's working on it, VMware's working on it. We're very, very active in how do we keep ahead of the attackers and the bad guys? Because this quantum thing is like a, it's a, it's a x-ray machine. You know, it's like, it's like a, a, a di lithium crystal that can power a whole ship. Right. It's a really, really, really powerful >>Tool. It's bad. Things will happen. >>Bad things could happen. >>Well, Tom, great to have you on the cube. Thanks for coming. Take the last minute to just give a plug for what's going on for you here at world this year, VMware explore this year. Yeah. >>We announced a bunch of exciting things. We announced enhancements to our, our NSX family, with our advanced load balancer, with our edge firewall. And they're all in service of one thing, which is helping our customers make their private cloud like the public cloud. So I like to say 0, 0, 0. If you are in the cloud operating model, you have zero proprietary appliances. You have zero tickets to launch a workload. You have zero network taps and zero trust built into everything you do. And that's, that's what we're working on and pushing that further and further. >>Tom Gill, senior vices president head of the networking at VMware. Thanks for coming up for you. Appreciate >>It. Yes. Thanks for having guys >>Always getting the security data. That's killer data and security of the two ops that get the most conversations around dev ops and cloud native. This is the queue bringing you all the action here in San Francisco for VMware. Explore 2022. I'm John furrier with Dave, Alan. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to San Francisco, "theCUBE" is live, our day two coverage of VMware Explore 2022 continues. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Dave and I are pleased to welcome Jason Collier, principal member of technical staff at AMD to the program. Jason, it's great to have you. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> So what's going on at AMD? I hear you have some juicy stuff to talk about. >> Oh, we've got a ton of juicy stuff to talk about. Clearly the Project Monterey announcement was big for us, so we've got that to talk about. Another thing that I really wanted to talk about was a tool that we created and we call it, it's the VMware Architecture Migration Tool, call it VAMT for short. It's a tool that we created and we worked together with VMware and some of their professional services crew to actually develop this tool. And it is also an open source based tool. And really the primary purpose is to easily enable you to move from one CPU architecture to another CPU architecture, and do that in a cold migration fashion. >> So we're probably not talking about CPUs from Tandy, Radio Shack systems, likely this would be what we might refer to as other X86 systems. >> Other X86 systems is a good way to refer to it. >> So it's interesting timing for the development and the release of a tool like this, because in this sort of X86 universe, there are players who have been delayed in terms of delivering their next gen stuff. My understanding is AMD has been public with the idea that they're on track for by the end of the year, Genoa, next gen architecture. So can you imagine a situation where someone has an existing set of infrastructure and they're like, hey, you know what I want to get on board, the AMD train, is this something they can use from the VMware environment? >> Absolutely, and when you think about- >> Tell us exactly what that would look like, walk us through 100 servers, VMware, 1000 VMs, just to make the math easy. What do you do? How does it work? >> So one, there's several things that the tool can do, we actually went through, the design process was quite extensive on this. And we went through all of the planning phases that you need to go through to do these VM migrations. Now this has to be a cold migration, it's not a live migration. You can't do that between the CPU architectures. But what we do is you create a list of all of the virtual machines that you want to migrate. So we take this CSV file, we import this CSV file, and we ask for things like, okay, what's the name? Where do you want to migrate it to? So from one cluster to another, what do you want to migrate it to? What are the networks that you want to move it to? And then the storage platform. So we can move storage, it could either be shared storage, or we could move say from VSAN to VSAN, however you want to set it up. So it will do those storage migrations as well. And then what happens is it's actually going to go through, it's going to shut down the VM, it's going to take a snapshot, it is going to then basically move the compute and/or storage resources over. And once it does that, it's going to power 'em back up. And it's going to check, we've got some validation tools, where it's going to make sure VM Tools comes back up where everything is copacetic, it didn't blue screen or anything like that. And once it comes back up, then everything's good, it moves onto the next one. Now a couple of things that we've got feature wise, we built into it. You can parallelize these tasks. So you can say, how many of these machines do you want to do at any given time? So it could be, say 10 machines, 50 machines, 100 machines at a time, that you want to go through and do this move. Now, if it did blue screen, it will actually roll it back to that snapshot on the origin cluster. So that there is some protection on that. A couple other things that are actually in there are things like audit tracking. So we do full audit logging on this stuff, we take a snapshot, there's basically kind of an audit trail of what happens. There's also full logging, SYS logging, and then also we'll do email reporting. So you can say, run this and then shoot me a report when this is over. Now, one other cool thing is you can also actually define a change window. So I don't want to do this in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday. So I want to do this later at night, over the weekend, you can actually just queue this up, set it, schedule it, it'll run. You can also define how long you want that change window to be. And what it'll do, it'll do as many as it can, then it'll effectively stop, finish up, clean up the tasks and then send you a report on what all was successfully moved. >> Okay, I'm going to go down the rabbit hole a little bit on this, 'cause I think it's important. And if I say something incorrect, you correct me. >> No problem. >> In terms of my technical understanding. >> I got you. >> So you've got a VM, essentially a virtual machine typically will consist of an entire operating system within that virtual machine. So there's a construct that containerizes, if you will, the operating system, what is the difference, where is the difference in the instruction set? Where does it lie? Is it in the OS' interaction with the CPU or is it between the construct that is the sort of wrapper around the VM that is the difference? >> It's really primarily the OS, right? And we've not really had too many issues doing this and most of the time, what is going to happen, that OS is going to boot up, it's going to recognize the architecture that it's on, it's going to see the underlying architecture, and boot up. All the major operating systems that we test worked fine. I mean, typically they're going to work on all the X86 platforms. But there might be instruction sets that are kind of enabled in one architecture that may not be in another architecture. >> And you're looking for that during this process. >> Well usually the OS itself is going to kind of detect that. So if it pops up, the one thing that is kind of a caution that you need to look for. If you've got an application that's explicitly using an instruction set that's on one CPU vendor and not the other CPU vendor. That's the one thing where you're probably going to see some application differences. That said, it'll probably be compatible, but you may not get that instruction set advantage in it. >> But this tool remediates against that. >> Yeah, and what we do, we're actually using VM Tools itself to go through and validate a lot of those components. So we'll look and make sure VM Tools is enabled in the first place, on the source system. And then when it gets to the destination system, we also look at VM Tools to see what is and what is not enabled. >> Okay, I'm going to put you on the spot here. What's the zinger, where doesn't it work? You already said cold, we understand, you can schedule for cold migrations, that's not a zinger. What's the zinger, where doesn't it work? >> It doesn't work like, live migrations just don't work. >> No live, okay, okay, no live. What about something else? What's the oh, you've got that version, you've got that version of X86 architecture, it-won't work, anything? >> A majority of those cases work, where it would fail, where it's going to kick back and say, hey, VM Tools is not installed. So where you would see this is if you're running a virtual appliance from some vendor, like insert vendor here that say, got a firewall, or got something like that, and they don't have VM Tools enabled. It's going to fail it out of the gate, and say, hey, VM Tools is not on this, you might want to manually do it. >> But you can figure out how to fix that? >> You can figure out how to do that. You can also, and there's a flag in there, so in kind of the options that you give it, you say, ignore VM Tools, don't care, move it anyway. So if you've got less, some VMs that are in there, but they're not a priority VM, then it's going to migrate just fine. >> Got It. >> Can you elaborate a little bit on the joint development work that AMD and VMware are doing together and the value in it for customers? >> Yeah, so it's one of those things we worked with VMware to basically produce this open source tool. So we did a lot of the core component and design and we actually engaged VMware Professional Services. And a big shout out to Austin Browder. He helped us a ton in this project specifically. And we basically worked, we created this, kind of co-designed, what it was going to look like. And then jointly worked together on the coding, of pulling this thing together. And then after that, and this is actually posted up on VMware's public repos now in GitHub. So you can go to GitHub, you can go to the VMware samples code, and you can download this thing that we've created. And it's really built to help ease migrations from one architecture to another. So if you're looking for a big data center move and you got a bunch of VMs to move. I mean, even if it's same architecture to same architecture, it's definitely going to ease the pain of going through and doing a migration of, it's one thing when you're doing 10 machines, but when you're doing 10,000 virtual machines, that's a different story. It gets to be quite operationally inefficient. >> I lose track after three. >> Yeah. >> So I'm good for three, not four. >> I was going to ask you what your target market segment is here. Expand on that a little bit and talk to me about who you're working with and those organizations. >> So really this is targeted toward organizations that have large deployments in enterprise, but also I think this is a big play with channel partners as well. So folks out there in the channel that are doing these migrations and they do a lot of these, when you're thinking about the small and mid-size organizations, it's a great fit for that. Especially if they're kind of doing that upgrade, the lift and shift upgrade, from here's where you've been five to seven years on an architecture and you want to move to a new architecture. This is really going to help. And this is not a point and click GUI kind of thing. It's command line driven, it's using PowerShell, we're using PowerCLI to do the majority of this work. And for channel partners, this is an excellent opportunity to put the value and the value add and VAR, And there's a lot of opportunity for, I think, channel partners to really go and take this. And once again, being open source. We expect this to be extensible, we want the community to contribute and put back into this to basically help grow it and make it a more useful tool for doing these cold migrations between CPU architectures. >> Have you seen any in the last couple of years of dynamics, obviously across the world, any industries in particular that are really leading edge for what you guys are doing? >> Yeah, that's really, really interesting. I mean, we've seen it, it's honestly been a very horizontal problem, pretty much across all vertical markets. I mean, we've seen it in financial services, we've seen it in, honestly, pretty much across the board. Manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, we have seen kind of a strong interest in that. And then also we we've actually taken this and presented this to some of our channel partners as well. And there's been a lot of interest in it. I think we presented it to about 30 different channel partners, a couple of weeks back about this. And I got contact from 30 different channel partners that said they're interested in basically helping us work on it. >> Tagging on to Lisa's question, do you have visibility into the AMD thought process around the timing of your next gen release versus others that are competitors in the marketplace? How you might leverage that in terms of programs where partners are going out and saying, hey, perfect time, you need a refresh, perfect time to look at AMD, if you haven't looked at them recently. Do you have any insight into that in what's going on? I know you're focused on this area. But what are your thoughts on, well, what's the buzz? What's the buzz inside AMD on that? >> Well, when you look overall, if you look at the Gartner Hype Cycle, when VMware was being broadly adopted, when VMware was being broadly adopted, I'm going to be blunt, and I'm going to be honest right here, AMD didn't have a horse in the race. And the majority of those VMware deployments we see are not running on AMD. Now that said, there's an extreme interest in the fact that we've got these very cored in systems that are now coming up on, now you're at that five to seven year refresh window of pulling in new hardware. And we have extremely attractive hardware when it comes to running virtualized workloads. The test cluster that I'm running at home, I've got that five to seven year old gear, and I've got some of the, even just the Milan systems that we've got. And I've got three nodes of another architecture going onto AMD. And when I got these three nodes completely maxed to the number of VMs that I can run on 'em, I'm at a quarter of the capacity of what I'm putting on the new stuff. So what you get is, I mean, we worked the numbers, and it's definitely, it's like a 30% decrease in the amount of resources that you need. >> That's a compelling number. >> It's a compelling number. >> 5%, 10%, nobody's going to do anything for that. You talk 30%. >> 30%. It's meaningful, it's meaningful. Now you you're out of Austin, right? >> Yes. >> So first thing I thought of when you talk about running clusters in your home is the cost of electricity, but you're okay. >> I'm okay. >> You don't live here, you don't live here, you don't need to worry about that. >> I'm okay. >> Do you have a favorite customer example that you think really articulates the value of AMD when you're in customer conversations and they go, why AMD and you hit back with this? >> Yeah. Actually it's funny because I had a conversation like that last night, kind of random person I met later on in the evening. We were going through this discussion and they were facing exactly this problem. They had that five to seven year infrastructure. It's funny, because the guy was a gamer too, and he's like, man, I've always been a big AMD fan, I love the CPUs all the way since back in basically the Opterons and Athlons right. He's like, I've always loved the AMD systems, loved the graphics cards. And now with what we're doing with Ryzen and all that stuff. He's always been a big AMD fan. He's like, and I'm going through doing my infrastructure refresh. And I told him, I'm just like, well, hey, talk to your VAR and have 'em plug some AMD SKUs in there from the Dells, HPs and Lenovos. And then we've got this tool to basically help make that migration easier on you. And so once we had that discussion and it was great, then he swung by the booth today and I was able to just go over, hey, this is the tool, this is how you use it, here's all the info. Call me if you need any help. >> Yeah, when we were talking earlier, we learned that you were at Scale. So what are you liking about AMD? How does that relate? >> The funny thing is this is actually the first time in my career that I've actually had a job where I didn't work for myself. I've been doing venture backed startups the last 25 years and we've raised couple hundred million dollars worth of investment over the years. And so one, I figured, here I am going to AMD, a larger corporation. I'm just like, am I going to be able to make it a year? And I have been here longer than a year and I absolutely love it. The culture at AMD is amazing. We still have that really, I mean, almost it's like that underdog mentality within the organization. And the team that I'm working with is a phenomenal team. And it's actually, our EVP and our Corp VP, were actually my executive sponsors, we were at a prior company. They were one of my executive sponsors when I was at Scale. And so my now VP boss calls me up and says, hey, I'm putting a band together, are you interested? And I was kind of enjoying a semi-retirement lifestyle. And then I'm just like, man, because it's you, yes, I am interested. And the group that we're in, the work that we're doing, the way that we're really focusing on forward looking things that are affecting the data center, what's going to be the data center like three to five years from now. It's exciting, and I am having a blast, I'm having the time of my life. I absolutely love it. >> Well, that relationship and the trust that you will have with each other, that bleeds into the customer conversations, the partner conversations, the employee conversations, it's all inextricably linked. >> Yes it is. >> And we want to know, you said three to five years out, like what? Like what? Just general futurist stuff, where do you think this is going. >> Well, it's interesting. >> So moon collides with the earth in 2025, we already know that. >> So we dialed this back to the Pensando acquisition. When you look at the Pensando acquisition and you look at basically where data centers are today, but then you look at where basically the big hyperscalers are. You look at an AWS, you look at their architecture, you specifically wrap Nitro around that, that's a very different architecture than what's being run in the data center. And when you look at what Pensando does, that's a lot of starting to bring what these real clouds out there, what these big hyperscalers are running into the grasps of the data center. And so I think you're going to see a fundamental shift. The next 10 years are going to be exciting because the way you look at a data center now, when you think of what CPUs do, what shared storage, how the networking is all set up, it ain't going to look the same. >> Okay, so the competing vision with that, to play devil's advocate, would be DPUs are kind of expensive. Why don't we just use NICs, give 'em some more bandwidth, and use the cheapest stuff. That's the competing vision. >> That could be. >> Or the alternative vision, and I imagine everything else we've experienced in our careers, they will run in parallel paths, fit for function. >> Well, parallel paths always exist, right? Otherwise, 'cause you know how many times you've heard mainframe's dead, tape's dead, spinning disk is dead. None of 'em dead, right? The reality is you get to a point within an industry where it basically goes from instead of a growth curve like that, it goes to a growth curve of like that, it's pretty flat. So from a revenue growth perspective, I don't think you're going to see the revenue growth there. I think you're going to see the revenue growth in DPUs. And when you actually take, they may be expensive now, but you look at what Monterey's doing and you look at the way that those DPUs are getting integrated in at the OEM level. It's going to be a part of it. You're going to order your VxRail and VSAN style boxes, they're going to come with them. It's going to be an integrated component. Because when you start to offload things off the CPU, you've driven your overall utilization up. When you don't have to process NSX on basically the X86, you've just freed up cores and a considerable amount of them. And you've also moved that to where there's a more intelligent place for that pack to be processed right, out here on this edge. 'Cause you know what, that might not need to go into the host bus at all. So you have just alleviated any transfers over a PCI bus, over the PCI lanes, into DRAM, all of these components, when you're like, but all to come with, oh, that bit needs to be on this other machine. So now it's coming in and it's making that decision there. And then you take and integrate that into things like the Aruba Smart Switch, that's running the Pensando technology. So now you got top of rack that is already making those intelligent routing decisions on where packets really need to go. >> Jason, thank you so much for joining us. I know you guys could keep talking. >> No, I was going to say, you're going to have to come back. You're going to have to come back. >> We've just started to peel the layers of the onion, but we really appreciate you coming by the show, talking about what AMD and VMware are doing, what you're enabling customers to achieve. Sounds like there's a lot of tailwind behind you. That's awesome. >> Yeah. >> Great stuff, thank you. >> It's a great time to be at AMD, I can tell you that. >> Oh, that's good to hear, we like it. Well, thank you again for joining us, we appreciate it. For our guest and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE Live" from San Francisco, VMware Explore 2022. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute. (upbeat music)

(soft joyful music) >> Welcome back everyone to the live CUBE coverage here in San Francisco for VMware Explore '22. I'm John Furrier with my host Dave Vellante. Three days of wall to wall live coverage. Two sets here at the CUBE, here on the ground floor in Moscone, and we got VMware and HPE back on the CUBE. Paul Turner, VP of products at vSphere and cloud infrastructure at VMware. Great to see you. And Mark Nickerson, Director of Go to Mark for Compute Solutions at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah. >> Thank you for having us. >> So we, we are seeing a lot of traction with GreenLake, congratulations over there at HPE. The customers changing their business model consumption, starting to see that accelerate. You guys have the deep partnership, we've had you guys on earlier yesterday. Talked about the technology partnership. Now, on the business side, where's the action at with the HP and you guys with the customer? Because, now as they go cloud native, third phase of the inflection point, >> Yep. >> Multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, steady state. Where's the action at? >> So I think the action comes in a couple of places. Um, one, we see increased scrutiny around, kind of not only the cost model and the reasons for moving to GreenLake that we've all talked about there, but it's really the operational efficiencies as well. And, this is an area where the long term partnership with VMware has really been a huge benefit. We've actually done a lot of joint engineering over the years, continuing to do that co-development as we bring products like Project Monterey, or next generations of VCF solutions, to live in a GreenLake environment. That's an area where customers not only see the benefits of GreenLake from a business standpoint, um, on a consumption model, but also around the efficiency operationally as well. >> Paul, I want to, I want to bring up something that we always talk about on the CUBE, which is experience in the enterprise. Usually it's around, you know, technology strategy, making the right product market fit, but HPE and VMware, I mean, have exceptional depth and experience in the enterprise. You guys have a huge customer base, doesn't churn much, steady state there, you got vSphere, killer product, with a new release coming out, HP, unprecedented, great sales force. Everyone knows that you guys have great experience serving customers. And, it seems like now the fog is clearing, we're seeing clear line of sight into value proposition, you know, what it's worth, how do you make money with it, how do partners make money? So, it seems like the puzzle's coming together right now with consumption, self-service, developer focus. It just seems to be clicking. What's your take on all this because... >> Oh, absolutely. >> you got that engine there at VMware. >> Yeah. I think what customers are looking for, customers want that cloud kind of experience, but they want it on their terms. So, the work that we're actually doing with the GreenLake offerings that we've done, we've released, of course, our subscription offerings that go along with that. But, so, customers can now get cloud on their terms. They can get systems services. They know that they've got the confidence that we have integrated those services really well. We look at something like vSphere 8, we just released it, right? Well, immediately, day zero, we come out, we've got trusted integrated servers from HPE, Mark and his team have done a phenomenal job. We make sure that it's not just the vSphere releases but VSAN and we get VSAN ready nodes available. So, the customers get that trusted side of things. And, you know, just think about it. We've... 200,000 joined customers. >> Yeah, that's a lot. >> We've a hundred thousand kind of enabled partners out there. We've an enormous kind of install base of customers. But also, those customers want us to modernize. And, you know, the fact that we can do that with GreenLake, and then of course with our new features, and our new releases. >> Yeah. And it's nice that the products market fits going well on both sides. But can you guys share, both of you share, the cadence of the relationship? I mean, we're talking about vSphere, every two years, a major release. Now since 6, vSphere 6, you guys are doing three months' releases, which is amazing. So you guys got your act together there, doing great. But, you guys, so many joint customers, what's the cadence? As stuff comes out, how do you guys put that together? How tightly integrated? Can you share a quick... insight into that dynamic? >> Yeah, sure. So, I mean Mark can and add to this too, but the teams actually work very closely, where it's every release that we do is jointly qualified. So that's a really, really important thing. But it's more interesting is this... the innovation side of things. Right? If you just think about it, 'cause it's no use to just qualify. That's not that interesting. But, like I said, we've released with vSphere 8 you know... the new enhanced storage architecture. All right? The new, next generation of vSphere. We've got that immediately qualified, ready on HPE equipment. We built out new AI servers, actually with Invidia and with HPE. And, we're able to actually push the extremes of... AI and intelligence... on systems. So that's kind of work. And then, of course, our Project Monterey work. Project Monterey Distributed Services Engine. That's something we're really excited about, because we're not just building a new server anymore, we're actually going to change the way servers are built. Monterey gives us a new platform to build from that we're actually jointly working. >> So double click on that, and then to explain how HPE is taking advantage of it. I mean, obvious you have more diversity of XPU's, you've got isolation, you've got now better security, and confidential computing, all that stuff. Explain that in some detail, and how does HPE take advantage of that? >> Yeah, definitely. So, if you think about vSphere 8, vSphere 8 I can now virtualize anything. I can virtualize your CPU's, your GPU's, and now what we call DPU's, or data processing units. A data processing unit, it's... think of it as we're running, actually, effectively another version of ESX, sitting down on this processor. But, that gives us an ability to run applications, and some of the virtualization services, actually down on that DPU. It's separated away from where you run your application. So, all your applications get to consume all your CPU. It's all available to you. Your DPU is used for that virtualization and virtualization services. And that's what we've done. We've been working with HPE and HPE and Pensando. Maybe you can talk some of the new systems that we've built around this too. >> Yeah. So, I mean, that's one of the... you talked about the cadence and that... back to the cadence question real briefly. Paul hit on it. Yeah, there's a certain element of, "Let's make sure that we're certified, we're qualified, we're there day zero." But, that cadence goes a lot beyond it. And, I think Project Monterey is a great example of where that cadence expands into really understanding the solutioning that goes into what the customer's expecting from us. So, to Paul's point, yeah, we could have just qualified the ESX version to go run on a DPU and put that in the market and said, "Okay, great. Customers, We know that it works." We've actually worked very tightly with VMware to really understand the use case, what the customer needs out of that operating environment, and then provide, in the first instantiation, three very discrete product solutions aimed at different use cases, whether that's a more robust use case for customers who are looking at data intensive, analytic intensive, environments, other customers might be looking at VDI or even edge applications. And so, we've worked really closely with VMware to engineer solutions specific to those use cases, not just to a qualification of an operating environment, not just a qualification of certain software stack, but really into an understanding of the use case, the customer solution, and how we take that to market with a very distinct point of view alongside our partners. >> And you can configure the processors based on that workload. Is that right? And match the workload characteristics with the infrastructure is that what I'm getting? >> You do, and actually, well, you've got the same flexibility that we've actually built in why you love virtualization, why people love it, right? You've got the ability to kind of bring harness hardware towards your application needs in a very dynamic way. Right? So if you even think about what we built in vSphere 8 from an AI point of view, we're able to scale. We built the ability to actually take network device cards, and GPU cards, you're to able to build those into a kind of composed device. And, you're able to provision those as you're provisioning out VM's. And, the cool thing about that, is you want to be able to get extreme IO performance when you're doing deep learning applications, and you can now do that, and you can do it very dynamically, as part of the provisioning. So, that's the kind of stuff. You've got to really think, like, what's the use case? What's the applications? How do we build it? And, for the DPU side of things, yes, we've looked at how do we take some of our security services, some of our networking services, and we push those services down onto the SmartNIC. It frees up processors. I think the most interesting thing, that you probably saw on the keynote, was we did benchmarks with Reddit databases. We were seeing 20 plus, I'm sure the exact number, I think it was 27%, I have to get exact number, but a 27% latency improvement, to me... I came from the database background, latency's everything. Latency's king. It's not just... >> Well it's... it's number one conversation. >> I mean, we talk about multi-cloud, and as you start getting into hybrid. >> Right. >> Latency, data movement, efficiency, I mean, this is all in the workload mindset that the workhorses that you guys have been working at HPE with the compute, vSphere, this is heart center of the discussion. I mean, it is under the hood, and we're talking about the engine here, right? >> Sure. >> And people care about this stuff, Mark. This is like... Kubernetes only helps this better with containers. I mean, it's all kind of coming together. Where's that developer piece? 'Cause remember, infrastructure is code, what everybody wants. That's the reality. >> Right. Well, I think if you take a look at... at where the Genesis of the desire to have this capability came from, it came directly out of the fact that you take a look at the big cloud providers, and sure, the ability to have a part of that operating environment, separated out of the CPU, free up as much processing as you possibly can, but it was all in this very lockdown proprietary, can't touch it, can't develop on it. The big cloud guys owned it. VMware has come along and said, "Okay, we're going to democratize that. We're going to make this available for the masses. We're opening this up so that developers can optimize workloads, can optimize applications to run in this kind of environment." And so, really it's about bringing that cloud experience, that demand that customers have for that simplicity, that flexibility, that efficiency, and then marrying it with the agility and security of having your on premises or hybrid cloud environment. And VMware is kind of helping with that... >> That's resonating with the customer, I got to imagine. >> Yeah. >> What's the feedback you're hearing? When you talk to customers about that, the like, "Wait a minute, we'd have to like... How long is that going to take? 'Cause that sounds like a one off." >> Yeah. I'll tell you what... >> Everything is a one off now. You could do a one off. It scales. >> What I hear is give me more. We love where we're going in the first instantiation of what we can do with the Distributed Services Engine. We love what we're seeing. How do we do more? How do we drive more workloads in here? How do we get more efficiency? How can we take more of the overhead out of the CPU, free up more cores. And so, it's a tremendously positive response. And then, it's a response that's resonating with, "Love it. Give me more." >> Oh, if you're democratizing, I love that word because it means democratization, but someone's being democratized. Who's... What's... Something when... that means good things are happening, which means someone's not going to be winning out. Who's that? What... >> Well it, it's not necessarily that someone's not winning out. (laughs) What you read, it comes down to... Democratizing means you've got to look at it, making it widely available. It's available to all. And these things... >> No silos. No gatekeepers. Kind of that kind of thing. >> It's a little operationally difficult to use. You've got... Think about the DPU market. It was a divergent market with different vendors going into that market with different kind of operating systems, and that doesn't work. Right? You've got to actually go and virtualize those DPU's. So then, we can actually bring application innovation onto those DPU's. We can actually start using them in smart ways. We did the same thing with GPU's. We made them incredibly easy to use. We virtualized those GPU's, we're able to, you know, you can provision them in a very simple way. And, we did the same thing with Kubernetes. You mentioned about container based applications and modern apps in the one platform now, you can just set a cluster and you can just say, "Hey I want that as a modern apps enabled cluster." And boom. It's done. And, all of the configurations, set up, Kubernetes, it's done for you. >> But the thing that just GreenLake too, the democratization aspect of how that changed the business model unleashes... >> Right. >> ...efficiency and just simplicity. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> But the other thing was the 20% savings on the Reddit's benchmark, with no change required at the application level, correct? >> No change at the application level. In the vCenter, you have to set a little flag. >> Okay. You got to tick a box. >> You got to tick a little box... >> So I can live with that. But the point I'm making is that traditionally, we've had... We have an increasing amount of waste to do offloads, and now you're doing them much more efficiently, right? >> Yes. >> Instead of using the traditional x86 way of doing stuff, you're now doing purpose built, applying that to be much more efficient >> Totally agree. And I think it's becoming, it's going to become even more important. Look at, we are... our run times for our applications, We've got to move to a world where we're building completely confidential applications at all time. And that means that they are secured, encrypted, all traffic is encrypted, whether it's storage traffic, whether it's IO traffic, we've got to make sure we've got complete route of trust of the applications. And so, to do all of that is actually a... compute intensive. It just is. And so, I think as we move forward and people build much more complete, confidential, compute secured environments, you're going to be encrypting all traffic all the time. You're going to be doing micro-zoning and firewalling down at the VM level so that you've got the protection. You can take a VM, you can move it up to the cloud, it will inherit all of its policies, will move with it. All of that will take compute capacity. >> Yup. >> The great thing is that the DPU's give us this ability to offload and to use some of that spare compute capacity. >> And isolate so the application chance can't just tunnel in and get access to that >> You guys got so much going on. You can have your own CUBE show, just on the updating, what's going on between the two companies, and then the innovation. We got one minute left. Just quickly, what's the goal in the partnership? What's next? You guys going to be in the field together, doing joint customer work? Is there bigger plans? Is there events out there? What are some of your plans together in the marketplace? >> That's you. >> Yup. So, I think, Paul kind of alluded to it. Talk about the fact that you've got a hundred thousand partners in common. The venn diagram of looking at the HPE channel and the VMware channel, clearly there's an opportunity there to continue to drive a joint, go to market message, through both of our sales organizations, and through our shared channel. We have a 25,000 strong... solution architect... force that we can leverage. So as we get these exciting things to talk about, I mean, you talk about Project Monterey, the Distributed Services Engine. That's big news. There's big news around vSphere 8. And so, having those great things to go talk about with that strong sales team, with that strong channel organization, I think you're going to see a lot stronger partnership between VMware and HPE as we continue to do this joint development and joint selling >> Lots to get enthused about, pretty much there. >> Oh yeah! >> Yeah, I would just add in that we're actually in a very interesting point as well, where Intel's just coming out with Next Rev systems, we're building the next gen of these systems. I think this is a great time for customers to look at that aging infrastructure that they have in place. Now is a time we can look at upgrading it, but when they're moving it, they can move it also to a cloud subscription based model, you know can modernize not just what you have in terms of the capabilities and densify and get much better efficiency, but you can also modernize the way you buy from us and actually move to... >> Real positive change transformation. Checks the boxes there. And put some position for... >> You got it. >> ... cloud native development. >> Absolutely. >> Guys, thanks for coming on the CUBE. Really appreciate you coming out of that busy schedule and coming on and give us the up... But again, we can do a whole show some... all the moving parts and innovation going on with you guys. So thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thank you. I'm John Dave Vellante we're back with more live coverage day two, two sets, three days of wall to wall coverage. This is the CUBE at VMware Explorer. We'll be right back.

>>Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the cubes day two coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 live from San Francisco. Lisa Martin here with Dave Nicholson. We're excited to kick off day two of great conversations with VMware partners, customers it's ecosystem. We've got a V an alumni back with us Kumer on Siva corporate VP of business development from AMD joins us. Great to have you on the program in person. Great >>To be here. Yes. In person. Indeed. Welcome. >>So the great thing yesterday, a lot of announcements and B had an announcement with VMware, which we will unpack that, but there's about 7,000 to 10,000 people here. People are excited, ready to be back, ready to be hearing from this community, which is so nice. Yesterday am B announced. It is optimizing AMD PON distributed services card to run on VMware. Bsphere eight B for eight was announced yesterday. Tell us a little bit about that. Yeah, >>No, absolutely. The Ben Sando smart neck DPU. What it allows you to do is it, it provides a whole bunch of capabilities, including offloads, including encryption DEC description. We can even do functions like compression, but with, with the combination of VMware project Monterey and, and Ben Sando, we we're able to do is even do some of the vSphere, actual offloads integration of the hypervisor into the DPU card. It's, it's pretty interesting and pretty powerful technology. We're we're pretty excited about it. I think this, this, this could, you know, potentially, you know, bring some of the cloud value into, in terms of manageability, in terms of being able to take care of bare metal servers and also, you know, better secure infrastructure, you know, cloudlike techniques into the, into the mainstream on-premises enterprise. >>Okay. Talk a little bit about the DPU data processing unit. They talked about it on stage yesterday, but help me understand that versus the CPU GPU. >>Yeah. So it's, it's, it's a different, it's a different point, right? So normally you'd, you'd have the CPU you'd have we call it dumb networking card. Right. And I say dumb, but it's, it's, you know, it's just designed to go process packets, you know, put and put them onto PCI and have the, the CPU do all of the, kind of the, the packet processing, the, the virtual switching, all of those functions inside the CPU. What the DPU allows you to do is, is actually offload a bunch of those functions directly onto the, onto the deep view card. So it has a combination of these special purpose processors that are programmable with the language called P four, which is one, one of the key things that pan Sando brings. Here's a, it's a, it's a real easy to program, easy to use, you know, kind of set so that not some of, some of our larger enterprise customers can actually go in and, you know, do some custom coding depending on what their network infrastructure looks like. But you can do things like the V switch in, in the, in the DPU, not having to all have that done on the CPU. So you freeze up some of the CPU course, make sure, make sure infrastructure run more efficiently, but probably even more importantly, it provides you with more, with greater security, greater separation between the, between the networking side and the, the CPU side. >>So, so that's, that's a key point because a lot of us remember the era of the tonic TCP, I P offload engine, Nick, this isn't simply offloading CPU cycles. This is actually providing a sort of isolation. So that the network that's right, is the network has intelligence that is separate from the server. Is that, is that absolutely key? Is that absolutely >>Key? Yeah. That's, that's a good way of looking at it. Yeah. And that's, that's, I mean, if you look at some of the, the, the techniques used in the cloud, the, you know, this, this, this in fact brings some of those technologies into, into the enterprise, right. So where you are wanting to have that level of separation and management, you're able to now utilize the DPU card. So that's, that's a really big, big, big part of the value proposition, the manageability manageability, not just offload, but you know, kind of a better network for enterprise. Right. >>Right. >>Can you expand on that value proposition? If I'm a customer what's in this for me, how does this help power my multi-cloud organization? >>Yeah. >>So I think we have some, we actually have a number of these in real customer use cases today. And so, you know, folks will use, for example, the compression and the, sorry, the compression and decompression, that's, that's definitely an application in the storage side, but also on the, just on the, just, just as a, as a DPU card in the mainstream general purpose, general purpose server server infrastructure fleet, they're able to use the encryption and decryption to make sure that their, their, their infrastructure is, is kind of safe, you know, from point to point within the network. So every, every connected, every connection there is actually encrypted and that, that, you know, managing those policies and orchestrating all of that, that's done to the DPU card. >>So, so what you're saying is if you have DPU involved, then the server itself and the CPUs become completely irrelevant. And basically it's just a box of sheet metal at that point. That's, that's a good way of looking at that. That's my segue talking about the value proposition of the actual AMD. >>No, absolutely. No, no. I think, I think, I think the, the, the CPUs are always going to be central in this and look. And so, so I think, I think having, having the, the DPU is extremely powerful and, and it does allow you to have better infrastructure, but the key to having better infrastructure is to have the best CPU. Well, tell >>Us, tell >>Us that's what, tell us us about that. So, so I, you know, this is, this is where a lot of the, the great value proposition between VMware and AMD come together. So VMware really allows enterprises to take advantage of these high core count, really modern, you know, CPU, our, our, our, our epic, especially our Milan, our 7,003 product line. So to be able to take advantage of 64 course, you know, VMware is critical for that. And, and so what they, what they've been able to do is, you know, know, for example, if you have workloads running on legacy, you know, like five year old servers, you're able to take a whole bunch of those servers and consolidate down, down into a single node, right. And the power that VMware gives you is the manageability, the reliability brings all of that factors and allows you to take advantage of, of the, the, the latest, latest generation CPUs. >>You know, we've actually done some TCO modeling where we can show, even if you have fully depreciated hardware, like, so it's like five years old plus, right. And so, you know, the actual cost, you know, it's already been written off, but the cost just the cost of running it in terms of the power and the administration, you know, the OPEX costs that, that are associated with it are greater than the cost of acquiring a new set of, you know, a smaller set of AMD servers. Yeah. And, and being able to consolidate those workloads, run VMware, to provide you with that great, great user experience, especially with vSphere 8.0 and the, and the hooks that VMware have built in for AMD AMD processors, you actually see really, really good. It's just a great user experience. It's also a more efficient, you know, it's just better for the planet. And it's also better on the pocketbook, which is, which is, which is a really cool thing these days, cuz our value in TCO translates directly into a value in terms of sustainability. Right. And so, you know, from, from energy consumption, from, you know, just, just the cost of having that there, it's just a whole lot better >>Talk about on the sustainability front, how AMD is helping its customers achieve their sustainability goals. And are you seeing more and more customers coming to you saying, we wanna understand what AMD is doing for sustainability because it's important for us to work with vendors who have a core focus on it. >>Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think, look, I'll be perfectly honest when we first designed our CPU, we're just trying to build the biggest baddest thing that, you know, that, that comes out in terms of having the, the, the best, the, the number, the, the largest number of cores and the best TCO for our customers, but what it's actually turned out that TCO involves energy consumption. Right. And, and it involves, you know, the whole process of bringing down a whole bunch of nodes, whole bunch of servers. For example, we have one calculation where we showed 27, you know, like I think like five year old servers can be consolidated down into five AMD servers that, that ratio you can see already, you know, huge gains in terms of sustainability. Now you asked about the sustainability conversation. This I'd say not a week goes by where I'm not having a conversation with, with a, a, a CTO or CIO who is, you know, who's got that as part of their corporate, you know, is part of their corporate brand. And they want to find out how to make their, their infrastructure, their data center, more green. Right. And so that's, that's where we come in. Yeah. And it's interesting because at least in the us money is also green. So when you talk about the cost of power, especially in places like California, that's right. There's, there's a, there's a natural incentive to >>Drive in that direction. >>Let's talk about security. You know, the, the, the threat landscape has changed so dramatically in the last couple of years, ransomware is a household word. Yes. Ransomware attacks happened like one every 11 seconds, older technology, a little bit more vulnerable to internal threats, external threats. How is AMD helping customers address the security fund, which is the board level conversation >>That that's, that's, that's a, that's a great, great question. Look, I look at security as being, you know, it's a layered thing, right? I mean, if you talk to any security experts, security, doesn't, you know, there's not one component and we are an ingredient within the, the greater, you know, the greater scheme of things. A few things. One is we have partnered very closely with the VMware. They have enabled our SUV technology, secure encrypted virtualization technology into, into the vSphere. So such that all of the memory transactions. So you have, you have security, you know, at, you know, security, when you store store on disks, you have security over the network and you also have security in the compute. And when you go out to memory, that's what this SUV technology gives you. It gives you that, that security going, going in your, in your actual virtual machine as it's running. And so the, the, we take security extremely seriously. I mean, one of the things, every generation that you see from, from AMD and, and, you know, you have seen us hit our cadence. We do upgrade all of the security features and we address all of the sort of known threats that are out there. And obviously this threats, you know, kind of coming at us all the time, but our CPUs just get better and better from, from a, a security stance. >>So shifting gears for a minute, obviously we know the pending impossible acquisition, the announced acquisition of VMware by Broadcom, AMD's got a relationship with Broadcom independently, right? No, of course. What is, how's that relationship? >>Oh, it's a great relationship. I mean, we, we, you know, they, they have certified their, their, their niche products, their HPA products, which are utilized in, you know, for, for storage systems, sand systems, those, those type of architectures, the hardcore storage architectures. We, we work with them very closely. So they, they, they've been a great partner with us for years. >>And you've got, I know, you know, we are, we're talking about current generation available on the shelf, Milan based architecture, is that right? That's right. Yeah. But if I understand correctly, maybe sometime this year, you're, you're gonna be that's right. Rolling out the, rolling out the new stuff. >>Yeah, absolutely. So later this year, we've already, you know, we already talked about this publicly. We have a 96 core gen platform up to 96 cores gen platform. So we're just, we're just taking that TCO value just to the next level, increasing performance DDR, five CXL with, with memory expansion capability. Very, very neat leading edge technology. So that that's gonna be available. >>Is that NextGen P C I E, or has that shift already been made? It's >>Been it's NextGen. P C I E P C E gen five. Okay. So we'll have, we'll have that capability. That'll be, that'll be out by the end of this year. >>Okay. So those components you talk about. Yeah. You know, you talk about the, the Broadcom VMware universe, those components that are going into those new slots are also factors in performance and >>Yeah, absolutely. You need the balance, right? You, you need to have networking storage and the CPU. We're very cognizant of how to make sure that these cores are fed appropriately. Okay. Cuz if you've just put out a lot of cores, you don't have enough memory, you don't have enough iOS. That's, that's the key to, to, to, you know, our approach to, to enabling performance in the enterprise, make sure that the systems are balanced. So you get the experience that you've had with, let's say your, you know, your 12 core, your 16 core, you can have that same experience in the 96 core in a node or 96 core socket. So maybe a 192 cores total, right? So you can have that same experience in, in a tune node in a much denser, you know, package server today or, or using Melan technology, you know, 128 cores, super, super good performance. You know, its super good experience it's, it's designed to scale. Right. And especially with VMware as, as our infrastructure, it works >>Great. I'm gonna, Lisa, Lisa's got a question to ask. I know, but bear with me one bear >>With me. Yes, sir. >>We've actually initiated coverage of this question of, you know, just hardware matter right anymore. Does it matter anymore? Yeah. So I put to you the question, do you think hardware still matters? >>Oh, I think, I think it's gonna matter even more and more going forward. I mean just, but it's all cloud who cares just in this conversation today. Right? >>Who cares? It's all cloud. Yeah. >>So, so, so definitely their workloads moving to the cloud and we love our cloud partners don't get me wrong. Right. But there are, you know, just, I've had so many conversations at this show this week about customers who cannot move to the cloud because of regulatory reasons. Yeah. You know, the other thing that you don't realize too, that's new to me is that people have depreciated their data centers. So the cost for them to just go put in new AMD servers is actually very low compared to the cost of having to go buy, buy public cloud service. They still want to go buy public cloud services and that, by the way, we have great, great, great AMD instances on, on AWS, on Google, on Azure, Oracle, like all of our major, all of the major cloud providers, support AMD and have, have great, you know, TCO instances that they've, they've put out there with good performance. Yeah. >>What >>Are some of the key use cases that customers are coming to AMD for? And, and what have you seen change in the last couple of years with respect to every customer needing to become a data company needing to really be data driven? >>No, that's, that's also great question. So, you know, I used to get this question a lot. >>She only asks great questions. Yeah. Yeah. I go down and like all around in the weeds and get excited about the bits and the bites she asks. >>But no, I think, look, I think the, you know, a few years ago and I, I think I, I used to get this question all the time. What workloads run best on AMD? My answer today is unequivocally all the workloads. Okay. Cuz we have processors that run, you know, run at the highest performance per thread per per core that you can get. And then we have processors that have the highest throughput and, and sometimes they're one in the same, right. And Ilan 64 configured the right way using using VMware vSphere, you can actually get extremely good per core performance and extremely good throughput performance. It works well across, just as you said, like a database to data management, all of those kinds of capabilities, DevOps, you know, E R P like there's just been a whole slew slew of applications use cases. We have design wins in, in major customers, in every single industry in every, and these, these are big, you know, the big guys, right? >>And they're, they're, they're using AMD they're successfully moving over their workloads without, without issue. For the most part. In some cases, customers tell us they just, they just move the workload on, turn it on. It runs great. Right. And, and they're, they're fully happy with it. You know, there are other cases where, where we've actually gotten involved and we figured out, you know, there's this configuration of that configuration, but it's typically not a, not a huge lift to move to AMD. And that's that I think is a, is a key, it's a key point. And we're working together with almost all of the major ISV partners. Right. And so just to make sure that, that, that they have run tested certified, I think we have over 250 world record benchmarks, you know, running in all sorts of, you know, like Oracle database, SAP business suite, all of those, those types of applications run, run extremely well on AMD. >>Is there a particular customer story that you think really articulates the value of running on AMD in terms of enabling bus, big business outcome, safer a financial services organization or healthcare organization? Yeah. >>I mean we, yeah, there's certainly been, I mean, across the board. So in, in healthcare we've seen customers actually do the, the server consolidation very effectively and then, you know, take advantage of the, the lower cost of operation because in some cases they're, they're trying to run servers on each floor of a hospital. For example, we've had use cases where customers have been able to do that because of the density that we provide and to be able to, to actually, you know, take, take their compute more even to the edge than, than actually have it in the, in those use cases in, in a centralized matter. The another, another interesting case FSI in financial services, we have customers that use us for general purpose. It, we have customers that use this for kind of the, the high performance we call it grid computing. So, you know, you have guys that, you know, do all this trading during the day, they collect tons and tons of data, and then they use our computers to, or our CPUs to just crunch to that data overnight. >>And it's just like this big, super computer that just crunches it's, it's pretty incredible. They're the, the, the density of the CPUs, the value that we bring really shines, but in, in their general purpose fleet as well. Right? So they're able to use VMware, a lot of VMware customers in that space. We love our, we love our VMware customers and they're able to, to, to utilize this, they use use us with HCI. So hyperconverge infrastructure with V VSAN and that's that that's, that's worked works extremely well. And, and, and our, our enterprise customers are extremely happy with that. >>Talk about, as we wrap things up here, what's next for AMD, especially AMD with VMwares VMware undergoes its potential change. >>Yeah. So there there's a lot that we have going on. I mean, I gotta say VMware is one of the, let's say premier companies in terms of, you know, being innovative and being, being able to drive new, new, interesting pieces of technology and, and they're very experimentive right. So they, we have, we have a ton of things going with them, but certainly, you know, driving pin Sando is, is very, it is very, very important to us. Yeah. I think that the whole, we're just in the, the cusp, I believe of, you know, server consolidation becoming a big thing for us. So driving that together with VMware and, you know, into some of these enterprises where we can show, you know, save the earth while we, you know, in terms of reducing power, reducing and, and saving money in terms of TCO, but also being able to enable new capabilities. >>You know, the other part of it too, is this new infrastructure enables new workloads. So things like machine learning, you know, more data analytics, more sophisticated processing, you know, that, that is all enabled by this new infrastructure. So we, we were excited. We think that we're on the precipice of, you know, going a lot of industries moving forward to, to having, you know, the next level of it. It's no longer about just payroll or, or, or enterprise business management. It's about, you know, how do you make your, you know, your, your knowledge workers more productive, right. And how do you give them more capabilities? And that, that is really, what's exciting for us. >>Awesome Cooper. And thank you so much for joining Dave and me on the program today, talking about what AMD, what you're doing to supercharge customers, your partnership with VMware and what is exciting. What's on the, the forefront, the frontier, we appreciate your time and your insights. >>Great. Thank you very much for having me. >>Thank you for our guest and Dave Nicholson. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 22 from San Francisco, but don't go anywhere, Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.

welcome back everyone to thecube's live coverage in san francisco for vmware explorer 2022 formerly vmworld i'm john furrier david live dave 12 years we've been covering this event formerly vmware first time in west now it's explore we've been in north we've been in south we've been in vegas multi-cloud is now the exploration vmware community is coming in john siegel svp at dell cube alumni dave mccraw vp at vmware guys thanks for coming back both cube alumni it's great to see you very senior organizations senior roles in the organizations of vmware and dell one year since the split great partnership continuing i mean some of the conversations we've been having over the past few years is that control plane the management layer making everything work together it's essentially been the multi-cloud hybrid cloud story what's the update what's how's the partnership look yeah i you know i just to start off i mean i would say i don't think our partnership's been any has ever been any better um if you look at you mention our vision very much a shared vision in terms of the multi-cloud world and i don't think we've ever had more joint innovation projects at one time i think we have over 40 now dave that are going on across multi-cloud ai cyber security uh modern applications and and uh you know here just at you just vmworld vmware explorer we have over 30 uh vmware sessions that are featuring dell um and this is i think more than we've ever had so look i think um there's a lot of momentum there and we're really looking forward to what's to come so you guys obviously spent a lot of time together when vmware was part of dell and then you've been it's been a year since the spin and then you codified i think it was a five-year agreement you know so you had some time to figure that out and then put it into paper so you just kind of quantified some of the stuff that's going on but now we're entering a yet another phase so that that that that agreement's probably more important than ever now i mean list in terms of getting it documented and an understanding right yeah that agreement really defines a framework for solution development and for go to market so we've been doing it and refining it for the last five years so now you know putting and codifying it into a written signed agreement it basically is instantiating what we've been doing that we know works uh where we can drive uh solution development we can drive deep architectural co-innovation together as well and as john said across multiple you know project and solution areas so we we've been talking to years to you know a lot of these strat guys guys like matt baker about things like you know you see aws do nitro and then of course project monterey and and i know that you guys have had a you know a big sort of input into that and so now to see it come to fruition is is huge because you know from our view it's the future of computing architectures how do you handle you know data rich applications ai applications that's what are your thoughts on here i couldn't agree more uh project monterey is a great example of how we're innovating together we just talked about i mean first of all it's all so we have vxrail which let's let's start there right we have over 19 000 joint customers right now we continue to innovate more and more on the vxrail architecture great example of that as our partnership with project monterey and taking essentially vsphere 8 and running it for the first time on an hci system directly on the dp used itself right on the dpus ability now to offload nsxt from from the cpus to the dpus uh hope you know in the short term first of all great benefits for customers in terms of better performance but as you just mentioned it's game changing in terms of laying the foundation for the future architectures that we plan on together helping out customers there's one other dynamic for you on is um and it's not unique to dell but dell's the biggest you know supply supplier partner etc but you're able to take vmware software and drive it through your business and and that enables you to get more subscription revenue and makes it stickier and that's a really important change from you know 10 years ago yeah and it's it's a combination as you know of dell software and vmware software together absolutely and i think what's with this is a game-changing innovation that you can run on top of our joint system vxrail if you will um and now what our customers can expect is life cycle automation of now you know the dpus as well as tanzu as well as everything else we layer on top of that core foundation that we have over 19 000 customers running today so i mean like that 19 000 number i want to get back up to the vx rail and you mentioned vsphere that's big news here this year vsphere 8 big release a lot of going on what's the hci angle you mentioned that what's in it for the customer what does that mean for the folks here because let's face it the vsphere aids got everyone in that they've all the v-sections are going going crazy right another vsphere release getting training they have the labs here what's it mean for the customers what's the value there with that hci solution with the gpus well first of all vsphere 8 as we know it has a lot of goodies in it but you know what what i think to me what's been most powerful about this is the ability to run vsphere 8 uh and and specifically on the dpus now you can run it it is open up all new possibilities now and so that nsxt that i mentioned you know running that on gpus opens up a whole new uh architecture now for our customers going forward and now really sets us up for modern distributed architecture for the future so like edge okay yeah and vsphere 8 brings in you know cloud connectivity as well so you know customers can run in a cloud disconnected mode they can run in a cloud connected mode so you know that's going to bring in the ability to do specialized things on security cycle management there's a whole series of services that can now be added as well as you know leveraging you know vcenter management capabilities so what's happening at the edge we had i think it was lows on hotel tech world right okay good not the other one um but so so that's got to be exploding now with that with that because it just changes the game for for these stores there's i mean retail uh manufacturing maybe you can give us an update on there's so much happening on the edge side as you know i mean that's where most of the a lot of the innovations happening right now is at the edge and a lot of the companies we talked to 8x right 8x expectation of increase in uh edge workloads over the next and the data challenge too and the data challenge is huge so you heard about the innovations with vsphere 8. in addition to that we just introduced today as well the smallest vx rail for the edge ever this thing is it's like think picture a couple eight and a half by 11 notebooks not much not much you know maybe a little wider than that but not much more um you know these these are stacked on top of each other these are you can rack and stack and mount these things anywhere and it also is the first aci system that has you know a built-in hardware witness so this helps set it up for environments that are you know network bandwidth constrained or have high high latency no longer an issue next gen app is going to want to have a local data server at the edge right and with compute there right high performance right right so now you're getting it across the wire yes you get racket stack a couple of these small things i mean they can they can fit into like a you know clark kent's briefcase right these things are so small um you want to do the analytics on site and return responses back you don't want to be moving massive data payloads off the egg so you got to have the right level of compute to run machine learning algorithms and and do the analytics type work that you want to do to make local decisions yeah i mean we just had david lithimon who was one of the keynote speakers here at the event and we've been talking about super cloud and multi-cloud meta cloud all the different versions of what we see as this next-gen and this brings up a point of like his advice to young people learn how multi-cloud learn about system architecture because if you can figure out how to put it together you're going to have to make more money anyway that this whole edge piece opens up huge challenges and opportunities around how do you configure these next-gen apps what does the ai look like what's the data architecture this is not like get some training curriculum online and you get you know 101 and you're getting a job no this is more complicated but with the hardware you guys make it easier so where's the complexity shift between having a powerful edge device like the vxrail with the vsphere what's the ec button on that like how do you guys what's the vision because this is going to be a major battleground this whole edge piece yeah it's going to be huge well i think when you look at the innovation that dell is bringing to market with technologies like outlander and then designing that into vxrail and then you combine that with our tonzu capabilities to manage development and deployment of applications this is about heterogeneous deployment and management at scale of applications with technologies like tons of mission control then deploying service mesh right for security being able to use sassy to be able to secure you know with cloud security over the wire so it's bringing together multiple technologies to deliver simplicity to the customer the ability to go one to many you know in terms of being able to deploy and manage and update whether that's a security patch or an application update and do that very rapidly at a low cost so the benefit with this solution now just putting this together is i can ship a box small and or stack them and essentially it's done remotely it's that's provision the provisioning issues not a truck roll as they say or professional services enabled you can just drop that out there and this is where the customers need to be yeah that absolutely is that the vision don't get that right exactly you don't you don't need the you don't need the skills yeah you don't need the specialized skills you don't need a lot of space you don't need you know high network bandwidth all these things right all these innovations that we're talking about here um really combined into really enabling a whole new whole new future here for edge is are you doing apex now is that i think thickest part sure part of yours okay so um is apex fitting into the to the edge how does it fit yeah i mean well first of all you know a lot of what we talked with apex is really about a consumption a way to ensure there's a common cloud experience wherever the data is and where the applications are and so absolutely edge fits into this as well and so we have we have common ways to consume our infrastructure today our joint infrastructure whether it's in the data center at the edge um or you know uh in the cloud usain ragu when he was on i said it was great keynote loved it one of the things that i didn't think there was enough of was security and he's like yeah we only had so much time but vmware is a very strong security story we heard a really strong security story at dell tech world i mean half the innovations and the new you know storage products were security and the new os's and it was impressive what what's how are you guys working together on security is that one of those let me give you a few key things you know our teams are working together at the engineer to engineer level you know reference architectures for zero trust as an example being able to look you know hardware root of trust up into the application layer right so we're looking at really defense in depth here you know i mentioned what we're doing with sassy right with cloud security capabilities so you really have to look at this from the edge to the core with the you know from a networking perspective getting the network the insights on things that maybe anomalies that may be happening on the network so using our network insight technology you know uh nsx and then being able to ultimately uh have a secure development pipeline as well i mean you we all know about the supply chain attacks that happen right and so being able to have a you know secure pipeline for development is critical for both of our companies working together i think the tan zoo and you mentioned the developer self-service that experience combined with kind of the power of the dell you know let's face it the boxes are awesome hardware matters and software matters so bringing that expertise together michael daley always used to say on thecube better together in respect to vmware and dell a lot of fruit has been born from that labor right specifically around and now when you add the tan zoo and you get vsphere you got the operational excellence you got the you got the performance and scale with the dell boxes and hardware and software and now you've got the tan zoo what's missing or is it all there now i mean where how would you how would you guys peg the progress bar is it like it's all rocking right now or or i'd say you're never done first of all but i you know i look at some of the innovations that we've brought to market recently where we've are combining and stacking these technologies into a more defense in-depth like solution you know bringing nsx onto vxrail so that you can flip a switch easily and light up the firewall the new plug-in yeah that's a great example simple simple um carbon black workload another example where we're taking carbon black technology that was typically on endpoints you know on pcs bringing that into the data center right and leveraging all the analytics and insights around you know being able to identify anomalies and then remediate those anomalies so we're seeing very good traction with those and the cloud native developers containers they're all native container working with compute and container storage object store in the cloud kubernetes we've embraced it yeah i mean yeah containers running containers and vms on the same infrastructure common way to manage it all i mean that that's been a big part of it as well obviously a lot of the focus that dell's bringing here as well is is the inability to run that stack easily right you heard the announcement on uh tanzu for kubernetes operators right earlier today tko we call it uh you know that running on vxrail now is really targeted at the i.t operator in allowing them to easily stand up a self-service developer devops environment on vxrail going forward and then a piece that might be invisible to them is back to monterey isolation right encryption and data moving you know absolutely storage the security the compute right the management right that's that's a complete and it's about reducing attack services as well right the security perspective as well when you when you're moving nsxt onto a dpu you're doing that as well so there's it takes the little things right at the end of the day security is a mindset up across both companies in terms of how we approach our architectures um and it's the you know a lot of times it's the little things as well that we make sure right so shared vision working at the engineering levels together for many many years know that you guys are validating more of that coming what's next take us through okay we're here 2022 we got super cloud multi-cloud hybrid full throttle right now it's hybrid's a steady state that's cloud operations infrastructure as code has happened it's happening what's next for you guys in the relationship can you share a little bit that you can if you can what we can expect what you see uh with monterrey is the start of a re-architecting of i.t infrastructure not just in the data center but also at the edge right these technologies will move out and be pervasive you know across i think edge to colo to core data center to cloud right and so that's a starting point now we're looking at memory tiering right i think we talked last time about capitola and memory tiering and you know being able to bring that forward uh being able to do more with confidential computing as an example right secure enclaves and confidential computing so you know a lot of this is focused around simplicity and security going forward and ease of management around take the heavy lifting away from the customer abstract that in offer the power and performance that's right and it's going to come down to delivering time to value for our customers you know can we cut that time to value by 25 50 percent so they can be in production faster yeah i think project monterey is something we'll be building on for a long time right i mean this is the start of a major new future architecture of these companies so if you had to pick one we have 40 initiatives that are joined together real literally project monterey is one of my favorites for sure in terms of what it's going to do not just for that common cloud experience but for the edge and and we talked a lot about the edge today and where that's headed you think it's going to explode up new apps i really do think so well it's going to put you in a new it's going to put in curve yeah absolutely right and operationally uh security wise um from a modern apps perspective i mean all it checks all the boxes and it's going to allow us to to help and take our existing customers on that journey as well what's great about this conversation we've been following both you guys for a long time and your companies and and technology upgrades and and the business impact and open source and all doing all this for customers but the wave that's coming we're seeing the expo hall here i mean it's people are really excited they're enthused they're committed highly confident that this this wave is coming they kind of see it people kind of seeing the fog lift they're seeing money making value creation people kind of feeling more comfortable but still a little nervous around you know what's coming next because it's still uncertainty but pretty good ecosystem i'd have to say that's pretty pretty interesting yeah a lot of them are excited about you know what they can do at the edge and how they can differentiate their businesses i mean that's right well congratulations guys thanks for coming on thecube and sharing the update thank you it more innovation it's not stopping here at vmware explorer dell and vm we're continuing to have that kind of relationship joint engineering it's all coming together and you can mix and match this and the stack but it's ultimately going to be cloud operations edge is the action of course hybrid cloud as well it's thecube thanks for watching [Music] you

(bright intro music) >> Welcome back everyone to VMware Explore '22. I'm John Furrier, host of the key with David Lante, our 12th year covering VMware's user conference, formerly known as VM-World now rebranded as VMware Explore. You got two great Cube alumni coming on the Cube. Ricky Cooper, SVP worldwide partner commercial VMware. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> We just had a great chat-- >> Good to see you again. >> At HPE discover. And of course, Joseph George, Vice President of Compute Industry Alliances. Great to have you on. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> So guys, this year is very curious, VMware, a lot going on. The name change of the event. Big move, Bold move. And then they changed the name of the event. Then Broadcom buys them. A lot of speculation, but at the end of the day, this conference... Kind of people were wondering what would be the barometer of the event. We were reporting this morning on the keynote analysis. Very good mojo in the keynote. Very transparent about the Broadcom relationship. The expo floor last night was buzzing. I mean, this is not a show that's looking like it's going to be, you know, going down. This is clearly a wave. We're calling it super cloud, multi-cloud's their theme. Clearly the cloud's happening. Not to date ourselves, but 2013 we were discussing on the-- >> We talked about that, yeah. >> HPE Discover about DevOps infrastructure as code. We're full realization now of that. This is where we're at. You guys had a great partnership with VMware and HPE. Talk about where you guys see this coming together because the customers are refactoring, they are looking at cloud native, the whole Broadcom visibility to the VMware customer bases activated them. They're here and they're leaning in. What's going on? >> Yeah absolutely, we're seeing a renewed interest now as customers are looking at their entire infrastructure, bottoms up all the way up the stack and the notion of a hybrid cloud, where you've got some visibility and control of your data and your infrastructure and applications. Customers want to live in that sort of a cloud environment. And so we're seeing a renewed interest, a lot of conversations we're having with customers now, a lot of customers committing to that model, where they have applications and workloads running at the edge in their data center and in the public cloud in a lot of cases. But having that mobility, having that control, being able to have security in their own control. There's a lot that you can do there. And obviously partnering with VMware. We've been partners for so long. >> 20 years, at least. >> At least 20 years. Back when they invented stuff. They were inventing way-- >> VMware's got a very technical culture, but Ricky, I got to say that we commented earlier when Ragu was on the CEO now CEO, I mean legendary product guy, set the trajectory to VMware, everyone knows that. I can't know whether it was VMware or HP, HP before HPE coined Hybrid. Cause you guys were both on, I can't recall Dave, which company coined it first, but it was either one of you guys. Nobody else was there. >> It was the partnership. (men chuckle) >> Hybrid Cloud I had a big thing with Pat Gelsinger, Dave. Remember when he said he got in my grill on theCube, live, but now you see. >> You focus on that multi-cloud aspect. So you've got a situation where our customers are looking at multi-cloud and they're looking at it, not just as a flash in the pan. This is here for five years, 10 years, 20 years. Okay. So what does that mean then to our partners and to our distributors, you're seeing a whole seed change. You're seeing partners now looking at this. So look at the OEMs, the ones that have historically been vSphere customers and now saying they're coming in, drove saying, okay, what is the next step? Well, how can I be a multi-cloud partner with you? How can I look at other aspects that we're driving here together? So GreenLake is a great example. We keep going back to GreenLake and we are partaking in GreenLake at the moment. The real big thing for us is going to be right. Let's make sure that we've got the agreements in place that support this Sasson subscription motion going forward. And then the sky's the limit for us. >> You're plugging that right into. >> Well, here's why, here's why, so customers are loving the fact that they can go to a public cloud and they can get an SLA. They come to an on-premise, you've got the hardware, you've got the software, you've got the guys on board to maintain this through its life cycle. I mean, this is complicated stuff. Now we've got a situation where you can say, Hey, we can get an SLA on premise. >> And I think what you're seeing is it's very analogous to having a financial advisor, just manage your portfolio. You're taking care of just submitting money. That's really a lot of what a lot of the customers have done with the public cloud. But now a lot of these customers are getting savvy. They have been working with VMware technologies and HPE for so long. they've got expertise. They know how they want their workloads architected. Now we've given them a model where they can leverage the cloud platform to be able to do this, whether it's on premise, the edge or in the public cloud, leveraging HPE GreenLake and VMware. >> Is it predominantly or exclusively a managed service or do you find some customers saying, hey, we want to manage ourself. What are you seeing is the mix there? >> It is not predominantly managed services right now. We're actually, as we are growing last time we talked at HPE discover. We talked about a whole bunch of new services that we've added to our catalog. It's growing by leaps and bounds. A lot of folks are definitely interested in the pay as you go, obviously the financial model, but are now getting exposed to all the other management that can happen. There are managed services capabilities, but actually running it as a service with your systems on-prem is a phenomenal idea for all these customers. And they're opening their eyes to some new ways to service their customers better. >> And another phenomenon we're seeing there is where partners such as HPA, using other partners for various areas of the services implementation as well. So that's another phenomenon. You're seeing the resale motion now going into a lot more of the services motion. >> It's interesting too. I mean the digital modernization that's going on, the transformation whatever you want to call it, is complicated, that's clear. One of the things I liked about the keynote today was the concept of cloud chaos, because we've been saying quoting Andy Grove, Next Intel, let chaos rain and rain in the chaos. And when you have inflection points, complexity, which is the chaos, needs to be solved and whoever solves it and kicks the inflection point, that's up and to the right. >> So prime idea right here. So. >> GreenLake is, well. >> Also look at the distribution model and how that's changed a couple of points on a deal. Now they're saying I'll be your aggregator. I'll take the strain and I'll give you scale. I'll give you VMware scale for all of the various different partners, et cetera. >> Yeah. So let's break this down because this is, I think a key point. So complexity is good, but the old model in the enterprise market was, you solve complexity with more complexity and everybody wins. Oh yeah, we're locked in. That's not what the market wants. They want self- service, they want as a service, they want easy, developer first security data ops. DevOps is already in the cycle. So they're going to want simpler, easier, faster. >> And this is kind of why I I'll say for the big announcement today here at VMware Explorer around the VMware vSphere distributed services engine, project Monterey that we've talked about for so long, HPE and VMware and AMD with the Pensando DPU actually work together to engineer a solution for exactly that. The capabilities are fairly straightforward in terms of the technologies, but actually doing the work to do integration, joint engineering, make sure that this is simple and easy and able to be running HPE GreenLake. >> We invested in Pensando right, we are investors. >> What's the benefit of that. That's a great point. You made what's the value to the customer bottom line, that deep, co-engineering, co-partnering, what is it deliver that others don't do? >> Yeah. Well, I think one example would be a lot of vendors can say we support it. >> Yep. That's great. That's actually a really good move, supporting it. It can be resold. That's another great move. I'm not mechanically inclined to where I would go build my own car. I'll go to a dealership and actually buy one that I can press the button and I can start it and I can do what I need to do with my car. And that's really what this does is the engineering work that's gone on between our two companies and AMD Pensando as well as the business work to make that simple and easy that transaction to work. And then to be able to make it available as a service is really what made, that's why it's such a winner here... >> But, it's also a lower cost out of the box. Yes. So you get in whatever it's called a 20%. Okay. But there's nuance because you're also on a new technology curve and you're able to absorb modern apps. We use that term as a promo, but when I say modern apps, I mean data, rich apps, things that are more AI driven. Not the conventional, not that people aren't doing, you know, SAP and CRM, they are. But, there's a whole slew of new apps that are coming in that traditional architectures aren't well suited to handle from a price performance standpoint. This changes that doesn't it? >> Well, you think also of going to the next stage, which is the go to market between the two organizations that before at the moment, HPE is running off doing various different things. We were running off to. Again, that chaos that you're talking about in cloud chaos, you got to go to market chaos, but by simplifying four or five things, what are we going to do really well together? How do we embed those in GreenLake and be known in the marketplace for these solutions? Then you get an organization that's really behind the go to market. You can help with sales, activation, the enablement. And then we benefit from the scale of HPE. >> Yeah. What are those solutions, I mean... Is it just, is it IS? Is it compute storage? Is it specific SAP? Is it VDI? What are you seeing out there? >> So right now for this specific technology, we're educating our customers on what that could be. And at its core, this solution allows customers to take services that normally and traditionally run on the compute system and run on a DPU now with project Monterey. And this is now allowing customers to think about where are their use cases. So I'm rather than going and say, use it for this. We're allowing our customers to explore and say, okay, here's where it makes sense. Where do I have workloads that are using a lot of compute cycles on services at the compute level? That could be somewhere else like networking as a great example, and allowing more of those compute cycles to be available. So where there are performance requirements for an application where there are timely response that's needed for results to be able to take action on, to be able to get insight from data really quick. Those are places where we're starting to see the services moving onto something like a DPU. And that's where this makes a whole lot more sense. >> Okay, so to get this right? You got the hybrid cloud, right? You got GreenLake and you got the distributed engine. What's that called? >> It's HPE Proliant Proliant with the VMware, VSphere. >> VSphere. That's the compute distributed. Okay. So does the customer, how do you guys implement that with the customer all three at the same time or they mix and match? How's that work? >> All three of those components. So the beauty of the HP Proliant with VMware vSphere distributed services engine also now is project Monterey for those that are keeping notes at home. Again already pre-engineered so we've already worked through all the mechanics of how you would have to do this. So it's not something you have to go figure out how you build, get deployment, work through those details. That's already done. It is available through HPE GreenLake. So you can go and actually get it as a service in partnership with our customer, our friends here at VMware. And because if you're familiar and comfortable with all the things that HP Proliant has done from a security perspective, from a reliability perspective, trusted supply chain, all those sorts of things, you're getting all of that with this particular solution. >> Sumit Dhawan had a great quote on theCube just a hour or so ago. He said you have to be early to be first. Love that quote. Okay. So you were first, you were probably a little early, but do you have a lead? I know you're going to say yes. Okay. Let's just assume that okay. Relative to the competition, how do you know? How do you determine that? >> If we have a lead or not? >> Yeah, if you lead, if you're the best. >> We go to the source of the truth, which is our customers. >> And what do they tell you? What do you look at and say, okay, now, I mean, when you have that honest conversation and say, okay, we are, we're first, we're early, we're keeping our lead. What are the things that you look at, as indicators? >> I'll say it this way. We've been in a lot of businesses where we do compete head-to-head in a lot of places and we know how that sales process normally works. We're seeing a different motion from our customers. When we talk about HPE GreenLake, there's not a lot of back and forth on, okay, well let me go shop around. It is HP GreenLake, let's talk about how we actually build this solution. >> And I can tell you from a VMware perspective, our customers are asking us for this the other way around. So that's a great sign. Is that, Hey, we need to see this partnership come together in GreenLake. >> Yeah. Okay. So you would concur with that? >> Absolutely. So third party validation. >> From Switzerland. Yeah. >> Bring it with you over here. >> We're talking about this earlier on, I mean, of course with I mentioned earlier on there's some contractual things that you've got to get in place as you are going through this migration into Sasson subscription, et cetera. And so we are working as hard as we can to make sure, Hey, let's really get this contract in place as quickly as possible, it's what the customers are asking us. >> We've been talking about this for years, you know, see containers being so popular. Now, Kubernetes becoming that layer of bringing people to bringing things together. It's the old adage that Amazon used to coin and Andy Jassy, they do the undifferentiated, heavy lifting. A lot of that's now that's now cloud operations. Underneath is infrastructure's code to the developer, right. That's at scale. >> That's right. >> And so you got a lot of heavy lifting being done with GreenLake. Which is why there's no objections probably. >> Right absolutely. >> What's the choice. What do you even shop? >> Yeah. There's nothing to shop around. >> Yeah, exactly. And then we've, that is really icing on the cake that we've, we've been building for quite some time. There is an understanding in the market that what we do with our infrastructure is hardened from a reliability and quality perspective. Times are tough right now, supply chain issues, all that stuff, we've talked about it. But at HPE, we don't skimp on quality. We're going to spend the dollars and time on making sure we got reliability and security built in. It's really important to us. >> We get a great use case, the storage team, they were provisioning with containers. Storage is a service, instantly. We're seeing with you guys with VMware, your customers bringing in a lot of that into the mix as well. I got to ask. Cause every event we talk about AI and machine learning, automation and DevOps are now infiltrating in with the Ci/CD pipeline security and data become a big conversation. >> Agreed. >> Okay. So how do you guys look at that? Okay. You sold me on green. I've been a big fan from day one. Now it's got maturity on it. I know it's going to get a lot more headroom to do there. It's still a lot of work to do, but directionally it's pretty accurate. It's going to be going to be success. There's still concerns about security, the data layer. That's agnostic of environment, private cloud hybrid, public and edge. So that's important and security has got a huge service area. These are a work in progress. How do you guys view those? >> I think you've just hit the nail on the head. I mean, I was in the press and journalist meetings yesterday and our answer was exactly the same. There is still so much work that can be done here. And I don't think anybody is really emerging as a true leader. It's just a continuation of trying to get that right. Because it is what is the most important thing to our customers. And the industry is really sort of catching up to that. >> And when you start talking about privacy and when you... It's not just about company information, it's about individuals information. It's about information that if exposed actually could have real impact on people. So it's more than just an IT problem. It is actually, and from HP's perspective, security starts from when we're picking our suppliers for our components. There are processes that we put into our entire trusted supply chain from the factory on the way up. I liken it to my golf swing, my golf swinging. I slice, right lik you wouldn't believe. But when I go to the golf pros, they start me back at the mechanics, the foundational pieces, here's where the problems are and start working on that. So my view is our view is if your infrastructure is not secure, you're going to have troubles with security as you go further up. >> Stay in the sandbox, so to speak, they're driving range on the golf analogy there. I love that. Talk about supply chain security real quick. Because you mentioned supply chain on the hardware side, you're seeing a lot of open source and supply chain in software trusted software. How does GreenLake look at that? How do you guys view that piece of it? That's an important part. >> Yeah, security is one of the key pillars that we're actually driving as a company right now. As I said, it's important to our customers as they're making purchasing decisions. And we're looking at it from the infrastructure all the way up to the actual service itself. And that's the beauty of having something like HP GreenLake, we don't have to pick is the infrastructure or the middle where, or the top of stack application, we can look at all of it. Yeah. It's all of it. That matters. >> Question on the ecosystem posture, so, I remember when HP was one company and then the GSIs were a little weird with HP because of EDS, you know, had data protector. So we weren't really chatting up Veeam at the time. And as soon as the split happened, ecosystem exploded. Now you have a situation where your Broadcom is acquiring VMware. You guys big Broadcom customer, has your attitude changed or has it not because, oh, we meet where the customers are. You've always said that, but have you have leaned in more? I mean, culturally is HPE, HPE now saying, hmm, now we have some real opportunities to partner in new ways that we don't have to sleep with one eye open, maybe. >> So I would some first of all, VMware and HPE, we've got a variety of different partners, we always have. If well, before any Broadcom announcement came along. We've been working with a variety of partners and that hasn't changed and that hasn't changed. And if your question is, has our posture toward VMware changed that all the answers absolutely not. We believe in what VMware is doing. We believe in what our customers are doing with VMware, and we're going to continue to work with VMware and partner with you. >> And of course we had to spin out ourselves in November of last year, which I worked on the whole Dell, whole Dell piece. >> But, you still had the same chairman. >> But since then, I think what's really become very apparent. And it's not just with HPE, but with many of our partners, many of the OEM partners, the opportunity in front of us is vast. And we need to rely on each other to help us solve the customer problems that are out there. So there's a willingness to overlook some things that in the past may have been barriers. >> But it's important to note also that it's not that we have not had history, right? Over... We've got over 200,000 customers join. >> Hundreds of millions of dollars of business. >> 100,000, over 10,000 or a 100,000 channel partners that we have in common. Numerous , numerous... >> And independent of the whole Broadcom overhang there, there's the ecosystem floor. Yeah, the expo floor. I mean, it's vibrant. I mean, there's clearly a wave coming. Ricky, we talked about this briefly at HPE Discover. I want to get an update from your perspective, both of you, if you don't mind weighing in on this, clearly the wave we calling it super cloud. Cause it's not just, multi-cloud completely different looking successes, >> Smart Cloud. >> It's not just vendors. It's also the customers turning into clouds themselves. You look at Goldman Sachs. I think every vertical will have its own power law of cloud players in the future. We believe that to be true. We're still testing that assumption, but it's trending in when you got OPEX has to go to in fund statement. CapEx goes to thanks for the cloud. All that's good, but there's a wave coming and we're trying to identify it. What do you guys see as this wave cause beyond multi-cloud and the obvious nature of that will end up happening as a state and what happens beyond that interoperability piece? That's a whole nother story and that's what everyone's fighting for. But everyone out in that ecosystem, it's a big wave coming. They got their surfboards. They're ready to go. So what do you guys see? What is the next wave that everyone's jacked up about here? >> Well, I think the multi-cloud is obviously at the epicenter. If you look at the results that are coming in, a lot of our customers, this is what's leading the discussion. And now we're in a position where we've brought many companies over the last few years, they're starting to come to fruition. They're starting to play a role in how we're moving forward. Some of those are a bit more applicable to the commercial space. We're finding commercial customers are never bought from us before never hundreds and hundreds are coming through our partner networks every single quarter. So brand new to VMware, the trick then is how do you nurture them? How do you encourage them? >> So new logos are coming in? >> New logos are coming in all the time, all the time from across the ecosystem. It's not just the OEMs, it's all the way back. >> So the ecosystem's back for VMware. >> Unbelievably. So what are we doing to help that? There's two big things that we've announced in the recent weeks is that partner connect 2.0. When I talk to you about multi-cloud and multicardt the customers are doing, you see that trend. Four, five different separate clouds that we've got here. The next piece is that they're changing their business models with the partners. Their services is becoming more and more apparent, etc. And the use of other partners to do other services deployment or this stuff is becoming prevalent. Then you've got the distributors that I talked about were there. Then you route to market, then you route to business. So how do you encapsulate all of that and ensure your rewarding partners on all aspects of that? Whether it's deployment, whether it's test and debt, it's a points based system we've put in place now. >> It's a big pie. That's developing the market's getting bigger. >> It's getting so much bigger and then help. >> You agree obviously with that. >> Yeah, absolutely, in fact, I think for a long time we were asking the question of, is it going to be there or is it going to be here? Which was the wrong question now it's everything. Yes. And what I think that what we're seeing in the ecosystem is people are finding the spots where they're going play. Am I going to be on the edge? Am I going to be an analytics play? Am I going to be a cloud transition play? A lot of players are now emerging and saying, we now have a place, a part to play. And having that industry view, not just of a commercial customer at that level, but the two of us are looking at Telco, are looking at financial services, at healthcare, at manufacturing. How do these new ecosystem players fit into it? >> ... is lifting, everyone can see their position there. >> We're now being asked for simplicity and talk to me about partner profitability. How do I know where to focus my efforts? Am I've spread too thin? And my advice that a partner ecosystem out there is, Hey, let's pick out spots together. Let's really go to, and then strategic solutions that we were talking about is good example of that. >> Sounds like composability to me, but not to go back guys. Thanks for coming on. I think there's a big market there. I think the fog is lifted, people seeing their spot there's value there. Value creation equals reward. Yeah. Simplicity, ease of use. This is the new normal great job. Thanks for coming on sharing. Okay. Back live coverage after this short break with more day one coverage here from the blue set here in Moscone.

>>Okay, welcome back everyone. There's the cubes coverage of VMware Explorer, 22 formerly world. We've been here since 2010 and world 2010 to now it's 2022. And it's VMware Explorer. We're here at the CEO, regular writer. Welcome back to the cube. Great to see you in person. >>Yeah. Great to be here in person, >>Dave and I are, are proud to say that we've been to 12 straight years of covering VMware's annual conference. And thank you. We've seen the change in the growth over time and you know, it's kind of, I won't say pinch me moment, but it's more of a moment of there's the VMware that's grown into the cloud after your famous deal with Andy jazzy in 2016, we've been watching what has been a real sea change and VMware since taking that legacy core business and straightening out the cloud strategy in 2016, and then since then an acceleration of, of cloud native, like direction under your leadership at VMware. Now you're the CEO take us through that because this is where we are right now. We are here at the pinnacle of VMware 2.0 or cloud native VMware, as you point out on your keynote, take us through that history real quick. Cuz I think it's important to know that you've been the architect of a lot of this change and it's it's working. >>Yeah, definitely. We are super excited because like I said, it's working, the history is pretty simple. I mean we tried running our own cloud cloud air. We cloud air didn't work so well. Right. And then at that time, customers really gave us strong feedback that the hybrid they wanted was a Amazon together. Right. And so that's what we went back and did and the andjay announcement, et cetera. And then subsequently as we were continue to build it out, I mean, once that happened, we were able to go work with the Satia and Microsoft and others to get the thing built out all over. Then the next question was okay, Hey, that's great for the workloads that are running on vSphere. What's the story for workloads that are gonna be cloud native and benefit a lot from being cloud native. So that's when we went the Tansu route and the Kubernetes route, we did a couple of acquisitions and then we started that started paying off now with the Tansu portfolio. And last but not the least is once customers have this distributed portfolio now, right. Increasingly everything is becoming multi-cloud. How do you manage and connect and secure. So that's what you start seeing that you saw the management announcement, networking and security and everything else is cooking. And you'll see more stuff there. >>Yeah know, we've been talking about super cloud. It's kinda like a multi-cloud on steroids kind a little bit different pivot of it. And we're seeing some use cases. >>No, no, it's, it's a very great, it's a, it's pretty close to what we talk about. >>Awesome. I mean, and we're seeing this kind of alignment in the industry. It's kind of open, but I have to ask you, when did you, you have the moment where you said multicloud is the game changer moment. When did you have, because you guys had hybrid, which is really early as well. When was the Raghu? When did you have the moment where you said, Hey, multicloud is what's happening. That's we're doubling down on that go. >>I mean, if you think about the evolution of the cloud players, right. Microsoft really started picking up around the 2018 timeframe. I mean, I'm talking about Azure, right? >>In a big way. >>Yeah. In a big way. Right. When that happened and then Google got really serious, it became pretty clear that this was gonna be looking more like the old database market than it looked like a single player cloud market. Right. Equally sticky, but very strong players all with lots of IP creation capability. So that's when we said, okay, from a supplier side, this is gonna become multi. And from a customer side that has always been their desire. Right. Which is, Hey, I don't want to get locked into anybody. I want to do multiple things. And the cloud vendors also started leveraging that OnPrem. Microsoft said, Hey, if you're a windows customer, your licensing is gonna be better off if you go to Azure. Right. Oracle did the same thing. So it just became very clear. >>I am, I have gone make you laugh. I always go back to the software mainframe because I, I think you were here. Right. I mean, you're, you're almost 20 years in. Yeah. And I, the reason I appreciate that is because, well, that's technically very challenging. How do you make virtualization overhead virtually non-existent how do you run any workload? Yeah. How do you recover from, I mean, that's was not trivial. Yeah. Okay. So what's the technical, you know, analog today, the real technical challenge. When you think about cross cloud services. >>Yeah. I mean, I think it's different for each of these layers, right? So as I was alluding to for management, I mean, you can go each one of them by themselves, there is one way of Mo doing multi-cloud, which is multiple clouds. Right. You could say, look, I'm gonna build a great product for AWS. And then I'm gonna build a great product for Azure. I'm gonna build a great product for Google. That's not what aria is. Aria is a true multi-cloud, which means it pulls data in from multiple places. Right? So there are two or three, there are three things that aria has done. That's I think is super interesting. One is they're not trying to take all the data and bring it in. They're trying to federate the data sources. And secondly, they're doing it in real time and they're able to construct this graph of a customer's cloud resources. >>Right. So to keep the graph constructed and pulling data, federating data, I think that's a very interesting concept. The second thing that, like I said is it's a real time because in the cloud, a container might come and go like that. Like that is a second technical challenge. The third it's not as much a technical challenge, but I really like what they have done for the interface they've used GraphQL. Right? So it's not about if you remember in the old world, people talk about single pan or glass, et cetera. No, this is nothing to do with pan or glass. This is a data model. That's a graph and a query language that's suited for that. So you can literally think of whatever you wanna write. You can write and express it in GraphQL and pull all sorts of management applications. You can say, Hey, I can look at cost. I can look at metrics. I can look at whatever it is. It's not five different types of applications. It's one, that's what I think had to do it at scale is the other problem. And, and >>The, the technical enable there is just it's good software. It's a protocol. It's >>No, no, it's, it's, it's it's software. It's a data model. And it's the Federation architecture that they've got, which is open. Right. You can pull in data from Datadog, just as well as from >>Pretty >>Much anything data from VR op we don't care. Right? >>Yeah. Yeah. So rego, I have to ask you, I'm glad you like the Supercloud cuz you know, we, we think multi-cloud still early, but coming fast. I mean, everyone has multiple clouds, but spanning this idea of spanning across has interesting sequences. Do you data, do you do computer both and a lot of good things happening. Kubernetes been containers, all that good stuff. Okay. How do you see the first rev of multi-cloud evolving? Like is it what happens? What's the sequence, what's the order of operations for a client standpoint? Customer standpoint of, of multicloud or Supercloud because we think we're seeing it as a refactoring of something like snowflake, they're a data base, they're a data warehouse on the cloud. They, they say data cloud they'd they like they'll tell us no, you, we're not a data. We're not a data warehouse. We're data cloud. Okay. You're a data warehouse refactored for the CapEx from Amazon and cooler, newer things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a behavior change. Yeah. But it's still a data warehouse. Yeah. How do you see this multi-cloud environment? Refactoring? Is there something that you see that might be different? That's the same if you know what I'm saying? Like what's what, what's the ne the new thing that's happening with multi-cloud, that's different than just saying I'm I'm doing SAS on the cloud. >>Yeah. So I would say, I would point to a, a couple of things that are different. Firstly, my, the answer depends on which category you are in. Like the category that snowflake is in is very different than Kubernetes or >>Something or Mongo DB, right? >>Yeah. Or Mongo DB. So, so it is not appropriate to talk about one multi-cloud approach across data and compute and so, so on and so forth. So I'll talk about the spaces that we play. Right. So step one, for most customers is two application architectures, right? The cloud native architecture and an enterprise native architecture and tying that together either through data or through networks or through et cetera. So that's where most of the customers are. Right. And then I would say step two is to bring these things together in a more, in a closer fashion and that's where we are going. And that is why you saw the cloud universal announcement and that's already, you've seen the Tansu announcement, et cetera. So it's really, the step one was two distinct clouds. That is just two separate islands. >>So the other thing that we did, that's really what my, the other thing that I'd like to get to your reaction on, cause this is great. You're like a masterclass in the cube here. Yeah, totally is. We see customers becoming super clouds because they're getting the benefit of, of VMware, AWS. And so if I'm like a media company or insurance company, if I have scale, if I continue to invest in, in cloud native development, I do all these things. I'm gonna have a da data scale advantage, possibly agile, which means I can build apps and functionality very quick for customers. I might become my own cloud within the vertical. Exactly. And so I could then service other people in the insurance vertical if I'm the insurance company with my technology and create a separate power curve that never existed before. Cause the CapEx is off the table, it's operating expense. Yep. That runs into the income statement. Yep. This is a fundamental business model shift and an advantage of this kind of scenario. >>And that's why I don't think snowflakes, >>What's your reaction to that? Cuz that's something that, that is not really, talk's highly nuanced and situational. But if Goldman Sachs builds the biggest cloud on the planet for financial service for their own benefit, why wouldn't they >>Exactly. >>And they're >>Gonna build it. They sort of hinted at it that when they were up on stage on AWS, right. That is just their first big step. I'm pretty sure over time they would be using other clouds. Think >>They already are on >>Prem. Yeah. On prem. Exactly. They're using VMware technology there. Right? I mean think about it, AWS. I don't know how many billions of dollars they're spending on AWS R and D Microsoft is doing the same thing. Google's doing the same thing we are doing. Not as much as them that you're doing oral chair. Yeah. If you are a CIO, you would be insane not to take advantage of all of this IP that's getting created and say, look, I'm just gonna bet on one. Doesn't make any sense. Right. So that's what you're seeing. And then >>I think >>The really smart companies, like you talked about would say, look, I will do something for my industry that uses these underlying clouds as the substrate, but encapsulates my IP and my operating model that I then offer to other >>Partners. Yeah. And their incentive for differentiation is scale. Yeah. And capability. And that's a super cloud. That's a, or would be say it environment. >>Yeah. But this is why this, >>It seems like the same >>Game, but >>This, I mean, I think it environment is different than >>Well, I mean it advantage to help the business, the old day service, you >>Said snowflake guys out the marketing guys. So you, >>You said snowflake data warehouse. See, I don't think it's in data warehouse. It's not, that's like saying, you >>Know, I, over >>VMware is a virtualization company or service now is a help desk tool. I, this is the change. Yes. That's occurring. Yes. And that you're enabling. So take the Goldman Sachs example. They're gonna run OnPrem. They're gonna use your infrastructure to do selfer. They're gonna build on AWS CapEx. They're gonna go across clouds and they're gonna need some multi-cloud services. And that's your opportunity. >>Exactly. That's that's really, when you, in the keynote, I talked about cloud universal. Right? So think of a future where we can go to a customer and say, Mr. Customer buy thousand scores, a hundred thousand cores, whatever capacity you can use it, any which way you want on any application platform. Right. And it could be OnPrem. It could be in the cloud, in the cloud of their choice in multiple clouds. And this thing can be fungible and they can tie it to the right services. If they like SageMaker they could tie it to Sage or Aurora. They could tie it to Aurora, cetera, et cetera. So I think that's really the foundation that we are setting. Well, I think, I >>Mean, you're building a cloud across clouds. I mean, that's the way I look at it. And, and that's why it's, to me, the, the DPU announcement, the project Monterey coming to fruition is so important. Yeah. Because if you don't have that, if you're not on that new Silicon curve yep. You're gonna be left behind. Oh, >>Absolutely. It allows us to build things that you would not otherwise be able to do, >>Not to pat ourselves on the back Ragu. But we, in what, 2013 day we said, feel >>Free. >>We, we said with Lou Tucker when OpenStack was crashing. Yeah. Yeah. And then Kubernetes was just a paper. We said, this could be the interoperability layer. Yeah. You got it. And you could have inter clouding cuz there was no clouding. I was gonna riff on inter networking. But if you remember inter networking during the OSI model, TCP and IP were hardened after the physical data link layer was taken care of. So that enabled an entire new industry that was open, open interconnect. Right. So we were saying inter clouding. So what you're kind of getting at with cross cloud is you're kind of creating this routing model if you will. Not necessarily routing, but like connection inter clouding, we called it. I think it's kinda a terrible name. >>What you said about Kubernetes is super critical. It is turning out to be the infrastructure API so long. It has been an infrastructure API for a certain cluster. Right. But if you think about what we said about VSE eight with VSE eight Kubernetes becomes the data center API. Now we sort of glossed over the point of the keynote, but you could do operations storage, anything that you can do on vSphere, you can do using a Kubernetes API. Yeah. And of course you can do all the containers in the Kubernetes clusters and et cetera, is what you could always do. Now you could do that on a VMware environment. OnPrem, you could do that on EKS. Now Kubernetes has become the standard programming model for infrastructure across. It >>Was the great equalizer. Yeah. You, we used to say Amazon turned the data center through an API. It turns, turns of like a lot of APIs and a lot of complexity. Right. And Kubernetes changed. >>Well, the role, the role of defacto standards played a lot into the T C P I P revolution before it became a standard standard. What the question Raghu, as you look at, we had submit on earlier, we had tutorial on as well. What's the disruptive enabler from a defacto. What in your mind, what should, because Kubernetes became kind of defacto, even though it was in the CNCF and in an open source open, it wasn't really standard standard. There's no like standards, body, but what de facto thing has to happen in your mind's eye around making inter clouding or connecting clouds in a, in a way that's gonna create extensibility and growth. What do you see as a de facto thing that the industry should rally around? Obviously Kubernetes is one, is there something else that you see that's important for in an open way that the industry can discuss and, and get behind? >>Yeah. I mean, there are things like identity, right? Which are pretty critical. There is connectivity and networking. So these are all things that the industry can rally around. Right. And that goes along with any modern application infrastructure. So I would say those are the building blocks that need to happen on the data side. Of course there are so many choices as well. So >>How about, you know, security? I think about, you know, when after stuck net, the, the whole industry said, Hey, we have to do a better job of collaborating. And then when you said identity, it just sort of struck me. But then a lot of people tried to sort of monetize private reporting and things like that. So you do you see a movement within the technology industry to do a better job of collaborating to, to solve the acute, you know, security problems? >>Yeah. I think the customer pressure and government pressure right. Causes that way. Yeah. Even now, even in our current universe, you see, there is a lot of behind the scenes collaboration amongst the security teams of all of the tech companies that is not widely seen or known. Right. For example, my CISO knows the AWS CSO or the Microsoft CSO and they all talk and they share the right information about vulnerability attacks and so on and so forth. So there's already a certain amount of collaboration that's happening and that'll only increase. Do, >>Do you, you know, I was somewhat surprised. I didn't hear more in your face about security would, is that just because you had such a strong multi-cloud message that you wanted to get, get across, cuz your security story is very strong and deep. When you get into the DPU side of things, the, you know, the separation of resources and the encryption and I'll end to end >>I'm well, we have a phenomenal security story. Yeah. Yeah. Tell security story and yes. I mean I'll need guilty to the fact that in the keynote you have yeah, yeah, sure time. But what we are doing with NSX and you will hear about some NSX projects as you, if you have time to go to some of the, the sessions. Yeah. There's one called project, not star. Another is called project Watchman or watch, I think it's called, we're all dealing with this. That is gonna strengthen the security story even more. Yeah. >>We think security and data is gonna be a big part of it. Right. As CEO, I have to ask you now that you're the CEO, first of all, I'd love to talk about product with you cuz you're yeah. Yeah. We just great conversation. We want to kind of read thet leaves and ask pointed questions cuz we're putting the puzzle together in real time here with the audience. But as CEO, now you have a lot of discussions around the business. You, the Broadcom thing happening, you got the rename here, you got multi-cloud all good stuff happening. Dave and I were chatting before we came on this morning around the marketplace, around financial valuations and EBIDA numbers. When you have so much strategic Goodwill and investment in the oven right now with the, with the investments in cloud native multi-year investments on a trajectory, you got economies of scale there. >>It's just now coming out to be harvest and more behind it. Yeah. As you come into the Broadcom and or the new world wave that's coming, how do you talk about that value? Cuz you can't really put a number on it yet because there's no customers on it. I mean some customers, but you can't probably some for form. It's not like sales numbers. Yeah. Yeah. How do you make the argument to the PE type folks out there? Like EBIDA and then all the strategic value. What's the, what's the conversation like if you can share any, I know it's obviously public company, all the things going down, but like how do you talk about strategic value to numbers folks? >>Yeah. I mean, we are not talking to PE guys at all. Right. I mean the only conversation we have is helping Broadcom with >>Yeah. But, but number people who are looking at the number, EBIDA kind of, >>Yeah. I mean, you'd be surprised if, for, for example, even with Broadcom, they look at the business holistically as what are the prospects of this business becoming a franchise that is durable and could drive a lot of value. Right. So that's how they look at it holistically. It's not a number driven. >>They do. They look at that. >>Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's a misperception to say, Hey, it's a numbers driven conversation. It's a business driven conversation where, I mean, and Hawk's been public about it. He says, look, I look at businesses. Can they be leaders in their market? Yeah. Because leaders get, as we all know a disproportionate share of the economic value, is it a durable franchise that's gonna last 10 years or more, right. Obviously with technology changes in between, but 10 years or more >>Or 10, you got your internal, VMware talent customers and >>Partners. Yeah. Significant competitive advantage. So that's, that's really where the conversation starts and the numbers fall out of it. Got it. >>Okay. So I think >>There's a track record too. >>That culture >>That VMware has, you've always had an engineering culture. That's turned, you know, ideas and problems into products that, that have been very successful. >>Well, they had different engineering cultures. They're chips. You guys are software. Right. You guys know >>Software. Yeah. Mean they've been very successful with Broadcom, the standalone networking company since they took it over. Right. I mean, it's, there's a lot of amazing innovation going on there. >>Yeah. Not, not that I'm smiling. I want to kind of poke at this question question. I'll see if I get an answer out of you, when you talk to Hawk tan, does he feel like he bought a lot more than he thought or does he, did he, does he know it's all here? So >>The last two months, I mean, they've been going through a very deliberate process of digging into each business and certainly feels like he got a phenomenal asset base. Yeah. He said that to me even today after the keynote, right. Is the amazing amount of product capability that he's seeing in every one of our businesses. And that's been the constant frame. >>But congratulations on that. >>I've heard, I've heard Hawk talk about the shift to, to Mer merchant Silicon. Yeah. From custom Silicon. But I wanted to ask you when you look at things like AWS nitro yeah. And graviton and train and the advantage that AWS has with custom Silicon, you see Google and Microsoft sort of Alibaba following suit. Would it benefit you to have custom Silicon for, for DPU? I mean, I guess you, you know, to have a tighter integration or do you feel like with the relationships that you have that doesn't buy you anything? >>Yeah. I mean we have pretty strong relationships with in fact fantastic relationships with the Invidia and Intel and AMD >>Benon and AMD now. >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've been working with the Pendo team in their previous incarnations for years. Right, right. When they were at Cisco and then same thing with the, we know the Melanox team as well as the invi original teams and Intel is the collaboration right. From the get go of the company. So we don't feel a need for any of that. We think, I mean, it's clear for those cloud folks, right. They're going towards a vertical integration model and select portions of their stack, like you talked about, but there is always a room for horizontal integration model. Right. And that's what we are a part of. Right. So there'll be a number of DPU pro vendors. There'll be a number of CPU vendors. There'll be a number of other storage, et cetera, et cetera. And we think that is goodness in an alternative model compared to a vertically integr >>And yeah. What this trade offs, right. It's not one or the other, I mean I used to tell, talk to Al Shugar about this all the time. Right. I mean, if vertically integrated, there may be some cost advantages, but then you've got flexibility advantages. If you're using, you know, what the industry is building. Right. And those are the tradeoffs, so yeah. Yeah. >>Greg, what are you excited about right now? You got a lot going on obviously great event. Branding's good. Love the graphics. I was kind of nervous about the name changed. I likem world, but you know, that's, I'm kind of like it >>Doesn't readily roll off your phone. Yeah. >>I know. We, I had everyone miscue this morning already and said VMware Explorer. So >>You pay Laura fine. Yeah. >>Now, I >>Mean a quarter >>Curse jar, whatever I did wrong. I don't believe it. Only small mistake that's because the thing wasn't on. Okay. Anyway, what's on your plate. What's your, what's some of the milestones. Do you share for your employees, your customers and your partners out there that are watching that might wanna know what's next in the whole Broadcom VMware situation. Is there a timeline? Can you talk publicly about what? To what people can expect? >>Yeah, no, we, we talk all the time in the company about that. Right? Because even if there is no news, you need to talk about what is where we are. Right. Because this is such a big transaction and employees need to know where we are at every minute of the day. Right? Yeah. So, so we definitely talk about that. We definitely talk about that with customers too. And where we are is that the, all the processes are on track, right? There is a regulatory track going on. And like I alluded to a few minutes ago, Broadcom is doing what they call the discovery phase of the integration planning, where they learn about the business. And then once that is done, they'll figure out what the operating model is. What Broadcom is said publicly is that the acquisition will close in their fiscal 23, which starts in November of this year, runs through October of next year. >>So >>Anywhere window, okay. As to where it is in that window. >>All right, Raghu, thank you so much for taking valuable time out of your conference time here for the queue. I really appreciate Dave and I both appreciate your friendship. Congratulations on the success as CEO, cuz we've been following your trials and tribulations and endeavors for many years and it's been great to chat with you. >>Yeah. Yeah. It's been great to chat with you, not just today, but yeah. Over a period of time and you guys do great work with this, so >>Yeah. And you guys making, making all the right calls at VMware. All right. More coverage. I'm shot. Dave ante cube coverage day one of three days of world war cup here in Moscone west, the cube coverage of VMware Explorer, 22 be right back.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore '22, formerly VMworld. This is our 12th year covering it. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellente. Two sets, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We're starting to get the execs rolling in from VMware. Sumit Dhawan, president of VMware's here. Great to see you. Great keynote, day one. >> Great to be here, John. Great to see you, Dave. Day one, super exciting. We're pumped. >> And you had no problem with the keynotes. We're back in person. Smooth as silk up there. >> We were talking about it. We had to like dust off a cobweb to make some of these inputs. >> It's not like riding a bike. >> No, it's not. We had about 40% of our agencies that we had to change out because they're no longer in business. So, I have to give kudos to the team who pulled it together. They did a fabulous job. >> You do a great check, great presentation. I know you had a lot to crack in there. Raghu set the table. I know this is for him, this was a big moment to lay out the narrative, address the Broadcom thing right out of the gate, wave from Hock Tan in the audience, and then got into the top big news. Still a lot of meat on the bone. You get up there, you got to talk about the use cases, vSphere 8, big release, a lot of stuff. Take us through the keynote. What was the important highlights for you to share, the folks watching that didn't see the keynote or wanted to get your perspective? >> Well, first of all, did any of you notice that Raghu was running on the stage? He did not do that in rehearsal. (John chuckles) I was a little bit worried, but he really did it. >> I said, I betcha that was real. (everyone chuckles) >> Anyways, the jokes aside, he did fabulous. Lays out the strategy. My thinking, as you said, was to first of all speak with their customers and explain how every enterprise is facing with this concept of cloud chaos that Raghu laid out and CVS Health story sort of exemplifies the situation that every customer is facing. They go in, they start with cloud first, which is needed, I think that's the absolutely right approach. Very quickly build out a model of getting a cloud ops team and a platform engineering team which oftentimes be a parallel work stream to a private cloud infrastructure. Great start. But as Roshan, the CIO at CVS Health laid out, there's an inflection point. And that's when you have to converge these because the use cases are where stakeholders, this is the lines of businesses, app developers, finance teams, and security teams, they don't need this stove piped information coming at 'em. And the converge model is how he opted to organize his team. So we called it a multi-cloud team, just like a workspace team. And listen, our commitment and innovations are to solve the problems of those teams so that the stakeholders get what they need. That's the rest of the keynote. >> Yeah, first of all, great point. I want to call out that inflection point comment because we've been reporting coming into VMworld with super cloud and other things across open source and down into the weeds and into the hood. The chaos is real. So, good call. I love how you guys brought that up there. But all industry inflection points, if you go back in history of the tech industry, at every single major inflection point, there was chaos, complexity, or an enemy proprietary. However you want to look at it, there was a situation where you needed to kind of reign in the chaos as Andy Grove would say. So we're at that inflection point, I think that's consistent. And also the ecosystem floor yesterday, the expo floor here in San Francisco with your partners, it was vibrant. They're all on this wave. There is a wave and an inflection point. So, okay. I buy that. So, if you buy the inflection point, what has to happen next? Because this is where we're at. People are feeling it. Some say, I don't have a problem but they're cut chaos such is the problem. So, where do you see that? How does VMware's team organizing in the industry and for customers specifically to solve the chaos, to reign it in and cross over? >> Yeah, you're a 100% right. Every inflection point is associated with some kind of a chaos that had to be reigned in. So we are focused on two major things right now which we have made progress in. And maybe third, we are still work in-progress. Number one is technology. Today's technology announcements are directly to address how that streamlining of chaos can be done through a cloud smart approach that we laid out. Our Aria, a brand new solution for management, significant enhancements to Tanzu, all of these for public cloud based workloads that also extend to private cloud. And then our cloud infrastructure with newer capabilities with AWS, Azure, as well as with new innovations on vSphere 8 and vSAN 8. And then last but not the least, our continuous automation to enable anywhere workspace. All these are simple innovation that have to address because without those innovations, the problem is that the chaos oftentimes is created because lack of technology and as a result structure has to be put in place because tooling and technology is not there. So, number one goal we see is providing that. Second is we have to be independent, provide support for every possible cloud but not without being a partner of theirs. That's not an easy thing to do but we have the DNA as a company, we have done that with data centers in the past, even though being part of Dell we did that in the data center in the past, we have done that in mobility. And so we have taken the challenge of doing that with the cloud. So we are continually building newer innovation and stronger and stronger partnerships with cloud provider which is the basis of our commercial relationships with Microsoft Azure too, where we have brought Azure VMware solution into VMware cloud universal. Again, that strengthens the value of us being neutral because it's very important to have a Switzerland party that can provide these multi-cloud solutions that doesn't have an agenda of a specific cloud, yet an ecosystem, or at least an influence with the ecosystem that can bring going forward. >> Okay, so technology, I get that. Open, not going to be too competitive, but more open. So the question I got to ask you is what is the disruptive enabler to make that happen? 'Cause you got customers, partners and team of VMware, what's the disruptive enabler that's going to get you to that level? >> Over the hump. I mean, listen, our value is this community. All this community has one of two paths to go. Either, they become stove piped into just the public-private cloud infrastructure or they step up as this convergence that's happening around them to say, "You know what? I have the solution to tame this multi-cloud complexity, to reign the chaos," as you mentioned because tooling and technologies are available. And I know they work with the ecosystem. And our objective is to bring this community to that point. And to me, that is the best path to overcome it. >> You are the connective tissue. I was able to sit into the analyst meeting today. You were sort of the proxy for CVS Health where you talked about the private that's where you started, the public cloud ops team, bringing that together. The platform is the glue. That is the connective tissue. That's where Tanzu comes in. That's where Aria comes in. And that is the disruptive technology which it's hard to build that. >> From a technology perspective, it's an enabler of something that has never been done before in that level of comprehensiveness, from a more of a infrastructure side thinking perspective. Yes, infrastructure teams have enabled self-service portals. Yes, infrastructure teams have given APIs to developers, but what we are enabling through Tanzu is completely next level where you have a lot richer experience for developers so that they never ever have to think about the infrastructure at all. Because even when you enable infrastructure as API, that's still an API of the infrastructure. We go straight to the application tier where they're just thinking about authorized set of microservices. Containers can be orchestrated and built automatically, shifting security left where we're truly checking them or enabling them to check the security vulnerabilities as they're developing the application, not going into the production when they have to touch the infrastructure. To me, that's an enabler of a special power that this new multi-cloud team can have across cloud which they haven't had in the past. >> Yeah, it's funny, John, I'd say very challenging technically. The challenge in 2010 was the software mainframe, remember the marketing people killed that term. >> Yeah, exactly. >> But you think about that. We're going to make virtualization and the overhead associated with that irrelevant. We're going to be able to run any workload and VMware achieved that. Now you're saying we run anything anywhere, any Kubernete, any container. >> That's the reality. That's the chaos. >> And the cloud and that's a new, real problem. Real challenging problem that requires serious engineering. >> Well, I mean it's aspirational, right? Let's get the reality, right? So true spanning cloud, not yet there. You guys, I think your vision is definitely right on in the sense that we'd like the chaos and multicloud's a reality. The question is AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, other clouds, they're not going to sit still. No one's going to let VMware just come up and take everything. You got to enable so the market- >> True, true. I don't think this is the case of us versus them because there is so much that they have to express in terms of the value of every cloud. And this happened in the case of, by the way, whether you go into infrastructure or even workspace solutions, as long as the richest of the experience and richest of the controls are provided, for their cloud to the developers that makes the adoption of their cloud simpler. It's a win-win for every party. >> That's the key. I think the simplest. So, I want to ask you, this comes up a lot and I love that you brought that up, simple and self-service has proven developers who are driving the change, cloud DevOps developers. They're driving the change. They're in charge more than ever. They want self-service, easier to deploy. I want a test, if I don't like it, I want to throw it away. But if I like something, I want to stick with it. So it's got to be self-service. Now that's antithetical to the old enterprise model of solve complexity with more complexity. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So the question for you is as the president of VMware, do you feel good that you guys are looking out over the landscape where you're riding into the valley of the future with the demand being automation, completely invisible, abstraction layer, new use case scenarios for IT and whatever IT becomes. Take us through your mindset there, because I think that's what I'm hearing here at this year, VMware Explorer is that you guys have recognized the shift in demographics on the developer side, but ops isn't going away either. They're connecting. >> They're connected. Yeah, so our vision is, if you think about the role of developers, they have a huge influence. And most importantly they're the ones who are driving innovation, just the amount of application development, the number of developers that have emerged, yet remains the scarcest resource for the enterprise are critical. So developers often time have taken control over decision on infrastructure and ops. Why? Because infrastructure and ops haven't shown up. Not because they like it. In fact, they hate it. (John chuckles) Developers like being developers. They like writing code. They don't really want to get into the day to day operations. In fact, here's what we see with almost all our customers. They start taking control of the ops until they go into production. And at that point in time, they start requesting one by one functions of ops, move to ops because they don't like it. So with our approach and this sort of, as we are driving into the beautiful valley of multi-cloud like you laid out, in our approach with the cross cloud services, what we are saying is that why don't we enable this new team which is a reformatted version of the traditional ops, it has the platform engineering in it, the key skill that enables the developer in it, through a platform that becomes an interface to the developers. It creates that secure workflows that developers need. So that developers think and do what they really love. And the infrastructure is seamless and invisible. It's bound to happen, John. Think about it this way. >> Infrastructure is code. >> Infrastructure has code, and even next year, it's invisible because they're just dealing with the services that they need. >> So it's self-service infrastructure. And then you've got to have that capability to simplified, I'll even say automated or computational governance and security. So Chris Wolf is coming on Thursday. >> Yeah. >> Unfortunately I won't be here. And he's going to talk about all the future projects. 'Cause you're not done yet. The project narrows, it's kind of one of these boring, but important. >> Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in the oven coming out. >> There's really critical projects coming down the pipeline that support this multi-cloud vision, is it's early days. >> Well, this is the thing that we were talking about. I want to get your thoughts on. And we were commenting on the keynote review, Hock Tan bought VMware. He's a lot more there than he thought. I mean, I got to imagine him sitting in the front row going there's some stuff coming out of the oven. I didn't even, might not have known. >> He'd be like, "Hmm, this extra value." (everyone chuckles) >> He's got to be pretty stoked, don't you think? >> He is, he is. >> There's a lot of headroom on the margin. >> I mean, independent to that, I think the strategy that he sees is something that's compelling to customers which is what, in my assessment, speaking with him, he bought VMware because it's strategic to customers and the strategic value of VMware becomes even higher as we take our multi-cloud portfolio. So it's all great. >> Well, plus the ecosystem is now re-energize. It's always been energized, but energized cuz it's sort of had to be, cuz it's such a strong- >> And there was the Dell history there too. >> But, yeah it was always EMC, and then Dell, and now it's like, wow, the ecosystem's- >> Really it's released almost. I like this new team, we've been calling this new ops kind of vibe going refactored ops, as you said, that's where the action's happening because the developers want to go faster. >> They want to go faster. >> They want to go fast cuz the velocity's paying off of them. They don't want to have to wait. They don't want security reviews. They want policy. They want some guardrails. Show me the track. >> That's it. >> And let me drive this car. >> That's it because I mean think about it, if you were a developer, listen, I've been a developer. I never really wanted to see how to operate the code in production because it took time away for developing. I like developing and I like to spend my time building the applications and that's the goal of Aria and Tanzu. >> And then I got to mention the props of seeing project Monterey actually come out to fruition is huge because that's the future of computing architecture. >> I mean at this stage, if a customer from here on is modernizing their infrastructure and they're not investing in a holistic new infrastructure from a hardware and software perspective, they're missing out an opportunity on leveraging the numbers that we were showing, 20% increase in calls. Why would you not just make that investment on both the hardware and the software layer now to get the benefits for the next five-six years. >> You would and if I don't have to make any changes and I get 20% automatically. And the other thing, I don't know if people really appreciate the new curve that the Silicon industry is on. It blows away the history of Moore's law which was whatever, 35-40% a year, we're talking about 100% a year price performance or performance improvements. >> I think when you have an inflection point as we said earlier, there's going to be some things that you know is going to happen, but I think there's going to be a lot that's going to surprise people. New brands will emerge, new startups, new talent, new functionality, new use cases. So, we're going to watch that carefully. And for the folks watching that know that theCUBE's been 12 years with covering VMware VMworld, now VMware Explore, we've kind of met everybody over the years, but I want to point out a little nuance, Raghu thing in the keynote. During the end, before the collective responsibility sustainment commitment he had, he made a comment, "As proud as we are," which is a word he used, there's a lot of pride here at VMware. Raghu kind of weaved that in there, I noticed that, I want to call that out there because Raghu's proud. He's a proud product guy. He said, "I'm a product guy." He's delivering keynote. >> Almost 20 years. >> As proud as we are, there's a lot of pride at VMware, Sumit, talk about that dynamic because you mentioned customers, your customer is not a lot of churn. They've been there for a long time. They're embedded in every single company out there, pretty much VMware is in every enterprise, if not all, I mean 99%, whatever percentage it is, it's huge penetration. >> We are proud of three things. It comes down to number one, we are proud of our innovations. You can see it, you can see the tone from Raghu or myself, or other executives changes with excitement when we're talking about our technologies, we're just proud. We're just proud of it. We are a technology and product centric company. The second thing that sort of gets us excited and be proud of is exactly what you mentioned, which is the customers. The customers like us. It's a pleasure when I bring Roshan on stage and he talks about how he's expecting certain relationship and what he's viewing VMware in this new world of multi-cloud, that makes us proud. And then third, we're proud of our talent. I mean, I was jokingly talking to just the events team alone. Of course our engineers do amazing job, our sellers do amazing job, our support teams do amazing job, but we brought this team and we said, "We are going to get you to run an event after three years from not they doing one, we're going to change the name on you, we're going to change the attendees you're going to invite, we're going to change the fact that it's going to be new speakers who have never been on the stage and done that kind of presentation. >> You're also going to serve a virtual audience. >> And we're going to have a virtual audience. And you know what? They embraced it and they surprised us and it looks beautiful. So I'm proud of the talent. >> The VMware team always steps up. You never slight it, you've got great talent over there. The big thing I want to highlight as we end this day, the segment, and I'll get your thoughts and reactions, Sumit, is again, you guys were early on hybrid. We have theCUBE tape to go back into the video data lake and find the word hybrid mentioned 2013, 2014, 2015. Even when nobody was talking about hybrid. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Multicloud, Raghu, I talked to Raghu in 2016 when he did the Pat Gelsinger, I mean Raghu, Pat and Andy Jassy. >> Yeah. >> When that cloud thing got cleared up, he cleared that up. He mentioned multicloud, even then 2016, so this is not new. >> Yeah. >> You had the vision, there's a lot of stuff in the oven. You guys make announcements directionally, and then start chipping away at it. Now you got Broadcom buys VMware, what's in the oven? How much goodness is coming out that's like just hitting the fruits are starting to bear on the tree. There's a lot of good stuff and just put that, contextualize and scale that for us. What's in the oven? >> First of all, I think the vision, you have to be early to be first and we believe in it. Okay, so that's number one. Now having said that what's in the oven, you would see us actually do more controls across cloud. We are not done on networking side. Okay, we announced something as project Northstar with networking portfolio, that's not generally available. That's in the oven. We are going to come up with more capability on supporting any Kubernetes on any cloud. We did some previews of supporting, for example, EKS. You're going to see more of those cluster controls across any Kubernetes. We have more work happening on our telco partners for enablement of O-RAN as well as our edge solutions, along with the ecosystem. So more to come on those fronts. But they're all aligned with enabling customers multi-cloud through these five cross cloud services. They're all really, some of them where we have put a big sort of a version one of solution out there such as Aria continuation, some of them where even the version one's not out and you're going to see that very soon. >> All right. Sumit, what's next for you as the president? You're proud of your team, we got that. Great oven description of what's coming out for the next meal. What's next for you guys, the team? >> I think for us, two things, first of all, this is our momentum season as we call it. So for the first time, after three years, we are now being in, I think we've expanded, explored to five cities. So getting this orchestrated properly, we are expecting nearly 50,000 customers to be engaging in person and maybe a same number virtually. So a significant touchpoint, cuz we have been missing. Our customers have departed their strategy formulation and we have departed our strategy formulation. Getting them connected together is our number one priority. And number two, we are focused on getting better and better at making customers successful. There is work needed for us. We learn, then we code it and then we repeat it. And to me, those are the two key things here in the next six months. >> Sumit, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for your valuable time, sharing what's going on. Appreciate it. >> Always great to have chatting. >> Here with the president, the CEO's coming up next in theCUBE. Of course, we're John and Dave. More coverage after the short breaks, stay with us. (upbeat music)

(gentle music) >> Hello, everyone welcome to "theCUBE's" live coverage here in San Francisco, California for VMware Explore not VMworld, it's VMware Explore. I'm John Furrier, your host of "theCUBE" with Dave Vellante. We're here with two sets. 12th year, Dave, covering VMworld, now VMware Explore, what a journey? I had a little reminiscing from Paul Maritz in 2010, who predicted the future but the timing was off. Raghu predicting the future, but is his timing right with multi-cloud or super-cloud? We're going to get into it. We got three days of wall to wall CUBE coverage, two sets. All the top execs from VMware coming on, including the CEO Raghu himself, Vittorio, Kit Colbert, the whole kit and caboodle of the executive group to talk about the future of VMware, where it's going, and of course the appearance of Hock Tan here from Broadcom, Dave, made an appearance. Michael Dell was also in presence. I get the vibe that there's something going on with Broadcom and VMware beyond just the acquisition. So a lot of people are curious. This event again is notable and historic from the sense of it's VMware Explore not VMworld, so they changed the name, and Broadcom's intent, and they're going to be buying VMworld. Dave, the keynote was anticipated by all, how it was going to go down, what was going to be said. Raghu set the table, I got a ton of notes, I know you do. What's your take? >> Well, you have to start with the Broadcom acquisition. You're right, Hock Tan was in the audience, he stood up, he got a little clap. >> Golf clap. >> He's paying $60 billion for VMware, he better be able to be recognized. And he was here yesterday with Michael Dell at the executive sessions. And their purpose I'm sure, they didn't let us in, but I'm sure the purpose was to make sure that customers were calm, they were comfortable with the direction. Of course, the narrative coming out of VMware is that, hey, they're investigating, they're going deep into our portfolio, and they like what they see, it's going to be all good, it's not going to be like the CA acquisition and de-levering and all that stuff. I still stand by what I wrote in my breaking analysis back in May. The fact is, Broadcom has promised $8.5 billion in EBITDA within three years. That's the only way they get there, is to cut, so that's going to happen. But the interesting dynamic in the market, I don't know if you've noticed this, VMware stock is trading at a 20% discount to what Broadcom is paying for it. So there's a big amount of fluff, if you want to do some arbitration. And I think it's due to the fact that it's a stock and a cash deal, it's a combination deal, and it's not going to close for a year. So there's maybe some skepticism around that. But that was an interesting dynamic. The keynote we'll get into it, but it's all around multi-cloud and what we call super-cloud. >> I have my conspiracy theories on Broadcom, actually they make chips. Looking at all the waves right now in the technology industry, silicon is hot, anyone who's doing custom silicon and putting software on the chip, making purpose built vertical applications is seeing performance gains in cloud and in these applications. So one, I'm really excited by the dots connecting there. But also the VMware story, Dave, is pretty interesting in the sense that timing's everything, the Broadcom acquisition, EBITDA focus might drive behavior. But notable for VMware, is Raghu has been on this vision for years. I remember in 2016 when I interviewed him with Andy Jassy, who was then the CEO of AWS, they had moved everything to Amazon Web Services. And that was the beginning of the vision of multi-cloud and cloud-native. VMware invested a ton, and so we're seeing some fruit come off the tree. If you will, bearing some fruit from that VMware investment in cloud-native across the board which was their bet prior to Broadcom buying them out. So the question is, does Broadcom harvest that, continue that nurturing of that "plantation of goodness" that could come out of that VMware? And again, it's probability, it's not guaranteed. Commentary on Twitter is pretty heavy on, can they win the Devs? Can the new Ops bringing around the front? So, VMware's and Broadcom in a tough position, they bought more than they thought in my opinion. And I think a lot of people are saying, does Broadcom recognize the strategic value of what's coming out of the oven, so to speak, or what's blowing off the tree from VMware? And is it real? That is the number one question. I talk to people in the hallway, that's what they're saying. They want to know what's going to happen with what's around the corner, that's on top of mind of everybody. >> It's a really important question because VMware's future is multi-cloud management, what we call super-cloud. And without Tanzu, and I speculated that Tanzu was probably going to be under the microscope and potentially on the chopping block because they spend a lot of money marketing it, but they're probably not today getting a lot of returns. But without Tanzu, without a cross-cloud PaaS we sometimes call a super PaaS. their strategy doesn't work, it basically fails. And I think what a lot of people are missing, and I saw you chime in on Twitter, is can they win the Devs? Can they win the Devs? This is table stakes. If you don't have a cross-cloud PaaS, and it's really about not necessarily just the Devs, it's about the ops, right? Because now it's about security. Yes, shift left, but shield right. But the DevOps team, the Ops team needs consistency. It's like Adrian Cockcroft says, the Devs, they love to get married, the Ops, they got to clean up after the divorce. And so they need standard- >> You're implying that they'll use any tool for the job and not really worry about lock in. And I think today on the keynote, Deshaun was up there who submitted a comment, "You kids have it easy these days." Implying us old guys, when we coded, you had to do everything yourself. Kelsey Hightower mentioned her support pack desktop edition. The old days when had to build everything by hand, now it's all automated, all goodness. But in all seriousness, the focus there was DevOps has won, DevOps is what the developers are doing. The developers are in the clear right now, as far as I'm concerned. They're sitting on the beach right now, sunglasses on, sun shining, everything's shift left, CI/CD pipeline, cloud-native goodness. If you're a dev, things are much rosier than an Ops person. So DevOps is developer, security and DataOps, is where the action is. So it's not so much IT operations as it is security and data leveling up to the velocity demand of developers and also ease of use. So self-service in the motion of coding, in the pipelining, that's what the developers have to have. And if people don't build that experience from the upside, the new ops is not going to enable the develop, it won't be adopted in my opinion. >> You mentioned Paul Maritz before, his whole thing was any workload, any cloud, the software mainframe, they're talking about any Kubernetes, any cloud. And we got to go through some of the announcements real quick here. VMware Aria is the new multi-cloud management platform. That is the fundamental strategy for going cross-cloud or what we call super-cloud. The vSphere and vSAN 8 are big deals. And as relates to compute with vSphere, they're really pushing that whole DPU. You might remember Project Monterey. Well, Project Monterey is essentially like AWS Nitro, it's the future of computing architecture seven years after AWS introduced it. So AWS has a huge lead here. But it's critical that a company like VMware is able to offer that capability with XPU optionality, GPU, CPU, Arm based, Pensando capabilities, eventually NPUs, other capabilities to bring in and support new workloads, new data driven workloads. So the lot of talk about the whole DPU thing. As I mentioned, Tanzu new version of Tanzu, they talked about edge. They're basically bringing VMware to the edge with an eventual consistency model. >> Hold on, the vSphere thing, just to jump in there real quick. I always thought that that'd be higher up in the keynote. Clearly in the keynote, they flexed their cloud-native positioning, they had to address the Broadcom thing, talk about modern applications. So it felt like they were selling the dream on the front end. And they buried the lead in my opinion, which is vSphere 8. They don't do a lot of vSphere 8 announcements. If you look at the history of VMworld, every few years they got a new release. This was packed with a lot of goodness. And I thought they'd buried that in the keynote. >> I don't know, Raghu mentioned it. Yeah, they had a lot to cover. And then the other thing was they announced support for Red Hat OpenShift. So everybody's like, "Ooh, wow." And then Tanzu for all the Kubernetes versions from the cloud guys. So a lot of announcements, you got to always give VMware props. It's not like they stopped engineering, they have a great engineering culture. And so it's nice to see Project Monterey in particular, go from R&D to actual product. And so we like to see that. >> Even towards the end, now that we're doing the keynote review, Raghu said, "As proud as we are," this is when they started talking about the sustainability, implying they're real proud engineering, and that's a good call out there. I think that's what were trying to get across to Hock Tan, who was sitting in the front row. But Dave, in terms of keynote, my analysis is clear. Raghu was nervous, you can tell. But he's a product guy, he even said that on stage. He set the table at the beginning, I thought really well with modern applications. He had to address the name change, and I thought that was interesting. He actually said, "We built a community with VMworld, but now with multi-cloud, we're going to recall it Explore." Not sure I agree with that. I think VMworld community is still vibrant, and that's why they're here. So I thought that was nice, the way he balance that out, the messaging is good, the graphics and the branding of Explore is world class, I think it's phenomenal. I'm not a big fan of the name change, but I never go well with change there. Hock Tan didn't speak, he did stand up and wave. >> There's no way he's going to get up to speak. >> He didn't speak. So I thought that was interesting front end, so they got that right out of the way. And absolutely you saying last night. And then they got into this digitally smart concept, which I thought was on point. Did not like the great replatforming message. I'm not a big fan of that because it reminded me of the great resignation. And I think there's going to be a lot of memes on that. So not a big fan of the great replatforming. I did like the Cloud Universal pitch. But this whole multi-cloud pitch seems to me, and I want to get your thoughts on this, is that that's what it reminded me of, Paul Maritz. So when Raghu is clearly betting the ranch on multi-cloud, the question is timing. Paul Maritz in 2010 here at VMworld Moscone, he laid out the vision, he was right. But timing was off, the top of the stack didn't materialize. But at the end of the day, ended up being the right architecture. Is VMware too early with multi-cloud, Dave? And that's the question, that's the question on the table. >> Well, so a couple things. So Maritz, the one mistake Maritz made was he really tried to go into apps, remember? So now at least I think Raghu, the current VMware thinking is, we're going to enable apps to be developed. And that is the right thinking. Are they too early or too late with multi-cloud? I think technically it just wasn't feasible, the customers weren't ready for it. VMware moves at the speed of the CIO we like to say. So I think the timing is actually really good because the technical capabilities are now there. You've got to have across-cloud paths, which Tanzu is about. And I think Tanzu was too immature before. They've got the pieces on the DPU side. And the other thing about the timing is now with Broadcom acquiring VMware, the whole non Dell ecosystem has got to be a lot happier. NetApp, guys like that, Cisco. >> Why is that? >> Because Dell, their thumb on the scale, they had the thing rigged, Dell was first in line for everything. When EMC owned VMware, that was the case. But they were required about it, Dell made no concessions. And they just came out and said, "We are going to be VMware first, we are the preferred partner, we do more business with anybody." They really drove a truck through that. And I think it caused a lot of the ecosystem to pull back, like HPE and others to say, "Okay, we're going to find some alternatives here." Now they can really lean in. It's like when HP broken two, that really changed the ecosystem posture with HPE. This is like that, but times 10. >> What did you think about the ecosystem floor last night? When I did a walk of the floor, I thought it was very vibrant, it was not a ghost town at all. >> No, not at all, we saw Alibaba Cloud was there, we saw a lot of- >> AWS. >> Smaller companies >> Microsoft. >> And so I thought it was better than I thought it would be. There's probably what, 7,000 people here I would say? So well off from the 15,000 pre-COVID highs, but still very robust, it's a good crowd. People are excited to be back in person obviously. And I think the messaging was right, John. I think cross-cloud, multi-cloud, super-cloud, that is the future. Well, David Floid took a stab at it and said, "I think it's going to be $100 billion market by the end of the decade." >> Super-cloud is a thing for sure. And I think that came out in Aria announcement, which was basically a rebranding. It's not a new product, essentially it's a cobble together management platform. I thought the Cloud Universal notes here were interesting. The Cloud Universal is the commercial cloud smart component. Meaning they're trying to make that the frame, Dave, for the hyperscalers to come in to a de facto consortium movement. I feel like that's next here. If this Cloud Universal could become the super-cloud consortium, that might give them a better shot. The ecosystem is buzzing, attendance is strong. It's interesting a lot of people were speculating, will this be an event? I thought they did a great job and I thought they came through well with this. >> You were saying about consortium, because have to have the cloud guys in any consortium. But is any one cloud going to drive it? VMware could be- >> AWS >> Could be the driver. >> I'm thinking if I had to make a prediction, looking at what I just saw in the keynote, we'll see what the VMware execs say, If I had to make a guess, I think you're going to have customers, "Let's still double down on VMware stuff." They're going to settle into vSphere and networking compute and storage, the normal stuff that they've got, the software to find data center core as a cloud operational platform. And then you're going to see a lot more AWS migration. You might see that if Broadcom doesn't nurture the fruit coming off the tree, as we mentioned earlier, I think you might see people go more cloud-native. But I think VMware's prepared for that with the hybrid. So it's going to be very interesting to see. I think the winners coming out of this will be AWS, maybe a little bit of trickle into Azure, Alibaba mostly for the European, I mean the China side. But I don't see them playing. Google is a wild card, we'll see it from them. >> I think the other big thing about the timing, to your earlier point is, VMware used to go to market with very bespoke, We got vSAN, we got NSX, we got vSphere, and now they're trying to bring that together. And essentially remember, they used to go to market and say, "Okay, hey, your ELA is up, time to renew." And they're talking to the wrong people. So now they're going forth with the Azure service model, they're going to move to a subscription model. And I think the timing is right for that. I would've liked to see it a little bit before hand, maybe pre COVID would have been better timing. But I think technically, the time is right now for that. >> And I think looking at the acquisition, speculating on that, I think let's discuss how we see things, how they might move forward. Again, we'll ask the guests as much as best as we can and the best they could answer. But let's take this forward. Okay, based upon what I'm seeing here, if I'm Hock Tan in the audience, I'm saying to myself, "Okay, I got more here than I thought I was buying." Maybe I thought I was getting some great EBITDA. I wonder if his outlook changed on how he goes to market with the new VMware post acquisition. So that means in the around February timeframe, I would probably, if I was advising him to say, "Okay, let's keep it as is, let's not do the cut, cut, cut. Maybe trim a little bit here and there." But for the most part, he's got the solid customer base and he's going to have to keep the event. >> Here's the problem with that. They have a very high do-say ratio. They do what they say they're going to do. And as a result, they've promised 8.5 billion in EBITDA within three years out of VMware. And they return 50% of their free cash flow to investors. If they break that promise, their stock will get crushed. I don't think they're going to break that promise. So I think they're going to run. That's something I believe in their playbook that they're not going to change. Now, could they get there without massive cuts? I think it's going to be hard. Can they get there with price increases? Yes. And better efficiency, yes. But they don't have a lot of go to market synergies, John. Broadcom doesn't have a big sales force that they can say, "Okay, we're going to fire all the VMware sales force and you're going to go to market through our channel." Like Oracle would do with their big sales force or a Dell would do with an acquisition, they can't. And so I just don't see how they're going to around it. The only other thing I would say is, to me, I thought the application development piece, the Tanzu piece was very appropriate. And I think they got it. Whether or not they're going to succeed there, we can debate that. But I thought what was missing was there wasn't enough, in my opinion, on their security posture, their security strategy. I thought they gave it lip service with, "Oh yeah, we're going to shift left and dev security, et cetera." They did not go in depth. I think when you talk to someone like Tom Gillis, who really can go deep, I think talking about Barry and the lead, that was not, security is the number one issue of CIOs, CSO. >> Data and security >> At boards, it's number one. And data is the second thing. And those two stories in the keynote where quasi non-existent or/and weak. >> Again, the reason why I believe, and you're discussing it publicly at a high level, is super-cloud is real because it's not just SaaS on cloud, it's hybrid, it's DevOps, it's developer. And security and data operations are just absolutely now leveling up, and the edge is a complete wild card. We met a company last night, they're doing the edge cloud. The edge is going to open up all kinds of new use cases and challenges. And that's on the DataOps, data security side. DevOps, IT operations is already in the dev cycle. If companies aren't doing that, in my opinion, they're not really doing it right. So I think it'll shift to security and Ops and DataOps, that's going to be the action. In the cloud operational framework, that's super-cloud. To me, if I'm Hock Tan, I'm saying, "VMworld, VMware Explore, VMware has to be a core component of super-cloud of the future. Not multi-cloud just a state." I think multi-cloud will be a description of a state, of an architecture, and an outcome, but that's not super-cloud, that's not a functioning operating system, that's not a functioning business driven technology. So I think VMware has the opportunity. So I look at that and say, I got cheap options all the way up to the top of the stack. And super-cloud paths layer, as you describe, that I think is the way to go. >> When you think about how VMware got here, VMware was a $13 billion trailing 12 month revenue company. There aren't a lot of $13 billion software companies. And the way VMware got here, is through great software engineering. They identified problems that the customers had and they went and solved them. They did it with virtualization, they did it with private cloud, they figured out their public cloud strategy. So I think the question for Broadcom is going to be okay, how fast can we monetize that engineering? Can we turn that engineering R&D into dollars? And how fast can we do that? They have two choices in my opinion, keep innovating, which of course we hope that's the case, or act like a private equity firm and just squeeze as much cash out of VMware as possible. Which I don't think would be the right strategy because eventually that says, okay, what's going to happen to Broadcom? How are they going to continue to grow? Are they're going to have to just keep growing through acquisitions? So I think R&D is a really good spend when it's VMware. >> And I think as we wrap up our keynote analysis, one of the things that's going to come out of this as the conversation, no doubt in my mind will be, VMware isn't CA. And the question is, does Broadcom go off their playbook with VMware because of the fact that you look at the sponsorships for the show, we got a robust set of sponsorships for "theCUBE." With two sets, we're booked, fully loaded. Conversation's high, the floor is all about next level cloud operations. This is not a dying market, this is a growth wave coming. So the question, as super-cloud becomes that growth, and everyone's talking about super-cloud there. Some people who don't like the name, which is good, keep grace debate. But there's no doubt that that next wave is the super-cloud philosophy, the super-cloud mindset and architecture, and development environment. And we've documented that on supercloud.world if anyone's interested. But that wave is coming, and you can see it on the floor. Look at the sponsors, look at what people are talking about, Dave. This is not like Broadcom buying VMware and tucking it under and saying, "Okay, hope we can service the customer." There's a real market growth here story. So the question is, what do you do with that? >> Well, so you start with the base. VMware is a very good platform. The reason why they don't have a ton of competition and the reason why, okay, Nutanix can maybe trickle some away, but VMware is really good, it works, it's stable, it recovers from failures, it's got a super strong ecosystem. So you start by building there and then you identify the places where you can spend a dollar and make it 10. >> Well, I was very excited that when we had our super-cloud event, which was a virtual event as a test, we had great VMware support. And a lot of the catalog sessions up here, on Moscone West, where we're sitting, upstairs is all the sessions, they're crowded. And they overlay, Dave, with our narrative and the industry narrative. On the influencer side, you're starting to see the influencers meeting our editorial and pursuing a super-cloud with VMware and their ecosystem. Kind of agreeing super-cloud is real. And I think that is an important note because just last December, when we coined the term at Reinvent, I think it was Reinvent look what's happened. I want to get your thoughts and your reaction to why super-cloud has got so much traction, it's a great buzz with the name. But why is it that our super-cloud, the VMware, and the ecosystem are all aligning with this? Why do you think that's happening? Why do you think that the momentum is accelerating? >> The reason is that, as everybody knows, organizations have multiple clouds, it's a function of shadow Devs, M&A. And so they end up with all these different clouds, all these different projects, different primitives, different APIs, different tool sets. And they called it cloud chaos today. It's accurate, it is cloud chaos. So what's the problem with that? Well, that makes it harder to secure, it makes it harder to govern, it makes it harder to share data, it creates data silos. What's the answer? Well, if you can create a layer that's an abstraction layer that simplifies all that cross cloud data sharing and development and have a consistent set of APIs through a PaaS layer, we call it super PaaS and you are going to have a metadata intelligence that says, "Okay, I'm going to put this here or put that there. And I'm going to deal with latency, I'm going to optimize for whatever purpose, data sharing, or performance or whatever it is." You're going to solve a lot of problems. And you're going to make the CIO's life easier so that they can invest in their own business and their digital transformation and their digital strategy. So that's why people agree. They might not agree with the name, but they certainly agree with the concept of that abstraction layer. >> The name is certainly a better name than multi-cloud, multi-cloud sounds broken. But I think CIOs and CXOs, CISO, CSOs have to get buy-in from their teams. The organic dev relationship with Ops and SecOps and DataOps has to be symbiotic, not conflicting. And I love the chaos story because as Andy Grove, the legend at Intel once said, "Let chaos reign and then reign in the chaos." >> Chaos is cash. >> So in any innovation inflection point, chaos becomes the complexity, abstraction layers, and or innovation takes that complexity away. This is the formula for success. And I think VMware is right in the middle of it. And I think if I'm looking at VMware right now, I'm saying, hey, reign in that chaos right now and you win. So chaos is not a bad thing if you can reign it in, Dave. >> And that's what they've done. You think about what they did with virtualization, it was chaotic, it was wasteful. I think of what they did with private cloud. They said, "Hey IT guys, we're going to help you not get cloudified. We're going to cloudify your presence on-prem and not just throw everything into the cloud." They did a great job there. And now it's all about multi-cloud. >> Well, we're going to reign in the chaos, extract the signal from the noise. Super CUBE here at super-cloud event VMware Explore. Dave, great to kick it off again. Again, 12th year of CUBE coverage. It seems like a lifetime, Dave. Just yesterday we were 2010 >> Amazing, right. We've been in Moscone South, we've been in North, we've been in Las Vegas. Now we're here West, first time in west. >> Some of these developers were in elementary school when we started "theCUBE" here, I was just feeling old relics. Anyway, we're going to bring more action, three days of coverage, thecube.net, check it out. Join our community, join the conversation. As the influences are coming more onto the market, you're seeing a lot more conversations on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on the internet, check it out. Join the conversation. I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante. We'll be back with more coverage here in San Francisco after this break. (gentle music)

(light music) >> Hello, welcome back everybody to theCUBE's coverage in New York City of AWS Summit 2022. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We had Dave Vellante, Lisa Martin here earlier. I'm going to wrap it up here with James Forrester, last interview of the day here in New York. Wish we would have had another day. It's a packed house, 10,000 people. James Forrester's the VP Worldwide Technical Leader for VMware's Cloud on AWS. On AWS is a big distinction. James, welcome to theCube. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much, John. It's great to be here. >> So I think it's been like six years since the announcement of VMware's Cloud on AWS, which is a separate instance, separate hardware, but it's changed the game for VMware. You guys have done a lot of work, successful traction with customers. Clarified, I remember at that time, it really clarified VMware's Cloud play. Which then gave VMware more time to work on what it's doing now, which is, you know, using all their assets and their operations with Tanzu, Monterey, Cloud Native, Cross Cloud. What they call you guys call Cross Cloud, I call Super Cloud, action, a lot of stuff happening. So thanks for coming on. Okay. So first question is, what's the future look like for VMware's Cloud on AWS? >> Super bright, super bright. And there's a couple of great reasons for that. I think firstly, what we're seeing is that customers have now made enough progress in their cloud journeys. Many of them have chosen AWS and they're going full force. We're going to help them go faster. We're going to help them get there and get native to those adjacent services much quicker with more confidence and more resiliency. So it's a super exciting time to be doing what we do. >> You know, VMware has had a steady install base, okay. I mean basically it's like almost ingrained in the operations. What do you guys see as that next level step up function? Because you know, obviously Broadcom is buying VMware. Obviously that utility will be in place, but there's more. There's more there that customers can tap into. This is the promise of the cross-cloud. How do you talk about that when you got the AWS action? How does that all integrate? >> Yeah, absolutely. And of course, because so many customers are going to AWS on their own cloud journeys right now, what we get to have the conversation about is how they can get there more confidently. And so for customers who are just starting out, who are looking at their application portfolios, who have a ton of skilled IT professionals who they want to bring into that cloud journey, they can use the skills they already have. For those folks who are a little bit further along but they may be finding that refactoring their applications is more complex, more difficult that they anticipated, we give them a way of moving with confidence and with much less risk so they can do those cloud journeys that they anticipated. >> You know, James, I want to get your thoughts on what the state of the current situation is, vis-à-vis, your customers and your customers' appetite for AWS services. 'Cause one of the promises of the original deal was clarifying messaging but more importantly, customers can get the VMware Cloud and take advantage of the higher level services on AWS. What's the update there? What's the current state of the art? What's some of the patterns that you're seeing on the uptake of services and how they're working together? >> Yeah, it's a great call out. And honestly, one of the misconceptions that I address right out of the gate is that somehow going VMware Cloud takes you away from those services. It doesn't, it gets you closer to them. Full, direct, native access to all of those hundreds of great AWS services. So what we often find is that customers have their enterprise data, inside data workloads in their data centers. But what they want to do is get that up next to the AWS services that can use it, like Redshift and Athena and Glue. They can move those workloads right adjacent to those services to start using them right away. So it's a great way to look at the platform. >> So one of the observations that's pretty well understood right now by most people, I'd say 90%, if not more, not a hundred percent 'cause I've heard people like not get it, but it's pretty clear that the operating model for the the enterprise will be hybrid as a steady state. I don't think there's any debate on that unless you think there is. >> Do you feel the same- >> No debate. No debate. >> Okay. Hybrid's a steady state. What does that mean as clients start to think about edge and their data centers. 'Cause now the private cloud is back in the game. So I've heard people talk about private cloud, which we, I think we coined the term with Dave, Wikibon years ago, but it kind of went away because that was not the public cloud. So public cloud won, on premise didn't go away. We saw Amazon with Outpost. So now they're like, I can still have stuff on prem and run it in a cloud operations. So they're calling that private cloud, I think. So you're starting to hear the same things. What it means basically is that hybrid is winning. It's the standard. What does the hybrid environment look like from a VMware perspective as you guys look at that and have been building that out 'cause you have customers that are on premises. >> Yeah. >> Is it just to the cloud and back? Is it, is there any changes? Is there new connective tissue? Is there a glue layer? What's the operating model for VMware customers? >> Well, customers wanted those same benefits from public cloud agility, cost benefits, elasticity, innovation, sovereignty, sustainability, but they wanted to be able to do that everywhere. They wanted it in their data centers. They wanted it at the edge. And as you've pointed out public cloud delivered that for customers. AWS first out there delivering that for customers. Now with innovations like VMware Cloud and AWS outpost, we're able to bring that back into the data center. We're able to bring those same benefits of public cloud into the customers on-prem environment. And you're right. We see hybrid just rolling and rolling and being able to offer our solution across all of it. >> Yeah, we're big fans of VMware because theCube's 12 years old, we've been at every VMworld. Now they're calling it VMware Explorer, the events coming up. So the folks watching, plug for VMware Explorer, formerly VMworld, it's on the schedule. Content catalog just came out last week. It's looking pretty good. So put a plug out there. We'll be there with theCube, two sets. So you know, if you're going to VMworld, now Explorer go register, get up there. It's in San Francisco, always a great event. vSphere and vSAN, always great products. But you got Carbon Black, you got Security. So these things have all been working kind of pistons for VMware. Tanzu, I know Raghu and those guys are doing it. Craig McLuckie and team, they're working on that. You got Tanzu, you got Monterey. That's the new cloud native thing. How is that tracking vis-à-vis, the operating model of the the core engine, vSphere, vSAN and others. And then with the native services of Cloud. So you got AWS Cloud with VMware Cloud, vSphere, vSAN, Carbon Black, and Security. And then you got the Tanzu over here. How are those three things coming together? >> Well, the services that customers know and love first and foremost that they've been running the mission critical workloads on, vSphere, vSAN, NSX. What VMware cloud and AWS is, is a packaging together of those services. So customers don't have to configure it all themselves and do the heavy lifting. We manage and run it on their behalf. What we are adding to that most recently with Tanzu is now the ability to run containers within the same environment. 'Cause customers tell us they've got parts of their organization that are very much on vSphere VMs. Parts of their organization are moving to containers. We want be able to provide a single operating model, a single layer, a single way of managing all of that. No matter where it's deployed. >> You know, remember back in the day, when Raghu wasn't the CEO, Carl Eschenbach was there, Sanjay Poonen was there. Carl's now at Sequoia Capital, Raghu's a CEO. Sanjay's kind of looking for a next gig. I always said, why doesn't vSphere and NSX become that abstraction layer and commoditize the network so that white boxes and Dell and HP could all play in that layer? It just never happened yet. Is that something you guys talk about at all? Like, I mean in the, in the smokey room, in the execs, is that happening? What's the vision? >> Well, we always work backwards- from customers, right? (John laughing) And what customers are telling us is they want us to help them with that undifferentiated heavy lifting. So who knows where that could take us, but right now we're very focused on helping those customers move with confidence to the cloud. >> You didn't take the bait on that one. I appreciate that. (James laughing) Okay. So let's get some perspective. You're out with customers. What are the big things that you're seeing right now from your customers right now? 'Cause you look behind us here, 10,000 people at this event. This is not a no-show. This is not a throwaway event in, you know, somewhere in the corner of the world. This is New York City, only one summit. This is bigger than Snowflake Summit and that was packed. So from an event standpoint, this is pretty a big game statement here for AWS. These companies are not experiencing headwinds, they're changing. So what are your customers telling you around what they're looking at for the cloud native architecture? I mean obviously the digital transformation is continuing, obviously clouds here. And again, we were saying earlier, this is the first time in history that the cloud hyperscalers have been in market during a so-called downturn. So there's no other data. 2008, I wouldn't call 'em up and running. They were building, but AWS, Azure, others, these cloud players they're in market. And so you're starting to see kind of some data coming out saying, Hey, this thing's still working, the engine of innovation is cranking out and it's not slowing down the digital transformation. It might change the capital markets and valuations but it's not changing customers. That's what I'm hearing. Now, you probably would agree with that, right? >> James: I think that's exactly right. >> Okay. So let's stay with that. If you believe that, then it's like, okay, what are they doing? So what are customers doubling down on? What are some of the patterns you're seeing in the environment today that you could share with the audience? >> Yeah, so I think first and foremost is that steady transition to the cloud to deliver all of those benefits, agility, cost, elasticity, innovation, sovereignty, sustainability that hasn't gone away at all. In fact, it's only accelerated. With workloads like virtual desktops, which became so critical during COVID the need to be able to provide that kind of scalable elastic capacity has only increased. Now, coupled with that, most of these customers are already on a cloud journey. And while some folks may have had the luxury of letting that go a little bit more slowly, nowadays the urgency is pervasive across all of the industries that we get to talk to in New York. Everyone needs to go faster. Everybody's not seeing the progress that they expected that we think we can help them deliver. So the opportunity I think that's come out of COVID is more workloads, different use cases, disaster recovery, ransomware- >> Is that more of an awareness or reality or both? >> Both. Absolutely. >> Okay. So let me ask the next question. 'Cause this is a good conversation, I think. I agree a hundred percent. We're seeing the same exact thing. Now let's talk about how companies are thinking about the real opportunity that's emerged, which is refactoring the business model without actually changing the makeup of the organization per se, to take on new territories and potentially take over categories. >> James: Mm hmm. >> So I mean a data warehouse and a data cloud's kind of the same thing. Snowflake probably wouldn't like me saying that they're a data warehouse because they call themselves a data cloud, but it's kind of the same thing, just refactored on AWS. >> James: Yep. >> That's a super cloud. So that's an opportunity for everyone to do that in every vertical. How many customers are actually thinking that way and actually taking steps to pursue that, capture that opportunity? Or do you agree it's the opportunity? >> No, I think that that is an opportunity and I love that idea of super cloud in that what I think customers have started to realize, over the last couple of years in particular, is it's very difficult to take advantage of all of those great cloud services if your applications are still behind a whole lot of different layers of firewalls and so forth. So getting the application close to those services, in proximity to those services is that first step in modernization. Then it doesn't have to be a change the wings on the plane while it's flying conversation, which- >> John: Yeah. >> You know, is very risky for a lot of organizations. >> John: Exactly. >> It's a let's get the plane going a little bit faster. Let's get the plane going a little bit smoother, and let's get the plane to its destination with less risk. >> You know, James, that reminds me of the old school conversations of non disruptive operations. Remember those days? >> James: I do, yeah. >> Mostly around storage and, and servers. But that's what basically what you're saying. Transform while operating, right? >> James: Exactly. >> So this is, you can do both. You got to make time and it's a talent question too. I'd love to get your thoughts on how customers are thinking about who do you put on which task. 'Cause you want your A players on both areas. You don't want all your A players, what I hear, CSOs and CIOs telling me is that, I put all my A players on transformation, I got no one running the business. >> James: Mm hmm. >> So you got to kind of balance. That's a cultural team decision. >> It's a cultural team decision. It's also a skills marketplace decision. >> John: Yeah. >> And there's a practical reality to the skills that are available and how fast you can hire them. So a big part of the conversation that we have is when customers have existing skills sets, plug those into their transformation, plug those into their business outcomes. I like to use the phrase, "Let's make heroes out of IT" because they can be a much more critical player than they think they can be. Yeah, IT basically is not even around anymore. It's part of the organization. And then you have data science and data engineering coming in. So it's, you know, IT is not a department anymore, it's the company >> Exactly right. >> If you're kind of going down that road, yeah. >> Yeah. Alright, so final question. What's the biggest change you've seen and observed in your current year and a half? You know, we're coming out of COVID, knowing what was before, what sea change, what inflection point are we in now? How would you describe this current market? 'Cause again, we're kind of in a unique market. You know, you got crypto around the corner, people getting attracted to that, little bubbly obviously, reality of cloud and 2.0 or super cloud emerging. On premise is not going away. Edge exploding on the industrial side, especially with machine learning coming along. So this operating model is clearly in sight. What's the biggest observation you've noticed. >> I think it's the sense of urgency over the last couple of years in that most customers I talked to are no longer relaxed about the timing of delivering cloud capabilities to their organizations. Most customers are on sort of a transformation journey of their own and digital transformation and cloud transformation are absolutely fundamental to that. >> One more real quick follow up question if you don't mind, 'cause I appreciate your time. One of the things that's come up a lot in our conversations is the role of the ecosystem. Not only as a part of the business model but also validation of the enablement that cloud offers companies. You have an enabling platform, your ecosystem is well known. And so your customers are starting to develop ecosystems. So if the cloud model kind of trickles like downstream, ecosystem is kind of a proof of something. >> James: Mm hmm. >> What's your view of all this ecosystem discussion as we transform this next generation? >> Yeah, I think it touches on a couple of things. So obviously there is a technology ecosystem, which is evolving very rapidly in support of cloud and cloud transformation. But what's interesting, I think is the business ecosystem that's evolving around it. We're seeing our customers evolve their own businesses to assume that those cloud capabilities will be available to them. And if the cloud capabilities are not available to them in a timely fashion, then the ecosystem starts to have a domino effect. So the ecosystems are interdependent between business, and technology, and skills, and talent. And I think that's a great to be >> James Forrester, they're going to shut us down. The speakers are on, they're going to pull the plug. Thanks for being our last interview here in New York City and bringing us home. Really appreciate you taking the time to come on theCube. >> John, thanks so much. Great to be here, really enjoyed it. Okay. We are wrapping it up here in New York City. I'm John Ford with theCube, great day. For Lisa Martin, Dave Vellante, and the entire crew of theCube here on the ground. Live in person events are back. theCube hybrid, get online, check out our coverage there. The SiliconANGLE and thecube.net. I'm John Furrier signing off from New York City. See you next time. (light music)

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is Breaking Analysis with Dave Vellante. >> After a two-year epic run in tech, 2022 has been an epically bad year. Through yesterday, The NASDAQ composite is down 30%. The S$P 500 is off 21%. And the Dow Jones Industrial average 16% down. And the poor holders at Bitcoin have had to endure a nearly 60% decline year to date. But judging by the attendance and enthusiasm, in major in-person tech events this spring. You'd never know that tech was in the tank. Moreover, walking around the streets of Las Vegas, where most tech conferences are held these days. One can't help but notice that the good folks of Main Street, don't seem the least bit concerned that the economy is headed for a recession. Hello, and welcome to this weeks Wiki Bond Cube Insights powered by ETR. In this Breaking Analysis we'll share our main takeaways from the first half of 2022. And talk about the outlook for tech going forward, and why despite some pretty concerning headwinds we remain sanguine about tech generally, but especially enterprise tech. Look, here's the bumper sticker on why many folks are really bearish at the moment. Of course, inflation is high, other than last year, the previous inflation high this century was in July of 2008, it was 5.6%. Inflation has proven to be very, very hard to tame. You got gas at $7 dollars a gallon. Energy prices they're not going to suddenly drop. Interest rates are climbing, which will eventually damage housing. Going to have that ripple effect, no doubt. We're seeing layoffs at companies like Tesla and the crypto names are also trimming staff. Workers, however are still in short supply. So wages are going up. Companies in retail are really struggling with the right inventory, and they can't even accurately guide on their earnings. We've seen a version of this movie before. Now, as it pertains to tech, Crawford Del Prete, who's the CEO of IDC explained this on theCUBE this very week. And I thought he did a really good job. He said the following, >> Matt, you have a great statistic that 80% of companies used COVID as their point to pivot into digital transformation. And to invest in a different way. And so what we saw now is that tech is now where I think companies need to focus. They need to invest in tech. They need to make people more productive with tech and it played out in the numbers. Now so this year what's fascinating is we're looking at two vastly different markets. We got gasoline at $7 a gallon. We've got that affecting food prices. Interesting fun fact recently it now costs over $1,000 to fill an 18 wheeler. All right, based on, I mean, this just kind of can't continue. So you think about it. >> Don't put the boat in the water. >> Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good luck if ya, yeah exactly. So a family has kind of this bag of money, and that bag of money goes up by maybe three, 4% every year, depending upon earnings. So that is sort of sloshing around. So if food and fuel and rent is taking up more, gadgets and consumer tech are not, you're going to use that iPhone a little longer. You're going to use that Android phone a little longer. You're going to use that TV a little longer. So consumer tech is getting crushed, really it's very, very, and you saw it immediately in ad spending. You've seen it in Meta, you've seen it in Facebook. Consumer tech is doing very, very, it is tough. Enterprise tech, we haven't been in the office for two and a half years. We haven't upgraded whether that be campus wifi, whether that be servers, whether that be commercial PCs as much as we would have. So enterprise tech, we're seeing double digit order rates. We're seeing strong, strong demand. We have combined that with a component shortage, and you're seeing some enterprise companies with a quarter of backlog, I mean that's really unheard of. >> And higher prices, which also profit. >> And therefore that drives up the prices. >> And this is a theme that we've heard this year at major tech events, they've really come roaring back. Last year, theCUBE had a huge presence at AWS Reinvent. The first Reinvent since 2019, it was really well attended. Now this was before the effects of the omicron variant, before they were really well understood. And in the first quarter of 2022, things were pretty quiet as far as tech events go But theCUBE'a been really busy this spring and early into the summer. We did 12 physical events as we're showing here in the slide. Coupa, did Women in Data Science at Stanford, Coupa Inspire was in Las Vegas. Now these are both smaller events, but they were well attended and beat expectations. San Francisco Summit, the AWS San Francisco Summit was a bit off, frankly 'cause of the COVID concerns. They were on the rise, then we hit Dell Tech World which was packed, it had probably around 7,000 attendees. Now Dockercon was virtual, but we decided to include it here because it was a huge global event with watch parties and many, many tens of thousands of people attending. Now the Red Hat Summit was really interesting. The choice that Red Hat made this year. It was purposefully scaled down and turned into a smaller VIP event in Boston at the Western, a couple thousand people only. It was very intimate with a much larger virtual presence. VeeamON was very well attended, not as large as previous VeeamON events, but again beat expectations. KubeCon and Cloud Native Con was really successful in Spain, Valencia, Spain. PagerDuty Summit was again a smaller intimate event in San Francisco. And then MongoDB World was at the new Javits Center and really well attended over the three day period. There were lots of developers there, lots of business people, lots of ecosystem partners. And then the Snowflake summit in Las Vegas, it was the most vibrant from the standpoint of the ecosystem with nearly 10,000 attendees. And I'll come back to that in a moment. Amazon re:Mars is the Amazon AI robotic event, it's smaller but very, very cool, a lot of innovation. And just last week we were at HPE Discover. They had around 8,000 people attending which was really good. Now I've been to over a dozen HPE or HPE Discover events, within Europe and the United States over the past decade. And this was by far the most vibrant, lot of action. HPE had a little spring in its step because the company's much more focused now but people was really well attended and people were excited to be there, not only to be back at physical events, but also to hear about some of the new innovations that are coming and HPE has a long way to go in terms of building out that ecosystem, but it's starting to form. So we saw that last week. So tech events are back, but they are smaller. And of course now a virtual overlay, they're hybrid. And just to give you some context, theCUBE did, as I said 12 physical events in the first half of 2022. Just to compare that in 2019, through June of that year we had done 35 physical events. Yeah, 35. And what's perhaps more interesting is we had our largest first half ever in our 12 year history because we're doing so much hybrid and virtual to compliment the physical. So that's the new format is CUBE plus digital or sometimes just digital but that's really what's happening in our business. So I think it's a reflection of what's happening in the broader tech community. So everyone's still trying to figure that out but it's clear that events are back and there's no replacing face to face. Or as I like to say, belly to belly, because deals are done at physical events. All these events we've been to, the sales people are so excited. They're saying we're closing business. Pipelines coming out of these events are much stronger, than they are out of the virtual events but the post virtual event continues to deliver that long tail effect. So that's not going to go away. The bottom line is hybrid is the new model. Okay let's look at some of the big themes that we've taken away from the first half of 2022. Now of course, this is all happening under the umbrella of digital transformation. I'm not going to talk about that too much, you've had plenty of DX Kool-Aid injected into your veins over the last 27 months. But one of the first observations I'll share is that the so-called big data ecosystem that was forming during the hoop and around, the hadoop infrastructure days and years. then remember it dispersed, right when the cloud came in and kind of you know, not wiped out but definitely dampened the hadoop enthusiasm for on-prem, the ecosystem dispersed, but now it's reforming. There are large pockets that are obviously seen in the various clouds. And we definitely see a ecosystem forming around MongoDB and the open source community gathering in the data bricks ecosystem. But the most notable momentum is within the Snowflake ecosystem. Snowflake is moving fast to win the day in the data ecosystem. They're providing a single platform that's bringing different data types together. Live data from systems of record, systems of engagement together with so-called systems of insight. These are converging and while others notably, Oracle are architecting for this new reality, Snowflake is leading with the ecosystem momentum and a new stack is emerging that comprises cloud infrastructure at the bottom layer. Data PaaS layer for app dev and is enabling an ecosystem of partners to build data products and data services that can be monetized. That's the key, that's the top of the stack. So let's dig into that further in a moment but you're seeing machine intelligence and data being driven into applications and the data and application stacks they're coming together to support the acceleration of physical into digital. It's happening right before our eyes in every industry. We're also seeing the evolution of cloud. It started with the SaaS-ification of the enterprise where organizations realized that they didn't have to run their own software on-prem and it made sense to move to SaaS for CRM or HR, certainly email and collaboration and certain parts of ERP and early IS was really about getting out of the data center infrastructure management business called that cloud 1.0, and then 2.0 was really about changing the operating model. And now we're seeing that operating model spill into on-prem workloads finally. We're talking about here about initiatives like HPE's Green Lake, which we heard a lot about last week at Discover and Dell's Apex, which we heard about in May, in Las Vegas. John Furrier had a really interesting observation that basically this is HPE's and Dell's version of outposts. And I found that interesting because outpost was kind of a wake up call in 2018 and a shot across the bow at the legacy enterprise infrastructure players. And they initially responded with these flexible financial schemes, but finally we're seeing real platforms emerge. Again, we saw this at Discover and at Dell Tech World, early implementations of the cloud operating model on-prem. I mean, honestly, you're seeing things like consoles and billing, similar to AWS circa 2014, but players like Dell and HPE they have a distinct advantage with respect to their customer bases, their service organizations, their very large portfolios, especially in the case of Dell and the fact that they have more mature stacks and knowhow to run mission critical enterprise applications on-prem. So John's comment was quite interesting that these firms are basically building their own version of outposts. Outposts obviously came into their wheelhouse and now they've finally responded. And this is setting up cloud 3.0 or Supercloud, as we like to call it, an abstraction layer, that sits above the clouds that serves as a unifying experience across a continuum of on-prem across clouds, whether it's AWS, Azure, or Google. And out to both the near and far edge, near edge being a Lowes or a Home Depot, but far edge could be space. And that edge again is fragmented. You've got the examples like the retail stores at the near edge. Outer space maybe is the far edge and IOT devices is perhaps the tiny edge. No one really knows how the tiny edge is going to play out but it's pretty clear that it's not going to comprise traditional X86 systems with a cool name tossed out to the edge. Rather, it's likely going to require a new low cost, low power, high performance architecture, most likely RM based that will enable things like realtime AI inferencing at that edge. Now we've talked about this a lot on Breaking Analysis, so I'm not going to double click on it. But suffice to say that it's very possible that new innovations are going to emerge from the tiny edge that could really disrupt the enterprise in terms of price performance. Okay, two other quick observations. One is that data protection is becoming a much closer cohort to the security stack where data immutability and air gaps and fast recovery are increasingly becoming a fundamental component of the security strategy to combat ransomware and recover from other potential hacks or disasters. And I got to say from our observation, Veeam is leading the pack here. It's now claiming the number one revenue spot in a statistical dead heat with the Dell's data protection business. That's according to Veeam, according to IDC. And so that space continues to be of interest. And finally, Broadcom's acquisition of Dell. It's going to have ripple effects throughout the enterprise technology business. And there of course, there are a lot of questions that remain, but the one other thing that John Furrier and I were discussing last night John looked at me and said, "Dave imagine if VMware runs better on Broadcom components and OEMs that use Broadcom run VMware better, maybe Broadcom doesn't even have to raise prices on on VMware licenses. Maybe they'll just raise prices on the OEMs and let them raise prices to the end customer." Interesting thought, I think because Broadcom is so P&L focused that it's probably not going to be the prevailing model but we'll see what happens to some of the strategic projects rather like Monterey and Capitola and Thunder. We've talked a lot about project Monterey, the others we'll see if they can make the cut. That's one of the big concerns because it's how OEMs like the ones that are building their versions of outposts are going to compete with the cloud vendors, namely AWS in the future. I want to come back to the comment on the data stack for a moment that we were talking about earlier, we talked about how the big data ecosystem that was once coalescing around hadoop dispersed. Well, the data value chain is reforming and we think it looks something like this picture, where cloud infrastructure lives at the bottom. We've said many times the cloud is expanding and evolving. And if companies like Dell and HPE can truly build a super cloud infrastructure experience then they will be in a position to capture more of the data value. If not, then it's going to go to the cloud players. And there's a live data layer that is increasingly being converged into platforms that not only simplify the movement in ELTing of data but also allow organizations to compress the time to value. Now there's a layer above that, we sometimes call it the super PaaS layer if you will, that must comprise open source tooling, partners are going to write applications and leverage platform APIs and build data products and services that can be monetized at the top of the stack. So when you observe the battle for the data future it's unlikely that any one company is going to be able to do this all on their own, which is why I often joke that the 2020s version of a sweaty Steve Bomber running around the stage, screaming, developers, developers developers, and getting the whole audience into it is now about ecosystem ecosystem ecosystem. Because when you need to fill gaps and accelerate features and provide optionality a list of capabilities on the left hand side of this chart, that's going to come from a variety of different companies and places, we're talking about catalogs and AI tools and data science capabilities, data quality, governance tools and it should be of no surprise to followers of Breaking Analysis that on the right hand side of this chart we're including the four principles of data mesh, which of course were popularized by Zhamak Dehghani. So decentralized data ownership, data as products, self-serve platform and automated or computational governance. Now whether this vision becomes a reality via a proprietary platform like Snowflake or somehow is replicated by an open source remains to be seen but history generally shows that a defacto standard for more complex problems like this is often going to emerge prior to an open source alternative. And that would be where I would place my bets. Although even that proprietary platform has to include open source optionality. But it's not a winner take all market. It's plenty of room for multiple players and ecosystem innovators, but winner will definitely take more in my opinion. Okay, let's close with some ETR data that looks at some of those major platform plays who talk a lot about digital transformation and world changing impactful missions. And they have the resources really to compete. This is an XY graphic. It's a view that we often show, it's got net score on the vertical access. That's a measure of spending momentum, and overlap or presence in the ETR survey. That red, that's the horizontal access. The red dotted line at 40% indicates that the platform is among the highest in terms of spending velocity. Which is why I always point out how impressive that makes AWS and Azure because not only are they large on the horizontal axis, the spending momentum on those two platforms rivals even that of Snowflake which continues to lead all on the vertical access. Now, while Google has momentum, given its goals and resources, it's well behind the two leaders. We've added Service Now and Salesforce, two platform names that have become the next great software companies. Joining likes of Oracle, which we show here and SAP not shown along with IBM, you can see them on this chart. We've also plotted MongoDB, which we think has real momentum as a company generally but also with Atlas, it's managed cloud database as a service specifically and Red Hat with trying to become the standard for app dev in Kubernetes environments, which is the hottest trend right now in application development and application modernization. Everybody's doing something with Kubernetes and of course, Red Hat with OpenShift wants to make that a better experience than do it yourself. The DYI brings a lot more complexity. And finally, we've got HPE and Dell both of which we've talked about pretty extensively here and VMware and Cisco. Now Cisco is executing on its portfolio strategy. It's got a lot of diverse components to its company. And it's coming at the cloud of course from a networking and security perspective. And that's their position of strength. And VMware is a staple of the enterprise. Yes, there's some uncertainty with regards to the Broadcom acquisition, but one thing is clear vSphere isn't going anywhere. It's entrenched and will continue to run lots of IT for years to come because it's the best platform on the planet. Now, of course, these are just some of the players in the mix. We expect that numerous non-traditional technology companies this is important to emerge as new cloud players. We've put a lot of emphasis on the data ecosystem because to us that's really going to be the main spring of digital, i.e., a digital company is a data company and that means an ecosystem of data partners that can advance outcomes like better healthcare, faster drug discovery, less fraud, cleaner energy, autonomous vehicles that are safer, smarter, more efficient grids and factories, better government and virtually endless litany of societal improvements that can be addressed. And these companies will be building innovations on top of cloud platforms creating their own super clouds, if you will. And they'll come from non-traditional places, industries, finance that take their data, their software, their tooling bring them to their customers and run them on various clouds. Okay, that's it for today. Thanks to Alex Myerson, who is on production and does the podcast for Breaking Analysis, Kristin Martin and Cheryl Knight, they help get the word out. And Rob Hoofe is our editor and chief over at Silicon Angle who helps edit our posts. Remember all these episodes are available as podcasts wherever you listen. All you got to do is search Breaking Analysis podcast. I publish each week on wikibon.com and siliconangle.com. You can email me directly at david.vellante@siliconangle.com or DM me at dvellante, or comment on my LinkedIn posts. And please do check out etr.ai for the best survey data in the enterprise tech business. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE's Insights powered by ETR. Thanks for watching be well. And we'll see you next time on Breaking Analysis. (upbeat music)