>> Female Voice: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware RADIO 2019, brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware RADIO 2019, Lisa Martin with John Furrier in San Francisco, talking all sorts of innovation in this innovation long history culture at VMware, welcoming back to theCUBE, Mornay Van Der Walt, VP of R&D in the Explorer Group. Mornay, thank you for joining John and me on theCUBE today. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, I got to start with Explorer Group. Super cool name. >> Yeah. >> What is that within R&D? >> So the origins of the Explorer Group. I've had many roles at VMware, and I've been fortunate enough to do a little bit of everything. Technical marketing; product development; business development; one of the big things I did before the Explorer group was created was actually EVO:RAIL. I was the founder of that, pitched that idea. Raghu and Ray and Pat were very supportive. We took that to market, took it to (inaudible), handed that off to Dell EMC, the rest is history, right? And then was, "what's next?" So Ray and me look at some special projects, go and look at IoT, go and look at Telemetry, and did some orders for them, and then said "Alright, why don't you look at all our innovation programs." Because beyond RADIO, we actually have four other programs. And everyone, was -- RADIO gets a lot of airtime and press, but it's really the collective. It's the power of those other four programs that support RADIO that allow us to take an idea from inception to an impactful outcome. So hence the name, the Explorer Group. We're going out there, we're exploring for new ideas, new technologies, what's happening in the market. >> Talk about the R&D management style. You've actually got all these-- RADIO's one-- kind of a celebration, it's kind of the best of the best come together, with papers and submissions. Kind of a symposium meets kind of a, you know, successive end for all the top engineers. There's more, as you've mentioned. How does all of it work? Because, in this modern era of distributed teams, decentralization, decisions around business, decisions on allocating to the portfolio, what gets invested, money, spend, how do you organize? Give a quick minute to explain how R&D is structured. >> So, obviously, we have the BUs structured-- well there's PCS, Raghu and Rajeev head that up. And then we've got the OCTO organization, which Ray O'Farrell heads up. And the business, you know, it's innovating every day to get products out the door, right, and that's something that we've got to be mindful of because, I mean, that's ultimately what's allowing us to get products into the hands of our customers, solving tough problems. But then in addition to that, we want to give our engineers an avenue to go and explore, and, you know, tinker on something that's maybe related to their day job, or completely off, unrelated to their day job. The other thing that's important is, we also want to give, because we're such a global R&D, you know, our setup globally, we want to give teams the opportunity to work together, collaborate together, get that diversity of thought going, and so a lot of times, if we do a Hackathon, which we call a Borathon, we actually give bonus points if teams pull from outside of their business units. So you've got an idea, well, let's make it a diverse idea in terms of thought and perspective. If you're from the storage business unit, bring in folks from the network business unit. Bring in folks from the cloud business unit. Maybe you've partnered with some folks that are in IT. It's very, you know, sometimes engineers will go, "Ah, it's just R&D that's innovating." But in reality, there's great innovation coming out of our IT department. There's great innovation coming out of our global support organization. Our SEs that are on the front lines, sometimes are seeing the customers' pain points firsthand, and then they bring that back, and some of that makes it into the product. >> How much of R&D is applied R&D, which is kind of business unit aligned, or somewhat aligned, versus the wacky, crazy ideas: "Go solve a big, hairy problem", that's out there, that's not, kind of, related to the current product sets? >> Ah, that's tough to put an actual number on it, >> John: Well ballpark, I mean. >> But if I just say, like, if I had to just think about budgets and that, it's probably ten to fifteen percent is the wacky stuff, that's, you know, not tied to a roadmap, that's why we call it "off-road innovation", and the five programs that my Explorer Group ultimately leads is all about driving that off-road innovation. And eventually you want to find an on-ramp, >> Yeah. >> to a roadmap, you know, that's aligned to a business unit, or a new emerging, you know, technology. >> How does someone come up with an idea and say, "Hey, you know, I want to do this"? Do they submit, like, a form? Is there a proposal? Who approves it? I mean, do you get involved? How does that process work? >> So that's a good question. It really depends on the engineer, right? You take someone who's just a new college grad, straight out of, you know, college. That's why we have these five programs. Because some of these folks, they've got a good idea, but they don't really know how to frame it, pitch it. And so if you've got a good idea, and let's say, this is your first rodeo, so to speak, We have a program called TechTalks where it allows you to actually go and pitch your idea; get some feedback. And that's sometimes where you get the best feedback, because you go and, you know, present your idea, and somebody will come back and say, "Well, you know, have you met, you know, Johnny and Sue over there, in this group? They're actually working on something similar. You should go and talk to them, maybe you guys can bring your ideas together." Folks that are, you know, more seasoned, you know, longer tenure, sometimes they just come up, and-- "I'm going to pitch an idea to xLabs," and for xLabs, for example --that's an internal incubator-- there is, like, a submissions process. We want to obviously make sure, that, you know, your idea's timing in the market's correct, we've got limited funding there so we're going to make sure we're really investing on the right, you know, type of ideas. But if you don't want to go and pitch your idea and get feedback, go and do a Borathon. Turn an idea into a little prototype. And we see a lot of that happening, and some of the greatest ideas are coming from our Borathons, you know? And it's also about tracking the journey. So, we have RADIO here today, we have mentioned xLabs, TechTalks, we have another program called Flings. Some of our engineers are shipping product, and they've got an idea to augment the product. They put it out as a Fling, and our customers and the ecosystem download these, and it augments the product. And then we get great feedback. And then that makes it back into the product roadmap. So there's a lot of different ways to do it, and RADIO, the process for RADIO, there's a lot of rigor in it. It's, like, it's run as a research program. >> Lisa: It's a call for papers, right? >> Call for papers, you know, there's a strict format, it's got to be, you know, this many pages; if you go over about one line, you're sort of, disqualified, so to speak. And then once you've got those papers, like this year we had 560 papers be submitted, out of those 560, 31 made it onto mainstage, and another 61 made it as posters, as you can see in the room we're sitting in. >> I have an idea. Machine learning should get all those papers. (laughs) I mean, that's-- >> Funny you say that. We actually have, one of our engineers, Josh Simons, is actually using machine learning to go back in time and look at all the submissions. So idea harvesting is something we're paying a lot of attention to, because you submit an idea, >> Interesting. >> the market may not be right for it, or reality is, I just don't have a budget to fund it if it's an xLab. >> John: So it's like a Google search for your, kind of, the indexing all those workers. >> Internally, yeah, and sometimes it's-- there's a great idea here, you merge that with another idea from another group or another geo, and then you can actually go and fund something. >> Well, that's important because timing is critical, in these early-- most stuff can be early in just incubation, gestation period for that tech or concept, could be in play because the computer-- all the new things, right? >> Correct. And, do you actually have the time? You're an engineer working on a release, the priority is getting that release out the door, right? >> (laughs) >> So, put the idea on the back burner, come off the release, and then, you know, get a couple of colleagues together and maybe there's a Borathon being held and you go and move that idea forward that way. Or, it's time for RADIO submissions, get a couple of colleagues together and submit a RADIO paper. So we want to have different platforms for our engineers to submit ideas outside of their day job. >> And it sounds like, the different programs that you're talking about: Flings, xLab, Borathon, RADIO, what it sounds like is, there isn't necessarily a hierarchy that ideas have to go through. It really depends on the teams that have the ideas, that are collaborating, and they can put them forward to any of these programs, >> Correct, yeah. >> and one might get, say, rejected for RADIO, but might be great for a Borathon or a Fling? >> Correct. >> So they've got options there, and there's multiple committees, I imagine? Is that spearheaded out of Ray's OCTO group, >> Yep. >> that's helping to make the selections? Tell us a little bit about that process. >> Sure, so. That's a great point, right? To get an idea out the door, you don't always have to take the same pathway. And so one thing we started tracking was these innovation journeys that all take different pathways. We just published an impact report on innovation for FY19, and we've got the vSAN story in there, right? It was an idea. A group of engineers had an idea, like, in 2009, and they worked on their idea a little bit-- it first made it to RADIO in 2011. And then they came back in 2013, and, sort of, the rest is history, you know. vSAN launched in 2014. We had a press release this week for Carbon Avoidance Meter. It was an idea that actually started as a calculator many years ago. Was used, and then sort of died on the vine, so to speak? One of our SEs said, "You know, this is a good idea. I want to evolve this a little bit further." Came and pitched an xLabs idea, and we said, "Alright, we're going to fund this as an xLabs Lite. Three to six months project, limited funding, work on one objective --you're still doing your day job-- move the project forward a little bit." Then Nicola Acutt, our Sustainability VP, got involved, wanted to move the idea a little bit further along, came back for another round of funding through an xLabs Lite, and then GSS, with their Skyline platform, picked it up, and that's going to be integrated in the coming months into Skyline, and we're going to be able to give our customers a carbon, sort of, readout of their data center. And then they'll be able to, you know, map that, and get a bigger picture, because obviously, it's not just the servers that are virtualized, there's cooling in the data center plants, and all these other factors that you've got to, you know, take into account when you want to look at your carbon footprint for your facility. So, we have lots of examples of how these innovation pathways take different turns, and sometimes it's Team A starting with an idea, Team B joins in, and then there's this convergence at a particular point, and then it goes nowhere for a couple of months, and then, a business unit picks it up. >> One of the things that's come out-- Pat Gelsinger mentioned that a theme outside of the normal product stuff is how people do work. There's been some actual R&D around it, because you guys have a lot of distributed, decentralized operations in R&D because of the global nature. >> Yeah. >> How should companies and R&D be run when the reality is that developers could be anywhere? They could be at a coffee shop, they could be overseas, they could be in any geography, how do you create an environment where you have that kind of innovation? Can you just share some of the best practices that you guys have found? >> I'm not sure if there's 'best practices', per se, but to make sure that the programs are open and inclusive to everybody on the planet. So, I'll give you some stats. For example, when RADIO started in the early days, we were founded in Palo Alto. It was a very Palo Alto-centric company. And for the first few years, if you looked at the percentage of attendees, it was probably over 75% were coming from Palo Alto. We've now over the years shifted that, to where Palo Alto probably represents about 44%, 16% is the rest of North America, and then the balance is from across the globe. And so that shift has been deliberate, obviously that impacts the budget a little bit, but in our programs, like a Borathon, you can hack from anywhere. We've got a lot of folks that are remote office workers, using, you know, collaborative tools, they can be part of a team. If the Borathon's happening in China, it doesn't stop somebody in Palo Alto or in Israel or in Bulgaria, participating. And, you know, that's the beautiful nature of being global, right? If you think about how products get out of the door, sometimes you've got teams and you are literally following the sun, and you're doing handoff, you know, from Team A to B to C, but at the end of the day you're delivering one product. And so that's just part of our culture, I mean, everybody's open to that, we don't say, "Oh, we can't work with those guys because they're in that geo-location." It's pretty open. >> This is also, really, an essential driver, and I think I saw last year's RADIO, there were participants from 25+ countries. But this is an essential-- not only is VMware a global company, but many of your customers are as well, and they have very similar operating models. So that thought diversity, to be able to build that into the R&D process is critical. >> Absolutely. And also, think about, you know, when you're going to Europe. Smaller borders, countries, you deploy technology differently. And so, you want to have that diversity in thought as well, because you don't just want to be thinking, "Alright, we're going to deploy a disaster recovery product in North America where they can fail over from, you know, East Coast to West Coast. You go to Europe, and typically you're failing over from, you know, site A to site B, and they're literally three or four miles apart. And so, just having that perspective as well, is very important. And we see that, you know, when we release certain products, you'll get, you know, better uptick in a certain geo, and then, "Why is it stalling over here?" well it's, sometimes it's cultural, right? How do you deploy that technology? Just because it works in the US, doesn't mean it's going to work in Europe or in APJ. >> How was your team involved in the commercialization? You mentioned vSAN and the history of that, but I'm just wondering, looking at it from an investment standpoint of deciding which projects to invest in, and then there's also the-- if they're ready to go to market, the balance of "How much do we need to invest in sales and marketing to be able to get this great idea-- because if we can't market it and sell it, you know, then there's obviously no point." So what's that balance like, within your organization, about, "how do we commercialize this effectively, at scale"? >> So that is ultimately not the responsibility of my group. We'll incubate ideas, like, for example, through an xLabs project. And, you know, sometimes we'll get to a point and we'll work, collaborate with a business unit, and we'll say, "Alright, we feel this project's probably a 24 months project", if it's an xLabs Full. So these folks are truly giving up their day job. But at the end of the day, you want to have an exit and when we say exit, what does that exit mean? Is that an exit into a business unit? Are you exiting the xLabs project because we're now out of funding? You know, think about a VC, I'm going to fund you to, you know, to a particular point; if there is no market traction, >> Right. >> we may, you know, sunset the project. And, you know, so our goal is to get these ideas, select which ones we want to invest in, and then find a sort of off-ramp into a business unit. And sometimes there'll be an off-ramp into a business unit, and the project goes on for a couple of months, and then we make a decision, right? And it's not a personal decision, it's like, "Well we funded that as an xLabs; we're now going to shut it down because, you know, we're going to go and make an acquisition in this space. And with the talent that's going to come onboard, the talent that was working on this xLab project, we can push the agenda forward." >> John: You have a lot of action going on so you move people around. >> Exactly. >> Kind of like the cloud, elastic resource, yeah? (laughs) >> So, then, some of these things, because xLabs is only a two-year-old, you know, we haven't had things exit yet that are, you know, running within a business unit that we're seeing this material impact. You know, from a revenue point of view. So that's why tracking the journeys is very important. And, you know, stay tuned, maybe in about three or four years we'll have this, similar, you know, interview, and I'll be able to say, "Yeah, you know, that started as an xLab, and now it's three years into the market, and look at the run rate. >> So there's 31-- last question for you-- there's 31 projects that were presented on mainstage. Are there any that you could kind of see, early on, "ooh", you know, those top five? Anything that really kind of sticks out-- you don't have to explain it in detail, but I'm just curious, can you see some of that opportunity in advance? >> Absolutely. There's been some great papers up on mainstage. And covering, you know, things on the networking side, there's a lot of innovation going in on the storage side. If you think about data, right, the explosion of data because of edge computing, how are you going to manage that data? How are you going to take, you know, make informed decisions on that data? How can you manipulate that data? What are you going to have to do from a dedupe point of view, or a replication point of view, because you want to get that to many locations, quickly? So, I saw some really good papers on data orchestration, manipulation, get it out to many places, it can take an informed decision. I saw great-- there was a great paper on, you know, you want to go and put something in AWS. There's a bull that you get at the end of the month, right? Sometimes those bulls can be a little bit frightening, right? You know, what can you do to make sure that you manage those bulls correctly? And sometimes, the innovation has got nothing to do with the product per se, but it has to do with how we're going to develop. So we have some innovation on the floor here where an engineer has looked at a different way of, basically, creating an application. And so, there's a ton of these ideas, so after RADIO, it doesn't stop there. Now the idea harvesting starts, right? So yes, there were 31 papers that made it onto mainstage, 61 that are posters here. During that review process, and you asked that question earlier and I apologize, I didn't answer it-- you know, when we look at the papers, there's a team of over 100 folks from across the globe that are reviewing these papers. During that review process, they'll flag things like "This is not going to make it onto mainstage, but the idea here is very novel; we should send this off to our IP team," you know. So this year at RADIO, there were 250 papers that were flagged for further followup with our IP team, so, do we go and then file an IDF, Invention Disclosure Form, do those then become patents, you know? So if we look at the data last year, it was 210. Out of those 210, 74 patents were filed. So there's a lot of work that now will happen post-RADIO. Some of these papers come in, they don't make it onto mainstage; they might become a poster. But at the same time they're getting flagged for a business unit. So from last year, there were 39 ideas that were submitted that are now being mapped to roadmap across the BUs. Some of these papers are great for academic research programs, so David Tennenhouse's research group will take these papers and then, you know, evolve them a little bit more, and then go and present them at academic conferences around the world. So there's a lot of, like, the "what's next?" aspect of RADIO has become a really big deal for us. >> The potential is massive. Well, Mornay, thank you so much for joining John and me, >> Thank you. >> and I've got to follow xLabs, there's just a lot of >> (laughs) >> really, really, innovative things that are so collaborative, coming forward. We thank you for your time. >> Thank you. >> For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin; you're watching theCUBE, exclusive coverage of VMware RADIO 2019, from San Francisco. Thanks for watching.

(energetic music) >> [Narrator] From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Radio 2018. Brought to you by VMware. >> Hello everyone. Welcome to the special CUBE coverage here in San Francisco, California for VMware's Radio 2018 event. This is their R&D big event kickoff. It's like a sales kickoff for engineers, as Steve Herrod said on stage. Out next guest is Mornay Van Der Walt, VP of the Explore Group, Office of the CTO. Also, program chair of the Event Today Conference, working for the collective of people within VMware on a rigorous selection committee for a high bar here at your event. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for joining me. >> Thank you. >> Talk about the event, because I know a lot of work went into it. Congratulations, the talks were amazing. I see the schedule. We have Pat Gelsinger coming on later today. We just had Ray O'Farrell on. This is like the, I don't want to say, Burning Man of Vmware, but this is really a recognition, but also really important innovation. Take a minute to talk about the process that you go through to put this together. It's a fantastic event. The smartest minds, the cream rises to the top. It's hard, it's challenging, it's a team effort, but yet you gotta ride the right waves. >> Right. So, RADIO: R&D Innovation Offsite. And as you said, it is tough because we've got this huge R&D community and they've all got amazing ideas. So they get the opportunity to submit ideas. I think this this year we have over 1,700 ideas submitted, and at the end of the day we're only going to showcase 226 of those ideas across research programs, posters, breakout sessions, Just-In-Time BOFs, Birds Of a Feather. You know, so, the bar is high. we've got a finite amount of time, but what's amazing is we take these ideas, and we don't just showcase them at RADIO. We have four other programs that give us the ability to take those ideas to the next level. So when we think about the innovation programs that come out of OCTO, this is really to drive what we call "Off-Road Map Innovation." So Raghu and Rajiv, with our Product Cloud Services Division, are driving road map, zero to three years out the stuff that you can buy from sales, >> [Furrier] Customer centric? >> Customer centric, yeah. OCTO is providing an innovation program structure, these five programs: Tech Talks, Flings, Borathons, RADIO, and xLabs, and as a collective, they are focused on off-road map innovation. Maybe something that's-- >> Give me an example of what that means, Off-Road Map. >> Sure. So last year at RADIO we did a paper that was showcased on functions as a service. So you think of AWS Lambda, right. [Furrier] Yep, yep >> VM was uniquely positioned, with the substrate, to manage and orchestrate VM's containers and whynot functions. So this radio paper was submitted, I then, as the xLabs group, said we're going to fund this, but given where we are in this market, we said, "Alright, we'll fund this for 12 months." So, we're incubating functions as a service. In July/August time frame, that'll actually exit xLabs into the Cloud Native business. >> It's a real rapid innovation. >> Very rapid. >> Within a 12 month period, we're gonna get something into a BU that they can take it to market. >> Yeah, and also I would say that this also I've seen from the talks here, there's also off-road map hard problems that need to kind of get the concepts, building blocks, or architecture... >> [Van Der Walt] Correct. >> With the confluence of hitting, whatever, its IOT or whatever, blockchains, seeing things like that. >> [Van Der Walt] Yeah. Correct. >> Is that also accurate too? >> Very true. And, you know, Ray had a great slide in his keynote this morning, you know, we spoke about how we started in 2003, when he joined the company, it was all about computer virtualization. Fast-forward 15 years, and you look at our strategy today, it's any Cloud, any device, any app, right? Then, you gotta look to the future, beyond there, what we're doing today, what are the next twenty years going to look like? Obviously, there's things like, you know, blockchain, VR, edge computing, you know, AIML... >> [Furrier] Service meshes? >> Services meshes, adaptive security. And, you know, people say, "Oh, AIML, that's a hot topic right now, but if you look back at VM ware, we've been doing that since 2006. Distributed resource scheduler: a great example of something that, at the core of the product, was already using ML techniques, you know, to load-balance a data center. And now, you can load-balance across Clouds. >> It's interesting how buzzwords can become industry verticals. We saw that with Hadoop; it didn't really happen, although it became important in big data as it integrates in. I mean, I find that you guys, really from the ecosystem we look at, you guys have a really interesting challenge. You started out as "inside the box," if you will. I saw your old t-shirt there from the 14 year history you guys have been doing this event. Great collection of t-shirts behind me if you can't see it. It's really cool. But infrastructures, on premise, you buy, it's data center, growth, all that stuff happened. Cloud comes in. Big data comes in. Now you got blockchain. These are big markers now, but the intersection of all these are all kind of touching each other. >> [Van Der Walt] Correct. >> IOT...so it's really that integration. I also find that you guys do a great job of fostering innovation, and always amazed at the VM world with some great either bechmarks or labs that show the good stuff. How do you do it? Walk me through the steps because you have this Explorer program, which is working. >> [Van Der Walt] Yeah >> It's almost a ladder, or a reverse ladder. Start with tech talks, get it out to the marketplace... >> [Van Der Walt] Do a hackathon. >> Hackathon. Take us through the process. So there's four things: tech talks, borathons, which is the meaning behind the name, flings, and xLabs. >> Correct >> Take us through that progression. >> ... and RADIO, of course. >> And RADIO, of course, the big tent event. Bring it all together. >> So, I'm an engineer. I have a great idea. I wanna socialize it; I wanna get some feedback. So, at VMWare, we offer a tech talk platform. You come, you present your idea. It's live. There'll be engineers in the audience. We also record those, and then those get replayed, and engineers will say, "You know, have you thought about this?" or "Have you met up with Johnny and Mary?" They're actually working on something very similar. Why don't you go and, you know, compare ideas? I can actually make that very real. I was in India in November, and we were doing a shark tank for our xLabs incubator, and this one team presented an idea on an augmented reality desktop. We went over to another office, actually the air watch office, and we did another shark tank there. Another team pitched the exact same idea, so I looked at my host, and I said, "Do these two teams know each other?" and the guy goes, "Absolutely not," so what did we do? We made the connection point. Their ideas were virtually identical. They were 25 kilometers apart. Never met. >> [Furrier] Wow. >> You know, so when, that's one of the challenges when your company becomes so big, you've got this vast R&D organization that's truly global, in one country 25 kilometers apart, you had two teams with the same idea that had never met. So part of the challenge is also bringing these ideas together because, you know, the sum of the parts makes for a greater whole. >> And they can then collectively come together then present to RADIO one single paper or idea. >> [Van Der Walt] Absolutely, or go ahead and say, you know what, let's take this to the next step, which would be a borathon, so borathons are heckathons. >> Explain the name because borathon sounds like heckathon, so it is, but there's a meaning behind the name borathon. What is the meaning? >> Sure. So, our very first build repository was named after Bora Bora, and so we paid homage to that, and so, instead of saying a heckathon, we called it a borathon. And one of our senior engineers apparently came up with that name, and it stuck, and it's great. >> So it's got history, okay. So, borathons is like ... okay, so you do tech talks, you collaborate, you socialize the idea via verbal or presentation that gets the seeds of innovation kinda planted. Borathon is okay, lets attack it. >> Turn it into a prototype. >> Prototype. >> And it gets judged, so then you get even more feedback from your most senior engineers. In fact ... >> And there's a process for all this that you guys run? >> Yeah, so the Explorer groups run these five innovation programs. We just recently, in Palo Alto, did a theme borathon. Our fellows and PE's came together. Decided the theme should be sustainability, and we mixed it up a little bit. So, normally, at a borathon, teams come with ideas that they've already been developing. For this one, the teams had no idea what the theme was going to be, so we announced the theme. Then, they showed up on the day to learn what the five challenges were going to be, and some of those challenges, one of them was quite interesting. It was using distributed ledger to manage microgrids, and that's a ... >> A blockchain limitation >> Well, it's a project that's, you know, is near and dear to us at VMWare. We're actually going to be setting up a microgrid on campus, and if you think about microgrids, and Nicola Acutt can talk more to this, we're gonna be looking at, you know, how can we give power back to the city of Palo Alto? Well, imagine that becoming a mesh network. >> [Furrier] With token economics. >> How do you start tracking this, right? A blockchain would be a perfect way to do this, right? So, then, you take your ideas at a borathon, get them into a prototype, get some more feedback, and now you might have enough critical mass to say, "Alright, I'm going to present a RADIO paper next year." So, then, you work as a team; get that into the system. >> [Furrier] And, certainly, in India and these third-world countries now becoming large, growing middle-class, these are important technologies to build on top of, say, mobile... >> [Van Der Walt] Absolutely. >> And with solar and power coming in, it's a natural evolution, so that's good use case. Okay, so, now I do the borathon. I've got a product. Flings? >> It's a prototype, right, so now ... >> You can socialize it, you have a fling, you throw it out there, you fling it out there What happens? >> Yeah, so, I've done something at a borathon. It's like, I want to get some actual feedback from the ecosystem: our customers and partners. That example I used with vSAN. You know, vSAN launched. We wanted to get some health analytics. The release managers were doing their job. The products got a ship on the state. Senior engineers on the team got a health analytics tool out as a fling. It got incredible feedback from the community. Made it into the next release. We did the same with the HTML clients, right? And that's been in the press lately because, you know, we've got Rotoflex. Now, there's HTML, but that actually started - two teams started working on that. One team just did HTML >> a very small portion of the HTML client, presented a RADIO paper. Two years later, another team, started the work, and now we have a full-fledged HTML client that's embedded into the VIS via product. >> [Furrier] So, the fling brings in a community dynamic, it brings in new ideas, or diversity, if you will. All kinds of diverse ideas melting together. Now, xLabs, I'm assuming that's an incubator. That brings it together. What is xLabs? Is that an incubator? You fund it? What happens there? >> So with an xLabs, the real way to think about it, it's truly an incubator. I don't want to use the word "start-up" there because you've clearly got the protection of the larger VMware organization, so you're not being a scrappy start-up, but you've got a great idea, we see there's merit ... >> [Furrier] Go build a real product. >> We see it more being on the disruptive side, and so we offer two tracks in the xLabs. There's a light track, which typically runs three to six months, and you're still doing your day job. You know, so you're basically doing two jobs. You know, we fund you with a level of funding that allows you to bring on extra contracting, resources, developers, etc., and you're typically delivering one objective. The larger xLab is the full-track, so functions as a service. Full-track, we showcased it as a RADIO paper last year. We said, "Alright, we're going to fund this. We're going to give it 12 months worth of funding, and then it needs to exit into a business unit," and we got lucky with that one because we were already doing a lot of work with containers, the PKS, the pivotal. >> [Furrier] Do the people have to quit their day job, not quit their day job, but move their resource over? >> [Van Der Walt] Absolutely. >> The full-track is go for it, green light >> Yep >> Run as fast as you can, take it to this business unit. Is the business unit known as the end point in time? Is it kind of tracked there, or is it more flexible still. >> Not all the time. You know so sometimes, with functions it was easier, right? So, we know we've got pull for zone heading up Cloud native apps. The Cloud native business unit is doing all the partnerships with PKS. That one makes sense. >> [Furrier] Yeah. >> We're actually doing one right now, another xLabs full, called network slicing, and it's going to play into the Telco space. We've obviously got NFV being led by Shekar and team, but we don't know if network slicing, when it exits, and this one is probably going to have a longer time arise and probably 24-36 months. Does it go into the NFV business unit, or does it become its own business unit. >> [Furrier] That's awesome. So, you got great tracks, end to end, so you have a good process. I gotta ask you the question that's on my mind. I think everyone would look at this, and some people might look at Vmware as, and most people do, at least I do, as kind of a cutting-edge tier one company. You guys always are a great place to work. Voted as, get awards for that, but you take seriously innovation and organic growth in community and engineering. Engineering and community are two really important things. How do you bring the foster culture because engineers can be really pissed off. "Oh my god! They're idiots that make the selection!" because you don't want engineers to be pissed cuz they're proud, and they're inventing. >> Yep, yep. >> So, how to manage the team approach? What's the cultural secret in the DNA that makes this so successful over 14 years? >> So, before I answer that question, I think it's important to take a step back. So, when we think about innovation, we call this thing the Vmware "innovation engine." It's really three parts to it, right? If you think about innovation at its core: sustaining, disruptive, internal, external, And, so, we've got product Cloud Services group, Raghu and Rajiv, we've got OCTO, headed up by Ray, we've got corp dev headed up by Shekar. Think of it as it's a three-legged stool. You take one of those legs away, the stool falls over. So, it's a balancing act, right? And we need to be collaborating. >> [Furrier] And they're talking to each other all the time. >> We're talking to each other all the time, right? Build or buy? Are we gonna do something internal, or we gonna go external, right? You think something about acquisitions like Nicira, right? We didn't build that; we bought it. You think about Airwatch, right? Airwatch put us into the top right quadrant from Gartner, right? So, these are very strategic decision that get made. Petchist presented at Dell emc world, Dell Technologies world. He had a slide on there that showed, it was the Nicira acquisition, and then it sort of was this arc leading all the way up to VeloCloud, and when you saw it on one slide, it made perfect sense. As an outsider looking in, you might have thought, "Why were they doing all these things? Why was that acquisition made? But there's always a plan, and that plan involves us all talking across. >> [Furrier] Strategic plan around what to move faster on. >> Correct >> Because there's always the challenge on M&A, if they're not talking to each other, is the buy/build is, you kinda, may miss a core competency. They always ... what's the core competency of the company? And should you outsource a core competency, or should you build it internally? Sometimes, you might even accelerate that, so I think Airwatch and Nicira, I would say, was kinda on the edges of core competency, but together with the synergies ... >> [Van Der Walt] Helped us accelerate. >> And I think that's your message. >> [Van Der Walt] Yep. >> Okay, so that's the culture. How do you make, what's the secret sauce of making all this work? I mean, cuz you have to kinda create an open, collaborative, but it's competitive. >> [Van Der Walt] Absolutely. >> So how do you balance that? >> You know, so clearly, there's a ton of innovation going on within the prior Cloud services division. The stuff that's on the truck that our customers can buy today, alright? We also know we gotta look ahead, and we gotta start looking at solving problems that aren't on the truck today, alright? And, so, having these five programs and the collective is really what allows us to do that. But at the same time, we need to have open channels of communication back into corp dev as well. I can give you examples of, you know, Shekar and his team might be looking at Company X. We're doing some exploratory work, IOT, I did an ordered foray. IOT is gonna be massive; everybody knows that, but you know what's going to be even more massive is all the data at the edge, and what do you do with that data? How do you turn that data into something actionable, right? So, if you think about a jet engine on a big plane, right? When it's operating correctly, you know what all the good levels are, the metrics, the telemetry coming off it. Why do I need to collect that and throw it away? You're interested in the anomalies, right? As we start thinking about IOT, and we start thinking all this data at the edge, we're going to need a different type of analytics engine that can do real-time analytics but not looking at the norm, looking at the deviations, and report back on that, so you can take action on that, you know? So, we started identifying some companies like PubNub, Mulesoft, too, just got acquired, right? Shekar and his team were looking at the same companies, and was like, "These companies are interesting because they're starting to attack the problem in a different way. We do that at Vmware all the time. You think about Appdefense. We've taken a completely different approach to security. You know what the good state is, but if you have a deviation, attack that, you know? And then you can use things like ... >> It's re-imagining, almost flipping everything upside-down. >> Yeah, challenging the status quo. >> Yeah, great stuff, great program. I gotta ask you a final question since it's your show here. Great content program, by the way. Got the competition, got the papers, which is deep, technical coolness, but the show is great content, great event. Thanks for inviting us. What's trending? What's rising up? Have you heard or kind of point at something you see getting some buzz, that you thought might get buzz, or it didn't get buzz? What's rising of the topics of interest here? What's kind of popping out for you; what's trending if I had to a Twitter feed, not Twitter feed, but like top three trending items here. >> Well, I'll take it back to that last borathon that we did on sustainability. We set out the five challenges. The challenge that got the most attention was the blockchain microgrid. So, blockchain is definitely trending, and, you know, the challenge we have with blockchain today is it's not ready for the enterprise. So, David Tennenhouse and his research group is actually looking at how do you make blockchain enterprise ready? And that is a difficult problem to solve. So, there's a ton of interest in watching ... >> [Furrier] Well, we have an opinion. Don't use the public block chain. (both laugh) >> So, you know, that's one that's definitely trending. We have a great program called Propel, where we basically attract the brightest of the brightest, you know, new college grads coming into the company, and they actually come through OCTO first and do a sort of onboarding process. What are they interested in? They're not really interested in working for a particular BU, but, you know, when we share with them, "You're gonna have the ability to work on blockchain, AI, VR, augmented reality, distributed systems, new ways of doing analytics >> that's what attracts them. >> [Furrier] And they have the options to go test and put the toe in the water or jump in deep with xLabs. >> Absolutely >> So, I mean, this is like catnip for engineers. It draws a lot of people in. >> Absolutely, and, you know, we need to do that to be competitive in the valley. I mean, it's a very hard marketplace. >> Great place to work. >> You guys have a great engineering team. >> Congratulations for a great event, Mornay, and thanks for coming on theCUBE. We're here in San Francisco for theCUBE coverage of RADIO 2018. I'm John Furrier. Be back with more coverage after this break. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)