(upbeat music) >> Okay, we're back. We're here in the main stage in Cloud City. I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Normally, we're over there on theCUBE set, but here we've got a special presentation. We'll talk about Totogi and the new CEO of Totogi is Danielle, who is also the CEO of TelcoDR, Digital Revolution. Great to see you. And of course, Robin Langley, we interviewed you in theCUBE, CTO of Totogi. This is a main stage conversation because this is the big news. >> Yeah. >> You guys launched there with a hundred million dollar investment. We covered that news a couple weeks ago and you as the CEO. What's the story. Tell us what is happening with Totogi? Why such a big focus? What's the big push? >> Yeah, I'm really excited about Totogi because I really think this team is working to build public cloud tools for Telco the right way. It's everything I've been talking about. I talked about it yesterday in my keynote and this is really the execution of that vision. So, I'm super excited about that. A couple of days ago, Rob and I were talking about the charging system, but there's another product that Totogi introduced to the world and that's the webscale BSS system. So I think we're going to talk about that today. It's going to be great. >> Let's get into actually the charging system, which was great processing here. What is this focus? What is BSS about with cloud? How does the public cloud innovation change the game with this? >> Well, a little bit like charging. I mean, there are maybe, you know, a hundred plus BSS systems out there, why does the world need yet another BSS? And I think one thing is we're coupling up with public cloud, which gives it that webscale element. Right? We can have a platform. Never do another upgrade again, which I think is really exciting. But I think the really key thing that we're working on is we're building on top of an open API standard. And a lot of vendors talk about their APIs, why is this different? These are standards developed by TM forum, right? It's an independent body in our industry. They've been working on these, sorry, open APIs, and all the different vendors signed a manifesto that say, "I pledge. I pledge to support the open API", but if you look at the leaderboard and everyone is Sub10, Sub5, right? And so it's kind of like, going through the actions and not falling, you know, saying it, but not following it up and we're doing it. >> Wow, so... >> Yeah. >> Dave: Robin, you guys just popped up on the leaderboard. You went from a standing start to, I think more than 10. >> Yeah. >> I don't think that's ever been done before, has it? >> No, so we were out there. We published 12 APIs and we've got a quote from, you know, TM forums saying, essentially I've never seen anyone move so fast and to publish. And it's our intent to publish, you know, 50 plus, all of their APIs by the end of the year. >> So, how were you able to do that? I mean, like, were you holding them back? Just kind of dumping them on one day? This is the nature of the new business, isn't it? >> Yeah, absolutely and then you think about BSS. It's just, you know, been known for years to be a spaghetti of, you know, applications, you know, disparate data, data being duplicated, systems not talking to each other, lots of different interface types. And it was crying out to be just, you know, sold properly in the cloud. And the public cloud is perfect for this. You know, we can build a model and start, rather than looking at the applications first, you know, let's look at the model, the unified model and build on those open APIs and then start to, you know, allow people to come in and create an ecosystem of applications all using that same model. >> If you don't mind me asking you, if you can explain. 'Cause we talked before we weren't on camera, but we talked about the cloud and you were explaining to me how this is perfect for the challenges that you guys are trying to solve. What about the public cloud dynamic or innovation component that you guys are leveraging? Take us through a little bit on that, because I think that's a big story here that's under the covers is... >> Yeah. >> What you're capable of doing here. Do you mind explaining? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. So the cloud gives us this true scalability across everything. You know, we can scale to billions of records. So we can hook in, you know, to suck in data from, you know, our on-premise systems anywhere. We have, you know, a product called Devflow, so we used to do that. And it can really allow us to bring that data in, scale-out, use standard term cloud innovations, like Lambda functions and AWS, you know, DynamoDB, and present that, you know, through that open API. So we can use, you know graphQL, you know, present that with rest on top. And so you can then build on top of that. You can take any low code, no code application building tool you like, put that on top and then start building your own ecosystem. You can build inventory systems, CRM, anything you like. >> Well one thing that's really interesting about these projects is they usually take months, years to deploy, right? And what we're doing is we're providing, almost BSS as a service, right? It's an API layer that anyone can go to. Maybe you need to use it for five minutes, five months, five years, right? With the open standard and your own developers can learn how to use this text stack and code to it doesn't require us. And so we're really trying to get away from being an SI, you know, systems integrator or heavy services revenue, and instead build the product that enables the telcos to use their own people, to build the applications that they, they know what they want, and so, here you go. >> It's a platform. >> Yeah. >> It's a platform. >> So, how do you connect to systems on the ground? Like what's the modern approach to doing that? >> Yeah, go for it. >> Yeah so, telcos have, you know, a huge amount of data on premise. They have difficulties you can get to it. So, as I mentioned before, we had this Devflows product and it has connectors. We have like 30 plus connectors to all the standard sort of, billing systems, CRM systems, you know, we can hook into things like Salesforce. And we can create either, you know, couple of a real-time interface in there, or we can start to suck data into the cloud and then make it available. So, if they want to start with a nice, easy step and just build slowly, we can just hook in and pull that information out. If there may be, you know, an attribute that you want to, you know, use in some of that application, you can easily get to it. And then, you know, over time you start to build your data into the cloud and then you've got the scale, you know, and all the innovations of that brings with it. >> So is Devflow an on-ramp, if you will, for the public cloud, is that the way you were thinking about it? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I call it the slurper. (group chuckles) Right. I mean, these telcos have, like Robin was saying, spaghetti systems that have been, you know, customized and connected and integrated. I mean, it is a jungle out there of data. They're not going to be able to move this in one step. We just think of like a pile of spaghetti, like the whole bowl. >> Overcooked spaghetti. >> Right overcooked, the whole bowl comes out and it's really hard to just pull out one noodle and the rest is there and what are you going to do? And so the slurper, right, Devflows, allows you to select which data you want to pull out. It could be one time, you could have it sync. You don't have to do the whole thing and it doesn't disrupt the production environment that's on-premise. But now you're starting to move your data into the public cloud and then like Robin was saying, you can throw it up against quick sites. You can throw it up against different Amazon services. You can create new applications. And so it's not this like, you know, big bang kind of approach. You can start to do it in pieces and I think that's what the industry needs. >> I'm talking about this the other day, when we're talk about charging. What a lot of vendors will do is they'll put a wrapper around it, containerize it and then shove it into the public cloud and say, "Okay". >> Check mark. >> Yeah a checkbox. And it affects how they price, if they price the same way. But we talked a lot about pricing the other day, really pricing like cloud, consumption pricing. How are you pricing in this case? >> Same with the charging system. The BSS system is paid by the use, paid by the API call. So, really excited to introduce yet, again, a free tier. We think we're doing 500 million API calls per month for free. We think this is great for a smaller telco where like, you're experimenting and just getting to know the system and before you like, go all in and buy. And I think that API pricing is going to go right at the heart of some of these vendors that love to charge by the subscriber or a perpetual license agreement, right? They're not quite moving as a service. And so, yeah. >> Are you saying, they're going to be disruptive in the pricing in terms of lower cost or more, consumable. >> And I think it's also an easier on ramp, right? It's easier to start paying by the use and experimenting. And it's really easy, just like I was talking about with charging, where you're going to get the same great product that you would sell to a tier one at a price that you can afford. And now those smaller two or three guys aren't having to make a trade off between great technology, but I'm paying through the nose or sacrifice on the tech, but I can afford it. And so, I think you're going to see this ecosystem of people starting to learn how to code and think in this way. Telcos have already decided that they want to adopt the TM forum, open APIs. They're on all the RFPs. Do you support it? Everyone says they support it, but we don't see anyone really doing it. They're not on the leaderboard. >> And there's transparency, because you're pricing by API call, right? Versus the spaghetti, you guys call it, the hairball of what am I paying for? >> Right, you're getting, all of this. It's by the subscriber. It's millions and millions of dollars. Oh, and you know, you're going to need to buy a bunch of consulting revenue to make it all work and talk to each other. Pay up, right? And that's what we're living in today. And I'm taking us to the, you know, public cloud future by the API. >> This is the big cloud revolution. It's unbundling has been a really big part of the consumption of technology paid by the usage, get in, get some value, get some data, understand what it is, double down on it, iterate. >> Put it up with different services that are available that we don't have, but Amazon uses, right? They have call centers up there, they have ML that you may want to use like, start using it, start coding, start learning about the AWS tech stack. >> So is it available now? >> Yeah. >> Yeah. No, it's available now. We've already published the swagger for the BSS APIs. So, you know, they can come on board, they can go to access to all the API straight away and start using it. They can load up their favorite REST clients and then start developing. >> So you got a dozen APIs today. Where are we headed? What can we expect? >> All by the end of the year. There's over 50 APIs. You know, the number one guy on the board is at like 22, 21, 22 APIs covered. We'll be 50 plus by the end of the year. And we're just going to blow doors. >> The API economy has come to telco. >> Yeah, I mean, it's really BSS' Lego pieces, right. Assembling these different components and really opening it up. And I think there's been a lot of power by the vendors to keep it locked down, keep it close. Yes, we have an API, but you got to use our people to do it. Here's the hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars that you're going to pay us and keep us in business, and fat and happy, and I'm coming right in on the low end. Right, dropping that price, opening it up. I think telcos are going to love it. >> Well, Mike, you said too, you'll allow the smaller telcos to have the same, actually, better capabilities than the larger telcos, right? Maybe the stack's not as mature or whatever, but they'll get there and they'll get there with a simpler, easier to understand pricing model and way, way faster. >> Yeah. >> All right and that's where the disruption comes. >> And I Think this is where AWS has really done well as a hyper scaler against their competition, is that they've really gotten to market very quickly with their services. Maybe they're not perfect, but they ship 'em. And they get them out there and they get people using them. They use them internally and they get them out. And I think this is where maybe some of the other hyperscalers, they hold them back and they wait until they're a little bit more mature. And AWS is one because they've been fast. And I want to sort of copy that feat. >> I think your idea of subscriber love in your keynote, and I think applies here because Amazon web services has done such a great job of working backwards from the customer. So they'd ship it fast on used cases that they know have been proven through customer interactions. >> Yep. >> They don't just make up new features. And then they iterate. They go, "Okay". >> Start simple, grow on that, learn from the market. What are people using? What are they not using? Iterate, iterate, iterate. >> Okay, so with that in mind, working backwards from your customer, how do you see the feature set evolving for this functionality? How do you see it evolving as a product? >> Yeah, I mean, I think all of the BSS systems today have been designed with manual people on the other side of the screen, right? And we've seen chat bots take off, we've seen, you know, using chat as support. I think we need to start getting into more automation right? Which is really going to change up telco, right? They have thousands of customer support agents and you're like, "Dude, I just want a SIM, that's all I need". >> Yeah. >> Just like, where do I push a button and send an Uber to my house and drop it off or eSim. And so, speeding up business, empowering the subscriber. We know how to interact, we just went through COVID where we learned about different apps that overnight, you can like order all of your groceries and order all of your food and there it is, and it was contactless and... >> It's funny, you said future of work, which we love that term, "work". Workloads, work force, you got all these kind of new dynamics going on with cloud enablement and the changes is radical. And the value is there. There's value opportunities. >> I mean like, you know, where are the ARVR applications, right? Where your agent pops. I saw the demo. There's a strife in Austin and they're going to kill me 'cause I can't remember their name. But they had a little on your mobile phone, a little holographic customer support. Like, "How can I help you"? Right. And I'm like, "Where's that", like, imagine you're like, ATT, you're not like on the phone for like an hour and a half trying to like, figure out what's wrong. And it's like, you know, it knows what's wrong. It understands my needs and so, no one's working on that. We're still working on, keyboards. >> Right, that and chat bot is a great example because it's all AI, and where's the best AI? It's in the cloud because that's where the data is. That's where the best of modeling has been. (chuckles) >> I think your point, it's the scale of data. >> Absolutely. >> And machine learning and AI needs a lot of data points to get really good. I mean, I'm old, I'm 50. I graduated in 1993. I took an AI class from Niels Nielsen, like the godfather of AI, right? Okay, like that AI, even 10 years ago AI, it's just moving so quickly and it's now super affordable. >> Well, I really want to thank you guys for coming up and sharing that knowledge and insight, congratulations on the product and open APIs. Love open API's open source with some new revolution. Danielle and Robin. Thank you so much. >> Thanks so much. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Congratulations. Thank you everyone for coming. (crowd applauding) (people whooping) Okay, back to you in the studio at Cloud City.

(gentle music) >> Okay, thank you Adam. Thank you everyone for joining us on the main stage here, folks watching, appreciate it. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante co-hosts of theCube. We're here in the main stage to talk to the two main players of Totogi, Danielle Royston, CEO as of today, the big news. Congratulations. >> Danielle: Yeah. Thank you. >> And Robin Langdon the CTO, Totogi. >> Robin: Thanks. So big news, CEO news today and $100 million investment. Every wants to know where's all the action? Why is this so popular right now? (Danielle chuckles) What's going on? Give us the quick update. >> Yeah, I met the Totogi guys and they have this great product I was really excited about. They're focused purely on telco software and bringing, coupling that with the Public Cloud, which is everything that I talk about, what I've been about for so long. And I really wanted to give them enough funding so they could focus on building great products. A lot of times, telcos, startups, you know they try to get a quick win. They kind of chase the big guys and I really wanted to make sure they were focused on building a great product. #2, I really wanted to show the industry, they had the funding they needed to be a real player. This wasn't like $5 million or a couple million dollars, so that was really important. And then #3, I want to make sure that we could hire great talent and you need money for compensation. And so $100 million it is. >> $100 million is a lot of fresh fat financing as they say. I got to ask you, what's different? Because I've been researching on the refactoring aspect of with the Cloud, obviously public cloud with AWS, a big deal. What's different about the charging aspect of this? >> Yeah I mean, charging hasn't been exciting, maybe ever. I mean, it's kind of like this really sort of sleepy area, but I think what the Totogi guys are doing is they're really coupling the idea of charging and network data to bring hyper-personalization to subscribers. And I think that's where it changes from being a charging engine to become an engagement engine. Telcos know more about us than Google, which is kind of crazy to think about it. They know when we wake up, they know what apps we use. If we call or text, if we game or stream and it's time to start using that data to drive a better experience to us. And I think to Totogi is enabling that. I'm super excited to do that. >> So Robin, I wonder if you could talk about that a little bit. I mean, maybe we get into the plumbing and I don't want to go too deep in it, but I think it's important because we've seen this movie before where people take their on-prem stacks, they wrap it in containers and they shove it into the Public Cloud and they say, "Hey, we're cloud too." If reading a press release, you guys are taking advantage of things like Amazon Nitro of course, but also Graviton and Graviton2 and eventually 3, which is the underlying capabilities, give you a cloud native advantage. Can you explain that a little bit? >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we wanted to build this in the Cloud using all of those great cloud innovations. So Graviton2, DynamoDB and using their infrastructure, just allowing us to be able to scale out. These all available to us to use and essentially free for us to use. And it's great, so as you say, we're not shoehorning something in that's decade's old technology, wrapping it in some kind of container and pushing it in. Which is just then, you just can't use any of those great innovations. >> And you've selected DynamoDB as the database. Okay, that's fine. We don't have to get so much into why, but maybe you could explain the advantage because I saw some benchmark numbers which were, like an order of magnitude greater than the competition, like share with us, why? How you were able to get there? And maybe share those numbers. >> Yeah, no, we do. So we just launched our benchmark. So, a million transactions per second. So we just blew away everyone else out there. And that's really because we could take advantage of all that great AWS technology in there and the database side we're using DynamoDB, where we had a huge debate about using what kind of database to go and use? There's a lot of people out there probably get very religious about the kind of database technology that you should be using. And whether it should it be SQL in-memory object database type technology, but really a single table design, gives you that true scalability. You can just horizontally scale that easily, across the whole planet. >> You know, Danielle. Again, I said that we've seen this movie before. There are a lot of parallels in telco with the enterprise. And if you look at enterprise SAS pricing, a lot of it is very static, kind of lock you in, per seat pricing, kind of an old model. And you're seeing a lot of the modern SAS companies who are emerging with a consumption pricing models. How are you guys thinking about pricing? >> Yeah, I don't know of any other company in telco that's starting to price by usage. And that is a very standard offering with the cloud providers, right? Google we know, Amazon, all those guys have a price by the API, price by the transaction. So we're really excited to offer that to telcos. They've been asking for it for awhile, right? Pay for what you need, when you need it, by the use. And so we're really excited to offer that, but I think what's really cool is the idea of a free tier, right? And so I think it's smaller telcos have a trade-off to make, whether, am I going to buy the best technology and pay through the nose and maybe at an unaffordable level, or do I compromise and buy something more affordable, but not as great. And what's so great about Totogi, it's the same product just priced for what you need. And so I think a CSP it'll, below 250,000 subscribers should be able to use the Totogi absolutely for free. And that is, and it's the same product that the big guy would get. So it's not a junior version or scaled back. And so I think that's really exciting. I think we're the only ones that do it. So here we go. >> Love the freemium model. So Robin, maybe you could explain why that's so much, so important in the charging space, because you've got a lot of different options that you want to configure for the consumer. >> Yeah. >> Maybe you could talk about sort of how the old world does that, the old guard and how long it takes and how you're approaching this. >> Yeah so it's, I mean traditionally, charging design, there's as you say, there's lots of different pricing leavers you want to be able to move and change to charge different people. And these systems, even if they say they're configurable, if they normally turn into an IT project where it takes weeks, months, even years to build out the system, you know, marketing can't just go in there and configure the dials and push out your new plans and tariffs. They have to go and create a requirement specification. They hand it down to IT. Those guys go and create a big change project. And by the time they're finished, the market's moved on. They're on to their next plan, their next tariff to go and build. So we wanted to create something that was truly configurable from a marketing standpoint. You know, user-friendly, they can go in there, configure it and be live in minutes, not even days or weeks. >> No, IT necessary. >> Robin: No IT necessary. >> So you know, I've been thinking about, John and I talk about this all the time, It's that there's a data play here. And what I think you're doing is actually building a data product. I think there's a new metric emerging in the industry, which is how long does it take me to go from idea to monetization with a data product. And that's what this is. This is a data product >> Yeah. >> for your customers. >> Absolutely, what Robin was talking about is totally the way the industry works. It's weeks before you have an idea and get it out to the market. And like Robin was mentioning, the market's changed by the time you get it out there, the data's stale. And so we researched every single plan in the world from every single CSP. There is about 30,000 plans in the world, right? The bigger you are, the more plans you have. On average, a tier one telco has 40 to 50 plans. And so how many offers, I mean think about, that's how many phones to buy, plans to buy. And so we're like, let's get some insight on the plans. Let's drive it into a standardization, right? Let's make them, which ones work, which ones don't. And that's, I think you're right. I think it's a data play and putting the power back into the marketer's hands and not with IT. >> So there's a lot of data on-prem. Explain why I can't do this with my on-prem data. >> Oh, well today that, I mean, sorry if you want to jump in. Feel free to jump in, right. But today, the products are designed in a way where they're, perpetually licensed, by the subscriber, rigid systems, not API based. I mean, there might be an API, but you got to pay through the nose to use it or you got to use the provider's people to code against it. They're inflexible. They were written when voice was the primary revenue driver, not data, right? And so they've been shoehorned, right? Like Robin was saying, shoehorned to be able to move into the world that we are now. I mean, when the iPhone came about that introduced apps and data went through the roof and the systems were written for voice, not written for data. >> And that's a good point, if you think about the telco industry, it seems like it could be a glacier that just needs to just break and just like, just get modern because we all have phones. We have apps. We can delete them. And the billing plans, like either nonexistent or it has to be all free. >> Well I mean, I'll ask you. Do you know what your billing plan is? Do you know how much data you use on a monthly basis? No one knows. >> I have no clue. >> A lot. >> No one. And so what you do is you buy unlimited. >> Dave: Right. >> You overpay. And so what we're seeing in the plans is that if you actually knew how much you used, you would be able to maybe pay less, which I remember the telcos are not excited to hear that message, but it's a win for the subscriber. And if you could >> I mean it's only >> accurately predict that. >> get lower and lower. I having a conversation last night at dinner with industry analysts, we're talking about a vehicle e-commerce, commerce in your car as you're driving. You can get that kind of with a 5G. The trend is transactions everywhere, ad-hoc, ephemeral... >> Yeah. >> The new apps are going to demand this kind of subscriber billing. >> Yeah >> Do people get this? Are you guys the only ones kind of like on this? >> No I think people have been talking about it for years. I think there's vendors out there that have been trying to offer this idea of like, build your own plan and all that other stuff but I think it's more than just minutes, text and data. It's starting to really understand what subscribers are using, right? Are you a football fan? Are you a golf fan? Are you a shopper? Are you a concert goer? And couple that with how you use your phone and putting out offers that are really exciting to subscribers so that we love our telco. Like we should be loving our telco. And I don't... I don't know that people talk >> They saved us >> about loving their telco. >> from the pandemic >> They saved us during the pandemic. The internet didn't crash, we got our zoom meetings. We got everything going on. What's the technical issue on solving these problems? Is it just legacy? Is it just mindset? Robin, what's your take on that? >> I'll keep talking as long as Robin will let me. (Daniel laughing) >> So the big technical issues, you're trying to build in this flexibility so that you can have, we don't know what people are going to configure in the future. It's minutes and text messages are given away for free. They're unlimited. Data is where it's at, about charging for apps and about using all that data in the network the telcos have, which is extremely valuable and there's a wealth of information in there that can be used to be monetized and push that out. And they need a charging system on top that can manage that and we have the flexibility that you don't have to go off and then start creating programs and IT projects that are going to do that. >> Well it's funny Danielle, you say that the telcos might not like that, right? 'Cause you might pay less. But in fact, that is the kind of on-prem mindset because when you have a fixed resource, you say, okay, don't use too much because we have to buy more. Or you overbuy to your point. The cloud mindset is, I'll try it. I'll try some more, I'll try some more. I'm aligning it with business value. Oh, I'm making money. Oh, great. I'm going to keep buying more. And it's very clear. It's transparent where the business value is. So my question is when you think about your charging engine and all this data conversation, is there more than just a charging engine in this platform? >> Well, I think just going back to what Robin was talking about. I think what Totogi is doing differently is by building it on the Public Cloud gives you virtually unlimited resources, right? In a couple of different directions, certainly hardware and capacity and scalability and all those other things, right? But also as Amazon is putting out more and more product, when you build it in this new way, you can take advantage of these new services very, very easily. And that is a different mindset. It's a different way to deploy applications. And I think that's what makes Totogi really different. You couldn't build Totogi on-premise because you need the infinite scalability. You need the machine learning, you need the AI of Amazon, which they have been investing in for decades, if they now charge you by the API call. And you get to use it like you were saying. Just give it a try, don't like it, stop. And it's just a completely different way of thinking, yeah. >> If I have to ask you a question about the Public Cloud, because the theme here in Cloud City is the Public Cloud is driving innovation, which is also includes disruption. And the new brands are coming in, old brands are either reinventing themselves or falling away. What is the Public Cloud truly enabling? Is it the scale? Is it the data? Is it the refactoring capability? What is the real driver of the Public Cloud innovation? >> I think the insight that CSPs are going to have is what Jamie Dimon had in banking. Like I think he was pretty famously saying, "I'm never going to use the Public Cloud. Our data is too precious, you know, regulations and all that stuff." But I think the insight they're going to have, and I hopefully, I do a keynote and I mentioned this, which is feature velocity. The ability to put out features in a day or two. Our feature velocity in telco is months. Months, months. >> Seriously? >> Yeah, sometimes years. It's just so slow between big iterations of new capability and to be able to put out new features in minutes or days and be able to outmaneuver your competition is unheard of. So the CSPs that starts to get this, it's going to be a real big get, and then they're going to start to.. (Danielle makes swishing sound) >> We just interviewed (Dave speaking indistinctly) a venture capitalist, Dave and I last month. And he's a big investor in Snowflake, on the big deals. He said that the new strategy that's working is you go to be agile with feature acceleration. We just talked about this at lunch and you get data. And you can dismantle the bad features quickly and double down >> Yup. >> on the winners. >> Ones that are working. So what used to be feature creep now is a benefit if you play it right? >> Danielle: It's feature experimentation. >> That's essentially what you- >> It's experimentation, right? And you're like, that one worked, this one didn't, kill that one, double down on this one, go faster and faster and so feature experimentation, which you can't do in telco, because every time we ask for a feature from your current vendor, it's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. So you don't experiment. And so yeah- >> You can make features disposable. >> Correct. And I think that we just discovered that on this stage just now. (group chuckling) >> Hey look at this. Digital revolution, DR. Telco DR. >> Yeah. >> Great to have you guys. >> This is super awesome. Thanks so much. >> You guys are amazing. Congratulations. And we're looking forward to the more innovation stories again, get out there, get the momentum. Great stuff. >> Danielle: It's going to be great. >> And awesome. >> Feature experimentation. >> Yeah. >> Hashtag. >> And Dave and I are going to head back over to our Cube set here, here on the main stage. We'll toss it back to the Adam in the studio. Adam, back to you and take it from here.

>> Narrator: From around the globe It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm John Furrier, your host. I've got a great guest here Robin Hernandez, vice president Hybrid Cloud Management and Watson AIOps. Robin, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks so much for having me, John. >> You know, Hybrid Cloud, the CEO of IBM Arvind loves Cloud. We know that we've talked to him all the time about it. And Cloud is now part of the entire DNA of the company. Hybrid Cloud is validated multi clouds around the corner. This is the underlying pinnings of the new operating system of business. And with that, that's massive change that we've seen IT move to large scale. You're seeing transformation, driving innovation, driving scale, and AI is the center of it. So AIOps is a huge topic. I want to jump right into it. Can you just tell me about your day to day IT operations teams what you guys are doing? How are you guys organized? How you guys bring in value to the customers? What are your teams responsible for? >> Yeah, so for a few years we've been working with our IT customers, our enterprise customers in this transformation that they're going through. As they move more workloads to cloud, and they still have some of their workloads on premise, or they have a strategy of using multiple public clouds, each of those cloud vendors have different tools. And so they're forced with, how do I keep up with the changing rate and pace of this technology? How do I build skills on a particular public cloud vendor when, you know, maybe six months from now we'll have another cloud vendor that will be introduced or another technology that will be introduced. And it's almost impossible for an it team to keep up with the rate and pace of the change. So we've really been working with IT operations in transforming their processes and their skills within their teams and that looking at what tools do they use to move to this cloud operations model. And then as part of that, how do they leverage the benefits of AI and make that practical and purposeful in this new mode of cloud operations >> And the trend that's been booming is this idea of a site reliability engineer. It's really an IT operations role. It's become kind of a new mix between engineering and IT and development. I mean, classic DevOps, we've seen, you know dev and ops, right? You got to operate the developers and the software modern apps are coming in that's infrastructure as course has been around for a while. But now as the materialization of things like Kubernetes and microservices, people are programming the infrastructure. And so the scale is there, and that's been around for a while. Now it's going to go to a whole enterprise level with containers and other things. How is the site reliability engineering persona if you will, or ITOps changed specifically because that's where the action is. And that's where you hear things like observability and I need more data, break down the silos. What's this all about? What's your view? >> Yeah, so site reliability engineering or SRE practices as we call it has really not changed the processes per se that IT has to do, but it's more accelerated at an enormous rate and pace. Those processes and the tools as you mentioned, the cloud native tools like Kubernetes have accelerated how those processes are executed. Everything from releasing new code and how they work with development to actually code the infrastructure and the policies in that development process to maintaining and observing over the life cycle of an application, the performance, the availability, the response time, and the customer experience. All of those processes that used to happen in silos with separate teams and sort of a waterfall approach, with SRE practices now, they're happening instantaneously. They're being scaled out. They're being... Failback is happening much more quickly so that applications didn't do not have outages. And the rate and pace of this has just accelerated so quickly. This is the transformation of what we call cloud operations. And we believe that as IT teams work more closely with developers and they moved towards this SRE model, that they cannot just do this with their personnel and changing skills and changing tools. They have to do this with modernized tools like AI. And this is where we are recommending applying AI to those processes so that you can then get automation out of the back end that you would not think about in a traditional IT operations, or even in an SRE practice. You have to leverage capabilities and new technologies like AI to even accelerate further. >> Let's unpack the AI operations piece because I think that's where I think I'm in hearing. I'd love you to clarify this because it becomes I think the key important point but also kind of confusing to some folks because IT operations people see that changing. You just pointed out why, honestly, the tools and the culture is changing, but AI becomes a scale point because of the automation piece you mentioned. How does that thread together? How does AIOps specifically change the customer's approach in terms of how they work with their teams and how that automation is being applied? 'Cause I think that's the key thread, right? 'Cause everyone kind of gets the cultural shifts and the tools, if they're not living it and putting it in place, but now they want to scale it. That's where automation comes in. Is that right? Is that the right way to think about it? What's your view on this? This is important. >> It's absolutely right. And I always like to talk about AI in other industries before we apply it to IT to help IT understand. Because a lot of times, IT looks at AI as a buzzword and they say, "Oh, you know, yes, sure. "This is going to help me." But if you think about... We've been doing AI for a long time at many different companies not just at IBM, but if you think about the other industries where we've applied it, healthcare in particular is so tangible for most people, right? It didn't replace a doctor but it helps a doctor see the things that would take them weeks and months of studying and analyzing different patients to say, "Hey, John, I think this may be a symptom "that we overlooked or didn't think about "or a diagnosis that we didn't think about," without manually looking at all this research. AI can accelerate that so rapidly for a doctor, the same notion for IT. If we apply AI properly to IT, we can accelerate things like remediating incidents or finding a performance problem that may take your eye months or weeks or even hours to find, AI applied properly find those issues and diagnose just like they could in healthcare it diagnoses issues correctly much more rapidly. >> Now again, I want to get your thoughts on something while you're here 'cause you've been in the business for many, many decades 20 years experience, you know, cloud cold, you know the new modern area you're managing it now. Clients are having a scenario where they, "Okay, I'm changing over the culture." I'm "Okay, I got some cloud, I got some public "and I got some hybrid and man, "we did some agile things. "We're provisioned, it's all done. "It's out there." And all of a sudden someone adds something new and it crashes (chuckles) And now I've got to get in, "Where's the risks? where's the security holes?" They're seeing this kind of day two operations as some people call, another buzz word but it's becoming more of, "Okay, we got it up and running "but we still now going to still push some code "and things are starting to break. "and that's net new thing." So it's kind of like they're out of their comfort zone. This is where I kind of see the AIOps evolving quickly because there's kind of a DevSecOps piece. There's also data involved, observability. How do you talk to that scenario? Where, okay, you sold me on cloud, I've been doing it. I did some projects. We're not been running. We got a production system and we added something new. Something maybe trivial and it breaks stuff? >> Yes. Yeah, so with the new cloud operations and SRE, the IT teams are much more responsible for business outcomes. And not just as you say, the application being deployed and the application being available, but the life cycle of that application and the results that it's bringing to the end users and the business. And what this means is that it needs to partner much more closely with development. And it is hard for them to keep up with the tools that are being used and the new code and the architectures of microservices that developers are using. So we like to apply AI on what we call the change risk management process. And so everyone's familiar with change management that means a new piece of code is being released. You have to maintain where that code is being released to was part of the application architecture and make sure that it's scaled out and rolled out properly within your enterprise policies. When we apply AI, we then apply what we call a risk factor to that change because we know so often, application outages occur not something new within the environment. So by applying AI, we can then give you a risk rating that says, "There's an 80% probability "that this change that you're about to roll out, "a code change is going to cause a problem "in this application." So it allows you to then go back and work with the development team and say, "Hey, how do we reduce this risk?" Or decide to take that calculated risk and put into the visibility of where those risks may occur. So this is a great example, change risk management of how applying AI can make you more intelligent in your decisions much more tied to the business and tied to the application release team. >> That's awesome. Well, I got you here on this point of change management. The term "Shift Left" has come up a lot in the industry. I'd love to get your quick definition of what that is in your mind. What does Shift Left mean for Ops teams with AIOps? >> Yeah, so in the early days of IT there was a hard line definitely between your development and IT team. It was kind of we always said throwing it over the fence, right? The developers would throw the code over the fence and say, good luck IT, you know, figure out how to deploy it where it needs to be deployed and cross your fingers that nothing bad happens. Well, Shift Left is really about a breaking down that fence. And if you think of your developers on your left-hand side you'd being the IT team, it's really shifting more towards that development team and getting involved in that code release process, getting involved in their CI/CD pipeline to make sure that all of your enterprise policies and what that code needs to run effectively in your enterprise application and architecture, those pieces are coded ahead of time with the developer. So it's really about partnering between it and development, shifting left to have a more collaboration versus throwing things over the fence and playing the blame game, which is what happens a lot in the early days IT. >> Yeah, and you get a smarter team out of it, great point. That's great insight. Thanks for sharing that. I think it's super relevant. That's the hot trend right now making dealers more productive, building security from the beginning. While they're doing it code it right in, make it a security proof if you will. I got to ask you one of the organizational questions as IBM leader. What are some of the roadblocks that you see in organizations that when they embrace AIOps, are trying to embrace AI ops are trying to scale it and how they can overcome those blockers. What are some of the things you're seeing that you could share with other folks that are maybe watching and trying to solve this problem? >> Yeah, so you know, AI in any industry or discipline is only as good as the data you feed it. AI is about learning from past trends and creating a normal baseline for what is normal in your environment. What is most optimal in your environment this being your enterprise application running in steady state. And so if you think back to the healthcare example, if we only have five or six pieces of patient data that we feed the AI, then the AI recommendation to the doctor is going to be pretty limited. We need a broad set of use cases across a wide demographic of people in the healthcare example, it's the same with IT, applying AI to IT. You need a broad set of data. So one of the roadblocks that we hear from many customers is, well I using an analytics tool already and I'm not really getting a lot of good recommendations or automation out of that analytics tool. And we often find it's because they're pulling data from one source, likely they're pulling data from performance metrics, performance of what's happening with the infrastructure, CPU utilization or memory utilization, storage utilization. And those are all good metrics, but without the context of everything else in your environment, without pulling in data from what's happening in your logs, pulling in data from unstructured data, from things like collaboration tools, what are your team saying? What are the customers saying about the experience with your application? You have to pull in many different data sets across IT and the business in order to make that AI recommendation the most useful. And so we recommend a more holistic true AI platform versus a very segregated data approach to applying and eating the analytics or AI engine. >> That's awesome, it's like a masterclass right there. Robin, great stuff. Great insight. We'll quickly wrap. I would love to you to take a quick minute to explain and share what are some of the use cases to get started and really get into AIOps system successes for people that want to explore more, dig in, and get into this fast, what are some use case, what's some low hanging fruit? What would you share? >> Yeah, we know that IT teams like to see results and they hate black boxes. They like to see into everything that's happening and understand deeply. And so this is one of our major focus areas as we do. We say, we're making AI purposeful for IT teams but some of the low hanging fruits, we have visions. And lots of our enterprise customers have visions of applying AI to everything from a customer experience of the application, costs management of the application and infrastructure in many different aspects. But some of the low hanging fruit is really expanding the availability and the service level agreements of your applications. So many people will say, you know I have a 93% uptime availability or an agreement with my business that this application will be up 93% of the time. Applying AI, we can increase those numbers to 99.9% of the time because it learns from past problems and it creates that baseline of what's normal in your environment. And then we'll tell you before an application outage occurs. So avoiding application outages, and then improving performance, recommendations and scalability. What's the number of users coming in versus your normal scale rate and automating that scalability. So, performance improvements and scalability is another low-hanging fruit area where many IT teams are starting. >> Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't you want to have the AIOps? They're totally cool, very relevant. You know, you're seeing hybrid cloud, standardized all across business. You've got to have that data and you got to have that incident management work there. Robin, great insight. Thank you for sharing. Robin Hernandez, vice president of Hybrid Cloud Management in Watson AIOps. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me John. >> Okay, this theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier your host. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Narrator: From around the globe. It's theCUBE with digital coverage of IBM Think 2021. Brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021 virtual, I'm John Furrier, your host. I've got a great guest here Robin Hernandez, vice president Hybrid Cloud Management and Watson AIOps. Robin, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks so much for having me, John. >> You know, Hybrid Cloud, the CEO of IBM Arvind loves Cloud. We know that we've talked to him all the time about it. And Cloud is now part of the entire DNA of the company. Hybrid Cloud is validated multi clouds around the corner. This is the underlying pinnings of the new operating system of business. And with that, that's massive change that we've seen IT move to large scale. You're seeing transformation, driving innovation, driving scale, and AI is the center of it. So AIOps is a huge topic. I want to jump right into it. Can you just tell me about your day to day IT operations teams what you guys are doing? How are you guys organized? How you guys bring in value to the customers? What are your teams responsible for? >> Yeah, so for a few years we've been working with our IT customers, our enterprise customers in this transformation that they're going through. As they move more workloads to cloud, and they still have some of their workloads on premise, or they have a strategy of using multiple public clouds, each of those cloud vendors have different tools. And so they're forced with, how do I keep up with the changing rate and pace of this technology? How do I build skills on a particular public cloud vendor when, you know, maybe six months from now we'll have another cloud vendor that will be introduced or another technology that will be introduced. And it's almost impossible for an it team to keep up with the rate and pace of the change. So we've really been working with IT operations in transforming their processes and their skills within their teams and that looking at what tools do they use to move to this cloud operations model. And then as part of that, how do they leverage the benefits of AI and make that practical and purposeful in this new mode of cloud operations >> And the trend that's been booming is this idea of a site reliability engineer. It's really an IT operations role. It's become kind of a new mix between engineering and IT and development. I mean, classic DevOps, we've seen, you know dev and ops, right? You got to operate the developers and the software modern apps are coming in that's infrastructure as course has been around for a while. But now as the materialization of things like Kubernetes and microservices, people are programming the infrastructure. And so the scale is there, and that's been around for a while. Now it's going to go to a whole enterprise level with containers and other things. How is the site reliability engineering persona if you will, or ITOps changed specifically because that's where the action is. And that's where you hear things like observability and I need more data, break down the silos. What's this all about? What's your view? >> Yeah, so site reliability engineering or SRE practices as we call it has really not changed the processes to say that it has to do, but it's more accelerated at an enormous rate and pace. Those processes and the tools as you mentioned, the cloud native tools like Kubernetes have accelerated how those processes are executed. Everything from releasing new code and how they work with development to actually code the infrastructure and the policies in that development process to maintaining and observing over the life cycle of an application, the performance, the availability, the response time, and the customer experience. All of those processes that used to happen in silos with separate teams and sort of a waterfall approach, with SRA practices now, they're happening instantaneously. They're being scaled out. They're being... Failback is happening much more quickly so that applications didn't do not have outages. And the rate and pace of this has just accelerated so quickly. This is the transformation of what we call cloud operations. And we believe that as IT teams work more closely with developers and they moved towards this SRE model, that they cannot just do this with their personnel and changing skills and changing tools. They have to do this with modernized tools like AI. And this is where we are recommending applying AI to those processes so that you can then get automation out of the back end that you would not think about in a traditional IT operations, or even in an SRE practice. You have to leverage capabilities and new technologies like AI to even accelerate further. >> Let's unpack the AI operations piece because I think that's where I think I'm in hearing. I'd love you to clarify this because it becomes I think the key important point but also kind of confusing to some folks because IT operations people see that changing. You just pointed out why, honestly, the tools and the culture is changing, but AI becomes a scale point because of the automation piece you mentioned. How does that thread together? How does AIOps specifically change the customer's approach in terms of how they work with their teams and how that automation is being applied? 'Cause I think that's the key thread, right? 'Cause everyone kind of gets the cultural shifts and the tools, if they're not living it and putting it in place, but now they want to scale it. That's where automation comes in. Is that right? Is that the right way to think about it? What's your view on this? This is important. >> It's absolutely right. And I always like to talk about AI in other industries before we apply it to IT to help IT understand. Because a lot of times, IT looks at AI as a buzzword and they say, "Oh, you know, yes, sure. "This is going to help me." But if you think about... We've been doing AI for a long time at many different companies not just at IBM, but if you think about the other industries where we've applied it, healthcare in particular is so tangible for most people, right? It didn't replace a doctor but it helps a doctor see the things that would take them weeks and months of studying and analyzing different patients to say, "Hey, John, I think this may be a symptom "that we overlooked or didn't think about "or a diagnosis that we didn't think about," without manually looking at all this research. AI can accelerate that so rapidly for a doctor, the same notion for IT. If we apply AI properly to IT, we can accelerate things like remediating incidents or finding a performance problem that may take your eye months or weeks or even hours to find, AI applied properly find those issues and diagnose just like they could in healthcare it diagnoses issues correctly much more rapidly. >> Now again, I want to get your thoughts on something while you're here 'cause you've been in the business for many, many decades 20 years experience, you know, cloud cold, you know the new modern area you're managing it now. Clients are having a scenario where they, "Okay, I'm changing over the culture." I'm "Okay, I got some cloud, I got some public "and I got some hybrid and man, "we did some agile things. "We're provisioned, it's all done. "It's out there." And all of a sudden someone adds something new and it crashes (chuckles) And now I've got to get in, "Where's the risks? where's the security holes?" They're seeing this kind of day two operations as some people call, another buzz word but it's becoming more of, "Okay, we got it up and running "but we still now going to still push some code "and things are starting to break. "and that's net new thing." So it's kind of like they're out of their comfort zone. This is where I kind of see the AIOps evolving quickly because there's kind of a DevSecOps piece. There's also data involved, observability. How do you talk to that scenario? Where, okay, you sold me on cloud, I've been doing it. I did some projects. We're not been running. We got a production system and we added something new. Something maybe trivial and it breaks stuff? >> Yes. Yeah, so with the new cloud operations and SRE, the IT teams are much more responsible for business outcomes. And not just as you say, the application being deployed and the application being available, but the life cycle of that application and the results that it's bringing to the end users and the business. And what this means is that it needs to partner much more closely with development. And it is hard for them to keep up with the tools that are being used and the new code and the architectures of microservices that developers are using. So we like to apply AI on what we call the change risk management process. And so everyone's familiar with change management that means a new piece of code is being released. You have to maintain where that code is being released to was part of the application architecture and make sure that it's scaled out and rolled out properly within your enterprise policies. When we apply AI, we then apply what we call a risk factor to that change because we know so often, application outages occur not something new within the environment. So by applying AI, we can then give you a risk rating that says, "There's an 80% probability "that this change that you're about to roll out, "a code change is going to cause a problem "in this application." So it allows you to then go back and work with the development team and say, "Hey, how do we reduce this risk?" Or decide to take that calculated risk and put into the visibility of where those risks may occur. So this is a great example, change risk management of how applying AI can make you more intelligent in your decisions much more tied to the business and tied to the application release team. >> That's awesome. Well, I got you here on this point of change management. The term "Shift Left" has come up a lot in the industry. I'd love to get your quick definition of what that is in your mind. What does Shift Left mean for Ops teams with AIOps? >> Yeah, so in the early days of IT there was a hard line definitely between your development and IT team. It was kind of we always said throwing it over the fence, right? The developers would throw the code over the fence and say, good luck IT, you know, figure out how to deploy it where it needs to be deployed and cross your fingers that nothing bad happens. Well, Shift Left is really about a breaking down that fence. And if you think of your developers on your left-hand side you'd being the IT team, it's really shifting more towards that development team and getting involved in that code release process, getting involved in their CI/CD pipeline to make sure that all of your enterprise policies and what that code needs to run effectively in your enterprise application and architecture, those pieces are coded ahead of time with the developer. So it's really about partnering between it and development, shifting left to have a more collaboration versus throwing things over the fence and playing the blame game, which is what happens a lot in the early days IT. >> Yeah, and you get a smarter team out of it, great point. That's great insight. Thanks for sharing that. I think it's super relevant. That's the hot trend right now making dealers more productive, building security from the beginning. While they're doing it code it right in, make it a security proof if you will. I got to ask you one of the organizational questions as IBM leader. What are some of the roadblocks that you see in organizations that when they embrace AIOps, are trying to embrace AI ops are trying to scale it and how they can overcome those blockers. What are some of the things you're seeing that you could share with other folks that are maybe watching and trying to solve this problem? >> Yeah, so you know, AI in any industry or discipline is only as good as the data you feed it. AI is about learning from past trends and creating a normal baseline for what is normal in your environment. What is most optimal in your environment this being your enterprise application running in steady state. And so if you think back to the healthcare example, if we only have five or six pieces of patient data that we feed the AI, then the AI recommendation to the doctor is going to be pretty limited. We need a broad set of use cases across a wide demographic of people in the healthcare example, it's the same with IT, applying AI to IT. You need a broad set of data. So one of the roadblocks that we hear from many customers is, well I using an analytics tool already and I'm not really getting a lot of good recommendations or automation out of that analytics tool. And we often find it's because they're pulling data from one source, likely they're pulling data from performance metrics, performance of what's happening with the infrastructure, CPU utilization or memory utilization, storage utilization. And those are all good metrics, but without the context of everything else in your environment, without pulling in data from what's happening in your logs, pulling in data from unstructured data, from things like collaboration tools, what are your team saying? What are the customers saying about the experience with your application? You have to pull in many different data sets across IT and the business in order to make that AI recommendation the most useful. And so we recommend a more holistic true AI platform versus a very segregated data approach to applying and eating the analytics or AI engine. >> That's awesome, it's like a masterclass right there. Robin, great stuff. Great insight. We'll quickly wrap. I would love to you to take a quick minute to explain and share what are some of the use cases to get started and really get into AIOps system successes for people that want to explore more, dig in, and get into this fast, what are some use case, what's some low hanging fruit? What would you share? >> Yeah, we know that IT teams like to see results and they hate black boxes. They like to see into everything that's happening and understand deeply. And so this is one of our major focus areas as we do. We say, we're making AI purposeful for IT teams but some of the low hanging fruits, we have visions. And lots of our enterprise customers have visions of applying AI to everything from a customer experience of the application, costs management of the application and infrastructure in many different aspects. But some of the low hanging fruit is really expanding the availability and the service level agreements of your applications. So many people will say, you know I have a 93% uptime availability or an agreement with my business that this application will be up 93% of the time. Applying AI, we can increase those numbers to 99.9% of the time because it learns from past problems and it creates that baseline of what's normal in your environment. And then we'll tell you before an application outage occurs. So avoiding application outages, and then improving performance, recommendations and scalability. What's the number of users coming in versus your normal scale rate and automating that scalability. So, performance improvements and scalability is another low-hanging fruit area where many IT teams are starting. >> Yeah, I mean, why wouldn't you want to have the AIOps? They're totally cool, very relevant. You know, you're seeing hybrid cloud, standardized all across business. You've got to have that data and you got to have that incident management work there. Robin, great insight. Thank you for sharing. Robin Hernandez, vice president of Hybrid Cloud Management in Watson AIOps. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you so much for having me John. >> Okay, this theCUBE's coverage of IBM Think 2021. I'm John Furrier your host. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

>> we believe in a multi cloud world we think our customers are going to consume. Cloud service is from a variety of cloud providers, and what we're all about is creating a common operating environment that lets you run, manage, connect and secure clouds, workloads on any cloud right consumed by any device. And that >> means we've got to be present. The line between public and private. Some line between on premise and off premise. It's fading. It's blurring. We're going to get to a point where we're just gonna talk about what's the workload and what's a service I need to deliver the workload. In this industry, you have to be constantly innovating. And if you get too protective of the market that you're in, you start to get into a cocoon, and then people are innovating around you and they're making you obsolete, and you're not even seeing it happen. I think the M word has a vision, and it's consistent. It really hasn't changed for many, many years. We were advocating Hybrid Cloud long, long ago, and so now you're you're seeing is the delivery against that vision? Now the industry is starting to talk about tech is a force for good. So now we're starting to move out of the conversation of just the technologies in the products and the impact. But what are we collectively doing to make this world a better place? That's a new dialogue. >> The World 2019 will continue in a moment on the Cube, now celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage.

(funky music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage it's "theCUBE" covering Vmworld 2019 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners >> John: Hey welcome back everyone its "theCUBE" live coverage here of VMworld 2019. We're in Moscone North in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Our tenth year covering VMworlds. The last show that's still around since "theCUBE" started. EMC World's now a part of Dell Technology World so VMworld was our first show of "theCUBE" in 2010 and we're here with then the Senior Director now the CMO of VMware Robin Matlock. Great to have you. Thanks for coming. 10 years ago we were across the street at the South. The first ever "CUBE", now 10 years later, what a run. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Robin: Well how 'about the fact that this is number 11 VMworld for me so I think we're on, like, number 16 or so for VMworld so, yeah, we've driving been this ship for a while and it's still going strong. >> John: And, you know, when you came in the studio we did a little preview video and one of the things we talked about and you jumped on was this notion of resiliency around VMware. I want to get into that because the keynote this year I thought really used some of his primetime real estate to highlight Tech for Good and really some of the efforts around that so 1. Shareholder value, you guys have been doing great. Stock prices up. But in this era of, you know, corporate responsibility and accountability, this Tech for Good message is real. You guys have been doing it for a while. It's not new, it's not like you're doing it for fashion, it's the real deal and it was a big part of the keynote. >> Robin: It was. In fact, it was really a highlight for part of the keynote for me personally. I mean, I think when it's in our DNA, and that is consistent with our values, and we've been at that for some time. We have values that are all about, you know, customer and community and that's who we are. We also have very high aspirations that of course we have to be performant. We have to perform well as a business and deliver shareholder value but that isn't enough. You know, I do think that Pat leads this narrative that we as a company have to think about giving back more than we take. And it's not just PowerPoint slides, it's real. We empower our employees. I hope you enjoyed the story about Callum Eade swimming the English Channel all for a cause that he chose. He raised the money, he drove that and VMware just opens up those opportunities to allow our employees to do that so I think, we think it's a really important topic, we tried to give it a lot of air time, and give a way for the attendees to connect with it and see what they could take action against. >> John: And also, you guys are also voted one of the best places to work. Your campus in Palo Alto, beautiful and it is a great place to work. But this is the ethos, but it's still competitive and had Carl Eschenbach recently in our studios in Palo Alto and he made a comment he's like, "You know, I've been at VMware "for many, many years", now he's a VC at Sequoia Capital, and Carl said, "You know, everyone's been "trying to kill VMware. This is going to VMware, "that's going to kill virtuals." The resiliency just around the staying power of the product and technology leadership happens. This year it's containers, the attendees are excited by it, the numbers are up, 20,000 people here. Still evolution on the technology side, still great community. >> Robin: Yeah, I mean I think, you know resiliency is in the fabric of VMware but I think innovation is what is the secret sauce and we know in Silicon Valley you better innovate and keep moving forward or you're going to find yourself kind of, left out and, you know, Pat's been an incredible visionary. He's got a team of leaders that are very confident, strong technological disrupters. I mean some of the big acquisitions that we announced just last Thursday at earnings that we are educating folks here about, the intent to acquire Pivotal, the intent to acquire Carbon Black, you know, further that we'll either do it organically or we will acquire interesting combinations of companies to drive unique value to our customers. So I think there was a whole bunch of that today. >> Dave: We were talking in "theCUBE" earlier, Robin, about how now it's a post-virtual machine world and if we go back to 2009, which was my first VMworld as well, Paul Maritz at the time said we're building this software mainframe. Now, of course, you got promoted and I'm sure killed that mainframe from all marketing but (laughs) so well done but you kind of evolved the software-defined data center vision. But one of the takeaways for me from the keynote was this notion of any workload, any app , which was kind of the vision back then and now in a cloud which the cloud wasn't as prominent then. And so from a marketing standpoint you've really, the vision has been consistent but now with all these acquisitions you're making you're really embracing a much broader vision and your marketing message has to evolve as well. >> Robin: To support that, I think the fact that our vision has been incredibly consistent for many years now, I mean, that's Pat's leadership kind of setting that foundation for the company. My job as a marketer is to help find the way to articulate that in a way that's consumable and people understand. But what's happened over the years is we deliver on that vision 'cause, you know, a vision it's not all perfect, we don't have every piece of it or it's not all optimized. All of these moves year after year are just validating and supporting the delivery of that vision to our customers and I think the big moves this year are no different, whether it's Tanzu for Kubernetes, whether it's the Carbon Black acquisition idea, whether it's Pivotal, these are just steps along a journey that's going to deliver on our vision which is delivering any application on any cloud consumed by any device, all with security intrinsically built in the fabric. >> Dave: Well and the gauntlet that you lay down this year in talking to your practitioner audience was that technologists who master multi-cloud will own the next decade. Okay. That kind of says it all, right? And that is a strong message that you're sending to your buyers, to your practitioners so. >> Robin: Yeah, and I think the people that are right here at VMworld, these are the kinds of technologists that have that opportunity in front of them. That's why this whole notion of make your mark it's like, lean into this opportunity. Betting on VMware, building your career on virtualization has opened up many opportunities. It went from compute to storage to networking. It's now into multi-cloud. These are incredible opportunities and these technologists are the ones that can deliver this value for their enterprises. >> Dave: And there's diversity in the messages, you know, all the major cloud players say, "Well no. Just our cloud." You guys are pushing in a new direction. I mean that's what leaders are supposed to do, right? >> Robin: Our strategy has always been about choice, you know, we've really been advocates of letting customers choose the path that's right for them and we know in this cloud war that we're all a part of that customers they are choosing. Some are leaning into AWS, some are leaning into Azure, some are biased towards IBM. Our job is really to enable them to have a rich, powerful experience without friction, efficiently, and operate those workloads in any of those environments. >> John: Have you seen any demographic shift in your primary audience because obviously the operating side, even with Kubernetes, they love it, containers, a messaging channel that's in and of itself but still containers seems to be that next step function with Kubernetes that VM's brought to computing. But when you bring in the dev and the ops that's where it starts to get magical when the operating's got to meet up with the developers. That's been the theme. cloud-Native. All this enablement's coming in. Has there been a shift in demographics to your audience? >> Robin: Well it is an evolving journey, if you will, and yes but it's still, I think we have a long ways to go. We are largely still have an infrastructure audience here, there's a mobility crowd here, there's a cloud architect crowd here. The new audiences are going to be the platform architects that dev/ops community and we do have shifts in that but I would say that's part of the value as we bring Pivotal into the family, we can now merge these audiences and, I think, do a much formidable job at that. >> John: It's interesting, Telco will have them on later. 5G was a big part of the keynote as well >> Robin: Yeah. >> John: A new opportunity, a new affinity group there. >> Robin: Without a doubt, I mean, the whole Edge and Telco clouds are really opening up new entirely new markets. The Telco, the 5G, we do think that's going to be a very significant wave and is going to create new opportunity for new application types, new fundamental architectures that we can now merge between Telco and Enterprise so we think it's really a rich ground for innovation. >> John: You mentioned Pivotal, I think that's more of they were already in the fold, now they're officially in the fold with Dell Technologies but your other acquisitions, there's a lot of them. You got to kind of bring them into the fold so is there the marketing playbook do you have an off-site meeting and you just give them the playbook? How do you handle all the integrations? 'Cause that's always a big challenge. IT integration, messaging integration, again it helps if they're on the fault line of the value proposition but >> Yeah. >> John: What's your strategy to integrate all these companies? >> Robin: Well, you know, any time you're doing a lot of mergers and acquisitions you definitely have to think very strategically about integration and then sometimes you want to integrate fully, right away and sometimes you want to let an acquired company be stand-alone for a little while. Got to get used to the culture a bit-- >> John: Like Velocloud? >> Robin: Velocloud is kind of independent-- >> John: They've got their own building. >> Robin: within the networking team. AirWatch was held very independent for a couple of years. Some other ones are just tuck-ins. You just bring 'em right into the family, you just merge 'em in, it just depends on the size, the scope, the culture and the strategy. I think we take a very purposeful approach to M&A integration and we don't really have a one-size-fits-all strategy. Depends on the circumstances. >> Dave: So follow up on that because clearly there's an engineering culture here at VMware and take the Carbon Black example for instance you talked about how you guys have sort of pretested it with AppDefense but from your standpoint, how do you think about the architecture of the marketing and the messaging? I think you answered it in part. It was sometimes it makes sense to keep it separate sometimes but when you think about the vision do you look at it and say, "Okay this plugs nicely into the vision "and so here's what I'm going to do?" How integrated is it with the rest of the sort of decision-making process? >> Robin: Well, you know, I would take the position that all these acquisitions are plugging into the vision. They are that's why we're buying them because they are very aligned to our strategy and vision. Now I have the challenge as a marketer to deal with a lot of different brands that are coming into the family. I mean, how and when do I consolidate and kind of unite the brands and that is a journey that we're going to be on. We'll take some time to do that. You don't want to rush things in that regard. I think it's very important that the market sees one VMware, one vision and strategy, you know, if it's delivered in a product and it's through an acquisition as a different brand that's okay, we can work on that over time but as long as we're laying out one strategy and vision to the marketplace and just showing these are evidence of proof points of that journey. >> John: Yeah. I mean, you guys, you're pretty clear. Your strategy is to evaluate, understand where they are in the value chain of what you're trying to do. Unlike others like IBM which brings companies in quickly, makes them IBM, you guys are a little bit different, You'll play with whatever the market will give you. That's pretty much what I hear you're saying. >> Robin: Well for example, Carbon Black, experts in security, you know. I think we want to capitalize on that expertise. We want to protect that expertise. They've already been partnering with AppDefense now for some period of time rather than, you know, it's like which one is >> Right. >> Robin: consuming the other (laughing) so our strategy is let's combine AppDefense with Carbon Black and then start working with Patrick and Carbon Black to merge that into the-- >> Yeah. >> Dave: Organizationally, I think that's, at least what I read >> Yeah. >> Dave: was you can set up essentially a cloud security division, right, that Patrick is going to >> That Patrick is going to run. >> Dave: run, so >> That's right. >> John: Okay so VMworld 2019, what's the update here? Give us some factoids, some of the exciting things happening here. We're in the meadow, there's birds chirping here. This is Moscone North, nice build-out, always good build-outs here. Moscone, we're back in from Vegas but what's going on? Labs, activities-- >> Robin: We've got it >> Give the-- >> Robin: all, John >> Give us the highlights. >> Dave: Klingons >> That's right. >> Robin: First of all you've got two great days of keynotes, right, those are really important highlights. Tomorrow we're going to do some really interesting things, demo, technical, deep dive. Great guest celebrity speakers, right, We're going with the sports theme this year and elite athletes and what they're giving back to the world with Lindsey Vonn and Steve Young. But here for the program we have the Hands-On Labs are on fire. They broke records on Sunday so I know they've been really well-attended and consumed. We have over 600 break-outs, so many it's mind-boggling. We have 230 sponsors in the Solutions Exchange and that's probably a place where you can go not just to get the VMware stuff but get that good exposure and lay of the land of the entire ecosystem. And they're all showcasing their innovation. What's new, what's the latest. So I think those give people a really good quick snapshot in one week, you can pretty much get an overview of the entire industry. >> John: Are there any must-sees in your opinion? >> Robin: (breathing in) Oh-- >> John: Or that people are talking about? >> Robin: I think for sure you got to get into this Kubernetes stuff. If you don't come out of this week of VMworld with a good handle on what is Tanzu, what's Tanzu Mission Control, what are we doing with the Heptio acquisition, what is PKS evolution happening, I think you would be missing something if you don't really grok that. Project Pacific work, Kubernetes in vSphere, tightly integrated, so that's a must-do. I think there's a lot happening in the networking space, right. Pat was pretty bold up there about, you know, what is the opportunity relative to network virtualization and the time is now so I think you've really got to get into that from the data center to the Edge to the cloud. Network transformation's hot. And then of course I think the cloud and I think we're really clear on hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud and how to really think about those environments and how, if you're architecting cloud for your company, what you want to be thinking about, what are we doing across multi-cloud, and, you know, I think all that hybrid-cloud stuff, it's all there. >> Dave: As we move to this, you know, this post-VMworld, VMware world how do you-- >> Robin: Is there a post-VMware world? >> Dave: What role, post-virtual-- >> John: Oh look at that, there we go. (laughing) >> Robin: I don't think there's a post-VMware world. >> Dave: Post-VM. I mean virtual machines. >> Robin: Virtualization. >> John: Are you changing the name to container world? >> Robin: No. (laughing) >> Dave: Right, exactly. So what (laughing) yeah what specifically are you guys doing to sort of educate folks, I mean, obviously you've got a lot of Kubernetes sessions, et cetera but just in terms of helping people sort of transform their skill sets into infrastructures of code, being able to take advantage of Kubernetes, you know, we've seen some things in the industry at events like this where you know, guys learn how to program in Python or, you know, whatever it is >> Right. >> Dave: Are there specific plans to do that? Is that actually happening at the event or? >> Robin: Well that's part of what all this content is about, I mean, you know, 600 break-out sessions aren't about, you know, compute virtualization. You can find those but this is about all these different dimensions, right? Whether it's what is Kubernetes, fundamentals, how you think about that in what kind of environment you're running. And I think that's the spirit of what VMworld is about. It's about hands-on, it's about meet the experts, it's about sessions, it's about the ecosystem, it's about having that all at your disposal in one week. >> You forgot something. >> Oh did I? >> The parties. >> The party? >> Everyone >> Well that's not helping your technical-- >> Everyone >> Aptitude >> Everyone knows VMworld has great parties at night and that's where all the action, you guys work hard/play hard one of the ethos of VMware culture. >> Robin: That's right, that's right. Well, we do work hard/play hard because this is intense, right? These guys are trying to jam as much as they can into four days and so we got to let off a little steam and OneRepublic is on stage on Wednesday night. We're going to have a great time. But I do think it's on the back drop of them here they are just like sponges trying to absorb this information. >> John: My final question is, and you guys brought it up in the keynote, around the tech industry good, bad, and Pat says neutral, it's how you shape the technology. Really a call to action and a strategic imperative to be more proactive in accountability and driving change for good. So I got to ask you about the word trust. I've seen a lot of marketing around companies always try to market around trust. Now more than ever the trust, whether it's fake news, company responsibility to security, which is a big part of what you guys do. How do you see that a marketer and what's the conscience of VMware because trust is certainly a big part of what you guys do. Is that a marketing, going to be a marketing ethos? Is it built into everything? Just curious how you personally feel about the word trust. >> Robin: Yeah, well first of all, I think it's foundational to doing good, healthy business. I think you got to be very careful as a marketer to market trust. I think you need to demonstrate your trustworthiness. You need to be consistent. You need to be credible. You need to be there when the times are tough. You need to be, you know, not always asking for something in return and if you earn trust you don't really have to say it. I believe we can position our validity and our credibility proven, you know, having customers say that we're trustworthy, having customers articulate >> Yeah >> Robin: why they depend on us, I believe that's more effective for our customers and, at the end of the day, probably more authentic. >> John: Yeah, and I think people, yeah that tends to be the track record of people who say it maybe haven't earned it, right, earning it's the better marketing strategy-- Yeah, I think these 20,000 (laughing) people are saying it as they show up here with their time and energy and investment. And I think our customers, you heard from a lot of customers on stage today. Gap, Freddie Mac, Verizon, there'll be more tomorrow. You know, I think there's over 100 customers in these sessions here and they're here advocating because they trust VMware. >> John: Well they run their business on you guys. Dave had a survey hey did, just published it yesterday, the spend is not going down. I mean the cloud impacts your business, you're getting into the cloud so that's pretty obvious but just overall the business is healthy >> Oh very >> John: for VMware (laughing) >> Robin: Very healthy. And you know we do that by really trying to have a balanced approach. It is about shareholder value but it's about tech as a force for good, we're passionate about that and ultimately we put customers at the center of our thinking, of our decisions, of our behaviors, and I think that ultimately keeps rewarding us. >> John: Well, Robin, it's been great to work with you over the past 10 years. Continue on. I think you guys have earned the trust, certainly the proof is in the results, and, you know, it is what it is, and the community votes with their wallet on the product and their participation so congratulations. >> Robin: Well if that's an indicator, I think we're getting a pretty good report card. >> John: Thanks, yeah. (laughing) >> Thanks for inviting me. Love being here, guys. Take care. >> John: Alright, Robin Matlock, CMO of VMware here inside "theCUBE" for our 10th year but also as VMware goes to the next level step function with virtualization to containers, Kubernetes, big theme here, I'm John with Dave Vallente, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (funky music)

>> live from Boston, Massachusetts. It's the queue covering your red. Have some twenty nineteen brought to you by bread. Welcome back a few, but our way Our red have some twenty nineteen >> center along with Sue Mittleman. I'm John Walls were now joined by Robin Goldstone, who's HBC solution architect at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Hello, Robin >> Harrier. Good to see you. I >> saw you on the Keystone States this morning. Fascinating presentation, I thought. First off for the viewers at home who might not be too familiar with the laboratory If you could please just give it that thirty thousand foot level of just what kind of national security work you're involved with. >> Sure. So yes, indeed. We are a national security lab. And you know, first and foremost, our mission is assuring the safety, security reliability of our nuclear weapons stockpile. And there's a lot to that mission. But we also have broader national security mission. We work on counterterrorism and nonproliferation, a lot of of cyber security kinds of things. And but even just general science. We're doing things with precision medicine and and just all all sorts >> of interesting technology. Fascinating >> Es eso, Robin, You know so much and i t you know, the buzzword. The vast months years has been scaled on. We talk about what public loud people are doing. It's labs like yours have been challenged. Challenge with scale in many other ways, especially performance is something that you know, usually at the forefront of where things are you talked about in the keynote this morning. Sierra is the latest generation supercomputer number two, you know, supercomputer. So you know, I don't know how many people understand the petaflop one hundred twenty five flops and the like, but tell us a little bit about, you know, kind of the why and the what of that, >> right? So So Sierra's a supercomputer. And what's unique about these systems is that we're solving. There's lots of systems that network together. Maybe you're bigger number of servers than us, but we're doing scientific simulation, and that kind of computing requires a level of parallelism and very tightly coupled. So all the servers are running a piece of the problem. They all have to sort of operate together. If any one of them is running slow, it makes the whole thing goes slow. So it's really this tightly couple nature of super computers that make things really challenging. You know, we talked about performance. If if one servers just running slow for some reason, you know everything else is going to be affected by that. So we really do care about performance. And we really do care about just every little piece of the hardware you know, performing as it should. So So I >> think in national security, nuclear stockpiles. Um I mean, there is nothing more important, obviously, than the safety and security of the American people were at the center of that. Right? You're open source, right? You know, how does that work? How does that? Because as much trust and faith and confidence we have in the open source community. This is an extremely important responsibility that's being consigned more less to this open source community. >> Sure. You know, at first, people do have that feeling that we should be running some secret sauce. I mean, our applications themselves or secret. But when it comes to the system software and all the software around the applications, I mean, open source makes perfect sense. I mean, we started out running really closed source solutions in some cases, the perp. The hardware itself was really proprietary. And, of course, the vendors who made the hardware proprietary. They wanted their software to be proprietary. But I think most people can resonate when you buy a piece of software and the vendor tells you it's it's great. It's going to do everything you needed to do and trust us, right? Okay, But at our scale, it often doesn't work the way it's It's supposed to work. They've never tested it. Our skill. And when it breaks, now they have to fix. They're the only ones that can fix it. And in some cases we found it wasn't in the vendors decided. You know what? No one else has one quite like yours. And you know, it's a lot of work to make it work for you. So we're just not going to fix and you can't wait, right? And so open source is just the opposite of that, right? I mean, we have all that visibility in that software. If it doesn't work for our needs, we can make it work for our needs, and then we can give it back to the community. Because even though people are doing things that the scale that we are today, Ah, lot of the things that we're doing really do trickle down and can be used by a lot of other people. >> But it's something really important because, as you said, you used to be and I was like, OK, the Cray supercomputer is what we know, You know, let's use proprietary interfaces and I need the highest speed and therefore it's not the general purpose stuff. You moved X eighty six. Lennox is something that's been in the shower computers. Why? But it's a finely tuned version there. Let's get you know, the duct tape and baling wire. And don't breathe on it once you get it running. You're running well today and you talk a little bit about the journey with Roland. You know, now on the Super Computers, >> right? So again, there's always been this sort of proprietary, really high end supercomputing. But about in the late nineteen nineties, early two thousand, that's when we started building these these commodity clusters. You know, at the time, I think Beta Wolf was the terminology for that. But, you know, basically looking at how we could take these basic off the shelf servers and make them work for our applications and trying to take advantage of a CZ much commodity technologies we can, because we didn't want to re invent anything. We want to use as much as possible. And so we've really written that curve. And initially it was just red hat. Lennox. There was no relative time, but then when we started getting into the newer architectures going from Mexico six. Taxi, six, sixty for and Itanium, you know the support just wasn't there in basic red hat and again, even though it's open source and we could do everything ourselves, we don't want to do everything ourselves. I mean, having an organization having this Enterprise edition of Red Hat having a company stand behind it. The software is still open. Source. We can look at the source code. We can modify it if we want, But you know what at the end of the day, were happy to hand over some of our challenge is to Red Hat and and let them do what they do best. They have great, you know, reach into the into the colonel community. They can get things done that we can't necessarily get done. So it's a great relationship. >> Yes. So that that last mile getting it on Sierra there. Is that the first time on one kind of the big showcase your computer? >> Sure. And part of the reason for that is because those big computers themselves are basically now mostly commodity. I mean, again, you talked about a Cray, Some really exotic architecture. I mean, Sierra is a collection of Lennox servers. Now, in this case, they're running the power architecture instead of X eighty six. So Red hat did a lot of work with IBM to make sure that that power was was fully supported in the rail stack. But so, you know, again that the service themselves somewhat commodity were running and video GP use those air widely used everywhere. Obviously big deal for machine learning and stuff that the main the biggest proprietary component we're still dealing was is thie interconnect. So, you know, I mentioned these clusters have to be really tightly coupled. They that performance has to be really superior and most importantly, the latent see right, they have to be super low late and see an ethernet just doesn't cut it >> So you run Infinite Band today. I'm assuming we're >> running infinite band on melon oxen finna ban on Sierra on some of our commodity clusters. We run melon ox on other ones. We run intel. Omni Path was just another flavor of of infinite band. You know, if we could use it, if we could use Ethernet, we would, because again, we would get all the benefit in the leverage of what everybody else is doing, but just just hasn't hasn't quite been able to meet our needs in that >> area now, uh, find recalled the history lesson. We got a bit from me this morning. The laboratory has been around since the early fifties, born of the Cold War. And so obviously open source was, you know? Yeah, right, you know, went well. What about your evolution to open source? I mean, ahs. This has taken hold. Now, there had to be a tipping point at some point that converted and made the laboratory believers. But if you can, can you go back to that process? And was it of was it a big moment for you big time? Or was it just a kind of a steady migration? tour. >> Well, it's interesting if you go way back. We actually wrote the operating systems for those early Cray computers. We wrote those operating systems in house because there really was no operating system that will work for us. So we've been software developers for a long time. We've been system software developers, but at that time it was all proprietary in closed source. So we know how to do that stuff. The reason I think really what happened was when these commodity clusters came along when we showed that we could build a, you know, a cluster that could perform well for our applications on that commodity hardware. We started with Red Hat, but we had to add some things on top. We had to add the software that made a bunch of individual servers function as a cluster. So all the system management stuff the resource manager of the thing that lets a schedule jobs, batch jobs. We wrote that software, the parallel file system. Those things did not exist in the open source, and we helped to write those things, and those things took on lives of their own. So luster. It's a parallel file system that we helped develop slow, Erm, if anyone outside of HBC probably hasn't heard of it, but it's a resource manager that again is very widely popular. So the lab really saw that. You know, we got a lot of visibility by contributing this stuff to the community. And I think everybody has embracing. And we develop open source software at all different layers. This >> software, Robin, you know, I'm curious how you look at Public Cloud. So, you know, when I look at the public odd, they do a lot with government agencies. They got cloud. You know, I've talked to companies that said I could have built a super computer. Here's how long and do. But I could spend it up in minutes. And you know what I need? Is that a possibility for something of yours? I understand. Maybe not the super high performance, But where does it fit in? >> Sure, Yeah. I mean, certainly for a company that has no experience or no infrastructure. I mean, we have invested a huge amount in our data center, and we have a ton of power and cooling and floor space. We have already made that investment, you know, trying to outsource that to the cloud doesn't make sense. There are definitely things. Cloud is great. We are using Gove Cloud for things like prototyping, or someone wants a server, that some architecture, that we don't have the ability to just spin it up. You know, if we had to go and buy it, it would take six months because you know, we are the government. But be able to just spin that stuff up. It's really great for what we do. We use it for open source for building test. We use it to conferences when we want to run a tutorial and spin up a bunch of instances of, you know, Lennox and and run a tutorial. But the biggest thing is at the end of the day are our most important work. Clothes are on a classified environment, and we don't have the ability to run those workloads in the cloud. And so to do it on the open side and not be ableto leverage it on the close side, it really takes away some of the value of because we really want to make the two environments look a similar is possible leverage our staff and and everything like that. So that's where Cloud just doesn't quite fit >> in for us. You were talking about, you know, the speed of, Of of Sierra. And then also mentioning El Capitan, which is thie the next generation. You're next, You know, super unbelievably fast computer to an extent of ten X that off current speed is within the next four to five years. >> Right? That's the goal. I >> mean, what those Some numbers that is there because you put a pretty impressive array up there, >> right? So Series about one hundred twenty five PETA flops and are the big Holy Grail for high performance computing is excess scale and exit flop of performance. And so, you know, El Capitan is targeted to be, you know, one point two, maybe one point five exit flops or even Mohr again. That's peak performance. It doesn't necessarily translate into what our applications, um, I can get out of the platform. But the reason you keep sometimes I think, isn't it enough isn't one hundred twenty five five's enough, But it's never enough because any time we get another platform, people figure out how to do things with it that they've never done before. Either they're solving problems faster than they could. And so now they're able to explore a solution space much faster. Or they want to look at, you know, these air simulations of three dimensional space, and they want to be able to look at it in a more fine grain level. So again, every computer we get, we can either push a workload through ten times faster. Or we can look at a simulation. You know, that's ten times more resolved than the one that >> we could do before. So do this for made and for folks at home and take the work that you do and translate that toe. Why that exponential increase in speed will make you better. What you do in terms of decision making and processing of information, >> right? So, yeah, so the thing is, these these nuclear weapons systems are very complicated. There's multi physics. There's lots of different interactions going on, and to really understand them at the lowest level. One of the reasons that's so important now is we're maintaining a stockpile that is well beyond the life span that it was designed for. You know, these nuclear weapons, some of them were built in the fifties, the sixties and seventies. They weren't designed to last this long, right? And so now they're sort of out of their design regime, and we really have to understand their behaviour and their properties as they age. So it opens up a whole nother area, you know, that we have to be able to floor and and just some of that physics has never been explored before. So, you know, the problems get more challenging the farther we get away from the design basis of these weapons, but also were really starting to do new things like eh, I am machine learning things that weren't part of our workflow before. We're starting to incorporate machine learning in with simulation again to help explore a very large problem space and be ableto find interesting areas within a simulation to focus in on. And so that's a really exciting area. And that is also an area where, you know, GPS and >> stuff just exploded. You know, the performance levels that people are seeing on these machines? Well, we thank you for your work. It is critically important, azaz, we all realize and wonderfully fascinating at the same time. So thanks for the insights here on for your time. We appreciate that. >> All right, Thanks for >> thanking Robin Goldstone. Joining us back with more here on the Cube. You're watching our coverage live from Boston of Red Hat Summit twenty nineteen.

>> Live, from Bellevue, Washington. It's theCUBE. Covering, Smartsheet Engage 18. Brought to you by, Smartsheet. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuing coverage of Smartsheet Engage 2018. I am Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. We are in Bellevue, Washington or, as I like to call it, not Vegas. Excited to welcome to theCUBE, Robin Sherwood, the Senior Director of Product Management at Smartsheet. Hey Robin. >> Hi, how's it goin? >> Great. This is, been a very buzzy morning, for Jeff and I here on this side. Lot's of people, this event has doubled in size. This is your second annual, so... >> Big growth in just a year. There's a, I think, Mark Mader, your CEO, shared some sats this morning. There are 1100 companies represented here customers. >> Correct. >> From twenty countries, there are more than fifty customer speakers, which is, I think there's no more validating voice, than the voice of a customer using the technology. When I was doing some research on Smartsheet, was looking at, you guys are partners with, some of your competitors. One of things I wanted to understand is, where do you have integrations with technology, versus where do you have connectors? What's the difference between those two, and how does is work >> Yeah. >> In a Smartsheet world. >> You know, I think, the integrations really are, where you're going to, you're really interacting with that other product directly, right? So, maybe it's, I want my outbound messages and notifications to go into a Slack channel, right? That's an integration. Or, I want to be able to connect to Google Drive, or 03 Secure, One Drive document, in those native stores. So, that's where we really see an integration. It's something that the end user themselves, is really interacting with. Where you see connectors is more around where I've got big systems of record in my organization, and I need data to flow between those tools. >> Like a Sales Force. >> Like a Sales Force, or a JEAR, or something like that. Microsoft Dynamics, right? I've got data there, when something happens in that system, I need it to flow magically into Smartsheet, or when something happens in Smartsheet, I need it to flow back into those systems. Cause, those are the systems of record, that my company cares about. >> So, a connection is a much bigger step in integration? >> They're just different. >> Connectors are really about the flow of data back and forth between systems of record and integrations are more about user content and user direct interactions. So, things like Drive and Box and Dropbox, and Slack and Teams and, stuff like that. Or, the web content, which we just announced. We want to be able to embed a Youtube video in a dashboard. That's not integrations, it's not, there's no data flowing back and forth, it's just a link, right? >> Got it, thank you. >> Yeah. >> So, lot of customer's we have, I think fifty customer's presenting, which is amazing out of 2,000 people in the whole conference. I don't know what the percentage is, but it's, (laughs), >> Yeah. >> Awfully large. So, just some of the all chatter here. You've been here for a couple of day now, you guys had some early training yesterday. What is some of the things you're picking up? You obviously love to hear back from the customer's. Kind of, what's the buzz on some of the new offerings, and what are you hearing, amongst the constituent here? >> I mean, it's always, you know, this is only our second year. But the energy from them is always amazing. And, you know, people were, I was talking to someone earlier and they were just blown away. By just the big list of things that we shipped, this week. And, as I was reflecting, like, I don't remember doing all that much. But then, when you see it all on one big slide, with everything listed out, it's incredible. So, it's hard to say if anybody latched on to one thing or another. Obviously, there was lots of applause during the product... >> Yes. >> Session, and we're really excited to have shipped, the multi-assign to feature, which has been our number one customer request for a while. But, it's not a, game-changing feature. Whereas, I think some of the Automation Rules ,and Updates there, and Workflow Builder, are really. People are going to go back and it's going to to change the way that they work. And, so people are really excited about that. But, really excited about Dynamic View. And being able to really, taylor the information that is shared across their organization. >> The word collaboration, like symbionic or bi-directional collaboration, popped into my mind. When Gene Pharaoh, your SVP of Product, who we had on earlier, was talking about some of the features and it was a really interesting dynamic with the audience. In that, number of times, you mentioned, the audience broke into applause. And, it probably feels pretty good. Like, yes, we're listening to you, we're doing this. Enabling, them to have technology that allows them to collaborate with and amongst teams and functions within an organization. But, you're also taking their feedback, directly and collaborating with customer's, to further innovate your product. With the spirit of collaboration, we had, Margo Visitacion on from Forrester. And she was talking about the collaborative work management CW as an emerging market. With respect to collaboration, you guys can enable sharing. I can be a licensed user, and share it with you who's not. How is that type of collaboration a differentiator for Smartsheet? >> Well, you know, I think there's a lot of tools where they're collaborative where you can comment on them. Google Doc, and that's great. But, I think where Smaresheet really excels, is really in this free collaborator model. That's not bounded by your particular organization or your team. And it really allows you to create, to spread, and create connections across customer's and vendors and other orgs within your team. And, this is where you're starting to see this these sort of step function changes in these organizations. Where, you know, you see this Office Depot example. And, he talks about, you know, taking a workflow in their organization they, going from, you know, four to six weeks, down to twenty-four hours. And, enabling people who are putting in budget request, to take action on that request, the next day. And, those are the kinds of things, that are going to fundamentally change those businesses. And so, that's where I think the collaboration piece is really powerful. You can't get that kind of compression in time. Unless, you can really span those traditional business hours. >> So Robin, one of the great things that happens always is, with tech companies is the application versus the platform exchange, right? Everybody wants to have a platform, it's really important. You get an ecosystem, lot of stuff going on, but nobody's got a line item in their budget for 2019 to buy a new platform, right? >> It's always, >> Correct >> Application centric, right. I got a problem, I've got to fix it. At the same time, you guys, you do have a platform. Meaning, you can go across a lot of different applications. So, when you're trying to balance out your priorities with the platform. Priority, in terms of more of, kind of a general purpose underly, versus and app priority, like you said, multi, how do you call... >> Multi-assignment. Yeah. >> Multi-assignment, you assign two people to the (laughs). To the no correct product management protocol, but everybody wants it, cause it's the real world. How do you kind of prioritize that? How do yo kind of look at the world when you're deciding, what are you going to roll out next, what are you going to roll out next, ware are you going to roll out next? >> It starts and ends with having conversations with real people. We've taken lots of data and we have enhancement request and usage data on how people use the product. Multi-assigning, actually, was less than 3% of all answered request in the last couple of years. But, it's our number one request. And so, it sort of. >> Oh, Wait, wait wait. So it was less than 3%. >> Of all enhancement request. >> But it was number one? >> But it's our number one. >> So you've got a giant laundry list. >> Giant laundry list of things, right. So, we can't just look at some metric and go, these are the next features we should build because we have this really strong signal. We actually, have a very, very weak signal when we look at it from a quantitative standpoint. So what we have to do is we really have to dig into these customer use cases. We have to meet with them. All of our project teams have dedicated researchers, and dedicated user experience. People that are going out, we're actually talking to people. We're testing stuff with them and we're trying to understand what commonalities exist between multiple cases across all of these different use cases. Because, there're so many different ways people use the product. There not enough people asking for one thing. >> Right. >> They're all asking for slightly different things. So, we really have to dig in and have a real, qualitative conversation with them. To understand, and bring that back and say okay, these things are related. We can build something that solves, all of these problems in a compelling way. >> Well, it's definitely more than 3% of the people cheer. When, when that. (laughs) >> Yes. >> When the feature was announced, that's for sure. So the other, kind of (mumbles), that you've got to wrestle with is, kind of a low code, no code, we want to be for everybody, yet at the same time, you want a sophisticated application. You want integrations and connectors to all these other applications. So, again, that's kind of a delicate, balancing act as well. Cause, you want to let everyone have access to be able to manipulate the tool, work with the tool, set up the tool, but at the same time, you got to keep it, pretty sophisticated to connect to all these other things. How do you kind of balance those. >> Well we... >> Priorities. >> We just try to hide as much of that as possible. You know, Smartsheets always been this tool, where it's like, it sort of looks like a spreadsheet, and it sort of looks like project management. But it's got this underlying flexibility built into it. We don't force you to, you know, if you've got a date column, we don't force you to put a date in there. If you don't know the answer, you can type in TBD. Whereas, a lot of purpose built applications, their like, this is a date, you have to enter it in the proper date format, or it doesn't work. We've always had this, sort of, flexibility and complexity trade off. The trade off is, if you give us real data, if you give us something that looks like a date, we'll draw a Gantt Chart for you. We don't need much more, it doesn't need to be more (mumbles) than that. We just won't draw the bar if you type in TBD. And so, we've always sort of danced this line, with making the tool super flexible and assume the users know what they're doing. When they're interacting withhe tool we assume they an intention and they're trinna do something. And, we shouldn't force them down a particular path. And that, sort of, plays out in all these features. The other thing that we do, is like I mentioned earlier, we do a lot of user research and we get in front of a lot of customers. And we put stuff out there, well in advance in releasing it. In a situation like this, we announced a bunch a capabilities around workflow and multi-step approvals and multi-step workflows. And, I think that's a complex feature set. That's gone through more iterations of design and review and scrapping it and back to the drawing board, than any feature I've seen at this company. But, it's probably one of the more complex features we've ever build, as well. And so that's what we would expect, right? We're not going to get this right, by just having a bunch of designers and engineers sit in a room and go, oh, we know that perfect solution to workflow management. >> Right. >> Most of our customer's don't even necessarily, use the term workflow. >> And if you look in the app, it doesn't even say. It says words and actions. You know? And little things with words matter. We have technical writers that are very specific on what we label something. It's not an if statement. It's when this happens, do this. And there's a lot of nuance and subtlety into all of this. To try and drive the complexity out of it as much as possible. >> Right. >> You can't avoid it, but you know. >> So, in hiding it, the last thing which your going to do, going forward is machine learning and artificial intelligence. Which we hear about all the time, but really the great opportunity in the field, is for you to leverage that under the covers. To hide. >> Absolutely. >> The nasty complexity to help suggest the right answer. To help suggest the right path. So, that's got to be a huge part of your roadmap. Integrating those types of capabilities, underneath the covers. >> Yeah and, there's been a lot of, we've have had tons of discussions and obviously we bought the Converse Chatbot Company back in January. And, that's been a huge sort of arrow in our quiver, so to speak, right, in that regard. We feel that we have a lot of really good information. But, at the same time, there's a lot of talk about machine learning and AI. And, the reality is, that relies on huge data sets. And it relies on a lot of analysis. And that data is not something that we can just look at, right? We take our customer's data, security data privacy very seriously. And we don't have access to that kind of information. So we need to look at this, the machine learning and the AI capabilities from a very different lens, then say a consumer product. That's sort of, you're getting to use it for free, they sort of do whatever they want with your data. And you don't really have a lot of recourse, other than leave the product. We don't start from that, we start from, your data is yours, you own it, we can't look at it. But we want to enable you, to turn these types of features on. So, we need to look at more of like an off-end model, where a customer can say oh, if I'm a big enterprise user at Smartsheet, I can turn certain capabilities on for my users, knowing that that information is going to stay in our, is going to comply with our data governance, and our data privacy rules. That our IT team puts forward. >> So the spirit of talking about abstraction, abstracting complexity, Hiding it, (mumbles). I'm curious, when you walk into a customer. Cause here we are in Bellevue, we're not in Vegas, But, we're neighors with AWS, with Microsoft, Microsoft announced Teams, about eighteen months, or so, ago. You partner with both, you compete, but you, also, you're competing with Teams. When you walk into a customer and an enterprise, likely has a mixture of, tons of different software appications, right. But they probably have, 360, Office 365, Para Bi, Excel... Why would a customer, who has such a familiarity with, say a Microsoft, work with Smartsheet versus, well we'll just extend our Microsoft expertese and bring in something like Teams? >> Yeah. >> I'm just curious, what...You've seen in that? >> Well, you know, I think it's that Smartsheet's always been good at sort of, orchestrating the actual work that's being done. And, there's a lot of tools out there where, you're having conversations and tools out there where you're creating content, and there's not a lot of tools out there, that are sort of bringing the conversation and the content together. In an actionable and accountable way, right? And that's the sort of, Gene will, you'll sometimes here hims say, use this term, shared fabric. The Smartsheet, really provides this shared fabric, that ties a bunch of these tool together. And we really, we want to partner with all these people, because every organization is different. Every organization has a different set of tools that they've already embraced. They have a different set of goals around how many tools they're going to embrace. You talk to some customer, they're like, I love Smartsheet, it's going to allow me to get rid of ten apps. And, you talk to another customer that's equal size or equal complexity two minutes later, then they'll be like, I love Smartsheet, it allows me to work with all the tools that I've already got. Very different, and they just have to different coperate goals and objectives there. And so, I think that the reason people like Smartsheet, is it doesn't, it's back to that kind of, hey, you don't have to put a date in a date cell. It's flexible. It's going to work with you and not force you to adopt the Smartsheet way about things. It's going to say look, oh, if you want to use, if you want to us Teams for your communications vehicle, and One Drive for all of your document storage, great. You want to embed a PowerPoint document in a dashboard in Smartsheet, great. We want that to be the case. We do that internally, right, we use all those. If you look at us internally, we're just like every other mordern company. We have a dozen tools or two dozen tools that we're using. And it's different from team to team and department to department. So, it's all about just embracing the reality, that as modern business and modern application, the ecosystem of applications that we all deal with on a day-to-day basis. >> So that flexibility is key. So we said about 1100 companies represented here, at this event. 2,000 people or so, fifty plus customer speakers. Is there one customer example that comes to mind, whether they're speaking here or not, that really is a great demonstrator of, we have a plethora of applications in our environment. We want to work with Smartsheet because it enables us to integrate and use these tools so much better? I didn't mean to put you on the spot. >> Yeah, no. I'm trinna think of a good. I don't know that I have a good standout example. I think that we hear little tidbits of that from everyone. And it's not, it's a very common theme. So, I don't know that. It's sort of back to the 3% thing, right? Nobody really stands out because everyone is doing that. Everyone is, I hear things, I'm going to replace this tool because you did this. Or, I'm going to now pull, integrate with this tool because, you've added this. So, you sort of take some and give some, on the same sentence almost. >> Yeah. You can do both. >> Yeah. >> Well Robin, thanks so much for stopping by. We appreciate your time. We're excited to be here. This is our first Smartsheet event. And we have some customers coming up, so looking forward to hearing some more these cases in action. >> Great, thanks a lot. >> Thank you. >> Thanks. >> We want to thank you for watching theCUBE, I'm Lisa Martin with Jeff Frick. You're watching us from Smartsheet Engage, in Bellevue, Washington. Stick around, Jeff and I will be right back, with our next guest. (tech music) (tech music) (tech music)

>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware, and its ecosystem partners. >> Hello everyone. Welcome back to theCUBE live coverage here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2018. It's our ninth year covering VMworld. Since 2010 we've covered every VMworld. Been with the journey and the transformation of VMworld. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We've got two sets here in the middle of VM village. And we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for CMO Robin Matlock, who's on theCUBE right now. Welcome back. Great to see you. >> I'm happy to be here guys, again. >> Again, great. >> Thanks for the support, for bringing theCUBE here. The community has been responding positively to the coverage because you guys had so much content here this year. As Pat said, a lot of the fruits been blooming off the tree from all the investments in product. And business is good. >> Good, we're keeping you guys busy I hope. Yep. It's been good. >> So what's going on? Let's get the numbers. We always get it out of the way. How many people are here at the event? We're at the Mandalay Bay. What's the story? >> Yeah, it's a great audience this year. We're definitely seeing some nice growth. We're well over 21,000 here today. Covering all segments of the market. Covering Asia Pacific. The Americas. Also executives as well as our true-blue IT practitioners. >> You got CIOs and practitioners with the hands-on labs, a range of audience personas. >> Yeah, it kind of goes from the practitioner base up. Your mid-level management, VPs, IT decision makers, CIOs. We really have a very wide variety. >> And the theme this year is? >> Possible begins with you. >> (laughs) Okay. >> Yeah, I popped into the CIO event last night. >> Yeah? >> And it was pretty high quality folks. I don't recall, you know, five, six, seven years ago seeing that kind of emphasis and that kind of seniority at the event. Did I just miss it, or is that new? >> No. It's been evolving over the years. I mean, at VMworld's core it is a technical conference Right? So I would say the base of the volume of the program is still catered towards a real, hands-on, technical practitioner and middle management. But we are seeing more business executives come. They want to know what their teams are exploring. They want to understand vision. And I think VMware's value proposition to enterprises is growing and therefore, it's starting to be more of a business conversation. So that is a segment of the audience that is growing. >> And you're nurturing that. Also you're making sure the hands-on labs are the best of the best. I saw Eric Nielsen has this new VMware code thing going on. >> Yes. >> Here at a little hack-a-thons happening. >> So a lot of mix in the community. The community is still robust. The ecosystem floor probably has more energy than I've seen since probably 2012 or something like that. Last time I've seen it this massive. 2012, remember Dave, was pounding. And then this year, it's just, the lift is big. Where's that coming from. >> Yeah. You know I think it's coming from a lot of things and there's no one silver bullet. First of all, VMware is just doing really well. Right? The company is very performing. It's success for our customers that've really come to buy into our strategy and our vision. And they have a veracious appetite to learn. And this is the place. You want to understand where the industry is going. You are technical and you want to be on the edge of the latest and greatest. VMworld is the place to come. So I think we're hitting on many different categories of technology. And it's all pulled together here. So it's one week where you can go from networking, to storage, to management, automation, cloud, mobility. It's all right here. >> And you guys always kind of keep a low profile in the market. You don't over amplify, over play your hand and grandstand too much on the marketing side. Which as always been the DNA of VMware. But this year, you've got Amazon coming on stage again. Andy Jassy returns to do a major announcement that Amazon, really for the first time, is building a product for VMware, on VMware, on premises. Pat's on stage. So you see the commitment from the two companies, the biggest public cloud provider, and the biggest operator of virtualized infrastructure and private cloud, partnering and performing. So I think that really kind of put a lot of wind in your sails. I mean, a lot of people are talking about it. It's been pretty much the top news story, the impact of that relationship. How has that affected VMworld? The announcements are, it seems like more announcements than ever before. How has that relationship changed you guys? >> Well I definitely think, we're several years into it now, and we are seeing the fruits of that effort. A couple of thoughts. First of all, the AWS relationship is not our sole element of our cloud strategy, but it's a big pillar of our cloud strategy. And I think, at the end of the day, by understanding our vision for how we can help deliver a bridge to the public cloud, the hybrid cloud, it is giving our customers the license and the comfort and the confidence to continue to invest. Whether it's in their data center or is in their public cloud. So there's something about just having that clarity of vision and strategy that unleashes potential, even in the data center. I think the second thing, to me, what was so significant with this Amazon announcement with VMware. Is you are now talking about public cloud services running on Primm. The line between public and private. The line between on premise and off premise is fading. It's blurring. We're going to get to a point where we're just going to talk about what's the workload, and what's a service I need to deliver the workload. Okay, and then I can consume those services in different ways, and what's the right way to consume those services. But it's not a monopoly on an off premise, or a monopoly on an on premise. It's a blur. And I think that's going to be in the best interest of customers, because I think it's going to really boil down to what is the workload, what are the services I need, and I have a lot of options on how to consume that. And I'm all for that. I think it's going to be great. >> Well, I got to say, John and I have watched this evolution for for now, as he said, this is our ninth year. You guys have done a great job of really being calm about all the things that were supposedly going to kill you. (laughter) Open stack, open source, cloud, Kubernetes, containers. You've embraced them all. I mean, I know cloud for a while was a little bit confusing. But now it's a real tailwind for you guys. I mean, great job there. And I think a lot of that is sort of how you've dealt with it internally, messaged it externally. I wonder if you could just address that for a minute. >> Yeah. You know, I love that observation about VMware, because that speaks to two big concepts: resiliency and innovation. In this industry you have to be constantly innovating. And if you get too protective of the market that you're in, you start to get into a cocoon. And then people are innovating around you and they're making you obsolete, and you're not even seeing it happen. I think VMware has a veracious appetite for innovation. And we are pushing, and pushing, and pushing. And we're never relaxed. We are always, you know, often pleased but not satisfied. Right? It's like you're never, ever done. And that keeps us being open to innovating, where once we might have been protective. It's like don't worry, things will change. We'll innovate on top of that. It's alright, a new environment. We'll innovate in that context. And I think we're very good about that. And then the other thing I think is resiliency. In this industry, there's not that many that can go from decade to decade and still be highly relevant. But you have to have the grit, and you have to have the kind of gorilla appetite that you will continue to reinvent yourself, listen to your customers, bring your ecosystem along, and partner like nobody else. And in the end you'll deliver more value. >> You know, that's a great point. I love that comment. That's going to be a highlight on our highlight reel for sure. I'll add, and love to get your reaction to, how you guys have maintained the community vibe and the ecosystem vibe. Again, to Dave's point, this is core. Pat said on earlier today, you know, "we're always going to have an open ecosystem." That's been the core DNA of VMware. So, and you also have a really strong community, hence the technical focus. These tech oriented folks, they love the tech. And they speak up a lot, you know that. They speak well. >> Oh yeah. They're vocal. >> They let you know when it's not right. But you guys embrace it. That hasn't changed. That's been a positive. How do you do it? >> Yeah, that's exactly right. I think we have, over the years, just built ecosystem into our core DNA. It's now defined by who we are and how we do things. And, you know, going back to your Amazon comment, I think that is simply an example, we know how to partner. We've been at it for 20 years. And it's just been part of how we perceived the requirements to be successful. And because of that it's now, we're just good at it. We get it. And the reason we're good at it is because we very much understand it's bi-directional. You can only win when you win together. >> You know, one other thing I want to point out, and at least give you guys some props while you're here and get your reaction to it is, we've done a little bit more cube with you guys, outside of the scope of the event. We did a lot of women in tech leadership events. We were invited to the first radio event where they opened it up to some press. So we got a glimpse inside >> Internal engineering kind of conference, yup. >> It's a total R&D, it's with all the technologies being incubated, it's a really great thing. Also being on campus, you guys are always consistently voted the best place to work, you got the innovation in the R&D, and you've just got a great workforce. So, that is also a cultural thing within VMware, right? 'Cause Pat said, we're going to continue to drive technology products, and sales and marketing for customers. Your reaction? >> Yeah, I think people are at the heart of great businesses. Right? And we have to create an environment where people can do their best work. Radio is a wonderful example. So that's an internal conference for our engineering teams. But what it is about building community within our engineering community. How do they explore new things? How do they take risks? And explore and innovate and try new things. And then how do they share that with their colleagues from all over the world. And I think that's just part of our value system is creating these kind of communities internally and externally. >> You opened it up to press, talk about taking a risk. >> That was a first time, yeah. >> That was the first time you've ever opened it up to some press outlets. We were one of three. But it was a peek. That's a risk. >> It is a risk. And I think the idea there is that being protective is not really helpful. That what you need to do is to really be open. That there's so much to deliver value and innovate. There's not reason to be so secretive. It's more about how can we feed of each others ideas. How can we plant seeds and see if these things are going to resonate. We don't know for sure these new emerging things are going to work or not. So the more we get feedback early, I think the faster we'll innovate. It'll accelerate innovation. It won't hold it back. >> Well, and your point about the ecosystem is right on. Sanjay made the point about ROI today. I thought that was really interesting data. About 10x was a conservative return number in the 100s of billions if not trillion of dollars that you've sort of paid forward through the ecosystem to the end customers. It's powerful. >> Very powerful. And at the end of the day, we need to just continue to focus on delivering more and more economic value, right? Whether it's cost savings, whether it's being able to fuel new innovation, whether it's consolidation. At the end of the day we all have to get more done with less and have more value and more impact. >> Well it's interesting to see you being in Amazon into this ecosystem, because you said you guys partnering is part of your DNA. You know, generally Amazon's partnerships have been come on into the marketplace, right? And now, they're diving into this world. Bringing their technology on prem. Which was heresy five years ago. You never would've seen Amazon do that. So, do you think you can teach Amazon something about partnering, humbly? >> Well, I'll let Amazon comment on that as opposed to me. >> Amazon's got a lot of partners, Dave. They've got thousands of partners. >> But, you know, I'm going to go back, I can't speak for Amazon on what their learning journey has been. I do feel confident that VMware, we are good at partnering, and I think we build good partnerships. >> My final question for you is community. Obviously, as people grow there's a demand for more cloud advocates, more cloud engineers, cloud architects. You guys always had a nice lock on that constituent. But we're seeing a lot of competition hire away people from communities. How do you maintain that community fabric when potentially they might be migrating to other communities. Is it through open source? Dirk Hohndel is leading the efforts with open source. Saw him last night. How are you thinking about maintaining an open, but yet inviting community when people potentially are being migrating around different communities. >> Yeah, I think you have to look at communities as personalities, and kind of the DNA of a community. And it's not a one-size-fits-all. When you're in the dev ops world, you need to act and behave and engage a certain way. You need to bring a certain type of content to that. Trust me, they don't want a lot of marketing in those conversations, right? When in enterprise class, you might be dealing with a different type of DNA. It's about proven, stability, security, resiliency. So there's a little different nature of the community and the dialogue there. I think our philosophy is you got to bring the right content to the people. And it's different, but make sure you understand the needs of the community. And we don't own these communities, right? These are volunteer, people do this because they care, and they want to and they're passionate about it. Our job is to foster that passion. Help make them effective, let them share amongst themselves. They are going to move around communities, we just want to be a part of it. We're not trying to own it, we're trying to be a part of it. >> That's the key, you try to get a land grab ownership, that's when they run. >> I don't think that's what it's about. I think it's really just about, what is the sense of community? What does the word mean? It means coming together, it means sharing, it means helping each other, it means people with like-minded needs and wants and interests. >> Robin, thanks for coming on Cube. I know you're super busy. Thanks for sharing. >> Always. >> Final word, just overall impressions so far. Are you happy the way things are going? The conference is phenomenal. Everything going smooth? >> You know, I couldn't be more excited about what's happened here so far. We're only into day two. For me, a couple of the highlights is how now the industry is starting to talk about tech as a force for good. So now we're starting to move out of the conversation of just the technologies, and the products, and the impact. But what are we collectively doing to make this world a better place. That's a new dialog. And I got so much positive response from Malala today. From, you know, some of the things that we're talking about impact on the world. And I think these just nothing but upside and opportunity for us. >> And that speaks to the culture, you guys are very inspirational. Love the tech for good. People want to work for a company that's doing tech for good, as well as making a profit. >> So do I. >> Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. >> You bet, you guys. >> Thanks, Robin. >> We're doing our best for good here on theCUBE by bringing the great voices in the community and also the executives bringing the content to you here. Two stages, ninth year covering VMworld. We're here with Robin Matlock the CMO. Stay tuned. I'm John Furrier, and Dave Vellante. We'll be back with more coverage. Stay with us.

>> Live from San Jose, in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's theCUBE. Covering DataWorks Summit 2018. Brought to you by Hortonworks. >> Welcome back everyone, you are watching day two of theCUBE's live coverage of DataWorks here in San Jose, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm coming at you with my cohost Jame Kobielus. We're joined by Partha Seetala, he is the Chief Technology Officer at Robin Systems, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Pleasure to be here. >> You're a first timer, so we promise we don't bite. >> Actually I'm not, I was on theCUBE- >> Oh! >> At DockerCon in 2016. >> Oh well excellent, okay, so now you're a veteran, right. >> Yes, ma'am. >> So Robin Systems, as before the cameras were rolling, we were talking about it, it's about four years old, based here in San Jose, venture backed company. Tell us a little bit more about the company and what you do. >> Absolutely. First of all, thanks for hosting me here. Like you said, Robin is a Silicon Valley based company. Our focus is in allowing applications, such as big data, databases, no sequel and AI ML, to run within the Kubernetes platform. What we have built is a product that converges storage, complex storage, networking, application workflow management, along with Kubernetes to create a one click experience where users can get managed services kind of feel when they're deploying these applications. They can also do one click life cycle management on these apps. Our thesis has initially been to, instead of looking at this problem from an infrastructure up into application, to actually look at it from the applications down and then say, "Let the applications drive the underlying infrastructure to meet the user's requirements." >> Is that your differentiating factor, would you say? >> Yeah, I think it is because most of the folks out there today are looking at is as if it's a competent based play, it's like they want to bring storage to Kubernetes or networking to Kubernetes but the challenges are not really around storage and networking. If you talk to the operations folk they say that, "You know what? Those are underlying problems but my challenge is more along the lines of, okay, my CIO says the initiative is to make my applications mobile. They want go across to different Clouds. That's my challenge." The line of business user says, "I want to get a managed source experience." Yes, storage is the thing that you want to manage underneath, but I want to go and click and create my, let's say, an Oracle database or distributions log. >> In terms of the developer experience here, from the application down, give us a sense for how Robin Systems tooling your product enables that degree of specification of the application logic that will then get containerized within? >> Absolutely, like I said, we want applications to drive the infrastructure. What it means is that we, Robin is a software platform. We later ourselves on top of the machines that we sit on whether it is bare metal machines on premises, our VMs, or even an Azure, Google Cloud as well as AWs. Then we make the underlying compute, storage, network resources almost invisible. We treat it as a pool of resources. Now once you have this pool of resources, they can be attached to the applications that are being deployed as can inside containers. I mean, it's a software place, install on machines. Once it's installed, the experience now moves away from infrastructure into applications. You log in, you can see a portal, you have a lot of applications in that portal. We ship support for about 25 applications of some such. >> So these are templates? >> Yes. >> That the developer can then customize to their specific requirements? Or no? >> Absolutely, we ship reference templates for pretty much a wide variety of the most popular big data, no sequel, database, AI ML applications today. But again, as I said, it's a reference implementation. Typically customers take the reference recommendation and they enhance it or they use that to onboard their custom apps, for example, or the apps that we don't ship out of the box. So it's a very open, extensible platform but the goal being that whatever the application might be, in fact we keep saying that, if it runs somewhere else, it's runs on Robin, right? So the idea here is that you can bring anything, and we just, the flip of switch, you can make it a one click deploy, one click manage, one click mobile across Clouds. >> You keep mentioning this one click and this idea of it being so easy, so convenient, so seamless, is that what you say is the biggest concern of your customers? Is this ease and speed? Or what are some other things that are on their minds that you want to deliver? >> Right, so one click of course is a user experience part but what is the real challenge? The real challenges, there are a wide variety of tools being used by enterprises today. Even the data analytic pipeline, there's a lot across the data store, processor pipeline. Users don't want to deal with setting it up and keeping it up and running. They don't want that, they want to get the job done, right? Now when you only get the job done, you really want to hide the underlying details of those platforms and the best way to convey that, the best way to give that experience is to make it a single click experience from the UI. So I keep calling it all one click because that is the experience that you get to hide the underlying complexity for these apps. >> Does your environment actually compile executable code based on that one click experience? Or where does the compilation and containerization actually happen in your distributed architecture? >> Alright, so, I think the simplest- >> You're a prem based offering, right? You're not in the Cloud yourself? >> No, we are. We work on all the three big public clouds. >> Oh, okay. >> Whether it is Azure, AWS or Google. >> So your entire application is containerized itself for deployment into these Clouds? >> Yes, it is. >> Okay. >> So the idea here is let's simplify it significantly, right? You have Kubernetes today, it can run anywhere, on premises, in the public Cloud and so on. Kubernetes is a great platform for orchestrating containers but it is largely inaccessible to a certain class of data centric applications. >> Yeah. >> We make that possible. But our take is, just onboarding those applications on Kubernetes does not solve your CXO or you line of business user's problems. You ought to make the management, from an application point of view, not from a container management point of view, from an application point of view, a lot easier and that is where we kind of create this experience that I'm talking about, one click experience. >> Give us a sense for how, we're here at DataWorks and it's the Hortonworks show. Discuss with us your partnership with Hortonworks and you know, we've heard the announcement of HDP 3.0 and containerization support, just give us a rough sense for how you align or partner with Hortonworks in this area. >> Absolutely. It's kind of interesting because Hortonworks is a data management platform, if you think about it from that point of view and when we engaged with them first- So some of our customers have been using the product, Hortonworks, on top of Robin, so orchestrating Hortonworks, making it a lot easier to use. >> Right. >> One of the requirements was, "Are you certified with Hortonworks?" And the challenge that Hortonworks also had is they had never certified a container based deployment of Hortonworks before. They actually were very skeptical, you know, "You guys are saying all these things. Can you actually containerize and run Hortonworks?" So we worked with Hortonworks and we are, I mean if you go to the Hortonworks website, you'll see that we are the first in the entire industry who have been certified as a container based play that can actually deploy and manage Hortonworks. They have certified us by running a wide variety of tests, which they call the Q80 Test Suite, and when we got certified the only other players in the market that got that stamp of approval was Microsoft in Azure and EMC with Isilon. >> So you're in good company? >> I think we are in great company. >> You're certified to work with HTP 3.0 or the prior version or both? >> When we got certified we were still in the 2.X version of Hortonworks, HTP 3.0 is a more relatively newer version. But our plan is that we want to continue working with Hortonworks to get certified as they release the program and also help them because HTP 3.0 also has some container based orchestration and deployment so you want to help them provide the underlying infrastructure so that it becomes easier for beyond to spin up more containers. >> The higher level security and governance and all these things you're describing, they have to be over the Kubernetes layer. Hortonworks supports it in their data plane services portfolio. Does Robin Systems solutions portfolio tap in to any of that, or do you provide your own layer of sort of security and metadata management so forth? >> Yeah, so we don't want- >> In context of what you offer? >> Right, so we don't want to take away the security model that the application itself provides because might have step it up so that they are doing governance, it's not just logging in and auto control and things like this. Some governance is built into. We don't want to change that. We want to keep the same experience and the same workflow hat customers have so we just integrate with whatever security that the application has. We, of course, provide security in terms of isolating these different apps that are running on the Robin platform where the security or the access into the application itself is left to the apps themselves. When I say apps, I'm talking about Hortonworks. >> Yeah, sure. >> Or any other databases. >> Moving forward, as you think about ways you're going to augment and enhance and alter the Robin platform, what are some of the biggest trends that are driving your decision making around that in the sense of, as we know that companies are living with this deluge of data, how are you helping them manage it better? >> Sure. I think there are a few trends that we are closely watching. One is around Cloud mobility. CIOs want their applications along with their data to be available where their end users are. It's almost like follow the sun model, where you might have generated the data in one Cloud and at a different time, different time zone, you'll basically want to keep the app as well as data, moving. So we are following that very closely. How we can enable the mobility of data and apps a lot easier in that world. The other one is around the general AI ML workflow. One of the challenges there, of course, you have great apps like TensorFlow or Theano or Caffe, these are very good AI ML toolkits but one of the challenges that people face, is they are buying this very expensive, let's say NVIDIA DGX Box, this box costs about $150,000 each, how do you keep these boxes busy so that you're getting a good return on investment? It will require you to better manage the resources offered with these boxes. We are also monitoring that space and we're seeing that how can we take the Robin platform and how do you enable the better utilization of GPUs or the sharing of GPUs for running your AI ML kind of workload. >> Great. >> Those are, I think, two key trends that we are closely watching. >> We'll be discussing those at the next DataWorks Summit, I'm sure, at some other time in the future. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you so much for coming on theCUBE, Partha. >> Thank you. >> Thank you, my pleasure. Thanks. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for James Kobielus, We will have more from DataWorks coming up in just a little bit. (techno beat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's The Cube. Covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partner. >> Okay welcome back everyone, live here on the VMvillage at VMworld 2017. It's The Cube's exclusive three day coverage, day three, kicking off. We're here with Robin Matlock, CMO of VMware. Great to see you with my co-host Dave Vellante. How are you? >> Good hi guys. >> Day three. >> Good to be here. >> We know that you got this thing down, this whole VMworld cadence. Day two is always a great networking night, a lot of different events going on. And then you kind of make it like a light morning, no Keynotes, by design I'm sure. >> David: Yeah thanks for that. >> The attendees really, to be honest, they want the breakout sessions and the lab. So you give them, when we do Keynotes, they don't have that opportunity to do that. So Wednesday and Thursday there's not very little to compete with that. They can get to those breakout sessions. >> Okay great, give us some of the inside, the numbers, attendees. What's going on this year? What's different about this year? If there's anything different or it's the same formula. Give us some of the data. >> Yeah you know, it's going to be interesting as we kind of leave the event and get a little bit of more postmortem insight, but my perception being in the middle of it is the energy this year is, there's a tipping point. We are at some inflection point in this industry, and you can just feel it here at VMware and VMworld. I think that, you know, kind of some of the partnerships that we highlighted on stage has just changed people's perspective about what's really going on in this industry and really what's VMware's role in it. >> Yeah new vibe too, I mean VMware. We were talking about the transformation of Vmware as a company, and from its roots to where it is now. And then just in the ecosystem just in the past two years alone, you're seeing almost like the eye of the storm and then all of a sudden now a new ecosystem vibe is here which is clarity. They kind of know what's going on. The cloud thing is decided, and they know what to expect there. And so people seem to be getting back down to business. >> Yeah I think first of all ecosystem is such a vital part of VMware's culture and success and history, but when any market goes through a massive disruption, it impacts everything, right? It starts with the customer, what they're trying to do with their business, but then all of us on the technology side, we're having to shift and adapt and change. And that means also our relationships with each other is shifting and adapting. You know, I think you're right. I think there is a lot of historical legacy, and many of our relationships are very strong. And I think those are going to continue to be very strong, but you're seeing a lot of new brands step in, whether that's the Google's or the Amazon's, kind of take a new role. >> This is new blood both on the ecosystem and also employees within VMware. We noticed some new Keynote folks on stage, some great women in tech now, a lot of ladies in tech going on at VMware. You guys done a great work there just want to give you a prop on that. >> Yeah, you know I actually, thank you for acknowledging that because it's so important that we drive diversity and inclusion in our industry. And we all know as an industry, we're not performing particularly well in that department. >> Actually I was told by my Cube guest one time, it's actually been changed. It's inclusion and diversity now. They kind of move the I first. That's what I was schooled on, but no, but this is important. Inclusion has always been part of VMware, But you guys are doing more of it now. >> And we're working hard and trust me those were conscious choices about thinking about who is the messenger for our narrative and our story from customers to employees. Want to make sure that we're representing, you know, the diverse world that we live in. >> So I got to ask you a question, sorry to interrupt but Sanjay was on. He's talking about the relationship with Amazon, now you got Google. I interviewed Sam Ramji yesterday after his Keynote here. And VMware goes to the Amazon events. You don't see Microsoft go to Amazon events, and Google going to Amazon events. So VMware is going to all the now cloud events. Kind of changes how you do the community as people start collaborating with Google now. You got Microsoft. You have Amazon. How is that changing some of your marketing tactics? If any or does it change at all? >> I think it's, first of all, our marketing tactics they're always grounded in one thing. What's the business outcome we're trying drive? What's our business strategy? And then we think about what's the right marketing strategy to get us there. And look, we've been very vocal and very consistent. We believe the world will be made up of multiple clouds, right? We believe in a multi-cloud world. We think our customers are going to consume cloud services from a variety of cloud providers. And what we're all about is creating a common operating environment that lets you run, manage, connect, and secure clouds, workloads on any cloud, consumed by any device. And that means we got to be present. Where these other clouds and their customers are engaging VMware needs to be present, so that's what's driving my strategy. >> So that's clear, that's really clear. Clarity is a real theme to me anyway of this year. But when you think about, maybe a related question on the marketing and the narrative, the broader narrative, the lows in this industry sometimes are low 'cause of external factors sometimes they're self-inflicted. And the highs are really high. And you guys are on a real high right now, so it's like your North Star is sort of that customer focus that value piece. So when you think about the changes that are going on and the ecosystem and it's reforming, do you try to sort of capture that momentum and ride it, or do you sort of try to stay steady stream from a marketing pro's perspective. >> Well I think absolutely we want to ride momentum, and I think, but first you have to have your fundamentals. I think all of it, we believe we create momentum. We create our own momentum. We're not responding to momentum. We're creating it. Now are we doubling down? Are we paying attention to what is resonating and what customers are saying that's important to me? Well yeah, then we'll kind of be agile and invest and really accelerate in particular areas. I do think Vmware has tremendous momentum, but I think we've been working on that for a long time. I don't think it's some short term thing that's happened. I think we've been building great momentum now quarter after quarter for quite a while. >> Sort of a self-powered machine is essentially what you're saying, but I do feel as though, and tell me if you agree, that the clarity with respect to, say for instance the AWS announcement, and the customer clarity we've been talking about it all week, with the notion that I'm not just going to bring my data into the cloud. I got to bring the cloud to my business model. And I think there's a reality that has set in. Have you seen those two factors sort of help you, help customers understand your vision better? What if you could comment? >> Yeah I think first of all, there's some level of just maturity that is happening. These things have been, three years ago they were so new, and we got really involved. And we started playing around, and we started some things and testing some things, and listening to more customers. And I think customers are going through their journey. So all of us I think are kind of on our spectrum of maturing and that helps drive clarity. I think VMware has a vision, and it's consistent. It really hasn't changed for many many years. We were advocating hybrid cloud long long ago. And so now what you're seeing is the delivery against that vision. So clarity you can start getting more and more focused because you keep making the next step forward and delivering on the vision that you set out. >> Well the best come through. You can see as it shapes that sort of happening. Which ones are not and then you, okay that's not working let's keep this going. >> And Dave just your point about customers. I think for us, we're always really deeply committed to staying connected to our customers. So the validation that customers are putting on stage and talking about that's really evidence of just that they validated our strategy and that as we're making these next milestones, they're in it with us. And I think that's a really important thing that we're constantly being responsive to. What are they're requirements as they learn more and digest this stuff more. >> One of the challenges that comes up with communities that are robust as VMware has and VMworld. Communities' have always been the strength. And the ecosystem's part of the community. Is as the world grows, open source is growing. Communities are growing. There's always been the talk that oh Reinvent's the new VM world. And then VMworld just never goes away. It's still a robust show. You guys continue to do a great job, but now you start to see these communities come together Reinvent and VMworld. Google now put an olive branch out there with you guys. I still haven't seen the Microsoft piece come together yet, but it's clear that Amazon Web Services and VMware have synergy, Andy Jassy's on stage with you guys. So you have to challenge the team to still be collaborative across the communities. How do you balance that from a marketing standpoint? Because they do compete, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, kind of compete. >> But if you look at VMware's position in that landcape, we are the common operating environment that lets you run, manage, connect and secure any workload on any cloud. And sure they're going to compete, and they're going to compete fairly, and they're going to go try to win in the market. Our job is not to help or break that. Our job is to let customers decide which of those clouds makes sense for their business and ensure they have a common operating environment. >> John: I think we used the word arms dealer yesterday. I don't think he was going for that. >> Well but you, VMware. >> That's not going to pass the marketing test just so you know. >> We like it 'cause it's good Cube material. >> But VMware has a point of view, and you have to assert that point of view as a leader, or you have to be subservient to those other leaders. And it doesn't appear that you want to be subservient. And there is a stack war that's emerging, and you are at the center of that and you can either lead it or you can follow it. >> And I think we all bring a different set of strengths to the table. At the end of the day, VMware as had incredible success in the enterprise and within the enterprise data center. And that is our forte and we're going to leverage that. And what we are the experiences, the training, the expertise that our customers have, they want to capitalize on that. They don't want to throw that out the window, and they don't need to. We're going to enable them to capitalize on that and use that in these other cloud environments and get the benefit from those cloud providers while not giving up some of the benefits they've been enjoying for years. >> Well and the technology matures very quickly, and we're seeing that. You guys address some of the cloud native stuff, but the people process stuff doesn't mature nearly as quickly, you know. Somebody said the other day, and I thought it was a great quote, "You're moving at the speed of the CIO." which is just really underscores that you can't get out ahead and over-rotate or you're going to lose that customer base. >> I would argue that the CIO probably needs to pick up the pace a bit. Because he's got to move, or she, at the speed of business. >> Dave: It's hard. >> And that's fast as Pat was saying, this is the slowest day of your life going forward today. And the next day's going to be faster. >> Exactly. >> Well props to Pat. We'll have him on at one because he's having a great year. Congratulations for really VMware. You guys did your homework. You made some calls, some decisions, certainly with the cloud thing that was a good call. And then you continue to make your bets. >> We've never been afraid of being decisive and making big bets. That's what staying relevant is all about. >> Well Robin, we made a bet on VMworld years ago. You made a bet on us, and we're proud to work with you. And thanks for your support for the Cube. >> Robin: Love the partnership with you guys. >> And Andy Jassy the same with AWS. We made a bet on them and they're didn't understand it. Now here it is, and soon to be Google's. So thanks so much for your support. >> Alright, well here's to adapting and being versatile in this crazy industry of ours. >> How about making the bets? Here at Vmworld 2017, that's the theme making the choices are clear, make the bets. This is The Cube bringing you all the action from VMworld 2017. We'll be back with more live coverage after this short break.

hello everyone I'm John for with the cube we are here on the ground at VMware's corporate headquarters in beautiful Palo Alto for a special presentation I'm joined with Robyn Matlock who's the chief marketing officer of VMware good to see you hi John nice to see you to our special cube on the ground getting all the data was a lot closer to get to just a little walk yeah I love this campus you guys had the most amazing facility one that voted one of the best places to work so it's good parking is always a hassle play I'll ago that garage anyway um how are you doing great so 2016's come to a close had a great vacation I heard New Zealand amazon reinvent you guys had a big presence Pat Gelsinger was up on stage with Andy Jassy on a fireside chat keynote interesting world of that we live in as they say interesting times VMware and Amazon with a strategic relationship certainly has impacted the market market attention on VMware's cloud strategy now comes into picture how's that affecting how you guys are talking to customers you know I think it's just been a tremendous you know last several weeks and frankly of course we've been preparing for this for months and months but the market has been very responsive to the news of these two great companies coming together and the you know announced in 10 of how our technologies are going to work better and the feedbacks been so positive I think at the end of the day this just opens up many avenues for customers they love VMware they love Amazon helping make their experience as they integrate those worlds together is just a win-win for them so I person very excited about it and we're getting great feedback you know you you've always lived in this world with VMware and I always compare fiemme words like Facebook where whenever there's a changed is a revolt right as always it's always naysayers and also people complaining now when you guys did the deal with Amazon people are speculating but in reality it's the culture there's no clash there there's really a geek culture on both sides what's your thoughts on that do you see it the same way and what's your observation of you know the VMware culture because you know you do a lot of digging into the data you run vmworld is reinvent is being called a cloud version of vmworld kind of coming together those two cultures your thoughts on the two I mean I think there's a couple of different dimensions to that question from a cultural standpoint the two companies actually have very similar cultures in the sense that they really value engineering innovation these are disruptive companies and they also both I think we can say focus on the customer it's all about customer value customer impact and when you keep your customer at the forefront of all the decision-making that you do it's really easy to make the right choices because you're doing on the benefit of that customer and and hey change is a constant and that's the one thing we can count on and those of us in the industry that don't change usually don't have a great outcome in the end right changes part of delivering more value to our customers yeah Jay volante s2 I wasn't there at the Dell Dell world this year once at the Grace Hopper event was awesome awesome event but the dell event they asked Michael about vmware always we always like they ask michael dell vmware and also jeremy burton talked about the messaging around dell technologies which is simply just a holding company I guess I'm structure but the people are trying to get the message out on what Dell technologies and you guys out CR as Michael said the crown jewel of Dell technologies talk about the strategic alignment with Dell technologies how does that affect your job and has it affect the positioning of how vmware is visa videl technologies delhi MC but also your growing ecosystem sure so you know first of all we had a great relationship with Dell prior to this acquisition for you know well over a decade right so the two companies knew each other very well of course we have a rich history with emc you know for us strategically VMware's being run much like it was before it's an independent company michael has been very consistent about that his behavior is consistent his you know message of the market is consistent this message of customers and partners is consistent VMware remains an independent company our ecosystem is one of our crown jewels and Michael's been very consistent in making sure that that ecosystem is protected and knows that vmware is going to operate in the best interest of their customers and that ecosystem and so for us in a lot of ways it feels really comfortable of course we're looking for opportunity right we're looking for the upside and we are seeing tremendous opportunity with Dell technologies to make sure that our joint customers have a better together experience than ever before and we look at those as incremental opportunities and we're very committed to that but at the end of the day that's a really important part of our ecosystem is Dell technologies but it's not a replacement of you always had a good eye for marketing I see the way you guys do your events and vmware's ecosystem you're always tested people always going to hold your feet to the fire you had a very active community when you look at the changes that are going on with the Amazon we heard Pat Gelson around stage again Andy Jesse both reiterating the same ethos that you listen to customers and the customers are saying that they want to have some cloud the one put VMware in the cloud how is that gonna change how you mark it in position and talk to customers yeah well we you know we've been talking about hybrid cloud computing for a long time so you know for us this is really about how its evolving and becoming more tangible and more real you're probably very familiar with the fact that we've positioned our cross cloud architecture at vmworld and our story with Amazon is very supportive of what that whole architecture was about it's about hey I'm standing up a stack in my private you know datacenter and this is my private cloud and I want to run that stack as is in other cloud environments I want compatibility between the different cloud providers that I leverage and what I'm doing here within my firewall and that's all very consistent under our vision and strategy about this cross cloud architecture I mean for customers it shouldn't feel like very siloed separate experiences environments different tools different experiences different skill sets they should be able to leverage their resources to be able to deliver these workloads in whatever cloud environment they choose and that's really cornerstone to our cloud strategy and Amazon's a major option for customers to extend into the Amazon Cloud but we also have the IBM cloud that's available to them we have over 4,000 service providers that provide specialty cloud services that are available to our customers the whole idea is that we unify this and make this a seamless experience and that's what that crossed out architecture is all about that's a great point Sanjay poonen brought that up q But reinvent around connecting the digital Islands so how is that changing if anything or is it the game still the same on the digital transformation on those solutions is the unification cross cloud the fundamental piece of it is there more to the story what's the essence of this digital transformation yeah I mean I think first of all at the heart of digital transformation is software right that is enabling this kind of unified approach and so that's kind of one point the second point is really the value for customers in the end user is about applications and then the question is how do you deliver those apps in all types of apps right we need the new modern apps the stuff that works on our cell phones and our iPads we also need the ERP systems and the mission critical systems and all that needs to be delivered in a seamless experience what I T and enterprise need is more options about where to put those workloads what's the right place for those workloads based on whatever their requirements are geography service levels back up discovery you know disaster recovery whatever their requirements are they need flexibility but they also need control and governance and management in a really efficient way and so I think at the heart of it is how you deliver apps to users in a much more expedient fashion as we come down to the end of 2016 we're looking at 2017 what's the vibe internally at VMware and what's your outlook for 2017 now CVM world will be again a the big tent event not sure what your thoughts are that was probably working on right now but is there any thoughts can you share any color around how you guys see 2017 or what's the conversations between you jeremy burden the folks within the core teams around the outlook for 27 you know I think people are feeling really bullish on VMware we're exiting the year in a position of great strength it's been a great year from a revenue standpoint it's been a great year from a emerging technology standpoint we're getting critical mass in some of the you know smaller businesses like network virtualization and you know software-defined storage with virtual san and hyper converged infrastructure you're seeing a lot of great traction our customers are speaking that you know they're out on stage with us they're really advocating and evangelized and the value that they're getting from their VMware invest and you know the bottom line is is we're executing across the world we have really strong you know footprint across all the regions and everybody's performing so I feel like the momentum is really theme for theme emerging for 2017 that's sauteing around in your marketing brain in terms of what you might feel happening yeah you know John I'm not gonna debut that right here watching things up our sleeves but you know at the heart of it this notion of unifying clouds is gonna be centerpiece to our strategy in 2017 and we are working on some new interesting ways of packaging it that but the whole cross cloud architecture truly is a driving force for us in 2017 and how we keep delivering that to customers and new and fresh ways and our ecosystem as well making sure they can deliver that has anything about the Amazon of announcements on web service announcement because you had Pat Gallagher and Andy Jassy and that was really kind of a big shocker for everyone I think I mean you can get it now you look back but they both onstage and II Jesse never comes down to San Francisco to do a press event pretty big announcement for Amazon to stand on the stain stage as vmware and same for you guys this opens up a whole nother dimension any surprises anything that's changed in your world that you can share that's been positive or concerns or comments from customers that that this relationship has changed with you well I think you know what our Amazon relationship does is kind of solidify that our position in the cloud is you know very viable because at the end of the day these are the leader and private cloud and the leader in public cloud coming together to deliver more hybrid cloud value to our customers now remember we also had announcement with IBM earlier in the year and I think this is just kind of reiterating this notion that what we've done in the private cloud is very special adds a lot of value to customers but they want this in public cloud environments and the more that we can make that seamless and easy and consumable for our customers the more we can take the complexity out of it the easier it is for them to govern it you know the more value this is for customers obviously Amazon's the brand in public cloud and I think that relationship has just made everybody more relevant both VMware & M's I'm very customer centric to it turns out you guys operates not like a magical Doremi worked on it yeah what Sanjay and the team exactly well Robin thanks so much for come on our special on the ground here we are on the ground here the VMware head coach Robin Matlock the CMO of VMware here telling us her thoughts on 2017 looking back the momentum of 2016 I'm John furrier thanks for watching

why from the mandalay bay convention center in las vegas it's the kue covering vmworld 2016 brought to you by vmware and its ecosystem sponsors now here's your host John furrier hey welcome back everyone we are here live in Las Vegas at the mandalay bay convention center in the hang space at vmworld 2016 i'm john fervid SiliconANGLE is our flagship program the cube where we go out to the events and extract the signal it annoys this is our seventh year covering vmworld and every year it gets bigger and better the cube and the guests on the content and I'm here with the person who's made it happen from day one Robyn Matlock was the CMO of VMware first of all congratulations on a great event and thank you for supporting the cube for seven years it's been fantastic and it gets better every year you well I'm thrilled to be here and you know a huge fan of the cube you're an integral part of the program so here we go again John we're ingesting all the day that we're analyzing and we're providing great great videos a lot of volume but what an interesting thing I want to get your take on because you have written the vmworld bus for a very long time don't remind me it's changed and grown and one of the conversations we've had all week is what I've been calling ecosystem two point oh what is the ecosystem going to evolve into for vmware and vm world and it's been interesting and so on to get your take on and one of the things that it was striking was what pat kelsey has said to me yesterday on the cube interview was VMware's not only if not a prop one product company anymore it has grown to be a multiple set of products on technologies which has created a diverse and growing community absolutely can you add some color to that because this has been it's always been the community is very strong in VMware vmworld and VMware so but it's evolving that's honestly shifting and changing it in bad way it's just growing and morphing can you comment on there I think it's a really interesting topic it's in it's a rich topic because it as VMware's business is changing first of all our value about the community has never changed I mean we really value an ecosystem our customers wanted expect that we work and play really well with the variety of technologies that are in their but of course is our business in portfolio has grown and expanded the nature of the types of companies that are engaged in and around as shifts and changes to and if it doesn't then we're probably all going to have some issues down the road so I think it's a lot like driven from customers what do they want all of us vendors to do to work together so their life is easier yeah and the other thing David's lawyer is the CTO Wikibon is very technical comment that it's the best vmworld ever from a statement of direction standpoints very clear that the data center role that vmware has and this intercloud in which we call Pat calls it cross cloud is a real rich area for innovation and growth oh I think we're just on the cusp of the potential of that so you heard us talk about the cross cloud architecture and we broke that down into a few things like the VMware cloud foundation that's recension the software-defined data center stack all with lifecycle management that you can consume on-premise and off premises the IBM partnership the opportunity for the V clutter network partners I mean there's just so many the size O's are involved in this it's just really it's almost like a whole economy that can integrate into this broader you know offering I guess with all that in mind how are you managing the logistics because you know it's pretty obvious at vmworld is back in Vegas Moscone is pretty much under construction for the next few years you're going to be here for a couple more years yes here for a couple more you learn and it's just growth in this community what's how do you do that what's the key keys to that you know I think first of all it's about really making sure you're connecting with your customers and your partners and it's about experiences right it's making sure that you're getting them the rich content this is a technical conference so we're going to be measured by did we showcase and engage our audience with the right kind of technical information give them hands-on access to the things that they want to learn and further their careers and you know I always use that it's like we've got to stay close to our customers so any feedback that you've heard positive areas to work on what are your thoughts and as you look back now it's day three looking out over the past few days and we can I say one of the things I'm most proud of and I am seeing it in the Twittersphere is the fact that we had a lot of customers do the talking customers do the showing there were over a hundred summer's here this week on panels in labs in keynotes on videos all talking about their experiences and this group of people they want to hear from their colleagues in their peers so I think customers really helped us this time tell our story and help people understand what does this mean for their business so customers coming on today on the cube so you continue to watch if you're out there I got to ask you the question because one of the things I every every cube event I always have my little puzzle pieces I want to try to figure out how know where the puzzle corners are and I've been asking all the VMware executives kind of hidden question but it's basically this what does VMware scan for and I've been kind of getting a couple different answers so you're obviously CMO so you're going to be right on message I want to get your thoughts on that but before your answer the best answer came from a former VMware employee Steve arid who is the CTO now he's a venture capitalist and just off the cuff II just said VMware likes to make complexity go away they want to simplify complexity create abstraction layers and that's essentially the theme of the show here so it's that how do you guys talk about that because the customers want to see the direction of VMware what is the official messaging what is is that is he on targeting me sees that you kind of made it comment like it's in the DNA of VMware I would agree that you know simplifying complexity is in our DNA I think it's a little bit hard to say that today's IT world though is simple III think we all have a long journey to really make IT simple I think we're about unleashing the innovation from IT and in order to do that you have to simplify the complicated so they can focus on the strategic right but I would say and our core what we're really about is how do we unleash that potential and remove obstacles simplify complexity to ensure they can contribute to their businesses with the most impact at the accelerated pace as possible that's why i think pats across cloud is interesting because that is certainly probably one of the most complex things to do absolutely to the cross cloud and only getting more complicated i think that's what we're seeing now you know fast for the cloud era is maturing but what we're finding now is businesses have many clouds they have SAS applications they have their private cloud they have multiple public clouds they have managed cloud services and we know we've been down this route before in the old compute server world managing these silos can become extremely complicated so I think right now we're already thinking about how do we drive this and simplify this other comment from our analyst kick off this morning and breaking down kind of the vmworld ecosystem and VMware and I like to get your thoughts on kind of the internal VMware conversation because I know and obviously the dell transaction with emc is going to be on the 7th so that's public now so but VMware it seems that David floyer said is unleashed and Michael Dell's making a commitment to VMware that's pretty sincere about being independent and partnering well I'm kind of seemed like EMC kind of had that invisible hand is invited to this David Floria said this but share some of the VMware because this is in the DNA is to be independent right you're right it is definitely in our culture and i think michael has been extremely consistent I've been with him in many meetings both public private and he is never wavered from his commitment to support VMware's independence to support our ecosystem and to really open up opportunities for us to grow at our full potential and I we are partnered with dell for a decade right this is not new to us and we have a great relationship with them regardless of this acquisition I think the opportunities and the doors are going to open even further there's a lot more we can do together but I really feel we've got a really good balance he knows that our ecosystem is the core success factor for us so ecosystem is a big big part of the success so in your definition what is the ecosystem two point oh I think the ecosystem involves a variety of things first of all there's emerging technologies their service providers their sizes there's the telcos there's ISVs there's the SAS providers there's the two-tier distribution the channel partners the people who touch the customers there's a consultants I mean I think it's just all evolving with us kind of in one big tornado you know I think it's all those things to get a lot of growth it's not a moving parts no and how about containers that so that you know a whole nother dimension right do and I was saying the container buzz was talking to Jerry Chen last night and say last year's all about containers only one session the cloud native session yesterday they did talk about it but it didn't dominate the show like it did last year the cross cloud really kinda was great and I'll see the end user computing stuff seems really compelling yeah I think things kind of ebb and flow it depends what's really new and so you know there's kind of different focuses each year I so give us the internal or our marketing philosophy now that you have stuff clicking together now with the product side you see the NSX with vsphere playing nicely it's a lot of stuff d-san is exploding the product the products are clicking absolutely oh there's a great chair that pad announced okay with it we'll do that later but how does that get marketed no product teams going to do it yes because it's interesting there's standalone products but also work well integrated yeah you know we're at this very interesting chasm and i would say we're kind of in our teenage years right now in my analogy and that when these products let's take virtual San or NSX when they're first coming out the door they need to be incubated and they need almost like startup attention and as marketers we wanted to give them that really dedicated focus but it's time for us now to grow into our 20s and what we need to do is to be more solution oriented and we need to be more industry oriented look at verticals and help our customers associate what's the impact in my world whether it's retail or its government or its healthcare so you'll see marketing at VMware shit more vertical solutions and verticals yes and by line of business kind of thing going on more mature more businesses I think it's really thing of the day our customers don't think about our line of businesses they think about what business problems are they trying to solve and they you know whatever business units we have is irrelevant to them I've taught in some of the VCS last night at that light speed party and a lot of Silicon Valley DC's were there and I said you know there's no Gartner Magic Quadrant for this horizontal solution set so you know usually have the magic quadrant you know the leadership's by categories but now you have this new kind of disruptive solution set which could be a vsphere here there and kind of stuff kind of cobble together integrated there's no magic quadrant for that so it's really hard for customers to find out the playbook right and we have to make that really simple for customers i also think that's the potential that vmware has which maybe is unique to a point product startup that they have one product we can put these things together for even more impact more value and a more seamless experience because i think that's key it's got to come together as an experience I no question Robin what are you going to take away from vmworld this year we're gonna take back to the ranch what are going to digest what are you going to share with your with your team and your colleagues that you've learned from this show you know I think we're really we're executing I think we've created a great experience I think we've attracted the right kinds of attendees you know this is just the first of many because we roll this program into barcelona in six weeks then we roll the following week all over asia i'm off to mumbai vented beijing we're just going to roll through Asia through December so the key is we're onto this right the content is right the cross cloud architecture is really resonating the cloud foundation it makes sense workspace one we just got to stay the course help make this stuff really simple and clear for our customers and partners that's great stuff it does make a lot of sense in and it's got clarity and you can see the 20 mile stare the straight and narrow and congratulations on a great vmworld John thank you so much appreciate it Robin Matlock CMO here inside the cube live at the Hang space the mandalay bay convention for vmworld 2016 you watching the cube

live from Las Vegas it's the cute cuddly emc world 2016 brought to you by emc now here are your hosts John furrier and Dave vellante okay welcome back everyone we are here live at emc world 2016 SiliconANGLE media's the cube it's our flagship program we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise i'm john for it my coast gave a lot there next is Robin Matlock was the CMO of VMware here on the cube cube alumni great to see you Robin thanks for joining us thanks happy to be here as always say no we just thought the jeremy bird news now the seam of gel technologies which he was illuminating the challenges of his branding challenge it's gonna be interesting to watch that happen but as a CMO you got to be plugged into all the themes so when i get your to get your thoughts on the show here and then you got the big show come up with vmworld what's your take on this because looking at the landscape there's a lot of change it's a challenge for marketers to try to make that message relevant what your thoughts of this show certainly the looming acquisition what's your thoughts on the show and how they're doing and and yeah so I think you have two big things there what's my thoughts on this show I think they've done a fabulous job Jeremy you know I go way back with Jeremy he's a fabulous market here one of the best in the industry and I mean this place is alive you know I think he has done some amazing creative things on stage on of you saw the keynote today I thought the James Bond thing was exceptional very entertaining keeps people engaged you know but also delivering really interesting content so I thought today's focus on cloud native was particularly interesting so I think he's doing a really good job of focusing on what people need to run their businesses today but also giving a nod out to the future and where the industry is going and the other thing that big discussion here I want to get your thoughts on this and is the first time pad Dell singers not here at emc world certainly a lot of hallway conversations it even surprised Joe Tucci who was Dave asked in the analyst session you know where's Pat guess was even on the cube every time so we had we miss you do not if you're watching this why isn't he here and just clear the air on the speculation of why he's not here there's a conspiracy theories are everywhere just let's clear the air on that first of all you guys crack me up if we run things the same every year you get bored you start coming up with all kinds of theories and rationale as to what's going on behind the scenes let me just put these rumors to rest Pascal singer is is fired up and excited about vmware and our future and the role we play in the dell technologies family as he ever has been when you do these events you think first and foremost what are the big messages or stories that i need to tell the marketplace it's no different than at vmworld then the second thing is who's the most appropriate person to come and tell these stories well the bottom line is the daily MC merger is probably one of the biggest most important messages that had to get covered here at emc world who's better to tell that story than Michael Dell and Joe Tucci right then there was a whole lot of great product information lots of new products being announced the best people to tell that are your CTOs your technical people we brought that you know some of the top talent from VMware ray o'farrell a longtime veteran of VMware was on stage yesterday talking about V realized in the control plane for a multi cloud world today KITT Kolbert you know one of the favorite VMware CTOs talking about cloud native so look there's nothing more to it than that Pat's alive and well trust me he's very engaged joe said that to the analyst he said look basically we only give Michael some time and we have all this product stuff to Paley's and that's a huge I mean they have a slew of announcements so it really took to summarize this is time slot issues they have been limited time on stage I mean Chad had to Russia's demo at the end so that seems to be the issue Michael needed to be out there up front obviously I don't even see it as an issue to be honest john i don't think it's an issue i think it's an opportunity at the end of the day what were the right things to cover what were the right speakers to cover those and you know I'm the one that called a shot for Pat I didn't think it was the right place i think really a rail farrell and kick Kolbert work yeah option kit was on the queue yesterday I'm all saurian given some great great commentary as well okay great so get that out of the way it's one of the clearly as a pat is our number one guest on the cube you know I don't you do that well there's number one Michael Dell I think it's given him a run for his money he's trying we're trying to see you at vmworld the corners let's talk about what's coming up because i see that pat will be on stage at vmworld so so he is going to have to put that together last year he delivered a really epic King no I thought it was very well done really talk about the future of the industry and vmware's role in it what's changed since then for you guys what can you share with us without you know tipping tipping the hand on the show theme because now we're gonna we were some almost there for vmworld last year to this year what's going on what's what's happening yeah I think there's gonna be a personal it'll be a lot of exciting things at vmworld and you have to be there delivered experience it firsthand we've laid out a vision for the industry and a lot of what we're doing is delivering on that vision I think there's things rapidly changing in our world that we know that for example cloud is changing every year there's kind of a new dimension to what's happening and how people are using clouds we think there's tremendous opportunities as we think about multiple clouds on how our customers are thinking about their workloads in a multi cloud world so I think you'll find a lot of interesting things we're doing in that front the whole roll of business mobility continues to evolve and change how does that relate to how I'm running my business on-premise or in the cloud I think you'll find a lot of neat things in that area and then this big wave of modern applications at the end of the day we're running our business on these big mission critical applications but the rapid iterative development process is really fundamentally changing the kind of value we can deliver back to the business and what we need to support that and do that as IT organizations to our line of business to people like me yeah CMOS who consume applications like nobody else in the business they don't excuse me you'll find a lot of focus on those areas well VMware has become such a strategic part of customers you know roadmaps and it's not just VMware it's the entire ecosystem that's what makes vmworld the best show this is the best enterprise show because everybody's there it's usually in San Francisco hey yeah is an awesome place to be I've got some additions on that we're in Vegas this year we I love it in our home turf in San Francisco we do to bottom line is mosconi's going through a lot of construction right now is there don't maybe the experience if you know is right for our great it's still the best under pressure because it is such a community and so you've got it you know you've got to keep elevating that right so you got the core technical content have some fun we saw some fun you know today so can you tell us kind of you know generally what we can expect this year yeah well first of all I think the audiences are evolving and you know our core traditional VI admin you know your virtual infrastructure admin of course that is the essence of the participation at vmworld but trust me new audience types are joining and coming to this event the networking side of the house you're seeing a lot more engagement participation their storage frankly there's overlap people come here they also go to vmworld your DevOps community is starting to find great value in a program like a vm world um some business executives but I'd say it is foundation it's a technical conference and it's the architects the CTOs and the class he updated the digital transformation I know that the air wash purchase was one that was a really good deal Sanjay poonen lead senior leader over there that the company has been doing very very well I've been seeing some updates on that what's going on with that cuz that's gonna bring in a whole nother IOT / application global peace any updates there from digital transformation conversations because at the end of the day as a CMO I feel like I'm at the tip of the spear of digital transformation you know I'm pushing the envelope about how we look at analytics and business intelligence and how we change the experience with our engagement with customers and partners how do I serve content more dynamically more relevant based on digital profiles that people who come and engage with us so i love this conversation and you know i think at the heart of all that we're doing is to accelerate digital transformation and make sure that I t plays the right critical role in that because the end of the day line of business has options and they are driving sometimes around IT but this is a really fantastic went for IT to be the experts in software software agility and really building apps for the business that are more relevant and you know really helpful and that I think is what VMware can really accelerate you mentioned the analytics I have a question for you around can you or how can you operationalize those analytics so you know traditionally the analytics have been insights for a few you gotta line up bill the cube takes forever how are you able to or are you able to operationalize those endings put those tool those tools in the hands of the people that can actually affect digital engagement in the front lines I think there's two dimensions to that I mean first of all you have to build your analytics environment on top of an agile infrastructure because at the end of the day the foundation has to be agile enough to serve a variety of different requirements changing requirements so you know obviously we have a big play on infrastructure infrastructure as a service and the foundations of that and the kind of root challenges their networking big bottleneck right so i might have this great infrastructure to compute on demand but I can't get my networking put you know protocols in place security risk things like that but then on the other hand you have to be able to consume these applications analytics is just one of many how do we ensure that i can get that out to my user community in the device form factor that they choose all controlled and governed effectively by me as an IT i think that really plays to both ends of the vmware strategy what we're doing in business mobility to allow you to transform experiences in engagement with customers and partners and employees but that also what we're doing kind of at the foundational level to ensure that the foundation can support these high demand applications that are distributed that micro services are a very different architecture from you know yesterday's are you doing that with your your team I mean you're gonna dogfooding that capability I don't know yeah vmware is one of the largest you know we are one of the biggest customers were the first customer for our technologies if i had my phone with you i could show you workspace one how i have access to my apps one button one push all completely under governance and control that's really the future of vmware it's the really the new form of user consumption of technology you guys are trying to make it easy your stand-up apps like workspaces and what not workspace one is breakthrough it's really break through and it you're right we're usually not engaging at the consumer level of enterprise right we're usually the back office were in that data center we're kind of in the bowels of IT but workspace one puts us forefront we're on the device now the user knows who vmware is now they're engaging with our applications and think it's really streamlined their experience to give them access to any app with one thumb print yeah and you know religious thing you've always been an enabling technology for innovation now it's moving up the stack so it's very interest to see that progress final question is that on that front I get that that's great news on the ecosystem what's change with the ecosystem because you know as you said vm was a very technical community yeah very engaging you don't have you have your shin you haven't they don't have your share fair of people who like to raise their hand and telling what do you think so a great active community so what are they saying what's the feedback from the community what are people raising their hands and and and saying and to you guys and and what's the conversation like right now I mean first of all um feedback from our ecosystem is fabulous i mean vmworld is really great case that he go look at the solutions exchange at vmworld it's just buzzing i can tell you we've pretty much are almost not quite but almost sold out of all the real estate that we have to offer in Vegas when we come here in late August I think that you could system that was changing evolving but you have really great evidence of new things happening I mean look at the X rail that got announced here between VMware and EMC look at the new pivotal cloud foundry photon platform bundle that we just announced last week you know so some real solutions orientation coming together in these partnerships and of course the broad ecosystem relative to cloud I think sis and SOS are getting very engaged with VMware in new ways we have a rich channel program I definitely think cloud providers service providers that's a kind of evolving and definitely growing part of our ecosystem and then I think even some of the traditional partners that we've had in the past you're seeing more solution oriented focus from those types of partnership Robin thanks so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to come share your insights on the cube anytime great Robin Matlock the CMO of VMware here sharing her thoughts about the industry in the show and also the upcoming vmworld 2016 which will be in Mandalay Bay this year not San Francisco because Moscone is going to be half under construction so got to do a little you know interim step here should be a great show it'll be our seventh VMware world this year like EMC we all started there so I want to thank you for all the support and appreciate enabling us to be successful thank you so much always a pleasure Robin Matlock on the cube I'm John Faraday volante you're watching the cube looking back at the history of Dell

now here's your host Jeff brick by Jeff Rick here with the cube we are on the ground at the vm women at vmworld what he calls his conference a side panel the discussions a side program side panel awesome joined by Robin Matlock the CM who just let a great panel discussion we had Laura McKenzie on she great a great keynote to beginning so first off terrific event thanks for having us we're happy to be here and thank you for coming I appreciate you covering this absolutely so talk about you know why are you doing this why is this important to the VMware you know women in tech is just such an important topic and really diversity in in all businesses and we find that here at the conference you'll find the ratio of women to men is really kind of small and this is a great opportunity to get women together talk about some of the issues not just women actually you want to correct that women and men together talk about some of the issues that are both opportunities and challenges for getting one more involved in tech we do you think it's an important topic we want women to feel inclusive being here at vmworld yeah and as Paul mentioned up on the panel you know the studies clearly show that when you have a diversity of opinions around innovation you're trying to solve a problem chances are you might find a better way to to skin that cat so clearly is a business benefit as well as a social benefit it's so true you know I think that for innovation one of the really things that can stop it is just 1-track thinking right and diversity helps bring different ideas different perspectives different ways of looking at things and so yeah we're a big believer that if we're more inclusive if we have more diversity we're going to drive more innovation and then drive the business which is what it's all about so you made some interesting comments on the panel that want to follow up on one was that you know you just did your thing you worked hard you believed in in the magic hand and here you are a successful businesswoman theam of a terrific company of probably the biggest tech event going on that you run terrific need and then suddenly kind of woke up or sounds like it were made aware what was kind of at it that process was like not everybody is fortunate to me to kind of just work and do my thing and reap the benefits yeah I what I acknowledged to the panel was that you know women in business wasn't really my torch it hasn't been my cause and it's only been as I've matured in my career that I've recognized that at the end of the day even though my career has been a great run I've had a tremendous you know I feel very blessed very grateful for the great success I've had but I recognize that I have a responsibility to women and when you really look at the data the numbers don't lie and the reality is we don't yet have equality and so as a senior executive woman I feel a real sense of accountability and responsibility to get more involved and get engaged and to help my women colleagues so talk about it because now you're doing some fun stuff you said you're working with girls who code and some other organizations how has that been you know it's been a fun experience of lightning what are some of the surprises that you found along the way yeah well recently I I met with a group girls who code and I have to say I was blown away these young women were sharp articulate technical creative daring bold and I was actually really inspired and I think the key is how do we just foster that and not let that die because they certainly have it right now at the age of 16 17 18 and I think the key is to make sure they have it at 37 38 and 40 and I think Renee zog made an interesting point we just had her on talking I was telling about the lorries little exercise where we were supposed to write down good things about yourself accomplishments assassin known at my table could do it in the whole two minutes so you know it's like think about somebody else compliment somebody else and she said she really realized that in complimenting herself it's really about helping other women helping the cause helping other people see that this can be a successful leader so you know you really need to kind of taught your own horn not necessarily for yourself but really did for other other executives I think this notion is sponsoring others and really making sure that you are enabling other people to be successful men and women but I think women it's a maybe something to really focus on and how are you introducing them into the workforce or how are you introducing them into their colleagues and setting them up for success is really important I think the other important thing we learned today was this factor that your horn for women sometimes can make you not come across as likable and that's a factor we also have to deal with in this balance of positioning ourselves effectively but also not losing those likeable points or managing that yeah it's interesting that that's still that still is pervasive it's crazy so last question first day of work for a bunch of new hires down at the campus of Palo Alto a bunch of women in the crowd diverse crowd what do you tell them welcome to the vmware well first of all we invest in all of our new talent one thing is about how to help them be successful at this great company we try to ground them all and what is our purpose we talk a lot about our epic values its core I think if you talk to any 19,000 VMware employees they could recite for you what are our epic values and we live by that and certainly diversity is a big part of our culture so we route them in that and then we also create a lot of mentoring opportunities and sponsorship opportunities so that those new hires they have someone that they can go do they have a buddy we really believe in that giving them a chance to you know get to know themselves the organization how to be successful at the company awesome well Robin thanks again for great event here and obviously a fantastic vmworld 2015 but 23,000 people and they stream by the cube every day on the way to quino's I love it all right here we go day 3 here we go come all right Jeff Rick here on the ground at the vm women at VMware 2015 you're watching the cube thanks for watching

it's the cube covering vmworld 2015 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors now your hosts John furrier and Dave vellante okay welcome back everyone we are live in San Francisco moscone north lobby here for vmworld 2015 this is silicon angles the Q this is our flagship program we go out to the events and extract the Sigma noise i'm john frieda found us look at a humdrum echoes dave vellante co-founder Wikibon calm research our next guest is Robin Matlock the CMO of VMware we are in the cubes set and the two sets here this year we have the director set new innovation here at vmworld again setting the stage the leadership of VMware and the person behind all this is Robin Matlock CMO thanks so much first of all for letting us come and do your lobby here it's been great so far it's one say thank you you guys you know we love having you you're a big part of this program for us six years now we've been watching the transformation it's been interesting this year has been fun to watch because of all the outside noise and certainly the products are doing great at Gelson's keynote this morning was really a home run he really knocked it out of the park so the messaging is tight this year really good it's looking forward it's got a longer perspective it's not a short-term driven messaging it is that by design i mean this is kind of showing the future yeah absolutely we really tried to change things up this year and you know that's important is that we have to reinvent we have to make ourselves relevant and part of it is taking something like the program at vmworld and making sure that every year it delivers fresh new a different perspective for these attendees so we changed things we started with Karl talking about one cloud any application any device very much frame the conversation for V emerald in the keynotes but also more of a 12 18 24 month kind of view and today we closed with Pat Gelsinger on the stage and you're right that was all about forward-looking what lies in the next to 35 years and what is our point of view on it and I agree with you I think that really did an amazing job this morning the ecosystems changing we've been monitoring the ecosystem on our crowd chat platform some great conversations with the thought leaders it's changing the demographics seem to be changing you own IP they got great market share and traditional IT that's being where's legacy wheelhouse so the Ops guys are all here but sad event the DevOps focus is really scratching the services at a whole new developer community do you guys were you guys aware of that is that kind of like the big AHA this year was it is that a big part of the ecosystem can you share some color and how this dev ops team is now resonating through the ecosystem sure and without a doubt it i wouldn't call it an aha i think it's a very strategic intentional move frankly the reality is the world is changing and it's impacting IT you know as part of the core of that transformation so I T needs to change to be relevant for business and DevOps is a part of that how are we going to build applications in this cloud native world how are we going to do it faster more agile and serve our businesses quicker well DevOps plays a key role there and what we can do is help IT serve at development community I mean obviously we had a lot of big announcements that are coming out this week and we wanted to make sure we had a way to deliver that content to this new audience so the ecosystem is evolving and it needs to because part of it is how we all transform so I'm glad you're noticing some of those changes are very strategic I mean the other thing about vmworld that that is been since day one is the core of the practitioner you know community and the peers and people are excited to be here they look forward to it they come early to hang out with their friends but a lot of parties but the content is very much around the customer and so you've been able to preserve that but at the same time you know provide an interesting layer of you know senior management perspectives high level customers when you talk about that chair at the core we really do see vmworld as a technical conference that would be the one thing that's anchored in the ground now as the people that need to engage with technology and as technology itself shifts and changes and VMware's offerings shift and change the ecosystem we have to be able to address a broader set of different types of audience so the practitioners are core but now you get the DevOps audience you get mobility professionals you get networking opps people you get you know storage folks so although the content will always stay very educational and technical in nature i do think we've done a really good job starting to broaden to appeal to these different audience types and so that's the other piece that i wanted to address is i think you know the roles are shifting with in IT and sometimes to me what this conference does it allows people who want a different career path to find one here they don't have to go to 10 different conferences and that's unique I think in the industry there was a wonderful tweet you'll have to pull it up for your audience and I'm sorry I can't reference the gentleman that did it but it it was at the end of yesterday while KITT kolbert and Rio Pharaoh were presenting we ran over a little bit so some people were moving on to their sessions and he tweeted that those that are leaving the hall right now I predict they may not have jobs five years from now because of the shifts and changes and how relevant it is to be in this cloud native world well I think if you know initially the the knee-jerk reaction to that change is somewhat negative and disconcerting but I think when people come to this event and they get back on the plane they start thinking about the opportunities they see this affords a lot of different avenues and it's really grown tremendously over the years i think vmware is doing a lot to help people bridge the two worlds and that's a big part of our philosophy it's a big part of how we're helping customers kind of get from point A to point B and helping the practitioners leverage the skills they've built over the last decade and really apply those to what's going to be required of them on the next decade I'm glad you mentioned that was a big theme of Pat's talk you know the bridge and you hear a lot of talk from the analyst community you know Gartner particular talks about bimodal IT my friends at IDC talk about the third platform but the problem i've always had with that is it's more silos like you know you don't want to be part of the old and i want to be part of it both what you guys are saying your messaging is we're going to bring the existing that asset base that you have along we recognize you want to go from point A to point B without just ripping everything out and so that's fundamental to the strategy and that's coming through in the messaging that's great to hear that is funny Massimino Ray fairing is the guy who said the cube we just pulled it up on our real-time analytics system but he said I feel those leaving you know during kit cobra session may be without a job in five years fact hashtag fact but that is a vibe of the show what are some of the stats on the number share some of the inside the numbers attendees sessions what can you share yes I mean I'm really proud of the stats actually so we exceeded our goal we have 23 5 23 thousand and five hundred plus attendees and they're still coming in the door as you can see out at the registration desk so biggest vmworld ever really solid growth and the demographics is shifting we're starting to see more of these new audience types so really excited about that we have over 400 breakout sessions very well subscribed the demand for the breakouts is quite incredible we have almost 300 289 or so exhibitors and the solutions exchange there is simply no more floor space if I could add another building I'd be able to scale out and get another hundred in the door but I'm just simply have a finite resource of space and we're chatting over Howard feet let's go there so I got it I got to ask about that there's never anyone it's always hard to please everybody at these events and you always feel oh nothing new at vmworld they have people coming oh sorry so fresh and relevant so you have you have a lot of people from the old guard and the new guard kind of coming together as Pat said cowboys and farmers kind of working together it's just quote on the q what is that vibe right now how would you describe that because you thought people scratching their heads and saying what's new this year femur I'm not seeing anything new so for the record sheriff Oakes what's new this year absolutely the new stuff yeah I think there's a lot of new stuff but we are getting into a more iterative development world where you know we're doing kind of lots of little or releases instead of you know five years ago where you just you held out for two years and then it was just one huge release you've got the evo SDDC that was new right and within that STD evo SDC manager brand new quickest way to really implement and get to a software-defined data center a tightly integrated software stack with new management capabilities to under you know manage the underlying hardware in infrastructure you have the whole photon platform right which kit Kolbert and rail Pharaoh launched so the photon platform which is largely open sourced with the exception of the very small in a just enough virtual machine all brand new photon OS photon controller the photon machine part of the photon platform then today we talked about business mobility so you have the workspace sweet Sanjay talked about that what we're doing with air watch we also then of course rolled out security and NSX 6.2 we have all kinds of new cloud services that came out vCloud air the disaster recovery on demand some new sequel database as a service technology so they're really I can just focus on stage Tigers are shaking it up here guys so I got to ask you so as a CMO your job is to kind of watched the trends walk to fashion if you will in the industry and you know the trend oh it says don't fight fashion you got to be fashionable and be relevant I get that but it's a hard thing to market vmware is its unique company you have a core a lot of things going on around the company I'll see the Federation EMC conversations you have customers that are changing hat laid out essentially a whole new future vision what's going to happen to VMware it basically devices world global global company how do you market that and how do you what's your approach and and what's your philosophy how do you how do you do that I think one of the most important things and I hope you got this from the keynotes this week is we are unifying behind a common narrative that is really relevant to our business and the value we deliver to our customers and everything we do somehow connects to that storyline and that's really this concept of one cloud any application any device and ago by one cloud I mean really the simplicity of managing something as one but it's really about a multiple cloud unified hybrid cloud strategy all delivering any application on any device I think the other common theme that we anchored around is what is our relevance to applications because at the end of the day that's what the business cares about so we've worked really hard to make sure that our customers understand how is it what we're doing is enabling them to deliver modern and traditional applications to their business really in any way they want to comply observation there Robin is when so that's great to have the high level messaging but when you test beneath Italy we ask pat ok so how do you live in that heterogeneous world and he basically explained ok took each of the levels of the stacks that is what we're doing there we can't do it at the you know this level we are will do it at this level with a very precise answer as to how that strategy turns along to reality so that to me is the ultimate test not just marketing a little marketing tagline and the reason why that's so important is because that when you test it with the customers and they're actually gonna be doing it you know down the road can't B's give a tie back and that's yeah thank you i would agree customers it has to be has to be relevant to customers I the end of the day they need trust in the vendor ok that I ask a question that everyone wants to know what's the party the big party everyone I mean VMware always has parties as so many parties going on did the event I mean I think there's like 10 different parties happening tonight now if we can't go to all of them but we'll try our best the big party at 18 c 4 share the big party yes it is always one of the highlights of the week i must say for all this technology it boils down to how great is a party well I have good news the San Francisco Giants cooperated and they went ahead and left town for a Wednesday night so we're able to get the park which is fabulous love being at the park so we're back at the park we're featuring two great bands and we very intentionally picked bands that are the up-and-comers you know not the kind of tried and true rock and roll we're going for someone sees every year all the different question the envelope John so you better get comfortable and come out and hang out with us Neon Trees opens up the act and then we're closing with Alabama Shakes and the rumor on the street is if you want to go to a good concert you go see Alabama Shakes perform so come join us it's going to be our walk we'll do our best to sneak into the VIP booth like they did her imagine dragons I hope to see you there okay thanks so much for coming on the guy know you're super busy thanks for sharing the insights and time and update almost love what you guys are doing it's a great audience love to have you thank you it would be back more live at San Francisco moscone north the Emerald 2015 things are shaking up up and coming new things a lot of stuff happening we'll be back after this short break

it's the kue here is your host John furrier hi I'm John furrier with the cube we are on the ground in san francisco for vmware's big launch in February this is the one cloud any application any device in San Francisco all the influences the whole press course here in the enterprise we had Quintin Hardy on stage i'm here with Robyn Matlock who's the CMO of VMware great to see you hi John free to be here pat pat gelsinger quentin hardy from the year x jeffrey more crossing the chasm awesome years all the influence all the press was here tell us about the event well this is all about really coming together and take a moment to sit back and see all of the great products and technologies that we're bringing to market so we launched one cloud any application any device and essentially this is a discussing a whole framework or architecture of how we're delivering and harnessing the power of all of your cloud and computing environments into one common architecture for one cloud how that supports both traditional apps modern apps and is delivered on any device for your consumers will be doing a bunch of crowd chest throughout the month and you guys have a lot of activities planned but this is really the kickoff you had a sales meeting last week get a partner exchange going on burnings were good business is good but there's a lot of competition right now so I want you to comment on the big announcement because Pat Gelsinger said this is the biggest vsphere launch in the history but it's not just vSphere it's a whole platform I'm it's complicated where you put it all together for the crowd out there you know it's a very dynamic marketplace right now and businesses are changing and transforming every industry we know is undergoing really significant transformations we think there's no better time to be in the industry we feel extremely well-positioned we have laid out a foundation for the data center of the future it's based on the software to find architecture we have tremendous opportunity now to help our customers harness all of their cloud silos into one cloud we think really we've got a great offering and it's just a great time to launch so you got VMware come I'm sure you got some point vmworld coming up what's the planning like he gives a little cheesy iran what's happening tomorrow this year John I'm just trying to get through partner exchange right now starting tomorrow so we've been really debris our day 7 of 10 days of intense launch and events and activities with our shareholders with our sales force with our partners so we're really going to think of it right now when I live for the moment we have a great offering some of the biggest news to come out of the company in a long time and so it's really I'm sure it's on your plate but it's around the coma talk about the partners change is one of things that's really important in ecosystem VMware's ecosystem is really really impressive but it's changing its growing you guys are growing what's new give us the update on the ecosystem you bet I mean our philosophy first of all is that we can't do this alone that we have to team and partner wisely and we are surrounded by the richest ecosystem in the industry bar none now I do believe that it is transforming as consumption models are changing as technologies are changing as cloud is stepping in it does require new types of services and new types of partners so we're talking more service providers more ISVs more sass providers but all of us coming together as one large ecosystem and ensuring that our customers have a unified experience what are you seeing the trends for them for the for the partners is it more channel more software more of ours what's the mix recent service providers that's new is that yeah I mean we've been in all of these various partner you know types for a long time I do think though that the mobile cloud era is putting you know more emphasis on services on cloud services on consulting services helping companies transform their operations that requires process transformation people transformation so I do think system integrators ISPs there's there's definitely new partner types I think are getting a day in the Sun so I gotta ask you I'm really impressed with the VMware culture you know that a big fan of VMware living in Palo Alto being a local local boy but in a fanny pack el Senor you've done an amazing job you're an amazing campus what's the culture like now at vm you guys are at the heart of Silicon Valley you know there's a lot of things going on in Silicon Valley right now that's really great and some things they're not going so great what's going on with VMware what's going on with your culture can you give us an update on what's you know I've been there almost six years and I think the VMware culture is stronger than it's ever been our culture is anchored around our values and its really clear their epic execution passion integrity customers and community and you will talk to any VMware employee and they feel that in their heart that's what we are first and foremost it's more about how we do what we do technology is great but if you know the day it's all about our values and it kind of shows when your campus is just so beautiful I mean just shows it okay so the next question final question is how do you market this complex complexity to customers obviously it's changing for you guys product wives heard the whole announcements change for your customers well how do you stay on top of the marketing and what is your strategy to market to the customers because you have now more stakeholders but used to have the IT guys out there so I would define data center what's new and what's some of the marketing opportunities you have well it's a great question at the end of the day our customers want business outcomes they want real value that solves critical business problems and I think although our portfolio is really is complex and diversifying what we ultimately deliver for our customers is getting quite simple we help them deliver one cloud for any application on any device we help them solve their business mobility problems we have a new term liquid-liquid cloud liquidity with whether that come from the pats no no no you're are you we're all behind that liquid is really just describing the context of the environment we're in that's the world around us business you know rigid structures of the past are giving away too much more fluid dynamic business models it's a liquid world it's real time and I think that speaks to it an average your storage a lot of announcement so summarized final question what's the bottom line for this event what's the main takeaway the main takeaway is that vmware is continue to innovate i mean we are really fearless innovators and we are delivering tremendous innovation that is helping deliver a brave new model of IT that is instant fluid and secure brave new world we are here on the ground robin Matlock CMO at vmware this is on the ground i'm john forever the cube thanks for watching you