>>Okay, welcome back everyone. There's the cubes coverage of VMware Explorer, 22 formerly world. We've been here since 2010 and world 2010 to now it's 2022. And it's VMware Explorer. We're here at the CEO, regular writer. Welcome back to the cube. Great to see you in person. >>Yeah. Great to be here in person, >>Dave and I are, are proud to say that we've been to 12 straight years of covering VMware's annual conference. And thank you. We've seen the change in the growth over time and you know, it's kind of, I won't say pinch me moment, but it's more of a moment of there's the VMware that's grown into the cloud after your famous deal with Andy jazzy in 2016, we've been watching what has been a real sea change and VMware since taking that legacy core business and straightening out the cloud strategy in 2016, and then since then an acceleration of, of cloud native, like direction under your leadership at VMware. Now you're the CEO take us through that because this is where we are right now. We are here at the pinnacle of VMware 2.0 or cloud native VMware, as you point out on your keynote, take us through that history real quick. Cuz I think it's important to know that you've been the architect of a lot of this change and it's it's working. >>Yeah, definitely. We are super excited because like I said, it's working, the history is pretty simple. I mean we tried running our own cloud cloud air. We cloud air didn't work so well. Right. And then at that time, customers really gave us strong feedback that the hybrid they wanted was a Amazon together. Right. And so that's what we went back and did and the andjay announcement, et cetera. And then subsequently as we were continue to build it out, I mean, once that happened, we were able to go work with the Satia and Microsoft and others to get the thing built out all over. Then the next question was okay, Hey, that's great for the workloads that are running on vSphere. What's the story for workloads that are gonna be cloud native and benefit a lot from being cloud native. So that's when we went the Tansu route and the Kubernetes route, we did a couple of acquisitions and then we started that started paying off now with the Tansu portfolio. And last but not the least is once customers have this distributed portfolio now, right. Increasingly everything is becoming multi-cloud. How do you manage and connect and secure. So that's what you start seeing that you saw the management announcement, networking and security and everything else is cooking. And you'll see more stuff there. >>Yeah know, we've been talking about super cloud. It's kinda like a multi-cloud on steroids kind a little bit different pivot of it. And we're seeing some use cases. >>No, no, it's, it's a very great, it's a, it's pretty close to what we talk about. >>Awesome. I mean, and we're seeing this kind of alignment in the industry. It's kind of open, but I have to ask you, when did you, you have the moment where you said multicloud is the game changer moment. When did you have, because you guys had hybrid, which is really early as well. When was the Raghu? When did you have the moment where you said, Hey, multicloud is what's happening. That's we're doubling down on that go. >>I mean, if you think about the evolution of the cloud players, right. Microsoft really started picking up around the 2018 timeframe. I mean, I'm talking about Azure, right? >>In a big way. >>Yeah. In a big way. Right. When that happened and then Google got really serious, it became pretty clear that this was gonna be looking more like the old database market than it looked like a single player cloud market. Right. Equally sticky, but very strong players all with lots of IP creation capability. So that's when we said, okay, from a supplier side, this is gonna become multi. And from a customer side that has always been their desire. Right. Which is, Hey, I don't want to get locked into anybody. I want to do multiple things. And the cloud vendors also started leveraging that OnPrem. Microsoft said, Hey, if you're a windows customer, your licensing is gonna be better off if you go to Azure. Right. Oracle did the same thing. So it just became very clear. >>I am, I have gone make you laugh. I always go back to the software mainframe because I, I think you were here. Right. I mean, you're, you're almost 20 years in. Yeah. And I, the reason I appreciate that is because, well, that's technically very challenging. How do you make virtualization overhead virtually non-existent how do you run any workload? Yeah. How do you recover from, I mean, that's was not trivial. Yeah. Okay. So what's the technical, you know, analog today, the real technical challenge. When you think about cross cloud services. >>Yeah. I mean, I think it's different for each of these layers, right? So as I was alluding to for management, I mean, you can go each one of them by themselves, there is one way of Mo doing multi-cloud, which is multiple clouds. Right. You could say, look, I'm gonna build a great product for AWS. And then I'm gonna build a great product for Azure. I'm gonna build a great product for Google. That's not what aria is. Aria is a true multi-cloud, which means it pulls data in from multiple places. Right? So there are two or three, there are three things that aria has done. That's I think is super interesting. One is they're not trying to take all the data and bring it in. They're trying to federate the data sources. And secondly, they're doing it in real time and they're able to construct this graph of a customer's cloud resources. >>Right. So to keep the graph constructed and pulling data, federating data, I think that's a very interesting concept. The second thing that, like I said is it's a real time because in the cloud, a container might come and go like that. Like that is a second technical challenge. The third it's not as much a technical challenge, but I really like what they have done for the interface they've used GraphQL. Right? So it's not about if you remember in the old world, people talk about single pan or glass, et cetera. No, this is nothing to do with pan or glass. This is a data model. That's a graph and a query language that's suited for that. So you can literally think of whatever you wanna write. You can write and express it in GraphQL and pull all sorts of management applications. You can say, Hey, I can look at cost. I can look at metrics. I can look at whatever it is. It's not five different types of applications. It's one, that's what I think had to do it at scale is the other problem. And, and >>The, the technical enable there is just it's good software. It's a protocol. It's >>No, no, it's, it's, it's it's software. It's a data model. And it's the Federation architecture that they've got, which is open. Right. You can pull in data from Datadog, just as well as from >>Pretty >>Much anything data from VR op we don't care. Right? >>Yeah. Yeah. So rego, I have to ask you, I'm glad you like the Supercloud cuz you know, we, we think multi-cloud still early, but coming fast. I mean, everyone has multiple clouds, but spanning this idea of spanning across has interesting sequences. Do you data, do you do computer both and a lot of good things happening. Kubernetes been containers, all that good stuff. Okay. How do you see the first rev of multi-cloud evolving? Like is it what happens? What's the sequence, what's the order of operations for a client standpoint? Customer standpoint of, of multicloud or Supercloud because we think we're seeing it as a refactoring of something like snowflake, they're a data base, they're a data warehouse on the cloud. They, they say data cloud they'd they like they'll tell us no, you, we're not a data. We're not a data warehouse. We're data cloud. Okay. You're a data warehouse refactored for the CapEx from Amazon and cooler, newer things. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a behavior change. Yeah. But it's still a data warehouse. Yeah. How do you see this multi-cloud environment? Refactoring? Is there something that you see that might be different? That's the same if you know what I'm saying? Like what's what, what's the ne the new thing that's happening with multi-cloud, that's different than just saying I'm I'm doing SAS on the cloud. >>Yeah. So I would say, I would point to a, a couple of things that are different. Firstly, my, the answer depends on which category you are in. Like the category that snowflake is in is very different than Kubernetes or >>Something or Mongo DB, right? >>Yeah. Or Mongo DB. So, so it is not appropriate to talk about one multi-cloud approach across data and compute and so, so on and so forth. So I'll talk about the spaces that we play. Right. So step one, for most customers is two application architectures, right? The cloud native architecture and an enterprise native architecture and tying that together either through data or through networks or through et cetera. So that's where most of the customers are. Right. And then I would say step two is to bring these things together in a more, in a closer fashion and that's where we are going. And that is why you saw the cloud universal announcement and that's already, you've seen the Tansu announcement, et cetera. So it's really, the step one was two distinct clouds. That is just two separate islands. >>So the other thing that we did, that's really what my, the other thing that I'd like to get to your reaction on, cause this is great. You're like a masterclass in the cube here. Yeah, totally is. We see customers becoming super clouds because they're getting the benefit of, of VMware, AWS. And so if I'm like a media company or insurance company, if I have scale, if I continue to invest in, in cloud native development, I do all these things. I'm gonna have a da data scale advantage, possibly agile, which means I can build apps and functionality very quick for customers. I might become my own cloud within the vertical. Exactly. And so I could then service other people in the insurance vertical if I'm the insurance company with my technology and create a separate power curve that never existed before. Cause the CapEx is off the table, it's operating expense. Yep. That runs into the income statement. Yep. This is a fundamental business model shift and an advantage of this kind of scenario. >>And that's why I don't think snowflakes, >>What's your reaction to that? Cuz that's something that, that is not really, talk's highly nuanced and situational. But if Goldman Sachs builds the biggest cloud on the planet for financial service for their own benefit, why wouldn't they >>Exactly. >>And they're >>Gonna build it. They sort of hinted at it that when they were up on stage on AWS, right. That is just their first big step. I'm pretty sure over time they would be using other clouds. Think >>They already are on >>Prem. Yeah. On prem. Exactly. They're using VMware technology there. Right? I mean think about it, AWS. I don't know how many billions of dollars they're spending on AWS R and D Microsoft is doing the same thing. Google's doing the same thing we are doing. Not as much as them that you're doing oral chair. Yeah. If you are a CIO, you would be insane not to take advantage of all of this IP that's getting created and say, look, I'm just gonna bet on one. Doesn't make any sense. Right. So that's what you're seeing. And then >>I think >>The really smart companies, like you talked about would say, look, I will do something for my industry that uses these underlying clouds as the substrate, but encapsulates my IP and my operating model that I then offer to other >>Partners. Yeah. And their incentive for differentiation is scale. Yeah. And capability. And that's a super cloud. That's a, or would be say it environment. >>Yeah. But this is why this, >>It seems like the same >>Game, but >>This, I mean, I think it environment is different than >>Well, I mean it advantage to help the business, the old day service, you >>Said snowflake guys out the marketing guys. So you, >>You said snowflake data warehouse. See, I don't think it's in data warehouse. It's not, that's like saying, you >>Know, I, over >>VMware is a virtualization company or service now is a help desk tool. I, this is the change. Yes. That's occurring. Yes. And that you're enabling. So take the Goldman Sachs example. They're gonna run OnPrem. They're gonna use your infrastructure to do selfer. They're gonna build on AWS CapEx. They're gonna go across clouds and they're gonna need some multi-cloud services. And that's your opportunity. >>Exactly. That's that's really, when you, in the keynote, I talked about cloud universal. Right? So think of a future where we can go to a customer and say, Mr. Customer buy thousand scores, a hundred thousand cores, whatever capacity you can use it, any which way you want on any application platform. Right. And it could be OnPrem. It could be in the cloud, in the cloud of their choice in multiple clouds. And this thing can be fungible and they can tie it to the right services. If they like SageMaker they could tie it to Sage or Aurora. They could tie it to Aurora, cetera, et cetera. So I think that's really the foundation that we are setting. Well, I think, I >>Mean, you're building a cloud across clouds. I mean, that's the way I look at it. And, and that's why it's, to me, the, the DPU announcement, the project Monterey coming to fruition is so important. Yeah. Because if you don't have that, if you're not on that new Silicon curve yep. You're gonna be left behind. Oh, >>Absolutely. It allows us to build things that you would not otherwise be able to do, >>Not to pat ourselves on the back Ragu. But we, in what, 2013 day we said, feel >>Free. >>We, we said with Lou Tucker when OpenStack was crashing. Yeah. Yeah. And then Kubernetes was just a paper. We said, this could be the interoperability layer. Yeah. You got it. And you could have inter clouding cuz there was no clouding. I was gonna riff on inter networking. But if you remember inter networking during the OSI model, TCP and IP were hardened after the physical data link layer was taken care of. So that enabled an entire new industry that was open, open interconnect. Right. So we were saying inter clouding. So what you're kind of getting at with cross cloud is you're kind of creating this routing model if you will. Not necessarily routing, but like connection inter clouding, we called it. I think it's kinda a terrible name. >>What you said about Kubernetes is super critical. It is turning out to be the infrastructure API so long. It has been an infrastructure API for a certain cluster. Right. But if you think about what we said about VSE eight with VSE eight Kubernetes becomes the data center API. Now we sort of glossed over the point of the keynote, but you could do operations storage, anything that you can do on vSphere, you can do using a Kubernetes API. Yeah. And of course you can do all the containers in the Kubernetes clusters and et cetera, is what you could always do. Now you could do that on a VMware environment. OnPrem, you could do that on EKS. Now Kubernetes has become the standard programming model for infrastructure across. It >>Was the great equalizer. Yeah. You, we used to say Amazon turned the data center through an API. It turns, turns of like a lot of APIs and a lot of complexity. Right. And Kubernetes changed. >>Well, the role, the role of defacto standards played a lot into the T C P I P revolution before it became a standard standard. What the question Raghu, as you look at, we had submit on earlier, we had tutorial on as well. What's the disruptive enabler from a defacto. What in your mind, what should, because Kubernetes became kind of defacto, even though it was in the CNCF and in an open source open, it wasn't really standard standard. There's no like standards, body, but what de facto thing has to happen in your mind's eye around making inter clouding or connecting clouds in a, in a way that's gonna create extensibility and growth. What do you see as a de facto thing that the industry should rally around? Obviously Kubernetes is one, is there something else that you see that's important for in an open way that the industry can discuss and, and get behind? >>Yeah. I mean, there are things like identity, right? Which are pretty critical. There is connectivity and networking. So these are all things that the industry can rally around. Right. And that goes along with any modern application infrastructure. So I would say those are the building blocks that need to happen on the data side. Of course there are so many choices as well. So >>How about, you know, security? I think about, you know, when after stuck net, the, the whole industry said, Hey, we have to do a better job of collaborating. And then when you said identity, it just sort of struck me. But then a lot of people tried to sort of monetize private reporting and things like that. So you do you see a movement within the technology industry to do a better job of collaborating to, to solve the acute, you know, security problems? >>Yeah. I think the customer pressure and government pressure right. Causes that way. Yeah. Even now, even in our current universe, you see, there is a lot of behind the scenes collaboration amongst the security teams of all of the tech companies that is not widely seen or known. Right. For example, my CISO knows the AWS CSO or the Microsoft CSO and they all talk and they share the right information about vulnerability attacks and so on and so forth. So there's already a certain amount of collaboration that's happening and that'll only increase. Do, >>Do you, you know, I was somewhat surprised. I didn't hear more in your face about security would, is that just because you had such a strong multi-cloud message that you wanted to get, get across, cuz your security story is very strong and deep. When you get into the DPU side of things, the, you know, the separation of resources and the encryption and I'll end to end >>I'm well, we have a phenomenal security story. Yeah. Yeah. Tell security story and yes. I mean I'll need guilty to the fact that in the keynote you have yeah, yeah, sure time. But what we are doing with NSX and you will hear about some NSX projects as you, if you have time to go to some of the, the sessions. Yeah. There's one called project, not star. Another is called project Watchman or watch, I think it's called, we're all dealing with this. That is gonna strengthen the security story even more. Yeah. >>We think security and data is gonna be a big part of it. Right. As CEO, I have to ask you now that you're the CEO, first of all, I'd love to talk about product with you cuz you're yeah. Yeah. We just great conversation. We want to kind of read thet leaves and ask pointed questions cuz we're putting the puzzle together in real time here with the audience. But as CEO, now you have a lot of discussions around the business. You, the Broadcom thing happening, you got the rename here, you got multi-cloud all good stuff happening. Dave and I were chatting before we came on this morning around the marketplace, around financial valuations and EBIDA numbers. When you have so much strategic Goodwill and investment in the oven right now with the, with the investments in cloud native multi-year investments on a trajectory, you got economies of scale there. >>It's just now coming out to be harvest and more behind it. Yeah. As you come into the Broadcom and or the new world wave that's coming, how do you talk about that value? Cuz you can't really put a number on it yet because there's no customers on it. I mean some customers, but you can't probably some for form. It's not like sales numbers. Yeah. Yeah. How do you make the argument to the PE type folks out there? Like EBIDA and then all the strategic value. What's the, what's the conversation like if you can share any, I know it's obviously public company, all the things going down, but like how do you talk about strategic value to numbers folks? >>Yeah. I mean, we are not talking to PE guys at all. Right. I mean the only conversation we have is helping Broadcom with >>Yeah. But, but number people who are looking at the number, EBIDA kind of, >>Yeah. I mean, you'd be surprised if, for, for example, even with Broadcom, they look at the business holistically as what are the prospects of this business becoming a franchise that is durable and could drive a lot of value. Right. So that's how they look at it holistically. It's not a number driven. >>They do. They look at that. >>Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's a misperception to say, Hey, it's a numbers driven conversation. It's a business driven conversation where, I mean, and Hawk's been public about it. He says, look, I look at businesses. Can they be leaders in their market? Yeah. Because leaders get, as we all know a disproportionate share of the economic value, is it a durable franchise that's gonna last 10 years or more, right. Obviously with technology changes in between, but 10 years or more >>Or 10, you got your internal, VMware talent customers and >>Partners. Yeah. Significant competitive advantage. So that's, that's really where the conversation starts and the numbers fall out of it. Got it. >>Okay. So I think >>There's a track record too. >>That culture >>That VMware has, you've always had an engineering culture. That's turned, you know, ideas and problems into products that, that have been very successful. >>Well, they had different engineering cultures. They're chips. You guys are software. Right. You guys know >>Software. Yeah. Mean they've been very successful with Broadcom, the standalone networking company since they took it over. Right. I mean, it's, there's a lot of amazing innovation going on there. >>Yeah. Not, not that I'm smiling. I want to kind of poke at this question question. I'll see if I get an answer out of you, when you talk to Hawk tan, does he feel like he bought a lot more than he thought or does he, did he, does he know it's all here? So >>The last two months, I mean, they've been going through a very deliberate process of digging into each business and certainly feels like he got a phenomenal asset base. Yeah. He said that to me even today after the keynote, right. Is the amazing amount of product capability that he's seeing in every one of our businesses. And that's been the constant frame. >>But congratulations on that. >>I've heard, I've heard Hawk talk about the shift to, to Mer merchant Silicon. Yeah. From custom Silicon. But I wanted to ask you when you look at things like AWS nitro yeah. And graviton and train and the advantage that AWS has with custom Silicon, you see Google and Microsoft sort of Alibaba following suit. Would it benefit you to have custom Silicon for, for DPU? I mean, I guess you, you know, to have a tighter integration or do you feel like with the relationships that you have that doesn't buy you anything? >>Yeah. I mean we have pretty strong relationships with in fact fantastic relationships with the Invidia and Intel and AMD >>Benon and AMD now. >>Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we've been working with the Pendo team in their previous incarnations for years. Right, right. When they were at Cisco and then same thing with the, we know the Melanox team as well as the invi original teams and Intel is the collaboration right. From the get go of the company. So we don't feel a need for any of that. We think, I mean, it's clear for those cloud folks, right. They're going towards a vertical integration model and select portions of their stack, like you talked about, but there is always a room for horizontal integration model. Right. And that's what we are a part of. Right. So there'll be a number of DPU pro vendors. There'll be a number of CPU vendors. There'll be a number of other storage, et cetera, et cetera. And we think that is goodness in an alternative model compared to a vertically integr >>And yeah. What this trade offs, right. It's not one or the other, I mean I used to tell, talk to Al Shugar about this all the time. Right. I mean, if vertically integrated, there may be some cost advantages, but then you've got flexibility advantages. If you're using, you know, what the industry is building. Right. And those are the tradeoffs, so yeah. Yeah. >>Greg, what are you excited about right now? You got a lot going on obviously great event. Branding's good. Love the graphics. I was kind of nervous about the name changed. I likem world, but you know, that's, I'm kind of like it >>Doesn't readily roll off your phone. Yeah. >>I know. We, I had everyone miscue this morning already and said VMware Explorer. So >>You pay Laura fine. Yeah. >>Now, I >>Mean a quarter >>Curse jar, whatever I did wrong. I don't believe it. Only small mistake that's because the thing wasn't on. Okay. Anyway, what's on your plate. What's your, what's some of the milestones. Do you share for your employees, your customers and your partners out there that are watching that might wanna know what's next in the whole Broadcom VMware situation. Is there a timeline? Can you talk publicly about what? To what people can expect? >>Yeah, no, we, we talk all the time in the company about that. Right? Because even if there is no news, you need to talk about what is where we are. Right. Because this is such a big transaction and employees need to know where we are at every minute of the day. Right? Yeah. So, so we definitely talk about that. We definitely talk about that with customers too. And where we are is that the, all the processes are on track, right? There is a regulatory track going on. And like I alluded to a few minutes ago, Broadcom is doing what they call the discovery phase of the integration planning, where they learn about the business. And then once that is done, they'll figure out what the operating model is. What Broadcom is said publicly is that the acquisition will close in their fiscal 23, which starts in November of this year, runs through October of next year. >>So >>Anywhere window, okay. As to where it is in that window. >>All right, Raghu, thank you so much for taking valuable time out of your conference time here for the queue. I really appreciate Dave and I both appreciate your friendship. Congratulations on the success as CEO, cuz we've been following your trials and tribulations and endeavors for many years and it's been great to chat with you. >>Yeah. Yeah. It's been great to chat with you, not just today, but yeah. Over a period of time and you guys do great work with this, so >>Yeah. And you guys making, making all the right calls at VMware. All right. More coverage. I'm shot. Dave ante cube coverage day one of three days of world war cup here in Moscone west, the cube coverage of VMware Explorer, 22 be right back.

>>We're back in Boston, the Cube's coverage of AWS reinforced 2022. My name is Dave ante. Steve Malanney is here as the CEO of Aviatrix longtime cube alum sort of collaborator on super cloud. Yeah. Uh, which we have an event, uh, August 9th, which you guys are participating in. So, um, thank you for that. And, yep. Welcome to the cube. >>Yeah. Thank you so great to be here as >>Always back in Boston. Yeah. I'd say good show. Not, not like blow me away. We were AWS, um, summit in New York city three weeks ago. I >>Took, heard it took three hours to get in >>Out control. I heard, well, there were some people two I, maybe three <laugh>, but there was, they expected like maybe nine, 10,000, 19,000 showed up. Now it's a free event. Yeah. 19,000 people. >>Oh, I didn't know it >>Was that many. It was unbelievable. I mean, it was packed. Yeah. You know, so it's a little light here and I think it's cuz you know, everybody's down the Cape, >>There are down the Cape, Rhode Island that's after the fourth. The thing is that we were talking about this. The quality of people are pretty good though. Yeah. Right. This is there's no looky lose it's everybody. That's doing stuff in cloud. They're moving in. This is no longer, Hey, what's this thing called cloud. Right. I remember three, four years ago at AWS. You'd get a lot of that, that kind of stuff. Some the summit meetings and things like that. Now it's, we're a full on deployment mode even >>Here in 2019, the conversation was like, so there's this shared responsibility model and we may have to make sure you understand. I mean, nobody's questioning that today. Yeah. It's more really hardcore best practices and you know how to apply tools. Yeah. You know, dos and don't and so it's a much more sophisticated narrative, I think. Yeah. >>Well, I mean, that's one of the things that Aviatrix does is our whole thing is architecturally. I would say, where does network security belong in the network? It shouldn't be a bolt on it. Shouldn't be something that you add on. It should be something that actually gets integrated into the fabric of the network. So you shouldn't be able to point to network security. It's like, can you point to the network? It's everywhere. Point to air it's everywhere. Network security should be integrated in the fabric and that wasn't done. On-prem that way you steered traffic to this thing called a firewall. But in the cloud, that's not the right architectural way. It it's a choke point. Uh, operationally adds tremendous amount of complexity, which is the whole reason we're going to cloud in the first place is for that agility and the ability to operationally swipe the card and get our developers running to put in these choke points is completely the wrong architecture. So conversations we're having with customers is integrate that security into the fabric of the network. And you get rid of all those, all those operational >>Issues. So explain that how you're not a, a checkpoint, but if you funnel everything into one sort of place >>In the, so we are a networking company, uh, it is uh, cloud networking company. So we, we were born in the cloud cloud native. We, we are not some on-prem networking solution that was jammed in the cloud, uh, wrapped >>In stack wrapped >>In, you know, or like that. No, no, no. And looking for wires, right? That's VM series from Palo. It doesn't even know it's in the cloud. Right. It's looking for wires. Um, and of course multicloud, cuz you know, Larry E said now, could you believe that on stage with sat, Nadela talking about multi-cloud now you really know we've crossed over to this is a, this is a thing, whoever would've thought you'd see that. But anyway, so we're networking. We're cloud networking, of course it's multi-cloud networking and we're gonna integrate these intelligent services into the fabric. And one of those is, is networking. So what happens is you should do security everywhere. So the place to do it is at every single point in the network that you can make a decision and you embed it and actually embed it into the network. So it's that when you're making a decision of does that traffic need to go somewhere or not, you're doing a little bit of security everywhere. And so what, it looks like a giant firewall effectively, but it's actually distributed in software through every single point in a network. >>Can I call it a mesh? >>It's kind of a mesh you can think of. Yeah, it's a fabric. >>Okay. It's >>A, it's a fabric that these advanced services, including security are integrated into that fabric. >>So you've been in networking much of >>Your career career, >>37 years. All your career. Right? So yay. Cisco Palo Alto. Nicera probably missing one or two, but so what do you do with all blue coat? Blue coat? What do you do with all that stuff? That's out there that >>Symantics. >>Yes. <laugh> keep going. >>Yeah, I think that's it. That's >>All I got. Okay. So what do you do with all that stuff? That's that's out there, you rip and replace it. You, >>So in the cloud you mean yeah. >>All this infrastructure that's out there. What is that? Well, you >>Don't have it in the right. And so right now what's happening is people, look, you can't change too many things. If you're a human, you know, they always tell you don't change a job, get married and have a kid or something all in the same year. Like they just, just do one of 'em cuz you it's too much. When people move to the cloud, what they do is they tend to take what they do on Preem and they say, look, I'm gonna change one thing. We're gonna go to the cloud, everything else. I'm gonna keep the same. Cuz I don't wanna change three things. So they kind of lift and shift their same mentality. They take their firewalls, their next gen fire. I want them, they take all the things that they currently do. And they say, I'm gonna try to do that in the cloud. >>It's not really the right way to do it. But sometimes for people that are on-prem people, that's the way to get started and I'll screw it up and not screw it up and, and not change too many things. And look, I'm just used to that. And, and then I'll, then I'll go to change things, to be more cloud native, then I'll realize I can get rid of this and get rid of that and do that. But, but that's where people are. The first thing is bring these things over. We help them do that, right? From a networking perspective, I'll make it easier to bring your old security stuff in. But in parallel to that, we start adding things into the fabric and what's gonna happen is eventually we start adding all these things and things that you can't do separately. We start doing anomaly detection. We start doing behavioral analysis. Why? Because the entire network, we are the data plan. We see everything. And so we can start doing things that a standalone device can't do because not all the traffic steered to them. It can only control what's steered to you. And then eventually what's happening is people look at that device. And then they look at us and then they look at the device and they look at us and they go, why do I have both of this? And we go, I don't know. >>You don't need it. >>Well, can I get rid of that other thing? That's a tool. >>Sure. And there's not a trade off. There's not a trade off. You >>Don't have to. No. Now people rid belts and suspenders. Yeah. Cause it's just, who has, who has enough? Who has too much security buddy? They're gonna, they're gonna do belt suspenders. You know anything they can do. But eventually what will happened is they'll look at what we do and they'll go, that's good enough. That happened to me. When I was at Palo Alto networks, we inserted as a firewall. They kept their existing firewall. They had all these other devices and eventually all those went away and you just had a NextGen >>Firewall just through attrition, >>Through Atian. You're like, you're looking, you go, well, that platform is doing all these functions. Same. Thing's gonna happen to us. The platform of networking's gonna do all your network security devices. So any tool or agent or external, you know, device that you have to steer traffic to ISS gonna go away. You're not gonna need it. >>And, and you talking multi-cloud obviously, >>And then don't wanna do the same thing. Whether man Azure, you know the same. >>Yeah. >>Same, same experie architecture, same experience, same set of services. True. Multi-cloud native. Like you, that's what you want. And oh, by the way, skill, gap, skill shortage is a real thing. And it's getting worse. Cause now with the recession, you think you're gonna be able to add more people. Nope. You're gonna have less people. How do I do this? Any multicloud world with security and all this kind of stuff. You have to put the intelligence in the software, not on your people. Right? >>So speaking of recession. Yep. As a CEO of a well funded company, that's got some momentum. How are you approaching it? Do you have like, did you bring in the war time? Conig I mean, you've been through, you know, downturns before. This is you are you >>I'm on war time already. >>Okay. So yeah. Tell me more about how you you're kind of approaching this >>So recession down. So didn't change what we were doing one bit, because I run it that way from the very beginning. So I've been around 30 years, that's >>Told me he he's like me. You know what he said? >>Yeah. Or maybe >>I'm like, I want be D cuz he said, you know, people talk about, you know, only do things that are absolutely necessary during times like this. I always do things that are only, >>That's all I >>Do necessary. Why would you ever do things that aren't necessary? >><laugh> you'd be surprised. Most companies don't. Yeah. Uh, recession's very good for people like snowflake and for us because we run that way anyway. Mm-hmm <affirmative> um, I, I constantly make decisions that we have to go and dip there's people that aren't right for the business. I move 'em out. Like I don't wait for some like Sequoia stupid rest in peace. The world's ending fire all your people that has no impact on me because I already operated that way. So we, we kind of operate that way and we are, we are like sat Nadel even came out and kind of said, I don't wanna say cloud is recession proof, but it kind of is, is we are so look, our top customer spends 5 million a year. Nothing. We haven't even started yet. David that's minuscule. We're not macro. We're micro 5 million a year for these big enterprises is nothing right. SA Nadel is now starting to count people who do billion dollar agreements with him billion over a period of number of years. Like that's the, the scale we have not even >>Gun billion dollar >>Agreements. We haven't even under begun to understand the scope of what's happening in the cloud. Right. And so yeah, the recession's happening. I don't know. I guess it's impacting somebody. It's not impacting me. It's actually accelerating things because it's a flight to quality and customers go and say, I can't get gear on on-prem anyway, cuz of the, uh, shortage, you know, the, uh, uh, get chips. Um, and that's not the right thing. So guess what the recession says, I'm gonna stop spending more money there and I'm gonna put it into the cloud. >>All right. So you opened up Pandora's box, man. I wanna ask you about your sort of management philosophy. When you come into a company to take, to go lead a company like that. Yeah. How, what, what's your approach to assess the team? Who do you, who do you decide? How do you decide who to keep on the bus? Who to throw off the bus put in the right seats. So how long does that take you? >>Doesn't take long. When I join, we were 30, 30, 8 people. We're now 525. Um, and my view on everything and I I've never met Frank Lubin, but I guarantee you, he has the same philosophy. You have a one year contract me included next year, the board might come to me and say, you were the right CEO for this year. You're not next year. Ben Horowitz taught me that it's a one year contract. There's no multi-year contract. So everybody in the company, including the CEO has a one year >>Contract. So you would say that to the board. Hey, if you can find somebody better, >>If, and, and you know what, I'll be the first one to pull myself, fire myself and say, we're, we're replacing me with somebody better right now. There isn't anybody better. So it's me. So, okay, next year maybe there's somebody better. Or we hit a certain point where I'm not the right guy. I'll I'll, I'll pull myself out as the CEO, but also internally the same thing just because you're the right guy this year. And we hire people for the, what you need to do this year. We're not gonna, we don't hire, oh, like this is the mistake. A lot of companies make, well, we wanna be a billion dollars in sales. So we're gonna go hire some loser from HPE. Who's worked at a company for a billion dollars. And by the way has no idea how they became a billion dollars, right. In revenue or billions of dollars. >>But we're gonna go hire 'em because they must know more than we do. And what every single time you bring them in what you realize, they're idiots. They have no idea how we got to that. And so you, you don't pre-hire for where you want to be. You hire for where you are that year. And then if it's not right, and then if it's not right, you'd be really nice to them. Have great severance packages, be, be respectful for people and be honest with them. I guarantee you Frank, Salman's not, if you're not just have this conversation with a sales guy before I came into here, very straight conversation, Northeast hockey player mentality. We're straight. If you're not working out or I don't think you're doing things right. You're gonna know. And so it's a one year, it's a one year contract. That's what you do. So you don't have time. You don't the luxury of >>Time. So, so that's probably the hardest part of, of any leadership job is, and people don't like confrontation. They like to put it off, but you don't run away from it. It's >>All in a confrontation, right? That's what relationships have built. Why do war buddies hang out with each other? Cuz they've gone through hell, right? It's in the confrontation. And it's, it's actually with customers too, right? If there's an issue, you don't run from it. You actually bring it up in a very straightforward manner and say, Hey, we got a problem, right? They respect you. You respect them, blah, blah, blah. And then you come out of it and go, you know, you have to fight like, look with your wife. You have to fight. If you don't fight, it's not a relationship you've gotta see in that, in that tension is where the relationship's >>Built. See, I should go home and have a fight tonight. You gotta have a fight with your wife. <laugh> you know, you mentioned Satia and Nadella and Larry Ellison. Interesting point. I wanna come back to that. What Oracle did is actually pretty interesting, do we? For their use case? Yeah. You know, it's not your thing. It's like low latency database across clouds. Yeah. Who would ever thought that? But >>We love it. We love it because it drives multi-cloud it drives. Um, and, and, and I actually think we're gonna have multi-cloud applications that are gonna start happening. Um, right now you don't, you have developers that, that, that kind of will use one cloud. But as we start developing and you call it the super cloud, right. When that starts really happening, the infrastructure's gonna allow that networking and network security is that bottom layer that Aviatrix helps once that gets all handled. The app, people are gonna say, so there's no friction. So maybe I can use autonomous database here. I can use this service from GCP. I can use that service and, and put it all into one app. So where's the app run. It's a multicloud app. Doesn't exist today. >>No, that doesn't happen today. >>It's it's happen. It's gonna happen. >>But that's kind of what the vision was. No, seven, eight years ago of what >>It's >>Gonna, that would be, you know, the original premise of hybrid. Right? Right. Um, I think Chuck Hollis, the guy was at EMC at the time he wrote this piece on, he called it private cloud, but he was really describing hybrid cloud application and running in both places that never happened. But it's starting to, I mean, the infrastructure is getting put in place to enable that, I guess is what you're saying. >>Yep. >>Yeah. >>Cool. And multicloud is, is becoming not just four plus one is a lot of enterprises it's becoming plus one, meaning you're gonna have more and more. And then there won't be infrastructure clouds like AWS and so forth, but it's gonna be industry clouds. Right? You've you've talked about that again, back to super clouds. You're gonna have Goldman Sachs creating clouds and you're gonna have AI companies creating clouds. You're gonna have clouds at the edge, you know, for edge computing and all these things all need to be networked with network security integrated. And you mentioned fact >>Aviatrix you mentioned Ben Horowitz, that's mark Andreesen. All, all companies are software companies. All companies are becoming cloud companies. Yeah. Or, or they're missing missing opportunities or they might get disrupted. >>Yeah. Every single company I talk to now, you know, whether you're Heineken, they don't think of themselves as a beer company anymore. We are the most technologically, you know, advanced brewer in the world. Like they all think they're a technology company. Now, whether you're making trucks, whether you're making sneakers, whether you're making beer, you're now a technology company, every single company in >>The world, we are too, we're we're building a media cloud. You're you know, John's, it's a technology company laying that out and yeah. That's we got developers doing that. That's our, that's our future. Yep. You know? Cool. Hey, thanks for coming on, man. Thank you. Great to see you. Thank you for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be back right after this short break. It keeps coverage. AWS reinforced 20, 22 from Boston. Keep it right there. >>You tired? How many interviewed.

(gentle music) >> We're back at the Seaport in Boston. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Paul Gillin. Tracie Zenti is here. She's the Director of Global Partner Management at Microsoft, and Tom Anderson is the Vice President of Ansible at Red Hat. Guys, welcome to theCube. >> Hi, thank you. >> Yep. >> Ansible on Azure, we're going to talk about that. Why do I need Ansible? Why do I need that kind of automation in Azure? What's the problem you're solving there? >> Yeah, so automation itself is connecting customers' infrastructure to their end resources, so whether that infrastructure's in the cloud, whether it's in the data center, or whether it's at the edge. Ansible is the common automation platform that allows customers to reuse automation across all of those platforms. >> And so, Tracie, I mean, Microsoft does everything. Why do you need Red Hat to do Ansible? >> We want that automation, right? We want our customers to have that ease of use so they can be innovative and bring their workloads to Azure. So that's exactly why we want Ansible. >> Yeah, so kind of loaded questions here, right, as we were sort of talking offline. The nature of partnerships is changing. It's about co-creating, adding value together, getting those effects of momentum, but maybe talk about how the relationship started and how it's evolving and I'd love to have your perspective on the evolving nature of ecosystems. >> Yeah, I think the partnership with Red Hat has been strong for a number of years. I think my predecessor was in the role for five years. There was a person in there for a couple years before that. So I think seven or eight years, we've been working together and co-engineering. Red Hat enterprised Linux. It's co-engineered. Ansible was co-engineered. We work together, right? So we want it to run perfectly on our platform. We want it to be a good customer experience. I think the evolution that we're seeing is in how customers buy, right? They want us to be one company, right? They want it to be easy. They want be able to buy their software where they run it on the cloud. They don't want to have to call Red Hat to buy and then call us to buy and then deploy. And we can do all that now with Ansible's the first one we're doing this together and we'll grow that on our marketplace so that it's easy to buy, easy to deploy, easy to keep track of. >> This is not just Ansible in the marketplace. This is actually a fully managed service. >> That's right. >> What is the value you've added on top of that? >> So it runs in the customer account, but it acts kind of like SaaS. So Red Hat gets to manage it, right? And it's in their own tenant. So they get in the customer's own tenant, right? So with a service principle, Red Hat's able to do that management. Tom, do you want to add anything to that? >> Yeah, the customers don't have to worry about managing Ansible. They just worry about using Ansible to automate their infrastructure. So it's a kind of a win-win situation for us and for our customers. We manage the infrastructure for them and the customer's resources themselves and they get to just focus on automating their business. >> Now, if they want to do cross-cloud automation or automation to their hybrid cloud, will you support that as well? >> 100%. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. >> We're totally fine with that, right? I mean, it's unrealistic to think customers run everything in one place. That isn't enterprise. That's not reality. So yeah, I'm fine with that. >> Well, that's not every cloud provider. >> No (laughing) that's true. >> You guys over here, at Amazon, you can't even say multicloud or you'll get thrown off the stage. >> Of course we'd love it to all run on Azure, but we want our customers to be happy and have choice, yeah. >> You guys have all, I mean, you've been around a long time. So you had a huge on-prem state, brought that to the cloud, and Azure Stack, I mean, it's been around forever and it's evolved. So you've always believed in, whatever you call it, Hybrid IT, and of course, you guys, that's your call of mission. >> Yeah, exactly. >> So how do you each see hybrid? Where's the points of agreement? It sounds like there's more overlap than gaps, but maybe you could talk about your perspective. >> Yeah, I don't think there are any points of disagreement. I think for us, it's meeting our customers where their center of gravity is, where they see their center of management gravity. If it's on Azure, great. If it's on their data center, that's okay, too. So they can manage to or from. So if Azure is their center of gravity, they can use automation, Ansible automation, to manage all the things on Azure, things on other cloud providers, things in their data center, all the way out to their edge. So they have the choice of what makes the most sense to them. >> And Azure Arc is obviously, that's how Azure Stack is evolving, right? >> Yeah, and we have Azure Arc integration with Ansible. >> Yeah. >> So yeah, absolutely. And I mean, we also have Rell on our marketplace, right? So you can buy the basement and you could buy the roof and everything in between. So we're growing the estate on marketplace as well to all the other products that we have in common. So absolutely. >> How much of an opportunity, just go if we go inside? Give us a little peak inside Microsoft. How much of an opportunity does Microsoft think about multi-cloud specifically? I'm not crazy about the term multicloud, 'cause to me, multicloud, runs an Azure, runs an AWS, runs on Google, maybe runs somewhere else. But multicloud meaning that common experience, your version of hybrid, if you will. How serious is Microsoft about that as a business opportunity? A lot of people would say, well, Microsoft really doesn't want. They want everything in their cloud. But I'd love to hear from you if that is good. >> Well, we have Azure Red Hat OpenShift, which is a Microsoft branded version of OpenShift. We have Ansible now on our marketplace. We also, of course, we have AKS. So I mean, container strategy runs anywhere. But we also obviously have services that enhance all these things. So I think, our marketplace is a third party marketplace. It is designed to let customers buy and run easily on Azure and we'd want to make that experience good. So I don't know that it's... I can't speak to our strategy on multicloud, but what I can speak to is when businesses need to do innovation, we want it to be easy to do that, right? We want it to be easy to buy, defined, buy, deploy, manage, and that's what we're trying to accomplish. >> Fair to say, you're not trying to stop it. >> No, yeah, yeah. >> Whether or not it evolves into something that you heavily lean into or see. >> When we were talking before the cameras turned on, you said that you think marketplaces are the future. Why do you say that? And how will marketplaces be differentiated from each other in the future? >> Well, our marketplace is really, first of all, I think, as you said off camera, they're now. You can buy now, right? There's nothing that stops you. But to me, it's an extension of consumerization of IT. I've been in IT and manageability for about 23 years and full automation is what we and IT used to always talk about, that single pane of glass. How do you keep track of everything? How do you make it easy? How do you support? And IT is always eeking out that last little bit of funding to do innovation, right? So what we can do with consumerization of IT is make it easier to innovate. Make it cheaper to innovate, right? So I think marketplaces do that, right? They've got gold images you can deploy. You're also able to deploy custom images. So I think the future is as particularly with ours, like we support, I don't remember the exact number, but over a hundred countries of tax calculation. We've got like 17 currencies. So as we progress and customers can run from anywhere in the world and buy from anywhere in the world and make it simple to do those things that used to take maybe two months to spin up services for innovation and Ansible helps with that, that's going to help enterprises innovate faster. And I think that's what marketplaces are really going to bring to the forefront is that innovation. >> Tom, why did Ansible, I'm going to say one, I mean, you're never done. But it was unclear a few years ago, which automation platform was going to win in the marketplace and clearly, Ansible has taken a leading position. Why? What were the factors that led to that? >> Honestly, it was the strength of the community, right? And Red Hat leaning into that community to support that community. When you look out at the upstream community for Ansible and the number of participants, active participants that are contributing to the community just increases its value to everybody. So the number of integrations, the number of things that you can automate with Ansible is in the thousands and thousands, and that's not because a group of Red Hat engineers wrote it. That's because our community partners, like Microsoft wrote the user integrations for Ansible. F5 does theirs. Customers take those and expand on them. So the number of use cases that we can address through the community and through our partners is immense. >> But that doesn't just happen. I mean, what have you done to cultivate that community? >> Well, it's in Red Hat's DNA, right? To be the catalyst in a community, to bring partners and users together, to share their knowledge and their expertise and their skills, and to make the code open. So anybody can go grab Ansible from upstream and start doing stuff with it, if they want. If they want to mature on it and management for it and support all the other things that Red Hat provides, then they come to us for a subscription. So it's really been about sort of catalyzing and supporting that community, and Red Hat is a good steward of these upstream communities. >> Is Azure putting Ansible to use actually within your own platform as opposed to being a managed service? Are you adopting Ansible for automation of the Azure Platform? >> I'll let you answer that. >> So two years ago, Microsoft presented at AnsibleFest, our fall conference, Budd Warrack, I'm butchering his last name, but he came on and told how the networking team at Microsoft supports about 35,000 access points across hundreds of buildings, all the Microsoft campuses using Ansible to do that. Fantastic story if you want to go on YouTube and look up that use case. So Microsoft is an avid user of the Ansible technology in their environment. >> Azure is kind of this really, I mean, incredible strategic platform for Microsoft. I wonder if you could talk about Azure as a honeypot for partners. I mean, it seems, I mean, the momentum is unbelievable. I mean, I pay attention to their earnings calls every quarter of Azure growth, even though I don't know what the exact number is, 'cause they won't give it to me but they give me the growth rates and it's actually accelerating. >> No lie. (Tracie laughing) >> I've got my number. It's in the tens of billions. I mean, I'm north of 35 billion, but growing at the high 30%. I mean, it's remarkable. So talk about the importance of that to the ecosystem as a honey pot. >> Paul Satia said it right. Many times partners are essential to our strategy. But if you think about it, software solves problems. We have software that solves problems. They have software that solves problems, right? So when IT and customers are thinking of solving a problem, they're thinking software, right? And we want that software to run on Azure. So partners have to be essential to our strategy. Absolutely. It's again, we're one team to the customer. They want to see that as working together seamlessly. They don't want it to be hardware Azure plus software. So that's absolutely critical to our success. >> And if I could add for us, the partners are super important. So some of our launch partners are like F5 and CyberArk who have certified Ansible content for Ansible on Azure. We have service provider partners like Accenture and Kindra that are launching with us and providing our joint customers with help to get up to speed. So it really is a partner play. >> Absolutely. >> Where are you guys taking this? Where do you want to see it go? What are some of the things that observers should pay attention to as marketers of success and evolution? >> Well, certainly for us, it's obviously customer adoption, but it is providing them with patterns. So out of the box patterns that makes it easy for them to get up and running and solve the use cases and problems that they run into most frequently. Problems ain't the right word. Challenges or opportunities on Azure to be able to automate the things. So we're really leaning into the different use cases, whether it's edge, whether it's cloud, whether it's cloud to edge, all of those things. We want to provide users with out of the box Ansible content that allows 'em to just get up and automating super fast, and doing that on Azure makes it way easier for us because we don't have to focus on the install and the setting up and configuring it. It's all just part of the experience >> And Tracie, for Microsoft, it's world domination with a smile. (all laughing) >> Of course. No, of course not. No, I think it's to continue to grow the co-engineering we do across all of the Red Hat products. I can't even tell you the number of things we work on together, but to look forward strategically at what opportunities we have across our products and theirs to integrate like Arc and Ansible, and then making it all easy to buy, making it available so that customers have choice and they can buy how they want to and simplify. So we're just going to continue to do that and we're at that infancy right now and as we grow, it'll just get easier and easier with more and more products. >> Well, bringing the edge into the equation is going to be really interesting. Microsoft with its gaming, vector is amazing, and recent, awesome acquisitions. All the gamers are excited about that and that's a huge edge play. >> You'll have to bring my son on for that interview. >> Yeah. >> My son will interview. >> He knows more than all of us, I'm sure. What about Ansible? What's ahead for Ansible? >> Edge, so part of the Red Hat play at the Edge. We've getting a lot of customer pull for both industrial Edge use cases in the energy sector. We've had a joint customer with Azure that has a combined Edge platform. Certainly, the cloud stuff that we're announcing today is a huge growth area. And then just general enterprise automation. There's lots of room to run there for Ansible. >> And lots of industries, right? >> Yeah. >> Telco, manufacturing. >> Retail. >> Retail. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. There's so many places to go, yeah, that need the help. >> The market's just, how you going to count it anymore? It's just enormous. >> Yeah. >> It's the entire GDP the world. But guys, thanks for coming to theCUBE. >> Yeah. >> Great story. Congratulations on the partnership and the announcements and look forward to speaking with you in the future. >> Yeah, thanks for having us. >> Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. And keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for Paul Gillin. This is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. We'll be right back at Seaport in Boston. (gentle music)