(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore '22, formerly VMworld. This is our 12th year covering it. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellente. Two sets, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We're starting to get the execs rolling in from VMware. Sumit Dhawan, president of VMware's here. Great to see you. Great keynote, day one. >> Great to be here, John. Great to see you, Dave. Day one, super exciting. We're pumped. >> And you had no problem with the keynotes. We're back in person. Smooth as silk up there. >> We were talking about it. We had to like dust off a cobweb to make some of these inputs. >> It's not like riding a bike. >> No, it's not. We had about 40% of our agencies that we had to change out because they're no longer in business. So, I have to give kudos to the team who pulled it together. They did a fabulous job. >> You do a great check, great presentation. I know you had a lot to crack in there. Raghu set the table. I know this is for him, this was a big moment to lay out the narrative, address the Broadcom thing right out of the gate, wave from Hock Tan in the audience, and then got into the top big news. Still a lot of meat on the bone. You get up there, you got to talk about the use cases, vSphere 8, big release, a lot of stuff. Take us through the keynote. What was the important highlights for you to share, the folks watching that didn't see the keynote or wanted to get your perspective? >> Well, first of all, did any of you notice that Raghu was running on the stage? He did not do that in rehearsal. (John chuckles) I was a little bit worried, but he really did it. >> I said, I betcha that was real. (everyone chuckles) >> Anyways, the jokes aside, he did fabulous. Lays out the strategy. My thinking, as you said, was to first of all speak with their customers and explain how every enterprise is facing with this concept of cloud chaos that Raghu laid out and CVS Health story sort of exemplifies the situation that every customer is facing. They go in, they start with cloud first, which is needed, I think that's the absolutely right approach. Very quickly build out a model of getting a cloud ops team and a platform engineering team which oftentimes be a parallel work stream to a private cloud infrastructure. Great start. But as Roshan, the CIO at CVS Health laid out, there's an inflection point. And that's when you have to converge these because the use cases are where stakeholders, this is the lines of businesses, app developers, finance teams, and security teams, they don't need this stove piped information coming at 'em. And the converge model is how he opted to organize his team. So we called it a multi-cloud team, just like a workspace team. And listen, our commitment and innovations are to solve the problems of those teams so that the stakeholders get what they need. That's the rest of the keynote. >> Yeah, first of all, great point. I want to call out that inflection point comment because we've been reporting coming into VMworld with super cloud and other things across open source and down into the weeds and into the hood. The chaos is real. So, good call. I love how you guys brought that up there. But all industry inflection points, if you go back in history of the tech industry, at every single major inflection point, there was chaos, complexity, or an enemy proprietary. However you want to look at it, there was a situation where you needed to kind of reign in the chaos as Andy Grove would say. So we're at that inflection point, I think that's consistent. And also the ecosystem floor yesterday, the expo floor here in San Francisco with your partners, it was vibrant. They're all on this wave. There is a wave and an inflection point. So, okay. I buy that. So, if you buy the inflection point, what has to happen next? Because this is where we're at. People are feeling it. Some say, I don't have a problem but they're cut chaos such is the problem. So, where do you see that? How does VMware's team organizing in the industry and for customers specifically to solve the chaos, to reign it in and cross over? >> Yeah, you're a 100% right. Every inflection point is associated with some kind of a chaos that had to be reigned in. So we are focused on two major things right now which we have made progress in. And maybe third, we are still work in-progress. Number one is technology. Today's technology announcements are directly to address how that streamlining of chaos can be done through a cloud smart approach that we laid out. Our Aria, a brand new solution for management, significant enhancements to Tanzu, all of these for public cloud based workloads that also extend to private cloud. And then our cloud infrastructure with newer capabilities with AWS, Azure, as well as with new innovations on vSphere 8 and vSAN 8. And then last but not the least, our continuous automation to enable anywhere workspace. All these are simple innovation that have to address because without those innovations, the problem is that the chaos oftentimes is created because lack of technology and as a result structure has to be put in place because tooling and technology is not there. So, number one goal we see is providing that. Second is we have to be independent, provide support for every possible cloud but not without being a partner of theirs. That's not an easy thing to do but we have the DNA as a company, we have done that with data centers in the past, even though being part of Dell we did that in the data center in the past, we have done that in mobility. And so we have taken the challenge of doing that with the cloud. So we are continually building newer innovation and stronger and stronger partnerships with cloud provider which is the basis of our commercial relationships with Microsoft Azure too, where we have brought Azure VMware solution into VMware cloud universal. Again, that strengthens the value of us being neutral because it's very important to have a Switzerland party that can provide these multi-cloud solutions that doesn't have an agenda of a specific cloud, yet an ecosystem, or at least an influence with the ecosystem that can bring going forward. >> Okay, so technology, I get that. Open, not going to be too competitive, but more open. So the question I got to ask you is what is the disruptive enabler to make that happen? 'Cause you got customers, partners and team of VMware, what's the disruptive enabler that's going to get you to that level? >> Over the hump. I mean, listen, our value is this community. All this community has one of two paths to go. Either, they become stove piped into just the public-private cloud infrastructure or they step up as this convergence that's happening around them to say, "You know what? I have the solution to tame this multi-cloud complexity, to reign the chaos," as you mentioned because tooling and technologies are available. And I know they work with the ecosystem. And our objective is to bring this community to that point. And to me, that is the best path to overcome it. >> You are the connective tissue. I was able to sit into the analyst meeting today. You were sort of the proxy for CVS Health where you talked about the private that's where you started, the public cloud ops team, bringing that together. The platform is the glue. That is the connective tissue. That's where Tanzu comes in. That's where Aria comes in. And that is the disruptive technology which it's hard to build that. >> From a technology perspective, it's an enabler of something that has never been done before in that level of comprehensiveness, from a more of a infrastructure side thinking perspective. Yes, infrastructure teams have enabled self-service portals. Yes, infrastructure teams have given APIs to developers, but what we are enabling through Tanzu is completely next level where you have a lot richer experience for developers so that they never ever have to think about the infrastructure at all. Because even when you enable infrastructure as API, that's still an API of the infrastructure. We go straight to the application tier where they're just thinking about authorized set of microservices. Containers can be orchestrated and built automatically, shifting security left where we're truly checking them or enabling them to check the security vulnerabilities as they're developing the application, not going into the production when they have to touch the infrastructure. To me, that's an enabler of a special power that this new multi-cloud team can have across cloud which they haven't had in the past. >> Yeah, it's funny, John, I'd say very challenging technically. The challenge in 2010 was the software mainframe, remember the marketing people killed that term. >> Yeah, exactly. >> But you think about that. We're going to make virtualization and the overhead associated with that irrelevant. We're going to be able to run any workload and VMware achieved that. Now you're saying we run anything anywhere, any Kubernete, any container. >> That's the reality. That's the chaos. >> And the cloud and that's a new, real problem. Real challenging problem that requires serious engineering. >> Well, I mean it's aspirational, right? Let's get the reality, right? So true spanning cloud, not yet there. You guys, I think your vision is definitely right on in the sense that we'd like the chaos and multicloud's a reality. The question is AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, other clouds, they're not going to sit still. No one's going to let VMware just come up and take everything. You got to enable so the market- >> True, true. I don't think this is the case of us versus them because there is so much that they have to express in terms of the value of every cloud. And this happened in the case of, by the way, whether you go into infrastructure or even workspace solutions, as long as the richest of the experience and richest of the controls are provided, for their cloud to the developers that makes the adoption of their cloud simpler. It's a win-win for every party. >> That's the key. I think the simplest. So, I want to ask you, this comes up a lot and I love that you brought that up, simple and self-service has proven developers who are driving the change, cloud DevOps developers. They're driving the change. They're in charge more than ever. They want self-service, easier to deploy. I want a test, if I don't like it, I want to throw it away. But if I like something, I want to stick with it. So it's got to be self-service. Now that's antithetical to the old enterprise model of solve complexity with more complexity. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So the question for you is as the president of VMware, do you feel good that you guys are looking out over the landscape where you're riding into the valley of the future with the demand being automation, completely invisible, abstraction layer, new use case scenarios for IT and whatever IT becomes. Take us through your mindset there, because I think that's what I'm hearing here at this year, VMware Explorer is that you guys have recognized the shift in demographics on the developer side, but ops isn't going away either. They're connecting. >> They're connected. Yeah, so our vision is, if you think about the role of developers, they have a huge influence. And most importantly they're the ones who are driving innovation, just the amount of application development, the number of developers that have emerged, yet remains the scarcest resource for the enterprise are critical. So developers often time have taken control over decision on infrastructure and ops. Why? Because infrastructure and ops haven't shown up. Not because they like it. In fact, they hate it. (John chuckles) Developers like being developers. They like writing code. They don't really want to get into the day to day operations. In fact, here's what we see with almost all our customers. They start taking control of the ops until they go into production. And at that point in time, they start requesting one by one functions of ops, move to ops because they don't like it. So with our approach and this sort of, as we are driving into the beautiful valley of multi-cloud like you laid out, in our approach with the cross cloud services, what we are saying is that why don't we enable this new team which is a reformatted version of the traditional ops, it has the platform engineering in it, the key skill that enables the developer in it, through a platform that becomes an interface to the developers. It creates that secure workflows that developers need. So that developers think and do what they really love. And the infrastructure is seamless and invisible. It's bound to happen, John. Think about it this way. >> Infrastructure is code. >> Infrastructure has code, and even next year, it's invisible because they're just dealing with the services that they need. >> So it's self-service infrastructure. And then you've got to have that capability to simplified, I'll even say automated or computational governance and security. So Chris Wolf is coming on Thursday. >> Yeah. >> Unfortunately I won't be here. And he's going to talk about all the future projects. 'Cause you're not done yet. The project narrows, it's kind of one of these boring, but important. >> Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in the oven coming out. >> There's really critical projects coming down the pipeline that support this multi-cloud vision, is it's early days. >> Well, this is the thing that we were talking about. I want to get your thoughts on. And we were commenting on the keynote review, Hock Tan bought VMware. He's a lot more there than he thought. I mean, I got to imagine him sitting in the front row going there's some stuff coming out of the oven. I didn't even, might not have known. >> He'd be like, "Hmm, this extra value." (everyone chuckles) >> He's got to be pretty stoked, don't you think? >> He is, he is. >> There's a lot of headroom on the margin. >> I mean, independent to that, I think the strategy that he sees is something that's compelling to customers which is what, in my assessment, speaking with him, he bought VMware because it's strategic to customers and the strategic value of VMware becomes even higher as we take our multi-cloud portfolio. So it's all great. >> Well, plus the ecosystem is now re-energize. It's always been energized, but energized cuz it's sort of had to be, cuz it's such a strong- >> And there was the Dell history there too. >> But, yeah it was always EMC, and then Dell, and now it's like, wow, the ecosystem's- >> Really it's released almost. I like this new team, we've been calling this new ops kind of vibe going refactored ops, as you said, that's where the action's happening because the developers want to go faster. >> They want to go faster. >> They want to go fast cuz the velocity's paying off of them. They don't want to have to wait. They don't want security reviews. They want policy. They want some guardrails. Show me the track. >> That's it. >> And let me drive this car. >> That's it because I mean think about it, if you were a developer, listen, I've been a developer. I never really wanted to see how to operate the code in production because it took time away for developing. I like developing and I like to spend my time building the applications and that's the goal of Aria and Tanzu. >> And then I got to mention the props of seeing project Monterey actually come out to fruition is huge because that's the future of computing architecture. >> I mean at this stage, if a customer from here on is modernizing their infrastructure and they're not investing in a holistic new infrastructure from a hardware and software perspective, they're missing out an opportunity on leveraging the numbers that we were showing, 20% increase in calls. Why would you not just make that investment on both the hardware and the software layer now to get the benefits for the next five-six years. >> You would and if I don't have to make any changes and I get 20% automatically. And the other thing, I don't know if people really appreciate the new curve that the Silicon industry is on. It blows away the history of Moore's law which was whatever, 35-40% a year, we're talking about 100% a year price performance or performance improvements. >> I think when you have an inflection point as we said earlier, there's going to be some things that you know is going to happen, but I think there's going to be a lot that's going to surprise people. New brands will emerge, new startups, new talent, new functionality, new use cases. So, we're going to watch that carefully. And for the folks watching that know that theCUBE's been 12 years with covering VMware VMworld, now VMware Explore, we've kind of met everybody over the years, but I want to point out a little nuance, Raghu thing in the keynote. During the end, before the collective responsibility sustainment commitment he had, he made a comment, "As proud as we are," which is a word he used, there's a lot of pride here at VMware. Raghu kind of weaved that in there, I noticed that, I want to call that out there because Raghu's proud. He's a proud product guy. He said, "I'm a product guy." He's delivering keynote. >> Almost 20 years. >> As proud as we are, there's a lot of pride at VMware, Sumit, talk about that dynamic because you mentioned customers, your customer is not a lot of churn. They've been there for a long time. They're embedded in every single company out there, pretty much VMware is in every enterprise, if not all, I mean 99%, whatever percentage it is, it's huge penetration. >> We are proud of three things. It comes down to number one, we are proud of our innovations. You can see it, you can see the tone from Raghu or myself, or other executives changes with excitement when we're talking about our technologies, we're just proud. We're just proud of it. We are a technology and product centric company. The second thing that sort of gets us excited and be proud of is exactly what you mentioned, which is the customers. The customers like us. It's a pleasure when I bring Roshan on stage and he talks about how he's expecting certain relationship and what he's viewing VMware in this new world of multi-cloud, that makes us proud. And then third, we're proud of our talent. I mean, I was jokingly talking to just the events team alone. Of course our engineers do amazing job, our sellers do amazing job, our support teams do amazing job, but we brought this team and we said, "We are going to get you to run an event after three years from not they doing one, we're going to change the name on you, we're going to change the attendees you're going to invite, we're going to change the fact that it's going to be new speakers who have never been on the stage and done that kind of presentation. >> You're also going to serve a virtual audience. >> And we're going to have a virtual audience. And you know what? They embraced it and they surprised us and it looks beautiful. So I'm proud of the talent. >> The VMware team always steps up. You never slight it, you've got great talent over there. The big thing I want to highlight as we end this day, the segment, and I'll get your thoughts and reactions, Sumit, is again, you guys were early on hybrid. We have theCUBE tape to go back into the video data lake and find the word hybrid mentioned 2013, 2014, 2015. Even when nobody was talking about hybrid. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Multicloud, Raghu, I talked to Raghu in 2016 when he did the Pat Gelsinger, I mean Raghu, Pat and Andy Jassy. >> Yeah. >> When that cloud thing got cleared up, he cleared that up. He mentioned multicloud, even then 2016, so this is not new. >> Yeah. >> You had the vision, there's a lot of stuff in the oven. You guys make announcements directionally, and then start chipping away at it. Now you got Broadcom buys VMware, what's in the oven? How much goodness is coming out that's like just hitting the fruits are starting to bear on the tree. There's a lot of good stuff and just put that, contextualize and scale that for us. What's in the oven? >> First of all, I think the vision, you have to be early to be first and we believe in it. Okay, so that's number one. Now having said that what's in the oven, you would see us actually do more controls across cloud. We are not done on networking side. Okay, we announced something as project Northstar with networking portfolio, that's not generally available. That's in the oven. We are going to come up with more capability on supporting any Kubernetes on any cloud. We did some previews of supporting, for example, EKS. You're going to see more of those cluster controls across any Kubernetes. We have more work happening on our telco partners for enablement of O-RAN as well as our edge solutions, along with the ecosystem. So more to come on those fronts. But they're all aligned with enabling customers multi-cloud through these five cross cloud services. They're all really, some of them where we have put a big sort of a version one of solution out there such as Aria continuation, some of them where even the version one's not out and you're going to see that very soon. >> All right. Sumit, what's next for you as the president? You're proud of your team, we got that. Great oven description of what's coming out for the next meal. What's next for you guys, the team? >> I think for us, two things, first of all, this is our momentum season as we call it. So for the first time, after three years, we are now being in, I think we've expanded, explored to five cities. So getting this orchestrated properly, we are expecting nearly 50,000 customers to be engaging in person and maybe a same number virtually. So a significant touchpoint, cuz we have been missing. Our customers have departed their strategy formulation and we have departed our strategy formulation. Getting them connected together is our number one priority. And number two, we are focused on getting better and better at making customers successful. There is work needed for us. We learn, then we code it and then we repeat it. And to me, those are the two key things here in the next six months. >> Sumit, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for your valuable time, sharing what's going on. Appreciate it. >> Always great to have chatting. >> Here with the president, the CEO's coming up next in theCUBE. Of course, we're John and Dave. More coverage after the short breaks, stay with us. (upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE wall-to-wall coverage, Sumit Dhawan president of VMware is joining me today. Sumit, welcome to theCUBE. >> Great to be here, John, good to see you. >> You know, I remember Raghu when we were talking to him when the original AWS deal, we covered it many, many years ago. It seems like yesterday, but since then, again, it was a lot of people who were kind of like looking at that deal, not understanding. We were very clear that we thought that that was going to create clarity. If you look at the success of VMware's cloud strategy, since that moment in time, it really has been an amazing run for VMware. And so congratulations and looking at that trajectory, we're going into what even a bigger wave now we're seeing, coming out of the pandemic with Edge, 5g, Cloud Native going mainstream. This is like another tipping point, another inflection. Well, how are we want to look at it? This is really big. Can you share your thoughts on how you see your customers and AWS customers coming together with the VMware. >> Yeah, we are excited about sort of this phase, era or whatever you want to call it, where customers are looking at just the power of cloud for all of their applications. And in fact, what we call multicloud, where they are looking at private cloud, public cloud, sometimes even multiple public clouds and Edge and how they are going to leverage all of this power of cloud across all their applications. And we're excited about the partnership, like you said, John, we did with AWS, customers have last two years, have had a hard time modernizing their infrastructure. And now they're looking at their tier one applications, which are oftentimes the lifeline of their businesses and they have not been, the infrastructure has not been modernized. And our partnership with AWS brings to the customers a fully modernized infrastructure as a service, which is optimized for their tier one application. So they can embrace the power of cloud, not just for new modern applications that they have built for running their new digital services, but also all of their tier one enterprise applications instantly modernize their infrastructure, secure it run their tier one applications through the power and the scale of public cloud. And then gradually start modernizing, like you mentioned, modernization of application is a key element and we have provided a rich stack for customers to be able to build their new SRE and DevOps practices and enable developers to have a fast journey to build these modern applications, leveraging the power of public cloud and in fact multiple public clouds seamlessly, and we're extending the same thing to the Edge. So it's actually exciting times in the industry. We call it the multicloud era and VMware is enabling our customers what we call smartest path to cloud. >> Well, congratulations, first of all, on the new independent company, VMware, that's great news. You guys now are on your own very valuable company in and of itself, under Dell Technologies now out on the open and we've been covering VMware, theCube's been to VMware every year. And looking at this year's VMware and looking at VMware for the old folks, the veterans VMware has been synonymous with operations, IT operations, running workloads in data centers to power business, enterprise classic innovation for business value. Now with the cloud, you see operations DevOps being discussed in security. You're talking about, and you mentioned SRE the workloads. The game is still the same, but it is shifting landscape wise. You got cloud scale, you mentioned on premises and multi-cloud. So with operations going to full scale, your customers are building and running their businesses on VMware and AWS and other clouds. This is the same game, but different world. Can you just share what's the current similarities and differences from where operations used to be from a workload standpoint. >> John, you're a hundred percent, right. The need for operational scale and discipline is always, there has always been there and now it's extended to potentially lot more complex world of what we call multicloud. In this new world, the whole aspect of operations is no longer the world of system admins, where you would have people pushing buttons to control the infrastructure and it's lot more where infrastructure is now designed to be managed as a code. There is a lot more of what is considered shift left, where more and more of power of orchestrating the infrastructure as given to the developers because they're oftentimes the sort of ones who understand the business logic and understand how the infrastructure is required to scale up and down the applications. And so along those two key trends, there is still a critical element of how a platform is needed for customers to operate that environment okay. You can't sort of have operational discipline be lost just because you have the paradigm changed and that's what VMware is enabling now with VMware stack, you can manage your entire infrastructure, not just public cloud, but even private cloud as a code, you can create a platform where developers get this freedom and a great experience to leverage any public cloud, to build their services and work closely with DevOps and SRE functions, to make sure that the orchestration of all of their cloud environment in a multicloud environment is available and enabled seamlessly through Kubernetes. This doesn't have to be done through virtual machines anymore it could be virtual machines or Kubernetes orchestrated containers across all clouds. And so bottom line operations has always been critical, but it has been done in a certain way in the world of multicloud it's changed to where it's more and more of infrastructure as a service shift left to developers and cybersecurity is extremely important where it needs to be built into the platform. And that's what VMware solutions are now enabling for our customers. >> Yeah, and for all the young guns coming into the business that have developers, the DevOps is still the same game. You've got developers and you've got operations now at large scale. And I think this whole multi-cloud is really kind of the multi-vendor equation so I think clear synergies and congratulations on the trajectory. I think it's really relevant. Can you take us through on how this means for the businesses, because at VMWorld this year, you guys talked about cross-cloud services. Can you talk about what that is and what does it mean for the customers, and what's the focus at reInvent this year? >> Yeah, so VMware this year at VMworld announced our sort of portfolio for enabling customers to embrace the power of multicloud easily. We call it cross-cloud services and they fit into five major categories. First is our cloud infrastructure that is available through partnership with all major cloud providers. We started with AWS and we expanded with all major cloud providers, including Azure, Google, Ali in China, Oracle, IBM. Secondly, our cloud native platform, Cloud native platform is where it doesn't have to be traditional VM based applications, applications built using modern cloud native technologies container-based, or that can be orchestrated using Kubernetes that are operationalized using our platform where customers can get any Kubernetes on any public cloud and operate them in a consistent and scalable fashion and enable a great developer experience at the same time. Third is networking and security services, which are underlay across both the cloud infrastructure, as well as cloud native services for this cloud management, how infrastructure as a code and shift-left developer function can be enabled through our management technologies designed for both private and public cloud, both VM based or VMware based infrastructure, as well as native public cloud infrastructure. And then lastly, at workspace and Edge services, enabling customers to build today's requirements of people working from anywhere and anywhere workspace experience for a hybrid workforce. So these are our five cloud services, John, that we call collectively as cross-cloud services, which enable customers to embrace the power of multicloud easily. These are modular, easy to acquire services designed to run across all clouds. And obviously for customers looking at leveraging the power of AWS, these services enable you to embrace it AWS at the fastest speed. >> Yeah and I think anything cross-cloud, multi-cloud, the ease of use and choice is key, you have to have choice that's cool. Open source is driving a lot of that, which I want to get to with the Tanzu, but you guys have had a great partnership with AWS, both on a development level, as well as a business partnership. Take us through the evolution of the partnership between VMware and AWS, because I know Raghu was really into this with Pat Gelsinger and then Andy Jassy, we covered that. But if you look at what Amazon web services is doing under Adam's leadership now they're going to set the table for the next 15 years. And you've got Outpost is going to be a big part of that. You've got all of the cloud native high level services inside the cloud, inside AWS as well. So take us through your view of the evolution of the VMware AWS partnership. >> Yeah I mean, AWS and VMware started a partnership for those of you who don't know, we started our partnership about five years ago, where we announced the availability of VMware cloud on AWS, which is all of our fully sort of modernized software defined data centers infrastructure available for running tear one enterprise applications on top of AWS all of their data centers globally. So our software with AWS hardware together as a managed service means customers could get fully modern infrastructure without refactoring any of their applications. They can run on AWS. And that relationship has grown significantly. We have continued to enable more and more of sort of different sized sort of platform infrastructure that we have continually made available. And the business has led to great success. We have at this point in time thousands of customers, joint customers running all of their tier one business applications, whether it's banking to healthcare, to insurance on top of our infrastructure, and it's been great. We then gradually expanded that partnership to other industries. Now we have customers in telcos running major telco cloud on top of our platform, we've expanded our partnership to other solutions. We brought our Tanzu, which is our cloud native platform for managing native cloud services on AWS, in an enterprise fashion, connected to all of their enterprise requirements as well in the marketplace we have brought other offerings, including security services on AWS marketplace for customers to get so over time. >> Hold on Sumit if you don't mind me asking, so you saying that Tanzu Carbon Black and VMware cloud are all in AWS marketplace. >> They're all available in AWS marketplace and they're all available to be transacted through even just the AWS's EDP. So the commercial relationship with AWS has strengthened significantly over time. >> EDP is their sales channel that's their direct. >> EDP is their enterprise agreement that's right. >> So you go to market together with AWS under the marketplace. >> Joint support integration so their customers can get joint support with us. So over time, the technology integration that started has led to strong commercial integrations, helping making sure customers can get one commercial agreement and one support agreement with VMware and AWS together. And that's been great for customers, customers have loved it and we are continuing to build upon it. Your second question was, well, what happens when AWS has new modern native services? And what we have done is for example, at Tanzu Solution, it is integrated with AWS's EKS. So their Kubernetes distribution can be fully operationalized as well as a great developer experience can be created for AWS native services using VMware Tanzu solution. So we are embracing the power of more and more of AWS services for our enterprise solutions. >> You know I love following VMware, especially and AWS. I spoke to companies, both very technical, pragmatic, very smart companies So congratulations on success. I got to ask you from a customer perspective, as you look at the landscape of the commercial side, what are the customers saying? What's the big summary of where they're at? What's the vibe, where's their head, what are they thinking? Take us through some anecdotal customer sentiment or data. >> Yeah, our customers tell us three things consistently. Number one, they say that they have, at this point of time, just decided that they're going to have some kind of a black solution, which will span multiple clouds, which could have public cloud, private cloud and Edge or multiple public clouds. In fact, we just did a recent survey, John and we found that 74% of our customers are already using multiple clouds. And 90 plus percent said that they want that freedom and choice to be able to use cloud of their choice and not be encumbered by any particular sort of just choice that they make. So that's the first trend we see, secondly, customers want to modernize their infrastructure and modernize their applications. They haven't been able to do so over the course of last two years, and modernization is a key requirement and VMware and AWS gives them that ability to do so now at this point in time, very, very quickly. And then third thing we hear is that customers are looking for some solution where cybersecurity is built in it's something where they are standardizing their enterprise requirements via a platform, which has a great experience for the developers, great operational scale and cybersecurity. And these are the three trends John, that VMware is solely focused on as part of our services and solutions and our partnership with AWS. >> Sumit, always great to talk to you. One final point. I want to get your reaction to a VMware has made a couple of big bets in the past decade. One, the deal with Amazon, which opened the door for multicloud, that path is clear. Cloud-scale check the box well done. And the other one was cloud native technologies and Kubernetes specifically, two big bets that don't, that kind of no one kind of saw coming, turns out they turned out pretty well. What's your reaction to that? Would you agree? And how would you talk about those two events? >> Yeah, we at VMware always considered sort of how we are going to keep innovating and the way we see the world is follow where the applications are going. It's pretty simple. Okay we saw that a few years ago where cloud and container technologies are where the applications are going. And we innovated through both our organic investments, as well as inorganic investments to bring our VMware cloud Solutions and Tanzu Solutions. And similarly, John, we're looking at now the next generation of applications where we fast forward three years down the road, we envision a great degree of innovation is going to happen in the Edge. And that's the third sort of area of innovation for us. So that public cloud or multi-cloud cloud native applications, as well as Edge applications can all be orchestrated using VMware's cross-cloud services. >> Sumit Dhawan, president of VMware thanks for coming on theCUBE we appreciate it. Enjoy the rest of the event. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(bright upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. I'm John Furrier your host of theCUBE wall-to-wall coverage, Sumit Dhawan president of VMware is joining me today. Sumit, welcome to theCUBE. >> Great to be here, John, good to see you. >> You know, I remember Raghu when we were talking to him when the original AWS deal, we covered it many, many years ago. It seems like yesterday, but since then, again, it was a lot of people who were kind of like looking at that deal, not understanding. We were very clear that we thought that that was going to create clarity. If you look at the success of VMware's cloud strategy, since that moment in time, it really has been an amazing run for VMware. And so congratulations and looking at that trajectory, we're going into what even a bigger wave now we're seeing, coming out of the pandemic with Edge, 5g, Cloud Native going mainstream. This is like another tipping point, another inflection. Well, how are we want to look at it? This is really big. Can you share your thoughts on how you see your customers and AWS customers coming together with the VMware. >> Yeah, we are excited about sort of this phase, era or whatever you want to call it, where customers are looking at just the power of cloud for all of their applications. And in fact, what we call multicloud, where they are looking at private cloud, public cloud, sometimes even multiple public clouds and Edge and how they are going to leverage all of this power of cloud across all their applications. And we're excited about the partnership, like you said, John, we did with AWS, customers have last two years, have had a hard time modernizing their infrastructure. And now they're looking at their tier one applications, which are oftentimes the lifeline of their businesses and they have not been, the infrastructure has not been modernized. And our partnership with AWS brings to the customers a fully modernized infrastructure as a service, which is optimized for their tier one application. So they can embrace the power of cloud, not just for new modern applications that they have built for running their new digital services, but also all of their tier one enterprise applications instantly modernize their infrastructure, secure it run their tier one applications through the power and the scale of public cloud. And then gradually start modernizing, like you mentioned, modernization of application is a key element and we have provided a rich stack for customers to be able to build their new SRE and DevOps practices and enable developers to have a fast journey to build these modern applications, leveraging the power of public cloud and in fact multiple public clouds seamlessly, and we're extending the same thing to the Edge. So it's actually exciting times in the industry. We call it the multicloud era and VMware is enabling our customers what we call smartest path to cloud. >> Well, congratulations, first of all, on the new independent company, VMware, that's great news. You guys now are on your own very valuable company in and of itself, under Dell Technologies now out on the open and we've been covering VMware, theCube's been to VMware every year. And looking at this year's VMware and looking at VMware for the old folks, the veterans VMware has been synonymous with operations, IT operations, running workloads in data centers to power business, enterprise classic innovation for business value. Now with the cloud, you see operations DevOps being discussed in security. You're talking about, and you mentioned SRE the workloads. The game is still the same, but it is shifting landscape wise. You got cloud scale, you mentioned on premises and multi-cloud. So with operations going to full scale, your customers are building and running their businesses on VMware and AWS and other clouds. This is the same game, but different world. Can you just share what's the current similarities and differences from where operations used to be from a workload standpoint. >> John, you're a hundred percent, right. The need for operational scale and discipline is always, there has always been there and now it's extended to potentially lot more complex world of what we call multicloud. In this new world, the whole aspect of operations is no longer the world of system admins, where you would have people pushing buttons to control the infrastructure and it's lot more where infrastructure is now designed to be managed as a code. There is a lot more of what is considered shift left, where more and more of power of orchestrating the infrastructure as given to the developers because they're oftentimes the sort of ones who understand the business logic and understand how the infrastructure is required to scale up and down the applications. And so along those two key trends, there is still a critical element of how a platform is needed for customers to operate that in Miami okay. You can sort of have operational discipline be lost just because you have the paradigm changed and that's what VMware is enabling now with VMware stack, you can manage your entire infrastructure, not just public cloud, but even private cloud as a code, you can create a platform where developers get this freedom and a great experience to leverage any public cloud, to build their services and work closely with DevOps and SRE functions, to make sure that the orchestration of all of their cloud environment in a multicloud environment is available and enabled seamlessly through Kubernetes. This doesn't have to be done through virtual machines anymore it could be virtual machines or Kubernetes orchestrated containers across all clouds. And so bottom line operations has always been critical, but it has been done in a certain way in the world of multicloud it's changed to where it's more and more of infrastructure as a service shift left to developers and cybersecurity is extremely important where it needs to be built into the platform. And that's what VMware solutions are now enabling for our customers. >> Yeah, and for all the young guns coming into the business that have developers, the DevOps is still the same game. You've got developers and you've got operations now at large scale. And I think this whole multi-cloud is really kind of the multi-vendor equation so I think clear synergies and congratulations on the trajectory. I think it's really relevant. Can you take us through on how this means for the businesses, because at VMWorld this year, you guys talked about cross-cloud services. Can you talk about what that is and what does it mean for the customers, and what's the focus at reInvent this year? >> Yeah, so VMware this year at VMworld announced our sort of portfolio for enabling customers to embrace the power of multicloud easily. We call it cross-cloud services and they fit into five major categories. First is our cloud infrastructure that is available through partnership with all major cloud providers. We started with AWS and we expanded with all major cloud providers, including Azure, Google, Ali in China, Oracle, IBM. Secondly, our cloud native platform, Cloud native platform is where it doesn't have to be traditional VM based applications, applications built using modern cloud native technologies container-based, or that can be orchestrated using Kubernetes that are operationalized using our platform where customers can get any Kubernetes on any public cloud and operate them in a consistent and scalable fashion and enable a great developer experience at the same time. Third is networking and security services, which are underlay across both the cloud infrastructure, as well as cloud native services for this cloud management, how infrastructure as a code and shift-left developer function can be enabled through our management technologies designed for both private and public cloud, both VM based or VMware based infrastructure, as well as native public cloud infrastructure. And then lastly, at workspace and Edge services, enabling customers to build today's requirements of people working from anywhere and anywhere workspace experience for a hybrid workforce. So these are our five cloud services, John, that we call collectively as cross-cloud services, which enable customers to embrace the power of multicloud easily. These are modular, easy to acquire services designed to run across all clouds. And obviously for customers looking at leveraging the power of AWS, these services enable you to embrace it AWS at the fastest speed. >> Yeah and I think anything cross-cloud, multi-cloud, the ease of use and choice is key, you have to have choice that's cool. Open source is driving a lot of that, which I want to get to with the Tanzu, but you guys have had a great partnership with AWS, both on a development level, as well as a business partnership. Take us through the evolution of the partnership between VMware and AWS, because I know Raghu was really into this with Pat Gelsinger and then Andy Jassy, we covered that. But if you look at what Amazon web services is doing under Adam's leadership now they're going to set the table for the next 15 years. And you've got Outpost is going to be a big part of that. You've got all of the cloud native high level services inside the cloud, inside AWS as well. So take us through your view of the evolution of the VMware AWS partnership. >> Yeah I mean, AWS and VMware started a partnership for those of you who don't know, we started our partnership about five years ago, where we announced the availability of VMware cloud on AWS, which is all of our fully sort of modernized software defined data centers infrastructure available for running tear one enterprise applications on top of AWS all of their data centers globally. So our software with AWS hardware together as a managed service means customers could get fully modern infrastructure without refactoring any of their applications. They can run on AWS. And that relationship has grown significantly. We have continued to enable more and more of sort of different sized sort of platform infrastructure that we have continually made available. And the business has led to great success. We have at this point in time thousands of customers, joint customers running all of their tier one business applications, whether it's banking to healthcare, to insurance on top of our infrastructure, and it's been great. We then gradually expanded that partnership to other industries. Now we have customers in telcos running major telco cloud on top of our platform, we've expanded our partnership to other solutions. We brought our Tanzu, which is our cloud native platform for managing native cloud services on AWS, in an enterprise fashion, connected to all of their enterprise requirements as well in the marketplace we have brought other offerings, including security services on AWS marketplace for customers to get so over time. >> Hold on Sumit if you don't mind me asking, so you saying that Tanzu Carbon Black and VMware cloud are all in AWS marketplace. >> They're all available in AWS marketplace and they're all available to be transacted through even just the AWS's EDP. So the commercial relationship with AWS has strengthened significantly over time. >> EDP is their sales channel that's their direct. >> EDP is their enterprise agreement that's right. >> So you go to market together with AWS under the marketplace. >> Joint support integration so their customers can get joint support with us. So over time, the technology integration that started has led to strong commercial integrations, helping making sure customers can get one commercial agreement and one support agreement with VMware and AWS together. And that's been great for customers, customers have loved it and we are continuing to build upon it. Your second question was, well, what happens when AWS has new modern native services? And what we have done is for example, at Tanzu Solution, it is integrated with AWS's EKS. So their Kubernetes distribution can be fully operationalized as well as a great developer experience can be created for AWS native services using VMware Tanzu solution. So we are embracing the power of more and more of AWS services for our enterprise solutions. >> You know I love following VMware, especially and AWS. I spoke to companies, both very technical, pragmatic, very smart companies So congratulations on success. I got to ask you from a customer perspective, as you look at the landscape of the commercial side, what are the customers saying? What's the big summary of where they're at? What's the vibe, where's their head, what are they thinking? Take us through some anecdotal customer sentiment or data. >> Yeah, our customers tell us three things consistently. Number one, they say that they have, at this point of time, just decided that they're going to have some kind of a black solution, which will span multiple clouds, which could have public cloud, private cloud and Edge or multiple public clouds. In fact, we just did a recent survey, John and we found that 74% of our customers are already using multiple clouds. And 90 plus percent said that they want that freedom and choice to be able to use cloud of their choice and not be encumbered by any particular sort of just choice that they make. So that's the first trend we see, secondly, customers want to modernize their infrastructure and modernize their applications. They haven't been able to do so over the course of last two years, and modernization is a key requirement and VMware and AWS gives them that ability to do so now at this point in time, very, very quickly. And then third thing we hear is that customers are looking for some solution where cybersecurity is built in it's something where they are standardizing their enterprise requirements via a platform, which has a great experience for the developers, great operational scale and cybersecurity. And these are the three trends John, that VMware is solely focused on as part of our services and solutions and our partnership with AWS. >> Sumit, always great to talk to you. One final point. I want to get your reaction to a VMware has made a couple of big bets in the past decade. One, the deal with Amazon, which opened the door for multicloud, that path is clear. Cloud-scale check the box well done. And the other one was cloud native technologies and Kubernetes specifically, two big bets that don't, that kind of no one kind of saw coming, turns out they turned out pretty well. What's your reaction to that? Would you agree? And how would you talk about those two events? >> Yeah, we at VMware always considered sort of how we are going to keep innovating and the way we see the world is follow where the applications are going. It's pretty simple. Okay we saw that a few years ago where cloud and container technologies are where the applications are going. And we innovated through both our organic investments, as well as inorganic investments to bring our VMware cloud Solutions and Tanzu Solutions. And similarly, John, we're looking at now the next generation of applications where we fast forward three years down the road, we envision a great degree of innovation is going to happen in the Edge. And that's the third sort of area of innovation for us. So that public cloud or multi-cloud cloud native applications, as well as Edge applications can all be orchestrated using VMware's cross-cloud services. >> Sumit Dhawan, president of VMware thanks for coming on theCUBE we appreciate it. Enjoy the rest of the event. I'm John Furrier host of theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (bright upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's, ongoing coverage of VMworld 2021. My name is Dave Volante. You know, I've been following VMware since the early days. And what is the one of, one of the most interesting stories in the history of enterprise tech? One of the hallmarks of VMware over the course of its long history has been a strong number two leader, an individual who looked after operations or advanced corporate development and enhanced, if you will, expanded the eyes, the ears, the heart, and the mind of the CEO. You know, at one point last decade, VMware actually had four co presidents. Some of the most accomplished individuals in Silicon valley have held this role. And it's our pleasure to welcome in VMware's newest president, Sumit Dhawan. Sumit welcome back to the cube, good to see you. >> Thank you, Dave. Great to be here. >> Okay, so you've been in this role for just over a hundred days after a 16 month stint as chief customer officer. So that's certainly a nice dovetail into your new role as president, but give us an overview of your new role here at VMware. What are your priorities? What are the key areas of focus? You know, SAS transformation, you got a lot going on, share with us. >> Yeah. You know, I think the main focus for me is to make sure our company's priorities are aligned with our customers. And in the first hundred days, my first objective was to spend as much time as possible with customers because it's, it's a source of learning for us. It's, it's clear speaking with customers, what their challenges are and what we ought to be doing to assist them in addressing those challenges. So I, really my responsibility, obviously I've got all the operations part of the business, which enable our customers to be successful, starting from, you know, ensuring that we chart the right path for them in success, in the sales organization, all the way to making sure that they are successful with the adoption of our solutions, with our services and support organizations. So, so spending time with the customers has been critical. And Dave, what I've learned is that customers are looking for VMware, just like they have in the past, be this trusted foundation for all of their innovation in the prior era pre cloud era to their data center and mobility technologies take that forward into the multicloud era, which is where now is where they're building new applications, taking their existing applications to the power of the cloud and across multiple clouds. And our objective is to make sure we keep providing that trusted foundation for them, for the new multi-cloud era. And I'm excited about it. >> Yeah, me too. Let's do it. We're going to dig into that a little bit. So you're obviously spending time getting close to the customers, of course, remotely, for the most part, some of those big themes you've mentioned, but I'd like to sort of peel the onion on that. Maybe some of the challenges that your customers are facing in terms of actually bringing forth that multi-cloud vision and specifically what's your approach to solving those challenges. >> Yeah. So, you know, as we all know, customers start out with this adopt started out adoption of the cloud. They started building some applications on the cloud. A lot of times these were the applications that were built, which were customer facing. And there was this cloud first thinking at that point of time. But soon the customers have realized and now customers have realized that power of building new innovation doesn't just lie in one cloud because there are certain capabilities like AI and ML that maybe they get from a cloud like Google. There are certain capabilities that may be storage and compute where maybe they prefer AWS productivity and identity maybe coming from Microsoft cloud. So the power comes in by adopting all of these services across cloud. It has lots of benefits, innovation at the fastest possible speed for our customers. Secondly, it helps customers not necessarily risk locking in and helps manage them, manage their costs. But in this multicloud world, it's a fairly complicated, and it can get very complex. Think about all the security networking developer experience control. Now this is where our customers need freedom and yet control to be able to have this multicloud environment managed and enabled for developer experience as best as possible. That's the problem we are committed to solving, and our solution and we call that across cloud services. >> I want to stay on this for a minute because I've been talking about multi-cloud this abstraction layer. This is really your opportunity on the cube last year with John farrier. You said the following quote multicloud doesn't mean you're running two different architectures on two different clouds. That's not multicloud. Multicloud means running a singular architecture on multiple clouds. Now Sumit, you're a technologist at the core. What you described is not trivial, it's a huge technical challenge. Can you talk about what VMware has to do to make that single architecture a reality? >> That's exactly the challenge team because you can adopt multiple clouds, but if you're doing so with different architectures, you're not getting the benefits of the velocity of building new applications fast, security is done in a unified fashion operations, at scale. To me, I would call that not a smart path to multi multiple clouds. The smart path to multiple cloud would be through a unified experience for developers, a control layer, which helps you orchestrate your applications in a unified fashion for your operators and security done in an, in a unified or a consistent fashion so that you know that you have the right governance. That's what I consider the smart path to multicloud. Doing any other way would actually be not fruitful. And that's what customers have had to face with without a solution like VMs. So we provide, that's what I call the smart path to multicloud. >> All right. So don't hate me for this, but I want to, I want to push on this and get your point of view on record if I can, because it's an important topic and you've intimated that choosing a single cloud provider, it's, it's problematic for customers, it's it, it limits the customers flexibility and choice. And I want to unpack that a bit and if I'm mischaracterizing your view, please correct me, but, but I want to understand why this is limiting. For example, if I go to AWS, I got access to primitives and API APIs. I got a range of compute storage, networking options, dozens of databases, open source, I get VMware cloud and AWS. So explain why this is a constraint for a customer. >> Yeah, it's a, it's a constraint for really three major reasons. Number one, different services are available across cloud that provide different capabilities. Sure, AWS provides a very rich set of primitives. So does Azure. So does Google. And in certain cases, when you're dealing with data sovereignty requirements across different countries, so to those clouds. So the, but if you are really looking for the best possible solution for AI and ML that may or may not sit in the cloud that you may have preferred for your compute and storage. If you're looking for identity solutions that integrate really well with the productivity applications that you have, that may not be the same cloud that you may have booked picked for AI and ML. You don't need to make compromises. In fact, developers don't want to make those compromises, but because by making those compromises, you're increasing your cost and lowering their customer experience. That's the power of leveraging innovation across cloud. Secondly, think about now, if you just build all your applications, buy services from one cloud and your entire business gets dependent on it. If there's risk there's cost. And that's why customers are telling us that they have made a decision for multicloud. In fact, we did a recent study Dave, and in the recent study, we found out that 73% of our customers are already running their applications on multi-cloud. If this is no longer a something of a future it's here today, they're just facing these challenges today with multicloud. >> And am I right? That there they're running applications on multiple clouds, but it's your job and your challenge now, to be able to abstract the underlying complexity of those multiple clouds and make it appear as one, I'm assuming that's not fully happening today, maybe that's an understatement, but that is your opportunity and your customer's opportunity, is that a fair statement? >> That's exactly our mission. We are providing our customers that foundation so that they can enable multicloud and drive their own innovation agenda at the pace that they want to. We did that in the past for data center technologies or mobile devices. Remember mobile devices come in different operating systems, different formats and data centers, hardware from servers, storage and network has always come in different flavors. We have abstracted that complexity for our customers in the past to deliver innovation three cloud, we're bringing the same value proposition. Now in the world of multicloud, obviously the applications have changed. They're no longer traditional applications. Now they are more and more cloud native applications. So we have solutions for cloud native enterprise applications that continue to be the heartbeat of more, more, most customers. We have solutions for traditional enterprise applications and the new and emerging edge native applications because of just now people and workforce being anywhere. We have solutions for providing security and providing additional functions for edge native applications. So that's what we are bringing to our customers as a platform that abstracts this complexity of multicloud. >> So much to talk to you about because you're right, the application is, are evolving. It's not just the standard SAP windows, et cetera. There's cloud native applications, there's data intensive applications. But, but I want to ask you, so in order for you to achieve that, you have to be able to exploit those primitives that we were talking about, whether it's AWS or Google Azure, Alibaba, you've got to understand as engineers, how to take advantage of whatever the cloud provider is offering, and then hide that complexity from the customer, and then build that, that layer and to do that it, to accommodate all these new applications. Not only do you have to have traditional, you have to have processor optionality, you got edge, you see arm coming in. If my understanding is, that's a big part of what project Monterrey is all about is offering that optionality around different workloads. Can you, can we dig into that a little bit? >> Yeah. So I think first of all, the people under appreciated or under estimate what it would be required for making sure that the applicant, the complexity of all of these different cloud platforms is, is, you know, abstracted by VMware solution. So customers don't have to think about, you know, what are the-- what is the different storage or server or primitives that are needed on Azure versus AWS? All of that gets hidden from customers in a simplified fashion, so with our solution, okay. So, and yet at the same time, there's no compromise that customers have. They can still leverage all the native primitives and services that the different cloud providers are using seamlessly. So that's very important. Now, in addition, what we are doing is we are continually making sure our platform can run the next generation of applications we are continually innovating to do so. And that's where project Monterey comes in. As customers build new applications, when they want to build those new applications and run emerging services that are highly sort of compute centric or network centric, or are providing rich amount of data. This is where project Monterey comes in. It enables our customers to, A, take all of the traditional applications onto VMware cloud, run it on across any cloud. And then B, when they are trying to expand those capabilities into the applications, the project Monterey enables them to do so by enabling new capabilities being powered in to the VMware cloud foundation. >> Yeah. So essentially you're, you're, you're building what I would look at as a new type of cloud that, that comprises on prem connections to public, to public cloud, across public clouds. And then out to the edge, you've talked a lot about telco, the specialized needs of the telco. Clearly there's different processing requirements. You've talked about 5G where we might not always have connectivity out there. Developers need to be able to write code for that edge. So it's an entirely new world you're essentially building out your own cloud. So you have to build in all that optionality all the tools. And at the same time, if, if just like the big cloud providers, you have to provide your own tooling, but also be open to providing other people's tooling. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, I think you're right. In terms of the tooling part there, what has happened is standards for controlling. All of the infrastructure has, you know, has become Kubernetes. Okay. So we have embraced that in fact, most the talent that has created the best Kubernetes at this point in time, we have it at VMware. Okay. The most contributions that are being made in terms of that standard, the most interesting ones are coming from VMware. So in terms of Kubernetes, we have embraced it. And what we are seeing is a tooling needs to be done in a way so that our customers can manage from infrastructure to their platform, all via code, all the standard like Kubernetes. And that's what we have embraced while at the same time, this tooling is done in a fashion so that the entire VM-ware cloud and the entire VMware Tansu platform can be controlled in a fashion that fits into customer's entire environment on how they manage it overall. >> Okay. So let's take that conversation to security. I don't know if you're familiar with the Optiva, it's this mind blowing, eye bleeding chart with all the different security tools in there, and I've been watching the moves that you guys have been making, you know, Carbon Black's an obvious one, what you're doing with end user computing and a number of other applications, creating a security, you know, cloud group within VMware. So that's a good example, but at the same time, customers are using all kinds of different, different toolings based on that chart. So are you saying it's the Kubernetes is the, is the secret their API APIs that allow you to, if a customer wants to use Octa or CrowdStrike or whatever it is, you can, you can incorporate that into the framework, or if they want to go all VMware, they can do that as well. Can you help us understand that? >> Yeah, I think our philosophy is that there are two components that are critical for making a solution, help our customers take the smartest path to multicloud, networking and security. So on security front, the philosophy is quite simple. You know, these days when you're going out and buying a car, you're not getting buying the car and outfitting it with airbags and, you know, AB, ABS, and any other sort of safety features, okay, why do we do that in the world of infrastructure and technology? It should just come as an, as an, even an option or a required component within the infrastructure itself, that's our philosophy. And so coming back to, if, if customers say they want to take an approach to multicloud, they want to make sure their developer experience their DevOps capabilities and their infrastructure management capabilities are there across all types of three applications, I mentioned, you know, the, the, the modern apps, the traditional enterprise apps and edge edge native apps. Our approach is quite simple, networking and security. Firstly is built in, okay, it's integrated in, you're not installing agents, you're not managing security thing on top. You're not putting air bags into the car after the purchase, they come with the purchase, you can choose to activate them or not activate them based on your price sensitivity. Second, we tell, we have, they're consistent once you learn them how to do it for traditional enterprise applications, the same capabilities, the same security workbench, the same detection and response capabilities carry forward to cloud native applications and edge native applications. That's the way we are thinking about for security for in our portfolio. >> It is the strategy summit to sort of be an end to end supplier of security, in other words, when you touch all parts of the stack, I mean, obviously with carbon black could do an end point, but, but things like identity and privilege, access and governance, I mean, there's just so many pieces to the value chain. Ca, will you try to try to be best of breed across that chain? Or do you see yourself picking this picking spots? >> No, Our focus is to pick the areas that we have focused on which is to enable customers to run, build and run and secure those, those applications that I mentioned, you know, the cloud native applications, edge native applications and enterprise applications. And our focus is to, to be able to secure those applications in, A, a consistent fashion and, B, built into the infrastructure, so it's not boarded on. So that's a focus on strategy and we still have great partnerships in the ecosystem for the rest of the portfolio, for the security technology to fit in with the rest of it. We just don't think that for the infrastructure that's running these critical business applications, you need, you should have, you know, a requirement to build these applications, build a security on top of it. And that's sort of our commitment to our customers. >> Got it. That makes sense. I mean, you've got a pretty clear swim lane in your infrastructure space. There might be a little gray area there, but you'll let the ecosystem take care of that if it makes sense. So I guess I would say I look back and if it was, first of all, VMware has had amazing engineering over the years, you're, you're very well known for that. You just, you just mentioned some of the best Kubernetes engineers on the planet. And of course, November is a big milestone for VMware, with the spin, you now will become a completely independent company again. And, and that's a big deal in my mind because I think, I think this is going to be expensive. I mean, to actually do this, these are big investments that you have to make. And I've, I feel like you finally going to get control of your own balance sheet, so you can make these investments as you see fit. So that's got to be an exciting time for you. And because I think you're going to need that free cash flow to really drive this in, in addition to the other things that you're going to do with buybacks and stock options, et cetera. >> I think we had excited about this whole upcoming, you know, spin off from Dell. Dell will continue to be a very important partner of ours. In fact, we have quoted and quantified what we are doing with them on innovation, as well as on sales and distribution perspective together. And I think, you know, to be candid just through that agreements that we have put in place without, I think the partnership could even get stronger because we have 15 statements of work where we have defined new innovation projects with Dell, for example. Okay. But at the same time, like you mentioned, we get a little bit more flexibility to be able to chart our own course, which is critical in the world of multicloud. Okay. We need, we are able to, not, not that we were constrained on, but customers still always asked us about how would you continue to sustain the partnerships with the cloud and hyperscalers? That's no longer a question in customers' eyes once you're independent. And secondly, it does give us flexibility on balance sheet to be able to make investments as needed within the agenda that we have on multicloud without having to, you know, sort of negotiate that. >> Yeah, I think it's an awesome move, of course, because I mean, I've certainly since the, the, the Dell acquisition of EMC, your business has even grown more with those combined companies. So we've seen that, but I, you know, I liken it to the, to the coach who has a kid on the team and the coach is extra hard on the kid, you know, and that's kind of almost the way it had to be in that relationship because your posture with the ecosystem had to be, hey, we're an open ecosystem. And so, and that was sometimes kind of weird and uncomfortable. Now it's clean, it's transparent. So I'm really looking forward to the innovation that you can create with Dell, of course, but with other parts of the ecosystem, which you always have, but I'm hoping the ecosystem now leans in even more. It's always had too, because you've got half a million customers and you've got a, such a huge presence in the market, but, but I think now there's going to be a little more comfort level there. So I'm really excited for that Sumit. >> Great. >> Hey, so this was great conversation. I can't wait to have you back really appreciate your time and insights. >> Well, thank you so much, Dave, from our perspective at VMware, you know, as I started with customers, I'm going to end sort of this thing with customers as well, always great times, great to spend time with customers. And we truly believe we have the best platform to give our customers the smartest path to multicloud. And I know, I know the feedback so far has been great. It's always great spending time with you. Thank you for having me. >> It's our pleasure, and we wish you the best. And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Volante for the cubes, continuous coverage of VM world 2021. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem >>partners. Hello and welcome to the Cube. Special coverage of VM World 2020 Virtual I'm John for host of the Cube were stupid men Day volonte all doing interviews covering the virtual version of VM World. First time it's ever happened. We've been covering VM World for over 10 years, our 11th season with Cube at VM World. And of course, it's difference virtual. But we're doing our part. We're getting in the programs. We need to get the stories out and we got a great guest here. Submit to on who's the chief customer officer of the M where, uh, back to VM, where he ran the end user computing of which we covered air. Watch a lot of great announcements Submit. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on to the Q. Virtual >>John. Great to see you again. And great to be back on the Cube. >>So great to see you. And again I know you. You came in your back into the wheelhouse of VM ware. But as the theme of this show is putting the digital foundation for an unpredictable world. Also, with Covidien going virtual makes a lot of sense. However, VM Ware has been doing extremely well on the business performance side and making all the right tech moves we've been covering them to Cuba is well documented, the business models evolving. The performance is there. You are in a new role for VM, where its newly created chief customer officer tell us why you're back. Why this role? Why is it important? >>Yeah, great question, John. You know, I I joined the anywhere because we end where I look at sort of what bm where is trying to do all aligned with what customers want If you think about customers, they have been up until now, dabbling with cloud building sort of strategies on how to embrace Cloud, which applications will go to which parts off the cloud. And it has been something that has been more off slow RL strategy and with the multi cloud transition plan. Now, VM Ware provides to some extent this, you know, started out with operating system for the hardware, and it has evolved to provide operating system for the cloud it truly runs applications across multiple clouds. And with our partnerships with AWS Azure, Microsoft Google, we're able to sort of give our customers this multi cloud platform for them to run any application, whether that's traditional or modern, in a sort of unified operational fashion. Now this is a different subscription world for customers, right and customers in the world of cloud, especially when they're going into this kind of a transformational journey. Um, you know, it requires we anywhere to think slightly differently. It's not just the traditional cell implement support kind of customer model. You have really help them achieve their out, come over a period of time and then make them successful as they continue to sort of face the uncertainties off the multi cloud world. So So So Pat and Sanjay decided to create this new customer experience office and all different functions from success support digital engagement as well a czar insulting professional services. Tam's were put together so that we can offer integrated experiences to the customer. And that sounded exciting and, you know, we're making tons off interesting innovations there. Some announced that GM World and, uh, very much aligned with an objective to help our customers. >>E. I want to dig into the news and the announcement because I think there's a specific thing I'd like to drill into. But I want to get your thoughts submit because I think VM Ware and I thought to Sanjay about this as well as Pat. Clearly. Cooper Days is the dial tone of the Internet investment cloud Native Project. Monterey speaks to Multi cloud, totally get it. But Cove it has accelerated not only VM where every company, whether they're on the delivery side of it selling side or even consuming of the technology cloud, for instance, has forced the digital transformation. And it's catching some people off guard, right? So what are your thoughts? Because, you know, you have a value projects, you sell it to customers, you implement it, you support it. I mean, that >>was a >>nice grew swing for enterprise vendors like VM Ware. But now, with cove, it and all the digital transformation acceleration, it's causing a lot of people to be ready faster. How >>do you get >>that readiness? What do you bring to the table? What's your view on this? What's your reaction? Because people >>try to >>figure this out. It's confusing. >>I mean, I You know what it's it's very interesting. For example, I will give you an example. There's like, two extremes, and both of them are dealing with a very similar situation, all caused because of prove it. Okay, On one end of the spectrum, there are customers who are saying, Listen, our business is doing extremely well because of digital, and all of a sudden, uh, business needs this rapid agility, which can only be achieved through modern applications, and they're able to sort of move these applications because of elasticity of the cloud and leveraging multiple clouds. To do so is extremely important. If you're on one side of the spectrum on your business, where the business is doing extremely well, you have a percentage of the business that was coming from e commerce. All of a sudden that e commerce has accelerated. You know you can think off certain retailers, you know. Large scale retailers in that segment, and their their multi cloud journeys are accelerated, mostly because off just this surge in demand and change in capabilities that are needed to perform digital engagement with customers at a much much rapid pace, which are very difficult to do without leveraging multiple clouds. That's one extreme. The other extreme is, you know, I'll give you an example from large scale airlines and we all know in the travel hospitality airline business, this is extremely slow business for them, right at this point of time, and they're using the opportunity off this sort of time when things are slower to say, Okay, why don't we take this opportunity to fundamentally change our distilling it and truly embraced multi cloud while doing so? Because there is an opportunity to do so. The workload on the application than the infrastructure does not high little more technology reasons. A little bit more sort of a for downtime reason sort of go through the transformation faster. In other words, both ends of the spectrum. I'm seeing customers move the words sort of this destination fast it. And guess what? There is really no one at this stage outside of VM ware who can help them achieve that because otherwise you set a single voice. You know, there are their players who died. You tow their singular cloud solution and running. You know what I what I tell customers is multi cloud doesn't mean you are running two different architectures on two different clouds, right? That's not multi cloud. Multi cloud means running a singular architectures on multiple clouds, because that's when you get through governance and true operational scale and true experience and elasticity and control. And that's what we, um, where is all about? So we are now engaged with those conversations and helping customers at both the front end right when they're engaged with us at this stage. But we have also down tailored our service delivery and our success off offerings and are how we engage with customers digitally and sort of technically and through people. Uh, in once they start their journey with us, Um, and they sort of embark on leveraging the technology into multi cloud I want. So So that's the sort of shift that has occurred. >>Yeah, I want to unpack the offering in a second, but I want to stay in the customer experience for a minute. We've heard that cliche a customer experience. So digital transmission. Okay, it's actually happening now, and I totally agree with you, by the way there's there's the modernization trend. You just basically spoke to the spectrums. But it's about modernization. Okay, if you think modernization, you think business model business model is Hey, it's pretty light right now. I'm not a lot of people traveling. Let's retool, Let's modernize, Let's use our resource is and modernize our business, which is a lot of applications. It's everything up and down the stack. And then the companies that have a tailwind with Covic, who have had the epiphany and saying, If we don't building modern app or have modern APS in market, we're out of business. So there's a critical urgency to, uh, coming out of it with a growth strategy that's a business model transformation. Totally get that. That's where the customers are. So the question for you is okay. How do you talk to the customer that is saying, Hey, I'm building a modern app. We have to pivot, were forced to pivot whatever word you want to use force to survive. They're now they have to build a modern app. How do you guys support that customer? How does that customer? What does that customer need to be successful? >>Yeah, I mean, I think it starts with an architectural approach right. We bring to the customers and architectural approach across multiple clouds that helped them when they go for their existing applications or new modern applications conforming toe, one operating model and one architectures. Because in this in this time, you know, customers have many critical line of business applications. This airline customer I was talking about, they have 600 applications that are quite critical. They sort of segment them out on which one they will truly modernize because of the business model modernization like you mentioned and which ones they will live with, the way they are for multiple reasons and how it starts with connecting them with a unified architect chair and a unified operating model is how we start with customers. Okay. And that is where the power off the younger comes in. Because, like I said, it becomes this architectural operating system for for the customers to run and adopt multiple clouds. >>You gotta be the chief customer officer. You're the quarterback. You're the one in charge of making sure customers were happy. Okay? And they get what they need. And again, there's different aspects of it. What do you guys announcing it? VM World 2020 virtual, um, that people should pay attention thio around servicing customers in this new subscription and SAS world. >>Yeah, I think besides the technology announcements in terms off modern, sort off, multi cloud platform, the architectural with Project Monterey from the customer experience side, we did announcement to announcements. One was for customers embarking on a journey. We want to make sure that customers get everything they need to be successful on the journey on an ongoing basis. Some off these journeys for large customers, John can take not just sort of three months, but three years because they're dealing with various applications. So for that we announced two pretty simple and easy to embrace offerings. One is AP navigator. AP Navigator enables customers to quickly assess which applications I have to be, you know, on one end, you know, rewritten, completely rewritten and on the other end simply sort of re hosted. Okay, and there are multiple options in between, and we call them as a five, our model with customers, and we guide customers through our own assessment and working with customers on how to sort of segment their applications and use a common architectures across all of them that we can then help and it and secondly, toe help them with. We announced something called Success 3 60 Success 3 60 is Our Mechanism Toe guide and help customers on an ongoing basis for a success plan with continuous, sort off adoption guidance designed workshops as well as providing they're dedicated support that customers need for embracing multiple cloud across all the cloud. With this architectural this way, customers get assured that they're able to get the right up front sort of assessment on applications and ongoing success. Okay, And that's sort of what we announced within customer experience side. And we have been able all of this available two people you know there are critical for large scale engagements, but also digital, you know, just like our customers are innovating with digital. We innovated with our own digital environment, and we brought it all together with something called customer Connect, all available with one single digital experience that's mobile friendly, alert driven, search driven. You know, all the AI that's needed at this point of time in terms of engaging with customers with proactive notifications and guidance in terms of how they're doing with success built into a singular experience so that they can engage with us, and we can engage with them to make them successful. >>And so it's people in technology you guys are bringing to the table. What can customers expect? Because, you know, as they've worked with the M where you've always had great technical support outside its have been a technology driven company. Um, but as you start getting into SAS, you're starting to get into the business model transformation. How do you guys impacting the customers and how you go to market and how you, uh, service your customer base? >>Yeah, I think there are two elements What customers can expect one. They don't have to stand up and engagement and experience mortal completely separate for a small set of applications on a completely different you know, cloud architectures. They could just fit and build a single experience off dealing with the M, where, as a mechanism to enable all of their applications to be hosted, regardless of which cloud there in Uh huh Sandvik they do it at their own pace, right? As then when they're ready for applications. Secondly, and more importantly, for the business model transformation side. We have a model where we continue to show them the value realization. Okay, because these are true business model transformations. At this stage, there is lot off investment that's coming into I P while at the same time, the rest off the business is doing belt type. So there is a continuous pressure on Earth. Customers are I t. That is the champion for the customers, and they're working with developers in line of business teams, and they have to continue to show how what they're investing into as a singular platform or in architecture is going to deliver some kind of a value on an ongoing basis. So we have delivered on an ongoing basis rip boards and feed back and continuous sort of information back to the customers so that they can take back to their businesses on all the investments they're making now are ongoing basis what value the business is getting, because at the end of the day in this, this is probably the first time in the where I I t is probably getting the least belt tightening in the case off sort of an economic downturn, and in fact, it is being looked at as a way to invest out off the downturn. Right? So they're going to be, in a way where there sometimes even going into the boardroom and showing not just governance, but also sort of the investments they made, what kind of value they they got. So those are the two things were providing seamless and at at pace move toe multi cloud with a common experience and second, ongoing value realization that they can communicate whoever they need. Toe >>submit. You know, we've been following VM where for many me personally of persons that was founded. But with the Cube since 2010 star 11th year, You know, we've been critical of times and pointing out the obvious and in some cases, not so obvious successes and challenges. Um and so we've seen the completeness of vision evolved and pat, certainly. You know, he he held the line and he did the right things. And then he executed. So, you know, as you look at the emerald, we're now been complimentary on some of the moves. Certainly on the technology side that you guys have made and then we again we've talked about this many times on the Cube. So complete in this, uh, vision check. Okay, this is wholesome. Michael Dell issues, but gave talks about that. So good vision complete executed business performance is there. But as you talk about sass and subscription, your ability to execute is going to be a key variable and things like the Gartner Magic quadrant for the areas you're competing in. Multi cloud talk about how you guys just set up financially to support that personnel. What is your organization gonna do? Can you share your vision? How you going to be able to execute customers success programs as this uncertainty around multi cloud continues to become reality and things are changing. >>Yeah, I think a couple of things firstly, you know, to be absolutely candid, you know, the pace at which the customers are going to the new multi cloud models is faster now than it was nine months ago. We just discussed that. Okay, so I wouldn't I would be misrepresenting if I said we always were ready for this kind of the case. We're also adjusting and innovating at this stage as fast as possible. The good news is that we were headed in the right direction. Okay, if we were headed in the wrong direction, it would have been much, much harder. Okay. Secondly, I think there is a very strong leadership, the leadership team. I mean, at the end of the day, it's vision, leadership, team investment, the components and, of course, diligence to execute that comes in for the execution. To me vision and the direction was always very, very strong. It motivated me to join the anywhere for this important mission. Second and many other exact. If second the leadership team is as strong as they get, the four team is extremely strong. We have strong leadership team leadership from Pat Michael, of course, as well as Sanjay Rgu Rajiv. Everyone provides strong leadership and then third, you asked about sort of the financial element. You know, they're The company continues to perform quite well, right? We have core businesses that some critical for customers to use as technologies to enable them, you know, to come out off this sort off economic issue we're facing and they're facing. So as a result, you know, financially, we're in a good position to be able to invest back into the business and Secondly, we have made now we've always, always been extremely strong on the technology front. Okay, now with Sanjay and packed sort of saying that we're going to be extremely strong in terms of customer experience front because the world of subscription, the world of cloud, the world off the SAS requires not just great technology but also a great customer experience. So we're seeing tremendous in a continued sort of support financially in terms of investing into the customer experience, from both getting the right set of people offerings as well as technology. So I believe we have all three things. Having said that, you know, some of these things that we're investing in. They need a lot of work, and I'm. While I'm proud of what we have accomplished, I truly believe you know the best is yet to come, and the right investments that we're making are going to continue to sort of enhance our offerings both through people as well as technology. But there's work to be done. You >>know, it's all about, you know, having the consume ability of the technology thio, the value proposition of VM ware and also also is a company being um, open and easy to work with and consumable that way. So I think this is a great time. Certainly. Product wise. Business wise, You guys do extremely well. Congratulations on your new role on the senior leadership is the chief customer officer of VM Ware will be following the stories of your customers. So I really appreciate you taking the time. >>Thank you. Thank you so much, John. Excited to be back. Great >>to have you back on the queue here. VM world coverage of 2020 virtual. I'm John for this. The host of Cube Virtual. Check us out cube dot Net. And also our new cube 3 65 where it's our new modern application for virtual events. Of course, we want to continue to tell the most important stories and cover all the key people making it happen. Submit. Thank you for coming on. This is the Cube. Thanks for watching

(upbeat music) >> From our studios, in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hey, welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at our Palo Alto studios having a CUBE Conversation, we're just about ready for the madness of the conference season to start in a few months, so it's nice to have some time to have things a little calmer in the studio, and we're excited to have a new company, I guess they're not that new, but they're relatively new, they've been working on a really interesting technology around infrastructure, and we welcome to the studio, first time, I think, Sumit Puri, CEO and co-founder of Liqid, welcome. >> Thank you guys, very very happy to be here. >> And joined by our big brain, David Floyer, of course, the CTO and co-founder of Wikibon and knows all things infrastructure. Dave, always good to see you. >> It's so good to see you. >> All right, so let's jump into this, Sumit, give us the basic overview of Liqid, what are you guys all about, little bit of the company background, how long you've been around. No, absolutely, absolutely, Liqid is a software-defined infrastructure company, the technology that we've developed is referred to as composable infrastructure, think, dynamic infrastructure, and what we do, is we go and we turn data center resources from statically-configured boxes to dynamic, agile infrastructure. Our core technology is two-part. Number 1, we have a fabric layer, that allows you to interconnect off-the-shelf hardware, but more importantly, we have a software layer, that allows you to orchestrate, or dynamically configure servers, at the bare metal. >> So, who are you selling these solutions to? What's your market, what's the business case for this solution? >> Absolutely, so first, I guess, let me explain a little bit about what we mean by composable infrastructure. Rather than building servers by plugging devices into the sockets of the motherboard, with composability it's all about pools, or trays, of resources. A tray of CPUs, a tray of SSDs, a tray of GPUs, a tray of networking devices, instead of plugging those into a motherboard, we connect those into a fabric switch, and then we come in with our software, and we orchestrate, or recompose, at the bare metal. Grab this CPU, grab those four SSDs, these eight GPUs, and build me a server, just like you were plugging devices into the motherboard, except you're defining it in software, on the other side, you're getting delivered infrastructure of any size, shape, or ratio that you want. Except that infrastructure is dynamic, when we need another GPU in our server, we don't send a guy with a cart to plug the device in, we reprogram the fabric and add or remove devices as required by the application. We give you all the flexibility that you would get from public cloud, on the infrastructure that you are forced to own. And now, to answer your question of where we find a natural fit for our solution, one primary area is obviously cloud. If you're building a cloud environment, whether you're providing cloud as a service or whether you're providing cloud to your internal customers, building a more dynamic, agile cloud is what we enable. >> So, is the use case more just to use your available resources and reconfigure it to set something that basically runs that way for a while, or are customers more using it to dynamically reconfigure those resources based on, say, a temporary workload, is kind of a classic cloud example, where you need a bunch of something now, but not necessarily forever. >> Sure. The way we look at the world is very much around resource utilization. I'm buying this very expensive hardware, I'm deploying it into my data center, typical resource utilization is very low, below 20%, right? So what we enable is the ability to get better resource utilization out of the hardware that you're deploying inside your data center. If we can take a resource that's utilized 20% of the time because it's deployed as a static element inside of a box and we can raise the utilization to 40%, does that mean we are buying less hardware inside of our data center? Our argument is yes, if we can take rack scale efficiency from 20% to 40%, our belief is we can do the same amount of work with less hardware. >> So it's a fairly simple business case, then. To do that. So who are your competition in this area? Is it people like HP or Intel, or, >> That's a great question, I think both of those are interesting companies, I think HPE is the 800-pound gorilla in this term called composability and we find ourselves a slightly different approach than the way that those guys take it, I think first and foremost, the way that we're different is because we're disaggregated, right? When we sell you trays of resources, we'll sell you a tray of SSD or a tray of GPUs, where HP takes a converged solution, right? Every time I'm buying resources for my composable rack, I'm paying for CPUs, SSDs, GPUs, all of those devices as a converged resource, so they are converged, we are disaggregated. We are bare metal, we have a PCIe-based fabric up and down the rack, they are an ethernet-based fabric, there are no ethernet SSDs, there are no ethernet GPUs, at least today, so by using ethernet as your fabric, they're forced to do virtualization protocol translation, so they are not truly bare metal. We are bare metal, we view of them more as a virtualized solution. We're an open ecosystem, we're hardware-agnostic, right? We allow our customers to use whatever hardware that they're using in their environment today. Once you've kind of gone down that HP route, it's very much a closed environment. >> So what about some of the customers that you've got? Which sort of industries, which sort of customers, I presume this is for the larger types of customers, in general, but say a little bit about where you're making a difference. >> No, absolutely, right? So, obviously at scale, composability has even more benefit than in smaller deployments, I'll give you just a couple of use case examples. Number one, we're working with a transportation company, and what happens with them at 5 p.m. is actually very different than what happens at 2 a.m., and the model that they have today is a bunch of static boxes and they're playing a game of workload matching. If the workload that comes in fits the appropriate box, then the world is good. If the workload that comes in ends up on a machine that's oversized, then resources are being wasted, and what they said was, "We want to take a new approach. "We want to study the workload as it comes in, "dynamically spin up small, medium, large, "depending on what that workload requires, "and as soon as that workload is done, "free the resources back into the general pool." Right, so that's one customer, by taking a dynamic approach, they're changing the TCO argument inside of their environment. And for them, it's not a matter of am I going dynamic or am I going static, everyone knows dynamic infrastructure is better, no one says, "Give me the static stuff." For them, it's am I going public cloud, or am I going on prem. That's really the question, so what we provide is public cloud is very easy, but when you start thinking about next-generation workloads, things that leverage GPUs and FPGAs, those instantiations on public cloud are just not very cheap. So we give you all of that flexibility that you're getting on public cloud, but we save you money by giving you that capability on prem. So that's use case number one. Another use case is very exciting for us, we're working with a studio down in southern California, and they leverage these NVIDIA V100 GPUs. During the daytime, they give those GPUs to their AI engineers, when the AI engineers go home at night, they reprogram the fabric and they use those same GPUs for rendering workloads. They've taken $50,000 worth of hardware and they've doubled the utilization of that hardware. >> The other use case we talked about before we turned the cameras on there, was pretty interesting, was kind of multiple workloads against the same data set, over a series of time where you want to apply different resources. I wonder if you can unpack that a little bit because I think that's a really interesting one that we don't hear a lot about. So, we would say about 60 plus to 70% of our deployments in one way or another touch the realm of AI. AI is actually not an event, AI is a workflow, what do we do? First we ingest data, that's very networking-centric. Then we scrub and we clean the data, that's actually CPU-centric. Then we're running inference, and then we're running training, that's GPU-centric. Data has gravity, right? It's very difficult to move petabytes of data around, so what we enable is the composable AI platform, leave data at the center of the universe, reorchestrate your compute, networking, GPU resources around the data. That's the way that we believe that AI is approached. >> So we're looking forward in the future. What are you seeing where you can make a difference in this? I mean, a lot of changes happening, there's Gen 4 coming out in PCIe, there's GPUs which are moving down to the edge, how do see, where do you see you're going to make a difference, over the next few years. >> That's a great question. So I think there's 2 parts to look at, right? Number one is the physical layer, right? Today we build or we compose based upon PCIe Gen 3 because for the first time in the data center, everything is speaking a common language. When SSDs moved to NVMe, you had SSDs, network cards, GPUs, CPUs, all speaking a common language which was PCIe. So that's why we've chosen to build our fabric on this common interconnect, because that's how we enable bare metal orchestration without translation and virtualization, right? Today, it's PCIe Gen 3, as the industry moves forward, Gen 4 is coming. Gen 4 is here. We've actually announced our first PCIe Gen 4 products already, and by the end of this year, Gen 4 will become extremely relevant into the market. Our software has been architected from the beginning to be physical layer-agnostic, so whether we're talking PCIe Gen 3, PCIe Gen 4, in the future something referred to as Gen Z, (laughing) it doesn't matter for us, we will support all of those physical layers. For us it's about the software orchestration. >> I would imagine, too, like TPUs and other physical units that are going to be introduced in the system, too, you're architected to be able to take those, new-- >> Today, today we're doing CPUs, GPUs, NVMe devices and we're doing NICs. We just made an announcement, now we're orchestrating Optane memory with Intel. We've made an announcement with Xilinx where we're orchestrating FPGAs with Xilinx. So this will continue, we'll continue to find more and more of the resources that we'll be able to orchestrate for a very simple reason, everything has a common interconnect, and that common interconnect is PCIe. >> So this is an exciting time in your existence. Where are you? I mean, how far along are you to becoming the standard in this industry? >> Yeah, no, that's a great question, and I think, we get asked a lot is what company are you most similar to or are you most like at the early stage. And what we say is we, a lot of time, compare ourselves to VMware, right? VMware is the hypervisor for the virtualization layer. We view ourselves as that physical hypervisor, right? We do for physical infrastructure what VMware is doing for virtualized environments. And just like VMware has enabled many of the market players to get virtualized, our hope is we're going to enable many of the market players to become composable. We're very excited about our partnership with Inspur, just recently we've announced, they're the number three server vendor in the world, we've announced an AI-centric rack, which leverages the servers and the storage solutions from Inspur tied to our fabric to deliver a composable AI platform. >> That's great. >> Yeah, and it seems like the market for cloud service providers, 'cause we always talk about the big ones, but there's a lot of them, all over the world, is a perfect use case for you, because now they can actually offer the benefits of cloud flexibility by leveraging your infrastructure to get more miles out of their investments into their backend. >> Absolutely, cloud, cloud service providers, and private cloud, that's a big market and opportunity for us, and we're not necessarily chasing the big seven hyperscalers, right? We'd love to partner with them, but for us, there's 300 other companies out there that can use the benefit of our technology. So they necessarily don't have the R&D dollars available that some of the big guys have, so we come in with our technology and we enable those cloud service providers to be more agile, to be more competitive. >> All right, Sumit, before we let you go, season's coming up, we were just at RSA yesterday, big shows comin' up in May, where you guys, are we going to cross paths over the next several weeks or months? >> No, absolutely, we got a handful of shows coming up, very exciting season for us, we're going to be at the OCP, the Open Compute Project conference, actually next week, and then right after that, we're going to be at the NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, we're going to have a booth at both of those shows, and we're going to be doing live demos of our composable platform, and then at the end of April, we're going to be at the Dell Technology World conference in Las Vegas, where we're going to have a large booth and we're going to be doing some very exciting demos with the Dell team. >> Sumit, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your day to tell us a story, it's pretty exciting stuff, 'cause this whole flexibility is such an important piece of the whole cloud value proposition, and you guys are delivering it all over the place. >> Well, thank you guys for making the time today, I was excited to be here, thank you. >> All right, David, always good to see you, >> Good to see you. >> Smart man, alright, I'm Jeff Frick, you're watching theCUBE from theCUBE studios in Palo Alto, thanks for watching, we'll see you next time. 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(music playing) >> Narrator: Live, from downtown San Francisco It's the Cube. Covering IBM Chief Data Officer Startegy Summit 2018. Brought to you by: IBM >> Welcome back to San Francisco everybody we're at the Parc 55 in Union Square. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching the Cube. The leader in live tech coverage and this is our exclusive coverage of IBM's Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit. They hold these both in San Francisco and in Boston. It's an intimate event, about 150 Chief Data Officers really absorbing what IBM has done internally and IBM transferring knowledge to its clients. Steven Eluk is here. He is one of those internal practitioners at IBM. He's the Vice President of Deep Learning and the Global Chief Data Office at IBM. We just heard from him and some of his strategies and used cases. He's joined by Sumit Gupta, a Cube alum. Who is the Vice President of Machine Learning and deep learning within IBM's cognitive systems group. Sumit. >> Thank you. >> Good to see you, welcome back Steven, lets get into it. So, I was um paying close attention when Bob Picciano took over the cognitive systems group. I said, "Hmm, that's interesting". Recently a software guy, of course I know he's got some hardware expertise. But bringing in someone who's deep into software and machine learning, and deep learning, and AI, and cognitive systems into a systems organization. So you guys specifically set out to develop solutions to solve problems like Steven's trying to solve. Right, explain that. >> Yeah, so I think ugh there's a revolution going on in the market the computing market where we have all these new machine learning, and deep learning technologies that are having meaningful impact or promise of having meaningful impact. But these new technologies, are actually significantly I would say complex and they require very complex and high performance computing systems. You know I think Bob and I think in particular IBM saw the opportunity and realized that we really need to architect a new class of infrastructure. Both software and hardware to address what data scientist like Steve are trying to do in the space, right? The open source software that's out there: Denzoflo, Cafe, Torch - These things are truly game changing. But they also require GPU accelerators. They also require multiple systems like... In fact interestingly enough you know some of the super computers that we've been building for the scientific computing world, those same technologies are now coming into the AI world and the enterprise. >> So, the infrastructure for AI, if I can use that term? It's got to be flexible, Steven we were sort of talking about that elastic versus I'm even extending it to plastic. As Sumit you just said, it's got to have that tooling, got to have that modern tooling, you've got to accommodate alternative processor capabilities um, and so, that forms what you've used Steven to sort of create new capabilities new business capabilities within IBM. I wanted to, we didn't touch upon this before, but we touched upon your data strategy before but tie it back to the line of business. You essentially are a presume a liaison between the line of business and the chief data office >> Steven: Yeah. >> Officer office. How did that all work out, and shake out? Did you defining the business outcomes, the requirements, how did you go about that? >> Well, actually, surprisingly, we have very little new use cases that we're generating internally from my organization. Because there's so many to pick from already throughout the organization, right? There's all these business units coming to us and saying, "Hey, now the data is in the data lake and now we know there's more data, now we want to do this. How do we do it?" You know, so that's where we come in, that's where we start touching and massaging and enabling them. And that's the main efforts that we have. We do have some derivative works that have come out, that have been like new offerings that you'll see here. But mostly we already have so many use cases that from those businesses units that we're really trying to heighten and bring extra value to those domains first. >> So, a lot of organizations sounds like IBM was similar you created the data lake you know, things like "a doop" made a lower cost to just put stuff in the data lake. But then, it's like "okay, now what?" >> Steven: Yeah. >> So is that right? So you've got the data and this bog of data and you're trying to make more sense out of it but get more value out of it? >> Steven: Absolutely. >> That's what they were pushing you to do? >> Yeah, absolutely. And with that, with more data you need more computational power. And actually Sumit and I go pretty far back and I can tell you from my previous roles I heightened to him many years ago some of the deficiencies in the current architecture in X86 etc and I said, "If you hit these points, I will buy these products." And what they went back and they did is they, they addressed all of the issues that I had. Like there's certain issues... >> That's when you were, sorry to interrupt, that's when you were a customer, right? >> Steven: That's when I was... >> An external customer >> Outside. I'm still an internal customer, so I've always been a customer I guess in that role right? >> Yep, yep. >> But, I need to get data to the computational device as quickly as possible. And with certain older gen technologies, like PTI Gen3 and certain issues around um x86. I couldn't get that data there for like high fidelity imaging for autonomous vehicles for ya know, high fidelity image analysis. But, with certain technologies in power we have like envy link and directly to the CPU. And we also have PTI Gen4, right? So, so these are big enablers for me so that I can really keep the utilization of those very expensive compute devices higher. Because they're not starved for data. >> And you've also put a lot of emphasis on IO, right? I mean that's... >> Yeah, you know if I may break it down right there's actually I would say three different pieces to the puzzle here right? The highest level from Steve's perspective, from Steven's teams perspective or any data scientist perspective is they need to just do their data science and not worry about the infrastructure, right? They actually don't want to know that there's an infrastructure. They want to say, "launch job" - right? That's the level of grand clarity we want, right? In the background, they want our schedulers, our software, our hardware to just seamlessly use either one system or scale to 100 systems, right? To use one GPU or to use 1,000 GPUs, right? So that's where our offerings come in, right. We went and built this offering called Powder and Powder essentially is open source software like TensorFlow, like Efi, like Torch. But performace and capabilities add it to make it much easier to use. So for example, we have an extremely terrific scheduling software that manages jobs called Spectrum Conductor for Spark. So as the name suggests, it uses Apache Spark. But again the data scientist doesn't know that. They say, "launch job". And the software actually goes and scales that job across tens of servers or hundreds of servers. The IT team can determine how many servers their going to allocate for data scientist. They can have all kinds of user management, data management, model management software. We take the open source software, we package it. You know surprisingly ugh most people don't realize this, the open source software like TensorFlow has primarily been built on a (mumbles). And most of our enterprise clients, including Steven, are on Redhat. So we, we engineered Redhat to be able to manage TensorFlow. And you know I chose those words carefully, there was a little bit of engineering both on Redhat and on TensorFlow to make that whole thing work together. Sounds trivial, took several months and huge value proposition to the enterprise clients. And then the last piece I think that Steven was referencing too, is we also trying to go and make the eye more accessible for non data scientist or I would say even data engineers. So we for example, have a software called Powder Vision. This takes images and videos, and automatically creates a trained deep learning model for them, right. So we analyze the images, you of course have to tell us in these images, for these hundred images here are the most important things. For example, you've identified: here are people, here are cars, here are traffic signs. But if you give us some of that labeled data, we automatically do the work that a data scientist would have done, and create this pre trained AI model for you. This really enables many rapid prototyping for a lot of clients who either kind of fought to have data scientists or don't want to have data scientists. >> So just to summarize that, the three pieces: It's making it simpler for the data scientists, just run the job - Um, the backend piece which is the schedulers, the hardware, the software doing its thing - and then its making that data science capability more accessible. >> Right, right, right. >> Those are the three layers. >> So you know, I'll resay it in my words maybe >> Yeah please. >> Ease of use right, hardware software optimized for performance and capability, and point and click AI, right. AI for non data scientists, right. It's like the three levels that I think of when I'm engaging with data scientists and clients. >> And essentially it's embedded AI right? I've been making the point today that a lot of the AI is going to be purchased from companies like IBM, and I'm just going to apply it. I'm not going to try to go build my own, own AI right? I mean, is that... >> No absolutely. >> Is that the right way to think about it as a practitioner >> I think, I think we talked about it a little bit about it on the panel earlier but if we can, if we can leverage these pre built models and just apply a little bit of training data it makes it so much easier for the organizations and so much cheaper. They don't have to invest in a crazy amount of infrastructure, all the labeling of data, they don't have to do that. So, I think it's definitely steering that way. It's going to take a little bit of time, we have some of them there. But as we as we iterate, we are going to get more and more of these types of you know, commodity type models that people could utilize. >> I'll give you an example, so we have a software called Intelligent Analytics at IBM. It's very good at taking any surveillance data and for example recognizing anomalies or you know if people aren't suppose to be in a zone. Ugh and we had a client who wanted to do worker safety compliance. So they want to make sure workers are wearing their safety jackets and their helmets when they're in a construction site. So we use surveillance data created a new AI model using Powder AI vision. We were then able to plug into this IVA - Intelligence Analytic Software. So they have the nice gooey base software for the dashboards and the alerts, yet we were able to do incremental training on their specific use case, which by the way, with their specific you know equipment and jackets and stuff like that. And create a new AI model, very quickly. For them to be able to apply and make sure their workers are actually complaint to all of the safety requirements they have on the construction site. >> Hmm interesting. So when I, Sometimes it's like a new form of capture says identify "all the pictures with bridges", right that's the kind of thing you're capable to do with these video analytics. >> That's exactly right. You, every, clients will have all kinds of uses I was at a, talking to a client, who's a major car manufacturer in the world and he was saying it would be great if I could identify the make and model of what cars people are driving into my dealership. Because I bet I can draw a ugh corelation between what they drive into and what they going to drive out of, right. Marketing insights, right. And, ugh, so there's a lot of things that people want to do with which would really be spoke in their use cases. And build on top of existing AI models that we have already. >> And you mentioned, X86 before. And not to start a food fight but um >> Steven: And we use both internally too, right. >> So lets talk about that a little bit, I mean where do you use X86 where do you use IBM Cognitive and Power Systems? >> I have a mix of both, >> Why, how do you decide? >> There's certain of work loads. I will delegate that over to Power, just because ya know they're data starved and we are noticing a complication is being impacted by it. Um, but because we deal with so many different organizations certain organizations optimize for X86 and some of them optimize for power and I can't pick, I have to have everything. Just like I mentioned earlier, I also have to support cloud on prim, I can't pick just to be on prim right, it so. >> I imagine the big cloud providers are in the same boat which I know some are your customers. You're betting on data, you're betting on digital and it's a good bet. >> Steven: Yeah, 100 percent. >> We're betting on data and AI, right. So I think data, you got to do something with the data, right? And analytics and AI is what people are doing with that data we have an advantage both at the hardware level and at the software level in these two I would say workloads or segments - which is data and AI, right. And we fundamentally have invested in the processor architecture to improve the performance and capabilities, right. You could offer a much larger AI models on a power system that you use than you can on an X86 system that you use. Right, that's one advantage. You can train and AI model four times faster on a power system than you can on an Intel Based System. So the clients who have a lot of data, who care about how fast their training runs, are the ones who are committing to power systems today. >> Mmm.Hmm. >> Latency requirements, things like that, really really big deal. >> So what that means for you as a practitioner is you can do more with less or is it I mean >> I can definitely do more with less, but the real value is that I'm able to get an outcome quicker. Everyone says, "Okay, you can just roll our more GPU's more GPU's, but run more experiments run more experiments". No no that's not actually it. I want to reduce the time for a an experiment Get it done as quickly as possible so I get that insight. 'Cause then what I can do I can get possibly cancel out a bunch of those jobs that are already running cause I already have the insight, knowing that that model is not doing anything. Alright, so it's very important to get the time down. Jeff Dean said it a few years ago, he uses the same slide often. But, you know, when things are taking months you know that's what happened basically from the 80's up until you know 2010. >> Right >> We didn't have the computation we didn't have the data. Once we were able to get that experimentation time down, we're able to iterate very very quickly on this. >> And throwing GPU's at the problem doesn't solve it because it's too much complexity or? >> It it helps the problem, there's no question. But when my GPU utilization goes from 95% down to 60% ya know I'm getting only a two-thirds return on investment there. It's a really really big deal, yeah. >> Sumit: I mean the key here I think Steven, and I'll draw it out again is this time to insight. Because time to insight actually is time to dollars, right. People are using AI either to make more money, right by providing better customer products, better products to the customers, giving better recommendations. Or they're saving on their operational costs right, they're improving their efficiencies. Maybe their routing their trucks in the right way, their routing their inventory in the right place, they're reducing the amount of inventory that they need. So in all cases you can actually coordinate AI to a revenue outcome or a dollar outcome. So the faster you can do that, you know, I tell most people that I engage with the hardware and software they get from us pays for itself very quickly. Because they make that much more money or they save that much more money, using power systems. >> We, we even see this internally I've heard stories and all that, Sumit kind of commented on this but - There's actually sales people that take this software & hardware out and they're able to get an outcome sometimes in certain situations where they just take the clients data and they're sales people they're not data scientists they train it it's so simple to use then they present the client with the outcomes the next day and the client is just like blown away. This isn't just a one time occurrence, like sales people are actually using this right. So it's getting to the area that it's so simple to use you're able to get those outcomes that we're even seeing it you know deals close quicker. >> Yeah, that's powerful. And Sumit to your point, the business case is actually really easy to make. You can say, "Okay, this initiative that you're driving what's your forecast for how much revenue?" Now lets make an assumption for how much faster we're going to be able to deliver it. And if I can show them a one day turn around, on a corpus of data, okay lets say two months times whatever, my time to break. I can run the business case very easily and communicate to the CFO or whomever the line of business head so. >> That's right. I mean just, I was at a retailer, at a grocery store a local grocery store in the bay area recently and he was telling me how In California we've passed legislation that does not allow plastic bags anymore. You have to pay for it. So people are bringing their own bags. But that's actually increased theft for them. Because people bring their own bag, put stuff in it and walk out. And he didn't want to have an analytic system that can detect if someone puts something in a bag and then did not buy it at purchase. So it's, in many ways they want to use the existing camera systems they have but automatically be able to detect fraudulent behavior or you know anomalies. And it's actually quite easy to do with a lot of the software we have around Power AI Vision, around video analytics from IBM right. And that's what we were talking about right? Take existing trained AI models on vision and enhance them for your specific use case and the scenarios you're looking for. >> Excellent. Guys we got to go. Thanks Steven, thanks Sumit for coming back on and appreciate the insights. >> Thank you >> Glad to be here >> You're welcome. Alright, keep it right there buddy we'll be back with our next guest. You're watching "The Cube" at IBM's CDO Strategy Summit from San Francisco. We'll be right back. (music playing)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering IBM Think 2018, brought to you by IBM. >> We're back at IBM Think 2018. You're watching the Cube, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante and I'm here with my co-host, Peter Burris. Ken King is here; he's the general manager of OpenPOWER from IBM, and Sumit Gupta, PhD, who is the VP, HPC, AI, ML for IBM Cognitive. Gentleman, welcome to the Cube >> Sumit: Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> So, really, guys, a pleasure. We had dinner last night, talked about Picciano who runs the OpenPOWER business, appreciate you guys comin' on, but, I got to ask you, Sumit, I'll start with you. OpenPOWER, Cognitive systems, a lot of people say, "Well, that's just the power system. "This is the old AIX business, it's just renaming it. "It's a branding thing.", what do you say? >> I think we had a fundamental strategy shift where we realized that AI was going to be the dominant workload moving into the future, and the systems that have been designed today or in the past are not the right systems for the AI future. So, we also believe that it's not just about silicon and even a single server. It's about the software, it's about thinking at the react level and the data center level. So, fundamentally, Cognitive Systems is about co-designing hardware and software with an open ecosystem of partners who are innovating to maximize the data and AI support at a react level. >> Somebody was talkin' to Steve Mills, probably about 10 years ago, and he said, "Listen, if you're going to compete with Intel, "you can copy them, that's not what we're going to do." You know, he didn't like the spark strategy. "We have a better strategy.", is what he said, and "Oh, strategies, we're going to open it up, "we're going to try to get 10% of the market. "You know, we'll see if we can get there.", but, Ken, I wonder if you could sort of talk about, just from a high level, the strategy and maybe go into the segments. >> Yeah, absolutely, so, yeah, you're absolutely right on the strategy. You know, we have completely opened up the architecture. Our focus on growth is around having an ecosystem and an open architecture so everybody can innovate on top of it effectively and everybody in the ecosystem can profit from it and gains good margins. So, that's the strategy, that's how we design the OpenPOWER ecosystem, but, you know, our segments, our core segments, AIX in Unix is still a core, very big core segment of ours. Unix itself is flat to declining, but AIX is continuing to take share in that segment through all the new innovations we're delivering. The other segments are all growth segments, high growth segments, whether it's SAP HANA, our cognitive infrastructure in modern day to platform, or even what we're doing in the HyperScale data centers. Those are all significant growth opportunities for us, and those are all Linux based, and, so, that is really where a lot of the OpenPOWER initiatives are driving growth for us and leveraging the fact that, through that ecosystem, we're getting a lot of incremental innovation that's occurring and it's delivering competitive differentiation for our platform. I say for our platform, but that doesn't mean just for IBM, but for all the ecosystem partners as well, and a lot of that was on display on Monday when we had our OpenPOWER summit. >> So, to talk about more about the OpenPOWER summit, what was that all about, who was there? Give us some stats on OpenPOWER and ecosystem. >> Yeah, absolutely. So, it was a good day, we're up to well over 300 members. We have over 50 different systems that are coming out in the market from IBM or our partners. Over 20 different manufacturers out there actually developing OpenPOWER systems. A lot of announcements or a lot of statements that were made at the summit that we thought were extremely valuable, first of all, we got the number one server vendor in Europe, Atos, designing and developing P9, the number on in Japan, Hitachi, the number one in China, Inspur. We got top ODMs like Super Micro, Wistron, and others that are also developing their power nine. We have a lot of different component providers on the new PCIe gen four, on the open cabinet capabilities, a lot of announcements made by a number of component partners and accelerator partners at the summit as well. The other thing I'm excited about is we have over 70 ISVs now on the platform, and a number of statements were made and announcements on Monday from people like MapD, Anaconda, H2O, Conetica and others who are leveraging those innovations bought on the platform like NVLink and the coherency between GPU and CPU to do accelerated analytics and accelerated GPU database kind of capabilities, but the thing that had me the most excited on Monday were the end users. I've always said, and the analysts always ask me the questions of when are you going to start penetration in the market? When are you going to show that you've got a lot of end users deploying this? And there were a lot of statements by a lot of big players on Monday. Google was on stage and publicly said the IO was amazing, the memory bandwidth is amazing. We are deploying Zaius, which is the power nine server, in our data centers and we're ready for scale, and it's now Google strong which is basically saying that this thing is hardened and ready for production, but we also (laughs) had a number of other significant ones, Tencent talkin' about deploying OpenPOWER, 30% better efficiency, 30% less server resources required, the cloud armor of Alibaba talkin' about how they're putting on their on their X-Dragon, they have it in a piler program, they're asking everybody to use it now so they can figure out how do they go into production. PayPal made statements about how they're using it, but the machine learning and deep learning to do fraud detection, and we even had Limelight, who is not as big a name, but >> CDN, yeah. >> They're a CDN tool provider to people like Netflix and others. We're talkin' about the great capability with the IO and the ability to reduce the buffering and improve the streaming for all these CDN providers out there. So, we were really excited about all those end users and all the things they're saying. That demonstrates the power of this ecosystem. >> Alright, so just to comment on the architecture and then, I want to get into the Cognitive piece. I mean, you guys did, years ago, little Indians, recognizing you got to get software based to be compatible. You mentioned, Ken, bandwidth, IO bandwidth, CAPI stuff that you've done. So, there's a lot of incentives, especially for the big hyperscale guys, to be able to do more with less, but, to me, let's get into the AI, the Cognitive piece. Bob Picciano comes over from running a $15 billion analytics business, so, obviously, he's got some knowledge. He's bringin' in people like you with all these cool buzzwords in your title. So, talk a little bit about infrastructure for AI and why power is the right platform. >> Sure, so, I think we all recognize that the performance advantages and even power advantages that we were getting from Dennard scaling, also known as Moore's law, is over, right. So, people talk about the end of Moore's Law, and that's really the end of gaining processor performance with Dennard scaling and the Moore's Law. What we believe is that to continue to meet the performance needs of all of these new AI and data workloads, you need accelerators, and not just computer accelerators, you actually need accelerated networking. You need accelerated storage, you need high-density memory sitting very close to the compute power, and, if you really think about it, what's happened is, again, system view, right, we're not silicon view, we're looking at the system. The minute you start looking at the silicon you realize you want to get the data to where the computer is, or the computer where the data is. So, it all becomes about creating bigger pipelines, factor of pipelines, to move data around to get to the right compute piece. For example, we put much more emphasis on a much faster memory system to make sure we are getting data from the system memory to the CPU. >> Coherently. >> Coherently, that's the main memory. We put interfaces on power nine including NVLink, OpenCAPI, and PCIe gen four, and that enabled us to get that data either from the network to the system memory, or out back to the network, or to storage, or to accelerators like GPUs. We built and embedded these high-speed interconnects into power nine, into the processor. Nvidia put NVLink into their GPU, and we've been working with marketers like Xilinx and Mellanox on getting OpenCAPI onto their components. >> And we're seeing up to 10x for both memory bandwidth and IO over x86 which is significant. You should talk about how we're seeing up to 4x improvement in training of MLDL algorithms over x86 which is dramatic in how quickly you can get from data to insight, right? You could take training and turn it from weeks to days, or days to hours, or even hours to minutes, and that makes a huge difference in what you can do in any industry as far as getting insight out of your data which is the competitive differentiator in today's environment. >> Let's talk about this notion of architecture, or systems especially. The basic platform for how we've been building systems has been relatively consistent for a long time. The basic approach to how we think about building systems has been relatively consistent. You start with the database manager, you run it on an Intel processor, you build your application, you scale it up based on SMP needs. There's been some variations; we're going into clustering, because we do some other things, but you guys are talking about something fundamentally different, and flash memory, the ability to do flash storage, which dramatically changes the relationship between the processor and the data, means that we're not going to see all of the organization of the workloads around the server, see how much we can do in it. It's really going to be much more of a balanced approach. How is power going to provide that more balanced systems approach across as we distribute data, as we distribute processing, as we create a cloud experience that isn't in one place, but is in more places. >> Well, this ties exactly to the point I made around it's not just accelerated compute, which we've all talked about a lot over the years, it's also about accelerated storage, accelerated networking, and accelerated memories, right. This is really, the point being, that the compute, if you don't have a fast pipeline into the processor from all of this wonderful storage and flash technology, there's going to be a choke point in the network, or they'll be a choke point once the data gets to the server, you're choked then. So, a lot of our focus has been, first of all, partnering with a company like Mellanox which builds extremely high bandwidth, high-speed >> And EOF. >> Right, right, and I'm using one as an example right. >> Sure. >> I'm using one as an example and that's where the large partnerships, we have like 300 partnerships, as Ken talked about in the OpenPOWER foundation. Those partnerships is because we brought together all of these technology providers. We believe that no one company can own the agenda of technology. No one company can invest enough to continue to give us the performance we need to meet the needs of the AI workloads, and that's why we want to partner with all these technology vendors who've all invested billions of dollars to provide the best systems and software for AI and data. >> But fundamentally, >> It's the whole construct of data centric systems, right? >> Right. >> I mean, sometimes you got to process the data in the network, right? Sometimes you got to process the data in the storage. It's not just at the CPU, the GPUs a huge place for processing that data. >> Sure. >> How do you do that all coherently and how do things work together in a system environment is crucial versus a vertically integrated capability where the CPU provider continues to put more and more into the processor and disenfranchise the rest of the ecosystem. >> Well, that was the counter building strategies that we want to talk about. You have Intel who wants to put as much on the die as possible. It's worked quite well for Intel over the years. You had to take a different strategy. If you tried to take Intel on with that strategy, you would have failed. So, talk about the different philosophies, but really I'm interested in what it means for things like alternative processing and your relationship in your ecosystem. >> This is not about company strategies, right. I mean, Intel is a semiconductor company and they think like a semiconductor company. We're a systems and software company, we think like that, but this is not about company strategy. This is about what the market needs, what client workloads need, and if you start there, you start with a data centric strategy. You start with data centric systems. You think about moving data around and making sure there is heritage in this computer, there is accelerated computer, you have very fast networks. So, we just built the US's fastest supercomputer. We're currently building the US's fastest supercomputer which is the project name is Coral, but there are two supercomputers, one at Oak Ridge National Labs and one at Lawrence Livermore. These are the ultimate HPC and AI machines, right. Its computer's a very important part of them, but networking and storage is just as important. The file system is just as important. The cluster management software is just as important, right, because if you are serving data scientists and a biologist, they don't want to deal with, "How many servers do I need to launch this job on? "How do I manage the jobs, how do I manage the server?" You want them to just scale, right. So, we do a lot of work on our scalability. We do a lot of work in using Apache Spark to enable cluster virtualization and user virtualization. >> Well, if we think about, I don't like the term data gravity, it's wrong a lot of different perspectives, but if we think about it, you guys are trying to build systems in a world that's centered on data, as opposed to a world that's centered on the server. >> That's exactly right. >> That's right. >> You got that, right? >> That's exactly right. >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Alright, you guys got to go, we got to wrap, but I just want to close with, I mean, always says infrastructure matters. You got Z growing, you got power growing, you got storage growing, it's given a good tailwind to IBM, so, guys, great work. Congratulations, got a lot more to do, I know, but thanks for >> It's going to be a fun year. comin' on the Cube, appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> Thank you. >> Appreciate you having us. >> Alright, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back with our next guest. You're watching the Cube live from IBM Think 2018. We'll be right back. (techno beat)

(light corporate music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to VMware Explore 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante. Our 12th year covering VMware's User Conference, formerly known as VMworld, now rebranded as VMware Explore. Two great cube alumnus coming down the cube. Ricky Cooper, SVP, Worldwide Partner Commercials VMware, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> We just had a great chat- >> Good to see you again. >> With the Discovery and, of course, Joseph George, vice president of Compute Industry Alliances. Great to have you on. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> So guys this year is very curious in VMware. A lot goin' on, the name change, the event. Big, big move. Bold move. And then they changed the name of the event. Then Broadcom buys them. A lot of speculation, but at the end of the day, this conference kind of, people were wondering what would be the barometer of the event. We're reporting this morning on the keynote analysis. Very good mojo in the keynote. Very transparent about the Broadcom relationship. The expo floor last night was buzzing. >> Mhm. >> I mean, this is not a show that's lookin' like it's going to be, ya' know, going down. >> Yeah. >> This is clearly a wave. We're calling it Super Cloud. Multi-Cloud's their theme. Clearly the cloud's happenin'. We not to date ourselves, but 2013 we were discussing on theCUBE- >> We talked about that. Yeah. Yeah. >> Discover about DevOps infrastructure as code- >> Mhm. >> We're full realization now of that. >> Yep. >> This is where we're at. You guys had a great partnership with VMware and HPE. Talk about where you guys see this coming together because customers are refactoring. They are lookin' at Cloud Native. The whole Broadcom visibility to the VMware customer bases activated them. They're here and they're leaning in. >> Yeah. >> What's going on? >> Yeah. Absolutely. We're seeing a renewed interest now as customers are looking at their entire infrastructure, bottoms up, all the way up the stack, and the notion of a hybrid cloud, where you've got some visibility and control of your data and your infrastructure and your applications, customers want to live in that sort of a cloud environment and so we're seeing a renewed interest. A lot of conversations we're having with customers now, a lot of customers committing to that model where they have applications and workloads running at the Edge, in their data center, and in the public cloud in a lot of cases, but having that mobility, having that control, being able to have security in their own, you know, in their control. There's a lot that you can do there and, obviously, partnering with VMware. We've been partners for so long. >> 20 years about. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. At least 20 years, back when they invented stuff, they were inventing way- >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> VMware's got a very technical culture, but Ricky, I got to say that, you know, we commented earlier when Raghu was on, the CEO, now CEO, I mean, legendary product. I sent the trajectory to VMware. Everyone knows that. VMware, I can't know whether to tell it was VMware or HP, HP before HPE, coined hybrid- >> Yeah. >> 'Cause you guys were both on. I can't recall, Dave, which company coined it first, but it was either one of you guys. Nobody else was there. >> It was the partnership. >> Yes. I- (cross talking) >> They had a big thing with Pat Gelsinger. Dave, remember when he said, you know, he got in my grill on theCUBE live? But now you see- >> But if you focus on that Multi-Cloud aspect, right? So you've got a situation where our customers are looking at Multi-Cloud and they're looking at it not just as a flash in the pan. This is here for five years, 10 years, 20 years. Okay. So what does that mean then to our partners and to our distributors? You're seeing a whole seed change. You're seeing partners now looking at this. So, look at the OEMs, you know, the ones that have historically been vSphere customers are now saying, they're coming in droves saying, okay, what is the next step? Well, how can I be a Multi-Cloud partner with you? >> Yep. Right. >> How can I look at other aspects that we're driving here together? So, you know, GreenLake is a great example. We keep going back to GreenLake and we are partaking in GreenLake at the moment. The real big thing for us is going to be, right, let's make sure that we've got the agreements in place that support this SaaS and subscription motion going forward and then the sky's the limit for us. >> You're pluggin' that right into GreenLake, right? >> Well, here's why. Here's why. So customers are loving the fact that they can go to a public cloud and they can get an SLA. They come to a, you know, an On-Premise. You've got the hardware, you've got the software, you've got the, you know, the guys on board to maintain this through its life cycle. >> Right. I mean, this is complicated stuff. >> Yeah. >> Now we've got a situation where you can say, hey, we can get an SLA On-Premise. >> Yeah. And I think what you're seeing is it's very analogous to having a financial advisor just manage your portfolio. You're taking care of just submitting money. That's really a lot of what the customers have done with the public cloud, but now, a lot of these customers are getting savvy and they have been working with VMware Technologies and HPE for so long. They've got expertise. They know how they want their workloads architected. Now, we've given them a model where they can leverage the Cloud platform to be able to do this, whether it's On-Premise, The Edge, or in the public cloud, leveraging HPE GreenLake and VMware. >> Is it predominantly or exclusively a managed service or do you find some customers saying, hey, we want to manage ourself? How, what are you seeing is the mix there? >> It is not predominantly managed services right now. We're actually, as we are growing, last time we talked to HPE Discover we talked about a whole bunch of new services that we've added to our catalog. It's growing by leaps and bounds. A lot of folks are definitely interested in the pay as you go, obviously, the financial model, but are now getting exposed to all the other management that can happen. There are managed services capabilities, but actually running it as a service with your systems On-Prem is a phenomenal idea for all these customers and they're opening their eyes to some new ways to service their customers better. >> And another phenomenon we're seeing there is where partners, such as HPA, using other partners for various areas of their services implementation as well. So that's another phenomenon, you know? You're seeing the resale motion now going into a lot more of the services motion. >> It's interesting too, you know, I mean, the digital modernization that's goin' on. The transformation, whatever you want to call it, is complicated. >> Yeah. >> That's clear. One of the things I liked about the keynote today was the concept of cloud chaos. >> Yeah. >> Because we've been saying, you know, quoting Andy Grove at Intel, "Let chaos rain and rain in the chaos." >> Mhm. >> And when you have inflection points, complexity, which is the chaos, needs to be solved and whoever solves it kicks the inflection point, that's up into the right. So- >> Prime idea right here. Yeah. >> So GreenLake is- >> Well, also look at the distribution model and how that's changed. A couple of points on a deal. Now they're saying, "I'll be your aggregator. I'll take the strain and I'll give you scale." You know? "I'll give you VMware Scale for all, you know, for all of the various different partners, et cetera." >> Yeah. So let's break this down because this is, I think, a key point. So complexity is good, but the old model in the Enterprise market was- >> Sure. >> You solve complexity with more complexity. >> Yeah. >> And everybody wins. Oh, yeah! We're locked in! That's not what the market wants. They want some self-service. They want, as a service, they want easy. Developer first security data ops, DevOps, is already in the cycle, so they're going to want simpler. >> Yeah. >> Easier. Faster. >> And this is kind of why I'll say, for the big announcement today here at VMware Explore, around the VMware vSphere Distributed Services Engine, Project Monterey- >> Yeah. >> That we've talked about for so long, HPE and VMware and AMD, with the Pensando DPU, actually work together to engineer a solution for exactly that. The capabilities are fairly straightforward in terms of the technologies, but actually doing the work to do integration, joint engineering, make sure that this is simple and easy and able to be running HPE GreenLake, that's- >> That's invested in Pensando, right? >> We are. >> We're all investors. Yeah. >> What's the benefit of that? What's, that's a great point you made. What's the value to the customer, bottom line? That deep co-engineering, co-partnering, what does it deliver that others don't do? >> Yeah. Well, I think one example would be, you know, a lot of vendors can say we support it. >> Yep. >> That's great. That's actually a really good move, supporting it. It can be resold. That's another great move. I'm not mechanically inclined to where I would go build my own car. I'll go to a dealership and actually buy one that I can press the button and I can start it and I can do what I need to do with my car and that's really what this does is the engineering work that's gone on between our two companies and AMD Pensando, as well as the business work to make that simple and easy, that transaction to work, and then to be able to make it available as a service, is really what made, it's, that's why it's such a winner winner with our- >> But it's also a lower cost out of the box. >> Yep. >> Right. >> So you get in whatever. Let's call it 20%. Okay? But there's, it's nuanced because you're also on a new technology curve- >> Right. >> And you're able to absorb modern apps, like, you know, we use that term as a bromide, but when I say modern apps, I mean data-rich apps, you know, things that are more AI-driven not the conventional, not that people aren't doing, you know, SAP and CRM, they are, but there's a whole slew of new apps that are coming in that, you know, traditional architectures aren't well-suited to handle from a price performance standpoint. This changes that doesn't it? >> Well, you think also of, you know, going to the next stage, which is to go to market between the two organizations that before. At the moment, you know, HPE's running off doing various different things. We were running off to it again, it's that chaos that you're talking about. In cloud chaos, you got to go to market chaos. >> Yeah. >> But by simplifying four or five things, what are we going to do really well together? How do we embed those in GreenLake- >> Mhm. >> And be known in the marketplace for these solutions? Then you get a, you know, an organization that's really behind the go to market. You can help with sales activation the enablement, you know, and then we benefit from the scale of HPE. >> Yeah. >> What are those solutions I mean? Is it just, is it I.S.? Is it, you know, compute storage? >> Yeah. >> Is it, you know, specific, you know, SAP? Is it VDI? What are you seeing out there? >> So right now, for this specific technology, we're educating our customers on what that could be and, at its core, this solution allows customers to take services that normally and traditionally run on the compute system and run on a DPU now with Project Monterey, and this is now allowing customers to think about, okay, where are their use cases. So I'm, rather than going and, say, use it for this, we're allowing our customers to explore and say, okay, here's where it makes sense. Where do I have workloads that are using a lot of compute cycles on services at the compute level that could be somewhere else like networking as a great example, right? And allowing more of those compute cycles to be available. So where there are performance requirements for an application, where there is timely response that's needed for, you know, for results to be able to take action on, to be able to get insight from data really quick, those are places where we're starting to see those services moving onto something like a DPU and that's where this makes a whole lot more sense. >> Okay. So, to get this right, you got the hybrid cloud, right? >> [Ricky And Joseph] Yes. >> You got GreenLake and you got the distributed engine. What's that called the- >> For, it's HPE ProLiant- >> ProLiant with- >> The VMware- >> With vSphere. >> That's the compute- >> Distributed. >> Okay. So does the customer, how do you guys implement that with the customer? All three at the same time or they mix and match? What's that? How does that work? >> All three of those components. Yeah. So the beauty of the HP ProLiant with VMware vSphere-distributed services engine- >> Mhm. >> Also known as Project Monterey for those that are keeping notes at home- >> Mhm. >> It's, again, already pre-engineered. So we've already worked through all the mechanics of how you would have to do this. So it's not something you have to go figure out how you build, get deployment, you know, work through those details. That's already done. It is available through HPE GreenLake. So you can go and actually get it as a service in partnership with our customer, our friends here at VMware, and because, if you're familiar and comfortable with all the things that HP ProLiant has done from a security perspective, from a reliability perspective, trusted supply chain, all those sorts of things, you're getting all of that with this particular (indistinct). >> Sumit Dhawan had a great quote on theCUBE just an hour or so ago. He said you have to be early to be first. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> I love that quote. Okay. So you were- >> I fought the urge. >> You were first. You were probably a little early, but do you have a lead? I know you're going to say yes, okay. Let's just- >> Okay. >> Let's just assume that. >> Okay. Yeah. >> Relative to the competition, how do you know? How do you determine that? >> If we have a lead or not? >> Yeah. If you lead. If you're the best. >> We go to the source of the truth which is our customers. >> And what do they tell you? What do you look at and say, okay, now, I mean, when you have that honest conversation and say, okay, we are, we're first, we're early. We're keeping our lead. What are the things that you- >> I'll say it this way. I'll say it this way. We've been in a lot of businesses where there, where we do compete head-to-head in a lot of places. >> Mhm. >> And we know how that sales process normally works. We're seeing a different motion from our customers. When we talk about HPE GreenLake, there's not a lot of back and forth on, okay, well, let me go shop around. It is HP Green. Let's talk about how we actually build this solution. >> And I can tell you, from a VMware perspective, our customers are asking us for this the other way around. So that's a great sign is that, hey, we need to see this partnership come together in GreenLake. >> Yeah. >> It's the old adage that Amazon used to coin and Andy Jassy, you know, they do the undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> [Ricky And Joseph] Yeah. >> A lot of that's now Cloud operations. >> Mhm. >> Underneath it is infrastructure's code to the developer. >> That's right. >> That's at scale. >> That's right. >> And so you got a lot of heavy lifting being done with GreenLake- >> Right. >> Which is why there's no objections probably. >> Right. >> What's the choice? What are you going to shop? >> Yeah. >> There's nothing to shop around. >> Yeah, exactly. And then we've got, you know, that is really icing on the cake that we've, you know, that we've been building for quite some time and there is an understanding in the market that what we do with our infrastructure is hardened from a reliability and quality perspective. Like, times are tough right now. Supply chain issues, all that stuff. We've talked, all talked about it, but at HPE, we don't skimp on quality. We're going to spend the dollars and time on making sure we got reliability and security built in. It's really important to us. >> We had a great use case. The storage team, they were provisioning with containers. >> Yes. >> Storage is a service instantly we're seeing with you guys with VMware. Your customers' bringing in a lot of that into the mix as well. I got to ask 'cause every event we talk about AI and machine learning- >> Mhm. >> Automation and DevOps are now infiltrating in with the CICD pipeline. Security and data become a big conversation. >> [Ricky And Joseph] Agreed. >> Okay. So how do you guys look at that? Okay. You sold me on Green. Like, I've been a big fan from day one. Now, it's got maturity on it. I know it's going to get a lot more headroom to do. There's still a lot of work to do, but directionally it's pretty accurate, you know? It's going to be a success. There's still concern about security, the data layer. That's agnostic of environment, private cloud, hybrid, public, and Edge. So that's important and security- >> Great. >> Has got a huge service area. >> Yeah. >> These are on working progress. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> How do you guys view those? >> I think you've just hit the net on the head. I mean, I was in the press and journalist meetings yesterday and our answer was exactly the same. There is still so much work that can be done here and, you know, I don't think anybody is really emerging as a true leader. It's just a continuation of, you know, tryin' to get that right because it is what is the most important thing to our customers. >> Right. >> And the industry is really sort of catching up to that. >> And, you know, when you start talking about privacy and when you, it's not just about company information. It's about individuals' information. It's about, you know, information that, if exposed, actually could have real impact on people. >> Mhm. >> So it's more than just an I.T. problem. It is actually, and from HPE's perspective, security starts from when we're picking our suppliers for our components. Like, there are processes that we put into our entire trusted supply chain from the factory on the way up. I liken it to my golf swing. My golf swing. I slice right like you wouldn't believe. (John laughing) But when I go to the golf pros, they start me back at the mechanics, the foundational pieces. Here's where the problems are and start workin' on that. So my view is, our view is, if your infrastructure is not secure, you're goin' to have troubles with security as you go further up. >> Stay in the sandbox. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So to speak, you know, they're driving range on the golf analogy there. I love that. Talk about supply chain security real quick because you mentioned supply chain on the hardware side. You're seeing a lot of open source and supply chain in software, trusted software. >> Yep. >> How does GreenLake look at that? How do you guys view that piece of it? That's an important part. >> Yeah. Security is one of the key pillars that we're actually driving as a company right now. As I said, it's important to our customers as they're making purchasing decisions and we're looking at it from the infrastructure all the way up to the actual service itself and that's the beauty of having something like HPE GreenLake. We don't have to pick, is the infrastructure or the middle where, or the top of stack application- >> It's (indistinct), right? >> It's all of it. >> Yeah. >> It's all of it. That matters. >> Quick question on the ecosystem posture. So- >> Sure. >> I remember when HP was, you know, one company and then the GSIs were a little weird with HP because of EDS, you know? You had data protector so we weren't really chatting up Veeam at the time, right? And as soon as the split happened, ecosystem exploded. Now you have a situation where you, Broadcom, is acquiring VMware. You guys, big Broadcom customer. Has your attitude changed or has it not because, oh, we meet with the customers already. Well, you've always said that, but have you have leaned in more? I mean, culturally, is HPE now saying, hmm, now we have some real opportunities to partner in new ways that we don't have to sleep with one eye open, maybe. (John laughing) >> So first of all, VMware and HPE, we've got a variety of different partners. We always have. >> Mhm. >> Well before any Broadcom announcement came along. >> Yeah, sure. >> We've been working with a variety of partners. >> And that hasn't changed. >> And that hasn't changed. And, if your question is, has our posture toward VMware changed at all, the answer's absolutely not. We believe in what VMware is doing. We believe in what our customers are doing with VMware and we're going to continue to work with VMware and partner with the (indistinct). >> And of course, you know, we had to spin out ourselves in November of last year, which I worked on, you know, the whole Dell thing. >> Yeah. We still had the same chairman. >> Yeah. There- (Dave chuckling) >> Yeah, but since then, I think what's really become very apparent and not, it's not just with HPE, but with many of our partners, many of the OEM partners, the opportunity in front of us is vast and we need to rely on each other to help us as, you know, solve the customer problems that are out there. So there's a willingness to overlook some things that, in the past, may have been, you know, barriers. >> But it's important to note also that it's not that we have not had history- >> Yeah. >> Right? Over, we've got over 200,000 customers join- >> Hundreds of millions of dollars of business- >> 100,000, over 10,000, or 100,000 channel partners that we all have in common. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yep. >> There's numerous- >> And independent of the whole Broadcom overhang there. >> Yeah. >> There's the ecosystem floor. >> Yeah. >> The expo floor. >> Right. >> I mean, it's vibrant. I mean, there's clearly a wave coming, Ricky. We talked about this briefly at HPE Discover. I want to get an update from your perspectives, both of you, if you don't mind weighing in on this. Clearly, the wave, we're calling it the Super Cloud, 'cause it's not just Multi-Cloud. It's completely different looking successes- >> Smart Cloud. >> It's not just vendors. It's also the customers turning into clouds themselves. You look at Goldman Sachs and- >> Yep. >> You know, I think every vertical will have its own power law of Cloud players in the future. We believe that to be true. We're still testing that assumption, but it's trending in when you got OPEX- >> [Ricky And Joseph] Right. >> Has to go to in-fund statement- >> Yeah. >> CapEx goes too. Thanks for the Cloud. All that's good, but there's a wave coming- >> Yeah. >> And we're trying to identify it. What do you guys see as this wave 'cause beyond Multi-Cloud and the obvious nature of that will end up happening as a state and what happens beyond that interoperability piece, that's a whole other story, and that's what everyone's fighting for, but everyone out in that ecosystem, it's a big wave coming. They've got their surfboards. They're ready to go. So what do you guys see? What is the next wave that everyone's jacked up about here? >> Well, I think that the Multi-Cloud is obviously at the epicenter. You know, if you look at the results that are coming in, a lot of our customers, this is what's leading the discussion and now we're in a position where, you know, we've brought many companies over the last few years. They're starting to come to fruition. They're starting to play a role in, you know, how we're moving forward. >> Yeah. >> Some of those are a bit more applicable to the commercial space. We're finding commercial customers that never bought from us before. Never. Hundreds and hundreds are coming through our partner networks every single quarter, you know? So brand new to VMware. The trick then is how do you nurture them? How do you encourage them? >> So new logos are comin' in. >> New logos are coming in all the time, all the time, from, you know, from across the ecosystem. It's not just the OEMs. It's all the way back- >> So the ecosystem's back of VMware. >> Unbelievably. So what are we doing to help that? There's two big things that we've announced in the recent weeks is that Partner Connect 2.0. When I talked to you about Multi-Cloud and what the (indistinct), you know, the customers are doing, you see that trend. Four, five different separate clouds that we've got here. The next piece is that they're changing their business models with the partners. Their services is becoming more and more apparent, et cetera, you know? And the use of other partners to do other services, deployment, or this stuff is becoming prevalent. Then you've got the distributors that I talked about with their, you know, their, then you route to market, then you route to business. So how do you encapsulate all of that and ensure your rewarding partners on all aspects of that? Whether it's deployment, whether it's test and depth, it's a points-based system we've put in place now- >> It's a big pie that's developing. The market's getting bigger. >> It's getting so much bigger. And then you help- >> I know you agree, obviously, with that. >> Yeah. Absolutely. In fact, I think for a long time we were asking the question of, is it going to be there or is it going to be here? Which was the wrong question. (indistinct cross talking) Now it's everything. >> Yeah. >> And what I think that, what we're seeing in the ecosystem, is that people are finding the spots that, where they're going to play. Am I going to be on the Edge? >> Yeah. >> Am I going to be on Analytics Play? Am I going to be, you know, Cloud Transition Play? There's a lot of players are now emerging and saying, we're- >> Yeah. >> We're, we now have a place, a part to play. And having that industry view not just of, you know, a commercial customer at that level, but the two of us are lookin' at Teleco, are looking at financial services, at healthcare, at manufacturing. How do these new ecosystem players fit into the- >> (indistinct) lifting. Everyone can see their position there. >> Right. >> We're now being asked for simplicity and talk to me about partner profitability. >> Yes. >> How do I know where to focus my efforts? Am I spread too thin? And, you know, that's, and my advice that the partner ecosystem out there is, hey, let's pick out spots together. Let's really go to, and then strategic solutions that we were talking about is a good example of that. >> Yeah. >> Sounds like composability to me, but not to go back- (laughing) Guys, thanks for comin' on. I think there's a big market there. I think the fog is lifted. People seeing their spot. There's value there. Value creation equals reward. >> Yeah. >> Simplicity. Ease of use. This is the new normal. Great job. Thanks for coming on and sharing. (cross talking) Okay. Back to live coverage after this short break with more day one coverage here from the blue set here in Moscone. (light corporate music)

(upbeat music) >> Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to "theCUBE." Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. This is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage of VMware Explore. John and I are pleased to welcome back one of our alumni, Muddu Sudhakar, the CEO of AISERA. Welcome to the program, Muddu. It's great to meet you. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thanks for having me. Thank you, John. >> Great to see you again. You're like an industry analyst coming on "theCUBE". You should be like a guest analyst, breaking down. I know you got your own company to run, and by the way, the recent funding you had, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> In a market that's not getting a lot of funding. You get an up around. Congratulations on that. >> Thank you. >> Business is good? >> Very good, thank you. Look, Goldman Sachs Investing, along with Zoom and Thoma Bravo, it was great for us. >> Great stuff. Well, I'm glad we could get you in. This day three, Lisa and I and Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson have all been talking to everyone for two days here at VMware Explore, formerly VMworld, our 12th year covering their annual conference, as you know, and we've been telling the executives, but day three is more of, we're going to mix it up. We're going to bring people in and get their opinions about Supercloud, does VMware go post-Broadcom? Obviously, that's going to happen. Looks like nothing's going to stop that from happening. What's next? What's the impact? Who wins? Who loses? VMware certainly not acting like they're going to get gutted. They're all full throttle ahead. They're laying down some announcements, vSphere 8, you got vSAN 8, they got cloud-native, they're talking multi-cloud. VMware's not looking like they're flinching. What's going on, in your view, outside of the bubble that we're here in San Francisco, out in the real world, in the trenches. What are people talking about? What do you see? >> Lot to unpack. (all laugh) >> Start at wherever you want. >> Yes. You know, I was a VMware alumni too. >> Yes >> You sold the company to VMware. You know the inside. Okay, So then, even then- >> I worked with Paul and Pat and Raghu. It's great to be back at VMware now. I think there's a lot going on in VMware. VMware is here to stay. The brand will stay. The VMware customers will stay for years to come. I think Broadcom and VMware, I think it's a great industry consolidation, the way in which I see it. And it is going to help all the customers too, right? Broadcom, having such a large foot play into both CA, the software business, the hardware business. I think what will happen is that Broadcom will try to create a hybrid cloud of their own with VMware. So there'll be a fourth player in the cloud industry. And then back to John, your Supercloud. The Supercloud by definition, there'll be private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds. I think Broadcom with VMware will help your vision of the Supercloud and what your customers are asking. >> Yeah, one of the things I want to get your thoughts on, Lisa and I were talking yesterday with the executives, AJ Patel in particular, he's a middleware guy. >> Right. >> So what he did was Oracle. He did a lot of the fusion stuff at Oracle. He now runs Modern Apps. And you came in at the time, I think, when they were just getting that app vision going, and Paul Moritz actually had it early with his 2010 vision, but too early on the app side. But that ended up happening too. So the question is, is Broadcom going to be this middleware layer, and treat the cloud like hardware. And then, apps or apps. Companies are apps. In a digital transformation, technology is the company. >> Right >> So the company is the app. >> That's right, >> Is an application. So apps and hardware, middle, a middleware model emerging. Do you think they're going for that? Or am I just making this up in my head? >> No, I think to me, I see Broadcom as much more, they're like a peer company at the high level. So they're funded by- >> Like a private equity company. >> Private equity company. >> You mean from a dollar standpoint. >> From a dollar standpoint. So Broadcom is going to fund companies. They're going to buy companies. They bought CA, they bought all the other assets. So Broadcom will have always hardware. The middle level could be VMware, but they also have CA, right? They have a bunch of apps here. So I see the Broadcom is also using VMware to run applications. So the consolidation will be they'll create a Supercloud using VMware. They're going to own their own apps. I don't think Broadcom's story is stopped. Its journey to come. They're going to buy more acquisitions, more apps companies. I won't be surprised, in the future, they buy Zendesk. I won't be surprised, in the future, they buy other apps companies, SaaS companies and cloud enterprise companies. Right? So that's where the P is coming. So the broad conversion is, I need a base middleware, like you're saying. There's no other middleware on top of hardware better than VMware. >> So do you think that they'll keep the stuff that's coming out of the other? 'Cause we've been speculating on "theCUBE" this week. They have the core business, but there's all this stuff that's kind of coming out of the oven that's not EBITDA-oriented yet. Do you think they keep that or they let it go? >> I think that's a great question to hang their CEO of Broadcom. But to me, I think, knowing them, they're going to keep, and if you look at Symantec, they kept parts of Symantec, this whole parts of it. So I think all options are on the table for them, right? They'll do whatever it is. But I think it has to be the ones that high growth companies they may give it. It all goes back to is it a profitability to it or not? But his vision is very good. I want to own the middleware, right? He will own the middleware using VMware to your vision, create a Supercloud and own the apps. So I think you'll see Broadcom is the fourth vendor in the cloud race. You have Microsoft, AWS, Google, and Broadcom is actually going to compete with this four. >> So you think there'll be a hyper scale? They'll be in the top three or four. >> There'll be top four. >> Okay. >> Along with Oracle. So now, we are talking about the five vendors will be Amazon, Azure, Google, Oracle, and Broadcom. >> We had Amazon guy on, Steve Jones. I should have asked him that question. I just don't see that happening yet. They have to have the full hardware side. How do you see that coming in? 'Cause Amazon's innovating at the atom level and they're working on stuff that's physical, transit, physics stuff, like down to the root level. >> I think Broadcom figure, look, they own the chips out right, at the end of the day. They also have a lot of chips such to supply to both mobile and this. So if there's anybody who can figure out the hardware, it will be Broadcom. That is their core of area. They didn't have the core in the software and the middleware. VMware is going to give them the OS, the Kubernetes, the VMs. Once you have that layer, I think you can innovate both up and below, right? So I think, John, I think Broadcom VMware will be a force to reckon with and I think these guys are going to get into healthcare space though. So if you see the way they battle, you and me are talking Lisa, like Microsoft bought new ones, Oracle bought Cerner. So they all paid 30 billion each. So the next battle ground will be, they'll start in the healthcare industry. Somebody's going to go look at the healthcare apps like Epic, right? They're going to look at how we can do the hospitals. They're going to look at hospital healthcare professionals. That area will be disrupted a lot in the same. >> What other industries do you think, besides healthcare, are ripe for disruption with Broadcom VMware? >> I think endpoint management, like remember VMware bought AirWatch when I was there back then, right? That whole area is called digital experience management. So that endpoint mainly will be disrupted. So Broadcom with VMware will go again into endpoint. I'm talking endpoint could be the servers, desktops, VMware Max, right? Virtual Desktop VDI. So that whole management of mobile devices to desktop, that whole industry will be disrupted. A lot of players are there trying to do more consulting services. I think VMware is a great assets and tools. If I'm Broadcom, my chip sets are going into the endpoint. So that area will be disrupted a lot with Broadcom in VMware. >> Yeah, one of the things that VMware, people have been talking about, is that the CA acquisition that Broadcom did was the playbooks public. Everyone saw what they did. They killed sales and market and they killed all the execs, metaphorically speaking. They fired them. VMware's got a different vibe here. I'm feeling like it could go one way or the other. I think they should keep them, personally. But you don't know. If they're a PE company, they EBIDA driven, maybe it's just simply numbers. >> Right. >> If that's the case, then I'm worried. But VMware's got pride, they got mojo, and they've got expertise in software. Maybe a little bit different circumstance? What's take on this? Or do you think it's going to be black and white to the numbers? >> I think, knowing Hank's playbook, if he knows what he's going to do, right? His playbook will be consistent with Symantec. >> You think he already knows what he wants to do? >> I think so. I think at that level, both with Simulink and Broadcom, they already know the playbook. At this stage the games, people already know their game. It's like a chess move. They already know. They'll look at VMware and see which assets to keep, which one not to keep, which organization, but I think Hank is a master at this one. To me, I'm personally excited with the VMware Broadcom combination. It's a great thing for the industry. It's great for VMware and VMware customers and partners. >> Well, John, you and Dave had a chance to sit down with Raghu. What were some of the things that he unpacked about the Broadcom acquisition? >> He was on talking points. He was on message. He was saying the things that any CEO was going to make a lot of cash on this deal. And he's proud. I think it wasn't about the money for him. I sensed that he's certainly going to make a lot of cash on this deal as an executive, but he's a long time VMware employee and a well loved and revered person. He's done a lot of great work, technically set the agenda. So I think their mindset is we're going to just continue to do an amazing job as VMware as we are and then let Broadcom, let the chips fall where they may, and hopefully, if they do a good job, maybe they'll either refactor some of their base plans or they laid it all out in the field, so to speak. So that's my vibe. Now specifically, he made some comments, like, "Yeah, we're really proud." And he staying technical. He's still like, "This is really happening." So I think he's going to, essentially, to the very end, be like, "Cross cloud and hybrid cloud. This is our third generation." So there he's hanging onto the VMware third act that they're saying, and he hopes that it comes home. And I think he's going to just deal with it. He didn't seem flustered and he didn't seem overly confident. >> Okay. >> I guess that's my opinion. What do you think? >> Personally worked with Raghu, worked for Raghu, so I think of him as the greatest CEO for VMware ever could have, right? It's a journey. It was Paul Maritz, then Pat Gelsinger, now Raghu. I think he's in the right place, right time to lead VMware, and Raghu's doing a fantastic job. And personally, getting these two companies married, I think Raghu did the right partnership with Broadcom. >> Well, I think if this event's any indication if they're just sitting back and waiting, they're not, and this event was well done, it was pulled off. The branding's amazing. I thought they did a good job with the name change. And then in light of all the Broadcom issues, the execution was great. It was not a bad show here. It was a good show. It wasn't terrible at all. People were excited. I think the ecosystem also felt that Broadcom, like an electronic shock to the system, like something's going to happen. Let's wait and see. I'm going to go to the event to see if it's going to be around and kind of getting a feel first party, in person, what's happening. Again, remember VMware didn't have an event since 2019. This is a community that thrives on physical, face to face camaraderie, community. And so, I think the show was a success. And I think that's a result of Raghu and his team. >> Because we have a booth there for AISERA, my company, we have a booth. We are offering coffee and donuts. You guys should come by and tell people. You'll get a free coffee and a donut, but it's one of the best shows I've seen. Well, I think people after pandemic are back, people are interacting. We have 500 people in one day at our booth. So for a startup company like us, getting that much crowd is unheard of. So it's great. We're very excited. >> The vibe from the partner community, I had a chance to talk with a lot of partners, AWS, NetApp, Rackspace, really seems like the partnerships side of VMware is very, very strong and the partners are excited about what's next for VMware. Did you have a chance to talk with any of the partners? >> Actually, look. I'm actually meeting with Karen. So Karen Egan is my contact at VMware too, and Sumit, (indistinct) a bunch of the customer success organization. We talk to people in their digital experience management team. We are very excited to be partner with both VMware's customer, partner, and all experts, right? I'll need the VMware ecosystem for my company to thrive. So for us, VMware customers are my customers and leveraging VMware APIs into VMware, that's that's important for us. >> Lisa, that's a great question because that brings us to the question of, okay, clearly this show also proves to us from our conversations and exploring the floor, the wave is coming. This next cloud wave is here. We're calling it Supercloud, whatever you want to call it, it's coming and it's real, and people know it. And also the lines of sight into economics around where people can fit in this next level ecosystem is becoming clear. So I think people kind of know what's the right side of the street to be on in this next shift. So that's coming. That's independent of Broadcom. So the floor represents to me the excitement for not only the VMware workload powering software, with or without Broadcom, but the next wave. So the question is if Broadcom goes down their path and Hank does what he does, who wins and who loses on where things flow? Because this energy is going to flow somewhere. Is it going to flow to AWS? Is it going to flow to Microsoft? Is it going to flow to HPE with Green Lake getting some great traction? NetApp's doing great. We just heard from them. So the partners aren't hurting. It's only going to get better. re:Invent's right around the corner. That's a packed house. Their ecosystem's growing like a weed. Who wins? 'Cause the customers at VMware are enterprise customers. They're used to being serviced. They have sales reps from Microsoft, they got sales reps from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, real senior enterprise stakeholders there. So someone's going to end up filling in as VMware settles into their broad composition. Who wins and who loses, in your mind? >> A Very good question. So my thing is, I think it's... Well, I put Microsoft and Amazon the winners. In that way, actually mean Microsoft will win because in a true Supercloud, your vision, back to hybrid cloud on-prem and public cloud, VMware disruption with Broadcom, as if there's any bridge in the market, Microsoft will take advantage of it. Azure, right? Amazon VMware is there. Then, you have Google and VMware. So I think Azure will probably try to take advantage of this, but very next will be Amazon, right away there. That leaves you with Google Cloud, right? Google Cloud is the one. So they're the people that are able to figure out what to do in this equation. And then, obviously, the other one is Oracle. Oracle has no hearts in this game. So to me, the people who are going to probably lose impact model will be Oracle if the Broadcom and VMware will happen. So it's Azure, Amazon winning the race, probably Google is right behind them. Oracle will be distinct. Other side is Dell. Actually, Dell has no game in this. Our Broadcom and VMware, Dell should be the one. >> Dell might have a little secret sauce on the table with Michael Dell. >> That's true. >> If he convert his shares, he might be the largest shareholder at Broadcom. >> That's true. >> He could end up owning all the back. >> So he may be the winner all the time. (all laugh) >> Don't count him out. Well, this is a good question. I want to just double click on this. So you get customer dynamic. Where do they go? You get the community, which is a big force multiplier in this world, and if you had to bet on community between Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, Amazon trumps Microsoft on force multiplier community. Ecosystem, AWS beats Microsoft on that one. So it's interesting because it's now multiple dimensions we're talking about here. It's customers. That's the top order, right? The customers. But also, you got community, the people who put on sessions, the people in the community that are the influencers that are leading the trends, and developers are very trending, relative to what kind of code they use, what's their environments? So the developers is changing that landscape and, ultimately, the ecosystem of partners, right? 'Cause there's a lot more overlap between AWS and VMware's ecosystem than there is between Microsoft and that. And HPE is just starting an ecosystem. So it's going to be very interesting. >> It is. It is. I think Broadcom and VMware cannot be any best time for the industry, right? As you said. HP is coming in. Oracle is coming in. And to your point, VMware and AWS are another best partners. Now, this going to create any gap for Microsoft to enter for Azure? I think that's where the market is saying that it's going to open up a hybrid cloud player for Microsoft to enter what is to be a tight relationship with VMware and Amazon. Right? So people will rethink through their apps. And more importantly, the end point to me. See, the key is, like you talk about with Supercloud, nobody's talking about Supercloud for the endpoint. >> You mean Edge or security? >> Not an Edge endpoint. Endpoint could be your devices, laptop, desktop. >> Or a building or a light bulb or whatever. >> Desktop or VDI desktop services servers, right? So we call it endpoint cloud. There's no endpoint Supercloud. John, that's an area that you should double click on. Super cloud for the servers is different from Supercloud for endpoint. >> Well, SuperCloud.World is the URL out there. If you're interested in Supercloud, we are adding tracks to that body of work. So we had our event on August 9th. It was virtual event, where Dave and I are going to add a data track, we're going to add a security track, and we should add, maybe, an endpoint workspace, work. >> That's a VMware brand, Workspace and Horizon. So that whole workspace endpoint for Supercloud is going to happen. >> Yes. >> Right. That kind of deviates from- >> Do you like Supercloud? Are you bullish on Supercloud? >> I'm very bullish on Supercloud because I, myself, is running on-prem in VPCs, public clouds, private clouds. Supercloud kind of composites it so app should be designed. 'Cause I don't want to design an app for one cloud. It's not going to work. So it's like how Java came and I can run it on any platform. The ideas you build it on Supercloud, run it, whatever you want. Right? >> That's exactly it. So what would you want to see in Supercloud as it evolves? And we were part of this open conversation. This is our point for today. We're going to have a great panel come up later today. We're going to have the influencers come on to debate what Supercloud should or shouldn't be. If you want to add to the contribution, we'll add this into the work, what should what's needed in Supercloud? What's table stakes. >> I think we need a Java compiler that will happen for Supercloud. I build it once, execute in any place I want, right? Using the Terraform, HashiCorp (indistinct) So what I don't want is keep building this thing for every cloud. I want to abstract that out. The whole idea of Supercloud is how Java gave me the abstraction for hardware 20 years back or 30 years back, we need the same abstraction for the cloud today. Otherwise, I'm customizing for VM Cloud, I'm customizing for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud. We, as an application vendor, it's too hard to keep doing it. I have now thousand tuners. I don't need thousand DevOps people. I need maybe 10 DevOps people. So there's a clear abstraction complexity that industry should develop, and your concept Supercloud with everybody thinking that, and it has to start from the grassroots with ecosystem. >> What do you think about the participants in this abstraction layer? Because someone said on "theCUBE" here this week, the people in the abstraction layer shouldn't be participants in the below or above the abstraction. >> I think it should be everybody, right? It's all inclusive. You need the apps guys to come in. You need the OS players to come in. You need the cloud vendors to come in, infrastructure. So you need everybody. >> Okay, let's just say that you were the spokesperson for the Supercloud organization, Supercloud.World. How would you sell AWS on why it's important for them? >> It's because they can build it and sell it in AWS and multiple AWS Gov Cloud, AWS On-prem, VPCs. It's even important for them, their expansion, their market time upfront. If I'm (indistinct), if I'm built on Supercloud, I can increase my time share. Otherwise I'm bringing only to public cloud. >> Okay, so I'll say, I'm Amazon and we have a concept called "One Way Doors." We don't want to go through a one way door. Is Supercloud a one way door for them? What's in it for them? Do they make more? Does it help their ecosystem? And the same question from Microsoft Azure and Google cloud. >> They're make more money. They're making their apps run in multiple places. It's a natural expansion. You are solving your customer problems for Amazon and DGC, right? My job is give people choices. I give choice to Lisa. Lisa can run it on public cloud. John, you can run it on VPC, AWS. >> So you're saying, so you think customers are asking for this right now? >> Everybody's asking. >> But don't really know how to say it? >> Customers are asking. Partners are asking. All of us are asking. >> Okay, what's the ask? >> Ask is give me a one place to build applications and run it anywhere without adding the complexity. >> Okay. Done. That's Supercloud. It'll ship tomorrow. (Lisa laughs) Well done. (John laughs) All right, well done. Final question for you. Lisa and I have been talking with folks here. What advice would you give the folks that are in here? 'Cause we have a lot of activity, people with marketing their solutions and products. They're trying to put a voice out there around thought leadership and trying to figure out what side of the street they should be on relative to the next 10 years as they're here at VMware Explore, as the next gen cloud comes around. What's the right narrative? What's the right positioning for companies to be on right now to be the most relevant and in the flow? >> I don't know about 10 years, but right now we are in difficult economic times, right? Markets are down. Inflation is up. So I think the fastest cost, people should focus on cost. How can it take cost? Automation is the key, right? Whether you use AI or automation , like you and me talking, John, last week, right? That's important. Every CEO I talk to is focused on cost. How do I cut my cost? How can I do with fewer resources? How can I do with fewer people, right? So the new budget right now is cut your budget in half. So every company, every exec should think about how can you be a good citizen? How can I get growth and scale? How can I do more with less? And that should be the next 12 months. >> That was a lot of the theme of conversations that I had with the VMware ecosystem, doing more with less. So that's definitely on everyone's minds. >> Right, and that's what my company is fully focused on. AISERA is all about AI automation. How can we solve your thing? We want to be solving customer problem. We are like your automation engine for your enterprise, right? We are a platform of platform. That's why I like the Supercloud. I can run AISERA as a platform on top of Supercloud. >> Excellent. >> Wow! If only we had more time! I know that you guys could really dig into Supercloud and take it even further. So you have to come back, Muddu. >> I will. >> He always wants to come back. >> I will be back. >> He's on the team. He's has contributed to the open source effort of Supercloud. Thank you. >> Yes. >> All right, thank you so much for joining John and me and kind of breaking down your vision on VMware Broadcom and the future. Next step, we've got to get some customers on here. I really want to understand what the customer experience is going to be like, but we'll have to another segment on that one. >> We will do that. Thank you, Lisa, for having me. >> My pleasure. >> John. >> Thank you very much. Thank you. >> For our guest and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" live on day three of our coverage of VMware Explore. We'll be back after a short break. (upbeat corporate music)

(lively music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage in San Francisco for VMware Explorer 22 formerly VMworld, Dave 12 years we've been covering VMware's annual conference. Going next level explores bigger theme, Multi-cloud another inflection point for VMware. And again at the center of it is the partners Zia Yusuf is here senior vice president strategic ecosystem and industry solutions. You're the, you're, you got the keys to the kingdom for VMware, welcome to theCube. >> It's a pleasure, I mean, you guys are a legend here. This is my first time here. So, it's a pleasure and excited to chat with you. >> Well, great to have you, every single year, since 2010 we've always had great commentary and discussion and sometimes contentious discussion around the role of partners. Visa V, VMware's value proposition, VMware dominant and the enterprise data center, everyone knows that. Dominant and hybrid was first there, everyone knows that. Now going to the next level, the customer stay, they stay with VMware, they don't really leave. They still got a great loyal base but now the enterprise is going NextGen cloud native. The partners are energized with the conversations we're hearing is huge. There's changes of roles is clarity on value proposition. Monetization is hoppin'. It's great stuff, what's going on? You're new, but you have a view of this before. Take us through your what's going on in the partner network, what's the state of the union? >> Yeah, I think, thanks for the question. I think maybe just step back a second right, the word partners is a big word. It covers all kinds of things. VMware has had a rich history of partnerships you know, mostly technology related partnerships. So much of our products depend on other partners, OEM partners, and so on. We've also had a rich history of our channel. So, as you look at different channel partners as you look at going through different parts of the segment SMB and so on, in a cloud context, based on what's happening we needed to take an integrated ecosystem approach. That's the word I use, right. And for me it's, it's a little bit like a spider's web. Like no single strand in the web is that strong but when you put it together thoughtfully in a very deliberate way. That's what an integrated ecosystem strategy. And so we've got our VCP partners, longstanding history that machine continues. We've got our channel partners and OEM partners that machinery continues obviously Dell strategic partner, significant business. The parts of the puzzle that I've been focusing on is five other different pieces. So first of course, is our hyper scale partnerships long history with AWS, very successful history. We have GCVE with GCP. We announced, I think three, four months ago that GCP was joining our VMware cloud universal and a big announcement yesterday about Microsoft doing the same. And hopefully we extend that. So, as we work with this hyper scaler six or seven of these partners, it's a, as you can imagine kind of a multidimensional chess game, if you will a little bit competitive mostly cooperative and stuff, right. The GSI is very exciting piece of it. The essentials that Deloitte, Deloitte announced a new business unit on VMware, ACL did the same. That energy level has really gone up. You see it at the show here as well. We recognize that these significant SI's play a huge role in the decision making process with customers. And we want to enable them to build significant VMware businesses. It's a different game from that perspective. Last thing I'm point out is, industry and verticals. Right I mean, this is not being necessarily an area because of the layer of the stack we've been in. Obviously Telco is an end to end business unit for us. We have products, we have a go to market on Telco, public sector to some degree because you need all these three letter agencies and the security and compliance. But as you look at financial services as you look at retail, as you look at healthcare we need to be aware of the workload we need especially on modern apps, especially on the edge. So we kind of doubling down on some of our vertical capabilities. So, all of those things are connected as well, right. The SI to the hyper scale partners in a vertical context. >> What's the biggest change that you've seen? Because we've observed some partners are leaning out as they change their business. And VMware has got new partners coming in, leaning in. So you got mentioned, Dave mentioned Telco and you got new use cases with edge and multi-cloud so you know, some people kind of maybe age out or change their strategy, some double down the core partner network, and then new ones come in. What's been the biggest change, if you can look at that holistically? >> Yeah, it's a great question, right? Because it's so multidimensional and there is no such thing as a GSI global system because they build products. Sometimes they act as a reseller, they're a solution provider. Also they provide services. So as their business model changes, we have to adjust how we engage with them. We can't put them in nice clean buckets. And that's what I'm doing with my colleagues here is how do we really enable them? And one of the things, I mean, I've done this type of stuff, I was at SAP for many years. We need to figure out how do we make them successful? Not just, this is what VMware wants you to do. We need to understand their business model and how do we fit into that? 'Cause if they grow, then we grow with that. And that is honestly a little, it's a subtle point, but it's a little bit of a nuanced. >> Yeah, it's very nuanced, but you have to nail that. You got to overlay. >> 100% >> The strategy where the enablement is technically or product wise, economics and conflict. (John laughing) >> And profitably, if they're profitably is important to us it's not just their growth. >> So Zia, I want to test the premise on you, something, John and I have been working on this notion of super cloud. And we did an event earlier this month, but one of the aspects that's kind of nuance and futuristic is if I'm a, let's say a financial services company and I'm going through a digital transformation I would be looking strategically at what, say Amazon did taking it's internal IT and then pointing at the world. I would say, I have data. I have tools, I have software, I have expertise that's really unique and could be value add. And I would be thinking, how do I monetize that, create my own cloud. And I'm actually just going to throw it into a public cloud to do that. I've got mainframes running, I've got Oracle stuff on Prem. I'm not going to shift that stuff into the cloud and maybe some of it, but I've got transaction systems and proprietary data. And a lot of it is running on VMware and I've got cloud stuff too. I would be looking at, okay, how do I build my own cloud and put my data, my tooling, my software in front of a new ecosystem, my own ecosystem that I can you know monetize. Are you seeing- >> Without spending the CapEx. >> Yeah, without having to build data centers? Right, exactly. I want to take advantage of the gift that the hyper scalers are given. Are you seeing any activity bubbling up in that regard? >> It's a really, it's a really interesting question. And I think the terminology that we've used around cloud smart kind of goes into that. So let me take what you said. >> Okay please, yeah. >> And frame it in a slightly different way. You can standardize on public clouds and everybody's using the same thing. You're using the same services, and so on. Theoretically that could lose some of your differentiation. Right, I mean, especially for financial services companies that have built so much of their you know, trading test down to the milli, milli, millisecond and how do they do that, and so on. So, I think you have something there right. So, as they look at their technology and software strategy, yes there's cost reduction aspects of it. There's refactoring aspects of it that hygiene that needs to be done as Rughu talked about from this cloud chaos to cloud smart, if you will but then how do you differentiate on the business processes? How do you differentiate that then down into the workloads? And I think that's where to use an old term. It takes a village, right, you've got the system integrator that's providing this stuff. You've got other strategy firms like the BCGs and McKinseys of the world that have huge influence now. Then you've got technology players that are coming into that. And I think the cloud smart approach is to do exactly what you're saying. It's not just the refactoring, it's not just movement to the cloud. How do you retain your competitive edge from the processes the models, the thinking that you've built up over many years. So, I don't know if it's super cloud or what that means, but that at the end of the day, this is about business processes. At the end of the day, this is about having a competitive edge in the market and I think you could do it. >> It's industry cloud, right? >> It's, that's a good way to put it. >> Yeah. >> I think Industry cloud is a good way. >> Why is there security cloud, Why isn't there an insurance cloud? Why's there a FinTech cloud? So I mean if you look at Goldman Sachs capital one. >> Right. >> There, CapEx is handled by AWS. Snowflake built their entire business on AWS. Didn't spend the dime on CapEx. Well, they spent a lot of operating expense for that CapEx and the fees, but still they became successful. And then the rest is history. So, I think people are seeing this idea of I'll ride that back on the CapEx of the hyper scalers and then use the tooling from the partner network and what's available. To then, cobble together in an architectural engineered way, distributed computing way, a new way to do things. Okay, so if you believe that, which we do, then you say, oh, it's on the balance sheet. So, what we've been hearing from companies is like, "Hey it's going to be on the balance sheet", I better have an income statement impact on the top line. So, you start to see behavior change at the customers not IT powering the business and the back office and terminals and some app. >> Crosscutting. >> It's like, no, no, no this is a digital business. So, the integration of balance sheet income statement on the economics is driving a lot of the behavior at the customers. So we see customers thinking this way and it's like we've never seen this level of business model refactoring as well as partner vendor selection, product technology mix at the same time. >> And VMware. >> At this level. >> Need the connective tissue between the hyper scalers in the ecosystem and actually provide those cross cloud connections. >> Yeah. >> You know, to the extent there's a business case there, that's what we're trying to of squint through. Is it going to be hybrid with on-prem in one cloud or is there an advantage of going cross clouds beyond just avoiding lock in you know, to take advantage of global infrastructure? >> So and then the next question is the Tam then bigger which means the partners are better? >> Yeah right. >> Participate in that. >> Yeah, I think, and we look at economics of this, right? I mean, there's a huge emphasis on cost, right. Cost, and I completely get that. I think, as I've talked to customers both now that I'm here but before advising a range of companies the innovation process, the time to impact is equally important all right as you compete. There's no point in just getting your cost down. If you're then getting beaten up in the market and you're not able to differentiate with new digital services. And this is where call it super cloud, call it industry cloud. We need to connect up to the business processes and the business impact and not just in my view the cost infrastructure piece of it. >> Yeah. And that we can't do on our own, we're not an apps company. So we're, you're not SAP, we're not Oracle, but we need to work with those players to make sure that their workloads are optimized in the right cloud in the right configuration. And that is a job to be done as opposed to just let's take it to town. >> And there's clearly a technology business case, especially if we're working with companies like VMware who's going to help me you know, simplify. >> Right. >> My move to the multi-cloud but there's also a business and economic impact in that. Even if it's not, if it could be simple as if I partner with Microsoft I'm going to do more business right if I'm one of these industry clouds. So I see that as another potential tailwind, it's really, it's like when Dreesen says all your companies are software companies, to me all companies are cloud companies, now increasingly. >> Look the difference between cloud and apps and then stuff, I mean like. >> Yeah, it's all. >> It's like you know there's used to be infrastructure and then apps company and so on. We need to deliver with our ecosystem partners and integrated solution and solution with a big S not just the technology solution but the broader, I mean look at the change management. >> Yeah, yeah. >> We talked about culture, I mean, if you don't get that piece right and the change management piece. >> Everything, yeah. >> You know the rest of it is history. >> Well and it's got to be delivered as a service, >> It has to be. >> Which is huge implications as to how you deal with change management. >> And this goes back to my kind of first comment is I really try and think of this by architecting the ecosystem. I don't like the word alliances. Right I mean, let's say kind of a one to one relationship. You know, let's do an agreement, let's go have dinner, but architecting the ecosystem the spiders web, who are the different players how can we compliment each other? And if it, Deloitte and a Microsoft want to do amazing business together related to VMware technology I want to encourage that. And so those third party Connections. >> You guys your contextualizing the ecosystem, basically. And I think from a customers standpoint that's a benefit to them, in my opinion in fact, Dave, remember at our supercloud.world event URL supercloud.world is the plug for the site. They can check it out. One of the comments from the cloudarati panel was we had a title this session called the innovators dilemma you know question mark you know . >> Best book ever written. >> Yeah, yeah. And so the, one of the panels said, it shouldn't be, we should change it to the integrators dilemma because what's happening is that integration is now standard table stakes and, but integrating the right things now matters, right? So, integration for integration sake isn't necessarily the end game anymore. >> And this is where. >> And this kind of where you're getting at with the spider's web is that integrating properly is a solution mindset. >> And look, I'm integrating also, you know have to bring in data from that perspective. Right, at the end of the day data being the new oil, if you will, the integration allows that data to flow to the right place at the right time to make the right decision. Now, we are not doing all of those pieces but we are certainly enabling that. And as you especially start looking at what we can do on the edge and what we can do in a retail store and a factory and so on those kinds of things come together. >> Okay, Zia take some time. We got a couple minutes left, only two minutes left, I want you to get some commentary directly to the audience around what specifically you're doubling down on. That's new that you're investing in on the partner network or your partner strategy. What is a steady state that's being nurtured and farmed or whatever word you want to use, but here's our core thing. Here's the area of improvement we're going to be in you know, cranking the handle on take us through that. >> Sure. >> I know you got OAM, got telco, got new things going on. >> Yeah so, maybe a couple of things right. >> lay it all out. >> First of all it has to be linked to VMware strategy. So as we transition on this journey to subscription saas ARR, we need to bring our ecosystem along to do that. That has business model implications that has implications on how we engage with them, how we define success how we value things. So that's an important journey. Secondly, is we need to do a better job of enabling our partners. Right, I mean, we have our partner connected. We do a pretty good job on the channel side. We need to do a better job on the GSIs is really understanding their business model, how they're engaging with their customers and provide them the technology the support, the financial resources, so that they can be successful. That's very important. Third is, to connect the dots on the ecosystem, right? I mean it's a, I've spent a lot of time in this event as well in joint meetings between system integrators and hyper scalers with our technology colleagues on Intel or NetApp or AMD. And these are companies that we have a rich history with. We're trying to connect, because that's how customers look at it. So, connecting the dots between the ecosystem super important to us, and then look, there's a change management journey within VMware. We also need to understand how we can engage with partners in a more productive, effective way. How do we scale this up? I believe, I think our leadership in Raghu and Sumit we are not going to succeed unless we have a profitable, engaged, passionate ecosystem around. >> Yeah I mean, they got to make money. They got to. >> Exactly. >> Be successful, have successful customers, their end customers your customers. Well, all good, question of where you're investing the most right now. If you had to put a kind of the pie chart together, I mean some of it's steady state like it's a machine, some of it's new like Telco for instance I mean here's. >> I think again, rich history on the channel side, we continue to invest there. Very valuable to go do that. I think some of these newer areas around the system integrators, especially the large ones, the Whipple's the HCLs, Deloittes essentials of the world, very important. The hyper scaler relationships directly leads into ARR. You saw the VMC cloud Universal will continue. >> We have Google on great props from Google. >> Yeah, We love it you guys. >> Yeah, and so look, I think we are not multi-cloud unless we go do this. Right I mean, Raghuram made a joke about this. We were single cloud and now we're multi-cloud, we want our customers to be able to procure these integrated solutions through VMware and our hyper scaler partners will continue to do that's when multi-cloud really become. And so the GTM motion, the discounting the commission structure all of that machinery is an important radio for me. >> Zia thank you so much for coming on theCube. I know you've been super busy. You got to go out and hit all the partners say hello, compressing you know, got to hit the pavement, say hello to everyone. >> It's been fantastic, the partners have too many, too many parties and so. (Interviewers laughing) But that's a fun part of my job, but appreciate your time. >> You got good stamina. >> Thanks Zia. >> So you got to have that in this game. Not about the faint of heart here at VMware. Zia thank you for coming on. >> Of course. >> This is the cube coverage, back after lunch. After the short break day two of three days of live coverage here in Moscone West on the street floor level of the event I'm John Furrier with Dave Alante. We'll be right back. (lively music)

(bright intro music) >> Welcome back everyone to VMware Explore '22. I'm John Furrier, host of the key with David Lante, our 12th year covering VMware's user conference, formerly known as VM-World now rebranded as VMware Explore. You got two great Cube alumni coming on the Cube. Ricky Cooper, SVP worldwide partner commercial VMware. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> We just had a great chat-- >> Good to see you again. >> At HPE discover. And of course, Joseph George, Vice President of Compute Industry Alliances. Great to have you on. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> So guys, this year is very curious, VMware, a lot going on. The name change of the event. Big move, Bold move. And then they changed the name of the event. Then Broadcom buys them. A lot of speculation, but at the end of the day, this conference... Kind of people were wondering what would be the barometer of the event. We were reporting this morning on the keynote analysis. Very good mojo in the keynote. Very transparent about the Broadcom relationship. The expo floor last night was buzzing. I mean, this is not a show that's looking like it's going to be, you know, going down. This is clearly a wave. We're calling it super cloud, multi-cloud's their theme. Clearly the cloud's happening. Not to date ourselves, but 2013 we were discussing on the-- >> We talked about that, yeah. >> HPE Discover about DevOps infrastructure as code. We're full realization now of that. This is where we're at. You guys had a great partnership with VMware and HPE. Talk about where you guys see this coming together because the customers are refactoring, they are looking at cloud native, the whole Broadcom visibility to the VMware customer bases activated them. They're here and they're leaning in. What's going on? >> Yeah absolutely, we're seeing a renewed interest now as customers are looking at their entire infrastructure, bottoms up all the way up the stack and the notion of a hybrid cloud, where you've got some visibility and control of your data and your infrastructure and applications. Customers want to live in that sort of a cloud environment. And so we're seeing a renewed interest, a lot of conversations we're having with customers now, a lot of customers committing to that model, where they have applications and workloads running at the edge in their data center and in the public cloud in a lot of cases. But having that mobility, having that control, being able to have security in their own control. There's a lot that you can do there. And obviously partnering with VMware. We've been partners for so long. >> 20 years, at least. >> At least 20 years. Back when they invented stuff. They were inventing way-- >> VMware's got a very technical culture, but Ricky, I got to say that we commented earlier when Ragu was on the CEO now CEO, I mean legendary product guy, set the trajectory to VMware, everyone knows that. I can't know whether it was VMware or HP, HP before HPE coined Hybrid. Cause you guys were both on, I can't recall Dave, which company coined it first, but it was either one of you guys. Nobody else was there. >> It was the partnership. (men chuckle) >> Hybrid Cloud I had a big thing with Pat Gelsinger, Dave. Remember when he said he got in my grill on theCube, live, but now you see. >> You focus on that multi-cloud aspect. So you've got a situation where our customers are looking at multi-cloud and they're looking at it, not just as a flash in the pan. This is here for five years, 10 years, 20 years. Okay. So what does that mean then to our partners and to our distributors, you're seeing a whole seed change. You're seeing partners now looking at this. So look at the OEMs, the ones that have historically been vSphere customers and now saying they're coming in, drove saying, okay, what is the next step? Well, how can I be a multi-cloud partner with you? How can I look at other aspects that we're driving here together? So GreenLake is a great example. We keep going back to GreenLake and we are partaking in GreenLake at the moment. The real big thing for us is going to be right. Let's make sure that we've got the agreements in place that support this Sasson subscription motion going forward. And then the sky's the limit for us. >> You're plugging that right into. >> Well, here's why, here's why, so customers are loving the fact that they can go to a public cloud and they can get an SLA. They come to an on-premise, you've got the hardware, you've got the software, you've got the guys on board to maintain this through its life cycle. I mean, this is complicated stuff. Now we've got a situation where you can say, Hey, we can get an SLA on premise. >> And I think what you're seeing is it's very analogous to having a financial advisor, just manage your portfolio. You're taking care of just submitting money. That's really a lot of what a lot of the customers have done with the public cloud. But now a lot of these customers are getting savvy. They have been working with VMware technologies and HPE for so long. they've got expertise. They know how they want their workloads architected. Now we've given them a model where they can leverage the cloud platform to be able to do this, whether it's on premise, the edge or in the public cloud, leveraging HPE GreenLake and VMware. >> Is it predominantly or exclusively a managed service or do you find some customers saying, hey, we want to manage ourself. What are you seeing is the mix there? >> It is not predominantly managed services right now. We're actually, as we are growing last time we talked at HPE discover. We talked about a whole bunch of new services that we've added to our catalog. It's growing by leaps and bounds. A lot of folks are definitely interested in the pay as you go, obviously the financial model, but are now getting exposed to all the other management that can happen. There are managed services capabilities, but actually running it as a service with your systems on-prem is a phenomenal idea for all these customers. And they're opening their eyes to some new ways to service their customers better. >> And another phenomenon we're seeing there is where partners such as HPA, using other partners for various areas of the services implementation as well. So that's another phenomenon. You're seeing the resale motion now going into a lot more of the services motion. >> It's interesting too. I mean the digital modernization that's going on, the transformation whatever you want to call it, is complicated, that's clear. One of the things I liked about the keynote today was the concept of cloud chaos, because we've been saying quoting Andy Grove, Next Intel, let chaos rain and rain in the chaos. And when you have inflection points, complexity, which is the chaos, needs to be solved and whoever solves it and kicks the inflection point, that's up and to the right. >> So prime idea right here. So. >> GreenLake is, well. >> Also look at the distribution model and how that's changed a couple of points on a deal. Now they're saying I'll be your aggregator. I'll take the strain and I'll give you scale. I'll give you VMware scale for all of the various different partners, et cetera. >> Yeah. So let's break this down because this is, I think a key point. So complexity is good, but the old model in the enterprise market was, you solve complexity with more complexity and everybody wins. Oh yeah, we're locked in. That's not what the market wants. They want self- service, they want as a service, they want easy, developer first security data ops. DevOps is already in the cycle. So they're going to want simpler, easier, faster. >> And this is kind of why I I'll say for the big announcement today here at VMware Explorer around the VMware vSphere distributed services engine, project Monterey that we've talked about for so long, HPE and VMware and AMD with the Pensando DPU actually work together to engineer a solution for exactly that. The capabilities are fairly straightforward in terms of the technologies, but actually doing the work to do integration, joint engineering, make sure that this is simple and easy and able to be running HPE GreenLake. >> We invested in Pensando right, we are investors. >> What's the benefit of that. That's a great point. You made what's the value to the customer bottom line, that deep, co-engineering, co-partnering, what is it deliver that others don't do? >> Yeah. Well, I think one example would be a lot of vendors can say we support it. >> Yep. That's great. That's actually a really good move, supporting it. It can be resold. That's another great move. I'm not mechanically inclined to where I would go build my own car. I'll go to a dealership and actually buy one that I can press the button and I can start it and I can do what I need to do with my car. And that's really what this does is the engineering work that's gone on between our two companies and AMD Pensando as well as the business work to make that simple and easy that transaction to work. And then to be able to make it available as a service is really what made, that's why it's such a winner here... >> But, it's also a lower cost out of the box. Yes. So you get in whatever it's called a 20%. Okay. But there's nuance because you're also on a new technology curve and you're able to absorb modern apps. We use that term as a promo, but when I say modern apps, I mean data, rich apps, things that are more AI driven. Not the conventional, not that people aren't doing, you know, SAP and CRM, they are. But, there's a whole slew of new apps that are coming in that traditional architectures aren't well suited to handle from a price performance standpoint. This changes that doesn't it? >> Well, you think also of going to the next stage, which is the go to market between the two organizations that before at the moment, HPE is running off doing various different things. We were running off to. Again, that chaos that you're talking about in cloud chaos, you got to go to market chaos, but by simplifying four or five things, what are we going to do really well together? How do we embed those in GreenLake and be known in the marketplace for these solutions? Then you get an organization that's really behind the go to market. You can help with sales, activation, the enablement. And then we benefit from the scale of HPE. >> Yeah. What are those solutions, I mean... Is it just, is it IS? Is it compute storage? Is it specific SAP? Is it VDI? What are you seeing out there? >> So right now for this specific technology, we're educating our customers on what that could be. And at its core, this solution allows customers to take services that normally and traditionally run on the compute system and run on a DPU now with project Monterey. And this is now allowing customers to think about where are their use cases. So I'm rather than going and say, use it for this. We're allowing our customers to explore and say, okay, here's where it makes sense. Where do I have workloads that are using a lot of compute cycles on services at the compute level? That could be somewhere else like networking as a great example, and allowing more of those compute cycles to be available. So where there are performance requirements for an application where there are timely response that's needed for results to be able to take action on, to be able to get insight from data really quick. Those are places where we're starting to see the services moving onto something like a DPU. And that's where this makes a whole lot more sense. >> Okay, so to get this right? You got the hybrid cloud, right? You got GreenLake and you got the distributed engine. What's that called? >> It's HPE Proliant Proliant with the VMware, VSphere. >> VSphere. That's the compute distributed. Okay. So does the customer, how do you guys implement that with the customer all three at the same time or they mix and match? How's that work? >> All three of those components. So the beauty of the HP Proliant with VMware vSphere distributed services engine also now is project Monterey for those that are keeping notes at home. Again already pre-engineered so we've already worked through all the mechanics of how you would have to do this. So it's not something you have to go figure out how you build, get deployment, work through those details. That's already done. It is available through HPE GreenLake. So you can go and actually get it as a service in partnership with our customer, our friends here at VMware. And because if you're familiar and comfortable with all the things that HP Proliant has done from a security perspective, from a reliability perspective, trusted supply chain, all those sorts of things, you're getting all of that with this particular solution. >> Sumit Dhawan had a great quote on theCube just a hour or so ago. He said you have to be early to be first. Love that quote. Okay. So you were first, you were probably a little early, but do you have a lead? I know you're going to say yes. Okay. Let's just assume that okay. Relative to the competition, how do you know? How do you determine that? >> If we have a lead or not? >> Yeah, if you lead, if you're the best. >> We go to the source of the truth, which is our customers. >> And what do they tell you? What do you look at and say, okay, now, I mean, when you have that honest conversation and say, okay, we are, we're first, we're early, we're keeping our lead. What are the things that you look at, as indicators? >> I'll say it this way. We've been in a lot of businesses where we do compete head-to-head in a lot of places and we know how that sales process normally works. We're seeing a different motion from our customers. When we talk about HPE GreenLake, there's not a lot of back and forth on, okay, well let me go shop around. It is HP GreenLake, let's talk about how we actually build this solution. >> And I can tell you from a VMware perspective, our customers are asking us for this the other way around. So that's a great sign. Is that, Hey, we need to see this partnership come together in GreenLake. >> Yeah. Okay. So you would concur with that? >> Absolutely. So third party validation. >> From Switzerland. Yeah. >> Bring it with you over here. >> We're talking about this earlier on, I mean, of course with I mentioned earlier on there's some contractual things that you've got to get in place as you are going through this migration into Sasson subscription, et cetera. And so we are working as hard as we can to make sure, Hey, let's really get this contract in place as quickly as possible, it's what the customers are asking us. >> We've been talking about this for years, you know, see containers being so popular. Now, Kubernetes becoming that layer of bringing people to bringing things together. It's the old adage that Amazon used to coin and Andy Jassy, they do the undifferentiated, heavy lifting. A lot of that's now that's now cloud operations. Underneath is infrastructure's code to the developer, right. That's at scale. >> That's right. >> And so you got a lot of heavy lifting being done with GreenLake. Which is why there's no objections probably. >> Right absolutely. >> What's the choice. What do you even shop? >> Yeah. There's nothing to shop around. >> Yeah, exactly. And then we've, that is really icing on the cake that we've, we've been building for quite some time. There is an understanding in the market that what we do with our infrastructure is hardened from a reliability and quality perspective. Times are tough right now, supply chain issues, all that stuff, we've talked about it. But at HPE, we don't skimp on quality. We're going to spend the dollars and time on making sure we got reliability and security built in. It's really important to us. >> We get a great use case, the storage team, they were provisioning with containers. Storage is a service, instantly. We're seeing with you guys with VMware, your customers bringing in a lot of that into the mix as well. I got to ask. Cause every event we talk about AI and machine learning, automation and DevOps are now infiltrating in with the Ci/CD pipeline security and data become a big conversation. >> Agreed. >> Okay. So how do you guys look at that? Okay. You sold me on green. I've been a big fan from day one. Now it's got maturity on it. I know it's going to get a lot more headroom to do there. It's still a lot of work to do, but directionally it's pretty accurate. It's going to be going to be success. There's still concerns about security, the data layer. That's agnostic of environment, private cloud hybrid, public and edge. So that's important and security has got a huge service area. These are a work in progress. How do you guys view those? >> I think you've just hit the nail on the head. I mean, I was in the press and journalist meetings yesterday and our answer was exactly the same. There is still so much work that can be done here. And I don't think anybody is really emerging as a true leader. It's just a continuation of trying to get that right. Because it is what is the most important thing to our customers. And the industry is really sort of catching up to that. >> And when you start talking about privacy and when you... It's not just about company information, it's about individuals information. It's about information that if exposed actually could have real impact on people. So it's more than just an IT problem. It is actually, and from HP's perspective, security starts from when we're picking our suppliers for our components. There are processes that we put into our entire trusted supply chain from the factory on the way up. I liken it to my golf swing, my golf swinging. I slice, right lik you wouldn't believe. But when I go to the golf pros, they start me back at the mechanics, the foundational pieces, here's where the problems are and start working on that. So my view is our view is if your infrastructure is not secure, you're going to have troubles with security as you go further up. >> Stay in the sandbox, so to speak, they're driving range on the golf analogy there. I love that. Talk about supply chain security real quick. Because you mentioned supply chain on the hardware side, you're seeing a lot of open source and supply chain in software trusted software. How does GreenLake look at that? How do you guys view that piece of it? That's an important part. >> Yeah, security is one of the key pillars that we're actually driving as a company right now. As I said, it's important to our customers as they're making purchasing decisions. And we're looking at it from the infrastructure all the way up to the actual service itself. And that's the beauty of having something like HP GreenLake, we don't have to pick is the infrastructure or the middle where, or the top of stack application, we can look at all of it. Yeah. It's all of it. That matters. >> Question on the ecosystem posture, so, I remember when HP was one company and then the GSIs were a little weird with HP because of EDS, you know, had data protector. So we weren't really chatting up Veeam at the time. And as soon as the split happened, ecosystem exploded. Now you have a situation where your Broadcom is acquiring VMware. You guys big Broadcom customer, has your attitude changed or has it not because, oh, we meet where the customers are. You've always said that, but have you have leaned in more? I mean, culturally is HPE, HPE now saying, hmm, now we have some real opportunities to partner in new ways that we don't have to sleep with one eye open, maybe. >> So I would some first of all, VMware and HPE, we've got a variety of different partners, we always have. If well, before any Broadcom announcement came along. We've been working with a variety of partners and that hasn't changed and that hasn't changed. And if your question is, has our posture toward VMware changed that all the answers absolutely not. We believe in what VMware is doing. We believe in what our customers are doing with VMware, and we're going to continue to work with VMware and partner with you. >> And of course we had to spin out ourselves in November of last year, which I worked on the whole Dell, whole Dell piece. >> But, you still had the same chairman. >> But since then, I think what's really become very apparent. And it's not just with HPE, but with many of our partners, many of the OEM partners, the opportunity in front of us is vast. And we need to rely on each other to help us solve the customer problems that are out there. So there's a willingness to overlook some things that in the past may have been barriers. >> But it's important to note also that it's not that we have not had history, right? Over... We've got over 200,000 customers join. >> Hundreds of millions of dollars of business. >> 100,000, over 10,000 or a 100,000 channel partners that we have in common. Numerous , numerous... >> And independent of the whole Broadcom overhang there, there's the ecosystem floor. Yeah, the expo floor. I mean, it's vibrant. I mean, there's clearly a wave coming. Ricky, we talked about this briefly at HPE Discover. I want to get an update from your perspective, both of you, if you don't mind weighing in on this, clearly the wave we calling it super cloud. Cause it's not just, multi-cloud completely different looking successes, >> Smart Cloud. >> It's not just vendors. It's also the customers turning into clouds themselves. You look at Goldman Sachs. I think every vertical will have its own power law of cloud players in the future. We believe that to be true. We're still testing that assumption, but it's trending in when you got OPEX has to go to in fund statement. CapEx goes to thanks for the cloud. All that's good, but there's a wave coming and we're trying to identify it. What do you guys see as this wave cause beyond multi-cloud and the obvious nature of that will end up happening as a state and what happens beyond that interoperability piece? That's a whole nother story and that's what everyone's fighting for. But everyone out in that ecosystem, it's a big wave coming. They got their surfboards. They're ready to go. So what do you guys see? What is the next wave that everyone's jacked up about here? >> Well, I think the multi-cloud is obviously at the epicenter. If you look at the results that are coming in, a lot of our customers, this is what's leading the discussion. And now we're in a position where we've brought many companies over the last few years, they're starting to come to fruition. They're starting to play a role in how we're moving forward. Some of those are a bit more applicable to the commercial space. We're finding commercial customers are never bought from us before never hundreds and hundreds are coming through our partner networks every single quarter. So brand new to VMware, the trick then is how do you nurture them? How do you encourage them? >> So new logos are coming in? >> New logos are coming in all the time, all the time from across the ecosystem. It's not just the OEMs, it's all the way back. >> So the ecosystem's back for VMware. >> Unbelievably. So what are we doing to help that? There's two big things that we've announced in the recent weeks is that partner connect 2.0. When I talk to you about multi-cloud and multicardt the customers are doing, you see that trend. Four, five different separate clouds that we've got here. The next piece is that they're changing their business models with the partners. Their services is becoming more and more apparent, etc. And the use of other partners to do other services deployment or this stuff is becoming prevalent. Then you've got the distributors that I talked about were there. Then you route to market, then you route to business. So how do you encapsulate all of that and ensure your rewarding partners on all aspects of that? Whether it's deployment, whether it's test and debt, it's a points based system we've put in place now. >> It's a big pie. That's developing the market's getting bigger. >> It's getting so much bigger and then help. >> You agree obviously with that. >> Yeah, absolutely, in fact, I think for a long time we were asking the question of, is it going to be there or is it going to be here? Which was the wrong question now it's everything. Yes. And what I think that what we're seeing in the ecosystem is people are finding the spots where they're going play. Am I going to be on the edge? Am I going to be an analytics play? Am I going to be a cloud transition play? A lot of players are now emerging and saying, we now have a place, a part to play. And having that industry view, not just of a commercial customer at that level, but the two of us are looking at Telco, are looking at financial services, at healthcare, at manufacturing. How do these new ecosystem players fit into it? >> ... is lifting, everyone can see their position there. >> We're now being asked for simplicity and talk to me about partner profitability. How do I know where to focus my efforts? Am I've spread too thin? And my advice that a partner ecosystem out there is, Hey, let's pick out spots together. Let's really go to, and then strategic solutions that we were talking about is good example of that. >> Sounds like composability to me, but not to go back guys. Thanks for coming on. I think there's a big market there. I think the fog is lifted, people seeing their spot there's value there. Value creation equals reward. Yeah. Simplicity, ease of use. This is the new normal great job. Thanks for coming on sharing. Okay. Back live coverage after this short break with more day one coverage here from the blue set here in Moscone.

(slow music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's ongoing coverage of VMworld 2021, the second year in a row we've done this virtually. My name is Dave Vellante and long-time VMware technologist and new CTO Kit Colbert is here. Kit, welcome. Good to see you again. >> Thanks, Dave. Super excited to be here. >> So let's talk about your new role. You've been at VMware. You've touched all the bases so to speak (Kit chuckles) and, you know, love the career evolution. You're ready for this job. So tell us about that role. >> Well, I hope so. I don't know. It's definitely a big step up. Been here at VMware for 18 years now, which, if know Silicon Valley, you know that's a long time. It's probably like four or five normal Silicon Valley lifetime's in terms of stints at a company. But I love it. I love the company. I love the culture. I love the technology and I'm super passionate, super excited about it. And so, you know, previously I was CTO for one of our business groups and focused on a specific set of our products and services. But now, as the corporate CTO, I really am overseeing all of VMware R&D. In the sense of really trying to drive a whole bunch of core engineering transformations, right, where we've talked a lot about our shift toward becoming a SaaS company. So, you know, a cloud services company. And so there's a lot of changes we got to make internally. Technologies, platform services we need to build out, you know, the sort of culture aspects of it again. And so, you know, I'm kind of sitting at the center of that and, I'll be honest, it's big, there's a lot of stuff to go and do, but I am just super excited about it. Wake up every day, really excited to meet a whole bunch of new people across the organization and to learn all the cool things we're doing. Well, you know, I'll say it again, like the level of innovation happening inside VMware is just insane. And it's really cool now that I get kind of more of a front and center row to see everything that's happening. >> And when I was preparing for the interview with Raghu, you know, I've been following VMware for a long time, and I sort of noted that it's like the fourth, you know, wave of executive management and I sort of went back and said, okay, yes, we know it started with, you know, Workstation. Okay, fine. But then really quickly went into really changing the way in which we think about servers, and server utilization, and driving. I remember the first time I ever saw a demo, I said, "Wow, this is going to be completely game-changing." And then thought about the era of the software-defined data center, fine-tuning the cloud strategy, and then this explosion of innovation, whether it was this sort of NSX piece, the acquisitions you've made around security, again, more cloud expansion. And now you're laying out sort of this Switzerland from Multi-Cloud combined with, as you're pointing out, this as a service model. So when you think about the technical vision of the company transforming into a cloud and subscription model, what does that mean from a sort of architectural standpoint >> Yeah. >> Or a mindset perspective? >> Oh yeah. Both great questions and both sort of key focus areas for me, and by the way, it's something I've been thinking about for quite a while, right? Yeah, so you're right. Like we are on our third or fourth lap of the track depending on how you count. But I also think that this notion of getting into Multi-Cloud, of becoming a real cloud services company is going to be probably the biggest one for us. And the biggest transformation that we're going to have to make, you know, we did extend from core compute virtualization to network and storage with the software-defined data center. But now these things I think are a bit more fundamental. So, you know, how are we thinking about it? Well, we're thinking about it in a few different ways. I do think, as you mentioned, the mindset is definitely the most important thing. This notion that, you know, we no longer really have product teams purely, they should be thinking of themselves as service teams and the idea being that they are operating and accountable for the availability of their cloud service. And so this means we really needed to step up our game, and we have in terms of the types of tooling that we built, but really it's about getting these developers engaged with that, to know that, hey, like what matters most of all right now is that service availability, in addition to things like security, compliance, et cetera. But we have monitoring systems to tell you, hey, like there's a problem. And that you need to go jump on those things immediately. This is not like, you know, a normal bug that comes in, oh, I'll get to it tomorrow or whatever. It's like, no, no, you got to step up and really get there immediately. And so there is that big mindset shift and that's something we've been driving for the past few years, but we need to continue to push there. And as part of that, you know, what we've seen is that a lot of our individual teams have gone out and build like really great cloud services, but what we really want to build to enable us to accelerate that, is a platform, a true, you know, SaaS platform and leveraging all these great capabilities that we have to help all of our teams go faster. And so it gets to things like standardization and really raising the bar across the board to allow all these teams to focus on what makes their products or services unique and differentiated rather than, you know, just doing the basic blocking and tackling. So those are couple of things I'm really focused on. Both driving the mindset shift. You know, as I was taking on this role, I did a lot of reading on other CTOs and, you know, how do they view their roles within their companies? And one of the things I did hear there was that the CTO is kind of the, I don't know if the keeper is the right word, but the keeper of the engineering culture, right, that you want to really be a steward for that to help take it forward in the right sort of directions that aligned with the strategic direction of the business. And so that's a big aspect for what I'm thinking about. And the second one in the SaaS platform, one of the really interesting things about this reorg that we've done internally is, that traditionally CTO is kind of focused, you know, outbound, maybe a little bit inbound, but typically don't have large engineering organizations, but here, what we want to do, because the SaaS platform is so important to us. We did centralize it within the office of the CTO. And so now, you know, my customers, from an engineering standpoint, are all the internal business units. So a lot of really big changes inside VMware, but I think this is the sort of stuff we need to do to help us really accelerate toward the multi-cloud vision that we're painting. >> Well, VMware has always had a superstrong engineering culture, and I liked the way you phrase that, "The steward of the engineering culture," when you think about a product mindset, 'course correct me, if I'm off here, but when you're building a product and you're making that thing rock-solid, you know, Maritz used to talk about the hardened top. And so it seems to me that the services mindset expands the mind a little bit in terms of what other services can I integrate to make my service better, whether that's a machine, intelligence service, or a security service or, you know, the dozens of other services that you guys are now building, the combination of that innovation has like a step function and a lever on top of the sort of traditional product mindset. >> Yeah, I think you're absolutely right there's a ton of like really fundamental mental mindset shifts, right? That are a part of that. And the integration piece you mentioned, super critical, but I also think it's actually taking a step back and looking at the life cycle more holistically. When you're thinking about a product, you're thinking about, okay, I'ma get the bits together, I'm going to ship it out. But then it's really up to the customer to go deploy that, to operate it, to, you know, deal with problems and bugs that come up. And when you're delivering a cloud service, those are all problems that you, as the application creator, have to deal with. And so you've got to be on top of all those things. And, you know, if you design something in such a way that it becomes kind of hard to debug at runtime, well, that's going to directly impact your availability, that might have, you know, contractual obligations with an SLA impact to a customer. So there's some really big implications there that I think traditionally product teams didn't always fully think through, but now that they sort of have to with like a cloud service. The other point, I think that's really important there, is the notion of simplicity and ease of use. Experience is always important, right? Customer experience, user experience, but it gets even more magnified in a SaaS type of environment because the idea is that you shouldn't have to talk to anybody. You, as a user, should be able to go and call an API and start using this thing, right, and swipe a credit card and you're good to go. And so, you know, that sort of maniacal focus on how you just remove roadblocks, remove any unnecessary things between that customer and getting the value that they're looking for. So in general, the thing that I really love about SaaS and cloud services is that they really align incentives very well. What you want to do, as an application builder, as a solution builder, really aligns well with what customers are looking for. And you can get that feedback very, very rapidly, which allows for much quicker evolution of the underlying product and application. >> So one of the other things I learned from my interview with Raghu, and I couldn't go deep into it, I did a little bit with Sumit, but I wonder if I get your perspectives as well. I always talk about this abstraction layer across clouds, hybrid, multi-cloud, edge, abstracting, you know, the underlying complexity, and Raghu, it's nuance, but he said, "Okay, but the thing is, we're not trying to limit access to the primitives. We want to allow developers to go there to the extent." And my takeaway was okay, but the abstraction is you want to be that single management layer with access to the deep primitives and APIs of the respective clouds. But simplify, to your point, across those estates at the management layer, maybe you could add some color to that. >> Yeah, you know, it's a really interesting question. But let me tell you about how we think about it because you're right. In that, you know, the abstractions can sometimes find the underlying primitives and capabilities. And so Raghu getting at, hey, like we don't necessarily force you one way or the other. And here's the way to think about it, is that it's really about delivering optionality. And we do that through offering these abstractions at different layers. So to your point, Dave, like we have a management capabilities that can enable you to manage consistently across all types of clouds, public, private, edge, et cetera, irrespective of what that underlying infrastructure is. And so you'll look at things that are like our vRealize suite of products, or CloudHealth, or Tanzu, Tanzu Mission Control is really focused on that one as well. But then we also have our infrastructure layer. That's what we're doing with VMware Cloud. And this notion of delivering consistent infrastructure. Now, even though the core, sort of IIS layer, is more consistent, you still get great flexibility in terms of the higher-level services. If you want to use a database from one of the public clouds, or a messaging system, or streaming service, or, you know, AI, whatever it is, you still got that sort of optionality as well. And so the reason that we offer these different things is because customers are just in different places. As a matter of fact, a single customer may have all of those different use cases, right? They may have some apps where they're moving from on-prem into the cloud. They want to do that very quickly. So, boom, we can just do it really fast with VMware Cloud, consistent infrastructure. We can VMotion that thing up in the Cloud, great. But for other ones, maybe a modern app they're building, and maybe a team has chosen to use native AWS for that, but they want to leverage Kubernetes. So there you could put in a Tanzu Mission Control to give them that, you know, consistent management across sites, or leverage CloudHealth to understand costs and to really enable the application teams to manage costs on their own. So, you know, I always go back to that concept of optionality, like we offer sort of these different levels of abstraction, and it really depends on what the use case is because the reality is, especially for a complex enterprise, they're likely going to have all of those use cases. >> You know, I want to stay on optionality for a moment because you're essentially becoming a cloud company. I'm expanding the definition of cloud, which I think is appropriate 'cause the cloud is expanding. It's going on-prem, it's going out to the edge, there's hybrid connections, across clouds, et cetera. And when you look at the public cloud players, they all are deep into what I'll call data management. I'm not even sure what that term means anymore sometimes, but certainly they all own, own, databases, but they also offer databases from folks. I go back to something Maritz said with the software mainframe that we want to be able to run any workload, you know, anywhere and have high reliability, recovery, you know, lowest costs, et cetera. So you're going to run those workloads. Project Monterey is about supporting new workloads, but it doesn't seem like you have aspirations to own sort of the database layer, for example, what's your philosophy around that? >> Yeah. Not generally. I mean, we do have some solutions like Greenplum, for instance, that play in that space, more of a data warehouse solution, but generally speaking, you're absolutely right. You know, VMware success was built through tight partnerships. We have a very, very broad partner network. And of course, we see hyperscalers as great partners as well. And so, I think if we get back to like, what's the core of VMware, it really is providing those powerful abstractions in the right places, at the infrastructure level, at the management level, and so forth. But yeah, we're not trying to necessarily compete with everyone, reinvent the world. And by the way, if I just take a step back, when we talk to customers, what really drives them toward using multiple clouds is the fact that they want to get after these, what we call, best of breed cloud services, that many of the different public clouds offer databases and AI and ML systems. And for each app team, the exact one that perfectly meets their needs may be different, right? Maybe on one conference is another cloud. And so that is really the optionality that we want to optimize for when we talk to those customers. They want the easiest way of getting that app onto that cloud, so we can take advantage of that cloud service, but what they worry about is the lack of consistency there. And that goes across the board. You know, if something fails at 2:00 am, and you have to wake up and go fix it. Do you have like the right sort of tooling in place, if it's fails on one cloud versus another, do you have to like, you know, scramble to figure out which tools to go use, you know, which dashboard to look at? It's like, no, that you want kind of a consistent one. When you think about, from a security perspective, how do you drive a secure software supply chain? How do you prevent the types of attacks that we've seen in the past few years? Where people insert malicious code into your supply chain and now you're running with hack code out there. And if you have different teams doing different things across different clouds, well, that's going to just open up sort of a can of worm of different possibilities there for hackers to get in. So that's why this consistency is so important. And so, you know, I guess, if we refine the optionality a little bit, that point, it's about getting optionality around cloud services and then like those are the things that really differentiate. And so, you know, we're not trynna compete with that. We're saying, hey, like we want to bring customers to those and give them the best experience that they can, irrespective of whether that's in the public cloud, or on-prem, or even at the edge. >> And that's a huge technical challenge and amazing value for customers. I want to ask you, there's a lot of talk about ESG today. How does that fit into the CTO mindset? >> Yeah. >> Is it a bolt-on, is it a fundamental component? >> Yeah. Yeah, so ESG is talking about environment, sustainability, and governance. And so, you know, it's not an environment, excuse me, equity, (Kit chuckles) equity, sustainability, and governance. Getting my acronyms wrong, which as the technologist, really a faux pas, but any case, equity, sustainability, and governance. And the idea there is that if we look at the core values for VMware, this is something that's hugely important. And something that we've actually been focused on for quite a while. We now have a whole team focused on this, really being a force multiplier to help keep us honest across VMware, to help ensure equity, and in many different ways, that we have or continue to increase, for instance, the amount of female representation within our organization, or underrepresented minorities or communities, ensuring that, you know, pay is equal across the company. You know, these different sorts of things, but also around sustainability. They actually have a number of folks working very closely with our teams to drive sustainability into our products. You know, vSphere is great because it reduces the amount of physical servers you need. So by definition reduces the carbon footprint there. But now, you know, taking a step further. We have cloud partners that we're working with to ensure that they have net-zero carbon emissions, you know, using 100% renewables by 2030. And in fact, that's something that, we ourselves, have signed up for, you know, today we are carbon-neutral, but what we want to get to is to be net carbon zero by 2030, which is an absolutely huge lift. And that's, by the way, not just for VMware, our operations, our offices, but also for our supply chain as well. And so, you know, when you look across, you know, as well as efforts around diversity and inclusion, this is something that is very core to what we do as a company, but it's also a personal passion of mine. The ESG office actually lives within my organization. And it does that because what I view the office of the CTO as being is really a force multiplier, as I said before, like, yes, the team is located here, but their purview is across all of engineering. And in fact, all of VMware. So I think, you know, when we look at this, it's about getting the best talent we have, very diverse talent, increasing our ability to deliver innovative products, but also doing so in a way that's good for the planet, that is sustainable. And that is giving back to the community. >> You know, by the way, I don't think that was faux pas. (Kit laughs) 'Cause a lot of times, people use environmental, social, and governance, and your equity piece would fall into the S in that equation, the social responsibility, you know, components. So I think you've just done an interesting twist on the acronym. So no mistake there. (Dave chuckles) Just another way to look at it. >> Yup, yup, yup. >> So you're now deep into the CTO role. What should we look for in the, you know, coming months and years? How should we >> Hmm. >> Kind of evaluate progress? What are those sort of milestones that we should be looking at? >> Yeah, so about a month or so into the job now, and so still getting my arms wrapped around, but, you know, I'm looking at measuring success in a few different ways. First of all, as I said before, the ESG component and in diversity, equity inclusion in particular, in terms of our workforce, extraordinarily important to me and something we're going to be really pushing hard on, you know, as we all know, you know, women, underrepresented minorities, not very well represented, in general, in Silicon Valley. So something that we all need to step up on. And so we're going to be putting a lot of effort in there, and that will actually help drive, as I said before, all of these innovations, this fundamental shift in mindset, I mean, that requires diverse perspectives. It requires pushing us out of our comfort zone, but the net result of that, so that what you're going to see, is a much faster cadence of releases of innovation coming from VMware. So there's some just insanely exciting things (Kit laughs) that are happening in the labs right now that we're cooking up. But, you know, as we start making this shift, we're going to be delivering those faster and faster to our customers and our partners. >> You know, I'm interested to hear that it's a passion of yours. There was an article, I think it was last week, in "The Wall Street Journal," it was an insert section on "Women in the Workforce," and there was a stat in there, which I thought was pretty interesting. I'll run it by and you see what you think, you know, it was talking about COVID, and post COVID,and the stresses. And it's interesting to me because a lot of executives, and pfft, you know, I'm with them, said, "Hey, work from home. This a beautiful thing. It's good for business too, because, you know, everybody's more productive," but you have this perpetual workday now. It's like we never sleep. It bleeds in the weekends. And the stat from Qualtrics, which was published in the journal, I think it said, "30% of working women said that their mental health has declined since COVID." And that number was only 15% for working men, is still notable, but half. And so, you know, one has to question maybe that perpetual work week and, you know, maybe there's a benefit from business productivity, but then there's the other side of that as well. And a lot of women have left the workforce, a lot of previously working moms. And so there's an untapped labor pool there, and there's this huge labor shortage. And so these are important issues, but they're not easy ones to solve, are they? >> No, no, no. It's something we've been putting a lot of thought into at VMware. So we do have a flexible program that we're rolling out in terms of work. People can come into the office if they want to, of course, you know, where we have offices where it's safe to do so, where the government has allowed that, and people can have an actual desk there, or sometimes they can say, "Hey, I only want to come in once or twice a week." And then we say, "Okay, we'll have some floating desks that you can take." And others are saying, "I want to be fully remote." So we give people a pretty broad range in terms of how they want to address that. But I do think, to your point though, and this is something I've been really trying to do already is to create a more inclusive environment by doing a number of different things. And so it's being thoughtful around when you're sending emails. 'Cause like my sort of schedule is, I do tend to like fire off emails late at night after the kids are in bed, I get a little quiet time, some thinking time, but I make it very clear that I'm not expecting an immediate response. Don't worry about it. This is my work time. Doesn't have to be your work time. And so really setting those, I guess, boundaries, if you will, explicitly and kind of the expectations maybe is a better term, setting that explicitly, trying to schedule meetings, not at times where you're going to have to drop the kids off at school or pick them (indistinct) and to take over your life. And so we really try to emphasize boundaries and really setting those things appropriately. But honestly, it's something that we're still working on and I'm still learning. And so I'd love to get feedback from folks, but those are some of the early thinkings. But I would say that we at VMware are taking it very, very seriously and really supporting our employees in terms of navigating that work-life balance. >> Well Kit, congratulations on the new role and it's great to see you again. I hope next year we can be face-to-face, always a pleasure to have you on theCUBE. >> Thanks, Dave. Appreciated being here. >> All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more right after this. (slow music)

>> Announcer: Live from downtown San Francisco, it's theCUBE covering IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit 2018, brought to you by IBM. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to San Francisco, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're covering the IBM Chief Data Officer Strategy Summit #ibmcdo. Ed Walsh is here. He's the General Manager of IBM Storage, and Steven Eliuk who's the Vice President of Deep Learning in the Global Chief Data Office at IBM, Steven. >> Yes, sir. >> Good to see you again. Welcome to The CUBE. >> Pleasure to be here. So there's a great story. We heard Inderpal Bhandari this morning talk about the enterprise data blueprint and laying out to the practitioners how to get started, how to implement, and we're going to have a little case study as to actually how you're doing this. But Ed, set it up for us. >> Okay, so we're at this Chief Data Officer Summit in the Spring, we do it twice a year and really get just Chief Data Officers together to think through their different challenges and actually share. So that's where we're at the Summit. And what we've, as IBM, as kind of try to be a foot forward, be that cognitive enterprise and showing very transparently what we're doing at our organization be more data-driven. And we've talked a bunch of different times. Everyone needs to be data-driven. Everyone wants to be data-driven, but it's really challenging for organizations. So what we're doing is with this blueprint which we're showing as a showcase, in fact you can actually physically come in and see our environment. But more importantly we're being very transparent on all the different components, high-level processes, what we did in governance, but also down to the Lilly Technology level and sharing that with our... Not because they want to do all of it, but maybe they want to do some of it or half of it, but it would be a blueprint that's worked. And then we're being transparent about what we're getting internally for our own transformation as IBM. Because really if we looked at this as a platform, it's really an enterprise cognitive data platform that all of IBM uses on all our transformation work. So our client, in fact, is Steven, and I think you can give what are we doing. By the way, it also, same type of infrastructure allows you to do what we did in the national labs, the largest supercomputers in the world, same infrastructure and the same thing we're trying to do, is make it easier for people to get insights from the data at scale in the enterprise. So that's why I want to bring Steven on. >> I joked with Inderpal. I said, "Well, if you can do it at IBM, "if you can do it there you can do it anywhere," (Ed laughing) because he's point oh. We're at a highly complex organization. So Steven, take us through how you got started and what you're doing. >> For sure, so I'm what's referred to probably as a difficult customer. So because we're so multifaceted we have so many different use cases internally in the orders of hundreds, it doesn't mean that I can just say, "Hey, this is a specific pattern that I need, Ed. "You need to make sure your hardware is sufficient in this area," because the next day I'm going to be hitting him and say, "Hey Ed, I need you to make sure "that it's also efficient in terms of bandwidth as well." And that's the beauty of working in this domain, is that I have those hundreds of use cases and it means that I'm hitting low latency requirements, bandwidth requirements, extensibility requirements because I have a huge number of headcount that I'm bringing on as well. And if I'm good now I don't have to worry about in six months to be stating, "Hey, I need to roll out new infrastructure "so I can support these new data scientists "and effectively so that they can get outcomes quicker." And I'd need to make sure that all the infrastructure behind the scenes is extensible and supports my users. And what I don't want them to have to worry about specifically is how that infrastructure works. I want them to focus on those use cases, those enterprise use cases, and I want them to touch as many of those use cases as possible. >> So Inderpal laid out sort of his five things that a CDO should do. He starts with develop a clear data strategy. So as the doer in the organization, how'd you go about doing that? Presumably you participated in that data strategy, but you're representing the lines of business presumably to make sure that it's of value to them. You can accelerate business value, but how did you start? I mean that's a big challenge, chewy. >> For sure, yeah, it's a huge challenge. And I think effectively curating, locating, governing, and quality aspects of that data is one of the first aspects. And where does that data reside, though, and how do we access it quickly? How does it support structured and unstructured data effectively? Those are all really important questions that had to come to light. And that's some of the approaches that we took. We look at the various business units and we look at are they curating the data correctly? Is it the data that we need? Maybe we have to augment that curation process before we actually are able to kind of apply new techniques, new machine-learning techniques, to that use case. There's a number of different aspects that kind of get rolled into that, and bringing effective storage and effective compute to the table really accelerates us in that journey. >> So Ed, what are the fundamental aspects of the infrastructure that supports this sort of emerging workload? >> Yeah, no, good question. And some of it is what we're going to talk about, what's a storage layer and what's a compute layer, but also what are the tools we're putting in place to use a lot of these open-source toolsets and make it easier for people to use but also use that underlying infrastructure better. So if you look at the high level, we use a storage infrastructure that is built for these AI workloads which is closer to an HPC workload. So the same infrastructure we use, we use the term ESS or elastic storage server. It's a combination. It's a turnkey solution, half rack, full rack. But it can start very small and grow to the biggest supercomputers in the world like what we're doing in the national labs, like the largest top five supercomputers in the world. But what that is is a file system called Spectrum Scale. Allows you to scale up at the performance but also low latency, gets added to the metadata but also high throughput. So we can do layers on that either on flash being all the hot tiers'll be on flash because it's not just the throughput you need which is high. So our lowest end box's close to like what, 26 gigabytes a second. Our highest one like national labs is 4.9 terabytes a second throughput. But it's also the low latency quick access. So we have a storage infrastructure but then we also have high-performance compute. So what we have is our Power Systems, our POWER9 Systems with GPUs, and the idea is how do you, we use the term feed the beast? How do you have the right throughput or IOPS to get the data close to that CPU or the GPU? The Power Systems have a unique bandwidth, so it's not like what you just find from a Comodo, the Intel servers. It's a much faster throughput, so it allows us to actually get data between the GPU CPU in storage or memory very fast. So you can get these deep learning times, and maybe you can share some of that. The learning times go up dramatically, so you get the insight. And then we're also putting layers on top which are IBM Cloud Private, is basically how do you have a hybrid cloud container-based service that allows you to move things seamlessly across and not have to wrestle with how to put all these things together either so it works seamlessly between a public cloud and private cloud? Then we have these toolsets, and I talked about this last time. It might not seem like storage or what you have in APU but we use the term PowerAI, is taking all these machine-learning tools because everyone always used open source. But we make them one more scale but also to ease your use. So how do you use a bunch of great GPUs and CPUs, great throughput, and how do you scale that? A lot of these tools were basically to be run on one CPU. So to be distributed, key research from IBM allows you to actually with PowerAI take the same TensorFlow workflows or dot dot dot and run it across a grid dramatically changing what you're doing from learning times. But anyway you can probably give more, I think, but it's a multiple layer. It's not one thing but it's not what you use for digital storage infrastructure, compute infrastructure for normal workloads. It is custom so you can't... A lot of people try to deploy maybe their NAS storage box and maybe it's flash and try to deploy it. And you can get going that way but then you hit a wall real quick. This is purposely built for AI. >> So Beth Smith was on earlier. She threw out a stat. She said that 85% of their, based on some research, I'm not sure if it was IBM or Forrest or Gartner, said 85% of customers they talked to said AI will be a competitive advantage but only 20% can use it today at scale. So obviously scale is a big challenge, and I want to ask you to comment on another potential challenge. We always talk about elastic infrastructure. You scale up, scale down, or end of month, okay. We sometimes use this concept of plastic infrastructure. Basically plastic maintains its shape because these workloads are so diverse. I don't want to have to rip down my infrastructure and bring in a new one every time my workload changes. So I wonder if you can talk about the sort of requirements from your perspective both in terms of scale and in terms of adaptability to changing workloads. >> Well, I think one of the things that Ed brought up that's really, really important is these open-source frameworks assume that it's running on a single system. They assume that storage is actually local, and that's really the only way that you get really effective throughput from it, is if it's local. So extending it via PowerAI, via these appliances and so forth means that you can use petabytes of storage at a distance and still have good throughput and not have those GP utilization coming down because these are very expensive devices. So if the storage is the blocker, is their controller and he's limiting that flow of data then ultimately you're not making the most effective use of those very expensive computational mediums. But more importantly it means that your time from ideation to product is slowed down, so you're not able to get those business outcomes. That means your competitor could get those business outcomes if they don't have it. And for me what's really important is I mentioned this briefly earlier, is that I need those specialists to touch as much of the data or as much as those enterprise use cases as possible. At the end of the year it's not about touching three use cases. It's the touching three this year, five, ten, more and more and more. And with the infrastructure being storage and computation, all of that is key attributes to kind of seeing that goal. >> Without having to rip that down and then repurpose building it every time. >> Steven: Yeah. >> And just being able to deal with the grid as a grid and you can place workloads across a grid. >> 100%. >> That's our Spectrum compute products that we've been doing for all the major banks in the world to do that and take these workloads and place them across a grid is also a key piece of this. So we always talk about the infrastructures being hey, Ed, that's not storage or infrastructure. No, you need that. And that's why it's part of my portfolio to actually build out the overall infrastructure for people to build on prim but also talk about everything we did with you on prim is hybrid. It's goes to the Cloud natively because some workloads we believe will be on the Cloud for good reasons, and you need to have that part of it. So everything we're going with you is hybrid cloud today, not in the future, today. >> No, 100%, and that's one of the requirements in our organization that we call A-1 architecture. If we write it for our own prim we have to be able to run it on the Cloud and it has to have the same look and feel and painted glass and things like that as well. So it means we only have to write it once, so we're incredibly efficient because we don't have to write it multiple times for different types of infrastructure. Likewise we have expectations from the data scientists that the performance all still have to be up to par as well. We want to really be moving the computation directly to where the data resides and we know that it's not just on prim, it's not in the Cloud, it's a hybrid scenario. >> So don't hate me for asking you this, Ed, but you've only been here for a couple years. Did you just stumble into this? You got this vast portfolio, you got this tooling, you got cloud. You got a part of your organization saying we got to do on prim. The other part's saying we got to do public. Or was this designed to the workload? Was kind of a little bit of both? >> Well, I think luck is good, but it's a embarrassment of riches inside IBM between our primary research, some of the things we were just talking about. How do you run these frameworks in a distributed fashion and not designed that way and do it performing at scale? That's our primary, that's research. That's not even in my group. What we're doing is for workload management. That's in storage, but we have these toolsets. The key thing is work with the clients to figure out what they're trying to do. Everyone's trying to be data-driven, so as we looked at what you need to do to be truly data-driven, it's not just having faster storage although that's important. It's not about the throughput or having to scale up. It's not about having just the CPUs. It's not just about having the open frameworks, but it's how to put that all together that we're invisible. In fact you said it earlier. He doesn't want his users to know at all what's underneath. He just wants to run their workload. You have people from my organization because I'm one of your customers. You're my customer but we go to you and say, "We're trying to use your platform "for a 360 view of the client," and our not data scientists, not data engineers, but ops team can use his platform. So anyway, so I actually think it's because IBM has its broad portfolio that we can bring together. And when IBM shows up which we're showing up in AI together in the Cloud, that's when you see something that we can truly do that you can't get from other organizations. And it's because of the technology differentiation we have from the different groups, but also the industry contacts that we bring. >> 100%. >> And also when you're dealing with data it is the trust. We can engage the clients at a high level and help them because we're not a single-product company. We might be more complex, but when we show up and bring the solution set we can really differentiate. And I think that's when IBM shows up. It's pretty powerful. >> And I think it's moved from "trust me" as well to "show me," and we're able to show it now because we're eating what we're producing. So we're showing. They called it a blueprint. We're using that effectively inside the organization. >> So now that you've sort of built this out internally you spend a lot of time with clients kind of showing them or...? >> Probably 15% of my time. >> So not that much. >> No, no, because I'm in charge of internal transformation operations. They're expecting outcomes from us. But at the same time there's clients that are in the exact same boat. The realization that this is really interesting. There's a lot of noise, a lot of interesting stuff in AI out there from Google, from Facebook, from Amazon, from all, Microsoft, but image recognition isn't important to me. How do I do it for my own organization? I have legacy data from 50 years. This is totally different, and there's no Git repo that I can go to and download them all and use it. It's totally custom, and how do I handle that? So it's different for these guys. >> What's on your wishlist? What's on Ed's to do list? >> Oh geez, uh... I want it so simple for my data scientists that they don't have to worry about where the data's coming from. Whether it be a traditional relational database or an object store, I want it to feed that data effectively and I don't want to have to have them looking into where the data is to make sure the computation's there. I want it just to flow effortlessly. That's really the wishlist. Likewise, I think if we had new accelerators in general outside the box, not something from the traditional GPU viewpoint, maybe data flow or something in new avant-garde-type stuff, that would be interesting because I think it might open up a new train of thought in the area just like GPUs did for us. >> Great story. >> Yeah I know, I think it's... So we're talking about AI for business, and I think what you're seeing is we're trying to showcase what IBM's doing to be really an AI business. And what we've done in this platform is really a showcase. So we're trying to be as transparent as possible not because it's the only way to do it but it's a good example of how a very complex business is using AI to get dramatically better and everyone's using the same kind of platform. >> Well, we learned, we effectively learned being open is much better than being closed. Look at the AI community. Because of its openness that's where we're at right now. And following the same lead we're doing the same thing, and that's why we're making everything available. You can see it and we're doing it, and we're happy to talk to you about it. >> Awesome, all right, so Steven, you stay here. >> Yeah. >> We're going to bring Sumit on and we're going to drill down into the cognitive platform. >> That's good. This guy, thanks for setting it up. I really, really appreciate it. >> Thank you very much. >> All right, good having you guys. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back at the IBM CDO Strategy Summit. You're watching theCUBE. 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(upbeat music) >> Live from San Francisco, California, it's theCUBE at VMWorld 2014. Brought to you by VMware, Cisco, EMC, HP, and Nutanix. (upbeat music) Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back, we're here live in San Francisco for VMWorld 2014, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. This is theCUBE. We expect to sue for the noise, get the tech athletes in from CEOs, entrepreneurs, startups, whoever we can get that has that signa. We have Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware here in the house. Pat, great to see you again, great keynote. >> Hey, thank you. >> You've been a great friend of theCUBE, five years now running, just want to put a plug in. >> Five years? Wow. >> I want to thank you for this amazing gift of pens we got from the VMware Opening Campus Day. Great pens, celebrating you guys opening up, officially, the Palo Alto campus, how's that going? What's happening with the campus? >> Well first, the campus opening was great, thank you for joining us there for it. It really is just a fabulous place. I mean, a beautiful campus, and we have the greatest employees, so we wanted to give them the greatest place to work. The campus has gone fabulous, we've opened up almost all the buildings now on campus. Just two more to build out, and we're hosting all sorts of wonderful people who want to come in and see the coolest place in Silicon Valley now. >> It's like China over there. New cranes going up, and putting new buildings up there. Are you guys done with construction there? What's happening? You guys are expanding like crazy. >> Two more buildings to go. >> (laughs) Two more buildings to go. >> Then we're done for a while, so (laughs) almost there, almost there. I got worried when there's so many cranes going around. Do I need all my employees to wear hardhats or something? It's like, no, we're soon done with that, and we can get everybody to work. >> Robin kicked off the keynote before you came on, she talked about staying the course, and use a computing hybrid cloud server to find data, so then you came out and laid out, essentially, the vision of this transformation that's happening. What's the state of your vision there? Expand on that keynote, and share with the folks who might not have caught it live. What was the crux of the presentation? 'Cause it had a lot of Pat Gelsinger vision, it felt like it's transformative. We've even had some guests on talking about commentary, the announcements. Are they playing defense, offense? You're not a defensive player. You're an offensive player. So talk about the offensive moves for VMware, and how that keynote struck a chord there. >> The first one really started with this phrase, "brave, new IT," and the nexus of that was all of our VMware faithful. The V admins, the people who've been using this. They are becoming critically important to the businesses that they serve going forward because not only is it about them doing their job, but with SDDC, Hybrid Cloud, end-user computing, it's them redefining the entire infrastructure for the business. And when the CEO looks down, across his leadership team, who's the most competent person there to navigate through all of these IT trends that are merging to, necessarily, redefine their businesses? And we call this liquid business that's changing. So very quickly, we're seeing that businesses redefine themselves from education, to government, to transportation. Uber, today, not owning any assets, has a market cap equal to that of Hertz and Avis combined. We're just seeing these things emerge so quickly. And who's the smartest guy in technology in the room? The IT guy. Out of that, we laid out, obviously, our continuing progression with the Software-Defined Data Center, updates on major projects, bringing those components together in a big way. One of our first, and I think, most significant announcements today, was a lot of the choice announcements. We are adding an OpenStack distribution, so if you're a vCloud user, I'm going to have the programmatic ability of infrastructure through the OpenStack API's, you now get it with VMware. We also announced an embrace of containers. Containers, this 20-year overnight success where all of a sudden, lots of discussions around containers, and how can I use containers as a new app delivery model? Well, the best way to deliver apps for an enterprise, on top of the VMware infrastructure. So we announced a relationship with Google and Kubernetes, with Docker, one of the leaders in that space early, and how we're going to make them containers without compromise in the data center for enterprise customers. >> On the container piece, last year, we asked you, here, on theCUBE, about Docker and containers. You were like, oh, containers have been around for a while. What made you go, hey, this Docker thing's got legs? Was it the community thing? Part of the Open Source tie-in? Was it the interoperability? Containers is not a new concept, as you had pointed out, but what's changed for you and VMware over the past year to make that happen? >> And it still is very early. Let's be clear, John, that we're very much in this early, nascent phase, right in the hype cycle curve, you know. We're way up, we're probably going to go through the valley of despair in this technology, but very quickly, there's a broad set of these third gen developers that are saying containers is a cool way for me to package, deliver, and manage app deployment over time. We're saying if that is how people want to be able to deliver apps, then we, the preferred infrastructure for delivering apps, we're going to embrace and enable that, as well. So very quickly, it came together, and we engaged with Docker and Google as partners, and they said absolutely, we want to partner with you in this space, so all of the pieces just snapped together overnight. We've been working with them, making meaningful contributions in the space. >> That's a DevOps ethos, right? That's basically a cloud, right? >> DevOps is a funny term. It's funny, I had a bunch of my guys at the DevOps conference here, you know who was there? It was all IT guys, not developers. It's really a progression of developers to DevOps into IT, and we really say that DevOps is where developers and IT come together. We really are trying to enable DevOps to satisfy the business guys. In fact, go back to my brave theme. You're seeing Shadow IT, and developer, and line-of-business go around IT, and IT is now being through announcements, like today, armed with the tools to go to developers and say, oh no, I'm your friend. >> Step out of the shadows. >> I'm going to enable you with the coolest, most efficient infrastructure, and I'm still going to have it secure and managed, as well. You don't need to be running in these environments that we can't scale, manage, and secure. Your apps, now, can operate in an enterprise-worthy way. >> That right once run anywhere concept is very powerful, is the premise, if I understand it correctly, that you'll bring that enterprise capability, the security, and other management capabilities to that concept? >> Yeah, the VM doesn't change. We're adding Docker on top of the VM, and enabling it with some cool, new technologies, like I mentioned, Project Fargo, that actually make that delivery of the container on the VM more efficient and lighter-weight, than a bare, metal, Linux implementation of Docker. That's really powerful, it's really cool that we can do that, and we have some cool technologies that we're showing off that enable that, and will be part of our next major vSphere release. >> So you touched that base, you touched the OpenStack, you got some action going on there, and sort of, embracing, OpenStack. More developers in OpenStack. VMware has a touch act to follow when you think about the whole where we've come from. It seems so simple now. Servers underutilized, you had a 10x disruptive factor. Now, you've got to do it again. I remember Moretz used to talk about this deeper business integration. He'd talk about it like this was grand vision, but you actually, now, have been executing on that. Is that where the next wave comes from? That deeper business integration? You talked about transforming infrastructure, so how do you do it again? Is it a cost reduction, is it a business integration, is it, as you say, transforming that infrastructure? What does that mean to the customer from an operational standpoint? >> If you're the IT guy, do you want to spend a lot of your time worrying about the infrastructure? Actually, what you want to do, is have this programmable, scalable, flexible infrastructure that enables you to go worry about the business problems, which are in the apps. Because you want the IT guy spending all of his time, and most people say, how can I do new application services? How can I enable new business models, et cetera. So he wants this flexible, programmable, secure, managed infrastructure, and he wants to worry less and less about it. E.g., it needs to become more automated, more efficient, more scalable. And we walk into that discussion, say, you know, we've earned the right, CIO, because we've demonstrated more value, more efficiency, more quality of software, and we now have 80 percent of the world's applications running on top of the software that we do enlist for you. We've earned the right to show that we can do that for the full data center. To be able to do that both on and off premise, in a reliable, scalable, managed, and secure fashion, so that we enable you, Mr. IT, to go deliver the environment for the developer. To deliver the environment on or off premise, to secure all those next generation devices and applications, as well. And that's what we're off to do for you, and we deserve a seat at your table to help you do that. >> The Federation helps you with that seat, although, you guys got a pretty big role in the Federation. >> Yeah, yeah, we do. >> I wanted to ask you about the financial analyst meeting, did you get a lot of questions about that? About the whole spin-out thing, and how was that addressed? >> Actually, surprisingly-- >> Didn't come up? >> Not a question. >> 'Cause it's already come up. >> We've talked about it before. Largely, EMC is addressing those things. We've been very proactive in our position. We think the Federation is the right model. It's working, it's delivering value, we're quite committed to it, and we're showing quite a number of cases where we're adding value, as a result of it this week. We announced EMC as one of our EVO:RAIL partners. We announced the ViPR-based object service for the vCloud Air service, that we announced this week. Announcing new solutions that we're doing with them, so lots of different areas that we're just demonstrating the value that comes from the Federation. >> Well, we know Joe a little bit, we know that's not going to happen anytime soon. So what kinds of things did come up? Were they nitty gritty things around enterprise license agreements, 2015 guidance, share with us what you guys-- >> Lots of questions around 2015. >> And you guys shared a little bit more, maybe, than in the last-- >> We gave them framework to go look at 2015, lots of questions about the strategies that we've laid out. How well this NSX thing play out? How rapidly is that going to grow? vSAN, how rapidly are you seeing that grow, as well? vCloud Air, how are you going to win in that business, and do it in a margined, effective way for VMware? And how does this vCloud Air network partnership work? Based on that, how should we look at your growth profile going forward, with your traditional business, as well as these new business areas, and what's that going to look like over 15 and beyond? So those are sort of the nature of the questions. >> The Air piece is interesting to John and me because we've been trying to parse through, on a long-term basis, you guys are software everything, you talked about that, at quite some length, and the business model's great. Marginal economics, go to zero. You see some of that happening with the public cloud. The traditional outsourcing is starting to fall, that software marginal economics line. My question relates specifically to how your, whatever it is, 4,000 partners, can you replicate that kind of marginal economics at volume, or is it more of a high touch belly-to-belly model? >> We definitely are viewing this as the potential for a very scalable model, working with service providers who invest substantial capital, who have data centers, who have networks, have unique, governed assets in their own countries that they participate in, as well. We're building the stack, being prescriptive in the hardware, building the software layer that we need to go with it, so that we can operationalize the seven by 24 service that scales, and do so with this hybrid model. Not be over here in the race to the bottom, with Amazon's and Google's, we're over here focused on enterprise customers to deliver value of how these things work across the boundary of on and off premise, the Hybrid Cloud, and enable which enterprise-class services on top of the platform. We're going to do so with what we do, we're going to leverage partnerships, like Savvis, CenturyLink, like the SoftBank partnership, and we're going to enable those 3,900 partners with additional service offerings, as well. It's a very effective business model. >> But you will build out your own data centers, or... >> No, we're not building our own concrete, air conditioning, and networks, we're doing Colo for the core vCloud Air offerings for those, but we're enabling our partners to do that, as well. Here are the recipes, you go build it, and operate it, as well. >> So that's a technology transfer, IP transfer? >> For that, we get a recurring revenue stream as they go run our software in their data centers and services. The combination of the two, we think, gives us a very effective business model for the future. >> Pat, last year, I asked you about the, you announced the Hybrid Cloud, all in. I made a comment, kind of off the cuff, that's a halfway house, got you agitated. Halfway house? (laughs) And you said no, it's the final destination. I took a lot of heat for that, I fall on my sword, I'll eat my own words there, but it turns out absolutely correct, right? That's absolutely the destination. That is the number one conversation, it's Hybrid Cloud, certainly on-prem, off-premise, new economics, value creation. I got to ask you, and the question from Twitter has come in, along the same lines, is ask Pat about moving up the Stack. And I also want to hear about the end-user piece, but inside the Hybrid Cloud destination, what is the VMware vision of moving up the Stack mean, and what does that mean to you? >> Anybody who lays out a strategy, to me, it's more important to answer what you're not doing, than what you are doing. For us, we're not doing hardware, making that clear, we're enabling hardware partners. We're not doing consumer, we're focused on the enterprise customer, and we're not doing apps. We are enabling more services, enterprise services, like DR-as-a-Service, Desktop-as-a-Service, but we're not going into the app space. That's the line that we're trying to draw. Everything that's an enterprise-class service, where people need enterprise capabilities, an identity, a DR, storage capabilities, things that really are common services for apps to utilize, that's what we're doing, but that's as far north, or far up the Stack that we'll go. >> I asked Steve Herod on our Crowd Chat pregame on Friday, what the hot opportunities are for startups, he said security, or mainly, not getting caught at this perimeter-base security. What's your view on that? >> The hard, crusty exterior, and the soft, gooey inside is how I described it this morning. My morning breakfast everyday, and with it, this whole idea of micro-segmentation, NSX, really redefines how you build networks, and that's going to allow us to re-factor every aspect of security, every aspect of routing, and load balancing, et cetera. We announced the five partnership. The Palo Alto Networks partnership is really enabling us to execute on the micro-segmentation use case. It's transformational about how services and networks are operated inside of data centers, and we have the poll position here with the NSX platform. >> One of the most common question we're getting from the crowd, is when are you going to get a Twitter handle? (groans) (laughs) >> I've never been a good social guy. (talking over each other) >> We'll show you the engagement container-- >> Thank you, you can help me out with that. That'll be good, thanks. I appreciate it. (laughs) >> On end-user computing, let's go to the part because Sanjay is onboard, the acquisition, give us the update, what's coming through that? >> What a team. Sanjay has been a great leader, we brought together a great leadership team, Sumit and John Marshall. Their passionate and aggressive in that space. The combination of the new assets, the AirWatch team, Revitalization of Horizon, DaaS as a service on the platform, we just announced Cloud Volumes. It's a very cool, dynamic app capability, so overall, really coming together. Momentum increasing in the marketplace, Sanjay's done a really fine job at driving us in that area. What a difference a year makes. >> Pat, I wish we had 34 minutes, which was your record on theCUBE-- >> We're just getting started, John. (laughter drowns out speaker) >> We appreciate your time, but I want to give you the final word, and we talked about this briefly earlier, everyone always wants to ask, is this a defensive move, what's the strategy? I've never seen you as a defensive player. In all the interviews we've done, knowing your history, you're an offensive player. You talked about, years ago, get out in front of that next wave, or you'll be driftwood. I don't see that defensive. What is the VMware offense? If you could describe the offense for VMware, as a company. And answer the question, offense, defense? Are you making defensive moves, or am I off-base by categorizing it offense? >> I think we're absolutely playing offense. If you think about it, we're transforming networking, we're transforming the entire data center operation, we're delivering the first, truly hybrid cloud, enabling secure, managed environments on those devices. Unquestionably, overall, we are playing offense. Now, some things I think we should've done sooner. We should've been in the public cloud space earlier, and we're having to catch up in that space. The moves that we've taken in OpenStack, I think they're pretty well-timed. The moves that we're taking in containers, I think we are way ahead of anybody else, in terms of delivering enterprise container environments, in that respect. >> M&A activity looking good right now? (laughs) >> I just announced one last week, I got more in the pipeline, we're never finished. Organic innovation, inorganic innovation, we're playing both, and we're absolutely playing offense 'cause here, we're playing to win because our customers want the very disruptive nature of the products that we deliver with the quality, the brand of VMware. That's what they want from us. >> And more open source is part of that playbook? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Seeing that grow? >> Absolutely, we will use open source every place that we can to accelerate the offerings that we bring to our customers. We don't mind fundamentally changing our business model, but we can add open source components to it, and we will, and today's OpenStack announcement is a great demonstration of that. >> Pat, put the bumper sticker on this to end the segment. What's the bumper sticker say for this year's VMWorld? What's on the bumper right now? What's it say for VMWorld-- >> Enabling brave, new IT. >> Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware here, inside theCUBE. Always great to have him. Our fifth year, we love having him on. Great tech athlete. This is theCUBE, be right back after a short break. (dull dinging)