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

>> live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's the King covering via World 2016 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem sponsors. Now here's your host stew minimum. Welcome back to the Cube here at VM World 2016. Happy to welcome back to the PO program. Christos Caramel analysts. Who's the fellow in CTO of the V A more storage and availability business unit. Thank you for joining us again. >> About to be buck >> Storage is a big focus here. Big announcements around. Not only the sand, but everything happened in the storage room. Tell us what you've been working on the last year. >> Yeah, quite a few things. As you know, Miss Olsen has become practically mainstream product now, especially since we saved the very same 6.2 back in March 2016 with a number of new enterprise grade features for space efficiency. New availability. Fisher's with the razor calls right 56 The product is really taking off. Taking off, especially in old flask configurations, is becoming the predominant model that our customers are using. So ultimately, of course, customers buy a new product like this on and hyper converts product because of the operational efficiencies and brings to their data centers. The way I present this is you have the personal efficiency off public clouds into your private data center now. But this is for me is thus the stepping stone for even a longer term term, bolder vision will have around the stores, the data management. So, the last several months now, I have been working on a new range of projects. Main theme. There is moving up the stock from stores and the physical infrastructure implications. It has two data management on starting with data protection on overall and managing the life cycle of your data for protection, for disaster recovery, for archival, so that you can have tools to be able to effectively and efficiently discover your data. Mine your data. Use them by new applications, including cloud native applications and a dent even know that this may sound a little controversial coming from Vienna, where sitio even moving your data to public clouds and allow application mobility freely between private public clouds. >> Yeah, it's really interesting and wonder if you can packed out a little bit for us, Veum, where, of course, really dominant, the Enterprise Data Center. We're trying to understand where Veum, where fits into the public cloud on how you cut both support the existing ecosystem and move forward. So, you know, it's interesting off >> course. There are silences. There are many open questions. I do not claim that we have the answers to everything. Everything. But you do see that we put a lot of emphasis on that because it is obvious that the I T world is evolving. Our own customers are gradually slowly, but certainly there start incorporating public clouds into the bigger I T organizations that have. So our goal is to start delivering value to our customers based on clouds, starting with what they have today into the data centers. Let me give you a specific example in the case of Virtual San, who have some really cool tools for Mona's in your infrastructure in a holistic way, computer networking and now stores a SZ part of that you have ah solutions and tools that allow the customer to monitor constantly there covered infrastructure, the configuration of that. The class is the network servers controller's down to individual devices, and we provide a lot of data to the customers, not only for the health but also for the performance off the off the infrastructure data to the customer can today used to perform root cause analysis of potential issues to decide how to optimize there. Infrastructure in the world clothes. But that is actually pretty no sophisticated house. You cannot expect a lot 500 thousands 1000 customers. Of'em were to be ableto do this kind of sophisticate analysis. So what we're working on right now is a set off analytics tools that do all this data Kranz ink and analysis a root cause analysis on DDE evaluation of the infrastructure on because of the customer instead of providing data now we're providing answers and suggestions now way want to be able to deliver those analytics in a very rapid cadence. So what we do is we develop all those things in via Morse. Cloud will collect data from the customer side through telemetry, the emir's phone home product, and we get off the data up in our club. We crunch the data on because of the customer, and we use really sophisticated methods that will be evolving over time and eventually will be delivering feedback and suggestions at a kind level to the customer that can be actionable. For example, weekend point out that certain firm were the 1st 1 off certain controllers, and the infrastructure is falling behind. I may have problems or point out to a certain SS thes uh, a problem getting close to the end off life. For more sophisticated thing. Starts us reconfigure your application with a different policy for data distribution to achieve better performers. The interesting thing is that going to be, you're going to be combining data from must multiple sites, multiple customers to be able to do this holistic analytics and say, You know what? Based on trance, I see. Another customer says. It says You also do that. Now they're really coursing out of this is that the customer does not have to go and use yet another portal on a public cloud to take advantage of that. But they in fact, we send all that feedback through the this fear you. I own premise to the customers, so really cool. So you have the best of both wars. There are big development off analytics using actually behind the senses a really complex cloud native application with the existing tools that the customers are usedto in on premise. So this is just one example >> crystals. Could you give us a little bit of insight as the guiding light for your development process? Do you use that kind of core customers that you're pulling in and working in? Is it a mandate from above that says, you know, Hey, we need to build a more robust and move up the stack. You know, what are some of the pieces that lead to the development that you >> know? This is a very interesting point. I must start by stating that vehement has always bean admitting they're driven company. Um, and look for products were, you know, ideas that were, you know, Martin by engineers, while others thought that was not your not even visible, of course, Mutualization in several stages. But features like the Muslim or stores of emotion Oreo even, you know, ideas kind of ritual, son, right. Claiming that I could do very effectively rate six in software was something that was not really, you know, appreciated in the industrial area stages. So a lot of the innovation is a grassroots innovation. We have our engineers exposed directly to customers customer problems off course. They also understand what is happening in the industry. The trends, whether that is encounter as its case these days with a new generation off first or its cover that is emerging, or where that that is a trend. Samoan customers, for example, using public clouds in certain ways where that is for doing testing dead or archiving their data way. Observe those things and then through a grassroots. Therefore, all this get amalgamated into some concrete ideas. I'm not saying that all those ideas result into products, but we definitely have a very open mind in letting engineers experiment and prove sometimes common sense to be wrong. So this is the process thesis. How Virtual Son started were a couple of us went to our CEO back then for marriage and suggested we do this drastic thing that is called no softer stores on that you can run the soft store of stock in software on the same servers that we visualize, and we're under V. M. So this is really how the process has always been working and this is still the case and we're very proud of this culture. This is one way we're actually tracking opens enduring talent in the competent. >> Yeah, I was loved digging into some of the innovation processes. Had a good chat with Steve Harris, former CEO of GM, where if I remember right? One of the thing processes user called flings, whereas you can actually get visibility from the outside it to some of those kind of trials and things that are going on that aren't yet fully supported yet. >> Absolutely. And that is still the case. Probably the best known fling these days is the HTML five days they you I for your sex, which is used extensively, both internally in the humor where it actually started as a tool for that purpose, but now wild by the community. And that Flynn gave us a lot off insides and how to evolve our mainstream user interface for for this fear, proper notes, Astoria sex. So this is exactly this alternative process that leads us to test the water and feel much more confident when we make bigger and investments in in Ireland, >> right architecturally via Moore has been around for quite a while now. I had a good talk with such a Pagani Who? I m f s earlier today and we were talking about, you know, new applications and new architectures when vms foot fest was built. You know, nobody's thinking about containers. You know, they weren't thinking about applications like duper some of these more cloud native applications. How do you take into consideration where things were going? How did these fit into, you know, kind of traditional VM wear V sphere. You know what things need to change? How do you look at kind of the code basis? >> Right. So first of all of'em affairs, I must say it's probably the most mature and most widely adopted class. The file system in the industry for over 10 years now has been used to visualize enterprise grade store, its stores, alien networks, and it was going to have a role for many years to come. But on the other hand, we all are technologists, and we understand that the product is designed with certain assumptions and constraints, and the EM affairs was designed back in the meat to thousands toe address the requirements for ritual izing lungs, and you know the traditional volumes that you'd be consuming from a disgrace. Now the world is changing, right. We have a whole new generation off solid state devices for stores. Servers on softer on commodity servers with Commodity stores Devices is becoming as your own reports that have been indicating the predominant no mortal of delivering stores in there in the enterprise that the sender and off course in even public clouds with copper scale storage. So what? The requirements there? Some things are changing. You need the store. Its plot from that can really take out the violence of the very low latency is off those devices. I was at Intel Developer for form a couple of weeks ago, and their intel announced for first time performance numbers for the new generation off Envy Me devices obtained that include the three D Chris Point technology under the covers. Latents is at around 10 microseconds, right and Iost per second scruples that are in the several kinds of thousands, if not millions so completely young game changer. And that is not the only company that is coming up with this technology. So you need to invest now in new technologies that can take the can harness the capabilities of this new devices, lightweights protocols like Envy me. In fact, I see envy me as the protocol is not just a protocol to accident device, but I can see a future for that off. Replacing Scott Z into the software start soon, and this is committing specific days. But soon will be sipping a vision off this fear that comes with ritual and via me in the guest visual ization of envy Me. So you can see here where we're heading and envy me, becoming a predominant protocol for the transport and for brutalizing stores. >> Interesting. And we've got a long history of things that start on. The guests Usually then takes a lot of engineering work to get them down to the hyper visor themselves. So, you know, without having to give away too much, is that we see that kind of progression sometime in the future. For some of these new memory, architectures >> certainly certainly are the sex store stock, and this is the stuff that is used by Veum infest by ritual son. It has been designed again for another era off stores. Now we are regarding a lot of these things there, and I cannot disclose too much detail, obviously, but I can tell that it's going to be a very different software stock. Much leaner, much more optimized for local, very fast devices and ultimately envying me is going to be a key technology in this new store stock. >> All right, so just last follow up on that topic. I think about kind of a new memory architectures. What's going on? As of September 7th, Del will acquire TMC. There's the relationship between A. M, C and V M wear. So could we expect some of these new memory technologies impacting things to be something that you'll work even closer with a deli emcee? And >> that is definitely case irrespective off the deal between the emcee and Dell, which, as you said, it's going to be closing. It seems pretty soon. From what I read in the newspapers, >> Michael confirmed, it's finally official. Some of the pathetic ALS. >> Yes, we're moving ahead with this new technologists, and we're working closely with all the partners micro intel and many of the other car vendors that are introducing such technologies to incorporate them into our systems into our software, for example, I see great opportunities for this very fast Cayenne dude owns but still quite expensive technologies to be used, for example, to store meta data. Things like duplication. Costabile is those kind off meta data that have an impact through because of my own verification to the performance that is perceived by the application by moving meta data like that into those tears are going to make a great difference in terms of performance consistent, late and see predictability of the day for the application. Now, thanks to the relations with del Auntie em. See, I can hope that some of these technologies will find their way into several platforms sooner than later. So all of us and our customers would benefit from that. >> All right? What? Christos really appreciate getting the update from you. Lots happening on the storage world. We're kind of talking about. One of my things coming into this this'll week was, if we can really simplify storage, we might actually have a storage. This world doesn't mean it reduces the value of storage or the importance of it, but gonna help the users to be able to move beyond that, we'll be back with lots more coverage here from the emerald 2016. You're watching the Cube. Glad to be here. Whatever. Apply from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's the King covering via World 2016 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem sponsors. Now here's your host stew minimum. Welcome back to the Cube here at VM World 2016. Happy to welcome back to the PO program. Christos Caramel analysts. Who's the fellow in CTO of the V A more storage and availability business unit. Thank you for joining us again. >> Glad to be back.