(vibrant music) >> Everyone, welcome to our Palo Alto studio. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. We're here for a digital conversation. Part of our new digital events, part of our new structure of bringing people into the studio and also doing remotes. We'd love to do that in the era of the travel bans, but it's always great to have local Silicon Valley executives and startups here. Milin Desai, CEO of Sentry IO is here with me. Former VM-ware industry executive, CEO of Sentry IO hot startup. Thanks for coming in. >> Thank you for having me. >> So you can drive in. You don't have to fly anywhere. It's all good. No wearing masks. The coronavirus is crazy. I'm so glad we have you at this studio and get this content acquisition. Thanks for coming in. I want to get your take on your company before we get into the industry thing. I think you look at some of the most successful categories that just came out of nowhere. You know, you look at AIOps for instance in driving, you know, observability. But what is observability? That beginning, that comes with public page or do the list just goes on and on. The cloud has created this agile market where real time and then a lot of automation is going on so whether it's error logs like a Splunk does and that's scaled up. You get to doing something variation with software code that's not just something breaks, a phone rings. There's a lot a going on. You're this really kind of the tailwind here for you with cloud scale. What does Sentry doing? What's their secret sauce? >> So, the simplest way I would put it is we help you measure and monitor your code in production in close to real time. So what does that mean? You look at all, all of the companies that we talk about, whether it's a John Deere on one end or a Spotify on the other. They're all getting more digital in nature, which means they all trying to interact with their customers more often, building apps with an interface with an API. And as we all know, through our own personal experiences, if you don't get a great experience, you simply move on. So, you pull up your app, you pull up Uber, it's not working, let me look at Lyft. Right? That's the kind of consumer behavior that's starting to take in. >> So-- >> Meaning you don't really know as the owner of the app if they're abandoning or not, it's just down sales or? >> Correct. And so, what we do is we help developers monitor how the usages of their code in production. So, as users hit editors, a checkout button is not working or a user is having a bad experience on a mobile phone, whereas the same application on a browser looks fine. We in real time giving notification saying X number of users on this type of device, on this type of interface are having issues. And not just that, it's an alert, it's an alert that says this is the issue, this is the line of code where the issue's taking place, this is the potential commit that you did in your getRepository, which is causing it. So, it's the full kind of metadata around the issue. Which typically would be, what, two days? I take it as filed. Support me, look at it. Hey, customer has an issue, let's reproduce it. Well the customer is gone. So this is all done in real-- >> Or it could be a complete blindspot too. You don't know, right? This is the thing. This is why I love this whole digital transformation role where instrumentation is re-imagining how everything's being done. So for instance, you could see a code push and you go, okay, it's in production. And then why are sales down? Why is usage down? And then you've got to do a postmortem. >> Correct. >> No one called, just going what the hell happened? Fingers are blaming. He did it! Here you're trying to get to the point where you can see that error earlier or before or after, during as it work. >> It's almost in real time. Close to real time. As the user has the error immediately through either PagerDuty, Slack, email, whichever your communication medium is. You get to know a user or a set of users are having an issue. You click it, you go to this portal. All the metadata is right there. So, it's in real time. And so to exactly your point, it's not after the fact. >> Yeah. >> Right, it's happening. And so, the CTO of tackled.io, said it best, it's a startup that helps companies get on to marketplaces. He said, "Hey, we found issues before our customers even filed a issue against us." So, you know, this helps us deliver true customer experience, as a development team. >> So, on the developers that target profile get that and they're coding away. They don't have time to do research. They'll be like, "Oh, I better bolt on some instrumentation here." That's been the successful move. Look at like what Datadog has done in DevOps. Just the easy onboarding, free use it. Is that the same model you guys are taking this free land, adopt then expand. So, is it a freemium, could you explain the business model? >> Yeah, so, a Sentry is a open source. And so customers can take the piece of software that we have as is, fully functional and run it themselves on their data center on their cloud, or they can choose a SaaS version from us and we offer kind of like a free version and then you pay for the plan. So, what we typically see is customers turn it on, developers turn it on and they like it. And then, the best score I got recently was, one CEO who said, "Hey, you know, I don't send you that many events, but I see the value of what you do, so I decided to pay you." Right, so, they went from free to paid. And that's kind of typical pattern that we see. And the best thing about this is, it takes you approximately four lines of code to get started. Four lines of code in your code and you get started getting the benefits of Sentry. >> What's good sign for monetization when you got the paying it forward literally with cash. I want to ask you the difference between the open source version because I saw in the origination story it's really interesting. They were at jobs and they saw this side project grow into a real opportunity. And it's always good to see the open source not die, right. So, this been maintain the project. When would someone use the open sources? Is that the hardcore folks or, so SaaS, obviously makes sense. It's easier if you're doing a lot of the extra support and whatnot on top of it. But what's the use case for the folks who are going to bring it in house loaded on their cloud? >> I think we'll leave it to our customers to decide that. And we've seen, folks who say, "Hey, you know, we have, we're going to try it out, it's a small, we have got a good DevOps practice. We're going to get it up and running." Here's what happened with one of my teams at VMware. The engineer in charge looked at it and said, "It's not worth my time given what the price on SaaS is." Right, so, like our smallest plan is $29, which satisfies most startups or small software projects. And his point was like, "Hey, you know, it's almost better for me to start and using that versus--" >> Well they weren't using NSX. I'm sure Pat Gels would be like, "Get shipped the next product." Well this is the trade off, right? I mean, so that's what's beautiful of open source. You want to bring it in and make it work for yourself. That trade off has to be economically there. >> Correct. >> So you have a nice balance of if you're hardcore, no problem. >> Please use-- >> Use it, contribute, be part of the team. But if you want ease of use and all the bells and whistles and the speed. >> I think it comes down to what we are starting to see, which is, how much do you care about getting to value faster and where is your value? Is it in kind of running and operating all these pieces of software or is it in, you know, getting value to your end customer? So, if you are focused on building your business, we are this value add that kind of gets you there faster. So, stop focusing on kind of building the infrastructure. Start delivering kind of the value to the business. >> So I'm going to ask you, so, are you the CEO? So the founders who I've not met. I look forward to interviewing them. They seem pretty cool. I'm sure they probably say, "Oh this guy from VMware, he's probably the big company guy." 'Cause they were like, we're going to Dropbox now. Engineers, I could almost imagine their, what they're like. Probably skeptical, this is VMware guy. How did you get through the interview process? Obviously, you're the CEO, you made it. Were they skeptical ? What worked? Why you, why'd you go there? >> You know, the best thing about this transition is Chris and David. So, David was the CEO. He is now the CTO. He's the founder creator along with Chris. And it was his decision, to bring someone into the company, given that we are seeing this, you know, we are now at 20000 plus customers and he felt like he wanted to kind of go back to building and creating and bring a partner in crime. So, that was the good part. I would say like, we started talking and we are at the same energy level, you know? So, I think it just worked out in the way we communicated. And you've known me for a bit. I'm kind of hands on. I like, you know, to kind of get into things and build businesses. So, I think the profile matched out and both of us took our time. So it was, a long dating process, where we got to know each other. Not just as, you know, what we do for work. But, you know, how we operate and had coffee and lunch and dinner and--- >> Well, it is a dating, dating and marriage is always thinking, but the founders are, it's a tough move to make. I mean, for founders to be self-aware, to bring in someone else. But also the fit has to be there. And a lot of entrepreneurs just check the box and try to hire someone too fast that could fail or gets jammed down by the VCs, you know. So, the founders are pretty kind of reluctant. So, that's interesting that you did that. >> Yeah, he's been thinking. You know, the thing about David is he's super thoughtful and hopefully you'll get to see him soon. He's been thinking about this for a bit. And he took his time. And he worked through the process and that's why I said it felt like we were not just talking about, me joining as a CEO, as much as us getting to know each other and building this for the long run. And so we really took our time on both ends--- >> And he want to to get back on the engine of the business? He's a developer, right? He's like the code. >> Just don't want to, >> It was-- >> 20000 customers, you going to get hiring people. It's HR issues. This probably, I don't want to do that. >> That and you know it was kind of the personality thing, right? Grit and grind, you know. We kind of, can somebody come in and have the passion, the same that he believes in what we do. And he saw that and I saw that in him and I'm like, this is a great opportunity that I cannot forego. >> So talk about the, I say love modern, the modern startups because, you know, you're on the right side of history when you got cloud at your tailwind and kind of DevOps, like vibe you get going on with, I know it's not DevOps, but it's common like cloud scale and the agility. How are you guys organized? You guys have virtual teams. You have a central office. Is there a physical place? Do people come in? What's the, how is the company's philosophy on work environment? >> So, we actually have three locations. One in San Francisco, which is the headquarters, where we are located. And then in Vienna, Austria, where one of the early engineers and pioneers live. And so we built around that person and that location. >> No one's complaining about that. >> No. >> Vienna's not a bad place there-- >> Not a bad place. I haven't visited yet. (laughs) I am looking forward to it. I was supposed to be there in April, but, given the circumstances, I'm postponing it. And we recently started this past year in Toronto. And so, we are--- >> So three strong areas for tech talent for sure. >> And then we do have some employees working from home. So, we try and hire the best, and then we accommodate. But we do try to kind of cluster around these three locations. >> So, I got to get your take as the CEO, obviously we're all grappling with this, work at home, Covid 19, the coronavirus, is impacting. Everything's being canceled here in Silicon Valley. I would say Seattle has more of a hotspot than our area. Mostly China as China. What's the view that you guys are taking right now? You're telling people who work at home. Obviously, events are being canceled. Places where people doing Biz Dev, KubeCon was canceled, Dell Technology World is can-- I mean everything's being canceled. How's that affecting your business and what's your philosophy? How are you guys are executing through this tough time? >> I think as a company we've kind of taken the step for having people work from home and we did it on a location by location basis. So, for folks in San Francisco, especially because folks who are commuting on public transportation and other things. We wanted to make our team feel comfortable. And so we've instituted a work from home policy, for, I think we said two weeks, but I think it's going to keep going until we get a clear signal from the government, both locally and at the federal level. So that's kind of where we are as a team. And then what we noticed was the Austrian government kind of had similar regulations of everyone's working from home. Slack, you know, Google Hangouts. We spending a lot of time on video, making sure we are connected as a team. And you know, just that spirit of how we operate and talk to each other continues. As a business, we are a bottoms up business. So, what I mean by that is folks sign up, they use the product. And developers are right now globally still fully functional. The only difference being they're now working from home. So we feel like as a business, we'll be fine. And we are ensuring that our customers through this transition and through this period of kind of unknowns are able to continue to be successful for their customers. >> It's funny, I was talking with someone, it's like there's going to be some, obviously, sectors, like events are going to take a big hit. South by got canceled, Coachella's being canceled. All the tech events are being canceled. That's why we're going to be doing our stuff at the studio with virtual events, for theCUBE. But certain things are going to be different. You going to see pregnancy, boom. You know, nine months later, people are going to be having kids cause they're home alone or divorces depending on how you look at it. But productivity, developer wise has been talked about as actually developers want to just crank out some code. They don't have to come into the office. You can be more, I mean you can still be productive. Developers have been doing this for decades. >> I think-- >> At least if they are more. >> You know, I think you, you know, I think there might be a scenarios of adjustment, a period of adjustment. And then folks will get comfortable. So, it's super important to create that engagement model. Whether, do you have the tooling to keep the team engaged. And there companies that are completely remote. And so we're making sure we learn from their best practices around that. But I do believe that, for tech companies or even for manufacturing companies focused on building software, developers are going to be productive. >> Okay, so a baby boom's coming, divorce rate's going to go up and productivity is skyrocketing. (both laugh) >> For developers. >> For developers. Well, I mean it's a good time. Okay, can I get your take on the industry now. Honestly, putting all the coronavirus aside, we saw a surge in public cloud check. Done. And ask you when your VMware with NSX coming in and becoming the engine with software defined networking as part of the Series piece. You're starting to see hybrid clear as day. It's going to happen. Multi clouds on the horizon. So, you now have a three wave cloud game going on. Wave one, done. Wave two is hybrid. Wave three maybe bigger than them all with multicloud. Do you agree with that trend analysis and what's your take on that? >> So, this is where I'll probably kind of look back at my time at VMware. I think, you know, definitely see the multicloud wave catching on. But I would use the word multicloud as in, not a app spread across three clouds as much as, you know, a company choosing to have a certain assets in AWS, certain assets in Azure, certain in Google. So, I don't see yet this idea of an app being stretched across the three clouds but definitely, while I was-- >> VMware tried that. (both laugh) >> While I was at VMware and in talking to customers, we definitely saw adoption of multiple clouds. And that's where when I was working with the cloud health team, this idea of managing cost and security across three clouds became very common as a pattern that came up. You definitely see that as a kind of directional thing that a lot of organizations are doing. >> Yeah, the idea of just rapidly shifting up workloads based on pricing, all that stuff. I think it's aspirational at best because development teams are now just getting their groove on with hybrid and operation, cloud operations. So, I can see a day where if you can manage the latency network issues, maybe some day, but I mean, come on, really? I think about how hard that is, just latency alone. >> And the issue is like, architecturally you have to make really good choices to get there. So, I think you might see that in like kind of tech software firms. We're thinking about, how do I stay cloud neutral? But for the most part, if you want to take the full value of AWS or full value of GCP, you want to go deeper in there. And use all their services. >> Yeah, I think that's great insight. Let's riff on that a little bit because one of the things I was talking to Dave Alante and Stu Miniman about was, if you look at the multicloud, I don't think it's going to come from a vendor. I think if you look at the success of the Facebooks of the world, even Dropbox where your founders came from, early on, they had to just basically build it from cloud native, from ground up. And all the hyper scalers use open source. They built all their stuff. No one was selling them anything. They just did it. So, I think you'll see smart architectural moves, but that'll be the unicorn. That'll not be the standard. That'll be the exception, not the rule. I don't think you can sell multicloud, in my opinion, yet, or I don't think that'll even be possible. But I think someone will come out and say, make those architectural decisions saying, "I have an architecture that works multicloud because we architect it that way." >> Yup, yup. And I think that's kind of the more, kind of from an engineering standpoint, I think you'll see more of that. I think from a, you know, from a kind of solution standpoint, you will see folks saying, "I will help you manage or secure or build into each of the clouds and give you kind of common pattern versus the latter of it." And engineering team says, "Here's a way to architect for multicloud." >> You know, we pay a lot of attention to the next gen kind of psychologies. Obviously, we do a lot of coding on with our cube cloud that's coming out now. But, how do you see the founders you're working with and that in this new peer group that's developing. I call it, the next gen entrepreneur, technical entrepreneur. As they look at the vast resources of cloud and all of the data opportunities there and mobility, internet things and all this stuff going on. What is the general mindset right now of these kinds of entrepreneurs from a technology perspective? How are they looking at the problem space? What's your take on this new landscape as an entrepreneur? >> Yeah, I'll give you kind of what got me super excited about Sentry. Like how, why did I think about that? Which is if you look at 2000 to 2010, we did software defined infrastructure. Things started moving into software. 2010 to 2020 was, as you correctly wanted a cloud, hybrid, everything became kind of as a service. I think this next decade will be about data. So, companies using the data to get a competitive advantage or figuring out, you know, how to stay ahead, whether it's competitively or even to win a market. And the other aspect of this is because everything is so, as a service, API centric, I think it's going to explode how we develop things. And I think this is going to be truly now the decade for the developer, who's going to make deeper choices, greater choices, buying decisions. And so, with data kind of exploding, and the management of it and getting insights out of it is one aspect of it. And, you know, as somebody who's looking at Sentry, we do a lot of that, right? Which is how are customers using it? What are they using? What languages? And everything else that goes with that. But on the other end, developers are going to start kind of using things and create a whole new set of use cases that's going to change the way we think about it. So I think there's a whole set of elements around how to use this infrastructure to build new applications, creative products, that is going to be a massive boom. >> I think that's a great point. I think that's great insight. Because you think about observability, which I was just joking earlier on about, but I think the relevance observability is network management applied to value real time, right? Because if you can instrument everything, the smart people are going to saying, "Hey, I can just instrument this and get the data I need rather than dealing with this hassle process we had before." So, it brings up that kind of philosophy of kill the old to bring in the new or something new that kills the old. So, it's an interesting phenomenon. I think it's very relevant. But I want to get your, question as a CEO now, you've got, you're at the helm, helm of a company is technical. And talking about architecture, what's your architecture for the venture? What's your plans? How do you see the, you said you're going to come and build this next level growth. What's your architecture look like? Are you going to, do more of the same? Any new things that we see? What are you going to... What's your plan? >> Fundamentally, you know, we as a kind of set of users in the world today, have spent a lot of time monitoring, as I told you earlier, machines, systems and applications, right? And so there's a lot of successful companies doing that. But if you fundamentally believe that this is the decade where you're going to write more code than we've ever before or refresh more applications than we've ever before. Our focus is code and how it does whether it's in a staging environment, in a canary deployment, or in production. How do we measure code and monitor code in production. And the impact of that code to the end users. So it could be errors and now increasingly code performance. So you will see us kind of venture into this idea of helping developers. Not only find issues that they run into production like we talked about before, but also be able to say, looks like over the past three releases, our logins per second have gone down progressively by 10%. Why is that happening? Where is that happening? Which team made that change? So, you will see us kind of really double down on this idea of measuring and monitoring code going forward, complimenting how we measure monitor systems, machines and applications today. >> Yeah, I mean, code has got to be managed, as people more, people contribute. It's like a compiler for the compiler. (laughs) >> It's like if code fails, your business-- >> Code for the code. >> Yeah. >> Meta three meta meta as they say, but code for the code. But that's, it's basically code management in a way, right? It's the code data. You're leveraging that code relationship to the application. >> And so we talk about applications a lot. And so we write code, we store code, you know, in a getRepository. Now there's a whole set of elements around securing it. We deploy it. What about measuring and monitoring it? That is the element where we focus and kind of bring that whole cycle together. Helping that application developer be successful. >> What's it like for you going from VMware to the startup? What's the biggest, coolest thing that's happened? >> It's been a great transition. You know, and I always say this to folks who ask me for career advice. They say, always choose the people you work with and the people you work for. And I've been fortunate enough to do that and I think this transition has been great for that reason alone. Which is I've had the time to get to know the team at Sentry. They got to know me and it's just been, it's been fantastic. I think the velocity of and the pace at which I can make changes, has been the most fun part of it. >> And you've got like 25, 20000 paying customers 50000 total customers roughly in that range. Pretty sizeable. Employee count, how many employees do you have? >> 100 plus employees and-- >> Still small, still small. >> Yeah, still small. And we're going to probably double this year, give or take. And you know, it's 20000 customers from every startup. I've spoken to a startups, over 100 startups in two months. And it's amazing to see their reaction and their love for Sentry. >> And funding, how many rounds of funding have you guys done? >> We just finished Series C, in September of last year. 40 million, any Accel growth. So, we feel really good about where we are. With the revenue ramp that we've seen, we're in great shape. >> And pretty good numbers in terms of a head count too, very leveraged SaaS model. Get the developers. >> Yes. >> Great. Well, we're going to be entertaining a lot of developers at DockerCon this year. DockerCon used to be an event for Docker. Now they sold half the business to Mirantis. They're focusing on Docker developers. We have an event here. We're doing a virtual event. So, a lot more developer action coming. We'll talk more about that. Love to meet your founders, have them come in too. We want to thank you for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Milin Desai, CEO of sentry.io, former VMware executive with a great hot startup, Series C funded, growing here in Silicon Valley, San Francisco and in Austria. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (vibrant music)

>> (upbeat music) From San Francisco it's the CUBE covering VMware radio 2019, brought to you by VM ware. >> Welcome to the cube Lisa Martin with John Furrier in our exclusive coverage of VM ware Radio 2019 in San Francisco. John and I are pleased to welcome back to the cube Rajiv Ramaswami, COO of products and cloud services Rajiv, Welcome back >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Oh thank you glad to be here as always >> Lisa Martin: 15th annual radio a lot of research a lot of innovation. Give our viewers an idea of some of the historical products and services that have come out of the radio and the innovation programs at VMware has been doing for a long time >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Yeah I mean, I'm excited about Radio right I mean many of our key innovations came out of Radio. Very early back in the days the fundamental concepts of vSphere replication and disaster recovery came out of Radio papers, a long time ago. Some of the innovations within vSAN were showcased at the radio many many years ago. So across the board, I would say many of the products you know are key portions of the products were deployed I mean in the form of Radio papers over the years and if you look at this year for example you know we can see how things have changed with the times as VMware is evolved, so does Radio along the way. So this year, I was struck by the number of papers on machine learning and AI right, it's forward-looking of course everything we do here and it's just now ML is now across many of our products and that's being you know seen in Radio and of course, what we see at Radio is always more forward-looking than what's actually in the products. So that's an area I see a lot of work and another area I see a lot of work on is Kubernetes and the cloud native and then of course the traditional areas of how to optimize storage, networking and even when it comes to networking and so forth, papers on cloud networking and how you know we can optimize for networking in the cloud So in general, I mean the trend here is a reflection of what we are probably likely to do in the next several years >> John Furrier: One of your jobs as Chief Operating Officer I see, to operate them on the product side of the business generate that kind of enablement for the sales team and ultimately customers right. >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Yes >> John Furrier: So you've got to kind of mind the farm here >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah >> John Furrier: kind of cultivate and see what's organically growing out of VMware from the top engineering and stuff top papers. what's the process? how do you go attack the all the action because there's a lot of forward-looking stuff there's a lot of pie in the sky is a lot of cool different stuff that looks weird >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: but sometimes that weird stuff looks is actually going to be the future so you got to have a broad perspective, how do you act this? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Yeah, in fact I would say one of our biggest jobs is portfolio management. We have to look at balance our investments across this range that you talked about right so at any point in time we will have a set of technologies and products that we incubating these are relatively new sometimes new areas for us sometimes extensions to existing areas that we are incubating and these are of course businesses that don't drive much revenue right now but over times yes hopefully well right and then there are businesses, I'll give you examples of each of these now there are businesses that are in growth mode where we've already established a good product market fit we know that we can scale this business and its a different set of investments and in that growth category and then there are relatively mature businesses that we know we need to run efficiently in fact they need to generate cash that we can go back and invest into these other right and then there are things that we want to get out of and diverse so we look at our R&D portfolio along those and at any point in time there's stuff in everyone of these buckets to give you some examples of what's in each of these today obviously we have a big focus in cloud native most of that is incubation at that point right not substantial revenue, yet a big you know we've acquired Heptio for example last year to bolster our own internal efforts so a lot of work a lot of effort being put into that with the idea of building a future business in a significant way some of our more recent growth business were are now very much in the scale category you look at VSAN, you look in a EXSi, you look at VeloCloud as part of the overall networking portfolio these are all in the scale category right they have substantial revenues are growing very nicely we're investing some of our other bigger businesses like vSphere which is our classic you know foundation for everything we do Yes, I would say in the mature, you know category and then over by an large we've reduced investments and some small businesses, I mean if we were to look at historically vCloud Air that the business we got out of right so these we do along the way otherwise >> John Furrier: a good call, or you quit call >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah so in fact one of Raghu's and my biggest jobs really is to figure out how much we put in each of the these buckets, make sure you're placing enough in the future of best category while also making sure your delivering on the numbers for the day >> John Furrier: I love that's exactly what I was going at this about the future bets >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah >> John Furrier: what is on the business side one of the I asked Pat Gels, I'll ask you the same thing but different context, you know this is an engineering celebration as well as kind of competition internally I guess kind of proud to be people are proud to be here kind of an elite status but engineers want to work for a company and solving hard problems >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: also retention and attraction thing. what are some of the hard problems that you're trying to deal with on business side? you're operating some of the core products and it sounds easy to say abstraction layer make things look easy, but these are hard problems what are the hard problems that you're solving that need to come out of this world? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah and some of these are better not this product they cut across every aspect of the company so far example we as a company are trying to move towards more of a cloud oriented business model right so that's why are group is called products and cloud services and those are combined in the sense that everything that we build up the product over time most of its get software also as a service and the underlying code base and the technologies are all the same great example for example is our VMware cloud offerings right they are all built on VMware cloud foundation which is offered as a software package for our customers who want to build private clouds its also available as a service from us as well as familiar for our partners. Now, for us the notion of transforming our company to be able to do both right just products from moving products to also to being delivering cloud services has a profound impact across every function R&D for sure, go to market in terms of how you align the Salesforce to sell that all our systems that are necessary to transact that business so that's a pretty big transformation that we are going through right now. >> John Furrier: That's a lot of software that needs to be code and automation is not easy >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah >> John Furrier: that's why machine learning problem is hot here >> Rajiv Ramaswami: absolutely yes >> Lisa Martin: What is that balance when you are looking at innovations that come out of not just radio but the other innovation programs that VMware has about managing the balance between the R&D investment and the investment that's going to be needed on the sales and marketing side to get the product or service the solution out on the market to start really dialing up this as a big revenue contributor. How do you look at that as you talk about that portfolio a minute ago and when something becomes like say it comes out of radio and it's well, this is a really good idea, but how are you looking at balancing the R&D investment versus what you know you're going to have to do to get it to market? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah and by the way that's a great point there because, you know too often engineers think about hey I've the coolest product let me go build it they don't think about how it needs to be sold and the how it needs to be sold is equally important the front more important than how you build it right. So in our world so when we do our planning on an annual basis for example we look at a holistic plan that covers the entire gamut right which means R&D, sales and marketing right and when within sales and marketing, investment across what our core sales team needs to do what our specialist sales teams you know For example some of these newer products will require specialist to sell they might be targeting different buyers within the customer base right, so we have to align our R&D and go to market investments together to create a full plan for the year and we do that for pretty much every product in our portfolio >> John Furrier: what I going to ask, I want to ask you a business question I know R&D is going to be key you guys did a great job, so Congratulations but one of the things that we're seeing in the market is new shifts in the landscape of either tech enablement or trends like kubernetes or 5G gives companies an opportunity to reset their architecture >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: and you now see with virtualization some of the things that you guys are doing we're seeing couple pivot points for customers now one cloud native, kubernetes >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: software - defined, your on-premise cloud operations, not C private cloud [Rajiv Ramaswami] yeah >> John Furrier: cloud and then like 5G >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: a little bit of you know networking these are major trends >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: how should companies start thinking? okay I have an opportunity as a catalyst to shift what what's your take on that trend advice to those customers because they might be able to do wholesale changes or migration >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Yeah, look from a customer perspective right, every one of them is going through this transformational journey and depending on you know where they are right, so if you take Telco's for example that's where the 5G applies primarily, I mean they have they go through this big capital cycles of investment that are geared towards massive technology generation size so last generation was 4G LTE and now the next thing is 5G and that is big new capital cycle and there's an opportunity at that time for them to fundamentally re-architect how they deployed their infrastructure and that's what they are doing with network function virtualization is 5G and so if 5G and we kind of go hand-in-hand together and its an opportunity too for them to go deploy a new infrastructure that is much more virtualized much more using standard hardware running everything in virtualized applications what's right the network function than they could before >> John Furrier: so the edge now is more dynamic than it was years ago so we look at 4G. What we have, what year that was, but I mean that even with healthy there's many many years ago the edge was not built out now you have a programmable intelligent, the edge market >> Rajiv Ramaswami: exactly >> John Furrier: how is 5G going to impact the Telco's? because this might be the right time for them to actually have a real business model. >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Yeah, well look I think 5G's offers them to try out many different models for example given that many the 5G radios are much more shorter range right, so your going to deploy more smaller cell sizes that means for example there's a new business model possible where you deploy radio multiple operators are sharing that radio, right where as traditionally today you know your base station so AT&T has their own, Verizon has their own tomorrow you could be okay you could have a bunch of >> John Furrier: basing radio service provider >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah in the buildings right here that and that could be shared by all the providers so its a completely different business model so those are the kind of things that 5G enables >> Lisa Martin: are there any projects that are being featured here talked about here at radio 2019 along the spirit of and NFP,5G >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Oh yeah there's a bunch of projects I mean on the floor right, you can go in fact even in the posters that you're sitting around here you'll see a lot of projects in 5G we have some nascent efforts on this what we call networks slicing for example >> Lisa Martin: and what is that? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: so the ability are going to share the network that you deploy a single network infrastructure and you are able to slice that into chunks and have different people use those chunks >> John Furrier: and I think that points out a trend that we've been reporting least on the queue and ways people say don't move data around move compute to the edge or software-based virtualization. You're putting basically virtualization on the radio's >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes exact software exact edge yeah, >> John Furrier: so when you look at the marketplace when you say okay VMware, it's got a transfer over one of the things that's come up a lot we've heard on the cube is a VMware's great, they don't know networking though now of course if NSX is didn't win now we know where that comes from multiple competitors. But talk about the networking aspect of what you're doing? because, the investment in this era that's the first real SDN company there's been some SDN around before but you guys not only do SDM you got networking, you got compute, security, talk about networking in the innovations there >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah let me talk about the division for networking and then also how its part of all the solutions right not necessarily just a stand alone sale so networking fundamentally you know it used to be about connect, for example it used to be about connecting in the campus, your laptops and desktops into the network right it was called workgroups and then campus networking or your land campus LAN then it became Wi-Fi came in there right and the in data center it was about connecting servers to storage and servers to other servers right all about this box mentality in the branch it was about putting in a branch router and providing a network connection through that right, but if you look at fundamentally what networking is evolved to now it's about connecting, what connecting users applications and data and these could be anywhere, right. you use this could be anywhere you could be sitting in a Starbucks shop accessing your applications that are sitting in a cloud someplace not even running through your enterprise network so the notion of a classic network has changed completely. so the network now is much more, it's really a virtual network because, you don't you know its not physical plumbing anymore that matter yes you need the physical plumbing the physical plumbing is going to be provided by multiple people that you as an enterprise do not even necessarily control. You might control your campus LAN you might control your data center, but you don't control the could right, you don't control running over a service partner networked into the edge of the branch and so fundamentally now the new networking layer has to be a layer of software that really delivers and connects and secures these applications users and data and that's really the concept of SDN that's evolved into what we call the virtual cloud Network and that fundamentally is our focus and for us we're not really burdened by the fact that we have an underlying physical network business that we have to go protect and we have to go build. >> John Furrier: your software company >> Rajiv Ramaswami: we're software company >> John Furrier: so you know like Cisco you (mumbles) switches and routers that's if you don't have one on the top of them >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah it doesn't matter what do you have underneath right everything runs on top and so that's the fundamental philosophy now when you look at how this is now starting to get deployed of course you know and you're seeing, we started out with the data center and we started you know focusing on virtual machines connecting virtual machines now we now extend that to connecting containers. Right, you can you need to network containers right applications running in containers they need to be networked you need to network base metal machines you still have some of those leftovers right, so you've got a network do's and then you have to network applications running well >> John Furrier: its not a software question, I want to ask this is the trend who was seeing hyper convergence is proven >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah >> John Furrier: glass multiple things into one thing and reduces one footprint and some easier to manage the 5G and these shifts and technologies cause some give people that operating reset they're our architecture a lot of people say okay Cisco's got gear, I got UCS and other thing >> Rajiv Ramaswami: sure >> John Furrier: so how it collapse that in well? they want me to not do that you guys are kind of a different approach or do you then Cisco? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: so this is exactly what we do right so now you take the networking that we've got with virtual floor networking and you actually integrate that as part of a solution with our VML foundation okay and now what, are you have a full solution that can be deployed on any hardware right, can be Cisco UCS hardware, can be del hardware or it can be HP hardware so you essentially have a software foundation that includes compute storage, networking automation all put together in a solution that you can deploy on Prem and you can deploy in the cloud >> John Furrier: that's like super hyper convergence >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes and in fact hyper-converged now it's not just about storage and compute anymore right that's how it started out. Its our compute storage networking all put together available not just on Prem, in a hardware appliance software that can be run on anything and extended it into the cloud that's really the new hyper-converged >> John Furrier: and that's new chanak's is plan actually, they are moving from a hardware, trying to do software. >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah we've always been there right. We started out with software and we've expanded that to the hybrid cloud right. Think about where we're at now we've got you know we mark Loudon AWS, we've got our four thousand plus VM cloud provider partners and increasingly more and more users >> John Furrier: so, you are saying copied you guys basically >> Rajiv Ramaswami: absolutely >> John Furrier: okay >> Lisa Martin: imitation is the highest form of flattery (laughing) >> Lisa Martin: question for you in terms of customers. You know we we're I'm sure going to hear some phenomenal successful customers at vmworld, which is just around the corner, how our customer is going to benefit from the innovation? and this is we talked about the competition, competitive nature of radio, but also the fact that one of these guys and gals are doing this in their spare time so this is really deep-rooted passionate projects we expect customers in any industry to be able to benefit from this and say the next nine to twelve months? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yeah look I mean at the end of the day you know these are complex systems and software that we have provide and deploy all right and a lot of innovations as under the covers and we have to translate that into value propositions that resonate with the customer that they can go deploy so what's the customer trying to do right? so think about it from a customer lens in so the customer is trying to say, well okay I'm on this journey I've got for example figure out how to have a completely you know dynamic infrastructure where I can run my applications and those could be if my existing applications modern applications that I'm building and they need to be able to run flexibly anywhere I want to be able to run them on Prem I want to be able to run them in the cloud give me an infrastructure that can solve that problem and that's really what we do with our hybrid cloud solution so the and so we have solved that problem for the customer then the customer's next problem is going to be around saying that well I want that flexibility I want to use AWS, I want to use Azure, I want to use Google and every one of these has a silo by itself I've got to retrain all my people to come manage every one of these separately VMware can you help us with that and we provided consistent operations and management's control planes that work across everyone of these clubs but allowing them to solve that problem easily and networking and security we already talked about right there's notion of being able to connect the absence users and data so converting all these innovations into you know solutions that customers can use is really what we do well >> John Furrier: you know we like to put pressure on you guys and ask the tough questions we've got to say you guys have done a great job, over the past couple of years on the product tech site a lot, a lot of clarity on vCloud air get that out of the way amazon relationship now that you got vCloud foundation, things are coming together the numbers are up >> Rajiv Ramaswami: yes >> John Furrier: Boss happy everyone's happy. What's next? What's the big next journey chapter and wave you ridin? >> Rajiv Ramaswami: look I think we're still early days when it comes to the two big transformational seems to be around right. cloud in containers I think we've got all of our solutions in the market now. We have to scale and build them past talked about this mission of how to you know make these cloud delivered service bigger chunk of our portfolio going forward and then containers in kubernetes I think is a big big cloud native with a big new area for us a lot more to go when it comes to networking in times transforming networking insecurity. I do expect us to be doing more and more there in that front and on the inducer I thin on there which we didn't cover much about here there's a fundamentally massive opportunity for us with modern management on Windows right with our partnership with Dell and taking really work space one into every windows machine that's out there and you also saw that partnership announcement with Microsoft last week at deltek world a couple of weeks ago so all of that I think you know There is a lot for us to execute >> John Furrier: I just want an alienware monitor the curve monitors are so good. I want one of those. >> Rajiv Ramaswami: Oh yeah those are beautiful monitors, elite. >> Lisa Martin: Well an impressive trajectory that you have no doubt the queue will be following closely, Rajiv thank you so much for joining me on the cube VMware radio 2019 we appreciate your time >> Rajiv Ramaswami: oh thank you Lisa, thank you John glad to be here again thank you >> Lisa Martin: our pleasure for John Fourier, I'm Lisa Martin coming to you from San Francisco at VMware radio 2019. Thanks for watching (high intensity music)