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