>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Cube. It's the Emerald 2019 our 10th year water wall coverage. Three days, two sets, lots of content. Instrument of my co host is Justin Warren. And one of the big stories coming into the show is VM Wear actually went on an acquisition spree. A hold number of acquisitions. Boston based Carbon Black over $2 billion Pivotal brought back into the fold for also, you know, around that ballpark of money on Happy to Welcome to the program. One of those acquisitions, such and Conti, is sitting to my right. He's the co founder of Hana is also a professor at Stanford University. Thank you so much for joining us and joining us. Also for the segment. Shakeri Air, the executive vice president general manager of Telco Edge Cloud at VM Wear, Shaker said, Yes, there's a lot of acquisitions not to play favorites, but maybe this is his favorite. No question about it. All right. Eso such in, you know, boy, you know the Paolo Alto Stanford connection. We were thinking back, You know, the Founders Of'em where, of course, you know came from Stanford. Many acquisitions over the year, including the mega next era acquisition. You know, quite a few years ago, I came out of Stanford. Give us what was the genesis in the Why of Hana. >> It's actually interesting Stanford Connection to So I've been a faculty at Stanford for the last 10 years on dhe. I have seen the SD and moment very close on up front on one of the dirty secrets of S. T M says it makes the netbooks programmable, but someone still has to write the programs on. So that's usually a very complex task on the pieces beyond the company was, Can we use the eye to learn how to program the network rather than humans having to program the network to do management or optimization? So the division really waas can be built? A network that learned how to optimize itself learns how to manage itself on the technology we're building. Is this a pipeline that basically tries to deliver on that for mobile? >> It's great, Sachin, you know, my background is networking and it feels like forever. We've been hooking well. We need to get people from the cli over to the gooey. But we know in today's rightly complex world, whether it's a I or just automation, humans will not be able to keep up with it. And, you know, we know that that's where a lot of the errors would happen is when we entered humans into doing some of this. So what are some of the key drivers that make this solution possible today that, you know, it might not have been able to do done when when one train was first rolling out the first S t n? >> Yeah, talk about it in three dimensions. The one is, Why do we need it today? Right on. Then what is being what is happening that is enabling this today, right? So, apart from what I talked about Stu and I think the other big driver is, the way I like to think about it is that the Internet is going from a means of consumption to a means of control and interaction. So, increasingly, the application to BC driving the next big decade, our very way of controlling things remotely or the network like a self driving car, or be in interacting but very highly rich visual content like E. R. India. So the applications are becoming a lot more demanding on the Net. At the same time, the network is going through a phase off, opening up on becoming disaggregated network complexity is increasing significantly. So the motivation behind the company and why I thought that was the right time to start the company was these two friends are gonna collide with five coming along the applications that are driving five g and then at the complexity increasing our five. So that's why we started the company. What actually is enabling. This is the fact that we have seen a lot of progress with the eye over the last few years. It hasn't really. It hadn't really been applied at scale to networks and specifically mobile that book. So we definitely saw no, actually there, but increasingly, ah, lot of the infrastructure that is being deployed there was more and more telemetry available. There was more and more data becoming available and that also obviously feet this whole engine. So I think the availability of all of these Big Data Technologies Maur data coming in from the network and the need because of these applications and that complexity. I think there's a perfect confluence >> that there's lots of lots of II floating around at the moment, and there's different flavors of it as well. So this machine learning there's Aye aye, sir. When when you say that there's there's a I behind this What? What particular kind of machine learning or a Y you're using to drive these networks? >> This a few different techniques because the problems we solve our anomaly detection off. Then problems are happening in the network predicting how network conditions are going to evolve. For example, predicting what your devices throughput is gonna be the next 30 seconds. We're also learning how to control the knobs in the neck using AI ai techniques. So each of these has different classes of the eye techniques. So, for example, for control we're using reinforcement learning, which is the same technique that Google used to kind of been on alphago. How do you learn how to play a game basically, but area the game you're playing it optimizing the network. But for the others, it's a record of neural networks to do predictions on Time series data. So I think it's a combination of techniques I wouldn't get to wherever the techniques. It's ultimately. But what is the problem you're trying to solve? And then they picked the right technique to solve it, >> and so on that because the aye aye is actually kind of stupid in that it doesn't know what they wouldn't. What an optimized network looks like. We have to show it what that is. So what? How do you actually train these systems to understand? But what is an optimized network? What? How does how does that tell you? Define this is what my network optimal state should be. >> So that's a great question, because in networking like that, any other discipline that wants to use the eye. There's not a lot of label data. What is the state I want to end up at what is a problem state or what is a good state? All of this is labels that someone has to enter, and that's not available axe kid, and we're never gonna be able to get it at the scale we wanted. So one of our secret sauce is if you will, is semi supervised learning but basic ideas that we're taking a lot of domain knowledge on using that domain knowledge to figure out what should be the right features for these models so that we can actually train these models in a scalable fashion. If you just throw it a lot of data any I model, it just does not converge. Hardly constructive features on the other thing is, how do I actually define what are good kind of end state conditions? What's a good network? And that's coming from domain knowledge to That's how we're making I scale for the stomach. >> I mean, overall, I would say, as you look at that, some of the parameters in terms of what you want to achieve are actually quite obvious things like fewer dropped calls for a cellular network. You know, that's good. So figuring out what the metrics need to be and what the tuning needs before the network, that's where Hana comes in in terms of the right people. >> All right, so shake her. Give us a little bit of an understanding as to where this fits into the networking portfolio. You know, we heard no we heard from Patty or two ago. You know what would have strong push? Networking is on the NSX number. Speaks for itself is what's happening with that portfolio? >> No, absolutely. In fact, what we're doing here is actually broader than networking. It's sort off very pertinent to the network off a carrier. But that is a bulk off their business, if you will. I think if you sort of go back and look at the emirs of any any, any vision, this is the notion of having any cloud in any application land on any cloud and then any device connected to those applications on that any cloud side we are looking at particularly to cloud pools, one which we call the Telco cloud and the other is the edge cloud. And both of these fortuitously are now becoming sort of transforming the context of five G. So in one case, in the telco cloudy or looking at their core and access networks, the radio networks, all of this getting more cloud ified, which essentially leads toe greater agility in service deployment, and then the edge is a much more distributed architecture. Many points over which you can have compute storage network management and security deployed. So if you now think about the sort of thousands off nodes on dhe virtualized clouds, it is just impossible to manage this manual. So what you do need is greater. I mean, orders of magnitude, greater automation in the ability to go and manage and infrastructure like this. So, with our technology now enhanced by Johanna in that network portfolio in the Telco Edge Cloud portfolio, were able to go back to the carriers and tell them, Look, we're not just foundational infrastructure providers. We can also then help you automate help you get visibility into your networks and just help you overall manager networks better for better customer expedience and better performance. >> So what are some of the use coasters that you see is being enabled by five G? There's a lot of hype about five short the moment and not just five jail. So things like WiFi six. Yeah, it would appear to me that this kind of technique would work equally well for five g Your wife. I short a WiFi six. So what are some of the use cases? You see these thieves service providers with Toko Edge clouds using this for? Yeah, So I think overall, first of all, I'd >> say enterprise use cases are going to become a pretty prominent part off five, even though a lot off the buzz and hype ends up being about consumers and how much bandwidth and data they could get in or whether five chicken passing preys or not. But in fact, things like on premise radio on whether that is private. Lt it's 40 or five t. These are the kinds of Uschi cases that were actually quite excited about because these could be deployed literally today. I mean, sometimes they're not regulated. You can go in with, like, existing architectures. You don't need to wait for standardization to break open a radio architecture. You could actually do it, Um, and >> so this sort off going in and >> providing connectivity on an enterprise network that is an enhanced state off where it is today. We've already started that journey, for example, with yellow cloud and branch networking. Now, if we can take that toe a radio based architecture for enterprise networking, So we think, ah, use case like that would be very prominent. And then based on edge architectures distributed networks now becoming the next generation Cdn is an example. That's another application that we think would be very prominent. And then I think, for consumers just sort of getting things like gaming applications off on edge network. Those are all the kinds of applications that would consume this sort off high skill, reliability and performance. >> Can you give a little sketch of the company pre acquisition, you know, is the product all g eight? How many customers you? Can you say what you have there? Sure >> it does us roughly three years old. The company itself so relatively young. We were around 33 people total. We had a product that is already deployed with chairman Telcos. So it is in production deployment with Chairman Telco Ondas in production trials with a couple of other tier one telcos. So we built a platform to scale to the largest networks in the world on If I, if I were to summarize it, be basically can observe, makes sense or in real time about every user in the network, what their experiences like actually apply. I modeled on top of that to optimize each user's expedience because one of the vision bee had was the network today is optimized for the average. But as all off our web expedience personalized netbook experiences, not personalized can be build a network Very your experiences personalized for you for the applications, your running on it. And this was kind of a foundation for that. >> I mean, we In fact, as we've been deploying our telco Cloud and carrier networks, we've also been counting roughly how many subscribers are being served up. Today we have over 800 million subscribers, and in fact, I was talking to someone and we were talking about that does. Being over 10% off the population of the world is now running on the lack of memory infrastructure. And then along comes Johanna and they can actually fine tune the data right down to a single subscriber. Okay, so now you can see the sort of two ends of the scale problem and how we can do this using a I. It's pretty powerful. Excellent. >> So So if we have any problems with our our service fighters, b tech support and I love to hear from both of you, you know what this acquisition position means for the future of the places and obviously VM wear global footprint. A lot of customers and resource is. But you know what I mean to your team in your product. >> I mean, definitely accelerating how quickly we can now start deploying. This and the rest of the world be as a small company, have very focused on a few key customers to prove the technology we have done that on. I think now it's the face to scale it on. Repeat it across a lot of other customers, but I think it also gives us a broader canvas to play that right. So we were focused on one aspect of the problem which is around, if you will, intelligence and subscriber experience. But I think with the cloud on but the orchestration products that are coming out of the ember, we can now start to imagine a full stock that you could build a network of full carrier network code off using using remote technology. So I think it's a broad, more exciting, actually, for us to be able to integrate not just the network data but also other parts of the stock itself. And >> it strikes me that this probably isn't just limited to telcos, either. The service providers and carriers are one aspect of this bit particularly five G and things like deployments into factory automation. Yes, I can see a lot of enterprise is starting to become much in some ways a little bit like a tell go. And they would definitely benefit from this >> kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, in fact, that's the basis of our internal even bringing our telco and EJ and I ot together and a common infrastructure pool. And so we're looking at that. That's the capability for deploying this type of technology across that. So you're exactly right, >> Checker want to give you the last word, you know, Telco space, you know? And then, obviously the broader cloud has been, you know, a large growth area. What, you want people taking away from the emerald 2019 when it comes to your team? >> Yeah, I think. To me, Calico's have a tremendous opportunity to not just be the plumbing and networking providers that they can in fact, be both the clowns of tomorrow as well as the application providers of tomorrow. And I think we have the technology and both organically as well as through acquisitions like Ohana. Take them there. So I'm just super excited about the journey. Because I think while most of the people are talking about five D as this wave, that is just beginning for us, it's just a perfect coming together on many of these architectures that is going to take telcos into a new world. So we're super excited about taking them. >> Shaker. Thank you so much for joining against auction. Congratulations and good luck on the next phase of you and your team's journey along the way. Thank you. Thank you for Justin. Warren comes to Minutemen, Stay with us. Still a bit more to go for VM World 2019 and, as always, thank you for watching the Cube.

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum World 2019. Brought to you by VM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Hey, welcome back here and live here in Mosconi North. The Emerald 2019 Cube Live coverage on Shopping Day Volante Jr Jr. Who's here? EVP general manager, Telco and Edge of Cloud for Vienna. Where Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. I know you're super busy. We don't have a lot of time. Get right to it. Um five g a big part of the key. No discussion that's gonna enable a whole bunch of Pakal the pregame show pre gaming not even talk about that. Also. Telco on the Edge Computing Big part Michael Dell said, Edges the future Now these air to emerging areas for you guys. What's the positioning? What's the update? >> No, absolutely. I mean, if you look a tw telecom infrastructure. For the longest time, telcos have played a role just as pure basic connectivity providers. And with five g coming on board, they finally have an opportunity to break out of that and redefine the cloud off the future. So for us the big opportunity around five g is not just the better provisioning off like Higher Man With Service is to consumer for voice and data buy the whole set off new enterprise service is that can be provided on top of this five g network. And in order to be able to do that, you really need to go in with a virtualized telco Cloud architecture. Underneath that, and so we are working with carriers globally now preparing them for five G with an architecture that's going to help them deploy. New service is faster for both their consumer as well as enterprise. >> Going to be the white knight at, so to speak. For these telcos because they've been struggling for years over the top and any kind of differentiates service is even in the network layer. Exactly. I've had tons of rack and stack machine, so they're after their well, well stacked up in terms of computer storage. Also connectivity to the edge. That's the back hall. So you have back haul, which is connectivity. Companies that have massive expertise in scale but fumbling in operational cloud natives that >> by not just that, but I also think that having the idea off on application platform that allows them to go and deploy service is faster and then decide whether they're just going to play at the network connectivity level or at the application tear or a full SAS tear. These are all options that are open to them now with this notion off. Telco five G coupled with an NFI and cloud telco cloud infrastructure. Underneath that and never before have they had this option to doing that. And this is now open to them >> and the cloud native is there greenfield for AP supporter having applications on top of it. Exact icing on the cake, right? >> Exactly, Exactly. And so they're all looking at core architectures and then, potentially, their radio architectures now all being opened up toe deploying new service is that are much faster to provisions and then extending that to EJ and >> five G's deploying. So we know it's out there. So it is pre game is Pat, Guzman said. You know, not even an inning Yet in the metaphor of baseball innings, I >> gotta ask you get my phone. That's not that's fake ill. I know it >> did that with four g to >> skeptic e stands for evolution, which is coming soon. >> That's vaporware for tell Coke language. The surface area is going to radically get bigger with this capability. Yeah, security's gonna be baked in. This is the number one concern for io ti. And more importantly, industrial I ot We've been reporting on silicon angle dot com. This is a national security issue because we're under cyber attacks. Town's getting locked out with ransomware critical infrastructure exposed. We're free country, and I want to be free. We don't lock down. So you have security built into this new promiscuous landscape that is called the coyote Edge. Because you wanna have no perimeter. You want the benefits of cloud. But one whole malware is in there. One take over physical device could cost lives. >> Yeah, there's a big concern. Yeah. What's your thoughts? Yeah, No. So I think there >> are two ways of looking at it. One is the way you looked at it in terms of the security perimeter expanding and then us making sure that we have the right level off infrastructure security baked in to enable this to be an easier, manageable security architecture. This is sort of the pitch you heard from Mia Mary, even in the context of our acquisition of carbon black and how we're thinking about baking security into the infrastructure, the other way of looking at this is if you think about some of the concerns around providers off telecom infrastructure today and how there might be or might not be security back doors. This is happening in today's hardware infrastructure. Okay, so in fact, I would argue that a sick software defined architecture, er, actually ends up providing you greater levels of security. Because what you now have is the option off running all of these network functions as secured as software workloads in a policy envelope that you can introspect. And then you can decide what kind of security you want to deploy on what kind of workload. >> That's an innovative approach. But it doesn't change much, really, from an infrastructure standpoint, does it? Or does it? >> No, it does, >> because now, instead of having a hardware box where you have to worry, I mean, if it's a close, hard red box and you don't quite know what is happening there, the question is, is that more secure than a infrastructure radio running the software that you can actually introspect. I would argue that the software defined approach is more secure than having a hardware box that you don't know. >> I would buy the premise that certainly we know that supply chain concerned. You know the speculation Super Micro, which never was proved. >> It doesn't matter who the vendor is or what the country is. It really is a concern in terms of not being able to introspect what has happened Going inside >> for my tea shop. I'm running VM where operating I want developers. So now you're going to tell Coz you revitalize their business model? They had a rule out appy. Now what did you see? That connecting is gonna be connective tissue between >> I'll think about it. I didn't feel goto a telco. We look at really three stakeholders in there. One is I t the second Is there be to be or enterprise facing business and then the 3rd 1 is their core and access network or the CTO. We're now have a value proposition of having a uniform architecture across all three stakeholders with the uniform ability to create applications and drop it on top of each of these infrastructures with the ability to manage and secure these again in a uniform way, not just that, but also make this work well with other cloud infrastructures private, hyper scale, public as well as EJ. >> That's table stakes. You have to do that. These jokers have to operate whatever >> well it is, But it's not. I mean, if you think about what the infrastructure off a tailcoat today is, it's far from that, because it's it's sort of a closed environment. You can't access anything from a telco environment in order to go build an application to it, and it does not resemble anything like any club >> you could enable Telco. Just I'm just kind of thinking connecting the dots here real time in the Cube. If I'm a telco, hell, I'll take that VM wear on a deli and see model. Make me a cloud and I'll sell Cloud Service is to markets that kind of >> it is. Actually it's a very important part of our business model because most telcos would not move their own infrastructure from a network standpoint onto a public cloud. But they are eagerly awaiting the ability to operate their own network as a cloud, and if they can have somebody manage that for them, then that is very much within the >> you're enabling. An increase in the number of cloud service provides potentially the paint on the makeup of the telco tier one tier two tier three size. Pretty much >> potentially. I mean, it's taking an existing operator and having them operate in a more agile way and potentially increasing anew form off a cloud service >> provided telcos wouldn't move into the public cloud because of they want to control. And the cost is that right or it's >> mostly control. It's not about cost. It's about taking What is your sort of coordinating for, ah, packet corps or for a radio network? Yeah, and there is also an angle around competition, I think telcos our what in about the Amazons of the world and the azure eyes of the world potentially becoming a service provided >> themselves. And that's what I wanted to ask you about the business impact of all this discussion you guys were having is, you know, the cost for bits coming down. The amount of data is increasing faster. You got over the top providers just, you know, picking off the telcos. Telcos can't compete their infrastructures of so hardened. Will this all change that? >> Absolutely So. I think that it has the potential to changing all that. I don't think all the telcos will take advantage of it. Some off them might end up being more traditional and sort of sticking to where they were. But for those that are willing to make the leap, I mean, as an example, Vodafone is a customer that has actually gone in with this architecture with us. A. T and T is working with us with the Vela Cloud software from via Mary bringing a new form off branch computer branch connectivity through SD man. So these are all examples of telcos that are actually leading the >> charter. But if they don't lean in, they have this vision there either. Well, it's either because they're protected by their local government or they're going to go out of business. No, I would >> agree. I mean, it's sort of silly from our standpoint to be talking about five G and not thinking about this as the architecture for five, right? I mean, if you only focus on radio waves and your wireless network that's like a part of the problem, but you really need to have the ability to deploy these agile service's. Otherwise, you could get killed by >> the O. T. T. So how do you compete against the competition? What's the business plan that you have? C. Five G? We see that in the horizon that's evolving its evolution, so to speak. Pun intended on edge is certainly very relevant for enterprises, whether it's manufacturing or industrial or just people. Yeah, >> I'd say there are two things. One is a CZ. I'm sure you heard from folks at GM, where our vision is this notion of any any anywhere. We've talked about any cloud at any application that any device. So that becomes one of the strongest different chaining factors in terms of what V Amir can bring. Tow any of our customers compared to the competition, right? Nobody can actually make it really across these dimensions. If you then take that architecture and use that to deploy a telco cloud, we're now making investments that are telco specific that allow the tailcoat than take this and make the most out of it. As an example, we're investing in open stack we're investing in container ization. We just bought a company called Johanna and Johanna essentially allows the operator to go and provide metrics from their radio access networks. Use at that to train a learning engine and then feed that back so that the operator can tune their network to get like fewer dropped calls in the region. So if you combined technology like that with this, any cloud infrastructure that we have underneath that that's the best in class deployment methodology for any. Tell Cho to deploy >> five. Your business model metrics for you internally is get Maur deployments. What stage of development five G certainly is in a certain stage, but you know, edges there. Where is the Progress bar? If you're the kind of oh, >> it's actually mold phenomenally. I mean, every time we have conversations like this, we're moving about further in terms off. How many carriers are deploying on via mare on a telco cloud Architecture? How many subscribers are basically being serviced by an architectural like this? And then how many network functions are being deployed? Two of'em air architecture. So we are over 100 carriers now we are over. We have about 800 million subscribers, or so that about globally are being serviced by a V M Air supported network. On then, we have essentially over 120 network functions that >> are operating on top of you. Usually bring in all the same stuff that's announced that the show that stuff's gonna fold into the operating platform or Joe Chuckles have different requirements. Off course. It's >> both. We take the best of what is there from the sort of overall vehement factory and then as a team. My team then builds other widgets on top that are telco specific. >> How big is your your tam up Terry for you? >> Well, so the best way to look at it as telcos globally spend about a trillion dollars in capital investment and then probably to X that in terms of their operating expenditure over the course off all of the things that they do right? And out of that, I would say probably a tent off that. So if you take about $100 billion opportunity, opens itself up toe infrastructure investment in terms off the kinds of things that we're talking about now, they're not gonna move from like 0 200 of course. So if you take some period of time, I would say good subset off that $100 billion opportunity is gonna open itself up >> to it. This kind of business cases, eliminating that two x factor, at least reducing it. Is that exactly? That's not just that Service is that's, >> ah, cost reduction alternative. But then you have the ability to go deploy. Service is faster, so it's really a combination off both sort of carrot and the stick, right? I mean, the character here is the ability to go monetize More new service is with five G faster. The stick is that if you don't do it, Ortiz will get there faster and your costs off. Deploying your simple service is will increase his >> telcos, in your opinion, have what they have to do to get the DNA chops to actually be able to compete with the over to top OT T providers and be more agile. I mean, it's obviously sort of new skills that they have to bring in a new talent. Yeah, >> well, first and foremost, they need toe get to a point where their infrastructure is agile and they get into a business model off knowing how to monetize that agile infrastructure. So, for example, they could offer network as a service on a consume as you go basis. They could offer a platform as a service on top off that network in order for or titties to go build applications so they can do Rev shares with the forties. Or they could have offer. Full service is where they could go in and say, We are the conferencing provider for videoconferencing for enterprises. I mean, these are all models that >> the great conversation love to do. Your Palo Alto? Yes. Have you in our studio want to do more of a deep dive? We love the serious, super provocative, and it's important Final question for you. Though Pat Sr here on the Cube, lay asked him, Look back in the past 10 years. Yeah, look back in the next 10 years. What waves should everyone be riding? He said three things that working security and kubernetes humans being number one actually promoting convinced everyone for the ride, for obvious reasons, clouded. I get that, but networking Yeah, that's your world. That's changing. Which which events do you go to where you meet your audience out there in the telco because networking is a telco fundamental thing. Sure moving packets around. This is a big thing, >> eh? So far, operator networking related stuff, I would say. I mean the biggest shows that for us would be Mobile World Congress as an example, right? It's where many operators are. But I would also say that when we do our own events like this is the ember. But the movie forums in in Asia packers an example. A lot of the telco conversations I find they are best done one on one before. Yeah, the forums are our forums, but we will goto have one on one conversations or small group conversations >> with our telco customers. Locals Shakaar Thanks for spending. You get a hard stop. Very busy. >> Thank you. Thanks for having me >> here, Sugar Yaar, Who's here inside the Cube bringing down five G, which is still pregame. A few winning something first thing is gonna come up soon, but edges super hot. A lot of telco customers be back with more live coverage of the emerald after this short break

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