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 music) >> Hello, and welcome to this CUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, here in Palo Alto, California. It's a hybrid world, we're still doing remote in news. Of course, events are coming back in person, but more importantly conversations continue. We've got two great guests here, John Siegal, SVP ISG Marketing at Dell Technologies, and Dave McGraw, office of the CTO at VMware. Gentlemen, great to see you moving forward. Dell Technologies and VMware great partnership. Thanks for coming on. >> Great to be back. >> Yeah, hi, John, thanks for having us. >> You know, the world's coming back to kind of real life, Omnicon virus is out there, but people say it's not going to be as bad as we think, but it looks like events are happening. But more importantly, the cloud native, cloud operations is definitely forcing lots of great new things happening, new innovations on-premises and at the Edge. A lot of new things happening in Dell and VMware, both have been working together for a long time now. VMware a separate company, we'll get to that in a second, but let's get to the partnership. What's new, what's changed with the relationship? >> Yeah, so I mean, just to kick that off and certainly Dave can chime in, but I think in a word, you know, John, nothing changes in terms of my customer's perspective. I mean, in many ways our joint relationship has never been stronger. We've put a ton of investment in both joint engineering innovation, Joint Go To Market over the last several years. And we're really been making what was our vision a couple of years ago a reality, and we only expect that to continue. And I think much of the reason we expect that to continue is because we have a shared vision of this distributed multi-cloud, you know, cloud native, modern app environment that customers want to drive. >> Yeah, and John, I would add that we've been building platforms together for the last five years, a great example is VxRail. You know, it's a market-leading technology that we've co-engineered together. And now it's a platform that we're actually building out use cases on top of whether it's multi-cloud solutions, whether it's private and hybrid cloud or including Tansu for developer environments. You know, we're using the investments we made and then we're layering in and building more value into those investments together. And we put agreements in place by the way that, you know, multi-year agreements around commercial arrangements and partnering together as well as our technology collaboration together. So we feel really confident about the future and that's what we're communicating to our customer base. >> Yeah, indeed just go ahead sorry, John. >> No, good. >> I was going to say just to build on that, as he said, I really, when I say not much changes, I mean, VMware has always been an open ecosystem partner, right? With its OEM vendors out there. And I think the difference here is Dell has made a strategic choice and a decision to make a significant investment in joint innovation, joint engineering, joint testing for VMware environments. And so I think a lot of this comes down to the commitment and focus that we've already made. You mentioned VxRail, which is a fantastic example where we at Dell, we've invested our own IP. You know, HCI systems software, that's sort of the secret ingredient that the secret sauce that delivers that single click, you know, automated lifecycle management experience. And we're investing lots of dollars in test labs just to ensure that customers always have that, you know, that seamless experience. >> You know, one of the benefits of doing theCUBE for 11 years now, it's just been that long, both EMC World and Dell World back in the day was our first events we went to. We've watched you guys together over the years. One of the things that strikes to be consistently the same is this focus of end to end, but also modularity, but also interoperability and kind of componentizing kind of the solution, not to oversimplify it, but this is kind of the big discussion right now as cloud scale, horizontal scale is with cloud resources are being put into the development stream where modern applications now are clear using only cloud native operations. That doesn't mean it's just cloud. I mean, it's cloud everywhere, but it's distributed computing. So this is kind of the original vision if you go back even five years or more. You guys have been working on this. This is kind of an important inflection point because now it's well known that the modern application is going to have to be programmable under the hood. Meaning everything's going to be scaling and rise of superclouds or new Edge technologies, which is coming fast. This is the new normal. This is not something that we were talking about mainstream five years ago, but you guys have been working on this kind of simplicity solutions-based approach. What's your reaction? >> That's right, John, I'll tell you, you might remember at VMworld a couple of years ago we announced Project Monterey. And now this was really a redefining architecture for not only data center, core data centers, but also for cloud and Edge environments. And so it's leveraging technology, you know, data processing units also known as smart NICs. You know, we're essentially redefining what that infrastructure looks like, making it more efficient, more performance, depending on the use case. So we've been partnering very closely with Dell to develop that technology and it's going to really transform what you see at the Edge and what you also see in core data centers going forward. >> Yeah, and there's so many of those. I mean, I think it seems Monterey is a great example of one that we continue to invest in. I think there's also NBME over TCP is another, if you will key ingredient to how customer is going to essentially get the performance they need out of the infrastructure going forward. And so we were proud to be a partner there, at most recent VMware where we announced, you know, the ability to essentially automate the integration of MBME over TCP with Dell EMC system integrated with vSphere. And that's a great example as well, right? I think there's countless. >> John: Yeah. >> And I'll tell you, we are so excited to see what Dell has done in the storage business with PowerStore X, where they've integrated vSphere ESXi into a storage array. And, you know, that creates all kinds of opportunities going forward for better integration and really for plug and play of, you know, the storage technology into cloud infrastructure. >> What's interesting about what you guys talking about is remember the old DevOps moving infrastructure as code. Okay, that became DevSecOps. That's big part of Tansu and security. Now it's all about devs, right? So now devs have all that built in and now the operations are the big conversation because one of the things we pointed out in the theCUBE recently is that, you know, VMware has owned the IT operations world, in our opinion for a long, long time. Dell has owned the enterprise for a very long time in terms of infrastructure in front solutions. The operational efficiency of cloud hybrid is really kind of what's the gateway to multi-cloud. This has been a big part of IT transformation. Can you guys share how you guys were working together to make that flexibility to transform from the old IT to the new IT? And what are some of the things that you're seeing with your customers that can give them a map of how to do this? >> Yeah, so I would say, you know, one area in particular that we're really coming together is around APEX, right? From an as a service perspective. I think what APEX is really doing is really unifying much of what you just described. It's taking as a service, it's taking multi-cloud, it's taking cloud native development if you will, and modern app development. And we together partner to ensure that's a consistent experience for customers. And we have a number of new APEX cloud services that keep that in mind and that are built on joint innovations, like frankly, VxRail at the bottom of that as they've said earlier. So for customers are looking to get, you know, item managing infrastructure altogether, which we, you know, we're seeing more and more now, we recently announced the APEX Cloud Services With VMware Cloud you know, which is again, a joint solution that'll be available soon. And it's one that is managed by Dell, but, you know, it gives customers that simplicity and scale of the public cloud, but certainly that control and security and performance, if you will, that they prefer to have in the private club. >> Yeah, and I think because, you know, the APEX Cloud Service is designed with the VMware Cloud, you have a capability that drives consistency and portability of workloads for customers. So they don't have to re-skill and retrain to be able to manage the environment. They also are not locked in to any particular solution. They have this ability to move workloads depending on what their needs are; economically, performance, you know, logistics requirements, and they can react accordingly as they digitize their business going forward. >> It's interesting, you guys are talking about this demand in a way, addressing this demand for as a service, which is, you know, it can be one cloud or multiple clouds, but it's really more of an abstraction layer of what you deploy to essentially create that connective tissue between what's existing, what's new and how to make it all work together to again, satisfy the developer 'cause the new apps are coming, right? They want more data is coming into them. So this has been, is this the as a service focus, is that what's happening? >> Yes, absolutely, yeah. The, as a service focus is, you know, at the end of the day is how are we going to really simplify this. We've been on this journey now for at least a year and much more to go. And VMware has been a key partner here, you know, on that journey. So a number of cloud services. We've had APEX Hybrid Cloud, APEX Private Cloud, you know, out there for some time. In fact, that's where we're getting a lot of the traction right now, and this new offering that's going to come out soon that we just mentioned with VMware cloud is just going to build on that. >> And VMware is a super cloud, isn't it Dave? Because you guys would be considered by our new definition of Supercloud because you can sit on Amazon. You also have other clouds too, so your customers can operate on any cloud. >> Our view is that, you know, from a multi-cloud future for customers to be able to be on-premises with a, you know, APEX service, to be able to be operating in a Colo, to be able to operate in one of many different hyperscalers, you know, providing that consistency and flexibility is going to be key. And I think also you mentioned Tansu earlier, John. You know, being able to have the customer have choice around whether they're operating with VMs and containers is really key as well. So, you know, what Dell has done with APEX is they set up again, another platform that we can just provide our SASE offerings to very simply and easily and deliver that value to customers in a consistent fashion going forward here. >> You know, I just love the term Supercloud. Actually, I called it subclass, but Dave Vellante called them Superclouds. But the idea is that you can have all the super power in the cloud capabilities, but it's also distributed clouds, right? Where you have Edge, you've got the Core and the notion of a cloud isn't like one place in which there's distributed computing. This is what the world now realizes. Again, we've talked about in theCUBE many times. So let's discuss this whole Core to Edge dynamic because if everything's cloudified, if you will, or cloud operations, you've got devs and ops kind of working together with security, all that good stuff. Now you have almost a seamless environment where code can run anywhere, data should traverse anywhere, but the idea of an Edge changes dramatically and certainly with 5G. So can you guys tie that Edge computing story together how Dell and VMware are addressing this massive growth at the Edge? >> Yeah, I would say, you know, first and foremost, we are seeing a major shift. As you mentioned today, the data being generated at the Edge it's, I think Michael Dell has actually gone on record talking about the next frontier, right? So it's especially happening because we're seeing all these smart monitoring capabilities, IOT, right? At almost any end point now from retail, traffic lights, manufacturing floors, you name it. I think anywhere where data is being acted upon to generate critical insights, right? That's considered an Edge now and we're expecting to see, as ITC has already gone out there on record as saying 50% of the new infrastructure out there will be deployed at the Edge in the next couple of years, so. And it's a different world, right? I mean, I think in terms of what's needed and what the challenges are, there's certainly a lack of specialized technical resources, typically at the Edge, there's typically a scaling issue. How do you manage all those distributed endpoints and do so successfully? And how do you ensure you lay any concerns around security as well? So, you know, once again, we've had a very collaborative approach when it comes to working on challenges like Edge, and, you know, we, again, common theme here, but the VxRail, which is a leading, you know, joint ACI off in the market is the foundation of many of our Edge offerings out there in the market today. The new satellite nodes that we just announced just a few months ago, extends VxRail's, you know, value proposition to the Edge, using a single node deployment. And it's really perfect for customers that don't have that local technical resource expertise or specialized resources. And it still has cyber resilience built right in. >> And John, just to follow up on that real quick, before Dave chimes in. On the Edge, compute has been a huge issue. And I've talked with you guys about this too. You guys have the compute, you have the integrated systems now, any update there on what VxRail is doing different or other Edge power (John laughs) PowerEdge sounds familiar? We need some more power at the Edge. So what's new there? >> Well, you know, first of all, we had new PowerEdge platforms of course, come out in this past year, and, you know, there's, we're building on that. I mean, the latest VxRail is of course, leveraged that power of PowerEdge. Yeah, lots of a good naming arrogance, right? PowerEdge. >> John: I love that. And, but, you know, it's, you know, it's at the heart of much of what we're doing. We're taking a lot of our capabilities that have been IP, like streaming data platform, which enables streaming, video and real-time analytics and running that on a VxRail or PowerEdge platform. You know, we're doing the same thing, you know, with, in the manufacturing side. We're working with partners that have IOT Edge platforms, you know, and running those on VxRail and PowerEdge. So we are taking very much the idea here that, yes, you're right with our rich resources of infrastructure, both with PowerEdge and VxRail, you know, building on that. But working with partners like VMware and others to collapse an integrated solution for the Edge. And so we're seeing really good uptake so far. >> Dave, what's your take on the Dell Edge with VMware, because automation is big theme, not moving data across an internet that's obviously huge. And you got to have that operational stability there. >> Absolutely, and, you know, to your point, being able to do the processing at the Edge and move results around versus moving massive amounts of data around is really key to the future going forward. And, you know, we've taken an approach with Dell where we're working with customers, we're having detailed conversations, really using a "Tiger Team Approach" around the use cases; manufacturing and retail being two of the real key focuses, healthcare another one where we're understanding customer requirements, it's both today and where they want to go. And, you know, so it's about distributed computing, certainly at the Edge. Dell is coming out with some great new platforms that we're integrating our software with. At the same time, we have technology in STWIN and SASE that become part of that solution as well, with VeloCloud. And we're developing a global network of points of presence that really will help support distributed application environments and Edge-native Application environments working with Dell going forward. >> That's great stuff. The next ending question is what's next. I want to just tee that up by bringing up what you kind of made me think of there, Dave, and this is key supply chain on both hardware and software talking about security. So when you say those things you're talking about in terms of functionality, the question is security, right? Both hardware and software supply chain with open source, with automation. I mean, this is a big discussion. What do you guys react to that about what's next.. >> Yeah, I can tell you from a central engineering perspective, you know, we're looking at security compliance and privacy every day, we're working closely with Dell. In fact, we're in the middle of meetings today in this area. And, you know, I look at a few key areas of investment that we're making collectively together. One is in the area of end to end encryption of data. For virtualized environments or containerized environments, being able to have end-to-end encryption and manage a very efficient way, the keys and maintain the data compression and deduplication capabilities for customers, you know, efficiency and cost purposes while being very secure. The second area we're working closely on is in Zero Trust. You know, being able to develop Zero Trust infrastructure across Edge, to Core, to Colo, to Cloud and making sure that, you know, we have reference designs available to customers with procedures, policies, best practices, to be able to drive Zero Trust environments. >> John what you're (indistinct) is huge and you guys have, literally could be the keys to the kingdom pun intended. You guys are doing a lot of great security at the Edge too, whether the traffic stays with the Edge or goes across the network. >> That's all right, I'm as curious, like you said, it's been a joint focus and initiative across much of our portfolio for quite a while now. And I think, you know, you asked what's next and I think, you know, sky's the limit right now. I mean, we've got the shared vision, right? I think at the end of the day, you know, we've shared a number of joint initiatives that are ongoing right now with Project Monterrey. Obviously our integration with Tansu and a number of solutions we have there, work around APEX, et cetera. I think we have complimentary capabilities. You mentioned, you know, areas like supply chain, areas like security, you know, and I think these are all things that we both do well together. And the thing I will say that I think is probably the most key to us sustaining this great execution together is our collaborative cultures. I think, you know, there's something to be said for what we built, you know, all these last several years, you know, around these collaborative cultures, working together on joint roadmaps and focusing on really end of the day solving our customer's biggest challenges, whatever those may be, you know? And so at the end of the day behind us, we have the greatest supply chains, you know, services, support, and innovation engines. But I think, you know, I think that the passion, our groups working together I think is going to be key to us going forward. >> Well, great stuff moving forward together with Dell Technologies and VMware. David, thanks for coming on. John, great to see you. Thanks for sharing insight. Great CUBE conversation talking encryption, we've spoken about Edge and supply chain as well. Great stuff, great conversation. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you >> Thank you so much, John. >> Okay, this is theCUBE conversation. I'm John Furrier, with theCUBE. You're watching CUBE coverage. Thank you so much for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's, ongoing coverage of VMworld 2021. My name is Dave Volante. You know, I've been following VMware since the early days. And what is the one of, one of the most interesting stories in the history of enterprise tech? One of the hallmarks of VMware over the course of its long history has been a strong number two leader, an individual who looked after operations or advanced corporate development and enhanced, if you will, expanded the eyes, the ears, the heart, and the mind of the CEO. You know, at one point last decade, VMware actually had four co presidents. Some of the most accomplished individuals in Silicon valley have held this role. And it's our pleasure to welcome in VMware's newest president, Sumit Dhawan. Sumit welcome back to the cube, good to see you. >> Thank you, Dave. Great to be here. >> Okay, so you've been in this role for just over a hundred days after a 16 month stint as chief customer officer. So that's certainly a nice dovetail into your new role as president, but give us an overview of your new role here at VMware. What are your priorities? What are the key areas of focus? You know, SAS transformation, you got a lot going on, share with us. >> Yeah. You know, I think the main focus for me is to make sure our company's priorities are aligned with our customers. And in the first hundred days, my first objective was to spend as much time as possible with customers because it's, it's a source of learning for us. It's, it's clear speaking with customers, what their challenges are and what we ought to be doing to assist them in addressing those challenges. So I, really my responsibility, obviously I've got all the operations part of the business, which enable our customers to be successful, starting from, you know, ensuring that we chart the right path for them in success, in the sales organization, all the way to making sure that they are successful with the adoption of our solutions, with our services and support organizations. So, so spending time with the customers has been critical. And Dave, what I've learned is that customers are looking for VMware, just like they have in the past, be this trusted foundation for all of their innovation in the prior era pre cloud era to their data center and mobility technologies take that forward into the multicloud era, which is where now is where they're building new applications, taking their existing applications to the power of the cloud and across multiple clouds. And our objective is to make sure we keep providing that trusted foundation for them, for the new multi-cloud era. And I'm excited about it. >> Yeah, me too. Let's do it. We're going to dig into that a little bit. So you're obviously spending time getting close to the customers, of course, remotely, for the most part, some of those big themes you've mentioned, but I'd like to sort of peel the onion on that. Maybe some of the challenges that your customers are facing in terms of actually bringing forth that multi-cloud vision and specifically what's your approach to solving those challenges. >> Yeah. So, you know, as we all know, customers start out with this adopt started out adoption of the cloud. They started building some applications on the cloud. A lot of times these were the applications that were built, which were customer facing. And there was this cloud first thinking at that point of time. But soon the customers have realized and now customers have realized that power of building new innovation doesn't just lie in one cloud because there are certain capabilities like AI and ML that maybe they get from a cloud like Google. There are certain capabilities that may be storage and compute where maybe they prefer AWS productivity and identity maybe coming from Microsoft cloud. So the power comes in by adopting all of these services across cloud. It has lots of benefits, innovation at the fastest possible speed for our customers. Secondly, it helps customers not necessarily risk locking in and helps manage them, manage their costs. But in this multicloud world, it's a fairly complicated, and it can get very complex. Think about all the security networking developer experience control. Now this is where our customers need freedom and yet control to be able to have this multicloud environment managed and enabled for developer experience as best as possible. That's the problem we are committed to solving, and our solution and we call that across cloud services. >> I want to stay on this for a minute because I've been talking about multi-cloud this abstraction layer. This is really your opportunity on the cube last year with John farrier. You said the following quote multicloud doesn't mean you're running two different architectures on two different clouds. That's not multicloud. Multicloud means running a singular architecture on multiple clouds. Now Sumit, you're a technologist at the core. What you described is not trivial, it's a huge technical challenge. Can you talk about what VMware has to do to make that single architecture a reality? >> That's exactly the challenge team because you can adopt multiple clouds, but if you're doing so with different architectures, you're not getting the benefits of the velocity of building new applications fast, security is done in a unified fashion operations, at scale. To me, I would call that not a smart path to multi multiple clouds. The smart path to multiple cloud would be through a unified experience for developers, a control layer, which helps you orchestrate your applications in a unified fashion for your operators and security done in an, in a unified or a consistent fashion so that you know that you have the right governance. That's what I consider the smart path to multicloud. Doing any other way would actually be not fruitful. And that's what customers have had to face with without a solution like VMs. So we provide, that's what I call the smart path to multicloud. >> All right. So don't hate me for this, but I want to, I want to push on this and get your point of view on record if I can, because it's an important topic and you've intimated that choosing a single cloud provider, it's, it's problematic for customers, it's it, it limits the customers flexibility and choice. And I want to unpack that a bit and if I'm mischaracterizing your view, please correct me, but, but I want to understand why this is limiting. For example, if I go to AWS, I got access to primitives and API APIs. I got a range of compute storage, networking options, dozens of databases, open source, I get VMware cloud and AWS. So explain why this is a constraint for a customer. >> Yeah, it's a, it's a constraint for really three major reasons. Number one, different services are available across cloud that provide different capabilities. Sure, AWS provides a very rich set of primitives. So does Azure. So does Google. And in certain cases, when you're dealing with data sovereignty requirements across different countries, so to those clouds. So the, but if you are really looking for the best possible solution for AI and ML that may or may not sit in the cloud that you may have preferred for your compute and storage. If you're looking for identity solutions that integrate really well with the productivity applications that you have, that may not be the same cloud that you may have booked picked for AI and ML. You don't need to make compromises. In fact, developers don't want to make those compromises, but because by making those compromises, you're increasing your cost and lowering their customer experience. That's the power of leveraging innovation across cloud. Secondly, think about now, if you just build all your applications, buy services from one cloud and your entire business gets dependent on it. If there's risk there's cost. And that's why customers are telling us that they have made a decision for multicloud. In fact, we did a recent study Dave, and in the recent study, we found out that 73% of our customers are already running their applications on multi-cloud. If this is no longer a something of a future it's here today, they're just facing these challenges today with multicloud. >> And am I right? That there they're running applications on multiple clouds, but it's your job and your challenge now, to be able to abstract the underlying complexity of those multiple clouds and make it appear as one, I'm assuming that's not fully happening today, maybe that's an understatement, but that is your opportunity and your customer's opportunity, is that a fair statement? >> That's exactly our mission. We are providing our customers that foundation so that they can enable multicloud and drive their own innovation agenda at the pace that they want to. We did that in the past for data center technologies or mobile devices. Remember mobile devices come in different operating systems, different formats and data centers, hardware from servers, storage and network has always come in different flavors. We have abstracted that complexity for our customers in the past to deliver innovation three cloud, we're bringing the same value proposition. Now in the world of multicloud, obviously the applications have changed. They're no longer traditional applications. Now they are more and more cloud native applications. So we have solutions for cloud native enterprise applications that continue to be the heartbeat of more, more, most customers. We have solutions for traditional enterprise applications and the new and emerging edge native applications because of just now people and workforce being anywhere. We have solutions for providing security and providing additional functions for edge native applications. So that's what we are bringing to our customers as a platform that abstracts this complexity of multicloud. >> So much to talk to you about because you're right, the application is, are evolving. It's not just the standard SAP windows, et cetera. There's cloud native applications, there's data intensive applications. But, but I want to ask you, so in order for you to achieve that, you have to be able to exploit those primitives that we were talking about, whether it's AWS or Google Azure, Alibaba, you've got to understand as engineers, how to take advantage of whatever the cloud provider is offering, and then hide that complexity from the customer, and then build that, that layer and to do that it, to accommodate all these new applications. Not only do you have to have traditional, you have to have processor optionality, you got edge, you see arm coming in. If my understanding is, that's a big part of what project Monterrey is all about is offering that optionality around different workloads. Can you, can we dig into that a little bit? >> Yeah. So I think first of all, the people under appreciated or under estimate what it would be required for making sure that the applicant, the complexity of all of these different cloud platforms is, is, you know, abstracted by VMware solution. So customers don't have to think about, you know, what are the-- what is the different storage or server or primitives that are needed on Azure versus AWS? All of that gets hidden from customers in a simplified fashion, so with our solution, okay. So, and yet at the same time, there's no compromise that customers have. They can still leverage all the native primitives and services that the different cloud providers are using seamlessly. So that's very important. Now, in addition, what we are doing is we are continually making sure our platform can run the next generation of applications we are continually innovating to do so. And that's where project Monterey comes in. As customers build new applications, when they want to build those new applications and run emerging services that are highly sort of compute centric or network centric, or are providing rich amount of data. This is where project Monterey comes in. It enables our customers to, A, take all of the traditional applications onto VMware cloud, run it on across any cloud. And then B, when they are trying to expand those capabilities into the applications, the project Monterey enables them to do so by enabling new capabilities being powered in to the VMware cloud foundation. >> Yeah. So essentially you're, you're, you're building what I would look at as a new type of cloud that, that comprises on prem connections to public, to public cloud, across public clouds. And then out to the edge, you've talked a lot about telco, the specialized needs of the telco. Clearly there's different processing requirements. You've talked about 5G where we might not always have connectivity out there. Developers need to be able to write code for that edge. So it's an entirely new world you're essentially building out your own cloud. So you have to build in all that optionality all the tools. And at the same time, if, if just like the big cloud providers, you have to provide your own tooling, but also be open to providing other people's tooling. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, I think you're right. In terms of the tooling part there, what has happened is standards for controlling. All of the infrastructure has, you know, has become Kubernetes. Okay. So we have embraced that in fact, most the talent that has created the best Kubernetes at this point in time, we have it at VMware. Okay. The most contributions that are being made in terms of that standard, the most interesting ones are coming from VMware. So in terms of Kubernetes, we have embraced it. And what we are seeing is a tooling needs to be done in a way so that our customers can manage from infrastructure to their platform, all via code, all the standard like Kubernetes. And that's what we have embraced while at the same time, this tooling is done in a fashion so that the entire VM-ware cloud and the entire VMware Tansu platform can be controlled in a fashion that fits into customer's entire environment on how they manage it overall. >> Okay. So let's take that conversation to security. I don't know if you're familiar with the Optiva, it's this mind blowing, eye bleeding chart with all the different security tools in there, and I've been watching the moves that you guys have been making, you know, Carbon Black's an obvious one, what you're doing with end user computing and a number of other applications, creating a security, you know, cloud group within VMware. So that's a good example, but at the same time, customers are using all kinds of different, different toolings based on that chart. So are you saying it's the Kubernetes is the, is the secret their API APIs that allow you to, if a customer wants to use Octa or CrowdStrike or whatever it is, you can, you can incorporate that into the framework, or if they want to go all VMware, they can do that as well. Can you help us understand that? >> Yeah, I think our philosophy is that there are two components that are critical for making a solution, help our customers take the smartest path to multicloud, networking and security. So on security front, the philosophy is quite simple. You know, these days when you're going out and buying a car, you're not getting buying the car and outfitting it with airbags and, you know, AB, ABS, and any other sort of safety features, okay, why do we do that in the world of infrastructure and technology? It should just come as an, as an, even an option or a required component within the infrastructure itself, that's our philosophy. And so coming back to, if, if customers say they want to take an approach to multicloud, they want to make sure their developer experience their DevOps capabilities and their infrastructure management capabilities are there across all types of three applications, I mentioned, you know, the, the, the modern apps, the traditional enterprise apps and edge edge native apps. Our approach is quite simple, networking and security. Firstly is built in, okay, it's integrated in, you're not installing agents, you're not managing security thing on top. You're not putting air bags into the car after the purchase, they come with the purchase, you can choose to activate them or not activate them based on your price sensitivity. Second, we tell, we have, they're consistent once you learn them how to do it for traditional enterprise applications, the same capabilities, the same security workbench, the same detection and response capabilities carry forward to cloud native applications and edge native applications. That's the way we are thinking about for security for in our portfolio. >> It is the strategy summit to sort of be an end to end supplier of security, in other words, when you touch all parts of the stack, I mean, obviously with carbon black could do an end point, but, but things like identity and privilege, access and governance, I mean, there's just so many pieces to the value chain. Ca, will you try to try to be best of breed across that chain? Or do you see yourself picking this picking spots? >> No, Our focus is to pick the areas that we have focused on which is to enable customers to run, build and run and secure those, those applications that I mentioned, you know, the cloud native applications, edge native applications and enterprise applications. And our focus is to, to be able to secure those applications in, A, a consistent fashion and, B, built into the infrastructure, so it's not boarded on. So that's a focus on strategy and we still have great partnerships in the ecosystem for the rest of the portfolio, for the security technology to fit in with the rest of it. We just don't think that for the infrastructure that's running these critical business applications, you need, you should have, you know, a requirement to build these applications, build a security on top of it. And that's sort of our commitment to our customers. >> Got it. That makes sense. I mean, you've got a pretty clear swim lane in your infrastructure space. There might be a little gray area there, but you'll let the ecosystem take care of that if it makes sense. So I guess I would say I look back and if it was, first of all, VMware has had amazing engineering over the years, you're, you're very well known for that. You just, you just mentioned some of the best Kubernetes engineers on the planet. And of course, November is a big milestone for VMware, with the spin, you now will become a completely independent company again. And, and that's a big deal in my mind because I think, I think this is going to be expensive. I mean, to actually do this, these are big investments that you have to make. And I've, I feel like you finally going to get control of your own balance sheet, so you can make these investments as you see fit. So that's got to be an exciting time for you. And because I think you're going to need that free cash flow to really drive this in, in addition to the other things that you're going to do with buybacks and stock options, et cetera. >> I think we had excited about this whole upcoming, you know, spin off from Dell. Dell will continue to be a very important partner of ours. In fact, we have quoted and quantified what we are doing with them on innovation, as well as on sales and distribution perspective together. And I think, you know, to be candid just through that agreements that we have put in place without, I think the partnership could even get stronger because we have 15 statements of work where we have defined new innovation projects with Dell, for example. Okay. But at the same time, like you mentioned, we get a little bit more flexibility to be able to chart our own course, which is critical in the world of multicloud. Okay. We need, we are able to, not, not that we were constrained on, but customers still always asked us about how would you continue to sustain the partnerships with the cloud and hyperscalers? That's no longer a question in customers' eyes once you're independent. And secondly, it does give us flexibility on balance sheet to be able to make investments as needed within the agenda that we have on multicloud without having to, you know, sort of negotiate that. >> Yeah, I think it's an awesome move, of course, because I mean, I've certainly since the, the, the Dell acquisition of EMC, your business has even grown more with those combined companies. So we've seen that, but I, you know, I liken it to the, to the coach who has a kid on the team and the coach is extra hard on the kid, you know, and that's kind of almost the way it had to be in that relationship because your posture with the ecosystem had to be, hey, we're an open ecosystem. And so, and that was sometimes kind of weird and uncomfortable. Now it's clean, it's transparent. So I'm really looking forward to the innovation that you can create with Dell, of course, but with other parts of the ecosystem, which you always have, but I'm hoping the ecosystem now leans in even more. It's always had too, because you've got half a million customers and you've got a, such a huge presence in the market, but, but I think now there's going to be a little more comfort level there. So I'm really excited for that Sumit. >> Great. >> Hey, so this was great conversation. I can't wait to have you back really appreciate your time and insights. >> Well, thank you so much, Dave, from our perspective at VMware, you know, as I started with customers, I'm going to end sort of this thing with customers as well, always great times, great to spend time with customers. And we truly believe we have the best platform to give our customers the smartest path to multicloud. And I know, I know the feedback so far has been great. It's always great spending time with you. Thank you for having me. >> It's our pleasure, and we wish you the best. And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Volante for the cubes, continuous coverage of VM world 2021. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>>mm We're entering the fourth grade era of VM ware Executive management From its beginnings in the late 90s is a Silicon Valley startup. It's five founders quickly built the company and it ended up as one of the greatest acquisitions in the history of enterprise tech when EMC bought VM ware for $625 million as a public company. But still under EMC's governance, paul Maritz was appointed Ceo in 2000 and eight and set the company on a journey to build what he called at the time. The software mainframe meaning the company's platform would run any application at high performance with low overhead and world class recovery. Pat Gelsinger took over the Ceo reins in 2012 and through organic investments and clever m and a set of course for the software defined data center and after some early miscalculations in cloud, realigned the company strategy to successfully partner with hyper scale hours and position the company for the multi cloud future. The hallmarks of VM where over the course of its history have been great engineering that led to great products, loyal customers and a powerful ecosystem. The other telling attribute of VM where is it? CEOs have always had a deep understanding of technology and its latest Ceo is no different. It's our pleasure to welcome raghu Raghuram back to the cube the fourth Ceo of VM ware and yet another Silicon Valley Ceo graduated from the IIttie rgu, great to see you again and congratulations on your new role. >>Thanks. It's great to be here. >>Okay, five months in 1st 100 days what we have focused on that journey to become the Switzerland of multi cloud, tell us about your early experience as ceo >>it's been fantastic. Uh our customers, all our employees, all our partners have been very welcoming and of course I've given me great input. What we've been able to do in the last 100 days is to really crystallize the strategy and focus it around what I'm sure we're gonna be spending a lot of time talking about. And that's about the multi cloud era of computing that most enterprises are going to go through over the next decade. And so that's really what I've been up to and you'll see the results of that in next week's uh we involved and uh where we would be talking about the strategy and some product announcements that go along with the strategy and so it's a very exciting time to be at Vandenberg. >>Yeah, I mean, I referenced it in my intro, it's almost like the light bulb went off when VM ware realized, wow, this cloud build out is just an opportunity for us and that's really what you're doing with the multi cloud as you're building on top of all the infrastructure that the hyper cloud vendors are putting out there. Maybe you can talk about that, that opportunity and what customers are telling you. >>Yeah, it's uh here is how I describe what has happened in the industry. Right, and what will happen in the industry. So, if you look at the the past decade, as cloud became a mainstream thing, most customers pick the cloud, they built their first digital applications into it, the ones that serve their mobile users or end users with digital products and that worked great for them. Then they step back and say, okay, how many modernize everything that we're doing has become a digital company. And when you go from 10, of your portfolio, 100% of your application portfolio being modernized. What has to happen is you got to go from figuring out, okay, how am I gonna put everything in one cloud to what does the application need and how do I put it on the right place? I look at the same time, the industry has also evolved from being uh predominantly supplied by one cloud provider to multiple cloud providers. At the same time, the thanks to companies like IBM where the data center has been transformed into a private cloud. The edges growing up to be its own location for a cloud sovereign clouds are going. So truly what has happened is it's become a multi cloud world. And customers are saying in addition to just being cloud first, I want to be cloud smart. And so this distributed era of computing that we are entering is what we are seeing in the industry. And what the empire is trying to do is to say, look, let's provide customers with the fastest way of getting to this multi cloud era of computing so that they can go fast, they can spend less and most importantly, they can be free, in other words, choose the right application, right cloud for right applications and have control over how they deploy and use their applications and data. That really is a strategy that we are putting in place. This is something that we've been working towards in the last couple of years now. I'm accelerating that and making that the main piece of what we end, where is doing in order to do that, we have a great opportunity to take partner even better with all of our cloud provider partners and that's where the Switzerland of the industry comes in without impending spin, especially, we have great partnership with the cloud players, great partnerships with infrastructure players. We truly can be a neutral partner to the customers as they look at all these choices and make the right choices for their applications. >>So, I want to ask you about this multi cloud when when the early multi cloud narrative came out where I go, I was saying, look, multi cloud is really multi vendor, you you've got workloads and apps running on different, different clouds. And then increasingly, the promise and your promises, we're going to abstract the underlying complexity of those clouds and we're going to give you an experience whether it's on premise, hybrid into a cloud. Across clouds. Eventually out to the edge, it's gonna be a singular, substantially identical, if not identical experience and we're going to manage the whole kit and caboodle. And how where are we in that first of all? Is that the right way to think about it? Where are we in that sort of transition from plugging into any, you know, a cloud? I'm compatible with the cloud to it's a singular sort of VM ware cloud if you will. >>Yeah. So, um, so I wanna clarify something that he said because this tends to be very commonly confused by customers use the word abstraction. And usually when people think of abstraction, they think it hides capabilities of the uh, cloud providers. That's not what we are trying to. In fact, that's the last thing we're trying to do. What we're trying to do is to provide a consistent developer experience regardless of where you want to build your application so that you can use the cloud provider services if that's what you want to use. But the deficit cops toolchain, the runtime environment, which turns out to be Cuban aires and how you control the kubernetes environment. How do you manage and secure and connect all of these things. Those are the places where we are adding the value. Right. And so really the VM ware value proposition is you can build on the cloud of your choice but providing these consistent elements. Number one, you can make better use of us, your scarce developer or operator resources and expertise. Right. And number two, you can move faster and number three can spend less as a result of this. So that's really what we're trying to do, but not. So I just wanted to clarify the word abstraction in terms of their way, we're still, I would say in the early stages, so if you look at what customers are trying to do, they're trying to build these Greenfield applications and there is an entire ecosystem emerging around Campaneris. There is still kubernetes is not a developer platform. The developer experience on top of kubernetes is highly inconsistent. And so those are some of the areas where we are introducing new innovations with our towns, our application platform. And then if you take enterprise applications, what does it take to have enterprise applications running all the time, be entirely secure, etcetera, etcetera. That's where the we ever cloud assets that are traditionally this fear based come into play and we've got this now in all of the clouds but it's still in the early days from uh on Azure and google et cetera. How do you manage and secure those things again? We're in the early days. So that's where we are. I would say, >>yeah, thank you for that clarification, I want to sort of come back to that and just make sure we understand it. So for example, if I'm a developer and I want to take advantage of, let's say graviton uh and build an app on that, that so maybe it's some kind of data intensive app or whatever it is. I can do that. You won't restrict me from doing that at the same time. If I want to use the VM where management experience across all my clouds, I can do that as well. Is that the right way to think about it? >>Yeah, exactly. So the management experience by the way, and this is the other thing that gets missed in the remember dialogue because we've been so phenomenally successful with this fear. There's a misperception that everything we are doing atmosphere today works only on top. So everything we're doing at BM wear works only on top of the sphere. That's not the case. Take management, for example, our management portfolio is modular and independent of these, which means it can manage the Graviton application that you're building, right. It can manage a traditional, these fear based application, it can manage rage application, it can manage VM based applications, can manage computer based applications. Uh so it's truly uh, overall management layer. So that is really what we're trying to do. Same thing with our kubernetes example. Right, So our communities control plane allows you to control these kubernetes clusters. Whether the clusters are utilizing gravity and whether clusters are utilizing these fear based crew binaries environments. >>Okay, that's great. So it's kind of a set up question because my next question relates to project Monterey, Because, you know, I've always said when I write about about these things, when I saw Nitro, I saw Graviton, I saw project monitor, I said uh everybody needs a Nitro Nitro or a graviton because new workloads are coming. It's not just the X 86 can handle everything anymore asap whether it's sequel server, whatever we've got new workloads that are coming ai ml data intensive edge workloads, et cetera. Is that how we should think of? Project Monterrey. Where are you in Project Monterey? Why is it so important? Help people understand that? >>Yeah. Project mantra is super exciting for a couple of different reasons. One is uh in its first iteration and uh we announced project monitoring and last being well, we continue to build and we're making great progress along with the hardware partners that we are working with um in its first hydration it allows um um some of the functions that you would expect in the software defined data center to be offloaded into these montri processors. The smart nick processes. Right. So what that does, is it clears up the core CPU for other application functions. Right, so you get better scalability, more resource utilization, etcetera, etcetera. The second thing it does is because some of the software defined data center functions are done in the smart make um it gets accelerated as well. Because it takes advantage of the special accelerators that are there security functions, manageability functions, networking functions etcetera, etcetera. So that's that what you're alluding to is overall it's the v sphere, the sX Hyper Visor complimentary itself. That's moving into the specialized processors which allows the hyper Visor will be built into these smart mix, which means the main CPU can be an intel. CPU can be an M D C P. You can be an arm. CPU can be whatever it is you want in the future. So truly enables Monte CPU heterogeneous computing. So that's that's why this is exciting. And of course because it is the sphere, it can happen in the data centers, it can happen in Carlos. It can happen in Sovereign clouds. It can happen in the public clouds all over a period of time. And >>and potentially the Edge I would presume in the future. >>Sorry. Yeah, that's a great point. Thanks for pointing that out. In fact, the Edge is one of the most important places that will happen because we need these low latency applications such as in the telco case for example, right. Or we need these applications that have specialized processing the required. If you're setting up a cashier less store and you need to process and you need a lot of influence engines. So, Monterey helps with all of those things. >>I want to make sure our audience understands. It's because the software defined data center was awesome but but it also created waste in the sense that you have all these offload functions in storage and networking and security running on on x 86 processors which may not be the most efficient way. So emerging architectures around arm might be less expensive, maybe more cost effective, lower power. Uh maybe they do memory management differently. So there are these offload use cases. But as well you we talked about the edge there could be a lot of edge use cases that or whatever whether it's arm or in video etcetera. So now you're driving that optionality for customers so you can support more workloads of the future. >>Yeah, so this is exactly if you think about in europe when you talked about the embers evolution, the inverse core DNA has always been to master hydrogen. Itty right. And what we're seeing is this world of heterogeneous hardware coming alive. Right. You talked about Professor hydrogen Itty including GPU chips and so on. There is a memory architecture heterogeneous, their storage architecture heterogeneous. And so the idea is that regardless of what you use, how do you provide the best workload platform and a consistent way of managing all of these things and reducing the complexity while gaining the efficiency benefits and the other benefits that you talked about. >>So speaking of geniality that brings me to Tansu, you know early on people thought, oh wow containers, that's gonna kill VM where this is the opposite happened. You guys leaned in as as you have as a sign of great leadership these days. You don't get defensive, you just, you know, get the trend is your friend, as they say, give us the update on on Tan xue. Why is that so important to the future? >>Yeah. So if you look at any enterprises portfolio right, they are looking at it and saying look, there's a whole set of applications that I need to modernize. Now. The question becomes how do you modernize these applications in a way that it is essentially done with these microservices architectures and so on and so forth. In that context, how do I maximize the developer productivity and provide a great developer experience because there is not enough developers in the world to modernize every application that that's in every enterprise. Right. So, Tan xue is our answer to help enterprises modernize their applications and deliver in a way that the developed makes the developers very productive on the cloud of their choice. So that is really the strategic intent of Tancill and the core building block for Tan xue is of course kubernetes as you well know, Kubernetes has become the common infrastructure abstraction across clouds. So if you want portability for traditional VM based applications, he used this fear, if you want portability for traditional for containerized microservices applications, you assume kubernetes, that's how companies companies are thinking about it. And so that's the first thing that we did now. The second is you've got developers building applications all over the place. So now, just like you used to have physical server sprawl and now and then VM sprawl these days you have cluster sprawl, kubernetes, cluster sprawl and tons of mission control affects as a multi cloud, multi cluster kubernetes control plan works on the chaos and everything else that some of the Sun. The third point of Tanzania is the developer experience and we have introduced Andrew application platform, which is really focused on delivering a great developer experience on top of any Cuban Aires. So that's really how we're building out the towns of portfolio. And then of course we got Spring and uh as you well know a majority of enterprise applications today are java and if you want to modernize java, you use spring boot and so we had tremendous success with our uh spring boot technology and our startup, Springdale Ohio capabilities and so on and so forth. So that's the entirety of the towns of portfolio. It's multi cloud, it's kubernetes agnostic. Of course it runs great on this fear but it's really the approach making developers productive in the enterprise >>awesome. Thank you for that. I know we're tight on time but it's like speed dating with you raghu. So I'm gonna go on to another topic. Really important topic of security, you've made obviously some big acquisitions, there are things like carbon black, you've got a lot of stuff going on with, with, with endpoint, with end user computing, I'm first interested in sort of how you organize it looks like you're putting security and the networking piece together and then what's your swim lane? It seems like you're, you're focused obviously on your infrastructure. You're not trying to be all things to all people. Help us understand your strategy in that regard. >>Yeah, I mean security is a massive space, Right? And you covered very well. Hundreds and thousands of security problems that customers want to be solving. What we are focused on is how do we simplify the security problem for the customers? And we're doing it through three wells. The first one is we are baking security into the platforms that customers used ones. Right. But there are more obvious fear our workspace one, our container platform etcetera, etcetera. Right? Cloud platforms. So that's the first thing that we're doing. The second is we are putting um, bringing together, we're taking an end to end view of security, which is everything from an end user connecting from home to the corporate network or the sassy, sassy applications to the Windows devices they are using to the data center applications they're using to the club. Right? So we're taking a holistic view of security. So which means we want to combine our network security assets with our endpoint security assets with our workload security assets. That is why we bought all of those things together under one roof. And the third is we are instrumental in all of these and collecting signals from all of these and pulling it into the cloud and turning security into a machine learning and the data problem, right? And that is where the problem. Black cloud comes in and by doing that, we are able to provide a holistic view of where uh customer security posture, right? And these sensors can be on BMR platforms, on non BMR platforms etcetera. And so so that's really how we are approaching it. I mean there's the emerging industry term for a policy XDR. You might follow that. So that's really what we're trying to do. >>Outstanding. Last question and I know, I know we got to go. You mentioned the spin that's happening in november. That's an exciting time for a lot of reasons. I think the ecosystem, you know, emphasizing your independence but also gives you control of your balance sheet, regaining control of your balance sheet, tongue in cheek there. But it's important because all this, this cloud build out this multi cloud, exposing the primitives, leveraging the primitives and the A. P. I. S. Of these clouds making them identical across all these estates. That's not trivial and you're obviously gonna need resources to do that. So maybe you can talk about that and how you see the future playing out organic inorganic, maybe a little lemon A in there. What's your approach? How are you thinking about that? >>Yeah. So we are very excited with the impending spain, which like you said is on track to happen early november. Um and if you think about the spin, there are three aspects that we are excited about. The first aspect is uh we have a great relationship with Dell Tech, the company right. What we have done is we have codified that into a framework agreement that covers the gold market and technology collaboration and we are super excited by that and that baselines against what we do today and then as incentives on both sides to continue to grow that tremendously. So we're gonna continue being, doing that and that's going to continue being a great partner at the same time. From a partnership point of view, is truly going to be a Switzerland of the industry. So previously companies that were otherwise a little bit more competitive with dull now no longer have that reservation in partnering very deeply with us. I'm totally, like you said from a capital structure point of view, it gives us the flexibility to use to do em in a should we decide to do so in the future right? And use both equity and cash for them in a so so that's the capital structure, flexibility, the Switzerland positioning and the continuing great relationship with dull Those are the benefits of the spin >>love and the partner ecosystem has always been a source of, of innovation and it's a big part of the flywheel, the power of many versus the resources of one Ragu, Thanks so much for coming back in the queue. Best of luck. We're really excited for you and for the future of VM ware. >>Thank you and thanks for all the great work that you do and look forward to continuing to read your great research, >>appreciate that. And thank you for >>watching the cubes, continuous >>Coverage of VM World 2021. Keep it right there. >>Thank you. Mhm. Yeah.

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

>> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2020. This is theCUBE virtual with VMworld 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante. It's our 11th year covering VMware. We're not in person, we're virtual, but all the content is flowing. Of course, we're here with Pat Galsinger, the CEO of VMware. Who's been on theCUBE all 11 years. This year virtual of theCUBE as we've been covering VMware from his early days in 2010, when theCUBE started 11 years later, Pat is still changing and still exciting. Great to see you. Thanks for taking the time. >> Hey, you guys are great. I love the interactions that we have, the energy, the fun, the intellectual sparring. And of course that audiences have loved it now for 11 years. And I look forward to the next 11 that we'll be doing together. >> It's always exciting cause we'd love great conversations. Dave and I like to drill in and really kind of probe and unpack the content that you're delivering at the keynotes, but also throughout the entire program. It is virtual this year, which highlights a lot of the cloud native changes. Just want to get your thoughts on the virtual aspect of VMworld, not in person, which is one of the best events of the year. Everyone loves it. The great community. It's virtual this year, but there's a slew of content. What should people take away from this virtual VMworld? >> Well, one aspect of it is that I'm actually excited about is that we're going to be well over a hundred thousand people, which allows us to be bigger, right? You don't have the physical constraints. You also are able to reach places like I've gone to customers and maybe they had 20 people attend in prior years. This year they're having a hundred, they're able to have much larger teams. Also like some of the more regulated industries where they can't necessarily send people to events like this, the international audience. So just being able to spread the audience much more broadly well, also our key messages a digital foundation for unpredictable world. And man, what an unpredictable world it has been this past year? And then key messages, lots of key products announcements technology, announcements partnership, announcements and of course in all of the VMworld, is that hands on (murmurs) interactions that we'll be delivering our virtual, you come to the VMware because the content is so robust and it's being delivered by the world's smartest people. >> Yeah. We've had great conversations over the years. And we've talked about hybrid clothing 2012, a lot of this stuff I looked back in lot of the videos was early on, we're picking out all these waves, but it was that moment four years ago or so, maybe even four, three, I can't even remember, seems like yesterday. You gave the Seminole keynote and you said, "This is the way the world's going to happen." And since that keynote I'll never forget was in Moscone. And since then you guys have been performing extremely well both on the business as well as making technology bets and is paying off. So what's next? I mean, you've got the cloud scale. Is it space? Is it cyber? I mean, all these things are going on. What is next wave that you're watching and what's coming out and what can people extract out of VMworld this year about this next wave? >> Yeah, one of the things I really am excited about I went to my buddy Jensen. I said, "Boy, we're doing this work and smart. Next We really liked to work with you and maybe some things to better generalize the GPU." And Jensen challenged me. Now, usually, I'm the one challenging other people with bigger visions, this time Jensen said, "Hey Pat, I think you're thinking too small. Let's do the entire AI landscape together. And let's make AI a enterprise classwork stowed from the data center to the cloud and to the Edge. And so I'm going to bring all of my AI resources and make VMware, And Tansu the preferred infrastructure to deliver AI at scale. I need you guys to make the GPS work like first class citizens in the vSphere environment, because I need them to be truly democratized for the enterprise. so that it's not some specialized AI development team, it's everybody being able to do that. And then we're going to connect the whole network together in a new and profound way with our Monterey Program as well being able to use the SmartNIC, the DPU as Jensen likes to call it. So now it's CPU, GPU and DPU, all being managed through a distributed architecture of VMware." This is exciting. So this is one in particular that I think we are now rearchitecting the data center, the cloud in the Edge. And this partnership is really a central point of that. >> Yeah, the Nvid thing's huge. And I know Dave, Perharbs has some questions on that. But I ask you a question because a lot of people ask me, is it just a hardware deal? I mean, talking about SmartNIC, you talking about data processing units. It sounds like a motherboard in the cloud, if you will, but it's not just hardware. Can you talk about the aspect of the software piece? Because again, Nvidia is known for GP use, we all know that, but we're talking about AI here. So it's not just hardware. Can you just expand and share what the software aspect of all this is? >> Yeah. Well, Nvidia has been investing in their AI stack and it's one of those where I say, this is Edison at work, right? The harder I work, the luckier I get. And Nvidia was lucky that their architecture worked much better for the AI workload, but it was built on two decades of hard work in building a parallel data center architecture. And they have built a complete software stack for all of the major AI workloads running on their platform. All of that is now coming to vSphere and Tansu, that is a rich software layer across many vertical industries. And we'll talk about a variety of use cases. One of those that we highlight at Vmworld is the university of California, San Francisco partnership UCSF one of the world's leading research hospitals, some of the current vaccine use cases as well, the financial use cases for threat detection and trading benefits. It really is about how we bring that rich software stack. this is a decade and a half of work to the VMware platform so that now every developer and every enterprise could take advantage of this at scale, that's a lot of software. So in many respects, yeah, there's a piece of hardware in here, but the software stack is even more important. >> So well on the sort of Nvidia the arm piece, there's really interesting, these alternative processing models. And I wonder if you could comment on the implications for AI inferencing at the Edge. It's not just as well processor implications, it's storage, it's networking. It's really a whole new fundamental paradigm. How are you thinking about that Pat? >> Yeah, we've thought about, there's three aspects, but what we said three problems that we're solving. One is the developer problem, what we said, now you develop once, right? And the developer can now say, "Hey, I want to have this new AI centric app and I can develop, and it can run in the data center on the cloud or at the Edge." You'll secondly, my operations team can be able to operate this just like I do all my infrastructure. And now it's VMs containers and AI applications and third, and this is where your question really comes to bear. Most significantly is data gravity, right? These data sets are big. Some of them need to be very low latency as well. They also have regulatory issues. And if I have to move these large regulated data sets to the cloud, boy, maybe I can't do that generally for my apps or if I have low latency heavy apps at the Edge, ah, I can't pull it back to the cloud or to my data center. And that's where the uniform architecture and aspects of the Monterey program, where I'm able to take advantage of the network and the SmartNIC that are being built, but also being able to fully represent the data gravity issues of AI applications at scale 'cause in many cases I'll need to do the processing, both the learning and the inference at the Edge as well. So that's a key part of our strategy here with Nvidia. And I do think is going to be a lock, a new class of apps because when you think about AI and containers, what am I using it for? Well, it's the next generation of applications. A lot of those are going to be Edge 5G based. So very critical. >> We got to talk about security now, too. I mean, I'm going to pivot a little bit here John if it's okay. Years ago you said security is a do over. You said that on theCUBE, It stuck with us. There's there's been a lot of complacency it's kind of, if it didn't broke, don't fix it, but COVID kind of broke it. That's why you see three mega trends. You've got cloud security, you see in Z scaler rocket, you got identity access management and I'll check, I think a customer of yours. And then you've got endpoint you're seeing CrowdStrike explode. You guys pay 2.7 billion I think for carbon black yet CrowdStrike has this huge valuation. That's a mega opportunity for you guys. What are you seeing there? How are you bringing that all together? You've got NSX components, EUC components. You've got sort of security throughout your entire stack. How should we be thinking about that? >> Well, one of the announcements that I am most excited about at Vmworld is the release of carbon black workload, this research we're going to take those carbon black assets and we're going to combine it with workspace one. We're going to build it in NSX. We're going to make it part of Tansu and we're going to make it part of vSphere. And carbon black workload is literally the vSphere embodiment of carbon black in an agentless way. Ans so now you don't need to insert new agents or anything. It becomes part of the hypervisor itself, meaning that there's no attack surface available for the bad guys to pursue, but not only is this an exciting new product capability, but we're going to make it free, right? And what I'm announcing at VMworld and everybody who uses vSphere gets carbon black workload for free for an unlimited number of VMs for the next six months. And as I said in the keynote today is a bad day for cybercriminals. This is what intrinsic security is about, making it part of the platform. Don't add anything on, just click the button and start using what's built into vSphere. And we're doing that same thing with what we're doing at the networking layer. This is the act, the last line acquisition. We're going to bring that same workload kind of characteristic into the container. That's why we did the Octarine acquisition. And we're releasing the integration of workspace one with a carbon black client, and that's going to be the differentiator. And by the way, CrowdStrike is doing well, but guess what? So are we, and like both of us are eliminating the rotting dead carcasses of the traditional AV approach. So there is a huge market for both of us to go pursue here. So a lot of great things in security. And as you said, we're just starting to see that shift of the industry occur that I promised last year in theCUBE. >> So it'd be safe to say that you're a cloud native in a security company these days? >> You all, absolutely. And the bigger picture of us, is that we're critical infrastructure layer for the Edge for the cloud, for the telco environment and for the data center from every end point, every application, every cloud. >> So Padagonia asked you a virtual question, we got from the community, I'm going to throw it out to you because a lot of people look at Amazon, The cloud and they say, "Okay, we didn't see it coming. We saw it coming. We saw it scale all the benefits that are coming out of cloud, Well-documented." The question for you is what's next after cloud, as people start to rethink, especially with COVID highlighting all the scabs out there. As people look at their exposed infrastructure and their software, they want to be modern. They want the modern apps. What's next after cloud. What's your vision? >> Well, with respect to cloud, we are taking customers on the multicloud vision, right? Where you truly get to say, "Oh, this workload, I want to be able to run it with Azure, with Amazon. I need to bring this one on premise. I want to run that one hosted. I'm not sure where I'm going to run that application." So develop it and then run it at the best place. And that's what we mean by our hybrid multicloud strategy is being able for customers to really have cloud flexibility and choice. And even as our preferred relationship with Amazon is going super well. We're seeing a real uptick. We're also happy that the Microsoft Azure VMware services now GA so they're in marketplace, our Google, Oracle, IBM and Alibaba partnerships in the much broader set of VMware cloud Partner Program. So the future is multicloud. Furthermore, it's then how do we do that in the Telco Network for the 5G build out, The Telco cloud? And how do we do that for the Edge? And I think that might be sort of the granddaddy of all of these because increasingly in a 5G world will be a nibbling Edge use cases. We'll be pushing AI to the Edge like we talked about earlier in this conversation, will be enabling these high bandwidth, with low latency use cases at the Edge, and we'll see more and more of the smart embodiment, smart cities, smart street, smart factory, or the autonomous driving. All of those need these type of capabilities. >> So there's hybrid and there's multi, you just talked about multi. So hybrid are data partner ETR, they do quarterly surveys. We're seeing big uptick in VMware cloud and AWS, you guys mentioned that in your call. we're also seeing the VMware cloud, VMware cloud Coundation and the other elements, clearly a big uptake. So how should we think about hybrid? It looks like that's an extension of on-prem maybe not incremental, maybe a share shift whereas multi looks like it's incremental, but today multi has really running on multiple clouds, but vision toward incremental value. How are you thinking about that? >> Yeah, so clearly the idea of multi is to link multiple. Am I taking advantage of multiple clouds being my private clouds, my hosted clouds. And of course my public cloud partners, we believe everybody will be running a great private cloud, picking a primary, a public cloud, and then a secondary public cloud. Hybrid then is saying, which of those infrastructures are identical so that I can run them without modifying any aspect of my infrastructure operations or applications. And in today's world where people are wanting to accelerate their move to the cloud, a hybrid cloud is spot on with their needs because if I have to refactor my applications it's a couple million dollars per app, And I'll see you in a couple of years. If I can simply migrate my existing application to the hybrid cloud, what we're consistently seeing is the time is one quarter and the cost is one eight, four less. Those are powerful numbers. And if I need to exit a data center, I want to be able to move to a cloud environment, to be able to access more of those native cloud services. Wow. That's powerful. And that's why for seven years now we've been preaching that hybrid is the future. It is not a waystation to the future. And I believe that more fervently today than when I declared it seven years ago. So we are firmly on that path that we're enabling a multi and a hybrid cloud future for all of our customers. >> Yeah. You addressed that like CUBE 2013. I remember that interview vividly was not a waystation. I got (murmurs) the answer. Thank you Pat, for clarifying than going back seven years. I love the vision. You're always got the right wave. It's always great to talk to you, but I got to ask you about these initiatives you seeing clearly last year or a year and a half ago, project Pacific name out almost like a guiding directional vision, and then put some meat on the bone Tansu and now you guys have that whole Cloud Native Initiative is starting to flower up thousand flowers are blooming. This year Project Monterrey has announced same kind of situation. You're showing out the vision. What are the plans to take that to the next level and take a minute to explain how project Monterey, what it means and how you see that filling out. I'm assuming it's going to take the same trajectory as Pacific. >> Yeah. Monetary is a big deal. This is rearchitecting The core of vSphere. It really is ripping apart the IO stack from the intrinsic operation of a vSphere and ESX itself, because in many ways, the IO we've been always leveraging the NIC and essentially virtual NICs, but we never leverage the resources of the network adapters themselves in any fundamental way. And as you think about SmartNICs, these are powerful resources now where they may have four, eight, 16, even 32 cores running in the smartNIC itself. So how do I utilize that resource? But it also sits in the right place in the sense that it is the network traffic cop. It is the place to do security acceleration. It is the place that enables IO bandwidth optimization across increasingly rich applications where the workloads, the data, the latency get more important both in the data center and across data centers to the cloud and to the Edge. So this rearchitecting is a big deal. We announced the three partners, Intel, Nvidia, Mellanox, and Penn Sandow that we're working with. And we'll begin the deliveries of this as part of the core vSphere offerings of beginning next year. So it's a big rearchitecting. These are our key partners. We're excited about the work that we're doing with them. And then of course our system partners like Dell and Lenovo, who've already come forward and says, "Yeah, we're going to be bringing these to market together with VMware." >> Pat, personal question for you. I want to get your personal take, your career, going back to Intel. You've seen it all, but the shift is consumer to enterprise. And you look at just recently snowflake IPO, the biggest ever in the history of wall street, an enterprise data's company. And the enterprise is now relevant. Enterprise feels consumer. We talked about consumerization of IT years and years ago, but now more than ever the hottest financial IPO enterprise, you guys are enterprise. You did enterprise at Intel. (laughs) You know the enterprise, you doing it here at VMware. The enterprise is the consumer now with cloud and all this new landscape. What is your view on this? Because you've seen the waves, and you've seen the historical perspective. It was consumer, was the big thing. Now it's enterprise, what's your take on all this? How do you make sense of it? Because it's now mainstream. what's your view on this? >> Well, first I do want to say congratulations to my friend Frank, and the extraordinary snowflake IPO, and by the way, they use VMware. So not only do I feel a sense of ownership 'cause Frank used to work for me for a period of time, but they're also a customer of ours. So go Frank, go snowflake. We're we're excited about that. But there is this episodic, this to the industry where for a period of time it is consumer-driven and CES used to be the hottest ticket in the industry for technology trends. But as you say, it is now shifted to be more business centric. And I've said this very firmly, for instance, in the case of 5G where I do not see consumer a faster video or a better Facebook, isn't going to be why I buy 5G. It's going to be driven by more business use cases where the latency, the security and the bandwidth will have radically differentiated views of the new applications that will be the case. So we do think that we're in a period of time and I expect that it's probably at least the next five years where business will be the technology drivers in the industry. And then probably, hey, there'll be a wave of consumer innovation and I'll have to get my black turtlenecks out again and start trying to be cool, but I've always been more of an enterprise guy. So I like the next five to 10 years better. I'm not cool enough to be a consumer guy. And maybe my age is now starting to conspire against me as well. >> Hey, Pat, I know you've got to go, but quick question. So you guys, you gave guidance, pretty good guidance, actually. I wondered have you and Zane come up with a new algorithm to deal with all this uncertainty or is it kind of back to old school gut feel? (laughs) >> Well, I think as we thought about the year as we came into the year and obviously, COVID smacked everybody, we laid out a model, we looked at various industry analysts, what we call the swoosh model, right? Q2, Q3 and Q4 recovery, Q1 more so, Q2 more so, and basically, we build our own theories behind that. We test it against many analysts, the perspectives, and we had vs and we had Ws and we had Ls and so on. We picked what we thought was really sort of grounded of the best data that we could put our own analysis, which we have substantial data of our own customer's usage, et cetera, and pick the model. And like any model, you put a touch of conservatism against it, and we've been pretty accurate. And I think there's a lot of things, we've been able to sort of, with good data good thoughtfulness, take a view and then just consistently manage against it and everything that we said when we did that back in March, sort of proven out incrementally to be more accurate. And some are saying, "Hey, things are coming back more quickly." And then, oh we're starting to see the fall numbers climb up a little bit. Hey, we don't think this goes away quickly. There's still a lot of secondary things to get flushed through the various economies, as stimulus starts tailoring off small businesses are more impacted and we still don't have a widely deployed vaccine. And I don't expect we will have one until second half of next year. Now there's the silver lining to that, as we said, which means that these changes, these faster to the future shifts in how we learn, how we work, how we educate, how we care for, how we worship, how we live, they will get more and more sedimented into the new normal relying more and more on the digital foundation. And we think ultimately that has extremely good upsides for us longterm, even as it's very difficult to navigate in the near term. And that's why we are just raving optimists for the longterm benefits of a more and more digital foundation for the future of every industry, every human, every workforce, every hospital, every educator, they are going to become more digital. And that's why I think going back to the last question, this is a business driven cycle, we're well positioned, and we're thrilled for all of those who are participating with VMworld 2020. This is a seminal moment for us and our industry. >> Pat, thank you so much for taking the time. It's an enabling model. It's what platforms are all about. You get that. My final parting question for you is whether you're a VC investing in startups or a large enterprise who's trying to get through COVID with a growth plan for that future. What is a modern app look like? And what does a modern company look like in your view? >> Well, a modern company would be that instead of having a lot of people looking down at infrastructure, the bulk of my IT resources are looking up at building apps. Those apps are using modern CICD data pipeline approaches built for a multicloud embodiment, right? And of course, VMware is the best partner that you possibly could have. So if you want to be modern, cool on the front end, come and talk to us. >> All right. Pat Galsinger the CEO of VMware here on theCUBE for VML 2020 virtual here with theCUBE virtual. Great to see you virtually Pat. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for your time. >> Hey, thank you so much. Love to see you in person soon enough, but this is pretty good. Thank you, Dave. Thank you so much. >> Okay. You're watching theCUBE virtual here for VMworld 2020. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vallente with Pat Gelsinger. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From around the globe, it's theCube. With digital coverage of VMworld 2020. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello, and welcome back to theCube virtual coverage of VMworld 2020. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube. VMworld's not in person this year, it's on the virtual internet. A lot of content, check it out, vmworld.com, a lot of great stuff, online demos, and a lot of great keynotes. Here we got a great conversation to unpack, the NVIDIA, the AI and all things Cloud Native. With Krish Prasad, who's the SVP and GM of Cloud Platform, Business Unit, and Manuvir Das head of enterprise computing at NVIDIA. Gentlemen, great to see you virtually. Thanks for joining me on the virtual Cube, for the virtual VMworld 2020. >> Thank you John. >> Pleasure to be here. >> Quite a world. And I think one of the things that obviously we've been talking about all year since COVID is the acceleration of this virtualized environment with media and everyone working at home remote. Really puts the pressure on digital transformation Has been well discussed and documented. You guys have some big news, obviously on the main stage NVIDIA CEO, Jensen there legend. And of course, you know, big momentum with with AI and GPUs and all things, you know, computing. Krish, what are your announcements today? You got some big news. Could you take a minute to explain the big announcements today? >> Yeah, John. So today we want to make two major announcements regarding our partnership with NVIDIA. So let's take the first one, and talk through it and then we can get to the second announcement later. In the first one, as you well know, NVIDIA is the leader in AI and VMware as the leader in virtualization and cloud. This announcement is about us teaming up, deliver a jointly engineered solution to the market to bring AI to every enterprise. So as you well know, VMware has more than 300,000 customers worldwide. And we believe that this solution would enable our customers to transform their data centers or AI applications running on top of their virtualized VMware infrastructure that they already have. And we think that this is going to vastly accelerate the adoption of AI and essentially democratize AI in the enterprise. >> Why AI? Why now Manuvir? Obviously we know the GPUs have set the table for many cool things, from mining Bitcoin to really providing a great user experience. But AI has been a big driver. Why now? Why VMware now? >> Yes. Yeah. And I think it's important to understand this is about AI more than even about GPUs, you know. This is a great moment in time where AI has finally come to life, because the hardware and software has come together to make it possible. And if you just look at industries and different parts of life, how is AI impacting? So for example, if you're a company on the internet doing business, everything you do revolves around making recommendations to your customers about what they should do next. This is based on AI. Think about the world we live in today, with the importance of healthcare, drug discovery, finding vaccines for something like COVID. That work is dramatically accelerated if you use AI. And what we've been doing in NVIDIA over the years is, we started with the hardware technology with the GPU, the Parallel Processor, if you will, that could really make these algorithms real. And then we worked very hard on building up the ecosystem. You know, we have 2 million developers today who work with NVIDIA AI. That's thousands of companies that are using AI today. But then if you think about what Krish said, you know about the number of customers that VMware has, which is in the hundreds of thousands, the opportunity before us really now is, how do we democratize this? How do we take this power of AI, that makes every customer and every person better and put it in the hands of every enterprise customer? And we need a great vehicle for that, and that vehicle is VMware. >> Guys, before we get to the next question, I would just want to get your personal take on this, because again, we've talked many times, both of you've been on theCube on this topic. But now I want to highlight, you mentioned the GPU that's hardware. This is software. VMware had hardware partners and then still software's driving it. Software's driving everything. Whether it's something in space, it's an IOT device or anything at the edge of the network. Software, is the value. This has become so obvious. Just share your personal take on this for folks who are now seeing this for the first time. >> Yeah. I mean, I'll give you my take first. I'm a software guy by background, I learned a few years ago for the first time that an array is a storage device and not a data structure in programming. And that was a shock to my system. Definitely the world is based on algorithms. Algorithms are implemented in software. Great hardware enables those algorithms. >> Krish, your thoughts. we live we're living in the future right now. >> Yeah, yeah. I would say that, I mean, the developers are becoming the center. They are actually driving the transformation in this industry, right? It's all about the application development, it's all about software, the infrastructure itself is becoming software defined. And the reason for that is you want the developers to be able to craft the infrastructure the way they need for the applications to run on top of. So it's all about software like I said. >> Software defined. Yeah, just want to get that quick self-congratulatory high five amongst ourselves virtually. (laughs) Congratulations. >> Exactly. >> Krish, last time we spoke at VMworld, we were obviously in person, but we talked about Tanzu and vSphere. Okay, you had Project Pacific. Does this expand? Does this announcement expand on that offering? >> Absolutely. As you know John, for the past several years, VMware has been on this journey to define the Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure, right? Essentially is the software stack that we have, which will enable our customers to provide a cloud operating model to their developers, irrespective of where they want to land their workloads. Whether they want to land their workloads On-Premise, or if they want it to be on top of AWS, Google, Azure, VMware stack is already running across all of them as you well know. And in addition to that, we have around, you know, 4,000, 5,000 service providers who are also running our Platform to deliver cloud services to their customers. So as part of that journey, last year, we took the Platform and we added one further element to it. Traditionally, our platform has been used by customers for running via VMs. Last year, we natively integrated Kubernetes into our platform. This was the big re architecture of vSphere, as we talked about. That was delivered to the market. And essentially now customers can use the same platform to run Kubernetes, Containers and VM workloads. The exact same platform, it is operationally the same. So the same skillsets, tools and processes can be used to run Kubernetes as well as VM applications. And the same platform runs, whether you want to run it On-Premise or in any of the clouds, as we talked about before. So that vastly simplifies the operational complexity that our customers have to deal with. And this is the next chapter in that journey, by doing the same thing for AI workload. >> You guys had great success with these Co-Engineering joined efforts. VMware and now with NVIDIA is interesting. It's very relevant and is very cool. So it's cool and relevant, so check, check. Manuvir, talk about this, because how do you bring that vision to the enterprises? >> Yeah, John, I think, you know, it's important to understand there is some real deep Computer Science here between the Engineers at VMware and NVIDIA. Just to lay that out, you can think of this as a three layer stack, right? The first thing that you need is, clearly you need the hardware that is capable of running these algorithms, that's what the GPU enable. Then you need a great software stack for AI, all the right Algorithmics that take advantage of that hardware. This is actually where NVIDIA spends most of its effort today. People may sometimes think of NVIDIA as a GPU company, but we have much more a software company now, where we have over the years created a body of work of all of the software that it actually takes to do good AI. But then how do you marry the software stack with the hardware? You need a platform in the middle that supports the applications and consumes the hardware and exposes it properly. And that's where vSphere, you know, as Krish described with either VMs or Containers comes into the picture. So the Computer Science here is, to wire all these things up together with the right algorithmics so that you get real acceleration. So as examples of early work that the two teams have done together, we have workloads in healthcare, for example. In cancer detection, where the acceleration we get with this new stack is 30X, right? The workload is running 30 times faster than it was running before this integration just on CPUs. >> Great performance increase again. You guys are hiring a lot of software developers. I can attest to knowing folks in Silicon Valley and around the world. So I know you guys are bringing the software jobs to the table on a great product by the way, so congratulations. Krish, Democratization of AI for the enterprise. This is a liberating opportunity, because one of the things we've heard from your customers and also from VMware, but mostly from the customer's successes, is that there's two types of extremes. There's the, I'm going to modernize my business, certainly COVID forcing companies, whether they're airlines or whatever, not a lot going on, they have an opportunity to modernize, to essentially modern apps that are getting a tailwind from these new digital transformation accelerated. How does AI democratize this? Cause you got people and you've got technology. (laughs) Right? So share your thoughts on how you see this democratizing. >> That's a very good question. I think if you look at how people are running AI applications today, like you go to an enterprise, you would see that there is a silo of bare metal sun works on the side, where the AI stack is run. And you have people with specialized skills and different tools and utilities that manage that environment. And that is what is standing in the way of AI taking off in the enterprise, right? It is not the use case. There are all these use cases which are mission critical that all companies want to do, right? Worldwide, that has been the case. It is about the complexity of life that is standing in the way. So what we are doing with this is we are saying, "hey, that whole solution stack that Manuvir talked about, is integrated into the VMware Virtualized Infrastructure." Whether it's On-Prem or in the cloud. And you can manage that environment with the exact same tools and processes and skills that you traditionally had for running any other application on VMware infrastructure. So, you don't need to have anything special to run this. And that's what is going to give us the acceleration that we talked about and essentially hive the Democratization of AI. >> That's a great point. I just want to highlight that and call that out, because AI's every use case. You could almost say theCube could have AI and we do actually have a little bit of AI and some of our transcriptions and work. But it's not so much just use cases, it's actually not just saying you got to do it. So taking down that blocker, the complexity, certainly is the key. And that's a great point. We're going to call that out after. Alright, let's move on to the second part of the announcement. Krish Project Monterey. This is a big deal. And it looks like a, you know, kind of this elusive, it's architectural thing, but it's directionally really strategic for VMware. Could you take a minute to explain this announcement? Frame this for us. >> Absolutely. I think John, you remember Pat got on stage last year at Vmworld and said, you know, "we are undertaking the biggest re architecture of the vSphere platform in the last 10 years." And he was talking about natively embedding Kubernetes, in vSphere, right? Remember Tanzu and Project Pacific. This year we are announcing Project Monterrey. It's a project that is significant with several partners in the industry, along with NVIDIA was one of the key partners. And what we are doing is we are reimagination of the data center for the next generation applications. And at the center of it, what we are going to do is rearchitect vSphere and ESX. So that the ESX can normally run on the CPU, but it'll also run on the Smart Mix. And what this gives us is the whole, let's say data center, infrastructure type services to be offloaded from running on the CPU onto the Smart Mix. So what does this provide the applications? The applications then will perform better. And secondly, it provides an extra layer of security for the next generation applications. Now we are not going to stop there. We are going to use this architecture and extended it so that we can finally eliminate one of the big silos that exist in the enterprise, which is the bare metal silo. Right? Today we have virtualized environments and bare metal, and what this architecture will do is bring those bare metal environments also under ESX management. So you ESX will manage environments which are virtualized and environments which are running bare metal OS. And so that's one big breakthrough and simplification for the elimination of silo or the elimination of, you know, specialized skills to keep it running. And lastly, but most importantly, where we are going with this. That just on the question you asked us earlier about software defined and developers being in control. Where we want to go with this is give developers, the application developers, the ability to really define and create their run time on the Fly, dynamically. So think about it. If dynamically they're able to describe how the application should run. And the infrastructure essentially kind of attaches computer resources on the Fly, whether they are sitting in the same server or somewhere in the network as pools of resources. Bring it all together and compose the runtime environment for them. That's going to be huge. And they won't be constrained anymore by the resources that are tied to the physical server that they are running on. And that's the vision of where we are taking it. It is going to be the next big change in the industry in terms of enterprise computing. >> Sounds like an Operating System to me. Yeah. Run time, assembly orchestration, all these things coming together, exciting stuff. Looking forward to digging in more after Vmworld. Manuvir, how does this connect to NVIDIA and AI? Tie that together for us. >> Yeah, It's an interesting question, because you would think, you know, okay, so NVIDIA this GPU company or this AI company. But you have to remember that INVIDIA is also a networking company. Because friends at Mellanox joined us not that long ago. And the interesting thing is that there's a Yin and Yang here, because, Krish described the software vision, which is brilliant. And what this does is it imposes a lot on the host CPU of the server to do. And so what we've be doing in parallel is developing hardware. A new kind of "Nick", if you will, we call it a DPU or a Data Processing Unit or a Smart Nick that is capable of hosting all this stuff. So, amusingly when Krish and I started talking, we exchanged slides and we basically had the same diagram for our vision of where things go with that software, the infrastructure software being offloaded, data center infrastructure on a chip, if you will. Right? And so it's a very natural confluence. We are very excited to be part of this, >> Yeah. >> Monterey program with Krish and his team. And we think our DPU, which is called the NVIDIA BlueField-2, is a pretty good device to empower the work that Krish's team is doing. >> Guys it's awesome stuff. And I got to say, you know, I've been covering Vmworld now 11 years with theCube, and I've known VMware since its founding, just the evolution. And just recently before VMworld, you know, you saw the biggest IPO in the history of Wall Street, Snowflake an Enterprise Data Cloud Company. The number one IPO ever. Enterprise tech is so exciting. This is really awesome. And NVIDIA obviously well known, great brand. You own some chip company as well, and get processors and data and software. Guys, customers are going to be very interested in this, so what should customers do to find out more? Obviously you've got Project Monterey, strategic direction, right? Framed perfectly. You got this announcement. If I'm a customer, how do I get involved? How do I learn more? And what's in it for me. >> Yeah, John, I would say, sorry, go ahead, Krish. >> No, I was just going to say sorry Manuvir. I was just going to say like a lot of these discussions are going to be happening, there are going to be panel discussions there are going to be presentations at Vmworld. So I would encourage customers to really look at these topics around Project Monterey and also about the AI work we are doing with NVIDIA and attend those sessions and be active and we will have a ways for them to connect with us in terms of our early access programs and whatnot. And then as Manuvir was about to say, I think Manuvir, I will give it to you about GTC. >> Yeah, I think right after that, we have the NVIDIA conference, which is GTC, where we'll also go over this. And I think some of this work is a lot closer to hand than people might imagine. So I would encourage watching all the sessions and learning more about how to get started. >> Yeah, great stuff. And just for the folks @vmworld.com watching, Cloud City's got 60 solution demos, go look for the sessions. You got the EX, the expert sessions, Raghu, Joe Beda amongst other people from VMware are going to be there. And of course, a lot of action on the content. Guys, thanks so much for coming on. Congratulations on the news, big news. NVIDIA on the Bay in Virtual stage here at VMworld. And of course you're in theCube. Thanks for coming. Appreciate it. >> Thank you for having us. Okay. >> Thank you very much. >> This is Cube's coverage of VMworld 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCube virtual, here in Palo Alto, California for VMworld 2020. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube covering magenta. Imagine twenty nineteen. Brought to you by Adobe. >> Hey, welcome back to the Cube. Lisa Martin at Imagine, twenty nineteen from the Wynn Las Vegas. It's happy hour here, but I really wish I had a Coke. I don't have one. But I do have a gentleman from Coca Cola, please doing me and welcoming a couple of guests to the Cube. We have Enrique no great day. The director of Direct to Consumer for Coca Cola Mexico. Enrique, Thank you for joining us. >> Thanks, Lisa. Nice to meet you. >> And we have from forty for Raghu Kerala managing partner. Welcome to >> the Cube. You nailed the name. There you go. Talk >> to >> that interview. I did my best. All right, so here we are in imagine, twenty nineteen with about thirty, five hundred or so people. This show is one that has a tremendous amount of energy. It's like you gave everybody a cook when they walked in the door. Didn't really need it, But we've heard a tremendous amount of positivity people very excited for being able to leverage the power of data to deliver really impactful experiences and as consumers of any product. We want a brand to know us. We want them to help us make our lives better. Before we dig into that with Coca Cola, argue, let's start with you. Forty four is one of magenta owes partners. Give us a little bit of a history there on what you guys do, together with the Gento and four customers like Coca Cola, Mexico. >> Thank you, Lisa, and thank you for inviting us here today. Well, when we put together forty four, we ask yourself some questions like, How do we aspire to be great? And one of the things was to surround ourselves with great partners and adobes definitely been a great partner for us, because what we want to do is bring tea to our customers. A not just a sight but an experience for their consumers. They can live on and grow and invest in a platform. And what we found with Adobe and the Magenta Commerce cloud was a way that we could start building something in an array, tours greatness by using data and insights to build upon our knowledge. And luckily, way found a great partner in Coca Cola that we could aspire to be great together to the end. Consumer e commerce is still in this early days, and what we wanted to say is that a great brand could start and start looking at e commerce in a way to improve their customers. Lives be available in moments that of need and moments of want. And that's something we started doing with North America about four years ago and brought that to Western Europe. And now Lat Ham in the last year has been a great experience partnering with you. >> CocaCola is a brand that everybody knows globally. It's one of those almost feel good brands, right? I mean, you just can't help but get a smile on your face when somebody asked If you want a cup full, of course, who would say no to that? Give me a little lemon twist and I'm very happy, but something that you guys are doing together with Coca Cola. Mexico was really inspirational, and it's really helping to transform and improve people's lives. And we could talk to us about the program that you're building with forty four and how it's actually making giving people access to things that they don't just want that they actually need, like, quality of life, type of sure products. >> So thanks. Thanks a lot, Lisa, for the invitations. So first of all, you know, we have a big challenge, because way No, we have a great brand way, actually have a lot of brands, and that's the challenge. So how can we create this? The solution where we can access people to this? Never. It's for life. So it's not only Coke way have a lot of different products, and Wei have in Mexico is that it's, ah, project that we are calling Coca Cola. It's Coke at home on what we do there is. We are providing the consumers a subscription model where we are enabling the access to multiple beverage products any time on everywhere. So that's that's That's the ambition we have we launched last year in the city of Monterrey. It's It's our first city. We are planning to scale this business into the whole country and probably Latin America. First on, why not probably the states on some foreseeable future. >> So this is more than on demand. I live in Silicon Valley, where we're pretty, you know, we have high expectations and I want to order something, whether it's on door dash or through Google expressed our Amazon that I wanted to show up within an hour. But that's, you know, I might be lazy, that I don't actually want to get in my car and driver walk somewhere. But what you're talking about this is this is not just I want Coca Cola products on demand. This is actually reaching people that really have a strong and need for this type of service. Talk to us about that human interaction and what you guys are really enabling there for your consumers. >> Sure, so So, yeah, United. So the thing is, what we see, the big opportunity here is way. Want to be closer to our consumers? We went to understand them. We want to to hear from them, to receive feedback directly back the way we are used to working Coca Cola in the past one hundred and thirty three years that that's a history of cardiac alights way have the customers that interact with consumers, and then we get some information from the consumers. We've been great doing marketing campaigns, you know. But right now the challenge that we're facing is we want to have direct feedback from them. So we're creating this eco system where we are getting feedback. We're getting knowledge from them, and we know exactly what what's their their needs. The pain points, their suffering, Andi the way what we can solve them and probably eventually some future products. But we can create for them with the specific necessities that they have. So that's what we're creating there. That's a big thing. >> And so we're gonna talk to us about the opportunity to work with a brand like Coca Cola that's been around for over one hundred thirty years, talk about transformation and be able to enable them to really kind of not just delight customers. But there's an emotional connection that people >> have this products. So we always say, like ideally done way can add value from the state of desire to the state of consumption, and in between is a transaction. It's fulfillment, its operations and perhaps unique to most clients of, um, Magenta and Adobe. Coca Cola in Mexico owns a full relationship, and it's a full branded piece from creating that desire in your heart in your mind in your taste buds, but then owning that all the way through the delivery trucks and the people delivering it to your door. And that's something that a CPD firm just actually, I'm not sure of any other CPV firm does in the US or in Mexico at this point. And but then what is the excellence mean? We haven't untidy of excellence of what Coke means to us, the nostalgia and what it means today. But that also raises the high bar because we're not allowed to not be excellent at any other touch point of the brand. But definitely it's fun, right? It's a challenge, you know, making money online. That's the easy part, Being really proud of what you're doing online. That's kind of what makes you go to work every day. >> Being relevant for consumers is what, yeah, >> being relevant? Absolutely, especially because there's a lot of choice with most products and services that are available to us as consumers these days. And if you think of you know, we've been talking a lot at this event about the customer experience and customer experience management, and how can Adobe Inn Magenta enable their customers to use data to understand what delivering what my customer wants to improve. Whether it's, you know, we talked to HP Inc this morning allowing me to order a new PC or printed or ink and have it delivered specifically exactly the way that I wanted to. Whether it's, you know, getting a Coca Cola. I want whoever I'm interacting with to give you a seamless experience. But use the data that you're collecting about me to make my life better. Make my life easier, more seamless. Frictionless. How are you guys at forty for helping Enrique and team utilize that data too crude to really enhance this consumer experience and maybe even create more brand loyalty? Yeah, it's >> interesting. I think data is a tool, but then your hypothesis, where you go from has to be endemic to the brand and for Coca Cola. On the internal, we think of it as a portfolio portfolio of different products in different needs states from hydration to enjoyment from special moments to everyday moments. But then that allows you to start thinking, How do I be part relevant part of more moments and then you could say, Where does data fit into that and now I can understand how there's a new moments being made because people's lives change and the youth always find different ways in different ways of living in different way from being. How can we be relevant to them through our throughout all of that, from the moment you wake up in what you need state is there to special moment of happiness, and they have a company that has products that could live up to. All of that is great and you know you need a portfolio. But you also need to being desire and wanted need all together in one thing, because one person has all of that and one company came, fulfill it if you think about it from a idea of moment. But then what data? Khun, Due to bring those to life >> so soon being relevant, continuing to be relevant is challenging. It's going to require you to really look at trends across a spectrum of, say, consumer behaviors. Enrique, what are some of the trends that you guys are seeing with this project that you've launched in Mexico, and how were you going to be using those trends to expand this globally? >> Sure, Yeah, So? So first of all, as you, as you know, probably e commerce in Mexico is is quite a small right now. So the thing is, it's growing in, you know, very aggressive rates on DH. It happens the same in the rest of Latin America countries. So what What other retailers are looking at is they want to create this this big business right now because they know that in the future it's going to be the competitive advantage for them. So So I think that's something that not many sippy jeez are looking at. There's a lot off are things that must happen inside the companies to enable this on DH. In my experience, the most challenging things and it's not a trend, but it's it's a challenge that we face us as a big city. Gee, Cos is how can we change the culture inside the company? Because this is the main barrier we have. We face when we see and I I'm going to give you the example of Mexico when we see the digital sales of the beverage in Mexico, it comes about two point five percent of the total sales that we have so its its really small if you compare it to the rest of the retail. So whenever we go to the to the rest of the corporation and the rest of the building in Mexico, we say that we want in best, and we want to do there's there's a lot of barriers, you know on the challenge, the main challenge that we face right now. The's companies that want to go direct ical Sumer is this is happen. We changed the mindset, change the culture, and I think that's the most relevant. It's no trend, but it's It's the most relevant challenge that we're facing right now, >> a big challenge because not just for for every convict, but a company with the history that Coca Cola has to be able to start leveraging that data to start to change mindsets and ship cultures. Where are you guys on that journey? And how is your partnership with forty four may be a facilitator of that cultural change? >> Yeah, sure, So it's to be really honest. We're we're beginning this journey way have some countries that are ahead of us. We have some examples in China, For example, curriculum, China's great things cortical in North America is doing very big things in Mexico and Latin America. We're starting the journey on the thing. What we realized is that we need to get together with people that know of this matter. Way are really good at marketing. We're really good at a commercial approach. Operational approach ware not the best at the commerce, but we. That's why we are partnering with guys that no one, we're partnering with platforms like Adobe Magenta, too. To achieve this, that's that's the thing, right? >> Yeah, >> Rookie will finish with you. What are some of the things that you have seen and heard at? Imagine twenty nineteen from a technology innovation perspective that give you the confidence that adobe in Magenta Technologies are going to be able to deliver, what it is that Enrique and his team need to make that barrier change internal evaporate. Yeah, >> I mean, I think when you think of technology right now, even within adobes, it's what the combination of different products that adobe has and how they're going to come together. So the roadmap is a critical piece of it. I think there's been a great announcement of Sensei's coming in and being part of the core offering to make each interaction a little smarter, but also really see the payoff and save what's the real need that trying to be solved, then back that into the products that you see to cut between the different between a press release and a road map? And I think when you come to a summit like this, you hear things from Adobe. But then you also hear the reactions from the customers. And if you hear those both at the same time, you find that great thing in the middle >> of >> what's actionable. And I think if you think of only customer opinions or the what the platform says individually, I think they're less relevant than finding that really time reaction to trends and say, Honestly, sometimes you're drowning in technology and you wantto move the business forward and react to that weak sales that month's numbers. But then you say, Well, let me take a step back and look at the road map or vice versa, and I think everybody's in different stages of where they're going. So until you get that wisdom from everybody else, anyone announcement might be might take you off course. But then you start saying other people are in my boat. Other people are filling my opportunity, sent my sense of opportunity, and other people are feeling my sense of pain. And it's great to see a community come together. It's five thousand people that all want to accomplish something different things, but they want to accomplish success. Whatever. However, they personally define it. >> And it is to your point. It's a very, very strong community here. But we thank you both so much for taking the time to share with us what you guys are doing together with Coca Cola run that everybody knows and loves. So I say we go get a cookie cola and wrap this segment. What do you think you're all right? >> Moment is coming. >> Fantastic. You're watching the Cube. I'm Lisa Martin from Imagine, twenty nineteen from the Wynn Las Vegas. Thanks for watching

>> Narrator: Live from New York City, it's theCUBE. Covering Lenovo Transform 2017. Brought to you by: Lenovo. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Lenovo Transform Event. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my co-host, Stu Miniman, who is a Senior Analyst at Wikibon. We are joined by Kirk Skaugan. He is the Executive Vice President and President of Lenovo Data Group. Welcome back to theCUBE, Kirk. You're a veteran. >> Yeah, we're doing this on a monthly basis. It's great. >> So you're fresh off the keynote. The theme of this conference is transform. Lenovo has undergone a massive transformation in recent years. What is your focus, and where do you see the biggest points of change in the company? >> Well, I think we're sort of celebrating today, this transformation to the next phase of our growth. If you think about us as a company, we've kind of acquired the x86 business, server business from IBM a few years ago, and we are also building off more than a decade of our China heritage, for the ThinkServer business, so that's combining the two together. Kind of driving to our next phase of growth. The whole purpose of today is really transforming the customer experience, and starting with the customer first. We're incredibly proud that we just got ranked number one in customer satisfaction, again but we're not kind of stopping there. We're going to use this announcement today to catapult us ahead. >> Customer service has always been a strength of Lenovo, and as you said, you're going to continue to drive toward that. You said in the keynote that you're incentivizing employees around customer service. Can you talk a little bit about how you plan on maintaining the edge? >> So this year, every Lenovo employee is getting incentivized on customer experience. We're making them take a personal goal of how they can better improve the customer. Regardless of whether you're an engineer, or you're in phone support, or these kind of things, so it really starts at the grass-roots level. It gets everybody thinking customer first, which is great. Again, we're excited, because we're in 21 of the 22 categories, number one is x86 servers, but we're constantly learning and wanting to improve. That's where we're starting. >> Kirk, Y.Y. in his keynote, talked about, just the pace of change. That, forget about 18 years ago, 18 months ago we probably couldn't predict how fast things are going. How does that drive your strategy? How you work with customers, and drive the product line? >> So I think customers are asking for simplicity. It's getting so complex, and the rate of change is so much, so when we did this design of both our server storage and networking, we're kind of future-proofing it. We are actually dramatically reducing the number of products, but building to be more flexible, so you can qualify less solutions, but have them live longer in your data-center. That's been a key attribute as we look at future-proofing. Also, as we move to software-defined, that's going to be a key element as well, because people aren't looking to change out the hardware as much as they are the software part. Everything from our configuration managers to our system hardware management, and with Xclarity, the whole design experience, we're changing to simply the experience for the customer. 'Cause the change is almost getting to the point that it's too much for people to handle, from a technology transformation perspective. >> You're celebrating 25 years of the x86 server that you're offering, so explain to us the new branding. You've got two new brands that you've announced today. The kind of, thinking behind that, and walk us through what they are. >> Sure, so today, we're announcing ThinkSystem and ThinkAgile. So on the server side, we had both the ThinkServer brand from Lenovo and the SystemX brand from IBM. We're building those two together. The engineers were given the charter years ago, to say how do you stay number one in reliability, Number one in customer satisfaction, and then we have a legacy now of over 150 world-record benchmarks. So it's a brand that's highly flexible, premium, and it's going to span now, not only our server products, but server, storage, and networking. One of the surprises I had joining Lenovo is just, we have hundreds of engineers in networking that the old IBM had acquired from companies like Blade Network Technologies, and now things like hyper-converged storage. Once you've solved the storage-compute integration, networking becomes the next bottleneck. The products we're announcing today on ThinkAgile, which is our software-defined products, are helping solve not only the hyper-converge storage problems, but also some of the challenges that brings to networking, and moving traffic from a traditional north-south architecture to east-west. Simply put, ThinkSystem for network, storage, and server; and ThinkAgile for software-defined. >> On the ThinkAgile, the two partners that I saw highlighted up on screen were Nutanix, which you've had in OEM for awhile, and the Microsoft Azure, with Azure staff, we knew is coming this year. Both of those companies have a lot of partners. Why is Lenovo positioned to be a strong contender with both of those companies. >> I think that when we talk to CIOs, what we're hearing pretty constantly is that Lenovo's lack of legacy... We don't have a huge legacy router business, or a huge legacy sand business, and all the associated costs and services. We see our competitors sometimes up, pushing one more generation of the legacy technology, and so we feel like we're getting pulled in to leap ahead, not being encumbered by the past. Then I always say, little things don't mean a lot; little things mean everything. It's the thousands of Lenovo engineers that are tuning this for both of those solutions, especially for Nutonix, we've got integrated networking now, in the stack, so we're not just solving the storage problem, but we're addressing that network solution as well. There's a reason why we have 150 world-record benchmarks. It's that fine-tuning with our partners to get the last few bits of performance out of the systems. >> I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about this lack of legacy, as well as the cost-efficiencies that you referenced in the keynote, in terms of having everything in China, and you described going left to make the servers, and going right to make the PCs. Can you talk a little bit about how that helps Lenovo improve it's offerings? >> So I think that we have the benefits of being an autonomous data center group, and making our own decisions, but we're taking care of the manufacturing, taking advantage of the manufacturing capability of Lenovo. If you look at the devices inside, Lenovo's building about four devices a second. On the server side, we build a little bit over a hundred servers an hour. But if you go into, for example, we have factories in Sárvár, Hungary; Monterrey, Mexico; North Carolina; and even Shenzen. If you go into our Shenzen factory, the parts warehouse is common on the first floor. It comes up through the second floor, and actually goes left for notebooks, right for servers. So all that vendor-managed inventory, we're taking advantage of that scale of four devices a second, and we get that advantage, unlike some of our competitors. What that really means to our customers is we can compete with the best commodity costs, and the best manufacturing costs in the industry. Some of our third-party analysts are saying we have manufacturing rates that could be almost half of our competition, because some of the scale that we have. >> Kirk, one of the things that caught my attention in the keynote was talking about using the intelligence, and inside your supply-chain through the whole life-cycle of the product. Can you give us a little bit of insight as to how you're using it internally, and what customers see from that. >> So we just hired our Chief Technology Officer, was Dr. Rui, Yong, who's ex-Microsoft. He's one of the world leaders in Artificial Intelligence. Our CIO and us in the data-center group, we've all been collaborating to bring Artificial Intelligence deeper into everything we do, but even from our supply chain to our order delivery, which is why I think our customer satisfaction rates are so high, because we can predict the supply chain, the right amount of inventory, and shipping it all the way through, and predicting the dock-date to our customers incredibly well. One of the key learners we had over the last couple of years of acquiring the IBM x86 server business, it took us almost two years to get off the IT systems, right? We had over forty different databases that we had to integrate in, and now that, as of January 1, they've all become part of Lenovo, pulling those big data analytics together and using Artificial Intelligence, we can now track the aged population of all of the installed base of over about two and a half million servers that we have out there, who's coming up for warranty replacements, who's coming up for hardware replacements, and it's almost that predictive analytics that customers are really valuing. >> In terms of Lenovo and it's aspirations for the future, in terms of becoming the world's biggest super-computing company, you are the fastest growing, but let's talk about impact. This is something that Y.Y. talked about in his keynote, and really making sure that Lenovo is working, not just helping companies sell more widgets, but also with scientific breakthroughs, curing diseases, predicting the effect of climate change. How big a part is that of your job? >> I think it's something that's incredibly motivating to Lenovo employees, beyond financial return to shareholders, is every day I get internal texts or WeChats from Lenovo employees that are feeling really proud to be part of a company that's off trying to do something good for humanity, as well. I mean on the PC side, we're selling ChromeBooks and bridging the digital divide between kids in Africa and kids in the major metropolitan areas of the world, but on the data center side, things like we did with the Barcelona supercomputer, where we now have the fastest, next-generation Intel computer on the planet. It is one of the breakthroughs of predicting weather and climate change, predicting and tracking the next tsunami to evacuate coastlines faster, trying to find cures to some of the most terrible diseases on Earth. It's a huge part of the culture, of trying to do good for the world, not just make a financial return. >> Kirk, I want to go back to ThinkAgile for a second, because you dropped a hint that we couldn't let pass. Said that it's likely that we should expect M and A, from Lenovo here, now, I don't expect you to tell us who you're looking at, but what do you look for, what type of company to look for, or what would fit well into the Lenovo portfolio? >> Well, it's funny, because we're Lenovo, so we're not Huawei, or Cisco, or EMC, right? Big names, without saying traditional networking and storage. All of these startups out there that are essentially competing with those large legacy companies are coming to us saying, we want either access to China, given our strong China presence, but also global-scale. Because once they get to a couple hundred million dollars in revenue, they have a real tough time scaling, and as I said, we're participating now in over 160 countries, 50 call-centers. That's a pretty big investment, even for some of the fastest growing software-defined companies in the world, to set up. I think we want to build our own internal intellectual property, but we're also going to look at joint ventures and M and A's in the areas of software-defined networking, software-defined storage, because our customers, again, see us with that lack of legacy and are really pushing us to go even faster, which is great. >> So those are the business that you're interested in, but what are the kind of cultures that you're looking for, particularly because culture is such an important part of Lenovo? >> One of the reasons I moved from Intel to Lenovo is that they're just fierceless innovators, right? And we became number one in PC through innovation, not just cost-cutting and I see that on the data-center side as well. All of those little things that matter. So I think we want to have people who have the highest of aspirations. When we go into something, we want to be number one in it. People who are fearless, they're not afraid of companies that might be three or four times our size, but that want to make a global impact. A lot of these customers, they've already made their financial returns in a previous startup, and now they're looking at how they can go change the world, and the scale that Lenovo brings, I think is something that's pretty exciting to them. >> Kirk, on the Intel point, I think this is the fourth show that we've done theCUBE at this year, where Intel's been up on stage, arm and arm with a partner, in the cloud-space, in the server-space, talking about that next generation chipset. What's going to set Lenovo apart with this next wave, and what are your customers excited about for this next spin of the Intel chipset? >> We're seeing 59% performance improvement on things like SAP HANA, where we're number one in the world in installations. We're seeing better total cost of ownership productions. So particularly in hyper-scale and HPC, we see a step-function transition over, almost immediately on the new Intel chips. We're looking at all architectures, of course, as well, but I think with Intel, we've put in the largest omni-pass solutions on the planet. With Barcelona supercomputer, we're working not just on processors, but on the SSDs, on their accelerator, on high technology, on the fabrics. So we have a really tight innovation relationship with them, so we're selling probably more content per box, therefore we're obviously able to fine-tune the entire portfolio together with them. I think customers are excited about us continuing this world-record performance that we've had. The TCO reductions, of getting to lower power. Most of these supercomputers are still constrained by power. We have more than 25 patents now in water-cooling technology to try to be greener for the Earth. I think that those are some of the things that we're seeing from Intel. >> Those are the selling points. >> Yeah, higher performance. We have a very tight, close relationship, so there's not a lot of finger-pointing. We get into an issue, as all companies do, we can solve it very, very quickly. I think again, being number one in customer satisfaction from a third-party is our testament to that. >> Kirk, this last question I had on that, the hyperscale market. Can you just give us the update, as kind of Lenovo's position there. Heard a lot about the HPC market, we know, kind of a traditional enterprise market, but hyperscale, I think, is one of the areas you differentiate yourself. >> We obviously sell Dubai, to Alibaba, Tencent is part of China, we're one of their largest suppliers and partners, and we're now expanding, through this new segment-focus into the west coast of the United States. We don't necessarily go out and say the names of those customers, but there are multiple hyperscale customers in the top ten, many of which are based in the US that we are already now shipping into significantly more units this year than last year. It's a function of really getting cost-optimized. Again, we're taking advantage of PC economics and bringing them to hyperscale computing, so we're not afraid of low-margin, high-volume business, because that's what we're doing in the PC space every day. So, we're going to continue to expand, not just in the top-tier ones, but also moving into the tier two, tier three, kind of customer bases as well, so we're expanding that sales force. Looking at it only end-to-end, only burdening it with what it needs to be burdened with, right? Relative to the cost structure so that we can compete with the best, most cost-effective companies in the world, and still make a little bit of money for Lenovo shareholders. >> Kirk, thanks so much for joining us. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. >> Yeah, the excitement around here's been great. We appreciate you guys coming, and appreciate your time. >> Great. I'm Rebecca Knight for Stu Miniman, we'll be back with more of Lenovo Transform after this.