>> from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering the em. Where Radio twenty nineteen brought to you by the PM where >> hi. Welcome to the Cube. Lisa Martin with John Furrier way are in the middle of the excitement and the action at the, um where Radio twenty nineteen in San Francisco. Please welcome back to the Cube. David Tennant House, the chief research officer at the end. Where. David Welcome back. >> Thank you. It's always great to have the Cube here radio, >> and it's we had in a really exciting day. And then suddenly this whole space opens up and you can imagine all the innovation and the collaboration that's going on in here. This is the fifteenth radio. This is just one of several big programs that the M where does that really inspires and fosters this really collaborative, innovative culture? You've been here for five years. You came from Microsoft tells a little bit about what makes not just radio, but the emir's culture of innovation unique and really gives it some competitive advantage in the market. >> Yeah, well, so that you know, I think there's a number of different things there. People are super passionate about technology I think there's also this shared thing at P m. Where which is, you know, we're a little understated, right? We're not a big consumer brand. And, you know, we almost pride ourselves in creating technology that goes under the covers, right? So whether it's inside the data center, you know, can we make, you know, with virtual ization, right, Khun? Oui. Make it so that you can run ten times as many virtual machines as you had physical machines and the applications never have to know, right? So that's kind of, you know, for us, it's perfect, technically hard problem and, you know, a little understated. So that kind of, you know, fits with our culture. I think another thing that we found, you know, having a research group often a challenge. His researchers will go to people in the product teams, and they sort of want to start the discussion. I've got this new idea, and maybe it could really help you with your product. And, you know, meanwhile, of course, the product people are, you know, they're working against deadlines. They want to get stuff out. They don't want people derailing their, you know, their agenda and their work. So something we find at PM where which is really I find unique, is let's say we goto a product team in many other companies environments, and I'm really not naming anyone. What happens is you gotta have a discussion with somebody who sort of, you know, is the expert on whatever name your technology and you say the reason starting point isn't Hey, I've got this whole new way of doing your stuff, right? Starting point is can you tell me how your stuff works? And usually the response that other companies is. Why do you want to know? Right. It's a really pointed defense of we find it. The m where is really people are incredibly open. I don't, you know, know exactly how this got embedded in the culture. Maybe because it was a spin off from the university, but deeply embedded in this culture is Oh, yeah, let me tell you how this stuff works. And, uh, you know, maybe you'LL have a better idea. We don't even have to start with, You know, we have a better idea. It's like, you know, and then from there way can have ongoing discussions about >> Oh, that prints and improve it. That Cruz, why you have a community? Yeah, transparent creates openness that creates solidarity around open >> concept. Exactly. And and that's kind of what you see here. Radio. I don't know if people can see in the background is This is, you know, already day for in the Expo Hall and people don't want to leave and they're walking around. They're looking at each other's posters, they're talking to each other, making connections, and then they're going to build on those connections in the coming, you know, week. It's months and over the next year. And, you know, this is they said, you know, this has been going on for four days. You think that by now people have seen all the posters, they talked about everything there is still finding things that they want to talk to the kid. >> The candy store is a lot to taste here and learn ivory engaged graphic contents good and congratulations and thank you. And I just want to add, >> like something I love is, uh, getting here. Actually, before people arrive on the first day each year because when they come in, it's like greeting old friends right. It's sort of like a reunion except nobody's worried about, you know, like school reunion. You know, people are just playing happy to see each other, so that fits with that community thing, you know, because sometimes they're there in their teams and they don't necessarily get what you're being humble. We've talked last year about some of the content you put together in the team, so it's not. It's a hive mind, but you're the chief researcher, >> So you've gotta figure out on at least some canvas to start shaping framing sets of agendas to go after that. So if you can. So Lisa and I were just talking about this here today about how if you have a tech canvas, you don't want to create barriers of thinking. You want to open it up but not make it two restricted. That's your job. What can you tell us about the research agenda that's here and way out there and how how do you see that aperture range >> of yeah topics? Well, I think you know, I want to re first before even getting into that agenda, reaffirm a key point you made right, which is don't constrain people too much. So radio, by the way, is really very, you know, bottoms up. This is not about saying, you know, here's the four topics people really submit. It's a very competitive process people want to be. Not every engineering BM where gets to come to radio, right? It's it's eighteen hundred developers, which is an incredible commitment by the company. He's still a small fraction of our community, so they're actually submitting, you know, bottoms up, uh, to you know, see you and then we have a program committee that reviews it. So that's Ah, bottoms up part of the process from where I sit, You know what I think happens is whether it's our research team or filtering. You know, we'LL look at what comes. Bottoms up and say, Well, what's the signal to noise? For example, there's you know, we've had this year a tremendous amount of machine learning activity, and you see this in the posters here and in the presentations. However, you know that it wasn't too hard to detect a rising signal a couple years ago. So in that case a couple years ago, we said, OK, this is important. We see it in the external community way see it in the developer community. We see it within our own teams and developers. Clearly important. So starting a few years ago, we pulled together some of the senior most technologists, the principal engineers, a subset of them, and said, Hey, we want you guys to dio what we call a of a test study for tests are going faster, but also Veum, Where? Technology Study. We want you to actually do a strategy, but not a business strategy. Technology strategy. Look at the landscape of this. Look at where we are. Look at where we need to be and start charting a course. So in that sense, what we you know, coming out of that was, for example, information of an internal machine Learning program office? Who? One of them gold. It's billed the ML community. You talked about that before. Inside the company. It's not just a technical goal, it's an organizational on community goal. And that's just sort of, you know, kind of one example that wasn't the only output of that. But it's it's one example and what you see a big surprise, you know, kind of ten x, the engagement in the space so that that would be, you know, one case. I think one of the key things is, well, pick up on different topics. And then the thing that we do that I think it's different from some other companies to stop and say what our enterprise is going to need to do because at the end of the war in enterprise company and our customers, our enterprises and their needs her actually, although they're in different verticals, for example, let me just use machine learning. But it could be blockchain. It could be I ot. Actually, what they need is different from, say, the machine learning that that the hyper scale er's needs. So we realised that actually, there's a very interesting needs for us to explore the underserved parts of machine learning because all of these companies, if you look at them, they have a larger number of machine learning problems to work on the hyper scaler. You know, Facebook, Google, love them. They're actually working on a very focused set of problems, right? It's you know it's at serving. It's the social network graph. It's, you know, cat photo recognition, and I don't mean to knock those and they've got a great business is built around them. But notice it's a small number of problems. They do it it immense scale. Okay, given Enterprise probably wants to apply machine learning to a large number of problems, they're not going to run each of those problems on a million servers there, actually, probably running those problems on tens or hundreds of the EMS, right? And so what's the technology they need to address those problems and you can go through way looked at, you know, machine learning That way. We looked at I ot that when he said, You know, look, we think the analytics and the M L. That's a really cool things. We want to play in that space, too. But you know what everybody's trying to do. That, and not a lot of attention being paid to our enterprise is going to secure right and and managed all these I O T devices and the gateways to the devices. So we chartered a strategy for both research and business in that space, watching same thing, really exciting technology Now for enterprises, it's not about big point. It's not about currency, right? It's a money decentralized trust. It's an infrastructure for decentralized trust and effectively think of this is, you know, a database like thing. Except now it's going to be shared across many different organizations. And it's going to change how organizations work with each other and how they work with their auditors on how they work with their regulators. So this is great. >> But, you know, let's focus on what am I the way I just retweeted while you were talking? I just got a clip from last year. I asked you that question about Blockchain. You nailed it Way talked about how all the hype and fraud and i CEOs and confusing it. Yeah, but the world kept moving along. A lot of progress on the supply chain side, lots of interest, rafters trust. He sat realized that it's not about >> the eye. Indio. Yeah, so wave you, that is, You know that there's the high poker and, you know, they'LL be a deflation after the hiker passes. But there's real signal under there and so, you know, and we just turn our strategy and we keep marching down that path, and we're, you know, building up more partners, more people to work with. So it's it's that sort of thing. Quantum computing, right? We're not, you know, developing our own quantum computers. I can tell you that right now, and we're not even doing quantum algorithms. I have some albums researchers, but they're not doing quantum algorithm. You know, I kind of wish we were doing some of that stuff, but what we did do, and we looked at this and we said, Okay, hold on a key challenges. Uh, when the quantum computers do show up, we're going to need to transition to new cryptography to quantum resistant. You know, our post quantum there. Two terms, they're used. Cryptography enterprise customers are going to need to do that. Well, one second, they can't wait till this shows up. It takes ten years. Change your crypto. And by the way, you know if you've encrypted data and other people got a copy of your encrypted data, if it's long living data like, you know, health care records, you don't want them decrypting that in five or ten years. So you got a sort of start now and again, this goes back to what oh enterprise customers need to do Well, okay. The new crypto standards for miffed and others aren't quite ready, Okay, but But by the time they're ready, it's going to be too late to get started. Okay, But we could start working with our customers to work on crypto agility to change how they handle their cryptography. First off, get a good inventory of it, and then get set up so that they're using essentially plug mobile libraries so that it's easier for them to change their cryptography as soon as the standard shows up. And by the way, even if quantum computing takes a lot longer than we all think, this is good hygiene anyway. In other words, it's just a no regrets move for our customers and Khun. We sort of help them go down that path. And this is an example where we can actually also partner with our colleagues that are, say, other parts of Del technologies to help make that work for We're working with others in the industry, you know, intel, and we've kind of convened a form of players within the industry. You know, start working in that direction again. What do enterprise you know, what's the cool new technology. What oh enterprises need. >> So you talked about this event being open in terms of like the agenda and the topics being driven from the bottom of it, That gets really cool. So in the spirit of talking about customers and, like you were saying designing for what enterprises need and all of the variations that encompasses where is customer influence not just a radio, but within the em wears research and innovation programs and strategy. What's that? I mean, I just Advisors don't like that. It's >> a great question. So, like many companies, you know, we do have various advisory body's right, so we bring them in and, well, we'Ll sort of half like, you know, the sea tabs are customer technical advisory body. So the more technical people in some of our kind of more leading customers and we'LL show them things that we're working on, you know, under any kind of India arrangement, and get their feedback, you know, sort of OK, Does this make sense? You know? If not, why not? If it does, you know often it's not that finery, right? It's how would you use it? And we really sort of them give that feedback backto our teams. Now many people do this kind of thing, so we have lots of other customer engagements. We bring customers into forms like radio to be on panels, breakouts, things like that to give presentation so that basically, let's face it in one or two events, that's not going to convey much signal to our engineers. It's a madam, a six storey engineers way want you to be out talking to customers, right? So getting our engineers to be at PM world but way have programmes to actually allow engineers and encourage them to get out, make customer visits above and beyond. And by the way, if you look at it again, our principal engineers in our fellows I think what you find is the vast bulk of them are distinguished because they love engaging with customers. They don't just do it because it's part of the job. They love getting that feedback, so it actually helps them in their career, and we try to sort of essentially teach that to folks. One of the programs we have that in the CTO office, but I love it's not him. It's not in my part, So you know this is a case of I love all the things that we have that just my own, You know, uh, is it's like it's like loving your nieces and nephews, right? Not just your own children way. You were going to ask you your favorite child so way have, like, the CTO ambassadors program, Uh, which basically is coming from the field. So we have, you know, field engineers. They're not on the development side, but these air super technical people that are out in the field touching our customers all the time in any company, there's always a subset of those folks that just have a really good intuitions for where the customers are going and are good at raising their hands about that. So way actually have a program with CTO Ambassador Program CTO way where, you know, literally we give them a pin right way, give them a bad on DH. So we've tried to identify that subset of the field engineers and way regularly bring them in, you know, to pollo alter or bring them together. Whether it's a V m world or radio or whatever again, same thing. We're going to let them know what we've got cooking. We're going to get their feedback. We're gonna hear from them on. And this is not just on research right away. This is on the product pipe lines. You know what's going on in the road map and everything else now to me again. That's just actually a starting point. Because when I put my people in front of Seo is its telling my people, this is the group of folks. When you have a new idea, don't just talk to the product people go find CTO is because, you know, one of the best ways and I'm gonna be a little selfish. One of the best ways for us to influence the customers it influence the company is to get customers excited about something you were doing right. So you know Helen Lawson talk about technology push. And if you really want to be a success, we'LL get innovating it. In a large company, you need to create whole absolutely, and so the CDOs are great. They help us find people to do posies with, because you have to find just the right. You have to find a customer that has a need for this new stuff, but they also have to be somebody that understands this isn't yet a product. This is a journey, right? We're going to jointly try something out. You're gonna learn about whether this new tech can help you and how it could help you. We're going to learn what the product ultimately means, but, you know, you're not gonna be able to actually take out your checkbook at the end and get it right away. So you have toe, you know, be comfortable investing the time and energy, and then they have >> a spy in three that is really one of the core elements that's essential to drive innovation. >> Absolutely. And you need that. As I said, you need that customer partnership to help fine tune things. It's, you know, one of the things more broadly I try to do with research team is, you know, on the one, and give them the freedom to say, Hey, I have a new idea and I want to explore that new idea. That's great. Now, if you think about it right, then they're running open. Luke, they're running based on, you know, kind of their guesses. What educated guess. Right? And their intuition what people might want in the future. So that's good. What a then do it say. Okay, that's great. Uh, you know, you did a little bit. You wrote a paper build a prototype. Okay, so now they get a prototype bill. Okay, That starts getting this idea little more concrete. They're okay with that. The next step, it sort of is. Okay. Now, >> you got to >> get somebody to use that prototype, because I need you to get. And you need you to get feedback and create a feedback loop. Because otherwise, what's gonna happen is they made that first intuitive guests. So let's say they had their really phenomenal and they have a seventy five percent chance of getting it right. Okay, that that. But if they now continue to make a series of educated guesses and they have, ah, you know, seventy eighty percent chance on each educated guests and they make a siri's of four or five of those they have almost, you know, very quickly, close to zero chance of being in the right spot if you just multiply out the probabilities. But if they make that first big league and they start getting customer feedback That actually helps them right get more and more focused on where the bull's eye is. You have a really great chance of changing, >> so they don't build this great technology with no customers. Crichton second >> don't want somebody for a problem, right? But if you want to, you know, kind of have >> some really big ball change. You've >> got to be. >> Well, you've got to be willing to make that first big step without the feedback because the customers don't wear right. And if you just went to the customers said if you had this, what would you do? And they probably say, No, no, no. Instead of that, I want another feature over here. So you got to go and build that first prototype and take the leap of faith. The issue is, if you compound the leap of faith, your odds of being successful slope. If you quickly get into the hands of the customers, get feedback and start focusing in on where the value is, your chance goes up dramatically. >> Awesome. I wish we had more time with you, David. We're gonna let you get back to all of the amazing innovation that I have no doubt it's going on right behind us. Thank you. Something, Johnny on the Cube today. >> Look forward to seeing you again soon. >> Absolutely. For John Ferrier, I'm least Martin. You're watching the cubes. Exclusive coverage of the young Where? Radio twenty nineteen. Thanks for watching.

>> Woman: From San Fransisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware Radio 2019. Brought to you by VMware. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware's Radio 2019, Lisa Martin with John Furrier, John, we started really bright and early this morning with a very excited Pat Gelsinger. VMware, this is the fifteenth Radio, Radio is R&D innovation offsite. There's about 1800 VMware engineers from lots of B.U.s, very competitive event, very passion driven event, and really just is a... what a great manifestation of the VMware culture and the spirit of innovation. >> This is the best of the best event, and the story around Radio 2019 is really a cumulation of multiple years, as you pointed out, of cultural innovation, engineering. VMware has always been an engineering culture, coming out of Stanford, and from day one they've had that guiding principle. They've also been open and transparent, as we heard on theCUBE interviews today, that has created the culture of community. Open Source dives beautifully into it. And so radio is about that cumulation of the talent. It's the best of the best internally, they submit papers, it's a bottoms-up process, so it's truly a meritocracy from an engineering standpoint. But it's a culture of engineering, and their job is to come up with the future, and what's notable about this event is it's the second year now theCUBE's been here. Last year was the first year they've invited press, so three outlets from the media were allowed, were one of them. And we get exposed, we get to look under the hood, and look at the engine of innovation coming down the road for VMware and their partners. So, it's a super exciting event, Radio is a community within VMware that's now global, 50% outside of North America and the United States, all a bottoms-up, a hive mind, we heard that here. Really successful for VMware to continue this, bringing the press in, get the stories out there, take that transparency and open message from the content. We can share it, we get access to the data, it's a beautiful co-creation formula with theCUBE and VMware. It's a success, and their challenge is can they take it global and extend it. >> And this is day four of Radio19 and you can hear the amount of people that are still here, still passionate, these are projects that they're doing outside of their day jobs. So, the transparency that you talked about, I loved when we were talking with David Tennenhouse about the bottoms-up approach, that this is not a set agenda, we're going to talk about Blockchain, and IOT, and security, this is driven as you said, from thousand-plus submissions of people who want to have papers presented here. >> People don't want to leave, because this is like a kid in the candy store, it's like being intoxicated with technology and there's so much content here. Now that's also a bellwether and a barometer of the company. If R&D is weak, you don't have the innovation. There's companies that don't really invest in R&D, they wouldn't have this kind of mojo or this kind of excitement. But VMware prides themselves on doing 15% R&D, that's way outside the box. The rest is all done within the constraints of what they're doing in the market, so relevance is high, but still room to play and dream the future. And again, I've always believed that you can't dream it up, you can't build it. >> Now of course, VMware, all about, as every business should be, we needed to be developing products and solutions and services that the market needs to solve real-world problems. One of the cool things we learned about today, John, is, from the EMEA CTO John Bagley, is the CTO Ambassador program, the CTOA program, where there are folks, and this is also a competitive program, it's a couple, I think you said a four year tenure to get folks through the program, but being out in the field, in customer sights, learning about all these enterprise organizations, what they actually need, so in that spirit of openness that you talked about, they're bringing in customer information, building and fostering relationships, so that what they're investing in from an R&D standpoint, is going to be able to solve customer problems that they don't even know they have today. >> Yeah, that Champion program, that Ambassador CTO program, that Joe mentioned, what's interesting about VMware, and this is what I love, I admire about the company, as well as companies like AWS and Amazon web services, the people are smart and they think about scaling. So, that's kind of a cliché these days, how does it scale, makes you look smarter if you ask that question, but VMware actually thinks about how to scale, and so, the problem that they had was, they had these field CTOs that were out evangelizing with customers half the time, and doing internal real CTO work around architecture with the teams to build great stuff and move that to market, they couldn't scale. So they used their community of their own ecosystem to find people to come in and replicate. You heard Joe Bagley, "I had to be Steve Herrod," cause he can't be everywhere. That's the mindset of this culture, and I think they have real opportunity to crush it at Open Source, they have a real opportunity to take the Radio culture, and superimpose that in as a new way to do work, new way to create distributed, decentralized teams, and ultimately better software, and at the end of the day, they have to attract great engineers and keep them, work on hard problems, because, Pat's ambitious. And we know Pat. What he says, and what's real, they're all catching up to Pat. Pat has this great vision and he's nailing it, but the engineers got to build what Pat says they got to do. When he says "I'm abstracting away Kubernetes, as an abstraction layer," yeah that sounds simple, but it's really hard to do. >> Absolutely, and I want to get your perspective too, on this, not just the culture of innovation, that you talked about, that VMware has had for a very long time, but also in the spirit of VMware leveraging their innovation programs like Radio, to attract and retain this high quality talent, from your perspective, how does a conference like this, which is kind of academic in nature, it's kind of like a science fair for engineers, how does it differ from some of the other companies, like a Google that say "we have innovation programs." In your perspective, how is this different? >> Well, Google actually is fairly similar in the sense that they came out of Stanford, they have that kind of ethos of academic. Facebook is exactly the opposite, he wants to be Bill Gates, and be like Microsoft, as I was saying the other day. Google's internal stuff is pretty strong, they don't externalize it, and that's why Google Cloud's having such a hard time gaining market shares, that they're not good on the external game. Their thing is the SAS offering, it's all programmable. They're awesome at technology, but they're not good at externalizing it. So, I think Google's struggle is not a lot of internal to external translation. What Radio has done successfully, and we heard a little bit here, was they took it from the Palo Alto bubble, which Google lives in, and they've extended it beyond to the rest of the world, so 50% of the Radio attendees here are from outside the United States. So what they got right is, they've actually externalized it better, they're allowing press to come in, the storytelling that we're doing, that's going on, the collaboration here, is about people collaborating, that's why this successful. And it a world where everything's open, and information's freely available, there's a an audience for "high end," tech nerd activity. This is, this meets the high bar of the geeks of the best of the best, and so why isn't it being covered? Well, it is. We are here. >> You're right, we are here. And also, if you look at, it's one thing for companies to have innovative cultures, but it's another thing, some of the key elements that really can catalyze innovation are partnerships, diversity, that come to mind, both of which VMware does very, very well. Big foci on partnerships, which we've seen and heard about here as well, as well as, not just diversity and gender and things, but also thought diversity, and how groups from completely disparate business units can come together, either organically, before Radio, or even probably, can you imagine the hallway conversations that are going on here? Where suddenly, these different ideas are coming together. Partnerships and diversity are really catalysts for VMware's innovation- >> Well that's a great point, one of the first, on the partnership side, clearly a catalyst, because of multi-cloud and cloud native, seeing that. Diversity is a homerun for them, because they are a diverse culture, but look, how many women are here? Not many, I mean still, more than some, still a lot more work to do. But diversity of opinion, the inclusion that VMware has, they're a very inclusive company. So, it's not like, I just don't think there's enough population of women, in my opinion, that are in the community. But they're inclusive, there's different people with different backgrounds, different technical backgrounds, so from so from a quote "diversity" skill set, it's a melting pot. You've got people talking about carbon fiber, sustainability, to kubernetes, all kind of coming together. So I think diversity's a real strength for them. >> So we heard, I know you had a really, really intriguing Blockchain conversation today. We talked a lot about some of those emerging technologies, Vmworld 2019, which theCUBE will be at, for, I believe the tenth year, it's just around the corner. What excites you about some of the things you heard today that you think we might hear more about in August? >> What excited me about VMworld is what Pat Gelsinger said off camera, that it's going to be a ton of news, a ton of activity, and I think if you look at what VMware's doing, again, like I said, Pat Gelsinger's got an amazing vision, and I think he's cleared the runway, or sailed away from the icebergs. VMware's in a really good market position right now. They have great growth going on, and, look, the organic innovation here at Radio, amazing. Content's solid, people are still buzzing for it, they could probably stay here for a week, two weeks. Acquisitions, CloudHealth, Bitnami, again, two smart acquisitions, they're making smart deals, the ecosystem's evolving, it's a new VMware. So I think Vmworld is going to be, have a spring to its step this year, I think you'll see a lot of action, they'll be two CUBE sets again this year, it's going to be a different company next ten years, VMWare, than it was the past ten years. >> Well, I'm excited to be there with theCUBE, two sets as you mentioned, my interest is certainly heightened after some of the things we heard today. John, as always, I had a blast co-hosting with you. You got some awesome swag to go home with. Until next time, right? >> Yeah. >> All right, for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you've been watching our exclusive coverage of VMware Radio2019 from San Fransisco. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering VMware Radio 2019. Brought to you by VMware. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware Radio 2019. Lisa Martin with John Furrier, in San Francisco. This is an internal R&D innovation off site that VMware does, lots of innovation going on here from engineers from all over the globe. We're pleased to welcome Joe Baguley, the CTO from EMEA, from VMware. Joe, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hi. >> So we've been having some great conversations this morning about this tremendous amount of innovation, I mean the potential is massive. Not just from Radio, but from all the other innovation programs that VMware has, really speaks very strongly to the culture of innovation that VMware has had. But of course all this innovation has to be able to be harnessed to deliver what customers need. Talk to us about that, you're in the field, field CTO. What is that connection with the innovation that happens within VMware? How do customers help influence that and vice versa? >> Yeah, I think we're very unique in the structure that we've put around that to drive that innovation over the years. So my job as field CTO is, I call it sort of 50, 50. So 50% is Chief Technology Officer, which is this kind of stuff for Radio and 50% is Chief Talking Officer, which is out with our customers and presenting at conferences, et cetera. But the general remit is connecting R&D in the field. And so for eight years now I've been connecting R&D in the field at VMware, I actually did at my previous company as well. And what we've done is, we've built a series of programs over the years to do that, and one of the biggest ones is the CTO Ambassadors. And so that was, you know, you get to a point, you get to a growth size, I've been here eight years, and suddenly you need someone else to help you because I can't be everywhere. And the original role was, back in the day I was hired to scale Steve Herrod, because Steve Herrod couldn't be in Europe all the time, I was like mini Steve Herrod that could be there when needed. But then eventually I can't be in every European country and our major regions as we get bigger and bigger, and we've grown dramatically. So the CTO Ambassadors is to support that. And that's really, we've got 140 of our top customer facing techies from around the globe in this program called the Ambassadors. And they have to be customer facing, and they have to be individual contributors, so like a pre-sales manager or something doesn't count. They're a massively active community, there's a whole bunch of them here at Radio as well. And their job is really that conduit, that source of information, and also a sounding board, a much shorter range sounding board for R&D. So if R&D want to get a feel of what's going on, they don't have to ask everyone they can bounce off the Ambassadors, which is part of what we do, and that makes it easier. >> So like a filter too, they're also also filtering input from the field, packaging it up for R&D. >> Totally. Yeah, and when you're at an organization of our scale, filtering is really important. Because obviously, you can't have every customer directly talking to every engineer, it's never going to work. (laughs) >> I mean another radio project stay right there, a machine learning based champion CTO to go through all the feedback. >> Yeah, so I started my career, with my previous company doing that, I was the filter. So I'd get a hundred questions a day from various people in the field, and 99 of those I'd bounce right back because I knew the answer. But there was the one that I was like, uh. Then I'd turn around to R&D and ask them. But the great thing was that R&D knew that if I was asking then it was a real question, it wasn't the 99. So the CTO Ambassadors, and what we do in Octo Global field is really a method of scaling that. >> I want to ask you about that because that's a great example of here reputation comes in. Because your reputation is on the line if you go back and pull the fire alarm, if you will, send too many lame requests back, you're going to be lame. So you've got to kind of check, balance there. So that begs the question, how do you do the filtering for the champions that work for you? Is there a high bar? Is there a certain line? Like being a kid, you've got to be this tall to ride the roller coaster. Is there criteria? Is there certification? Take us through the filtering there. >> The Ambassador program is a rotating nomination system. So essentially there's a two year tenure. So what happens is, if you're in the field and you want to be an ambassador, which is a really prestigious thing, then you nominate yourself or get nominated and then people vote on you and you put forward your case, et cetera. Essentially it's a democratic process based on your peers and other people in the company. And then after you're allowed a maximum of two years. Sorry, two tenures so you get four years, if that makes sense, I'm not confusing you. >> John: So term limits? >> Yeah there's term limits, right, we have term limits. And after two terms you have to go out for a year to give someone else a chance because otherwise it will just glub- >> It'll turn into the US government. (laughs) >> But no, it's important to maintain freshness, maintain diversity and all those kind of things. And so it comes back to that filter piece we were talking about before. The reputation is massive, of the CTO Ambassadors. I mean when we started this six years ago as a program, most of R&D were like, who are these Ambassador guys? What value are they going to add? Now, if you're in R&D, one of the best things you can say, if you want to get something done, is what the CTO Ambassador said. I mean, literally it is, you can go and we have- >> John: The routine approach to that. Talk about how you guys add in a new category. So, for instance kubernetes, we saw this years ago when KubeCon was started, theCUBE was there present at the creation of that trend we kind of got it right away. Now Gelsinger and the team sees this as a massive traction layer. So that would be an example, where we need an Ambassador. So do you like just create one or how does that work? >> They create themselves, that's the best thing. So we have an annual conference which is in February, held in Paolo Alto where we all get together along with all the chief technologists, which is the level below me. And the principles, which the most senior field people. So literally the best of the best get together. It's about 200 plus get together for a week. And we are an hour and a half on on one with Pat for example, so Pat's there with all of us in a room. But one of the sessions we do is the shark tank, and there's two of them. One of them is, come up with your really cool, crazy, wacky ideas, and the other one is the acquisition shark tank. So there we get the MNA team, include our E-staff sit in, and the Ambassadors, as teams, will come in and present. We think we should acquire, uh because that's making a big difference. The great thing is, not nine times out of 10 but probably seven times out of 10, the E-staff are going, yeah we know about that, when actually we can't really tell you what's going on but yeah we know about them. But there's the two or three times out of 10 that people are like, oh yeah, so tell me more about them. And it might be a company that's just coming up, it might be 2013 and there's this company called Docker that no one's heard of, but the Ambassadors are shouting about Docker, and saying it's a big, you know. So there's that- >> So white space is too emerging you can see it's a telemetry, literally feedback from the field to direct management on business strategy. >> And our customers are pushing our field in directions faster than maybe R&D get pushed if you know what I mean. >> You guys deserve a lot of credit because Pat Gelsinger was just on this morning with Lisa and me, and we were talking about that. He just came back from the Sales President's club cruise, and one of the comments he said was the sales executive said, hey, who does strategy? Because everything's fitting together beautifully. Which kind of highlights how radiance this all progresses, not like magic, there's a process here, and this kind of points to your job is to fit that pieces in, is that correct? >> Yeah. People always say, as a CTO do you all sit down once a week and talk about strategy? And that's not what you do. There's a hive mind, there's a continual interaction, there's conference calls, there's phone calls, there's meetings, there's get togethers of various different types, groups, and levels. And what happens is there's themes that emerge over that. And so my role specifically, as the EMEA CTO is to represent Europe, Middle East, and Africa's voice in those conversations. And maybe the nuances that we might have around particular product requirements or whatever, to remind people that maybe sit in a bubble in Silicon Valley. >> John: I'm sure you raised your hand on privacy and GDPR? (laughs) >> Just a couple of times, yeah. Yeah, now and again. >> The canary in the coal mine is a really big point that helps companies, if they're not listening to the signals coming in. >> Well you do, and you see a lot. There's a lot of the tech companies that I see, it's often defined as the three bubbles, or your Massimo Re Ferrè, who's now at Amazon. When he was here, did this fantastic blog post talking about the first bubble is Silicon Valley, and the second bubble is North America, and the third bubble is everywhere else. And so you kind of watch these things emerge. And my job is to jump over that pop into the Silicon Valley bubble before something happens and say, no you should be thinking about X, you should think about Y. At an event like Radio I've got a force multiplier because I've got 40 plus Ambassadors with me all popping up at all these little booths you see behind you, and the shows, and the talks. >> And the goal here is not to be a bubble, but to be completely one hive mind. >> And the diversity at VMware just blows my mind, it really does. I think a lot of people comment on it quite often, and in fact I've been asked to be a non-exec director of other companies, to help them advise on their culture. Which is not in tech, in culture, which is quite interesting. And so the diversity that we have here is really infusing people to innovate in a way that they've not done before. It's that diverse set of opinions really helps. >> Well it does. And this, from what we've heard, Radio is a very, there's a lot of internal competition, it's like a badge of honor to be able to respond to the call for papers, let alone get selected. Touch on the synergies, the symbiosis that I feel like I'm hearing between the things that are presented here, the CTO Ambassadors and the customers. Like maybe a favorite example of a product or service that came from, maybe a CTO Ambassador, to Radio, to market. >> Yeah, I'm just trying to think of any one specific one. There are always bits and pieces, and things here and there. I think I should have thought of that before I came on really. I think what you're looking at here is, it's much more about an informed conversation and so it's those ideas around the fact. And also, quite often someone will have a cool idea, and they'll go to the Ambassadors, can you find me five customers that want to try this? Bang, we've got it. So if you're out there on a customer, and someone comes to you as an ambassador and says, I've got a really cool thing I'd like you to try. It might be before, we have a thing called Fling, so it might even be before it's made a fling. You probably heard from Morney how that process goes. Then engage fast, because you're probably getting that conduit direct into the core of R&D. So a lot of the features that people see and functions and products et cetera, that people see. A lot of the work you see, we're doing with the next version if you realized our management platform, a lot of that has been driven by work that's been done by Ambassadors in the field, and what we're doing there. All the stuff you'll see, I've got my jacket over there with NANO EDGE written on it. A lot of the EDGE stuff that you see, a lot of the stuff around ESXi on Arm, a lot of the stuff around that is driven specifically around a particular product range. So a really good example is, a few years ago, probably around four, myself and Ray sat down and had a meeting in VMware Barcelona, with a retail customer, and the retail customer was talking about could we get them an STDC, but small enough to fit in every store. They didn't say that at the time, but that's how we kind of got to it. So that started off a whole process in our minds, and then I went back and we, the easiest actual way for me to do it was to then get a bunch of the Ambassadors to present that as one of their innovation ideas, which became NANO EDGE. I originally called it VX Nook, because we were going to do it on intel Nooks. (laughs) Unfortunately the naming committee wouldn't allow VX Nook, so it became NANO EDGE. And that drove a whole change within the company, I think within R&D. So if you think up until that point, four years ago, most of what we were doing was, how do we run things bigger and faster? It was all like Monster VM, remember that? All those kinds of things, right? How do we get these SAP HANA 12 terabyte VMs running? And really NANO EDGE was not necessarily a product, per se but it was more of a movement driven by a particular individual, Simon Richardson, who had got promoted to Principle as a result, through the Ambassador program. That was driven through our R&D to get them to think small as well as big, you know. So next time you're building that thing, how small can you run your SX, how small can we get an SX? >> John: Small, at scale. Which is EDGE, right? >> And, you know, so get small, at scale, which was EDGE. And so suddenly everyone starts talking about EDGE, and I'm like, hang on I've been talking about this for a while now, but we just didn't really call it that. And then along comes technology like Kubernetes, which is how do you manage thousands of small things. And it's kind of, these things come together. But yes, totally, you can almost say our EDGE strategy, and a lot of the early EDGE work was done and driven out of stuff that was done from CTO Ambassadors. It's just one of the examples. >> What are some of the Kubernetes service mesh? Because one of the things we heard from Pat, and we've heard this before, but most recently at Dell Technologies World, in the last couple of weeks, was don't look down, look up. Which basically means we're automating the infrastructure. I get that, I've covered ad nauseam. But looking up the stack means you're talking about kubernetes app developers, you've got cloud native, you've got services meshes, microservices, new kinds of challenges around instrumentation. How are you guys inside Radio looking at that trend? Because there's some commercial impact, You've got Heptio, you've got Craig and the team, some of the original guys. >> Yeah, yeah. >> As well as you have a future state coming out, with state, pun intended, data, stateless. (laughs) These are new dynamics. >> Yeah, yeah. >> What's the R&D take on this? >> So there's two ways that I really talk to people about this. The first one is, I've got a concept that I talk about called application chromatography. Which sounds mental, but you remember from high school probably, chromatography was where you had that really special paper and you put the dot of liquid on and it spread it to all it's constituent parts. That's actually what's happening with our applications right now. So, we've gone through a history of re-platform. You know, mainframe, blah blah blah blah blah. So then when we got to x86, everything's on x86, along comes cloud, and as you know John, for the last 10 years it's been everything's going to cloud because we think that's the next platform. It's not, but then everything's not going to SAS, it's not all going to paths, it's not all going to Functions, it's not all going to containers. What you're seeing is those applications are coming off that one big server, and they're spreading themselves out to the right places. So I talk to customers now and they say, okay, well actually I need a management plan, and a strategy and an architecture for infrastructure as a service, containers as a service, functions as a service platform as a service and SAS, and I need a structure for that on premises and off premises. So that's truly driving R&D thinking is not how do we help our customers get from one of those to the other? They're going to all of them. >> It sounds like a green screen for media. >> It is, and then the other side of that is I've just had a conversation with some of the best, you know, what these events are like? Some of the best conversations in the water cooler, in the- >> In the hallway, yup exactly. >> I've just had a fascinating conversation with one of our guys has been talking about, oh it's really cool if we got kubernetes cause I could use it right down at the edge. I could use it to manage thousands as a tiny EDGE things. And as I'm talking to him and sort of saying, you know what he's doing, I suddenly went, hang on a second, how does a developer talk to that? He's like, well I've not really thought about that. I said, well that's your problem. We need to stop thinking about things from how can that framework help me? But how can I extend that framework? And so a lot of that- >> Moving beyond just standing up kubernetes, for what purpose? Or is that what you know, the why, what? >> So if the developers there, it shouldn't be all. I'm going to use this new framework to solve my problem or the EDGE if an R&D person would, but people like myself are there to drive them to think of the bigger picture. So ultimately at some point a developer in the future is going to want to sit there and through an API, push out software SQL server, a bit of Mongo over here, some stuff on AWS, go and use the service on our Azure at the same time pushing stuff into their own data center and maybe push a container to every store if they're a retailer and they want to do that through one place. That's what we're building. And you know, driving that, all these bits and pieces you see behind you pulling those all together into this sort of consistent operations model. As I'm sure you've heard many of- >> And it's dynamics not static, so it's not like provisioning the old way. You got to track what's being turned on and off because how do you log off? What goes turns on? What services get turned on? Turned off, turned on. >> If you don't get a theme of really, I suppose not only Radio, but our industry of the last few years, people have always said if that cliche change is constant, right? Oh, change is constant. Yet still architects build systems that are static, right? You guys that just, I'm designing an architect in this new system for the next three years. I'm like, that's stupid. What you need to do is design a system that you know is going to change before you've even finished starting it. More or less started going half way through it. So actually, as I see, I was in a fantastic session yesterday with the Architects around ESXi and VCenter, which might be boring to most, but where we architecting that for scale at a huge way. >> Well, I think that's the key thing I mean this is, first of all, we'd love this conversation because, if you can make it programmable with API and have data available, that's the architecture because it's programmable, it's not static. So you let it morph into however the application, because I think I mentioned green screen, you know chroma keys as we have those concepts here, but that's what you're saying. The apps are going to have this notion of, I need an app right now and then it goes away. Services are going to be provisioning and turning on and off. >> There is a transience, there's a transience to infrastructure, there's a transience to applications, there's a transience to components that traditional mechanisms aren't built to do. So if you look at actually, what are we building here? And what's that sort of hive mind message? It's how do we provide that platform going forward that supports transience? that allows customers to come, I mean people used to use the term agile, but it's been over years and it's not right. It's the fact that literally it's a situation of constant change. And what your deploying onto, it's constantly changing and what you're deploying is constantly changing. So we're trying to work out how do we put that piece in the middle, that is also changing but allows you some kind of constancy in what you're doing, right? So we can plug new things in the bottom, a new cloud here, a new piece of software there, a new piece of hardware there or whatever. And at the same time, there's new ways of doing architecture coming on top. That's the challenge of this, the software defined data centers, almost like an operating system for clouds or the future operating system for all apps on all clouds and all of- >> It's a systems thinking for sure, absolutely. >> Let's put your Chief Talking Officer hat on for a second as we look- >> I thought I've been doing that for the last fifteen minutes. (laughs) >> At VMWorld 2019, which is just around the corner. Any cool ANEA customers that are going to be on stage that we should be excited to hear about it? >> Actually, I was having a meeting yesterday morning about that, so I can't really say, but there's some exciting stuff we're lining up right now. We're obviously now is the time we start thinking about the keynotes, now at the time you start thinking about who's on stage. Myself and a few others are responsible for what those demos are, you know the cool demos you see on stage every year. So we literally had the meeting yesterday morning at Radio to discuss what's going to be the wow at VMWorld this year. So I'm not going to give anything away to you. I'll just say make sure you're there to watch it because it's going to be good. And we're also making sure there's a big difference between what we're doing in Moscone now and what we're going to be doing it in Barcelona when we- >> And when expand theCUBE outside of the United States certainly, we'd love to have you guys plug in and localize some of these unique challenges. Like you said, I agree bubble now the west of the world has different challenges content different. >> Definitely, I think to that end, multicloud is probably more of a thing in Europe than it was necessarily in, in North America for a longer time because those privacy laws you talked about before, people have always been looking at the fact that maybe they had to use a local cloud for some things. You know, a German cloud run by German people in a German data center and they could use another cloud like Amazon for other things. And you know, we have UK cloud who provide a specific government based cloud, et cetera. Whereas in America there was, you could use an American cloud and that was fine. So I think actually in Europe we've already been at the forefront of that multicloud thinking for a while. So it's worth watching. >> It is worth watching, I wish we had more time to, so you're just going to have to come back. >> Definitely, anytime tell me when. >> We look forward to seeing you at VMWorld. We thank you for sharing some insights with John and me on theCUBE today. >> Cool, thank you. >> For John Ferrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware Radio 2019, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> 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.

>> (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)

>> Host: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware Radio 2019! Brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin in San Francisco, at VMware Radio 2019. This is a really cool internal R&D innovation off-site with about 1800 engineers across many business units at VMware, and we're pleased to welcome back to theCUBE the VP of the sustainability strategy at VMware, Nicola Acutt. Nicola, it's great to have you back on theCUBE! >> Thank you, Lisa, it's wonderful to be here and welcome back to Radio! >> This is only the second year that press has been allowed so this is an exclusive for theCUBE, we appreciate being here. So, sustainability. It's a word that is talked about so globally in so many industries, but it has different meanings. When I think of sustainability, the first thing that comes to my mind is energy, but it's more than that. What is sustainability to VMware? >> Great, thank you Lisa. And you're right, sustainability means a lot of things to different people. In its holistic sense, we think of sustainability as the capacity to endure, the ability to endure over time, and it has environmental dimensions, it has social dimensions and of course it has economic dimensions. The way we think about sustainability at VMware is through the lens of innovation, because we really do believe that solving many of the sustainability challenges in the world today is about innovation, and so we're really excited to be able to do that work and to pursue that mission in the office of the CTO. >> So talk a little bit more about that, with the sustainability strategy being within the office of the CTO. What sort of superpowers does that give VMware to amplify what it's doing and really also, in the eyes of your customers and partners, leverage sustainability as a differentiator? >> Yeah, I love that you used the word superpowers. I think of it exactly that. For me, it's about how do we connect our tech superpowers with this vision and foresight around solving really challenging problems? So for us, how we approach that problem, is really in three dimensions. So we think about sustainability and innovation around our operation, so that's walking the talk, first and foremost, right, getting things right internally, and from an innovation perspective, that's not just about innovation in terms of energy management, you used the energy example, right, but it's also about processes. How do we think about our engineering processes, to make sure that our engineering productivity is as efficient as possible. Yesterday our chief research officer David Tennenhouse made a comment to our 18,000 engineers that it's two sides of the same coin when we're talking about innovation for good, we also have to talk about good engineering so it's both, right? So that's one. Innovation in our operations. The second lens that we think about is innovation in terms of what we do, our products and how our products serve our customers and help them achieve their sustainability goals. Also at Radio we were really pleased this year to announce a new product initiative called CAM, the Carbon Awareness Meter, and this is a product feature in Skyline which will be available to our customers later on this year, which will allow them, through the Skyline platform, to derive almost real-time carbon scores and provide them with more information, more transparency into what's happening in their infrastructure, and then serve up information that can make choices around whether it's virtual machine density or opportunities to optimize their hardware, and then also even provide them information about the grid that their data center is operating on, and that then, we hope, will empower them, our huge customer base, to think about what they can do possibly as a result. >> Oh absolutely, I can't imagine what having that insight into their own grid will allow them to do in terms of resource optimization, to be able to use resources better, to identify new products and services. I'm curious about CAM, though, being announced at Radio 2019. Was this a product, or an idea that spun out of a past Radio event, since this is the 15th annual? >> I'm so glad you asked that question. Exactly why I think this is such an exciting announcement, not only is it a really cool product feature, but it tells the story of innovation at VMware and the path that an idea can track through from an idea in someone's head to a product in our customer's system. So that journey at VMware started with this idea going back, gosh, more than three years. In fact it was round about the time that we introduced sustainability to the office of the CTO and this was a challenge we put out to engineers around how can we innovate around sustainability? It first was discussed as a tech talk and then the idea came to Radio, here, as one of these poster papers. It was then also a birds of a feather, a talk, a breakout talk. Later on, the idea then gained more momentum, it was funded as part of X-Labs which is one of our innovation programs. In fact it was so popular it got funded a second time and developed, and now it has graduated from the office of the CTO and the innovation programs into the BU. So that's a great example of this journey that our innovators, our engineers, can take with an idea, from concept to impact. >> One of the things Ray O'Farrell mentioned to John Furrier and me this morning was that this year's Radio, he said, it's kind of surprising that there's a lot of projects around proposals around collaboration. So talk about how CAM was developed, I mean, the spirit of different BUs collaborating, different minds, different engineering minds coming together with ideas that really over time and through not just Radio but the other innovation programs, you mentioned X-Labs, that this idea became something that is now enabling your customers to make big decisions and save a considerable amount of resources. How does collaboration between BUs really get VMware's innovation culture dialed way up? >> That's actually really important, this concept of collaboration. The way I think about it is connecting dots, and a key role that the office of the CTO plays is to do just that, to create the spaces like this event, which you increase the probability that people are going to have a conversation or people are thinking about something and you give them a platform to share that idea and that's where the spark comes from. You hear it in the conversations, you hear it in the energy, but that is critical. I don't think you can create a culture of innovation without creating a culture of collaboration. >> Absolutely, they're hand-in-hand. So you talked about CAM. What are some of the technological changes, improvements that VMware has made to its technologies to become, to really deliver on your sustainability goals? >> Yeah, I think it goes back to our roots, right? The very beginning of VMware, and the legacy of our core product and our core innovation has been a massive contribution to the computing field of course, and to industry and to the world, but it's also been a great, what I call one of the greatest positive externalities in terms of saving energy and resources. So that was a great start to build on, and the announcement of the CAM project today was another step in that journey to now be really intentional about connecting sustainability with innovation, just like we do with quality and with security, and really thinking about this as part of what we do. So what that journey looks like is continuing to invest in, I talked about operational innovation, I talked about our product, the third area of our strategy is really around future bets and the products that are currently off road map but on our radar. You've probably heard, a great example of that is our work on blockchain, and so we're being intentional about developing that software to be energy efficient, number one. You'll hear more about that, I hope, later in the year. We have an intern coming in the summer to help the team work on the sustainability dimensions of our blockchain approach. We just did a demo actually at Radio this week, there was a live demo on stage with our blockchain team testing out a use case in sustainability and sustainable supply to our supply chain custody, with the example of ocean plastics and making sure that we were able to really track that supply chain and blockchain was a really powerful application for a solution like that. So that's just an example of where we're thinking about applying this lens of sustainability and innovation to our future products, as well as to some of the big challenges we face as a global society. >> Right, globally and environmentally, we look at within the data center, outside the data center from the core to the edge. Where does code sustainability fit in, and how does that facilitate reducing carbon footprint at VMware, enabling that for your customers, how does that factor into becoming more efficient and more aware globally and societally as well? >> Right, well it starts with what you do, right? For us, writing code is the core of all of the applications, everything, all of the powerful things that we can do starts with the integrity of the code, and so at Radio we have one of our sessions with principal engineers and the sustainability team is working on a project to define what does that mean for us? So, it's about efficiency, it's about really thinking about how do we optimize? How do we design and pay attention to the very core of what we do? From the get-go, as a priority. >> Last question, from the customer's perspective, what is one of the many VMware customer stories that comes to mind when you think about VMware as an enabler, as a catalyst for helping an organization really dramatically reduce carbon footprint, leverage your technology for their sustainability? >> Such a great question, and y'know something interesting, I'll tell you a story. We recently looked at some of the companies that are making very serious commitments to sustainability, putting their money where their mouth is and, for example, organizations that are committing to being carbon neutral, to being RE100 which is renewable energy 100 powering their organizations through clean power, as well as committing to science-based targets around their operations, and when we looked at the data it was absolutely fascinating to see that many of VMware's best and biggest customers are in that category of leaders and so for us that represents a billion dollars of revenue so this is important, not just to us but to our customers, and so this is a journey. We're working within the office of the CTO with our field teams to really help connect the dots more intentionally and to drive additional value for our customers through their use of our products and their relationship with VMware as a solution provider. >> And it just shows and speaks to the great synergies that VMware has developed over its history with its customers. Nicola, thank you so much for joining me at Radio 2019, and sharing with our audience the massive impact, both internally and externally, that VMware's sustainability strategy is having on the world. Thank you! >> Thank you, Lisa, absolute pleasure. >> Likewise! I'm Lisa Martin, with John Furrier joining me at VMware Radio 2019 in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>> from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering the M Wear Radio twenty nineteen brought to you by the M where >> welcome to Special Cube conversation here in San Francisco for PM wears radio event there. Top engineers air here for once a year Get together and show in the best stuff road map to get to great guests. Here we got Mike Petrillo is the senior director of Blockchain of'em were here where their journey is, where they come from and gone to today where they are up to and for Team A Gluckman Engineering leader Blockchain engine both with GM Where great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate spending the time My favorite topic block Jane our favorite topic to thanks for joining me. So, Mike, let's start with you. Take a street where you guys are now Because we talked about a year ago. Just getting the putting the team together. You were here last year radio kind of getting some core mo mentum. Where have you guys come from? And where are you now? Yeah, >> it's been quite a journey. You know, over the past five years, we've been doing a lot of research that research culminated in an open source project called Project Concorde that we announced last year. Then we wrapped some commercial offerings around it around really the operational side. How do you operate a blockchain at scale in an enterprise setting we introduced? That is Veum wear Blockchain. It's a very descriptive on the naming, and it really focuses on three core things. Enterprise grade, decentralized trust, not distributed trust but really decentralized trust. So being able to deploy it across multiple different cloud environments as well as on prim, it concentrates on robust Day two operations. How do you operate it at scale in an enterprise setting? How do you deal with stuff like GDP are the right to be forgotten? You know, data sovereignty issues, things like that, which is much different than other block Janes. And then the third thing is really being developer friendly. Last year we were fully Ethereum compatible. We had the Ethereum language sitting on top of our block chain. Since then, we've added support for Djamel from digital asset. So another language and we're adding more and more languages so the developers can develop in the framework that they're used to on the best scaleable. You know, Enterprise Supporter >> brings him Dev Ops Mojo Concepts to blockchain. Absolutely, absolutely somewhat. The demo you guys did you get on stage? I want to get too, because it's a really use case. So again, rnd concept jewel years of research started putting together making some progress on developer. So the solutions that you guys presented, we really take us through that. >> So the ocean plastics demo that we talked about a radio basically solves this problem or, you know, just the plastics polluted, polluting our oceans today. So if you look at the numbers are staggering and the BP that you actually a consume, you know, in fish it's pretty scary. The other thing is, you know, it's been predicted that we'll have mohr plastic in our oceans than fish by twenty fifty. And one of the things Dell is trying to do is clean up the environment, and they're building these reusable trays or packaging material for their Dell laptops. And so this use case was providing them that functionality. And if you look at del they you know, they have a massive supply chain. They've got hundreds and thousands of renders that you know, they use despite systems that don't actually talk to each other, they've got complicated work flows. There's also a lot off corruption in their supply chain. And one of the things that can really solve a lot of those problems is bmr blockchain. And they have an instance running on our service, which runs on VM CNW s and I walked through the devil of just going through an aggregator to getting to a manufacturer and then assembling these laptops with the trays and shipping them off to >> think this was something we covered. A del technology world. I just wanna point out for the folks watching Dell's taking recycled material from the ocean, using it as materials into their laptops as a part of sustainability. Great business. You know, Malcolm for del the supply chain pieces. Interesting. So you guys are using blockchain and track the acquisition of the plastic out of the ocean? >> Yes. To manufacturing and to end >> Yes. In tow? Yes. >> Using of'em were blocking. >> Yes. So who coded >> this up? It was actually >> del Del developers coded it up. So they quoted up. They took two weeks to code it. We had absolutely no support issues that came away, which really talks about these. A fuse of our platform. And, you know, just the applications that running. >> How does someone get involved real quick at the plug for they have someone joins the bm where? Blockchain initiative? Yes, Via more block >> change. That's ah, manage service offering from us. So it's a license, you know, product. If they're interested, they can go to the inn where dot com slash blockchain or emails? The blockchain dash info beyond where dotcom get it signed up on the beta. We have an active beta. We have lots of enterprise customers all around the planet using it today. You know, at scale >> is a free servicers are licensed paid license. >> There will >> be a paid license for it. You know, we're invader right now, so it is free, right? >> I get it. But we're gonna get you in the snow. So it is. It is a licence service. Yeah, It's Amanda's >> service offering on. That's you know, the beauty of it is that you don't have to worry about updating it, you know, keeping the nose live anything like that. We don't see the transactional data. We don't manage the nodes or anything like that. But we deploy and keep him updated. Keeping refresh. >> You know, one of the benefits Ray Farrell's on. Just how about the ape revolution? How I change the world with the Internet and the web that blockchain has that same kind of inflection point impact you mentioned GDP are that implies, Reed. You know, changing the the values on the block chain will dwell in the Ganges is immutable. How do you handle that? Because if it's already immutable on encrypted, how does Tootie pr work? >> Yeah, just doesn't take >> care of you. Why wait? If it's encrypted, no one can see it. >> Yeah, well, you know, block chains, not about encrypting the data, right? There are some block change that do encrypted data. People get confused because they associated the cryptography with it, which links the blocks together. But the data in there is still visible. Right? We're working on privacy solutions to make privacy per transaction. We're working on GDP our issues right now, because that is an issue. When you get into a regulated environment, which there isn't really a non regulated environment these days. You have to worry about these things. You know, Blockchain gives you a mutability and that gives you to trust. But really, Blockchain is about trust. It's about this decentralized trust. And when you think about it in that context, you say, Well, if I trust that I want to be able to delete that data and we reach consensus on it and we still maintain the order, right, the proper order of the bits, which is really what Blockchain is doing, is giving you trust on that order. Bits and I agree, is a consensus to delete one of those pieces out of the order bit, and we can still maintain trust of the order bits. And that's fine. Now I can't get into details on this engineering secret sauce. >> I. So one of the things I want to ask >> you guys just engineers, because I think this is one of the things that I see is that Blockchain is attractive. There's a lot of unknowns that coming down the pike, but we do know one thing. It's a distributed, decentralized kind of concept that people like it. I see a new generation of attracted the blockchain new generation of entrepreneurs, a new generation of young people, engineers who see use cases that others from old school industry might not. So you start to see. I won't say it's the hipster or cutting edge. It's just that it's attracting this kind of new generation developer for engineer. >> Why do you >> think that's the case? Why, and and is that right assumption to look at? Because, you know, when asked his blockchain, certainly state of the art. Yeah, it's not as fast as a database of I wanted to do something. Technically, that's like saying the Internet dial up was bad. But what happened after? So you know, a lot of people making these arguments, But I see it definitely resonating with young people. Yes, look at Facebook who tried looking blockchain and moving their entire a broken system. Teo blocked, Jammed. Try to fix that so you can feel these indicators. What's your thoughts? >> I think >> part of it. And I definitely saw this, you know, last Friday and Saturday, I was eighty three up in New York City, right, and it was very much that hipster crowd, and I was really attached to the crypto currency phase. Cryptocurrency allowed individuals to make investments. You know, the kind of millennials to make investments. They didn't have to go to a e trade or they didn't have to go to some broker. It wasn't caught up in anything. They could, you know, make these bets. And now they can build applications that are directly attached to that currency. They can make up their own currency. They can make up their own value system. You know, you've done some of that with a cube, right? We've launched an application that provides value around the content and token eyes. Is that value? And now it can transfer that value So it opens up the transfer of that value, the trust of that value. And I think, you know, we're in a generation of trust and transparency. That's what's powering the world right now is about trust and transparency, and that's what Blockchain gives you, gives you trust in the system that no one person or no one government owns, and >> I really like that. >> But one thing important is I mean, we just have to demystify this like we just have to say, This is not about Cryptocurrency. That's one thing, and what I am is doing is enterprise blockchain and, you know, and Mike, you've talked about this. You always say, you know, black jeans, not going toe, you know, save the world or, you know it's not going to get rid of poverty. But there's four use cases that we've drilled down to in the supply chain realm, and there's the financial services. And so those are some of the things we're tackling, and I think it's important to like talk about that. And, you know, there's these hipsters every time we go and talk anything with regarding the blockchain, we know a big chunk of people, therefore Cryptocurrency and apparently at consensus in New York, they reduce their audience from I can't remember the numbers. When >> I was >> in the two thousand >> last year were about House kicked out all the crypto >> currency people, and so it's important to make that distinction. >> I think the crypto winter probably hurt them more than taking up, because last year there was a lot of hype there, but I think the bubble was already burst around February last year. But this piece of the good point is something that we've been kind of covering on silicon angle. The Cube is there's infrastructure dynamic. The engineering goodness. I think that certainly is intoxicating to think about Blockchain as an impact. Engineering wise, the token conversation brings up utility, the decentralized crypto currency, the icy, his initial coin offerings. The fraud part or regulated part has caused a lot of problems. So to me, well, I tell people was looking the CEO kind of scams and fraud kind of put a shadow on token economics. And Blockchain is a technology so supply chain no doubt is great. Blockchain. That's where you guys are focused. That's what the enterprise want. Way start getting into tokens. Tokens is a form of measurement. Uh huh. And that's where I think the regulators to do your point earlier is it's caused a lot of problems. So you know, the says if you got a utility token and you're selling >> it, it's Zane exchanges, not kill each other. So that's you're >> called. A lot of it would call those app developers. >> Yeah, but the up developers were still out there, right? And what's nice is these app developers that are on the side building these unique little applications. They still end up working for these larger companies and driving interesting solutions through like we're doing with supply chain like we're doing financial services like what we're doing in Telco and Media. You look at the people that we're dealing with in these companies. They came from building those applications. Heck, some of our own product managers came from building unique things mining rigs and mining companies. So you still have that background. They still have that entrepreneurial, you know, asset. And that's what's changing these cos they're driving change these companies saying, Hey, look, we can use the blockchain for this really unique thing that opens up a brand new business line, you know, for this large corporation, >> you know, I showed you our check preview. We did a quick preview of'Em World last year with our block changing me with a cube coin token, kind of total experimental thing. And it was interesting time because I think you hit the nail on the head. We as entrepreneurial developers. I had this great application we want to do for the Cube community, but we were stalled by the you know, the crypto winter, and you know, we're Apple developers, so there's many use cases of such scenarios like that. That's kind of people are kind of halfway between a Z A B. What's your advice toe to us, or folks like us who were out there who want to get the project back on track? What what what should we and application will do? They should they free focus on the infrastructure peace? What's your advice for the marketplace? >> It's so early, it's It's so early to actually really comment on that. I mean, I would say Just keep at it because you never know. It's I feel like we're so early in the game that though we can solve world hunger, there's so many use cases and applications that come out of it and we just have to keep going. And I think the developer community is what's going to make this successful, you know, and even emerging standards. I think that's one thing is standards across, You know, these block chains like we don't have that right now, and that's something we really need to need to do. And >> I don't know we program in Ethereum. >> So the question is, is that a bad choice is a lot of cognitive dissonance around with the right to. >> That's what I was just going to bring up is that >> you know, you brought up the point of your an app developer and you become stalled, you know, in your project. And we see that exactly same thing happening in the enterprise. We go into account after account where they've chosen some block change solution that's out there and to become what I call a stalled pioneer. They've gone through. They develop that application. But they either hit a scale, ability issue and then, you know, throughput or the number of nodes. They hit an operations thing. You know, operations comes in and says, Whoa, how are you going to do an audit on that thing? What about data Sovereign? What about GPR? What about this one? How are we? My God, you're gonna operate it inside of my environment? You know, what's the security side? So it's really round scale ability. It's around operations. It's around security. Those are three things we hit on over and over and over again with the stalled pioneers. So those of the accounts that we go into and rescue them essentially right, we say we can provide you the scale. We can provide you the through, but we can provide you the operations. For twenty years, the Empire has been taking large, complex distributed systems and making you operate them at scale in an enterprise setting. Where the experts at it So we're doing that would block chain now and allowing your blockchain projects to succeed and >> really find that term. Yep. Yeah. Okay, So, radio. What's the feedback here? Obviously got. Got the demo. What's been some of the peer review Give us the the four one one on peer review here. People liking what's going on? >> I think the demo really talk to people. It was relatable. You're a There was a social good a demo. I think it really impacted them. Um, but some of the cool stuff we're doing is also like in the financial services side. You know, we've got Mohr interesting stuff on the supply chain, so the feedbacks been great. Ah, lot of focuses on VM are blockchain, which is also cool. We didn't quite have that last year. In radio, we had everyone running off in different directions. So now it's via more blockchain And what Mike talked about installed pioneers is you know, we were seeing scalability throughput on numbers. And, you know, we talked about it at the immoral Barcelona A numbers. They're looking really great. And, you know, we're we're optimizing pushing our platform so we could get to, you know, perhaps the papal numbers rave, and someday visa, >> you have high availability. You guys know scale. Yeah. You happy where you are right now? >> Very happy where we >> are right >> now. I mean, we've got great customers. Great feedback, you know, great solution that solving real world problems. You know, engineers like doing two things shipping code and solving stuff that's going to help the world. At least you're of'em where that's our culture, right? And And we're able to do that day in and day out and the entire block chains the cornerstone to that. That's what makes people happy. >> Mike Protein, We following your journey. Great. Teo, check in Great to hear the progress. Congratulations on the great demo reel Use cases in supply chain. We'LL be following you guys and keep in touch. Thanks for coming on the key. Absolutely. Thank you for >> the time >> chauffeur here with Lisa Martin here in San Francisco for work. You coverage of radio, the top engineering event where they all come together internally with GM, where one of a few press outlets here, the Cube bringing exclusive coverage. Thanks for watching.

>> from San Francisco. It's the Cube covering the M Wear Radio twenty nineteen. Brought to you by the M >> where >> Hi. Welcome to the Cube. Lisa Martin with John Farrier at the fifteenth annual Veum, Where radio, which is there are anti innovation summit. Pleased to welcome back one of the Cube alumni extraordinaire CEO Being where hot girl singer. Hey, Pat. Good morning. >> Good morning. Great to be with you guys today. Thanks >> so much Right to be here. So this this is the fifteenth radio your internal innovation summit that really has been very influential. NPM wears development over the last fifteen or so years About eighteen hundred engineers here. So each year growing Mohr and Mohr interest, excitement cross collaboration with India More talk to us about how this is really worthy of the CEOs. Time to come here. And with this geek fest, >> well, it is, in many ways, just one of these pieces of the VM wear R and D culture is a research and development innovation off site. And it's something, you know, long preceded me. But when I got here, it's like I'm going to keep doing it. Of course we are. You know this is sort of like the party for the top engineers, right? You know, they get to come geek out, share their best ideas, interact with each other. So it's become one of those unique pieces of our of our development culture and ultimately is, I say, bm where well to do two things right, developed great, breakthrough, innovative, disrupt the products and make our customers successful with those products. So everything that we do sort of centers around those two things. And obviously, if the products are great, we don't have that. We know what to do So to us, keeping that culture of innovation and giving our engineers time to really just geek out, see what each others are doing, challenge each other. It's really pretty special. And yeah, it deserves the CEO's time. >> And you've got You just had your sales president's club without top performers. On the sales side, this is the technical version. It hasn't been that organic piece of the VM were culture, engineering, leadership. But you also have acquisitions, just acquired it. Nami. Yes, you've had a few other you cloud health big time moves relationship with a ws azure. The cloud foundation stuff. How is lending it together? Because you have all this organic innovation. I see cloud management, networking, security outside suffer to find data center is playing out. As you you guys had predicted. How does the acquisitions fit into the culture and the radio? >> Well, you know, part of it is when we talked to many of the engineers about the acquisitions, we say, Hey, we do radio. They're like, huh? All right, this is well, it's this opportunity for us to see what everybody is doing interactive that level and good engineers are almost always part of the decision with respect acquisitions. So they just take to it like, you know, fish and water, right? They just jump in, right, start interacting with their peers. And it is such a, you know, open, diverse pool that all of sudden ideas air being a bounced off each other, homogenize challenged and, you know, people seeing how they can connect with people. So tow us. Many of the acquisitions just find us to be so beneficial to how they come into the company. And they quite appreciate it, you know, just getting back from sales club hate sales leaders >> and he was pretty good. I like this, you >> know, for many of those acquisitions. But the engineers, this is even better for you >> guys aren't just buying stuff up. You guys are very specific in your acquisitions. Cloud Health again is a great example. Scene. No air watch going with further back. Why? Bit, Nami, What was so big and important about it, Nami to acquire them? >> Well, you know, we saw a couple of things. One is that, you know, it's a company. They definitely had this ability, this respect. We're poor with the open source community, you know, and being able to cross between open source and enterprise credibility. That's exactly where I am, where seas and wants to be able to position ourselves so they fit exactly into that space. This idea of being able to bring enterprise packages is the cool open source applications space. And we already had a multiple set of marketplace efforts internally where we saw that we needed that ecosystem play for activities so they just snap so perfectly into the middle of that and very much hybrid will take cloud, uh, aspects to it. And as we do for every one of our acquisitions and I personally meet with every CEO before we do the deal Are they going to fit our culture? And you know, there aren't that many of our acquisitions where I have people saying no, no I'll i'll be the executive sponsor for this one. No, no, no, I will, I will. I will be No, no, no, please. I'll do this one. And you know, of course, the fact that it's in Seville, Spain, right? You know, I think I think if you it was just driven by vacation plans. But it's >> all well, of course, Erica Cube alumni. And we have a whole cube alumni thing going on here. There's no emanate work we're doing here just good people of nice. And so >> you're planing the Cube visit to civilly explain. It's >> like love, Teo. Of course, we have international presents. One of the things I always quote from you is Besides, that hybrid cloud reference years ago was a quote. You said I think twenty, twelve or twenty thirteen feet which year it wass seems like yesterday. You said if you're not out on that next wave your driftwood, so I gotta ask you here at radio you got You got all this organic stuff. It's kind of the wave's coming. Is this what wave is? Are you seeing the end? We're riding right now, because business is great. Um, you're pumping on all cylinders. You've kind of gone through your ten years that through the early days of and you got CEO and you know it. Everything's normal life now and you're on a good run. What waiver? You're going to be surfing on the business side of all this stuff behind you. What's what? When is this all fit in? >> Well, you know, one of the things that I think is so critical for us now and particularly with the, you know, the, um, war cloud on eight of us. Go now with the relationships with Azure and IBM. Alibaba are four thousand BC PP partners. So that's, you know, really starting to take off our BM or Cloud Foundation on premise. We have a big customer saying Okay, I get it right. Don't look down the stack. Look up. Rely on you guys to be the infrastructure. Bring that together for the hybrid infrastructure is a service. And to me You know, part of what I'm looking for for this from the conference is putting all those pieces together because our customers don't want to be doing it. They want us to do it, but we have to make it so consumable, so compelling that just sort of like the sphere. Was it our beginning? They just sort of say, the M where your hybrid cloud, That's what I want, right? And be ableto operationalize at a scale. And if we get that really working well for customers, the management, the automation, the security operations of that boy. Now we do have the opportunity to ride the Cuban eighties wife right into me. It really is. We have to straddle those two over the next several years, >> so make you know, super nice party stand, >> that embracing that next major trend, >> which is up on top of the stack program ability. >> Yeah. You know, when the aside describe Coburn at ease and containers, it's like Java was twenty years ago. You know, what was the last major software abstraction that the industry agreed upon? Jonah, It's almost exactly twenty years ago, and it defined middleware abstraction for the last twenty years. Containers Cooper, Netease the next middleware abstraction. And we see Cooper. Nate is becoming the next native a P I that thie VM where infrastructure, STD see will support and will deliver. And we're going to make containers and cue bernetti so seamless with regard to the core bm infrastructure that a customer never needs to decide. >> What impact will this have? I mean, I see you've been involved many ways talked about the Pentium in the Intel side of your career, I'll see and and what that enabled in terms of inflection, point and growth and creation of value. Where do you see this Cooper Netease Abstraction. If this is going to be one of those inflection points as you as you point out, how do you envision the impact to the industry? What's gonna happen? >> We see that Cuban eighties layer impacting down as well as impacting up, and that's why we see it. It's so critical to get it right. You know, it becomes the consumption a p I infrastructure, and we've talked about, you know, infrastructure is code or, you know, a P. I ittle dismiss a displace open stack. As an AP, I becomes the middle, where a pea eye of choice, but also that defines the middle where abstraction of choice. So all of your Web spheres, Web logics, Java communities, they're going to get displaced as well as they are re factored into this automated containerized, the scale out world. That's exactly where we're sitting. And that's another piece of the bit Nami acquisition that we just announce because you know, being ableto package containerized, open source applications packages exactly fits into that strategy as well. And if we do those two things, I think VM where is going to be extraordinarily well positioned for decades to come way past me? >> So let's talk about customers. Here we are at radio twenty, nineteen, fifteen years I mentioned you guys, This is a really competitive event. Engineers want to be here. You probably had well over a thousand projects. Submissions. How do customers one benefit from the innovations that are discussed here at radio, but also how to customers influence some of the projects of the exciting things that engineers want to put together? >> Well, one of the things that we really enjoy about the whole BM where R D community is you know engineers are leaving with customers all the time. We push him out into those places, you know, we selectively bring customers in and have them in Iraq. Tear a radio. We have other mechanisms, like flings, right? Yeah. These open source lightweight things that customers could be giving us code. We could be giving them code. We you regularly, you know, bring them into our campus for, you know, their participation and different advance programs. So it really is a very constant, ongoing and somewhat end and dialogue that we're having weather. That's from an early product concept that we might be seeing for the first time here at Radio Teo Act The part, this patient and beta activities before we roll them out broadly. So it really is having them participate in the end, the end roll of innovation. And sometimes Hey, it sounds like a good idea. And it sort of sucked right when we tried to do it. Other times they're like, Oh, wow, some of these things, really. I've taken off and gain legs while beyond what we would have dreamed of. >> What have you seen that this year's event? Project Wise featured project. Why's that really kind of caught your attention, Like you. That's a really good idea. >> Well, I must admit, I just landed last night, So today is my first day at radios. So I just got back from our sales club, as John mentioned earlier. So I think I'm gonna have to take a buy on that question here because I got to go do my homework here. >> We'LL ask the questions. I have attracted talent, engineering, talent That's also the best of the best elite forces. This is a challenge in the streets of retain talent on engineers. Love to work on a hard problem. I gotta ask you what, Some of the hard problems at the end where is trying to tackle that would attract the elite engineering forces to the company. Because again, you're talking about something really big is going on with software. What are some of the big problems? >> Yeah, well, a couple of them that, you know, I'm pretty focused on for our team, and one is we said, you know, we said it's a software defined data center. Right? Going forward. It's the self driving data center. How do we bring so much telemetry? and automation that we truly are running the data center on customers behalf. And if I, you know, build on the Del Technologies World announcement of'em were cloud on Delhi emcee. You know, we're now managing their on premise data center from our cloud. You know what? If we can put more machine learning a I into the middle of that, it's not just that I wantto do it instead of them. I want to do it dramatically better than they ever could write. Using the greatest algorithms telemetry, learning, etcetera that the infrastructure becomes more reliable, right, it becomes higher performance. It becomes increasingly predicted right of its behavior and adjusting to those things. So the self driving data center's pretty high on the list for us. You know this idea then of a true multi cloud operational plane. We're customers. Just say, Here's there's my working. Would you figure out where to run it here? My policies. Here's the work will take care of it for me today. I was running it on this cloud the afternoon I brought it back on promise, because you it >> sounds easy, >> Cassidy. Right? Wow, If you could do that, its scale But then you say, boy, You know, if I move it around, where does the day to reside? Right, You know, have I met my policies and compliance requirements? So this a multi cloud operational plane is a >> big problem that you're attracting talent Is that distract complexity away and making it easy? >> Yeah, right, R, that's what we do. It's hard. I know. You know some >> of the cool things, you know, the are blockchain All right, you know, also breaking through reside. Describe blockchain. It's like the public private key encryption breakthroughs of forty years ago. But they're still very raw, right? Their performances crappy. You know, they don't scale very well. You have all sorts of issues associated with audit ability and repute, ability of those mechanisms. So those are some of the new problems and then also attacking entirely new new segments like NFI, right? Hey, we're going to build a five g network. That's not reliant on hard work, right? >> Well, when you're out of the quiet here, we're going to come to your office, will go deeper, dive on the business and some of the cool tech stuff, >> and we're just coming up on the M world in a couple of months. I think this will be the cubes tenth time there and any little teasers that you could give us about the world twenty nineteen. >> Well, we certainly hope that, you know, we're able to bring a lot of these club messages together right and have sort of, you know, connected all the dots. Att VM world This year's >> state When you heard it here on the Q first, some exciting announcements coming from BM, where in just a few months at being World twenty nineteen. Pak Gil Senior Seo Thank you so much for joining Jon and me at Radio twenty nineteen. As a pleasure. Always thank you so much. We want to thank you for watching for John Ferrier. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Vienna, where Radio twenty nineteen and San Francisco. Thanks for watching

>> Narrator: From San Francisco, its theCUBE. Covering VMware Radio 2019. Brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome to theCUBE, from San Francisco at the VMware Radio 2019 Event. I am Lisa Martin with John Furrier, welcoming back one of our distinguished CUBE alumni, VMware CTO Ray O'Farrell. Ray, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you, very happy to be here. >> This is the fifteenth annual Radio R and D. >> Yes >> Innovation offsite. >> Correct. >> Really competitive there's about eighteen-hundred engineers here, Over a thousand different projects submitted. >> Yes. >> Only about 15 to 20 percent may be selected to be featured here. >> Correct. >> This is the third day or so, talk to us about some of the projects that really caught your attention as really innovative, that really kind of embody the VMware culture of innovation. >> Okay, so the event is an internal event, and, so, but are treated very much in the same way as you would, you know, a more formal, people submitting papers, being peer reviewed and then as you say. A small number of them make it through to the poster sessions or the presentations here. If you look at the broad swat that come in initially, they are very broad, covering everything from technologies that VMware has a lot of focus on whether that's kubernetes virtualization and so on, but also some that are, you know, for the field like virtual reality, augmented reality. You also get quite a few projects which are, fall into how can we be better as a company, So better ways of, if we developed our software using this technology or this approach we'd see better efficiency or ways of testing in new and interesting ways. And I also, for the first time, I think saw a few projects which were more around, less around the technology and more around ways of working together. How can we build teams that work better globally. There's quite a few poster sessions around here about even how to manage and increase the inclusiveness of your team, right? So you're seeing it beyond the technology and instead, how do we as a company become more successful. >> I think that Virtual first is an interesting dynamic, we call it Virtual first because no one has actually built technology for fully virtual teams. >> Yes. >> It's always been kind of collaboration bolted onto pre-existing on premise activity. >> Yeah yeah its a, so our R&D teams, as most R&D teams you're going to see these days are going to be pretty distributed, you are going to have people working from home, you're going to have people in remote sites, you're going to have many project teams, where the actual project itself, right down to the smallest team of ten to fifteen people may well be distributed, so what you got is very core pieces of code being done by teams who are acting remotely. Now, when you think about it, as we work with more and more open source, you're seeing the exact same thing and like the open source community has worked very well in terms of how do you run those projects and so we get to learn from that and we've actually created an office for open source, open source program office, and a lot of what we're trying to figure is how do we make sure to be able to build and leverage that innovation across multiple teams. >> Well Ray, we want to thank you because I know Ray has been around for a while but this is the second year where presses select presses. >> Correct. >> To be invited to get access to some of the projects so we really appreciate that. >> Great idea. >> As CTO of VMware you got to look at the landscape and just look at the organic innovation inside, bring the acquisitions in, and then bring it through to the company architecture. What's, Where's the intersection point on the organic to the CTO, architecture map because you got a lot of great business model going on now, the cloud's looking good. Cloud foundation, yet the Telco business booming, where is the action on the business side, where is this come in, where's the action happening? on the technical business side. >> Yeah on the technical side, what we're seeing is well you've mentioned two questions in there, one is about the innovation and what we will do, how do we fit acquisitions and so on into that mix, we have a fairly formal, I guess, innovation program if I could put it that way. Which basically focuses on what do we do to make sure that we have a really strong culture of innovation as the company, and this event is one of those things. It's not just a few days event, that lead up to it, the lead off from it and so on, that really is focus on make sure we have a culture of innovation in the company. We can create new products, new features as needed, from that. But we also recognize that some of those innovations are going to come from partnerships and from acquisitions, either from partnerships with an Open-source community or in the case of, you saw yesterday, we made an acquisition of a company, Bitnami, which is part of the broader story of us being focused on cloud native applications, what is the best way to be able to, you know, manage that new type of development, container based, kubernetes based and so on. So we're open to wherever that innovation comes from, In fact, that's one of the things I really like about the company. You know, we will look at all the possibilities. And sometimes, you know, as you saw with even some of the partnerships we struck in the last year, you got to be creative. >> So I got to ask you about 5G, one of the things that we're seeing is a lot of hype around 5G, I mean, I was in Vegas, they said 5G LTAE. (laughs) >> Yes. >> E 5GE evolution it wasn't even real 5G. So there's some skepticism, but certainly it's a catalyst. How is 5G impacting your business opportunity in the industry? >> So the Telco industry in general was not particularly virtualized if you go back you know, about two years or three years ago. So one of the key things as people as Telco's are building out, you know, to deal with the 5G infrastructure, there're also saying okay what do I need to build, do I use the way I used to do it? And more and more are saying hey, I should be able to use virtualization, why can I not leverage that same technology which revolutionized Cloud in the data center. So we're seeing some very good business in that space, much of it is what you call the Telco Core, the you know, core infrastructure before you get to the radio networks themselves, but we're also beginning to see even some of that beginning to move out to the radio networks. >> John: Virtualization or software, or both? >> Well virtualization even in fact, that MobileWorld Congress in February I guess, we did some demos of some pretty advanced technologies around network slicing where you're essentially beginning to virtualize the network all the way from the radio network back into the data center itself. >> And the Telco's are certainly from a business that already have been struggling for decades, trying to figure out what that over the top, what their business model could be, will this help them? >> Yeah, well any time, our experience is that anytime you turn something into a flexible software model within that agility within that flexibility you get to do a whole ton of advantages, because you're able to update, you're able to modify, so it's all around flexibility. And everybody talks about you know, how agile you need to be, well, virtualization software, moving into a more software defined model really helps with that. >> Let's talk about, back to Radio 2019, the R and D innovation offsite Radio. Let's talk about customers, how do customer influence projects say from last year to what some of the engineers put together, are these engineers that are having a lot of interactions with customers, what is that influence that customers deliver to VMware's culture of innovation? >> Yeah, it's rather interesting, with more and more we have customers who come to us and actually are asking the question, not necessarily about products, but about the culture of innovation, a question around how do they repeat that or can they learn something from us, and we learn from them too, but it's interesting that the question that has begin to come up more and more as these customers realize we must be agile, we must innovate or else someone is going to get them, from a competitive point of view. They're trying to understand what we do in that space, so that's one aspect of it. In terms of the projects, and what you see here, we do have our professional services organization here, we do have our customer support organization, we do have a lot of our CTO's, a lot of these projects come from offices of the CTO, they all spend a ton of time with customers. We also do make sure for the most part that we get our senior engineers to have an opportunity to go out and visit customers or when customers come on site, that we will have those discussions. So there's a lot of customer input into the mix, where you actually see it showing out or where you should see it begin to appearing more and more, there's a lot of projects here that are deeply systems projects. You'll also find a lot though around pretty basic customer satisfaction things, like user interfaces, ease of licensing all those types of things. So there's a good balance between the two. >> You know one of the things you guys are really doing well in the market place, obviously with the cloud decision with AWS that was a great message to both your field, customer base, how cloud is going to evolve, then cloud foundation, now you got the edge of the network developing, but the software defined data center NSX is doing well. As you start to get into the networking side because the pitch we heard at Dell technologies world was, don't look down, look up the stack. That's where kubernetes is and where the action is on the abstraction layer. There's still a lot of work to do with the networking and security piece of it. >> Correct. >> Where's the innovation angle there, what are the dots to connect on the networking and security side. >> I think probably the biggest focus is on security, almost every customer as they're becoming completely dependent on digital infrastructure just to get there work done. You know like, everything from a farmer to a hospital, they're all digital now, right? Security pops up over and over again. The key products we have in that space are things like, obviously NSX has a large security component to it, but also app defense and some of the projects we do there. So I think security is probably one of the key areas we see that focus. In some ways, what we're seeing is customers coming to us and saying, I want to be able to worry about my applications, can you somehow figure out how to make the IS and the virtualized infrastructure and the security as policy-driven, as automated as possible. And that's where we're focusing. >> You know, one of the things I see as a trend, obviously a student would love, any man would love to be also talking about is the hyper-converged HDI (mumbles) infrastructure really was a tell sign to what customers want, they want to converge everything into an abstraction. >> Correct. >> Into software model, Cloud's hyper-converging. Cloud's is also another. >> Correct. >> Multi-cloud kind of objective. So this notion of consolidating. >> Yeah. >> And kind of creating abstraction is a trend. >> It is, I actually think its really a decision by most customers to say where do I need to focus all of my bandwidth to be successful, and they're saying I want to focus on the layer which is specific to my company. The applications, my customer relations, please somebody help me with all the other stuff. And that's cloud hyper-converge infrastructure VMware. >> John: Do you feel you got like VMware's positioned well in that area? >> I do, I think that in the end, I think we have an interesting blend of what I sometimes use the word agnost or enterprise pragmatic innovation, we know you want to leverage the latest technologies, we know you want to be able to advance in those spaces, but we also know in the end, you know, you are a bank or a hospital, and you need to manage that transition in a fashion which allows you to keep your business going, I think we've been very good at helping companies do that-- >> If I took you on a sales call and I was say, a VMware sales rep or a competitor, obviously the competitors will try to counter what you guys are doing, as we know, we see Cisco out there and others where there's competition, this industry is evolving but you guys have an advantage, what is that pitch to the customer, why VMware over the competition, because they're certainly saying that they can do things better than you guys (mumbles) and vice versa. >> Yeah, I think there's a few advantages, one of them is our enterprise history, our enterprise readiness, some of our competitors obviously have that as well, but you know we are very very strong across all the global, the worlds global enterprises. The other part that you are going to see of course is in some ways we've got the ability to be a little bit of a Switzerland in many cases, our job is effectively to say abstract virtualize your infrastructure, make it easy to manage and optimize and we don't necessarily care what that infrastructure is, is it a public cloud, is it a private cloud, is it a hyper converge infrastructure. So we're able to offer that unified or essential kind of digital infrastructure that goes across all of those things. And within that you're giving choice and flexibility. If you want to move that work load because you think you'll get a better deal on a different cloud, we will help you to do that, or at least make that easier to do. >> Along the spirit of competitive advantage, besides innovation, which we talked about, this very rich history, twenty plus years of innovation at VMware. What are some of the other elements in your opinion that companies like VMware need to have, to be disruptors, couple that come to mind when I think of VMware are partnerships and diversity, what are some of those core elements that really are essential to drive disruption. >> So I often use the phrase which sounds maybe a little bit opposite to disruption, which is resilience, right? Is your company in a position to be able to take either blows from an economy, from competition, and so on. And actually take advantage of those in some ways. And the other part of that is leveraging that innovation as you're trying to say I want to be able to grow and be successful can I do so in a way which that innovation is, I use that word again, pragmatic it fits well with everything you do. I think VMware in my view has a very strong culture, which leads to that, and sometimes we use the phrase of VMware, as a bit of a why culture, people ask why all the time, right? So if I say we're going to do something with project X, some senior engineer is going to say why, now what's even more important, is that often becomes a why not, so you look at some of the partnerships we've done, some of these, where we get into those conversations and you know, the natural thing, well we're not going to partner there, but then somebody says why not, we could partner there, and after that you get some very interesting-- >> We can integrate this into theCUBE Q and A, so right, why block chain? >> Right. (John laughs) Yeah so, the key area where we look at block chain is what actually part has, made some comments on block chain around it being this key almost like the IP story for the future of financial services, right, IP networking so from networking point of view. So what we see is that this is essentially a foundation layer for applications to be built on, not just for financial services, but we see it also showing up more and more in things like supply chain. That's a hard problem, its a distributed problem, its a problem where you get a bunch of customers saying we want to operate as some sort of a group together but one wants to go on prem, the other wants to go on cloud. And that's what, where we've got a unique-- >> The IP metaphor is interesting, I mean, if you look at what IP networking did. >> This is pre-web, this is internet. >> Correct yeah. >> I mean what happened after that was just an amazing shift in our world. So you guys see block chain as a similar paradigm? >> We do see that, well we see, its a layer for which it's be, kind of somewhat ubiquitous layer that then you build these trust applications on top of, right. And so its almost like a platform layer at that stage. That's why when we look at it, its almost becoming kind of a software infrastructure story. >> Well, you know we'd love block chain. We (mumbles) time We're going to talk more in depth. >> You do I saw some of your stuff on block chain online. >> Yeah, great Thanks. >> Yeah. >> So I saw a tweet from you the other day, that of all these poster presentations behind us you were really trying, with all these stickers and things. How is you sticker collection coming along? >> It's coming pretty well, its kind of funny, what you're, me seeing here is a bunch of engineers who are really passionate about the thing they are presenting. So when I find someone and built little LEGO characters, there's little stickers that they build and so on all trying to push to some degree their passion about what they're doing, right? So yesterday I come in here at 7a.m, thought the place would be empty but there was actually a bunch of engineers here. But I was getting all these stickers, right, it was just surprising to me, wow, people put a lot of even artwork into these projects as they try and describe them. >> Well, and what I think about that is it shows creativity and its one of those, you might call it a softer skill, which I don't know why its called softer skills, but thats essential is, is the ability to express that creativity. And also some of the other skills like collaboration and learning how to present even better, which are also elements that the folks that attend Radio get to work on. >> Correct, many of the engineers who present here, this will be their first maybe or their second time presenting to a large group, now they are presenting in front of two thousand people, and in many cases, two thousand of their peers, who know exactly what technology they're talking about, so you can't just give some high-level, oh it might be better kind of thing. Someone will say, where will it be better, how fast will I be, and so on. So, we make sure that if any engineers are looking for training, or want to get some help to do those presentations, we spend quite a bit of time making sure they can get that because that's part of growing them as engineers and as future professionals or business leaders. >> Absolutely, well Ray thank you so much for joining John and me on theCUBE at Radio 2019, great to talk to you, and excited to hear some exciting things to come out of VMworld 2019 which is just around the corner. >> That's right just coming up, Thank you. >> Absolutely. For John Furrier I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from VMware Radio 2019 from San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

really is a unique piece of the VMware culture where the tech guys get together and they just geek out for a couple of days and you know to be to be awarded best the radio it's like oh man you're a god right I think culture is something that happens over time it is preserved over time and it's preserved through people it's not like anything you can write down right of course you can write it down but it won't be worth the paper it's written down unless it's practiced every day by the people about the future is about not only the applications and the the problems that technology can help solve but it's also about the nature of energy and the energy the grid makes the energy in the room is just phenomenal if people are they're really passionate about talking about their work and this people are they're wondering and you meet new people in fact for me in my role what I enjoy the most is of course getting to hear what you guys are doing but also helping them make connections [Music]

>> [Narrator] From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Radio 2018. Brought to you by VMware. (upbeat techno music) >> Welcome back everyone. We're here with theCUBE in San Francisco for exclusive coverage for VMware's Radio 2018. I'm John Furrier, your host. This is the event where everyone comes together in the R&D and the organic engineering organization of VMware to flex their technical muscles, stretch their minds, compete for the papers, and also get to know each other. And the key person behind this is the chief research officer David Tennenhouse. Thanks for joining us today. >> Thank you John. Really glad to be here. >> So you're the chief research officer. You got to look at the company-wide agenda. But this event is more of a special event, organically. Talk about for the folks out there watching what's different about this event that goes outside the scope of kind of the top-down research. >> Yeah this is really, you know, for the developers by the developers. So when you said I'm in charge, I'm definitely not in charge. And you know, we have a program committee. There's a programming committee chair. It's much like the way an academic conference might be organized, where you know, there's kind of a group of academics that sort of watch over the content. In this case, we have many hundreds of folks that submit proposals into radio. They can't all get selected. It's very competitive because in addition, if you get accepted, you get a ticket to radio. You get to attend. So everybody really wants to do that. >> Talk about the organic nature. 'Cause this is one of the things that I've seen that's been part of a world-class organization. Like Amazon has their own process for it called the big idea. They have certain working documents that process to foster any idea across the organization. How important is that as part of Radio? I mean literally it's anyone right? >> Well it's not just Radio. It's important to the whole company. So I think of this as when you're working on innovation, you're gonna have sort of a breadth component. You want everybody doing a little. And some of that's gonna be incremental. One thing I learned in a prior role at a different company is you know if you add up a lot of two percenters, that's how you can double things and keep on Moore's law every year. So you're gonna get some of that. And you're gonna get some really disruptive ideas. So you know, from a top-down point of view, we try to drive some disruptions. Some disruptions show up organically from the troops. And a ton of that breadth stuff shows up. >> I'm honored to be here. It's the 14th year, and some T-shirts commemorating the key milestones from way back in the day. This is the first year press was allowed in. I noticed a handful of folks came in to kind of document this. A lot of the brightest minds in VMware here. Again, great to have us. We're super excited. But share with us. Like, what's happened over the years. Give some examples of where people were coming together, where there's a collision of ideas, and just that combustion that happens. Can you share some stories around key notable, or potentially as Raghu pointed out, there's been some misses too. (laughing) >> Yeah, you're gonna get some of that. I mean you've gotta take risks. Not everything's gonna work. You know and just to speak to misses. What I've learned in the innovation and research space is as much as anything, it's about timing. It's pretty rare that you completely technically miss. Usually engineers have an idea. They'll figure out a way to make it happen. Then the question is, is it the right time? Are the customers ready? Is the market ready to go in that direction? So, that's just to talk to that. >> Timing's everything. >> Timing is a big deal. >> Well there's never a miss too in R&D because if you, like Pat Yelson said, understand when it's gotta be re-casted. Know if it works or not. >> Yeah just understanding. So those are the ones actually you know I feel, what I really hate is if for some reason we have to end a project and we haven't actually gotten to the bottom of it. And so you don't know yes or no. And sometimes that can be the kind of time's run out, right. You've decided well, even if it works, it's too late. But you know, getting back to some of the examples, I'll focus on some more recent ones. We had some really interesting work come together on containers. And there were some folks that, and this is going back like four years ago. Containers aren't a new story, and certainly not for VMware. But around four years ago, there was a proposal at Radio that had to do with hey let's make containers a first class citizen on VMware's platform. Okay, so top level that makes great sense. Let's go do it. Containers are great for developers. The IT folks still want the isolation they get form VMs. Let's put these together really effectively. So that was top level. There was a next level, the idea that said gee at Radio, a couple years before, there'd been this idea of being able to do something called VM fork, or being able to clone a VM. And saying you know... And this came out of our end user computing group, the VDI folks. And if you think about it, if you've got a virtualized PC, you want to be able to clone that so you can start these up really fast. And the container folks said hey, we've got the same problem. Could we actually try to make use of that technology and use that as part of our bigger container push? So you know, those are examples of things that came together at Radio. And there are also examples of things where the market timing may not have quite been there. So we went out with the container work. That was actually post-Radio. It was funded. We incubated it. You've got vSphere Integrated Containers hit the market exactly the right time. >> Timing right there. >> Right, timing right there. But what we learned as we actually started doing trials with customers was that they didn't actually need the instant clone on the containers. What they needed is throughput. They wanted to know that they could do large numbers per second as opposed to you'll get that container really quickly. So as the team went along, they actually shifted away from that fork idea. We'll probably come back to it when the time's right for it. >> Well you have a nice little positioning there. I like the timing. 'Cause by the way, entrepreneurial timing is the same way. You go outside... >> I was a VC. (laughing) >> Okay, so you know okay. Timing's everything. How many times you seen that entrepreneur wicked early on it going... And they keep scratching that itch and finally they get it. The art of the timing. But also the art of knowing when to, what to keep in inventory. Pat mentioned vCloud Air as an interesting example. Recognizing abandonment there. Okay hey, let's just stop, take pause. Let's use what we have. >> Do something else. >> Do something else. >> Gotta do something else. And by the way along the way, in parallel with vCloud Air, we had built up these vCloud partners. And that's phenomenal right. So we have you know, people think in terms of a couple of very large public clouds. But we've got literally thousands of people running public clouds in either specialized markets, or particular countries, that are running on our platform. And you know that whole vCloud Air effort helped push that forward. >> So where were you a VC? Just curious. >> I was actually in a company that fits with sort of my role in research and innovation. I was in a specialized firm, boutique firm, new venture partners, that specialized in spin outs from large companies. This goes to the timing, right. I'd previously been at another large company. You know, and whenever you have a research portfolio, you're gonna have some projects that you started. They were technically successful. That's your first notch. Then you go look and say hey, can I find a business model for it. Some of these are both technically successful. You find a business model, but you had anticipated that the company strategically was gonna zig. The company zagged. Now this is a great opportunity that doesn't quite fit. So you know, we did those as spin outs. >> Well I love the perspective too of you said earlier, David, around not getting to the bottom of it. And that's the most frustrating part. Because you just gotta get some closure you know. Like okay, this thing, we took it to the end, completion, this is not gonna... Good try guys. >> And we know why. >> And you know why. Now let's take it to the next level. Now the market we're living in now I heard with Ray O'Farrell, I was talking with earlier. We talked about the confluence of these big markets coming together. Infrastructure market, which is kinda declining on paper. But cloud is filling the void. Big data's becoming AI, and blockchain over the top. These are four major markets. And at the center of them, intersecting all these nuances, security, data, IoT. >> Governance. >> Governance. So there's some sticky areas that are evolving based upon these moving markets. Opportunity recognition's another one. So this is what you're kind of doing now with the research. Talk about opportunity recognition. >> We definitely do that. And I do want to say on the infrastructure side, you know something to recall is that as people, you know they've got their private clouds. Those are individually getting actually bigger as they consolidate. But now with IoT, you're seeing edge computing pop up. Right, so the private infrastructure doesn't go away, it moves around. It's like a liquid. And you pour it from place to place in some sense. >> Moving computer around. Sound like what Ray O'Farrell was talking about in his keynote, early days of VMware. Again, Compute's the center of this. >> Right, Compute, but you know I'm a networking guy so you know, we've grown that. And I think that in fact, you know more and more as we make progress with software defined network, and network virtualization. And if you think about that, so you know let's look at that. So Compute's definitely at the center of what happens in the data center, in the cloud, right. You're gonna want to be able to string those piece together. So today we've got AirWatch. I think that's strategically really key. Because it gives us a little bit of presence on the edge devices that touch people. That's one of the ways information gets from the physical world to the virtual world is through people. >> It's an edge device. People are things too. >> IoT, right. So we're you know, working hard. And that's one of the projects that we incubated, and researched, and is now become a business at Vmware. It's to get that presence right at the edge of the gateways that bridge between the things that are connected to the physical world, and bringing it into the virtual world. Now if we can put our software defined network between all that, so you got it between the public cloud, the private cloud, the mobile devices in people's hands. >> And on premise, data center. >> Exactly, all of 'em. >> All right, so here's a question for you. This is one of those trick questions. Is the cell phone an edge device or an IoT device? >> Well I think it's in many ways both. And what I think of it is is more of a gateway. If you think about the IoT world, you have the things. >> IoT is a strict definition though in your mind, right. People refer to IoT as more of a sensor thing to a physical device. >> I tend to think of it as it's got some connection to some physical device. It's able to bring information in from the physical world. Okay, so now you look at your cell phone. It can bring information. It's got that microphone. It's got that camera, right. It can bring information in. >> [John] Connect it to a physical person. >> It can put information back out. Yeah, through a physical person. I've been in the space for a long time. Going back to my time at DARPA, we set out to create the IoT world. This wasn't an accident, right. We looked at this and said, okay the main way information gets between these two worlds today is through human beings. The way I used to explain this to the generals is you know, we can't keep putting human beings in the direct line of fire of information technology. So we've gotta get these devices, gotta get all these sensors. It's taken a long time. This is you know again, timing. But if you look at the research world. >> By the way, incredible work you've done by the way from there to here, it's been amazing. >> You know pull this along. But you know so when you look at that cell phone, it's got some of those sensors. It's got actually a whole pile of sensors in the phones today. It's got actuation, the ability to put the information back out. It's also a gateway. Because typically you know, particularly through its Bluetooth functionality, and as we get Bluetooth low power now. So it's also acting as a gateway to connect up other devices around your body, network etc. >> Personal networking, whatever comes on your physical presence. >> So you know, turn that around and it says in the IoT world, we've gotta manage gateways. We've gotta make sure gateways stay secure. Because they're really gonna be the sort of main perimeter, the line of defense. If you think about all these things that are gonna be out there, as an industry, we're gonna collectively try very hard to secure all those things. But let's be realistic. They're gonna be supplied from a wide variety of companies, and they're gonna last longer than people might think. >> How much of those devices are operationally, operation technology is non IP, versus not IP. Internet Protocol. >> Non Internet Protocol. Yeah, yeah. >> Internet Protocol now. >> [David] Non Internet, you had it right. >> Got the VC in the brain there. The VC, IP, I'm like get that IP right. So internet protocol devices, which has some challenges but that's getting fixed, versus OT just sensors proprietary. >> Yeah well either proprietary or let's say, you know it may be an industry standard, but an industrial standard. So today, a very large fraction, particularly you asked about how we focused at Vmware. Well one of our foci is we're about what are our enterprise customers gonna need. So when we think IoT, we're not really thinking that much about the consumer devices. We're thinking about those enterprise devices. So a lot of those will use... >> That's where AirWatch might come in. So employees still have phones though. >> Employees still have phones. So that's why I said, so there's the human interface. We want to be there. And there's the other enterprise interfaces to all these sensors. That could be in a factory. It could be in a smart city, any number of places. So as we pull information in from those, we're gonna find that they come from a lot of different suppliers and they're gonna last a long time. You know, even if you buy a device that's got a three to four year lifetime, probably 10 to 20% of those still gonna be around 10 years later, right. You're smiling because you know that in your home you have some wifi connected devices that are a little older than they probably should be. >> And they have full processing capability threaded processes on it, which could be running malware as we speak. >> So as I said, as an industry, we'll try to secure those really edge things. But the reality is we're gonna have to draw the line at the gateway. >> It's a lot more security work. I totally hear you. I mean the light bulb could have a full thread on there. The surface area is so huge now. >> And there have been attacks on light bulbs. >> Yeah I know. So I gotta ask you a question. 'Cause you bring up this networking edge, which by the way I love anything that's network. 'Cause I think this is the future of work. How is the future of work impacting some of the R&D you're doing. Because you talked about AirWatch them having more mobility. The human impact, society, whether it's mission driven and or just human collaboration going digital. You're gonna need to have policies. You need to have a networked society. This is super relevant. But it brings back that future work. >> It does. And so couple different aspects. You know, one you know, which just relates to a point you raised is if you look at something like our Workspace ONE product, if you've had a chance to do that. It's kind of a win win, because you get one portal. So you know, an employee for an enterprise, they've got one portal. They get access, it doesn't matter whether they're getting to a web app, they're getting to a you know, a DVI supported application. They're getting to something that's on a server, something on a SAS player, right. They get through that portal. So for them it's convenient. I mean for me as a manager, I love this, right. Because whether I'm on my cell phone, I'm on a laptop, doesn't matter, I can get to the same expense app. I can approve things. >> You don't need to carry two phones. My work phone and my... >> And I can do all these approvals really easily, right. So I also don't worry. I don't see the difference between which device I'm on. At the same time that you're delivering that convenience to the user, you're delivering governance because the IT team can be deciding how that portal's populated, how things are connected, right, and how the wiring works. All the authorization, you've got a common identification system and all of that. So that's kind of very specific to you know, let's say near term changing the user interface. In terms of the broader future of work, clearly machine learning is the big story here, right. And I think that what we're gonna see is, particularly again in enterprise, more and more need for data analysts to be able to look at the big data. We're gonna see sort of more and more use of machine-learning technologies. It's gonna you know basically creep in everywhere. And we're getting this at just the right time. So if you want to think about future work in the big national and international scale, what you really sort of stop to look at is say, gee, okay, these machines are gonna do all this work. What about the people? And you know a lot of people therefore get concerned. Gee, the computers are gonna take away all the jobs. Right, you get these sound bytes. >> I think right now we're worried about fake news and real content. (laughing) >> Well let's come back to that one later. But there is a sense of gee, you know, the computers will take on all the jobs. And you know what I think people are not doing carefully is looking at the demographics. Because if you look at basically all the developed economies for practical purposes, we actually have a demographic problem. Our problem is actually not a surplus of workers. It's gonna be a shortage of workers. In fact, actually in the US right now, you're starting to feel this. Now that's at the peak of the economic cycle. So of course you feel it, you know, a bit. >> They need trained workers too. Also people who qualify. >> Right. So I think the thing we really need to look at is how do we do a much better job at matching, you know, sort of workers, both folks coming into the workplace, people with existing skills, to available opportunities. Because actually we're gonna have a shortage of workers. And it's not just sort of the US and Europe. I mean China, Japan. Well Japan for a long time. China, headed to a shortage of workers. I was out in Singapore not too long ago and was surprised to find out not just that they're concerned. But they went and looked at the Southeast Asian countries around them that are their markets. They're looking at a shortage of workers. So you know, if we didn't have something like machine-learning and AI coming along, we'd be sitting there saying, how are we gonna keep our economies growing? >> We need augmentation for sure. >> We need this augmentation. And it's coming at just, you know, you talked about timing. You know, it's coming at just the right time. Now, there definitely are gonna be some tough transitions along the way, right. So we definitely, you know, for example, as autonomous vehicles come along, we've gotta figure out, okay, all those people that are driving vehicles, what are they gonna do going forward? But let's not kid ourselves too, you know. If you've got trucks moving around with high-value cargoes, you're not gonna leave those unattended, right. We're gonna have to figure all this out. So there's gonna be a lot of interesting opportunities. >> What's your take on blockchain? Well first of all, GDPR, real quick. Train wreck, useful? >> I think it's you know, if you backed up and asked me four or five years ago, I'd have said train wreck. And largely because we still don't have the sort of kind of international consensus on what the rules should be. >> But you mentioned governance earlier. That certainly needs to be at the center of the action. >> Right, but you know, if we take a look now, it seems like it's showing up at just the right time, right. You know, in that sense. I think part of what's happened is over the intervening years, a lot of countries outside of Europe, because they realize these regulations would apply to them, they've worked with European regulators to help the regulators understand the technology, you know, help the companies understand. >> That's a good politically correct answer. I'll just say I think it's a shit-show personally. But you know. I mean it's gonna force people... It's like Y2K in money making, but Y2 never happened. It's forcing people to really, I think the value of GDPR is the big companies are gonna get hit hard on some suits. Just the trolling thing bothers me. Just the trolls that come out of the woodwork. But I think the positive that puts the center of the value proposition, making data, not a one off, like backup and recovery. It has to be core to technical operations. >> And making privacy something that's really in that first class category. You know, as I said. >> Great first step, but... There's a big but. >> There is more to be done. >> Hopefully they don't go after us little guys. All right, final question, blockchain. We are super excited about blockchain. You have teams working on this. >> [David] I am super excited about blockchain. >> Talk about your view on blockchain. Why are you excited about it? Obviously we feel it's very efficient, makes inefficiencies efficient across all industries. Your thoughts. >> Okay so again, we look at things through this prism. What are enterprise customers gonna be looking at? What do they want? And you know, so we're not you know... I think you're in the same place. We're not looking at the crypto currencies, right. That's not the thing. And in fact, we're not even looking at cohabiting on the Bitcoin blockchain. Because do you really want to run your business in the same place that a whole bunch of other people are running illegal businesses and the whole thing. >> And by the way, there's some technical issues. (laughing) >> We'll get to that. We're gonna get there. But just even as a starting point. So we pretty quickly looking even you know, three, four years ago said, okay enterprise is not gonna want to go that way. But this idea of a federated ledger, right. So if you can make federated ledgers and we can have reusable technology, that means now, if I want to federate with other companies or other organizations, or you know, or you need companies federating with governments, or governments federating with each other. Anywhere you want to pull together essentially a club for the exchange of data, with a persistent record of what happened, you've now got a common way of doing it, right. Or we can drive towards that. You know there'll be a standardization process to get there. But so it's not to me, federated ledgers means lowering the barrier to federation. And I think that's pretty exciting. Whole bunch of places. You know, supply chain, clearly one. Financial technology, but... >> David, we gotta spend some time, have you come in the studio. I'd love to explore some of these great topics with you. But I gotta ask you one final question. You know, with your history going back to ARPA, D-ARPA days, and looking at really the beginning of the information super highway, IP, connecting some universities together, to today, the waves that have gone through. We've talked about standards. The OSI stack, you had all these grandiose standard plans. Not all of them have happened exactly as planned. But defacto standards play a really important role. It galvanizes community, gives people guiding principles, a north star, whatever metaphor you want to use. The key is the enabling disrupting technologies, a defacto standard. What's happening now in your mind that you see out there that's starting to emerge as defacto? 'Cause certainly there's a lot of standard things going, open sources for tier one citizen growing, rapidly, which is greatness. Cloud is booming, unlimited resources, Compute, fingertip compute... All this is good. >> Yeah. >> All these new standards, I got Kubernetes, I got this going on, what's emerging? >> Well again, they're defacto, right. Kubernetes is an interesting example of basically open source meets defacto. And that's pretty exciting right. I mean, we're excited about it. I think people are often surprised we're a fan of open source. And I guess really, I just like to sort of back up a notch. Because you know what you touched on is defacto standards, whether it's open source or not, have suddenly become a lot easier. When I say suddenly, over like a 10 year period. And I think what's going on there is this is part of the change to software. So you know, if you're talking about hardware, and you got screws, you know, and you got threads, these physical things have to match, and they have to match exactly, right. Say when you travel overseas, you need to carry converters, physical converters to convert from one thing to another. So if you want to interoperate, if you and I want to have stuff that interoperates, we needed to build like either, do the same thing, or have a physical adapter. There was a cost to not having a standard. If you think about in the software world, we can build software converters, right. So if I've got you know, say we've got two, or three, or four, or even 50 defacto standards in the software world. You know, blockchain. So there's 50 new things. Everybody launches their own. Pretty quickly, the market will drive that down to a small number. And then you can put software converters in place. So we no longer actually have to get to one. >> [John] That's the software economic model. >> It's a big change. >> And that is huge. So by the way, we had Dirk Hohndel on at CubeCon. Love his open source mission, just a shout out to you guys, doing a great job. You guys at VMware certainly that we know, love you over on the East Coast. Final prediction. Final question. Give us a prediction. >> Give you a prediction. >> 2018, second half of the year, what's gonna happen? What's gonna be a notable thing that you see out on the horizon that might happen in the marketplace that might be notable for people to stand up and pay attention to? >> I think we're gonna see some significant developments in the blockchain space. And it's gonna be in the category of people starting to announce real deployments. And you know, if you're sort of looking at that time frame, you know you've had a lot of different enterprises try things. We've had people kind of dabble at things. I think you're gonna start seeing some people really move significantly in that space. >> And do you think like, just to follow up on that, do you think like in the database world now, where by the way, it's okay to have a zillion databases now. 'Cause you talk about databases. >> But it consolidated down to a few players. >> You get some extraction layers. It's okay to have a few variety of blockchains. I mean, there's no one blockchain. >> Correct, so that's where I think as I said, you're gonna see actually a bunch of these deployments. They'll be using different technologies. And then the fun really starts right. As people consolidate, especially with open source, they swap ideas. We boil it down to what's the best of the best. We've got you know, stuff we're doing certainly to knock the throughput down, sorry throughput up, latency down. (John laughing) And you know, we think we've got a very scalable approach. And most important, you know something that's really... I don't know if you talked to people about our sustainability. You know, it's a key value for VMware. >> [John] Yeah, lot of great standards there, yeah. >> So you can imagine we looked at blockchain. We looked at proof of work. And we said that's proof of energy wasted. We're not going there. >> Gotta make it more efficient. >> I think you're gonna see more and more folks focusing on things like Byzantine fault tolerant. Ours is scalable. You know SBFT. >> Yeah performance is key. And the energy's a huge problem. >> But performance and at acceptable energy. You can't you know, just waste. It's immoral to just waste energy. And it really goes against what a lot of the whole IT industry's built up. You know, I think we've, over the decades, we've done a lot of things for the good of society. And we gotta stay the mission. >> I think as the more, I won't say mature, but big world-class organizations join in, I think that'll straighten itself out. And certainly, as any evolution would see, the web. I remember dial-up and AOL. It can't go as fast as this minicomputer. Well you don't get it, it's the web okay. David, thanks so much for coming on, appreciate it. Great conversation here at Radio 2018. I'm John Furrier, Cube coverage of VMware's annual 14th year conference, at Radio 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat techno music)

>> [Narrator] From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Radio 2018, brought to you by VMware. >> Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Radio 2018. We are in San Francisco for their VMware's Radio 2018. It's their R&D fiesta, party. As Steve Harris said, former CTO, it's like a sales kickoff for engineers. It's a great time, but it's also serious. A lot of real serious discussion and of course people are flexing their technical muscle and stretching their minds. And I'm here with one of the chief operator, one of the main principals and legend in VMware, Raghu Raghuram. Chief Operating Officer, new title. Chief Operating Officer, Products and Cloud Services. >> That's right. >> Great to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> What year did you join VMware? >> 2003 (chuckling) >> 15 years >> So, you've seen many of these radios. >> Yes, it's one of the highlights of the year for me. >> Yeah, super important architect of VMware, great part of the community, leader, architect of the AWS relationship. >> [Raghu] Sure >> Part of that movement with Andy Jassy, Sanjay Poonen. This is the 14th year of radio and VMware has changed a lot since you joined. It's now a world class organization. Getting check marks for one of the best places to work. Certainly for engineers it's like a great party environment. Take a minute to explain the radio culture, it's 14th year, there's t-shirts behind us, to commemorate the key milestones, where it's come from, where it's gone, your thoughts on the program and the community. >> Yeah, I mean this is in fact one of the unique characteristics of VMware. I have checked around with my peers in the industry and I don't think any other tech company of our size does this. Radio stands for R&D innovation offsite. Like you said, we started fourteen years ago just to take a bunch of engineers out from their daily grinds and say, "what could we be building fundamentally that's groundbreaking?" So, I would say it's a cross between a wild science fair and a research conference. In fact, both of these go hand in hand at this place. People publish papers and there is a selection committee just like in serious conferences. In fact, Ray had some amazing stats for this year's submissions and the selection is very very rigorous. At the same time, you'll go upstairs and you'll see the exhibition hall where there are all kinds of things that are displayed. Things that could be very well incremental things in the next release and things that are wild and wacky off the wall that we might never ever do. So, it's really the full gamut. Another interesting thing is we've gone bigger. We are getting people from pretty much all parts of the Emirate. I think there is representation from 25 companies. >> [John] How many engineering centers are there roughly? I mean, there's core centers and then you have engineers all over the world. How many engineers, ballpark? >> I would say, in terms of medium to big size centers, there are probably over a dozen across the globe and literally every continent. Clearly, in the US we have four big centers. In Europe, we have three at least. In Asia, we have another three or four. So, we definitely have over 10. >> I mean everyone who knows the VMware and also knows theCUBE, for nine years, well this is our ninth year covering VMworld, all you gotta do is look at VMworld and you can tell one thing right out of the gate. Very community oriented. All the decisions are made in the community. Also, people who know VMware know you're highly an engineering organization. >> [Raghu] Yep. >> This is not like a lot of marketing fluff. Although, you do have some good marketing here and there, but the point is it's an engineering culture with community. This is unique. I've seen companies that don't walk the talk on "community engineering". They have silos, there's a lot of infighting. How have you- How has VMware preserved a culture of innovation amongst their peers when it's competitive as hell inside VMware? One to be smart, achieve the success. But, also, VMware has always been in always a moving market. How do you guys do it? What's the secret sauce? >> I mean, there's not a single thing. Like you said, culture is something that happens over time and is preserved over time and is preserved through people. It's not like anything you can write down, right? Of course you can write it down. But, it won't be worth the paper it's written down on unless it's practiced everyday by other people. And so, I think that is the key thing here. Right from the get go, customer centric innovation has ruled the rules here. So, the question to ask always is great innovation, look at it from a customer end point of view. I think that matters a lot here. Secondly, there is a lot of emphasis on breaking the rules in terms of doing something disruptive, right? And, the engineers that come here tend to be the kind to respond to that, right? And then lots of venues. Like this is not the only thing that we do, right? We do these things called borathons, which is our internal version of hackathons. We do regional versions of these things. Each of the teams, like the business units, have their own little R&D innovation activities that go on. >> They have a playground. They can basically go outside the scope of their job. >> Exactly. >> Get an idea, a passion, an idea and go after it and not have to worry about anything. >> Yup, exactly. >> [John] With a path to commercialization, if it hits. >> Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. We have a fairly high success rate, I would say, of taking things that we see here and turning them into product and eventually into monetizable businesses. All the things that go into the product features. >> Give some examples of historically, successes, notables, and then also talk about some ones that aren't notable that have come out. I know a lot has come out of this, the numbers are clear. What are some highlights that have come out of the radio event that have been blockbuster successes? >> A lot of the things that you see in the networking today came out of radio. Things about doing security and networking from the hypervisor up, came from here. What you see today as vSAN, had its roots here. What you see today with the app defense and the security stuff, had its roots here. A lot of the features that are in vSphere today, especially the storage vMotion and so on and so forth, was first showcased here. This goes on and on and on. We also have a lot of things that have shown up here that we have not pursued. For example, almost like an eBay for VM capacity. We didn't pursue it. God knows, that could've been a huge idea. (laughing) >> It's the misses too. >> Yeah, there's the misses too. But, that's the whole point of this. >> Yeah. There's parts to creativity. How much creativity goes on at this event? I mean there's certainly a lot of barnstorming, brainstorming, or whatever you wanna call it. A lot of interaction, physical face to face. How much creativity is happening you think here? >> Yeah, so a few years back they introduced a couple of things. One is a instant birds of a feather. Where you can literally go to a whiteboard and say, "hey let's discuss this topic," and set up a time and then people show up. There's this other one they call Lightning Rounds, which literally happens over drinks I think tomorrow or something. Where people come in and it's lots of the mini gauntlet where nothing is scripted. All sorts of crazy ideas keep flowing. I would say those are two examples where there's a lot of on the spot creativity. As a company, the R&D teams have gotten more dispersed. This is the opportunity for people to get together even within the same business unit or across business units and say let's go solve this problem. You and I have been talking about this on email, let's talk about it face to face. Hey, let's bring somebody else in that's relevant to this conversation as well. So, those are the kind of things that go on here that spark the creativity. And then of course, the exhibits. When people start thinking about these exhibits and talking to people that are showing there, other ideas get spawned off as well. >> Raghu, talk about just from your experience, you got a great track record, and certainly it was in VMware, it goes back to the early 2000s. What is your observation on the innovation formula? What's been the consistent constant of innovation? As the waves have changed- I mean, I've been in Palo Alto for 19 years now, in my 20th year. Even Palo Alto's changed. So, the world's changed, modern. And we'll get to the Amazon deal in a second. Certainly cloud's here. What have you seen as the constant innovation variable? >> What I would say is this. Fundamentally the people that we tend to recruit into VMware are by large what we call, or at least I call, platform thinkers. So, they think of building a fundamental piece of technology that can be possibly be used in 10 different ways, and they build it for one particular use case. And then, the questions goes back to, now we've done this, what else can we do with this foundational technology? If you look at vSphere, does the same thing. If you look at networking, same thing. Storage is the same thing. So, I would say that is the constant. That's one constant here. Which is, how do you build fundamentally a platform that could be used in very different ways. >> Some will also say systems thinking. >> Exactly, so that's a compliment. >> The cloud is a system. >> (mumbles) I think Paul Maritz is a 2010 picture. Although, some of the calls didn't come out. He kind of generally had the architecture. >> Yeah, yeah >> He nailed it (laughs) >> There are a few people like Paul in the world and absolutely he nailed it. >> Dave and I would give him a lot of credit for that. Okay, let's talk about Amazon Web Services. Certainly Radio's now 14th year. At what point did the cloud start clicking in? You said there's some misses, the eBay for VMs. Certainly cloud is on the radar. >> Yeah >> And vCloud, we know what happened there. Pat talked about how you guys really took that opportunity, which is, you made lemonade out of some lemons there with that product. That's my words, not his. When did cloud first appear on the horizon in Radio and how do you see that happening now as we talk multi-cloud? >> You missed the alumni session today. One of the early engineers said when he was interviewed by Mendel, which was in 1999, Mendel is of course the founder and first chief scientist here. He said he foresaw the event. When the engineer asked him, "how are we gonna make money on this?" He thought there would be a day when people just rent computer capacity from a data center instead of going out and buying gear. In some ways- >> He predicted >> He predicted >> Cloud operations >> Back in the company's starting days. But really I think we saw this in 2005, 2006, 2007. At the same time actually as Amazon saw this. But, the big difference was we were growing 100% a year on core business and we had our hands full that way. We felt like as a software company the way to play it was by delivering technology to other people to build it. So, that's when it really made it's way here, in Radio and in the products. >> And by the way, it wasn't obvious to many people in the industry at that time, to Amazon. I've had many conversations with Andy Chassy and he now uses the term being misunderstood. They were completely misunderstood unless you were an entrepreneur who was using EC-2 just to avoid seed money. 'Cause it was a dream for entrepreneur's at that time. I remember that clearly. That was not obvious. It really wasn't obvious until about 2010, nine, 10. So you guys were growing. Missed that. Radio is not about missing it. It's about identifying. >> Exactly. >> So, how does it translate today for Amazon? >> The Amazon relationship, if you think about the technical underpinnings of it, clearly we did a vCloud error. We learned a lot on that. Within some of our engineers, the question that was asked was, "what if we could run a cloud on top of other peoples clouds?" And we did experiments with nested virtualization. We did experiments with bare metal. And then we chose the start of our model. So, that's one of the technical early indicators of what we could do on other people's clouds. So, that's a big thing. The rest of the things we're doing with respect to elastically growing capacity and all those things, came from experiments that were shown up here. So, that was the connection back to Radio. In terms of the Amazon partnership itself, a lot of it was driven from the customer end. As we were thinking about VCN not working the way we wanted it to work, we went back to the customers and said, "what is wrong with this picture?" And, the answer that came back was very clear. They said, we like the hybrid idea, but we want the hybrid to be VMware on prem and Amazon in the cloud because 70% of our customers turned out to be AWS customers. And at the same time AWS was hearing the same thing. Why don't you guys team up instead of being either or? That's what led to the partnership. >> Your team at VMware came as the cloud native piece? >> Yeah >> Aspect of it. So Kubernetes is on the horizon. Not on the horizon, in your face. And you've got service mesh over the top. >> Yep, yep >> That's up the stack. It's networking. >> Yep, exactly. >> Still needs to do networking. >> Yeah, exactly. >> It's like, you guys must be like, hey we love what's going on up there. Come down to the store. >> Yeah. So, the boundary between what is application platform and infrastructure platform is constantly changing. Kubernetes, when it started out people said oh it's an application platform. Now it turns out its actually infrastructure. Same thing in networking. So what we see is, things were the lower level of the infrastructure constructs, the same idea is applied at the next level up. That's why we love Kubernetes. We love Service Mesh. We love similar concepts that are coming about in storage and security it's one- >> A unified stack is coming. >> Yep, exactly. >> Just someone fix networking and then the holy grail, programmable networks. >> Yep >> When are they coming? >> At the application level. >> Let's go >> Yeah >> Holy grail is finally here. It's not where you thought it was gonna be. >> It is at both places, right. I mean, it's tying back to the conventional layer, two layer, three stuff because that's also important still. >> Raghu, I love having a chat with you. It's great to chat. >> Good to see you again John. >> Super impressive with the work you've been doing. Love the cloud deal with Amazon, you know that. Love what's going on at Kubernetes and containerization. Love what's going on with Service Mesh, unified stack. Love cryptocurrency, which I didn't get to ask you. >> Yep >> Thumbs up? >> Crazy things going on there too >> Thumbs up, okay, thumbs up. >> We're watching the cryptocurrency. >> Watching, token economics coming right behind it. It's theCUBE bringing you all the action here at Radio. We're the signal. 2018, Radio 2018. I'm theCUBE with Raghu. I'll be right back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat music)

>> [Voiceover] From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Radio 2018, brought to you by VMware. (upbeat techno music) >> Okay welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage, and John Furrier, Here in San Fransisco for VMware's Radio 2018 14th year where all the top engineers and R&D folks get together and show their best stuff, ideas, discussions, and have a great time. Our next guest is Nicola Acutt who's the vice president of stability strategy office of the CTO VMware part of the group that puts this event together, really a celebration, but also competitive. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for showing up. >> Thanks, it's great to be here, thank you. >> So, talk about what your role is, because sustainability, we were just talking off camera about blockchain and the energy. Is sustainability an energy thing, is it a society thing, what is your focus? >> John we think about sustainability at VMware in a holistic way, and it's some total of how we run our business, so from an operations perspective, how we do that in a responsible and an environmentally responsible way, but it also includes our people and culture. Sustainability is a lot about culture change, and then most importantly, it's also about what we do, and the impact of our product. And so at VMware, we focus on sustainability and what's unique about our approach is that it's in the business, that we have placed the sustainability function in the office of the CTO, because we believe that the biggest impact that we can have is actually through our technology. >> You guys do a great job, I have to say. And the building, by the way, in Palo Alto, your headquarters, which is voted one of the most best places to work, is very sustainable. I know they got a couple of pens from the trees, and you guys use all the wood, all the stories involving the building. So the culture's there, so I gotta ask you here at Radio, what are some of the sustainability ideas, what are some of the conversations, what are some of the papers, what are some of the core tech off-road map that's exciting you and the team at VMWare on sustainability? >> Right, it's really exciting, and Radio is such a magical event for all those reasons. And the sustainability piece of this is really exciting, and there's a couple of dimensions that we have. We have an expo up in the science fair part of the event where some of our engineers who participated in our recent Borathon, which is like a Hackathon, and the theme was sustainability, and so they're presenting their hacks, some of their crazy cool ideas. On one end there was a project around using block chain technology for microgrids, there was a broken build predictor, there was a project around monitoring real time energy for our service. So fascinating, sort of skunkwork projects in the office of the CTO, and then we also are going to be doing a paper cosponsored with two of our principle engineers looking at, and asking a really big question. And that is around code sustainability, and how we think about sustainability and energy as a metric of success just like we consider performance, quality, and security. So I'm excited about that, because that ultimately is about culture, and it's about thinking about hard problems. And that's what innovation is about, right? It's creativity solving hard problems, and implementing something as a result. >> And the big debate about, oh servers aren't gonna be made 'cause the clouds eating server market, well someone's gotta buy servers, someone's gotta run data, so that's always been the challenge of how do I get more power? And now intermitting things, the IOT devices, are needing power. So you've got solar, not a lot of challenges at the network layer but also our layer. Because it's not connected to the network, it has to transmit, it needs power. How do you guys see that evolving on the R&D front? >> You know, I think that's one of the big horizon issues for our industry, frankly. VMWare celebrating our 20th year anniversary, and recently we had an event where some of our alumni and founders and they were asked the question, "what are the things that "keep you up at night about our industry?" And there were two answers to that, one is security and the other is energy. So we really have to fundamentally think about this question, and that is something that we are taking to heart at VMWare and considering what does that future look like? For some companies sustainability is about innovating around things like, can we make products from plastic pollution in the ocean? And for us, we're asking the question what does the future of energy look like for our customers and for our industry? And that future is going to be a distributed energy future. So what does that mean for computing? I don't have the answers right now, but that's part of, and events like this where we bring our smart people together to start to ask those questions, and that's where innovation begins. >> And you don't know where the spark is gonna come from, that's what's great about these tech events, is that there's no bad ideas, 'cause you can kick it around. There's enough people around you, and then now you go back to the company, digitally connected. So you have the Hackathons and the tech talks, you have cool vibe environment, the question I wanna ask you with that is that, is that distributed energy challenge the number one item on the agenda? What are some of the key things that are shaping the agenda for you guys with sustainability? 'Cause I think that's what folks might wanna know about, "okay, what should I think about, is it energy, "what are some of the things I should "start thinking about in the shower, "thinking about as I'm at work or at play?" >> Right, great question. And you know, sustainability is a complex issue that challenges us as a society. For us at VMware, like I said, we're taking a holistic perspective on sustainability, so that includes environmental, social and governance matters. But to answer your question from a technology perspective, we are focused on energy, that's not the only thing, but it is a priority. So we're looking at that from several dimensions. One is our own processes, so that's where the sustainability code initiative code comes in, so how we make our code and our product. And then the products and features that get built into our products and services to our customers, and then layered on top of that is then the energy mix, and doing our part as a progressive company to drive through renewable energy's markets. So we've made a commitment to 100% renewable energy, to carbon neutrality, to do our fair share, but also to help shift the market. Because the future is about not only the applications and the problems that technology can help solve, but it's also about the nature of energy, and the grid mix, so that's a combination. >> And the empowerment to society is also a big one. Huge focus this year, not this year, but this decade on mission driven initiatives. Sustainability clearly falls in that. We were talking about before we came on camera about block chain, and one of the things I've observed in my reporting is that a lot of energy ideas in block chain. You mentioned one of them, where token economics could be an issue. I know block chain has it's own challenges with energy, but that's a hard problem that could be solved that needs to be solved. So folks watching, solve the energy problem, and the speed problem too on block chain. But these are the new ideas that are growing in India, in Africa, these new areas of the world where the middle class is exploding in growths. More access people to computing, more mobile devices. So you start to see new geographies around the world challenge. >> Absolutely, and I fundamentally share the optimism around technology. I think as technologists, we need to be thoughtful about the impact of technology, and I think that is another topic of the day we could have a separate conversation on that, but when you look at the challenges of the world, and the United Nations has put out the sustainable development framework that really names those big gnarly problems of the world that we need to solve, and at the heart of all of those, I believe, technology plays a role. To me, I think that's where companies like Vmware can have a bigger impact, is to think about where is that sweet spot around which we can help bridge those divides, and enable a better future more globally. >> I know you gotta go, real quick, describe what's going on here at Radio, San Francisco to the folks that are watching could make it, what's the vibe, what's it like, share some color commentary. >> You can just feel the energy. It's like a big science fair, but at the end of the day-- >> [John] It's social, too. >> It's very social, and this event is about technology, but it's actually about community. So we talk a lot about all the cool things and things in our future, off-road maps, but at the end of the day, software is all about people, and you see that here, you feel it, it is a community event, and it is about people connecting, and that's the best part about it. >> It's the social collaborative construct. We love coming here, thanks for inviting us. The engineering's action's happening, it's happening here at Radio in San Francisco for VMware, this is theCUBE coverage, I'm John Furrier, we'll be back with more coverage after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

>> [Announcer] From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Radio 2018, brought to you by VMware. (upbeat music) >> Hello everyone welcome back, this is theCUBE's exclusive coverage here at VMware's Radio 2018, this is their seminal, big-tent event for their top engineers, smartest people come together present their reports, their projects, and come together as a community and share great content and agenda. As Steve Herrod former CTO says, this is like a sales kickoff for engineers, it's motivated and they flex their muscles, technically, stretch their minds. I'm here with Pat Gelsinger, the CEO VMware, great to see you, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Hey thank you very much, it's fun to be here at Radio. >> So this is nerd central, this is >> Absolutely, this is like geek city baby. >> Dave and I always complement you on your business acumen obviously doing great as a CEO, the numbers, business performance, world class organization, check, best place to work, one of the best places to work for, check. But you're kind of a geek at heart, you like to get down and dirty, technical, this is your event. You gettin' down with the folks? >> Yeah it's fun, I was just at our sales, we have a top sales people, our sales club, so we did it in Abu Dhabi this year, so I was just over there a couple of week ago for that so hobnobbing with the sales guys which is super important, right? Their motivation, their creme de la creme of the year, but to me this one is better, right? Just 'cause now the tech guys comin' together 'cause most companies don't do anything like this, right? So it really is a unique piece of the VMware culture where the tech guys get together and they just geek out for a couple of days and to be awarded best of Radio, it's like, oh man you're a god inside of VMware. >> It's like the Sundance Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, the Oscars, it's a huge accomplishment and knowing people internally. >> Yeah and some of Ray's numbers this morning as he showed in the keynote, I mean it's competitive to get your paper shown here is competitive, right? So there's a set of judges that are picking the papers that are here out of this we already have over 200 invention disclosures that have come out of just the preparation for the conference and we haven't even gotten started yet, and now the keynotes this morning and poster sessions all week long, and letting the engineers just really vibrate off of each others' ideas and challenge them and all of our PEs and fellows roaming around here they're sort of like the big guys on campus, but hey the young Turks are coming up and they're challenging them on ideas it really is a delightful few days. >> I love your perspective, I wanna get your reaction 'cause one, not only do you have a storied history working at Intel, really a great innovative founders of Silicon Valley with HPs of the world, and now you're the chief of VMware a modern era's here, you talk about this all the time publicly about the business context and at the events, but it's different Google had pioneered this notion of 20% of your time you could work on side project, more of an academic culture Google has, I mean I love that it's cool, but VMware has a unique culture and I want you to talk about that dynamic because you have to be versatile now, agile more than ever, you have to be faster time to market, and it's always been hard for companies to crack the code on knocking down the big ideas, solving the hardest problems but yet making it practical at the same time. What's your reaction to how you guys are doing it, >> what's different? Share some color. >> In some ways and I think some of the panel, we had a panel session this morning, Steve did one session, but we had of the original engineers in the company, the five of the original engineers, right were here and they were saying it was sort of like we're doing research in a business who had business objectives, right? Solving problems that had never been solved before, Sort of the VMware culture is if it's not a hard problem, it's not worth it, right? And our objective isn't to be 2x or 10% better, but to be 10x better, right? And when you're doin' those kind of things you can't always put that on a schedule, right? The problem is solved when it's solved, right? And I was just meeting with one of my teams last night and this is, well alright that looked pretty good but I don't think you've met the minimum viable product yet so let's put it in an open beta for six months before we actually call it GA 'cause I don't think you're done >> solving the hard problem yet, right? >> So you're squinting through and looking at the projects from that? >> Yeah right, is it ready? And have we really delivered something that customers can say, "Yeah here's the value proposition you promised, here's what you're delivering me, it is a quality product," right? Which is something that's deep in that history of VMware right in many cases, and I love one of the statistics this morning, they said the early core dumps of ESX, right they found that over 2/3 of them were a result of memory parody errors, not of ESX failures of any sense, so meaning that the hardware was less reliable than the software was, that's all we sort of this magic that we say, we're out to produce world class infrastructure software that's better than the hardware ever could have been and for a hardware guy that's sort >> So that was your problem, originally I think it was on your watch actually the first core dump. Throwback Thursday would they do core dumps from like 10 years ago look at a simpler core, >> look at x say "Hey look at the core dump, Hey look at cool that is." (laughing) >> If I see the Biaz prompt oh my gosh where did that come from? >> Let's get some vinyl records and look at some core dumps from 1992. >> So Pat, now this is important because I think this is a killer point, when you look at innovation VMware has to meet the challenge of being on that next wave and you've said on theCUBE many times, if you're not on that next wave you're driftwood. A lot of companies who try to do R&D end up solving hard problems to attract the top talent, but they end up getting so focused on the problem they end up in a cul-de-sac on the wrong wave, they miss the next wave. >> [Pat] Yeah. >> How do you manage that? 'Cause this is your sticking point is to make sure you don't miss the next wave, you transition properly, how do you avoid that problem of getting so focused on the intoxicating aspect of solving problem and being in a cul-de-sac no market wave missed? >> Yeah and it's hard right? In that sense and I'll say there's, we sort of look at it from three different dimensions, one is, hey you gotta keep this bubbling cauldron of ideas and that's why we're here at Radio, right? Just these people working on ideas, right? You have some really cool stuff and every once in a while you're telling the engineers, "Well that's good but you haven't solved the hardest piece of that problem yet and so on." Then you have to be able to take it from that bubbling cauldron to, I'll say, an incubation product, right? 'Cause VMware yeah we do R&D, we do core research as well, but fundamentally we've been able to create markets based on our products and really scale them, right? The embarrassing truth of any enterprise software company is for every dollar of R&D you spend, you spend two dollars of sales and marketing, so we can't under invest in those products that we've picked that now are scaling into the market, we have to put the >> dedicated sales >> [John] Get the leverage >> out of it >> The SEs et cetera, that's really frightening. When I'm done innovating a new idea maybe I've dumped 10 million or 15 million into the core idea, okay, now I got to go spend twice that amount on >> Good marketing. >> Marketing of it and boy it's expensive to bring things into the enterprise and if the product isn't robust and solid and really compelling, then it might be three or four x, so you're now rewarded with your R&D investment to go spend on sales and marketing now, so yeah we've really taken and we have a very BCG matrix kind of view of how we take products from incubation into early market success and then into scale and finally cash cow and retirement and that process is one you have to be equally disciplined about. The third piece of it is you have to be able to declare failure and for failures, it's how do you harvest technologies and learning, but be able to look at something vCloud Air and say, "Okay we weren't successful" and now go build a multi cloud, an Amazon partnership coming out of it, we have to be able to make those shifts right and be able to declare failure, be able to move our customers forward, and then move on to the next big thing >> [John] I mean the math works >> 'Cause you're not gonna get 'em all right. >> So to your point, the math works when you can abandon quickly >> [Pat] Yeah. >> That's where the winners are 'cause then you can move the probability of success somewhere else. >> Yeah and if you can't declare failure, right, and view that in the positive and proud way. One of the failures of vCloud Air became the success of our hybrid cloud service capability now, right a lot of this ability to move workloads between public clouds was a direct harvesting of our vCloud Air failure, we're able to take that technology forward and that's now one of the pillars of how we're differentiate and our Amazon service, OBH partnership, IBM, are building on those hybrid cloud capabilities. >> Pat we've been watching you that's one of the things I will say that you're really amazing at, you're good at, you're the captain, you've got your hand on the wheel, you gotta know when to say, "Hey, close that hatch, or we're going to sink," you gotta, or I'm not that there, knowing when to make the calls. So I gotta ask you, when you look at the marketplace now, you have the option to build, the option to buy, and you have to kinda also balance those three areas, you've got Ray, you've got Rajiv, and you've got the Corp Dev guys, they have to work together and sometimes, hey let's go buy that hot start up or no I have it internally, and sometimes it might be in a core competency area. Talk about as the CEO, you've got your hand on the wheel, okay, you're steering the ship, you're setting the direction, the team's workin' hard, how do you make those calls buy build, and when it's in the core area as the market's shifting, what's that look like for you? What your view as you look forward? >> Yeah there's clearly and we think about the case let's take two examples of our buy. AirWatch, hey we saw that we had nothing in mobility and if we're gonna be in end-user computing we must have mobility in the family, so we really in some degree, we didn't have a choice, we had to go buy if we're gonna be in that space and it became foundational for us in that area. You might have argued, hey we should have done that five years sooner, but we didn't, we had to make a buy decision and then we went out and shopped, literally MobileIron or AirWatch? We looked at those and bake those off until almost the last day, alright? And I went into that expecting we were gonna buy MobileIron, right? >> [John] Really? What was the tipping point? >> Right, well, I became a Silicon Valley company, I thought their technology was a little bit better, I thought the AirWatch guys were a little bit too much market and focused on winning the early market, I didn't know if the product had the quality of a VMware product, so I really was handicapping the MobileIron one and the team came out unanimously with my agreement that AirWatch was the right thing, right? In the case of Nicira, one of the other foundational acquisitions that we did, we had a lot of the distributive virtual switch technology we had already innovated, but we hadn't put a control plane, a scale control plane against and that's Nicira did, so there it was really bringing those pieces together which really has become, I'll say, a marquee aspect of our acquisition, in many cases we're in the space >> You feel good about that, how much you paid for that. >> Oh yeah, I mean at the time people said, "1.2 billion for less than 10 million of revenue, what are you guys stupid?" Now everybody says, "Wow you're brilliant." >> So they didn't look at the underlying technology. >> Absolutely >> Leverage you were getting. >> Four years of hard work, core technology, right, and boom, we're unquestionably the leader in software defined networking now as a result of making a pretty bold bet at the time. Obviously organic innovation is the best because it sort of fits in your stream, you don't have to go, you know, change gooey practices or test release practices, it's already part of you as well. But sometimes, hey, I get to look over 10 startups and pick the winner. I may not be able to fund 10 startups internally and pick the winner, but I can look out over, you pay a premium, and one of the unique things about VMware is that over the 60 or so 70 acquisitions I think we've done now, as a company we have a highly successful track record. >> Is that because of the architectural decisions? It's not just bolt on a business unit and say stand alone and produce cash you guys are thinking strategically around how it fits architecturally, is that the difference? >> I'd say it boils down to a handful of things. That's absolutely one of 'em. We're looking deep at technology, how does it fit our technology, can we bring it in? Second we look at the culture of the company, right? We've said no to some acquisitions just 'cause we've decided that culture won't fit our culture or we're not gonna be able to mold it into our culture as well. Number three, we protect this thing, we run a process by which, hey if this is the acquired company, right, and here's the CEO of this startup company, he has passion, he is the commander of his universe, and tomorrow some low-level legal person can say, "No you can't do that," right, yesterday he was enjoying (laughing). Do we protect them? Do we turn their passion and get them to believe that their passion, remember, they're, yeah they wanna be successful, but they wanna turn their passion and objective into a big industry-changing event. And is that passion better executed inside of the platform of VMware? So we protect them, that low-level legal person can't say no or that finance person, we run a special board process around 'em to protect 'em. >> You don't want people handcuffed. >> Yeah, absolutely, we want them to be unleashed, that they have more power not less after they become part of this company that the platform for their vision and passion becomes bigger as part of ours so we protect 'em like crazy in that process. >> And you do that here at Radio as well. You wanna unleash the ground swell, get the grass roots movement going, let the sparks of innovation kinda fly out there. >> Yeah and our success rate is close to 90% on acquisitions and the industry average is below 50% so I think we've really mastered organic and inorganic innovation as good as any company has in the industry. >> Yeah I will say that's the totally true. And also Vsam became a project that came out of Radio that's been highly successful. >> [Pat] Yeah totally organic in that one. >> So you guys think strategically, it's not just bolting on revenue, although that could help if you can find it, there's not much out there for you guys. (both men laughing) Let's talk about some of the hot trends here at Radio. One of the things we're seeing, obviously with tie-in of the competitive, but also the comradery, a lot of, it's interesting to see how competitive it is, but also again VMware's got a hard core engineering culture, but also a hardcore community culture that shines through, it's obvious, so props to the folks running Radio and then the process. But when you look at the trends, what's trending up is the blockchain. We talked to some of your folks there you guys are looking at this, this is really strategic aspect, you talked with Dave about it briefly at Dell Technologies World, what's your view on blockchain? Obviously, you look at infrastructure, blockchain jumps out at you, your reaction to the hype and allusions and reality of blockchain crypto currency, not so much the ICO's, I think that's just a funding dynamic, lot of project-based stuff, but really there's some infrastructuring dynamics, your thoughts on blockchain as an infrastructure enabler for future wave? >> Yeah you know a couple of comments and one is, I think blockchain as a algorithmic breakthrough is on par with public private key encryption, alright? It's just sort of opened up the world of general purpose cryptography, and I think this idea of an immutable distributive ledger, right, sort of busts apart the database and I don't have to bring things together now the databases spreads, right, across it, immutability, right, transactability, et cetera, takes a lot of the acid characteristics of core databases and now does it in the fully distributive way, very powerful and I think it's gonna change supply chains, change financial systems, it's gonna have very broad implications so overall we're in, we believe very much in the importance of that. >> Real quick, to interrupt you real quick, >> 'cause I wanna get this thought in because you brought up general purpose, one of the things we've been kind of talking off camera, most of our team members is, blockchain looks a lot like maybe processors, general purpose processors, opening up an PC revolution, in the sense of general purpose computing. Blockchain seems to have that same dynamic, potentially, not as a direct metaphor, but if you can open up a new dynamic, that could explode new business models yet to be foreseen. >> Oh yeah, yeah, yeah absolutely. If we could take the cost of transactions down by an order of magnitude, right? If you could increase the reliability of a supply chain, right? If you could right in fact guarantee the source of origin of any product against the ultimate place of consumption, these are industry-changing type of capabilities, so we do see it quite significantly that way. But then as VMware looks at it, if there's not a hard problem to solve, then we shouldn't be in this space. So our team, one of the core problems of blockchain, right >> [John] Slow. >> Is the exponential compute requirements of higher order blockchains, so our team has solved that problem we've done some algorithmic breakthroughs that we believe allow blockchain to scale, a close to linear scale as opposed to exponential scale, wow that's game-changing for, we're also solving the auditability problem, immutable, anonymous, immutable is great, but a lot of things need to audited, right? So how can you bring some of those core concepts into blockchain? So those are some of the hard problems that we're solving, sort of back to the 10x culture, solve hard problems in fundamental ways and that's what we think that we can bring to the blockchain universe. >> Well Pat, I think it's amazing that you're here at the event, I know that you love, look forward to this as well, but to have the CEO come in at the Radio event and really lead the troops by example is awesome. We've got VMworld coming up around the corner, give us some teasers, what's happening? I know you're gonna get in trouble from Robin Matlock, (Pat laughing) but come on tell us what's coming at VMworld. >> (laughes) Well you know we have, of course we have a lot of key products, updates and other things that are coming out. I hope to broaden at VMworld this year, the view of the cloud, right? And you say, "Broaden the view of the cloud, what are you talking about Pat?" Well you're gonna have to come to VMware to get the full story, but I do think that we've thought about the hybrid cloud world largely in this idea of public and private in the past, right? But we see that the vision that we're pursuing is one much larger than that where, right, it's public, private, telco, and edge, right? And the confluence of those four worlds, we believe is something that VMware is uniquely positioned to be able to bring right to the marketplace and the implications of that so, I'm quite excited as I broaden our general view >> of the cloud as we come up on VMworld. >> And one of the exciting things it's our ninth year at VMworld, we've been every year one since theCUBE's existed and thank you for your support. >> Ah that's great. >> But I gotta say, one of the things we can do is look at the tape as they say, you said in 2011 or 2012, hybrid cloud and I kind of was like, Pat come on, hybrid cloud. >> Now everybody's talking about it. >> I think that's what it is. >> Yeah. >> But 2012? How many years ago was that? >> I think 2012 I think is when we first started to use that word. >> Yeah you put the stake in the ground, >> again, you saw that as a wave and a lot's been changed and you look back since 2012 you make the right calls, you feel good about where you're at? Things you could do over? What would you do given from a progress standpoint? What's changed radically in your mind? 'Cause we're still talking about private cloud, what, I mean obviously service mesh is around the corner other cool stuff's happening. >> Yeah you know, clearly I think when we think about the STBC, hey we called it right, we're executing better than anybody else. So you can sort of say check, right? Virtual storage, check. We talk about what we've done at NuComputing, transformed their workplace, check. We're unquestionably the industry leader in that area. I think this idea of hybrid cloud it's taken us too hard, too long too hard to realize that the multicloud vision, so that's the one I'd say, okay we haven't delivered as rapidly or as effectively as we needed to, it's now really starting to materialize, but it's taken me a couple, three years longer than it should have to get there and we comment on the vCloud Air and a little bit of the miss that we had there and that delayed our schedule, also some of the Amazon aspects sent us sideways a little bit, but hey I think we're on a very good path now but then to broaden it, to what we're doing in telco, what we're doing in edge, okay this gets to be really really powerful. >> Pat, great for you success. Thanks for coming by theCUBE here at Radio 2018 this is where all the R&D, it's where the ideas are booming I'm John Furrier with Pat Gelsinger, here in San Francisco for Radio 2018, we'll be back with more coverage after this break, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> [Narrator] From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Radio 2018, brought to you by VMware. (digital music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE special coverage here in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier. We're here at VMware's Radio 2018, its 14th year, its annual, I won't call it a spring fling, I won't call it the burning man. It's like a sales kickoff for engineers as Steve Harod, former CTO said on stage. Rajiv Ramaswami chief operating officer of VMware products, one of the groups here, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Great to be here John. >> So Steve Hared kind of coined it, it's like a sales kickoff for engineers, which is like motivating, intoxicating, a lot of energy, a lot of good technical buzz going on. >> [Man] Indeed. >> People are flexing their muscles, stretching their minds. >> [Man] Totally, totally. >> Creating their sparks of innovation. >> Totally, totally. >> [John Furrier] How do you guys do it? What's the secret sauce? >> Yeah, you know, let me take a step back here. Innovation overall at VMware, it's part of the culture. It's not something that is just purely dropped down to it, in fact I don't believe we can simply drive down innovation from the top, it has to come from within. But what we do at VMware is, culturally we have several set of activities that we foster, that create this culture of innovation. Let me lay out a few examples. And of course we will get to radio, and why we're here. But, everything from, you start with this Tech Talks. Anybody can bring a group of people together, we have weekly Tech Talks, to talk about anything. It might be stuff that they're working on that they want to get a broader audience for, or there may be stuff that, you know, is far out, that they just want to get an audience and communicate. So we have Tech Talks. We have our own version of Hackithon, we call them ballithons. We run globally at all our sites you know our 7,000 plus R and D engineers globally. We run these everywhere and out of those by the way, come great ideas. And these are typically one to two day kind of events that groups of people get together, they actually build prototypes. They called prototypes, the expectation is they have to show us something working at the end of those two days. And all kinds of cool things have come out of those. The next step there is, flings. If you have a prototype and you actually want to get customer feedback, and you want to get equal system feedback, it's not a sanctioned product. But you can go out there and release it and have customers support that and test it for you. And finally then we have sort of a more incubation type, what we call like slaps, that it's actually now more of a centrally funded project that moves on and works on a particular topic. And last, but not least, this event, Radio. >> So the Radio encapsulates the big tent event but you're talking about a specific process for innovation. >> Yep, exactly. >> So, it's organic so I gotta ask you, one of the things I've observed over my 19 years living in Palo Alto and nine years covering VMware, seeing from founding principles to now is, there's two things that jump out at me. Engineering culture, and community. >> [Man] Yes. >> These have always been kind of like the, you know, the nine lives for VMware. You guys always been leveraging those two things. >> [Man] That's right. >> How do you guys do that going forward because as it becomes more competitive you're bigger now, you got a process, so that's cool, I get that. How do you guys drive the process without sacrificing the engineering and the community? >> So let me tell you one thing that you should keep in mind. All of this is done on people's spare time. This is not their day job. Every one of these people, engineers who are here are doing this separate from their day jobs. And so they are motivated and what prompts people to come to VMware in the first place is the ability to work on interesting, difficult problems. Particularly when it comes to infrastructure related. Our motto and our mission is around how software can really change the world. So there's a fundamental driven culture. >> The passion is you want to work on hard problems, changing the world kind of thing. >> That's right, they want to work on hard problems and we foster that, we encourage them to do that and you know, they like it. And also the fact that in most cases these are not individuals. In fact almost every people that you see here is actually a small group of people. And what I'm amazed at as I look through the work that people do, a lot of the stuff, some of it may be a derivative of what they're actually doing in their day jobs and that there's some substance but a lot of it is actually stuff that is actually done completely different from what they do in their day job. >> In the X labs, is it just because you have two tracks as we heard earlier, there's kind of like, continue to incubate it further with some funding while you do your day job, then it's like, oh my god, you know, functions is a service. Let's fast track that, take a break, find someone else to fill your job, or we'll do it and you work it full time. >> [Rajiv] That's right, that is a full time job. Once we get to an X lab, that is a funded incubation project that you are dedicated to. And we allow people to go out and go off and do that, and sometimes it will be successful, sometimes it won't and then they can come back. >> Rajiv, I gotta ask you the engineering question because all my engineering friends, we always talk about this and you hit it the first one which was, we want to work for a company that solves hard problems. >> Yeah. >> You guys, check. And you've been voted a great place to work across the board so great culture, I can attest the culture is great. The second problem is all the engineers, you know, oh I didn't get picked, or who made this selection, there's also self governance going on so you have to manage the typical engineering reaction because everyone loves their baby. So it might not get picked for Radio. >> [Rajiv] But you know what, I mean. >> [John] How do you manage that dynamic? >> So, yeah it's a competitive process by the way. And we run Radio, let me talk a little bit about Radio. We run Radio much like any world class technical conference that Ithiam would run or I typically would run. We encourage an open process where people can submit papers, we have a committee that's actually sitting and reviewing these papers. Just like any other technical conference, some of them are gonna make it, some of them won't. >> It's not a black box though, it's transparent. >> It's not a black box. It's a pretty open, transparent feedback. Okay, it's not like, hey you submit something and we throw it over the fence. We actually give feedback. In fact there's a whole process here. So first of all, this year for example, we had over 1,200 submissions and we picked 200. That's all we can afford. Think about the acceptance rate right there. That is on par, if not better than most top notch technical conferences. So there is a very high bar, okay. And by the way, the stuff that doesn't get picked can still continue. If not, maybe refine it and do better next year, maybe they'll continue some of it, >> [John] Or join in someone else in the team. >> Yeah, exactly, yeah. >> You allow for people to come together. >> Of course, people can come together and it's completely informal, we don't mandate who comes together, they can come together. And once they get selected by the way, the other part of this is actually helping the engineers double up as public speakers and presenters also. You know, a lot of us engineers particularly like to sit in their black box, they're sitting up their coding on a daily basis. Here's an opportunity for them to actually go out and present their ideas to a broad forum. And we actually, part of it is we help coach them and build them into good presenters as well as part of this process. So for them it's a personal development experience. This competitive dynamic by the way is what actually holds up the bottom quality for Radio. It actually has no negative value. It's not like if you don't get selected this year there is a bad feeling or anything. You can try again next year, and to new people every year. >> It's a pride just to be a part of it. >> Exactly. >> And succeeding the bar is a big accomplishment internally. >> Yes, yes, and frankly by the way out of these 1,200 submissions or so in addition to the papers that get accepted here about 200 of these actually are invention disclosures that eventually find their way into patents over time too. So there's other ways that these things get moved forward. >> There's a social benefit also a personal benefit to grow. >> Absolutely. >> And you have the patent option. >> And the networking that comes here, the most important part. I don't know if you saw the poster session yesterday, I mean, the energy in the room is just phenomenal. The people are there who are really passionate about talking about their work, and people are there wandering and you meet new people. In fact, for me in my world, what I enjoy the most is of course getting to hear what these guys are doing but also helping to make connections. Because I sort of look at all of R and D and then somebody here is doing something, in fact I will give you an example. There was somebody who was figuring out how to do, the topic was called teleportation, but it was really about fast data movement. So this was a team in our core virtualization platform. And then I said hey, there's this other team that is focused on hyper-connectivity, you guys should connect because they're actually building a product that could leverage what you do. So you make those informal connections here and then off they run. >> You know it's interesting. Ray Alferil and I were talking about the confluence of these markets coming together. You guys started out in a data center, you got cloud, AI now, which is big data, and now block chain, really interesting stuff you guys are doing with block chain. We were talking off camera and I talked with some of your folks, you guys are already eyeing that way pretty heavily and I know there's work going on there. But in the intersection of infrastructure, AI, cloud, block chain and decentralized applications is a lot of really important stuff. This is the confluence, this where it all has to mash together, the mash up of security, IOT and data. Not big data, or AI. Data hits everything, security hits everything, IOT is hitting everything. So do you have to tweak your R and D focus? How do you guys manage these changing confluences? >> Yes, we are constantly adapting and evolving what we do. It's never static. I will give you an example from recent times. When we call it networking we find we constantly find software to find networking. And we came on initially, it was all about data center. It was about how to, you know, connect and secure applications inside data centers. Then we saw the world changing. Applications are moving out to the public cloud and then more recently applications are moving to the edge to your earlier point. So what did we do? We took that networking mission, we expanded it to now include public clouds, include the edge, and that's what we just launched recently. So that's an area where things are dynamic, our innovation moves on. As I do believe the edge is gonna be one of the next big areas of investment and opportunity. And security is pervasive across the board. So our vision now encompasses security everywhere. All the way from your mobile device, to the edge, to branch offices, to the public cloud, and to your data centers. Anywhere where you have applications running data sitting, and users, you gotta secure that. >> What's the big waves? Pat Gelser's gonna come on soon and he always talks about the waves of innovation. If you're not out in front of the next wave you're driftwood, his famous quote on theCUBE years ago. You gotta pick the big waves obviously, you see block chain as a great call, cloud, no brainer, you're there. Data center, you've been there entrenched. You got AI, I know you guys are working on stuff. Are those the waves you're on, is there a new wave that no one's seeing, and how do you guys look at that? >> Of course it's all adjacent right? Edge computing is adjacent to what we do, and IOT so that's obviously a big area for us. Telcos, for us, you may not necessarily think of it as innovation but they are actually redoing how they do their entire infrastructure. And that's a great opportunity for us. At the end of the day, there's two things. We have innovation and innovation is correlated to also to what markets we can go after that are new and driving committal business for us. So the edge and Telco in our view are two big big opportunities for us. >> You guys are doing a great job. World class organization, it's fun to watch. It's a pleasure to interview such great smart people here. Rajiv you're one leading the team. My final question I want to ask you for the folks watching who don't work at VMware describe what it's like to work here. What's the DNA of the culture? Explain the dynamic, 'cause it's like a kid in a candy store in here if you're an engineer. Explain what's goin on. >> Look, the things that I continue to be impressed by here, and I have been here about two and a half years is the quality and depth of the engineering talent we have and the willingness to work on difficult and interesting problems. And also share that across the board. There is no, very rarely do we have people sitting isolated that go off and do something. People are willing to share. We work as a community together. That really really stands out. I worked at many companies and I have to say, no other company really creates this kind of culture of innovation where we bring all these people together. This event, Radio is absolutely unique. I have not really seen it at this scale anywhere else. >> It's a great use case of world class in a modern era. I think you guys have the secret, engineering and community focus has been a key backbone for you guys. >> The other thing, by the way, I will say is, engineers feel that their ideas are valued, and they are actually used. Something that starts out, you know, in a very small way actually could end up getting a lot of visibility. I will give you an example. Out of our Ballithon last year or so somebody came up with the idea of using a virtual reality headset to figure out how you can actually manage your entire data center using virtual reality and pick and place. >> [John] That's great for working at home. >> Cool, right? This just came out of a two day hackathon session. And what did we do with that? Well, we did that, I took that and made it a demo center stage at VM world and all our VM forums across the world And all of us by the way, Pat, myself, we were all sitting out there doing virtual reality demos built on what a couple of engineers had done in two days. Great visibility. Now that's not gonna go into a product anytime soon I think but it's a cultural thing. >> It's a cultural example of grassroots innovations sparks of innovation can come from anywhere. >> That's right. >> Rajiv, thanks for coming on, appreciate it. This is theCUBE's coverage here in San Francisco for Radio 2018, its 14th year annual event it's turning into quite the showcase for flexing and also stretching the minds of the smartest people in VMware. Of course theCUBE's here on the ground. I'm John Furrier. Back with more coverage after this break. Stay with us. (digital music)