>> Announcer: Live from San Diego, California, it's theCUBE, covering Kubecon and CloudNativeCon, brought to you by RedHat, a CloudNative computing foundation and it's ecosystem partners. >> Hi and welcome back to Kubecon, CloudNativeCon 2019 here in San Diego. I'm Stu Miniman and my cohost for three days of coverage is John Troyer, and happy to welcome back to the program, was on the keynote stage earlier at the conference, Derek Collison is the founder and CEO of Synadia. >> Yes, welcome. >> Stu: Showing the logo, thanks so much for joining us, Derek. >> Oh, thank you, I really appreciate it, it's been a while. >> Yeah, it has, so you know, we've known you for many years, had you on the program, you look at us, you've got one of those VIP logos 'cause you've been on the show a few times, and you've seen a couple of these waves. Latest thing, of course, you're talking a lot about NATS, but of course Cloud Foundry you built that, so you've seen a lot of these waves, but I want to start with something you said that I thought was really thought-provoking and interesting. A lot of people, we talk about the Cloud economy, talk about the data economy... You talk about the connective economy, so, explain to our audience a little bit what that means. >> So, the general gist of it is, hey, where's the innovation and where's the value coming out of information technology, IT, infrastructure and things like that, and for a long time, we were swept up in the Cloud economy, which was how you move from CapEx into OpEx, and things like that, and then of course it was all about data. And it still is about data, but if you notice, it's not the data moving to where you're trying to process things, now it's all of a sudden being distributed, and so you take that, and you take MicroServices, and you take all these things, and at least from my perspective, I see the value driving out of these systems now is in, how are they connected? How are you observing them, how are you securing them and trusting them? And I believe that's where the value in the next wave of innovation's going to come from. >> Yeah, it's funny, I hear sometimes we talk about the pendulum of technology, and I look in the ten years we've been doing this, really we're talking about the journey along the distributed architecture we've been trying to build, and it's not moving back and forth, but it's kind of... >> Derek: Circling. >> It's kind of circling, and some of the themes are repeating, but it's growing that along the way, so, give us NATS and messaging, how this plays into helping to solve that communication issue, it's the kind of thing, we read about in the Google papers as to, global distributed architectures. >> Yeah, so, the general gist is that NATS was built to power Cloud Foundry, right, and that was the deployment mechanism for applications and such like that. And NATS, just like a lot of the other technologies, was built for an itch I needed to scratch. And it was a silo technology. So about two years ago, we had the opportunity to actually think about if we wanted to make a business out of NATS, right? And any time you say open source and commercial entity, there's challenges, and I don't think anyone has all of the answers. But the answer we came up with internally as a team was, we need to build something that's value is greater than the sum of its parts. I personally, again, and a lot of people won't agree with me and that's okay, I don't believe in the open core model. I don't believe in the fact that you make certain enterprise features and certain open source features. However, what I do believe is that if we could take a communication technology and make it a true utility, like the global cellular now, or the Internet, and connect everything, we'd have these opportunities that no one could foresee, for example, with the web, or even with the global cellular network and what people think is about to happen with the 5G. So we took NATS, which is a very mature technology, made it multi-tinted, made it very, very forward-looking secure, made it run in any Cloud, Edge, IoT, with the hope that we could encourage people to connect everything, start isolated, but have the ability to say, hey, we want to start sharing data securely in an audited way, that it's drop-dead simple to do. It's not a, let's plan a six-month project to integrate your systems with these systems and things like that, and so that's the gist of what we're trying to do, and we believe that running this thing as a server as such that it's a utility, it's not just something for you or for you or for me, it's that we're all using the same thing and we're all connected if we want to be, we think there's value there. >> Derek, maybe let's go in a little bit on NATS, and the service you're running too, but maybe educate us a little bit on the landscape here. We've already talked about IoT, Cloud data, VAP messaging, and I think people understand, to a certain extent, what a messaging system is, sometimes it gets conflated with a streaming system, maybe you could talk about what NATS does really well, we've talked about security, we've talked about a few other things, you've teased already here, but how should we be thinking about NATS? >> Well, I think, outside of NATS, just in general, any type of way of communications, we need to think secure by default, right? We can't do what happened with the Internet, where we go, ooh, it'd be really nice to do these kind of things, but we need security. And we have to wait, as a group of excited individuals, probably 15 years to get that, we can't do that in this generation with IoT and things. But when you look at NATS, or any technology, there's essentially two types of patterns that anybody wants to support. A service-based pattern, where I ask you a question, you give me an answer, ninety-plus percent of distributed systems today, that's their main architectural pattern. So I'm coordinating and asking a lot of questions of these services, micro-services, you know, has become popular. Streaming is now becoming popular with things like Kafka and stuff like that, it's been around for a while, but that's the second, other pattern. So it's like, I'm emitting events or data streams or things like that, and they could be persisted or not, but essentially if you want to make it simple, it's services and streams, and for us, we wanted technology that did equally well in both of them, right, you didn't have to pick one technology for one pattern and another one for a different one. >> All right, let's talk a little bit about your business. So you talked a little bit about kind of the business model, so explain the business model, what you're doing, how that actually goes together? >> Yeah, and for the viewers, this is our take on it, which means it's advice, you get what you pay for, it's free, type of stuff, but, you know... Been around the block a little bit. So, when we started out, what we didn't want to do is ignore the old models. I don't think a long-term business model is the old models, meaning recurring support, consulting, NRE work type of stuff, but I've also seen startups that ignore that and say, "no, we're not going to do that at all." And I did a little bit of that with my prior company, so we embrace that, but we know long-term that's not going to be it. So we deploy a global network, we have a global network, it's available with a single URL, secure by default, runs in every Cloud, every major GO, and more importantly, you can extend it on your own, on your own servers, with the RN off to do that. And we believe that Saas model, that utility model where, again, its value is greater than the sum of its parts, allows us to keep everything open-source, but there's a value in being connected to this network. Multi-Cloud, Cloud to Edge, all that kind of stuff. And what we want is we want customers to slowly transition to that. I've been telling people there's basic cable, which is like, just the dial tone, then there's going to be premium channels on that, that you can pay for, like storage, DR, secrets, zero-trust mechanisms, anomaly detection around communication patterns. People might opt in and say, "ooh, we want to pay for those things 'cause they're interesting to us." And then the last piece of that pie is, there may be people who are running against the global utility, running their own servers, and they go, "that service right there inside of that system, we love it, we want it on premise, can we actually license it from you?" So it's a combination of softwares and service, license revenue, and recurring support. >> Okay, and so, are you enabling partners to deliver those services, is that Synadia does that themselves, where do those premium services come from? >> So, we're going to seed the market, but yeah, we want it to be an open marketplace, and what we will provide is things like billing and such like that, almost, not exactly, but almost like the app store, the Apple app store, where someone who just wants to write a simple service, and if people like it, they don't have to do much, they just have it run and it's receiving stuff and they just get paid. So we do think that's a federated model. Believe it or not, we also feel running the network on a global scale is also federated. So we've designed it such that we don't have to be the only operators. Matter of fact, if we're successful, we're the smallest operator going forward. But, the system is always interconnected, right, so if John's trying to connect in and he's connecting to a Google server, I can connect to that server also, even though Synadia might have actually granted me the rights to access the system. And so we're working on that, we're thinking about that, but Cloud providers are really good at running infrastructure and running services on that infrastructure. We want to embrace that, we just want to make sure that any user of the system, it's like a SIM card that's unlocked, essentially, right? You could go to any provider that you want and it works, that's what we want to make sure we set up for. >> Right, it seems like a great example of this next wave of companies that's being built on top of the existing Cloud infrastructure. You don't have to be a hoster yourself, you could take advantage of and partner with all the other infrastructure providers and interconnect them in several different ways. Maybe, Derek, could you give us an example of an app, what an app might look like that's globally distributed and what kind of messages would be being passed back and forth? >> Sure, so, we're about to release something on Synadia where we truly believe, at the base of everything, it's just sending messages. And so, most people think of NATS as a communication mechanism, and it is, but when we say storage or state storage, they kind of say, "oh, NATS doesn't do that." But we can send a message to a KV service that says KV.set, and I could send a message that says KV get and get it back. Now, what's interesting is, we can make that zero trust, meaning, it leaves your app totally encrypted, so none of our servers, none of Google, Amazon, or Azure's servers, actually even understand what the heck it is, but what's interesting is, you could connect to any of our servers worldwide, or even run your own servers, and connect to those, and it works, all the time. We have another one that's just a usage server, meaning it tells you how much usage you've been racking up, let's say, over the month, kind of like a cell bill. And the way we built it was, there's multiple servers that are running, collecting this data, totally independent, there's no consensus. Everyone has the same subject, NGS.usage, you send a request saying, "what's my usage for the last hour?" Yet the backend service, guaranteed secure, trusted, it receives a request that it knows it's John, knows it's Stu, knows it's Derek, and so it can say, "oh, I'm trying to get John's usage, I'm trying to get Stu's usage." Yet the user experience is, everyone does the same thing, which we think is extremely powerful. And you don't have to do anything unnatural to get that with a system like NATS, right, where we tried to put security first and really think hard about what it meant, and that wasn't fun, it wasn't easy, but we think it's important. >> Yeah. So, Derek, I want to kind of step up-level a second here, 'cause you've got some great viewpoints on things, so, there's some people that look at a show like this or look at the industry and say, "Ah, there's all this hype around multi-Cloud, but there's a lot of challenges." Does it become least common denominator? How do these things work together? My definition that I've been saying for a while, I'll use a phrase you've used a couple of times. If, for multi-Cloud to be real, the value that I get out of it has to be greater than the sum of its parts. You live through the PaaS and the post-PaaS era, you've done a number of environments here, so where are we today, where do we need to go as an industry, as a whole, to reach that value statement that we talk about? >> Yeah, that's a great question. Even from day one in Cloud Foundry, I've believed in multi-Cloud, but I've watched how the markets have actually reacted and what they are doing, and the first wave in my perspective was, posturing for better pricing. To be honest with you, it was Netflix go, "hey we're going to move to Google unless you give us a better price." And I've seen that time and time again. Where it becomes real, though, is, when there's a class of service in a given Cloud provider, that is extremely attractive. Amazon, just in terms of the breadth, Azure a lot for some of the big data stuff, Google a lot for some of the AI stuff they have. Where an organization has a legitimate use to say "we really need best of breed in AI," best of breed in, let's say, big data, and they want to run an app in Azure and an app in Google, and that's kind of the realest situation I've seen. The notion of running something that's truly oblivious and can run anywhere, it's possible, but your lowest common denominators compute and simple storage, and a lot of times, that's not actually distinguishing. So I still see a lot of pricing pressure, you know, posturing, around multi-Cloud, just as a negotiation tactic. Where I see it being real is, this class of app, we want to run it in this Cloud provider to access these services that are differentiating. >> Derek, you have been around for a few generations of Stack wars, PaaS wars, I don't know that they need a name. Any advice to application architects and technologists who are choosing technologies here? I mean, here at this conference, Kubernetes is kind of a common assumption for a lot of what people are doing, not everybody, but there's a lot of other parts that plug into it, and a lot of other decisions to be made about architectures, and about, everything from messaging, to security, to networking, to storage, and I can go on and on and on and on. So, I mean how... Again, you've seen this happen a couple times, people having to pick and make choices, worried about lock-in, whatever they're worried about, I don't know. What are your thoughts on what's the, what are the right ways to do this so you actually succeed? >> Yeah, you know, it's a great question. And yeah, I have seen the pendulum swing back and forth quite a bit, but I think for the viewers, I can simplify it, at least from my perspective. It goes between choice and simplicity. So if you look in even the PaaS wars versus IaS versus all that stuff, PaaS was a swing towards simplicity, get stuff done, you know what I mean? And then there was like, "oh, I can get stuff done, but I don't have enough choice." So we saw this swing back, and I think Kubernetes hit at the absolute perfect time to take advantage of, "hey, we need choice at these base layers," right? And the way Kubernetes was architected was to give you that full choice. So if a startup's coming along and saying, okay, given the fact that the pendulum's over here, knowing it's going to be swinging back, and at least in my opinion, we're swinging back for simplicity, concentrate on, how do you simplify what people are struggling with today? So at this conference, there's a tremendous amount of people, you can get a lot of insight into what's going on, ask 'em where it hurts, you know what I mean? What are you struggling with? How long have you been struggling with it? And then solve those problems, especially when the pendulum you know is starting to swing back around. Hey, can we do this in a more simplified way, why does it have to be so hard? Those are the big opportunities right now. But again, it'll swing this way, and it'll swing back, eventually it'll get to the middle, and then we'll pick a whole other class of problems to, you know, swing back and forth from. >> Well, you know, it actually, it's not surprising to me that you're actually echoing a comment that Steve Harrod made on the program yesterday, saying when he goes and talks to all the companies here, it's, tell me how you make my life better as a company, and that's what we need to focus on. That wave toward simplicity absolutely is something we see, it's something we've been driving toward from Kubernetes, but an area that you're spending some time in talking about at the keynote, Edge computing. And absolutely, we need simplicity for that to be able to come there. What are you seeing in the Edge space, what's real, customers you're talking to, give us a little bit of forward-looking as where you see that whole space going. >> Yeah, so, I mean, for me, Edge and IoT, you can define it a lot of different ways, but even for enterprise companies that are here, it's, hey, do you deploy a piece of software out into the field, or a hardware/software combination? So, Bose headsets, Peloton bikes, whatever, that's kind of an industrial IoT type of thing. I see a lot of people wanting to drag what they think works in Cloud out to the Edge. Kubernetes works here, we're going to drag it out here. We're just going to slim it up a little bit and package it. I don't know if that's the right answer. What I think we need to think about is how do we get data and compute, compute meaning processing of that data, securely in a trusted fashion out to the Edge, however that works? It doesn't necessarily mean we have to have all the same pieces, but you have to say, I want to push an update and I want it to go over the air so to speak to the Edge, I want to be able to trust that it's doing the right thing. And so I think there's a massive amount of opportunity around that, and in how do you move all those pieces around. And what we're trying to do at Synadia is encompassing both, right? So we started with the secure by default, trusting in the beginning, and then if we say, hey, it's just messages, and in the keynote, I talked a little bit about our excitement around web assembly. But where we get excited about it is, we give you a drop-dead easy system and say, I want to digitally sign that web assembly for use in this certain situation at the Edge. And then that shovels it out there, and the system looks at it, verifies that it was signed by John, and says, yep, I can run this now. And so we're looking very heavily at those types of opportunities. We don't care how the things are deployed per se, but I would say that I think as you get further out, I think you're going to see more common denominators around web assembly, secure and signed web assemblies, than on how we actually deploy them. So you're going to see lighter weight things, not to say that Kubernetes might not have relevance out there, but I don't think it's needed to get to where we want. We need that trust factor, ubiquitous, communications to really kind of light that field up. The other one at least that we feel we need to meet the customer where they're at, is most of the IoT type devices are MQTT. And so we talked also that in Q1, we're going to allow native MQTT apps to connect directly into a NATS server and the NGS ecosystem, meaning you get the best of both worlds as well. Then an Edge router's running a NATS server, could be a raspberry pie, thousands of devices all connecting in, we think that connectivity and trust will light up a lot of opportunities. >> All right, well, Derek, always a pleasure to catch up with you, thanks so much for the updates. >> Thank you guys, I really appreciate it. >> All right. John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more coverage here at Kubecon CloudNativeCon, thanks for watching theCUBE.

>> Voiceover: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. (electronic music) >> Hello everyone, welcome back to live coverage. This is theCUBE at VMworld 2017, our eighth year covering VMworld, going back to 2010. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, and my co-host this segment, Justin Warren, industry analyst, and our guest, Alan Cohen, Chief Commercial Officer, COO for Illumio. Great to see you, CUBE alumni. Special guest appearance, guest analyst appearance, but also Chief Commercial Officer, Illumio is a security start-up, growing. Thanks for coming on. >> It's not even a startup anymore. >> Justin: It's technically a startup. >> John: After five years, it's not a startup. >> It's not a startup right, you raise $270 million, it's not exactly a startup. >> (laughs) That's true. Well, welcome back. >> Alan: Thank you. >> Welcome back from vacation. Justin and I were talking before you came on, look at, let's go get you on and get some commentary going. >> Alan: Okay. >> You're an industry vet, again, in security, some perspective, but industry perspective, you've seen this VMware cycle many times. What's your analysis right now, obviously stock's 107, they don't to a cloud, no big catback, so it's good. You've made a decision. What's your take on this? >> I've been coming to VMworld for a long time, as you guys have as well, and from my perspective, this was probably the biggest or most significant transition in the history of the company. If you think about the level of dialogue, obviously there's a lot about NSX, which came from the Nicira, I'm always happy about. But, if you hear about, talking about cloud, and kind of talking about a post-infrastructure world, about capabilities, about control, about security, about being able to manage your compute in multiple environments, this is, I think, the beginning of a fundamentally different era. I always think about VMware, this is the company that defined virtualization. No one will argue with that point, so when they come out and they start talking about how are your computes going to operate in multiple environments? And how you're going to put that together, this is not cloud-washing, this is a fairly, all right they have fully acknowledged that the cloud is not a fad, the cloud is not for third tier workloads, this is mainstream computing. I think this is the third wave of computing and VMware is starting to put its markers down for the type of role that it intends to play in this transition. >> Yeah, I agree. >> We have to argue if you don't agree (laughs). >> I'll mostly agree with you, how about that? >> All right that's good. >> At this show, VMware has stopped apologizing for existing. I think, previously, they've been trying to say, "No, no we're a cloud too, "in fact, we're better than cloud "and you shouldn't be using it." It forced customers to choose between two of their children, really, like which one do you love more? And customers don't like that. Whereas at this show, I think it's finally being recognized that customers want to be able to use cloud, as well as use VMware, so that they're taking a more partnership approach to that and it's more about the ecosystem. And, agree, they're not about the infrastructure so much, they're not about the Hypervisor, they're about what you run on top of that. But, I still think there's a lot of infrastructure in that because VMware is fundamentally an infrastructure. >> Alan: Well, you got to get paid, right? >> That's right, (Alan laughs) and there's a lot of stuff out there that's already on VMware. What do you think about the approach? Like with cloud, they have a lot of people doing things in new ways and you mentioned this is the third wave of computing that we're doing it a new way. A lot of VMware stuff is really the whole reason it was popular is that we have people doing things a particular way on physical hardware and then they kept doing more or less the same thing, only on virtual hardware. What do you say about people who are still essentially going to be doing virtual hardware, they're just running it on cloud now? That's not really changing much. >> The way I think about it is: Are you going to be the Chevy Volt or are you going to be a Tesla? What I mean by that, and by the way now GM has the Bolt, which is their move toward Tesla, which is that if you look at the auto industry, they talk about hybrid and you talk about it, and you talk to Elon Musk and he goes, "Hybrids are bullshit." Either you're burning gas, or you're using electricity. To me, this cloud movement is about electricity, which is: I'm going to use cloud-native controls, I'm going to use cloud-native services, I'm going to be using Python and Ruby, and I'm going to have scripting, and I'm going to act like DevOps. And so, cloud is not just a physical place where I rent cycles from Amazon or Azure, it is a way of computing that's got a distributed, dynamic, heterogeneous, and hybrid. When you're in your virtualization on top of cloud, you're still in your Chevy Volt moment, but when you say, "I'm going to actually be native "across all of these environments," then you're really moving into the Tesla movement. >> Hold on. Let me smoke a little bit, I'll pass it over to you because that's complete fantasy. Right now the reality is, is that-- >> It's legal here in LA, in Las Vegas. >> (laughs) I don't think so yet, is it? >> Only outside. >> You can go to Walgreens across the street. >> Whatever you're smoking is good stuff. No, I agree, cloud obviously as a future scenario, there's no debate, but the reality is, like the Volt, Tesla is a one-trick pony. So, greenfield-- >> But, once again, I'm not disagreeing with you, John, but my point is that VMware and most of the IT industry is not there. Most companies don't have DevOps people, you run up and down, you go to all of these shows, ask these guys how many of these guys does Ruby, Python, real scripting, they don't do that. They still have Lu-Wise and management consults and they have the old IT, but this is the beginning movement-- >> They've got legacy bag, I mean we call it legacy baggage in the business, we know what that is. >> Heritage systems. (all laugh) >> Well, Gelsinger was here, I had him in at one o'clock and I kind of, sometimes VMware, they make the technical mistake in PR, they don't really get sometimes where to position things, but the Google announcement was very strategic intent, but they kind of made it a land grab and they tried to overplay their hand, in my opinion, on that one thing, it's strategic intent. This audience, they're not DevOps ready, they're Ops trying to do Dev, so they're not truly ready. So, it's okay to say, "Here's Amazon. "Great, that's today, if you want to do that, "let's get going, checking the boxes, "we're hitting the milestones." And then to dump a headroom deal announcement, that's more headroom, which is cool, but not push it on the Ops guys. >> Here's the opportunity and here's the risk: If Amazon is a $16 billion a year business, it's a rounding error in IT spend. When you take the hype away, nothing against it, and I love that prices are cheaper at Amazon and you can buy a Dot in the fruit aisle, that would totally-- >> John: I think the margins are like 60% (laughs). >> On your cloud. >> My wife took a picture of a rib steak and it said $18, now $13.99, I said, "Fantastic, thank you, Jeff Bezos. "We're eating well, "and we're going to have a little extra money." What I think this transition is not about infrastructure, it's about how IT people do their job. >> John: That's a main point. >> Justin: That's a big, big change. >> Yeah. >> Okay, in this show today doing your job, Justin I want you to comment on this because you were talking with Stu about it. I'm a VMware customer, what do I care about right now in my world? Just today. >> Well, in my world I've got conflicting things, I need to get my job done now. There's nothing different about the IT job, really, which is a shame because some of it needs to change, but there is a gradual realization that it's not about IT, it's not about building infrastructure for the sake of, "Because I like shiny infrastructure." It's, "I'm being paid by my business "to do IT things in service of the business." I have customers who are buying Apples, or using Apple docs, you're laundering. >> In IT you're paid for an outcome. You don't create the outcome. The way IT works is business creates the outcome, IT helps fulfill the outcome, unless you work-- >> John: Is IT a department today? >> Yeah, it's still a department. >> It's still a department? >> Yeah, it is, but it's a department in the same way that, well finance is important, but it's actually the business. Sales is part, they're all integrated. In a really well-run business, they're all integrated. >> How do you know what a real business is? You go to a building, you go to the main offices, you visit the marketing floor, you visit the IT floor. Tell me what the decor is like. They'll tell you what they care about in a business. (John laughs) I've been in a lot of IT shops, not the beautiful shiny glass windows because it's perceived as a back office cost center. >> Digital transformation is always about taking costs, that's table stakes, but now some of the tech vendors need to understand that as you get more business focused, you got to start thinking about driving top line. >> You're also thinking about being in the product. For example, my company, we have three of the four top SAS vendors, as Illumio customers, we do the micro-segmentation for them. We're not their micro-segmentation, we're a component in the software they sell you guys. >> Justin: You're an input. >> Yeah, you are a commodity in the mix of what somebody's building and I think that's going to be one of the changes. The move to cloud, it's not rent or buy, it's not per hour per server, or call Michael Dell and send me a bunch of Q-series, or whatever the heck it's called, it's increasingly saying, "We have these outcomes, we have these dates, "we have these deliverables, "what am I doing to support that and be part of that?" >> Justin: That's it, it's a support function. It's a very important support function, but there's very few businesses, like digital transformation, I don't like that as a term-- >> What the heck does that mean? >> It means something to do with fingers. >> Alan: You use it a lot, what does it really mean, digital transformation? >> To me, first of all, I'm not a big hype person, I like the buzz word in the sense that it does have a relevance now in terms of doing business digitally means you're completely 100% technology-enabled in your business. That means IT is a power function, not a cost center, it's completely native, like electricity in the company-- >> Unless, let's say I have two customers, I have the Yellow Cab company of Las Vegas and I have Uber or Lyft as a customer. My role, as a technologist, or technology provider, is dramatically different in either one of those-- >> Digital transformation to me is a mindset of things like, "I'm going to do a blockchain, "I'm going to start changing the game, "I'm going to use technology "to change the value equation for my customer." It's not IT conversation in the sense of, let's buy more servers to make something happen for the guy who had a request in that saying, "Let's use technology digitally to change the outcomes." >> But, given that, if we assume that that's true, then there's two ways of doing that. Either we have the IT people need to learn more about business, or the business people need to learn more about IT. >> That's right. >> Which one do you think should happen? Traditionally-- >> I think they're on a collision course. >> I don't think you can survive as a senior executive in most businesses anymore by saying, "Oh, I'll get my CIO in here." >> I would like to believe that that's true, but when people say that it should be a strategic resource and so on, and yet we spend decades outsourcing IT to someone else. If it's really truly important to your business, why aren't you doing it yourself? >> Justin, it's a great question and here's my observations, just thinking out loud here. One, just from a Silicon Valley perspective, looking at entrepreneurial as a canary in the coalmine, you've seen over the past 10-15 years, recently past 10, entrepreneurs have become developer entrepreneurs, product entrepreneurs, have become very savvy on the business side. That's the programmer. When we see Travis with Uber, no VC, they got smart because they could educate themselves. AngelList, Venture Hacks, there's a lot of data out there, so I see some signs of developers specifically building apps because user design is really important, they are leading into, what I call, the street MBA. They're not actually getting an MBA, they don't read the Wall Street Journal, but they're learning about some business concepts that they have to understand to program. IT I think is still getting there, but not as much as the developers. >> Here's a great question that I've learned over the years, and look, I'm coming out of the IT side, as we all are. When I visit a customer and I try to sell them my product, my first question is, "If I didn't exist, what would you do? "And if you don't buy my product, what happens in your business?" And if they're saying, "I have this other alternative." Or it's like, "Ah, we'll do it next year." I mean, maybe I can sell them some product, but what they're really telling me is, "I don't matter." >> All right, let's change the conversation a little bit, just move to another direction I want to get your thoughts on. And I should have, on the intro, given you more prompts, Alan. You were also involved in Nicira, the startup that VMware had bought-- >> Alan: Before all this NSX stuff, I was early. >> Hold on, let me finish the intro. We've interviewed Martin Casado. Stu talks to us all the time, I'm sure Chess has been hearing on the other set, "Oh, hey Martin Casado." It was a great interview, of course they're on theCUBE directory. But, you were there when it was just developing and then boom, software-defined networking, it's going to save the world. NSX has become very important to VMware, what's your thoughts on that? What does the alumni from Nicira and that folks that are still here and outside of VMware think about what's it's turned into? Is it relevant? And where is it going? >> Look, I could have not predicted five years ago when Nicira was acquired by VMware, it would be the heart of everything that their CEO and their team is talking about, if you want to know if that's important, go to the directory of sessions and one out of every three are about NSX. But, I think what it really means is there's a recognition that the network component, which is what really NSX represents, is the part that's going to allow them to transcend the traditional software-defined data center. I have two connections, so Steve Herrod is my investor, Steve is the inventor of the software-defined data center. That was the old Kool-Aid, not the new Kool-Aid. We've left the software-defined data center, we've moved into this cloud era and for them NSX is their driving force on being able to extend the VMware control plane into environments they used to never play in before. That's imminently clear. >> John: Justin, what's your take on NSX? >> NSX is the compatibility mechanism for being able do VMware in multiple places, so I think it's very, very important for VMware as a company. I don't think it's the only solution to that particular problem of being able to have networks that move around, it's possible to do it in other ways. For example, cloud-native type things, will do the networking thing in a different way. But, the network hasn't really undergone the same kind of change that happened in server or it did in storage, it's been pretty much the same for a long, long time. >> You've had an industry structurally dominated by one company, things don't change when-- >> Justin: And it still is, yeah. >> John: Security, security, because we've got a little bit of time I want to get to security. You guys are in the security space. >> Thanks for noticing. >> (laughs) I still don't know what you did, I'm only kidding. Steve Harrod is your investor, former CEO of VMware, very relevant for folks watching. Guys, security Pat Gelsinger said years ago it should be a duo, we've got to fix this. Nothing has really happened. What is the state of the union, if you will, of security? Where the frig is it going? What the hell's going on with security? >> There's two issues with that. If we put our industry analyst hat on, security is the largest segment of IT where nobody owns 5% market share, so there's not gorilla force that can drive that. VMware was the gorilla force driving virtualization, Cisco drove networking, EMC, in the early days, drove storage, but when you get to security you have this kind of-- >> John: Diluted. >> It's like the Balkans, it's like feudal states. >> Justin: It's a ghastly nightmare. >> What I think what Pat was talking about, which we also subscribe to, there are some movements in security, which micro-segmentation is one of them, which are kind of reinstalling a form of forensic hygiene into saying, "Your practices, if they occur, "they will reduce the risk profile." But, I think 50% of the security solutions and categories-- >> So, if I've lost my teeth, I don't get cavities. That kind of thing going on. >> If you're a doctor and you're making rounds in the hospital, you wash your hands or you put on gloves. >> And that's where we are. That is the stage we are at with security is we're at the stage where surgeons didn't believe they should wash their hands because they knew better and they'd say, "No, this couldn't possibly be making patients sick." People have finally realized that people get sick and the germ theory is real and we should wash our hands. >> Your network makes you sick. Your network is the carrier. Everything that's happening in network is effectively the Typhoid Mary of security. (John laughs) We're building flat, fast, unsegmented Layer 3 networks, which allow viruses to move at the speed of light across your environment. So, movements like, what's that called App Defense? >> Justin: App Defense, yep. >> App Defense or micro-segmentation from Illumio and Vmware, are the kind of new hygiene and new practices that are going to reduce the wide-spread disease growing. >> From an evolution theory, then the genetics of networks are effed up. This is what you're saying, we need to fix-- >> No, the networks are getting back to what they were supposed to do. Networks move packets from point A to point D. >> The dumb network? >> Alan: Yes, the dumber the better. >> Okay. You agree? >> Alan: Dumb them down. >> Dumb networks, smart end points. Smart networks doesn't scale as well as smart end points, and we're seeing that with edge computing, for example. Distributed networking is a hard problem and there is so much compute going out there, everything has a computer in it, they're just getting tinier and tinier. If we rely on the network to secure all of that, we're doomed. >> Better off at the end point. And this fuels the whole IoT edge thing, straight up one of the key wave slides out there. >> What you're going to have is a lot of telemetry points and you're going to have a lot of enforcement points. Our architecture is compatible with this, VMware is moving in this direction, other people are, but the people that are clinging to the gum up my network with all kinds of crap, because actually people want it to go the other way. If you think about it, the Internet was built to move packets from point A to point B in case of a nuclear war and, other than routing, there wasn't a whole lot-- >> We still might have that problem (laughs) >> Yeah, well there's always that (laughs). >> Fingers crossed. >> Guys, we got to break, next segment. Al, I'll give you the last word, just give a quick plug for Illumio. Thanks for coming on and being a special guest analyst, as usual, great stuff. Little slow from vacation, you're usually a little snappier. >> Alan: Little slow off the vacation mark. >> Yeah, come on. Back in Italy-- >> Too much Brunello di Motalcino, yeah. >> John: (laughs) Quick plug for Illumio, do a quick plug. >> We're really great to be here. John, you and I talked recently, Illumio is growing very rapidly, clearly we are probably emerging as one of the leaders in this micro-segmentation movement. >> John: A wannabe gorilla. >> What's that? >> You're a wannabe gorilla, go big or go home. >> We are, well, gorillas have to start as little gorillas first, we're not a wannabe gorilla, we're just gorillas growing really rapidly. It takes a lot more food at the zoo to keep us going. About 200 people growing rapidly, just moved into Asia, Pat, we got a guy in your part of the world we work with. >> First of all, it's not a zoo, it's still a jungle. The zoo is not yet established. >> That's true. We're going to establish the zoo. Things are great at Illumio. We have amazing things on the floor here today of, basically the system will actually write its own security policy for you. It's a lot of movement into machine learning, a lot of good stuff. >> All right. Guys, thanks so much. Alan Cohen with Illumio, >> Alan: Thank you. >> Chief Commercial Officer. And Justin Warren, analyst, I'm John Furrier. More live coverage from VMworld after this short break. (electronic music)