>> Announcer: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto and Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hello, welcome back to theCUBE's coverage, CUBE Virtual's coverage, CUBE digital coverage, of AWS Summit, virtual online, Amazon Summit's normally in face-to-face all around the world, it's happening now online, follow the sun. Of course, we want to bring theCUBE coverage like we do at the events digitally, and we've got a great guest that usually comes on face-to-face, he's coming on virtual, Sanjay Poonen, the chief operating officer of VMware. Sanjay great to see you, thanks for coming in virtually, you look great. >> Hey, John thank you very much. Always a pleasure to talk to you. This is the new reality. We both happen to live very close to each other, me in Los Altos, you in Palo Alto, but here we are in this new mode of communication. But the good news is I think you guys at theCUBE were pioneering a lot of digital innovation, the AI platform, so hopefully it's not much of an adjustment for you guys to move digital. >> It's not really a pivot, just move the boat, put the sails up and sail into the next generation, which brings up really the conversation that we're seeing, which is this digital challenge, the virtual world, it's virtualization, Sanjay, it sounds like VMware. Virtualization spawned so much opportunity, it created Amazon, some say, I'd say. Virtualizing our world, life is now integrated, we're immersed into each other, physical and digital, you got edge computing, you got cloud native, this is now a clear path to customers that recognize with the pandemic challenges of at-scale, that they have to operate their business, reset, reinvent, and grow coming out of this pandemic. This has been a big story that we've been talking about and a lot of smart managers looking at projects saying, I'm doubling down on that, and I'm going to move the resources from this, the people and budget, to this new reality. This is a tailwind for the folks who were prepared, the ones that have the experience, the ones that did the work. theCUBE, thanks for the props, but VMware as well. Your thoughts and reaction to this new reality, because it has to be cloud native, otherwise it doesn't work, your thoughts. >> Yeah, I think, John, you're right on. We were very fortunate as a company to invent the term virtualization for an x86 architecture and the category 20 years ago when Diane founded this great company. And I would say you're right, the public cloud is the instantiation of virtualization at its sort of scale format and we're excited about this Amazon partnership, we'll talk more about that. This new world of doing everything virtual has taken the same concepts to whole new levels. We are partnering very closely with companies like Zoom, because a good part of this is being able to deliver video experiences in there, we'll talk about that if needed. Cloud native security, we announced an acquisition today in container security that's very important because we're making big moves in security, security's become very important. I would just say, John, the first thing that was very important to us as we began to shelter in place was the health of our employees. Ironically, if I go back to, in January I was in Davos, in fact some of your other folks who were on the show earlier, Matt Garman, Andy, we were all there in January. The crisis already started in China, but it wasn't on the world scene as much of a topic of discussion. Little did we know, three, four weeks later, fast forward to February things were moving so quickly. I remember a Friday late in February where we were just about to go the next week to Las Vegas for our in-person sales kickoffs. Thousands of people, we were going to do, I think, five or 6,000 people in Las Vegas and then another 3,000 in Barcelona, and then finally in Singapore. And it had not yet been categorized a pandemic. It was still under this early form of some worriable virus. We decided for the health and safety of our employees to turn the entire event that was going to happen on Monday to something virtual, and I was so proud of the VMware team to just basically pivot just over the weekend. To change our entire event, we'd been thinking about video snippets. We have to become in this sort of virtual, digital age a little bit like TV producers like yourself, turn something that's going to be one day sitting in front of an audience to something that's a lot shorter, quicker snippets, so we began that, and the next thing we began doing over the next several weeks while the shelter in place order started, was systematically, first off, tell our employees, listen, focus on your health, but if you're healthy, turn your attention to serving your customers. And we began to see, which we'll talk about hopefully in the context of the discussion, parts of our portfolio experience a tremendous amount of interest for a COVID-centered world. Our digital workplace solutions, endpoint security, SD-WAN, and that trifecta began to be something that we began to see story after story of customers, hospitals, schools, governments, retailers, pharmacies telling us, thank you, VMware, for helping us when we needed those solutions to better enable our people on the front lines. And all VMware's role, John, was to be a digital first responder to the first responder, and that gave tremendous amount of motivation to all of our employees into it. >> Yeah, and I think that's a great point. One of the things we've been talking about, and you guys have been aligned with this, you mentioned some of those points, is that as we work at home, it points out that digital and technology is now part of lifestyle. So we used to talk about consumerization of IT, or immersion with augmented reality and virtual reality, and then talk about the edge of the network as an endpoint, we are at the edge of the network, we're at home, so this highlights some of the things that are in demand, workspaces, VPN provisioning, these new tools, that some cases we've been hearing people that no one ever thought of having a forecast of 100% VPN penetration. Okay, you did the AirWatch deal way back when you first started, these are now fruits of those labors. So I got to ask you, as managers of your customer base are out there thinking, okay, I got to double down on the right growth strategy for this post-pandemic world, the smart managers are going to look at the technologies enabled for business outcome, so I have to ask you, innovation strategies are one thing, saying it, putting it place, but now more than ever, putting them in action is the mandate that we're hearing from customers. Okay I need an innovation strategy, and I got to put it into action fast. What do you say to those customers? What is VMware doing with AWS, with cloud, to make those innovation strategies not only plausible but actionable? >> That's a great question, John. We focused our energy, before even COVID started, as we prepared for this year, going into sales kickoffs and our fiscal year, around five priorities. Number one was enabling the world to be multicloud, private cloud and public cloud, and clearly our partnership here with Amazon is the best example of that and they are our preferred cloud partner. Secondly, building modern apps with microservices and cloud native, what we call app modernization. Thirdly, which is a key part to the multicloud, is building out the entire network stack, data center networking, the firewalls, the load bouncing in SD-WAN, so I'd call that cloud network. Number four, the modernization of workplace with an additional workspace solution, Workspace ONE. And five, intrinsic security from all aspects of security, network, endpoint, and cloud. So those five priorities were what we began to think through, organize our portfolio, we call them solution pillars, and for any of your viewers who're interested, there's a five-minute version of the VMware story around those five pillars that you can watch on YouTube that I did, you just search for Sanjay Poonen and five-minute story. But then COVID hit us, and we said, okay we got to take these strategies now and make them more actionable. Exactly your question, right? So a subset of that portfolio of five began to become more actionable, because it's pointless going and talking about stuff and it's like, hey, listen, guys, I'm a house on fire, I don't care about the curtains and all the wonderful art. You got to help me through this crisis. So a subset of that portfolio became kind of what was those, think about now your laptop at home, or your endpoint at home. People wanted, on top of their Zoom call, or surrounding their Zoom call, a virtual desktop managed easily, so we began to see Workspace ONE getting a lot of interest from our customers, especially the VDI part of that portfolio. Secondly, that laptop at home needed to be secured. Traditional, old, legacy AV solutions that've worked, enter Carbon Black, so Workspace ONE plus Carbon Black, one and two. Third, that laptop at home needs network acceleration, because we're dialoguing and, John, we don't want any latency. Enter SD-WAN. So the trifecta of Workspace ONE, Carbon Black and VeloCloud, that began to see even more interest and we began to hone in our portfolio around those three. So that's an example of where you have a general strategy, but then you apply it to take action in the midst of a crisis, and then I say, listen, that trifecta, let's just go and present what we can do, we call that the business continuity or business resilience part of our portfolio. We began to start talking to customers, and saying, here's our business continuity solution, here's what we could do to help you, and we targeted hospitals, schools, governments, pharmacies, retailers, the ones who're on the front line of this and said again, that line I said earlier, we want to be a digital first responder to you, you are the real first responder. Right before this call I got off a CIO call with the CIO of a major hospital in the northeast area. What gives me great joy, John, is the fact that we are serving them. Their beds are busting at the seam, in serving patients-- >> And ransomware's a huge problem you guys-- >> We're serving them. >> And great stuff there, Sanjay, I was just on a call this morning with a bunch of folks in the security industry, thought leaders, was in DC, some generals were there, some real thought leaders, trying to figure out security policy around biosecurity, COVID-19, and this invisible disruption, and they were equating it to like the World Wars. Big inflection point, and one of the generals said, in those times of crisis you need alliances. So I got to ask you, COVID-19 is impactful, it's going to have serious impact on the critical nature of it, like you said, the house is on fire, don't worry about the curtains. Alliances matter more than ever when you need to come together. You guys have an ecosystem, Amazon's got an ecosystem, this is going to be a really important test to the alliances out there. How do you view that as you look forward? You need the alliances to be successful, to compete and win in the new world as this invisible enemy, if you will, or disruptor happens, what's your thoughts? >> Yeah, I'll answer in a second, just for your viewers, I sneezed, okay? I've been on your show dozens of time, John, but in your live show, if I sneezed, you'd hear the loud noise. The good news in digital is I can mute myself when a sneeze is about to happen, and we're able to continue the conversation, so these are some side benefits of the digital part of it. But coming to your question on alliance, super important. Ecosystems are how the world run around, united we stand, divided we fall. We have made ecosystems, I've always used this phrase internally at VMware, sort of like Isaac Newton, we see clearly because we stand on the shoulders of giants. So VMware is always able to be bigger of a company if we stand on the shoulders of bigger giants. Who were those companies 20 years ago when Diane started the company? It was the hardware economy of Intel and then HP and Dell, at the time IBM, now Lenovo, Cisco, NetApp, DMC. Today, the new hardware companies Amazon, Azure, Google, whoever have you, we were very, I think, prescient, if you would, to think about that and build a strategic partnership with Amazon three or four years ago. I've mentioned on your show before, Andy's a close friend, he was a classmate over at Harvard Business School, Pat, myself, Ragoo, really got close to Andy and Matt Garman and Mike Clayville and several members of their teams, Teresa Carlson, and began to build a partnership that I think is one of the most incredible success stories of a partnership. And Dell's kind of been a really strong partner with us on private cloud, having now Amazon with public cloud has been seminal, we do regular meetings and build deep integration of, VMware Cloud and AWS is not some announcement two or three years ago. It's deep engineering between, Bask's now in a different role, but in his previous role, that and people like Mark Lohmeyer in our team. And that deep engineering allows us to know and tell customers this simple statement, which both VMware and Amazon reps tell their customers today, if you have a workload running on vSphere, and you want to move that to Amazon, the best place, the preferred place for that is VMware Cloud and Amazon. If you try to refactor that onto a native VC 2, it's a waste of time and money. So to have the entire army of VMware and Amazon telling customers that statement is a huge step, because it tells customers, we have 70 million virtual machines running on-prem. If customers are looking to move those workloads to Amazon, the best place for that VMware Cloud and AWS, and we have some credible customer case studies. Freddie Mac was at VMworld last year. IHS Markit was at VMworld last year talking about it. Those are two examples and many more started it, so we would like to have every VMware and Amazon customer that's thinking about VMware to look at this partnership as one of the best in the industry and say very similar to what Andy I think said on stage at the time of this announcement, it doesn't have to be now a trade-off between public and private cloud, you can get the best of both worlds. That's what we're trying to do here-- >> That's a great point, I want to get your thoughts on leadership, as you look at COVID-19, one of our tracks we're going to be promoting heavily on theCUBE.net and our sites, around how to manage through this crisis. Andy Jassy was quoted on the fireside chat, which is coming up here in North America, but I saw it yesterday in New Zealand time as I time shifted over there, it's a two-sided door versus a one-sided door. That was kind of his theme is you got to be able to go both ways. And I want to get your thoughts, because you might know what you're doing in certain contexts, but if you don't know where you're going, you got to adjust your tactics and strategies to match that, and there's and old expression, if you don't know where you're going, every road will take you there, okay? And so a lot of enterprise CXOs or CEOs have to start thinking about where they want to go with their business, this is the growth strategy. Then you got to understand which roads to take. Your thoughts on this? Obviously we've been thinking it's cloud native, but if I'm a decision maker, I want to make sure I have an architecture that's going to carry me forward to the future. I need to make sure that I know where I'm going, so I know what road I'm on. Versus not knowing where I'm going, and every road looks good. So your thoughts on leadership and what people should be thinking around knowing what their destination is, and then the roads to take? >> John, I think it's the most important question in this time. Great leaders are born through crisis, whether it's Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Roosevelt, any of the leaders since then, in any country, Mahatma Gandhi in India, the country I grew up, Nelson Mandela, MLK, all of these folks were born through crisis, sometimes severe crisis, they had to go to jail, they were born through wars. I would say, listen, similar to the people you talked about, yeah, there's elements of this crisis that similar to a World War, I was talking to my 80 year old father, he's doing well. I asked him, "When was the world like this?" He said, "Second World War." I don't think this crisis is going to last six years. It might be six or 12 months, but I really don't think it'll be six years. Even the health care professionals aren't. So what do we learn through this crisis? It's a test of our leadership, and leaders are made or broken during this time. I would just give a few guides to leaders, this is something tha, Andy's a great leader, Pat, myself, we all are thinking through ways by which we can exercise this. Think of Sully Sullenberger who landed that plane on the Hudson. Did he know when he flew that airbus, US Airways airbus, that few flock of birds were going to get in his engine, and that he was going to have to land this plane in the Hudson? No, but he was making decisions quickly, and what did he exude to his co-pilot and to the rest of staff, calmness and confidence and appropriate communication. And I think it's really important as leaders, first off, that we communicate, communicate, communicate, communicate to our employees. First, our obligation is first to our employees, our family first, and then of course to our company employees, all 30,000 at VMware, and I'm sure similarly Andy does it to his, whatever, 60, 70,000 at AWS. And then you want to be able to communicate to them authentically and with clarity. People are going to be reading between the lines of everything you say, so one of the things I've sought to do with my team, all the front office functions report to me, is do half an hour Zoom video conferences, in the time zone that's convenient to them, so Japan, China, India, Europe, in their time zone, so it's 10 o'clock my time because it's convenient to Japan, and it's just 10 minutes of me speaking of what I'm seeing in the world, empathizing with them but listening to them for 20 minutes. That is communication. Authentically and with clarity, and then turn your attention to your employees, because we're going stir crazy sitting at home, I get it. And we've got to abide by the ordinances with whatever country we're in, turn your attention to your customers. I've gotten to be actually more productive during this time in having more customer conference calls, video conference calls on Zoom or whatever platform with them, and I'm looking at this now as an opportunity to engage in a new way. I have to be better prepared, like I said, these are shorter conversations, they're not as long. Good news I don't have to all over the place, that's better for my family, better for the carbon emission of the world, and also probably for my life long term. And then the third thing I would say is pick one area that you can learn and improve. For me, the last few years, two, three years, it's been security. I wanted to get the company into security, as you saw today we've announced mobile, so I helped architect the acquisition of Carbon Black, very similar to kind of the moves I've made six years ago around AirWatch, very key part to all of our focus to getting more into security, and I made it a personal goal that this year, at the start of the year, before COVID, I was going to meet 1,000 CISOs, in the Fortune 1000 Global 2000. Okay, guess what, COVID happens, and quite frankly that goal's gotten a little easier, because it's much easier for me to meet a lot more people on Zoom video conferences. I could probably do five, 10 per day, and if there's 200 working days in a day, I can easily get there, if I average about five per day, and sometimes I'm meeting them in groups of 10, 20. >> So maybe we can get you on theCUBE more often too, 'cause you have access to a video camera. >> That is my growth mindset for this year. So pick a growth mindset area. Satya Nadella puts this pretty well, "Move from being a know-it-all to a learn-it-all." And that's the mindset, great company. Andy has that same philosophy for Amazon, I think the great leaders right now who are running these cloud companies have that growth mindset. Pick an area that you can grow in this time, and you will find ways to do it. You'll be able to learn online and then be able to teach in some fashion. So I think communicate effectively, authentically, turn your attention to serving your customers, and then pick some growth area that you can learn yourself, and then we will come out of this crisis collectively, individuals and as partners, like VMware and Amazon, and then collectively as a society, I believe we'll come out stronger. >> Awesome great stuff, great insight there, Sanjay. Really appreciate you sharing that leadership. Back to the more of technical questions around leadership is cloud native. It's clear that there's going to be a line in the sand, if you will, there's going to be a right side of history, people are going to have to be on the right side of history, and I believe it's cloud native. You're starting to see this emersion. You guys have some news, you just announced today, you acquired a Kubernetes security startup, around Kubernetes, obviously Kubernetes needs security, it's one of those key new enablers, disruptive enablers out there. Cloud native is a path that is a destination opportunity for people to think about, why that acquisition? Why that company? Why is VMware making this move? >> Yeah, we felt as we talked about our plans in security, backing up to things I talked about in my last few appearances on your show at VMworld, when we announced Carbon Black, was we felt the security industry was broken because there was too many point benders, and we figured there'd be three to five control points, network, endpoint, cloud, where we could play a much more pronounced role at moving a lot of these point benders, I describe this as not having to force our customers to go to a doctor and say I've got to eat 5,000 tablets to get healthy, you make it part of your diet, you make it part of the infrastructure. So how do we do that? With network security, we're off to the races, we're doing a lot more data center networking, firewall, load bouncing, SD-WAN. Really, reality is we can eat into a lot of the point benders there that I've just been, and quite frankly what's happened to us very gratifying in the network security area, you've seen the last few months, some firewall vendors are buying SD-WAN players, kind of following our strategy. That's a tremendous validation of the fact that the network security space is being disrupted. Okay, move to endpoint security, part of the reason we acquired Carbon Black was to unify the client side, Workspace ONE and Carbon Black should come together, and we're well under way in doing that, make Carbon Black agentless on the server side with vSphere, we're well on the way to that, you'll see that very soon. By the way both those things are something that the traditional endpoint players can't do. And then bring out new forms of workload. Servers that are virtualized by VMware is just one form of work. What are other workloads? AWS, the public clouds, and containers. Container's just another workload. And we've been looking at container security for a long time. What we didn't want to do was buy another static analysis player, another platform and replatform it. We felt that we could get great technology, we have incredible grandeur on container cell. It's sort of Red Hat and us, they're the only two companies who are doing Kubernetes scales. It's not any of these endpoint players who understand containers. So Kubernetes, VMware's got an incredible brand and relevance and knowledge there. The networking part of it, service mesh, which is kind of a key component also to this. We've been working with Google and others like Istio in service mesh, we got a lot of IP there that the traditional endpoint players, Symantec, McAfee, Trend, CrowdStrike, don't know either Kubernetes or service mesh well. We add now container security into this, we really distinguish ourselves further from the traditional endpoint players with bringing together, not just the endpoint platform that can do containers, but also Kubernetes service mesh. So why is that important? As people think about their future in containers, they'll want to do this at the runtime level, not at the static level. They'll want to do it at build time And they'll want to have it integrated with some of their networking capabilities like service mesh. Who better to think about that IP and that evolution than VMware, and now we bring, I think it's 12 to 14 people we're bringing in from this acquisition. Several of them in Israel, some of them here in Palo Alto, and they will build that platform into the tech that VMware has onto the Carbon Black cloud and we will deliver that this year. It's not going to be years from now. >> Did you guys talk about the-- >> Our capability, and then we can bring the best of Carbon Black, with Tanzu, service mesh, and even future innovation, like, for example, there's a big movement going around, this thing call open policy agent OPA, which is an open source effort around policy management. You should expect us to embrace that, there could be aspects of OPA that also play into the future of this container security movement, so I think this is a really great move for Patrick and his team, I'm very excited. Patrick is the CEO of Carbon Black and the leader of that security business unit, and he came to me and said, "Listen, one of the areas "we need to move in is container security "because it's the number one request I'm hearing "from our CESOs and customers." I said, "Go ahead Patrick. "Find out who are the best player you could acquire, "but you have to triangulate that strategy "with the Tanzu team and the NSX team, "and when you have a unified strategy what we should go, "we'll go an make the right acquisition." And I'm proud of what he was able to announce today. >> And I noticed you guys on the release didn't talk about the acquisition amount. Was it not material, was it a small amount? >> No, we don't disclose small, it's a tuck-in acquisition. You should think of this as really bringing us some tech and some talent, and being able to build that into the core of the platform of Carbon Black. Carbon Black was the real big move we made. Usually what we do, you saw this with AirWatch, right, anchor on a fairly big move. We paid I think 2.1 billion for Carbon Black, and then build and build and build on top of that, partner very heavily, we didn't talk about that. If there's time we could talk about it. We announced today a security alliance with top SIEM players, in what's called a sock alliance. Who's announced in there? Splunk, IBM QRadar, Google Chronicle, Sumo Logic, and Exabeam, five of the biggest SIEM players are embracing VMware in endpoint security, saying, Carbon Black is who we want to work with. Nobody else has that type of partnership, so build, partner, and then buy. But buy is always very carefully thought through, we're not one of these companies like CA of the past that just bought every company and then it becomes a graveyard of dead acquisition. Our view is we're very disciplined about how we think about acquisition. Acquisitions for us are often the last resort, because we'd prefer to build and partner. But sometimes for time-to-market reasons, we acquire, and when we acquire, it's thoughtful, it's well-organized within VMware, and we take care of our people, 'cause we want, I mean listen, why do acquisitions fail? Because the good people leave. So we're excited about this team, the team in Israel, and the team in Palo Alto, they come from Octarine. We're going to integrate them rapidly into the platform, and this is a good evidence of VMware investing more in security, and our Q3 earnings pulled, John, I said, sorry, we said that the security business was a billion dollar business at VMware already, primarily from network, but some from endpoint. This is evidence of us putting more fuel behind that fire. It's only been six, seven months and Patrick's made his first acquisition inside Carbon Black, so you're going to see us investing more in security, it's an important priority for the company, and I expect us to be a very prominent player in these three pillars, network security, endpoint security, endpoint is both client and the workload, and cloud. Network, endpoint, cloud, they are the three areas where we think there's lots of room for innovation in security. >> Well, we'll be watching, we'll be reporting and analyzing the moves. Great playbook, by the way. Love that organic partnering and then key acquisitions which you build around, it's a great playbook, I think it's very relevant for this time. The most important question I have to ask you, Sanjay, and this is a personal question, because you're the leader of VMware, I noticed that, we all know you're into music, you've been putting music online, kind of a virtual band. You've also hired a CUBE alumni, Victoria Verango from McAfee who also puts up music, you've got some musicians, but you kind of know how to do the digital moves there, so the question is, will the music at VMworld this year be virtual? >> Oh, man. Victoria is actually an even better musician than me. I'm excited about his marketing gifts, but I'm also excited to watch him. But yeah, you've heard him sing, he's got a voice that's somewhat similar to Sting, so we, just for fun, in our Diwali, which is an Indian celebration last year, Tom Corn, myself, and a wonderful lady named Divya, who's got a beautiful voice, had sung a song, which was off the soundtrack of the Bollywood movie, "Secret Superstar," and we just for fun decided to record that in our three separate homes, and put that out on YouTube. You can listen, it's just a two or three-minute run, and it kind of went a little bit viral. And I was thinking to myself, hey, if this is one way by which we can let the VMware community know that, hey, you know what, art conquers COVID-19, you can do music even socially distant, and bring out the spirit of VMware, which is community. So we might build on that idea, Victoria and I were talking about that last night and saying, hey, maybe we do a virtual music kind of concert of maybe 10 or 15 or 20 voices in the various different countries. Record piece of a song and music and put it out there. I think these are just ways by which we're having fun in a virtual setting where people get to see a different side of VMware where, and the intent here, we're all amateurs, John, we're not like great. There are going to be mistakes in this music. If you listen to that audio, it sounds a little tinny, 'cause we're recording it off our iPhone and our iPad microphone. But we'll do the best we can, the point is just to show the human spirit and to show that we care, and at the end of the day, see, the COVID-19 virus has no prejudice on color of skin, or nationality, or ethnicity. It's affecting the whole world. We all went into the tunnel at different times, we will come out of this tunnel together and we will be a stronger human fabric when we're done with this, We shall absolutely overcome. >> Sanjay, give us a quick update to end the segment on your thoughts around VMworld. It's one of the biggest events, we look forward to it. It's the only even left standing that theCUBE's been to every year of theCUBE's existence, we're looking forward to being part of theCUBE virtual. It's been announced it's virtual. What are some of the thinking going on at the highest levels within the VMware community around how you're going to handle VMworld this year? >> Listen, when we began to think about it, we had to obviously give our customers and folks enough notice, so we didn't want to just spring that sometime this summer. So we decided to think through it carefully. I asked Robin, our CMO, to talk to many of the other CMOs in the industry. Good news is all of these are friends of ours, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Salesforce, Adobe, and even some smaller companies, IBM did theirs. And if they were in the first half of the year, they had to go virtual 'cause we're sheltered in place, and IBM did theirs, Okta did theirs, and we began to watch how they were doing this. We're kind of in the second half, because we were August, September, and we just sensed a lot of hesitancy from our customers that wanted to get on a plane to come here, and even if we got just 500, 1,000, a few thousand, it wasn't going to be the same and there would always be that sort of, even if we were getting back to that, some worry, so we figured we'd do something that might be semi-digital, and we may have some people that roam, but the bulk of it is going to be digital, and we changed the dates to be a little later. I think it's September 20th to 29th. Right now it's all public now, we announced that, and we're going to make it a great program. In some senses like we're becoming TV producer. I told our team we got to be like Disney or ESPN or whoever your favorite show is, YouTube, and produce a really good several-hour program that has got a different way in which digital content is provided, smaller snippets, very interesting speakers, great brand names, make the content clear, crisp and compelling. And if we do that, this will be, I don't know, maybe it's the new norm for some period of time, or it might be forever, I don't know. >> John: We're all learning. >> In the past we had huge conferences that were busting 50, 70, 100,000 and then after the dot-com era, those all shrunk, they're like smaller conferences, and now with advent of companies like Amazon and Salesforce, we have huge events that, like VMworld, are big events. We may move to a environment that's a lot more digital, I don't know what the future of in-presence physical conferences are, but we, like others, we're working with AWS in terms of their future with Reinvent, what Microsoft's doing with Ignite, what Google's doing with Next, what Salesforce's going to do with Dreamforce, all those four companies are good partners of ours. We'll study theirs, we'll work together as a community, the CMOs of all those companies, and we'll come together with something that's a very good digital experience for our customers, that's really what counts. Today I did a webinar with a partner. Typically when we did a briefing in our briefing center, 20 people came. There're 100 people attending this, I got a lot more participation in this QBR that I did with this SI partner, one of the top SIs in the world, in an online session with them, than would I have gotten if they'd all come to Palo Alto. That's goodness. Should we take the best of that world and some physical presence? Maybe in the future, we'll see how it goes. >> Content quality. You know, you know content. Content quality drives everything online, good engagement creates community, that's a nice flywheel. I think you guys will figure it out, you've got a lot of great minds there, and of course, theCUBE virtual will be helping out as we can, and we're rethinking things too-- >> We count on that, John-- >> We're going to be open minded to new ideas, and, hey, whatever's the best content we can deliver, whether it's CUBE, or with you guys, or whoever, we're looking forward to it. Sanjay, thanks for spending the time on this CUBE Keynote coverage of AWS Summit. Since it's digital we can do longer programs, we can do more diverse content. We got great customer practitioners coming up, talking about their journey, their innovation strategies. Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware, thank you for taking your precious time out of your day today. >> Thank you, John, always a pleasure. >> Thank you. Okay, more CUBE, virtual CUBE digital coverage of AWS Summit 2020, theCUBE.net is we're streaming, and of course, tons of videos on innovation, DevOps, and more, scaling cloud, scaling on-premise hybrid cloud, and more. We got great interviews coming up, stay with us our all-day coverage. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nashville, Tennessee, it's theCUBE, covering Commvault GO 2018. Brought to you by Commvault. >> Welcome to the Music City. You're watching theCUBE, the worldwide leader in live tech coverage. This is Commvault GO. 20-year-old company, Commvault, the third year of their show, and the first time we have theCUBE here, and the first time we've been in Nashville, Tennessee. I'm Stu Miniman, your host for one day of coverage and joining me to help unlock the Commvault is the CTO advisor, Keith Townsend. >> Good to be back on theCUBE. >> Yeah, Keith, so you've actually been to this show before. It's my first time. I've known Commvault for a long time, but, you know, we talk about companies, they're all going through some kind of digital transformation and Commvault is no exception. I love the energy that I'm seeing at this show. They've got great puns around data. Data is at the center of everything, and really comes to what we see. You know, we know that data is so important. All the tropes out there. It's the new oil, it's the new currency, it is one of the most important things, not only in IT, but in business. So what's your experience been, so far? >> So far great. You know, they did a great job, second go for me. Last year, they had Captain Sully, great inspirational talk. This year they had a comedian, Connell on it, did a fabulous job of fast-paced multimedia sessions, talking about the connection of data, our everyday lives, lives as a technologist. Really high-powered show, a lot of great conversation around data and its applicability. >> Yeah, I did love that. Steve Connell, he is a poet, and some humor, and a lot of geeky things in there, talking about, right, how data fits into all of our lives, and what we do. And then that's one of the reason's why we're here, why the customers are here, and that's what it's about. You look at a company like Commvault. They've got 10s of thousands of customers, and as the big wave's coming in, what is Cloud Mead? I like some of the messages. I know we're going to dig in, both in our analysis, as well as with the guests, how cloud is impacting this, as well as things like the wave of AI. How is that changing the product? How can I access the information? I hear things like ransomware and GDPR, and hacking. It's a dangerous time in technology, whether you're talking social media, or talking in business. So give us a little bit of background, what you're hearing. Keith, you're talking to customers in your day job all the time. How important is data? And things like backup and data recovery, where do they fit in their world? >> Well, you know what? Customers are still learning this journey. I've talked to plenty of customers that have used Commvault, competing products, and a lot of, at the low level, a lot of these guys are still thinking about it as backup, but great, great testimony from one of the larger customers, out there, Merck, who talked about using backup or data protection, as part of their data management strategy, moving workloads from worker mobility, moving workloads from cloud to cloud, location to location. Every customer is dealing with multi-cloud challenges. Stu, we've talked about multi-cloud and the keys to multi-cloud data is absolutely the most important part of getting your multi-cloud strategy, or even cloud strategy, straight. So, I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation I've had out in the field, which is customers challenged with how do I simply identify a data management strategy? To hearing Commvault's message today and throughout the guests that we'll have on, customers, partners, the entire ecosystem, about how Commvault enables multi-cloud through data management. >> Yeah, I was curious what I would see coming in. Would this be, kind of, a hard core, let's get in to the product and understand things like backup and recovery. As you know, backup's important, but recovery is everything. We heard some of the customer stories about how fast they can recover. Those are great stories. How does cloud fit into it? You had the CEO and the COO on stage talking about do you go, when you go to the cloud, do you go simple or do you go smart? And there's some nuance there that you'll want to unpack as to understanding. You know, as we look at cloud, it's not just take the way we were doing things and throw them up there. I mean Keith, they talked about tape and virtual tape. You know, I remember back when, like, the VTLs were first being a thing, I was working at a storage company back then. You know, it was a huge move. Backup, those processes, are really hardened into an environment. What do the admins have to do? What do they have to change in the way they're doing things? Let's look at the news a little bit. So, you know, there was the, Commvault did a good job, I think, of checking all the check boxes. While there was nothing that jumped out at me as, like, wow this is the first time I've heard it, it's what I'm hearing from customers. So, moving to, and as a service portfolio, they've got a full line of appliances, but it's not only hardware. If you'd like to buy the software from them, of course you could do that. Got a number of big partners. We're going to HPE on the program. We're going to have Cisco on the program. NetUP is another big, big partner here. As well as, I think that the product that they're most excited to talk about is Commvault Activate, which is really looking a lot of the governance, which, when you talk in a cloud world, is one of the biggest challenges. By the way, if people in the background hear these cheering, the Commvault employees are really excited, everybody's starting to walk on the show floor. We're in the center of it all, Keith. So, we got a preview yesterday, they actually announced it to the tech field day crew, which you and I sat in with. So, give me your thoughts as to what you saw in the product line. How does that line up with what you're hearing from customers in a competitive nature? >> So, I think I tweeted out yesterday, doing the tech field day session, Commvault does not sleep at the wheel. As you said, Stu, there's nothing amazingly new about what they announced, but a 20-year-old technology company is definitely keeping pace with the innovation that we've seen in the field. Customers want options when it comes to consuming backup and recovery. From a storage layer, they want the storage bricks, they want a hardware solution, they want to consume it via subscription, or perpetual license. They want this cloud-type capability. More importantly, they want, and they talked about it on stage today, this analytics capability. The ability to extract intelligence out of your data. Commvault calls is 4-D indexing. Other vendors just call it, simply, meta-data. But taking advantage of 15, 20 year-old data, to drive innovation in today's society, while keeping compliant with GDPR and other regulations that are coming up, sprouting up as it seems, every other week. >> I did like that terminology that you used. The 4-D innovation, because of course the fourth dimension is time and we're using intelligence. The challenge we have, as we know, is we have so much data and what do we the analytics for? They said we can use the analytics, first of all, compliance. I need to understand that I take care of that. Secondly, what if I want to cull data? What data don't I need anymore? What can I get rid of? There's huge cost savings that I can have there. And lastly, what can I get from analytics? How can I get value out of that information? And more. So, the use of analytics is something I was looking for, obviously want to talk to some of the product people, some of the customers, about what I've heard so far and talking to people. People were excited. I was actually talking to one of the partners of Commvault, they said one of the reasons they partnered deeper and are looking to work with Commvault, is they've got good tech. There's a reason they've been around for 20 years. They're a publicly traded stock. They've been doing well. They have been growing. Revenue wise, I looked, the last three years, I think they're at 700 million, they've been growing in the kind of eight to 9% year over year for the last couple years. Which, as a software company, it's not taking the world by storm, but for, in the infrastructure space, that is good growth. I do have to mention, there was some activist investor activity that came on. We actually we're going to have the CMO, we're going to have the COO on the program. We won't have the CEO, they are in the midst of going through a change there. And, you know, look, say what you will about activist investors. The reason they're getting involved is because they believe that there is more value that can be unlocked in Commvault with some changes and with product line and the things happening that's what we're starting to see here. That's why were excited to dig in and kind of understand. >> Yeah, we can see that even in some of the tech customer's testimonials. The state of Colorado net new customer. This is amazing in an area that we've seen 90 million, 250 million, easily a half a million dollars of investment in the data protection space. Commvault, 20-year-old company, still gaining traction with net new use cases and if I was an activist investor, I'd look at that. I'd look at the overall industry and thinking what can we do to unlock some of the potential of a fairly large customer base? Pretty stable company, but a very, very exciting part of the industry. >> Yeah, and Keith, you brought up meta-data. Meta-data's something that, you know, in the industry we've been talking about for a long time. It's really that intelligence that's going to allow the systems to gather everything. I know, when I get my brand new phone now, I can search my 4,000 photos by location, by date, everything like that. It's auto-recognizing information. The same thing we're getting on the business side. It used be oh okay, let's make sure when you put your photo, your file, in there that you tag it. Come on. Nobody can do this. Nobody's thinking when I'm doing my job, well I really need to think about the meta data 'cause five years from now, I might want to do it. Oh, I can search by person or project or things like that. But it's the intelligence in the system to be able to learn and grow and the more data we have, actually the more that the intelligence can get there. >> And that's critically important for even compliance. Again, culling data. You know, Bill Nye got up on stage and talked about being able to use data, or I'm sorry, AstraZeneca got up on stage and talked about using data that was 15-years-old to rerun through today's algorithms and trials. If you were to cull the wrong data, then they could not have the innovation that they've created by having 15-year-old data. So, the meta data, the ability to go back again, search your repository for key words, content, surface up that data and leverage that data. This is why we say data is the new currency, it's the new oil, it's the most critical. I even heard on stage today, data's the new water. I don't know if I'd go quite that far, you know I like my old-fashioned glass of water, but this is why we hear these terms because companies are reinventing themselves with the data. >> Alright, so Keith, what Dave Allante would point out is water is a limited resource. Data, we can reuse it. We can take a drink of data, we can share it. Data helps complete us. It's the shirts that they have at the show. We've got AstraZeneca, we've got the state of Colorado, we've got other users. The key partners, key executives. We're going to bring you the key data to help you extract the signal from the noise here at Commvault GO. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. Thanks for joining theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Berlin, Germany, it's theCUBE. Covering NetApp Insight 2017. Brought to you by NetApp. (techno music) Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of NetApp Insight here in Berlin, Germany. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, along with my cohost Peter Burris. We have two guests for this segment. We have Matt Watts, he is the director and data strategist and director of technology at NetApp, and Kenneth Cukier, a senior editor at The Economist, and author of the best-selling book Big Data, and author of a soon to be best-selling book on AI. Welcome. Thank you. Thank you much for coming on the show. Pleasure to be here. So, this is the, we keep hearing NetApp saying this is the day of the data visionary. I'd love to hear both of you talk about what a data visionary is, and why companies, why this is a necessary role in today's companies. Okay, so I think if you look at the generations that we've been through in the late nineties, early 2000's, it was all about infrastructure with a little bit of application and some data associated to it. And then as we kind of rolled forward to the next decade the infrastructure discussion became less. It became more about the applications and increasingly more about the data. And if we look at the current decade that we're in right now, the infrastructure discussions have become less, and less, and less. We're still talking about applications, but the focus is on data. And what we haven't seen so much of during that time is the roles changing. We still have a lot of infrastructure people doing infrastructure roles, a lot of application people doing application roles. But the real value in this explosion of data that we're seeing is in the data. And it's time now that companies really look to put data visionaries, people like that in place to understand how do we exploit it, how do we use it, what should we gather, what could we do with the information that we do gather. And so I think the timing is just right now for people to be really considering that. Yeah, I would build on what Matt just said. That, functionally in the business and the enterprise we have the user of data, and we have the professional who collected the data. And sometimes we had a statistician who would analyze it. But pass it along to the user who is an executive, who is an MBA, who is the person who thinks with data and is going to present it to the board or to make a decision based on it. But that person isn't a specialist on data. That person probably doesn't, maybe doesn't even know math. And the person is thinking about the broader issues related to the company. The strategic imperatives. Maybe he speaks some languages, maybe he's a very good salesperson. There's no one in the middle, at least up until now, who can actually play that role of taking the data from the level of the bits and the bytes and in the weeds and the level of the infrastructure, and teasing out the value, and then translating it into the business strategy that can actually move the company along. Now, sometimes those people are going to actually move up the hierarchy themselves and become the executive. But they need not. Right now, there's so much data that's untapped you can still have this function of a person who bridges the world of being in the weeds with the infrastructure and with the data itself, and the larger broader executives suite that need to actually use that data. We've never had that function before, but we need to have it now. So, let me test you guys. Test something in you guys. So what I like to say is, we're at the middle of a significant break in the history of computing. The first 50 years or so it was known process, unknown technology. And so we threw all our time and attention at understanding the technology. >> Matt: Yeah. We knew accounting, we knew HR, we even knew supply-chain, because case law allowed us to decide where a title was when. [Matt] Yep. But today, we're unknown process, known technology. It's going to look like the cloud. Now, the details are always got to be worked out, but increasingly we are, we don't know the process. And so we're on a road map of discovery that is provided by data. Do you guys agree with that? So I would agree, but I'd make a nuance which is I think that's a very nice way of conceptualizing, and I don't disagree. But I would actually say that at the frontier the technology is still unknown as well. The algorithms are changing, the use cases, which you're pointing out, the processes are still, are now unknown, and I think that's a really important way to think about it, because suddenly a lot of possibility opens up when you admit that the processes are unknown because it's not going to look like the way it looked in the past. But I think for most people the technology's unknown because the frontier is changing so quickly. What we're doing with image recognition and voice recognition today is so different than it was just three years ago. Deep learning and reinforcement learning. Well it's going to require armies of people to understand that. Well, tell me about it. This is the full-- Is it? For the most, yes it's a full employment act for data scientists today, and I don't see that changing for a generation. So, everyone says oh what are we going to teach our kids? Well teach them math, teach them stats, teach them some coding. There's going to be a huge need. All you have to do is look at the society. Look at the world and think about what share of it is actually done well, optimized for outcomes that we all agree with. I would say it's probably between, it's in single percents. Probably between 1% and 5% of the world is optimized. One small example: medical science. We collect a lot of data in medicine. Do we use it? No. It's the biggest scandal going on in the world. If patients and citizens really understood the degree to which medical science is still trial and error based on the gumption of the human mind of a doctor and a nurse rather than the data that they actually already collect but don't reuse. There would be Congressional hearings everyday. People, there would be revolutions in the street because, here it is the duty of care of medical practitioners is simply not being upheld. Yeah, I'd take exception to that. Just, not to spend too much time on this, but at the end of the day, the fundamental role of the doctor is to reduce the uncertainty and the fear and the consequences of the patient. >> Kenneth: By any means necessary and they are not doing that. Hold on. You're absolutely right that the process of diagnosing and the process of treatment from a technical standpoint would be better. But there's still the human aspect of actually taking care of somebody. Yeah, I think that's true, and think there is something of the hand of the healer, but I think we're practicing a form of medicine that looks closer to black magic than it does today to science. Bring me the data scientist. >> Peter: Alright. And I think an interesting kind of parallel to that is when you jump on a plane, how often do you think the pilot actually lands that plane? He doesn't. No. Thank you. So, you still need somebody there. Yeah. But still need somebody as the oversight, as that kind of to make a judgment on. So I'm going to unify your story, my father was a cardiologist who was also a flight surgeon in the Air Force in the U.S., and was one of the few people that was empowered by the airline pilots association to determine whether or not someone was fit to fly. >> Matt: Right. And so my dad used to say that he is more worried about the health of a bus driver than he is of an airline pilot. That's great. So, in other words we've been gah-zumped by someone who's father was both a doctor and a pilot. You can't do better than that. So it turns out that we do want Sully on the Hudson, when things go awry. But in most cases I think we need this blend of the data on one side and the human on the other. The idea that the data just because we're going to go in the world of artificial intelligence machine learning is going to mean jobs will be eradicated left and right. I think that's a simplification. I think that the nuance that's much more real is that we're going to live in a hybrid world in which we're going to have human beings using data in much more impressive ways than they've ever done it before. So, talk about that. I mean I think you have made this compelling case that we have this huge need for data and this explosion of data plus the human judgment that is needed to either diagnose an illness or whether or not someone is fit to fly a plane. So then where are we going in terms of this data visionary and in terms of say more of a need for AI? Yeah. Well if you take a look at medicine, what we would have is, the diagnosis would probably be done say for a pathology exam by the algorithm. But then, the health care coach, the doctor will intervene and will have to both interpret this for, first of what it means, translate it to the patient, and then discuss with the patient the trade-offs in terms of their lifestyle choices. For some people, surgery is the right answer. For others, you might not want to do that. And, it's always different with all of the patients in terms of their age, in terms of whether they have children or not, whether they want the potential of complications. It's never so obvious. Just as we do that, or we will do that in medicine, we're going to do that in business as well. Because we're going to take data that we never had about decisions should we go into this market or that market. Should we take a risk and gamble with this product a little bit further, even though we're not having a lot of sales because the profit margins are so good on it. There's no algorithm that can tell you that. And in fact you really want the intellectual ambition and the thirst for risk taking of the human being that defies the data with an instinct that I think it's the right thing to do. And even if we're going to have failures with that, and we will, we'll have out-performance. And that's what we want as well. Because society advances by individual passions, not by whatever the spreadsheet says. Okay. Well there is this issue of agency right? So at the end of the day a human being can get fired, a machine cannot. A machine, in the U.S. anyway, software is covered under the legal strictures of copywriting. Which means it's a speech act. So, what do you do in circumstances where you need to point a finger at something for making a stupid mistake. You keep coming back to the human being. So there is going to be an interesting interplay over the next few years of how this is going to play out. So how is this working, or what's the impact on NetApp as you work with your customers on this stuff? So I think you've got the AI, ML, that's kind of one kind of discussion. And that can lead you into all sorts of rat holes or other discussions around well how do we make decisions, how do we trust it to make decisions, there's a whole aspect that you have to discuss around that. I think if you just bring it back to businesses in general, all the businesses that we look at are looking at new ways of creating new opportunities, new business models, and they're all collecting data. I mean we know the story about General Electric. Used to sell jet engines and now it's much more about what can we do with the data that we collect from the jet engines. So that's finding a new business model. And then you vote with a human role in that as well, is well is there a business model there? We can gather all of this information. We can collect it, we can refine it, we can sort it, but is there actually a new business model there? And I think it's those kind of things that are inspiring us as a company to say well we could uncover something incredible here. If we could unlock that data, we could make sure it's where it needs to be when it needs to be there. You have the resources to bring to bed to be able to extract value from it, you might find a new business model. And I think that's the aspect that I think is of real interest to us going forward, and kind of inspires a lot of what we're doing. Great. Kenneth, Matt, thank you so much for coming on the show. It was a really fun conversation. Thank you. Thank you for having us. We will have more from NetApp Insight just after this. (techno music)