>> Live, from Las Vegas! It's theCube! Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone, it's theCube's live coverage in Las Vegas for VMworld 2018, it's theCube. We got two sets, 24 interviews per day, 94 interviews total. Next three days, we're in day two of three days coverage. It's our ninth year of covering VMworld. It's been great. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, next guest, Cube alumni, number one in the leading boards right now, Sanjay Poonen did a great job today on stage, keynote COO for VMware. Great to have you back. Thanks for coming on. >> John and Dave, you're always so kind to me, but I didn't realize you've been doing this nine years. >> This is our ninth year. >> That's half the life of VMware, awesome. Unreal. Congratulations. >> We know all the stories, all the hidden, nevermind, let's talk about your special day today. You had a really, so far, an amazing day, you were headlining the key note with a very special guest, and you did a great job. I want you to tell the story, who was on, what was the story about, how did this come about? Tech for good, a big theme in this conference has really been getting a lot of praise and a lot of great feedback. Take us through what happened today. >> Well listen, I think what we've been trying to do at VMware is really elevate our story and our vision. Elevate our partnerships, you've covered a lot of the narrative of what we've done with Andy Jessie. We felt this year, we usually have two 90 minute sessions, Day One, Day Two, and it's filled with content. We're technical company, product. We figured why don't we take 45 minutes out of the 180 minutes total and inspire people. With somebody who's had an impact on the world. And when we brainstormed, we had a lot of names suggested, I think there was a list of 10 or 15 and Malala stood out, she never spoke at a tech conference before. I loved her story, and we're all about education. The roots of VMware were at Stamford Campus. Diane Greene, and all of that story. You think about 130 million girls who don't go to school. We want to see more diversity in inclusion, and she'd never spoken so I was like, you know what, usually you go to these tech conferences and you've heard somebody who's spoken before. I'm like, lets invite her and see if she would come for the first time, and we didn't think she would. And we were able to score that, and I was still a little skeptical 'cause you never know is it going to work out or not. So thank you for saying it worked, I think we got a lot of good feedback. >> Well, in your first line, she was so endearing. You asked her what you thought a tech conference, you said too many acronyms. She just cracked the place up immediately. >> And then you heard my response, right? If somebody tells me like that, you tell VMotion wrong she looked at me what? >> Tell them about our story, real quick, our story I want to ask you a point in question. Her story, why her, and what motivated you to get her? >> Those stories, for any of you viewers, you should read the book "I'm Malala" but I'll give you the short version of the story. She was a nine year old in the Pashtun Area of the Swat Valley in Pakistan, and the Taliban setted a edict that girls could not go to school. Your rightful place was whatever, stay at home and become a mom with babies or whatever have you. You cannot go to school. And her father ran a school, Moster Yousafzai, wonderful man himself, an educator, a grandfather, and says know what, we're going to send you to school. Violating this order, and they gave a warning after warning and finally someone shot her in 2012, almost killed her. The bullet kind of came to her head, went down, and miraculously she escaped. Got on a sort of a hospital on a plane, was flown to London, and the world if you remember 2012, the world was following the story. She comes out of this and she's unscathed. She looks normal, she has a little bit of a thing on the right side of her face but her brains normal, everything's normal. Two years later she wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Has started the Malala Fund, and she is a force of nature, an amazing person. Tim Cook has been doing a lot with her in the Malala Fund. I think that actually caught my attention when Tim Cook was working with her, and you know whatever Apple does often gets a little bit of attention. >> Well great job selecting her. How's that relevant to what you guys are doing now, because you guys had a main theme Tech for Good? Why now, why VMware? A lot of people are looking at this, inspired by it. >> There are milestones in companies histories. We're at our 20 year birthday, and I'm sure at people's birthday they want to do big things, right? 20, 30, 40, 50, these decades are big ones and we thought, lets make this year a year to remember in various things we do. We had a 20 year anniversary celebration on campus, we invited Diane Greene back. It was a beautiful moment internally at Vmware during one of our employee meetings. It was a private moment, but just with her to thank her. And man, there were people emotional almost in tears saying thank you for starting this company. A way to give back to us, same way here. What better way to talk about the impact we're having in the community than have someone who is of this reputation. >> Well we're behind your mission 100%, anything you need. We loved the message, Tech for Good, people want to work for a mission driven company. People want to buy >> We hope so. >> from mission driven companies, that stated clear and the leadership you guys are providing is phenomenal. >> We had some rankings that came out around the same time. Fortune ranked companies who are changing the world, and VMware was ranked 17th overall, of all companies in the world and number one in the software category. So when you're trying to change the world, hopefully as you pointed out it's also an attractor of talent. You want to come here, and maybe even attractor of customers and partners. >> You know the other take-away was from the key note was how many Cricket fans there are in the VMworld Community. Of course we have a lot of folks from India, in our world but who's your favorite Cricketer? Was it Sachin Tendulkar? (laughs) >> Clearly you're reading off your notes Dave! >> Our Sonya's like our, >> Dead giveaway! >> Our Sonya's like our Cricket Geek and she's like, ask him about Sachin, no who's your favorite Cricketer, she wants to know. >> Sachin Tendulkar's way up there, Shayuda Free, the person she likes from Pakistan. I grew up playing cricket, listen I love all sports now that I'm here in this country I love football, I love basketball, I like baseball. So I'll watch all of them, but you know you kind of have those childhood memories. >> Sure >> And the childhood memories were like she talk about, India, Pakistan games. I mean this was like, L.A. Dodgers playing Giants or Red Socks, Yankee's, or Dallas Cowboys and the 49ers, or in Germany playing England or Brazil in the World Cup. Whatever your favorite country or team rivalry is, India Pakistan was all there more, but imagine like a billion people watching it. >> Yeah, well it was a nice touch on stage, and I'd say Ted Williams is my favorite cricketer, oh he plays baseball, he's a Red Sock's Player. Alright Sanjay, just cause your in the hot seat, lets get down to business here. Great moment on stage, congratulation. Okay Pat Gelsinger yesterday on the key note talked about the bridges, VMware bridging, connecting computers. One of the highlights is kind of in your wheelhouse, it's in your wheelhouse, the BYOD, Bring Your Own Device bridge. You're a big part of that. Making that work on on the mobile side. Now with Cloud this new bridge, how is that go forward because you still got to have all those table stakes, so with this new bridge of VMware's in this modern era, cloud and multicloud. Cluely validated, Andy Jassy, on stage. Doing something that Amazon's never done before, doing something on premise with VMware, is a huge deal. I mean we think it's a massive deal, we think it's super important, you guys are super committed to the relationship on premises hybrid cloud, multicloud, is validated as far as we're concerned. It's a done deal. Now ball's in your court, how are you going to bring all that mobile together, security, work space one, what's your plan? >> I would say that, listen on as I described in my story today there's two parts to the VMware story. There's a cloud foundation part which is the move the data center to the cloud in that bridge, and then there's the desk job move it to the mobile. Very briefly, yes three years of my five years were in that business, I'm deeply passionate about it. Much of my team now that I put in place there, Noah and Shankar are doing incredible jobs. We're very excited, and the opportunity's huge. I said at my key note of the seven billion people that live in the world, a billion I estimate, work for some company small or big and all of them have a phone. Likely many of those billion have a phone and a laptop, like you guys have here, right? That real estate of a billion in a half, maybe two billion devices, laptops and phones, maybe in some cases laptop, phone, and tablets. Someone's going to manage and secure, and their diverse across Apple, Google, big option for us. We're just getting started, and we're already the leader. In the data center, the cloud world, Pat, myself, Raghu, really as we sat three years ago felt like we shouldn't be a public cloud ourselves. We divested vCloud Air, as I've talked to you on your show before, Andy Jassy is a friend, dear friend and a classmate of mine from Harvard Business School. We began those discussions the three of us. Pat, Raghu, and myself with Andy and his team and as every quarter and year has gone on they become deeper and deep partnerships. Andy has told other companies that VMware Amazon is the model partnership Amazon has, as they describe who they would like to do business more with. So we're proud when they do that, when we see that happen. And we want to continue that. So when Amazon came to us and said listen I think there's an opportunity to take some of our stack and put it on premise. We kept that confidential cause we didn't want it to leak out to the world, and we said we're going to try'n annouce it at either VMworld or re:Invent. And we were successful. A part with these projects is they inevitably leak. We're really glad no press person sniffed it out. There was a lot of speculation. >> Couldn't get confirmation. >> There was a lot of speculation but no one sniffed it out and wrote a story about it, we were able to have that iPhone moment today, I'm sorry, yesterday when we unveiled it. And it's a big deal because RDS is a fast growing business for them. RDS landing on premise, they could try to do on their own but what better infrastructure to land it on than VMware. In some cases would be VMware running on VxRail which benefits Dell, our hardware partners. And we'll continue doing more, and more, and more as customers desire, so I'm excited about it. >> Andy doesn't do deals, as you know Andy well as we do. He's customer driven. Tell me about the customer demand on this because it's something we're trying to get reporting on. Obviously it makes sense, technically the way it's working. You guys and Andy, they just don't do deals out of the blue. There's customer drivers here, what are those drivers? >> Yeah, we're both listening to our customers and perhaps three, four, five years ago they were very focused on student body left, everybody goes public cloud. Like forget your on premise, evaporate, obliterate your data centers and just go completely public. That was their message. >> True, sweep the floor. >> Right, if you went to first re:Invent I was there on stage with them as an SAP employee, that's what I heard. I think you fast forward to 2014, 2015 they're beginning to realize, hey listen it's not as easy. Refactoring your apps, migrating those apps, what if we could bring the best of private cloud and public cloud together enter VMware and Amazon. He may have felt it was harder to have those cultivations of VMware or for all kinds of reasons, like we had vCloud Air and so on and so forth but once we divested that decision culminations had matured between us that door opened. And as that door opened, more culminations began. Jointly between us and with customers. We feel that there are customers who want many of those past type of services of premise. Cause you're building great things, relational database technology, AI, VI maybe. IoT type of technologies if they are landing on premise in an edge-computing kind of world, why not land on VMware because we're the king of the private cloud. We're very happy to those, we progress those discussion. I think in infrastructure software VMware and Amazon have some of the best engineers on the planet. Sometimes we've engineers who've gone between both companies. So we were able to put our engineering team's together. This is a joint engineering effort. Andy and us often talk about the fact that great innovation's built when it's not just Barny go to Marketing and Marketing press releases this. The true joint engineering at a deep level. That's what happened the last several months. >> Well I can tell you right now the commitment I've seen from an executive level and deep technology, both sides are deep and committed to this. It's go big or go home, at least from our perspective. Question I want to ask you Sanjay is you're close to the customer's of VMware. What's the growth strategy? If you zoom out, look down on stage and you got vSAN, NSX at the core, >> vSANjay (laughs) >> How can you not like a product that has my name on it? >> So you got all these things, where's the growth going to come from, the merging side, is the v going to be the stable crown jewels at NSX? How do you guys see the growth, where's it going to come from? >> Just kind of look at our last quarter. I mean if you peel back the narrative, John and Dave, two years ago we were growing single digits. Like low single digits. Two, three percent. That was, maybe the legacy loser description of VMware was the narrative everyone was talking about >> License revenue was flattish right? >> And then now all of sudden we're double digits. 12, 15 sort of in that range for both product revenue. It's harder to grow faster when you're bigger, and what's happened is that we stabilize compute with vSphere in that part and it's actually been growing a little bit because I think people in the VMware cloud provider part of our business, and the halo effect of the cloud meant that as they refresh the servers they were buying more research. That's good. The management business has started to grow again. Some cases double digits, but at least sort of single digits. NSX, the last few order grew like 30, 40%. vSAN last year was growing 100% off a smaller base, this year going 60, 70%. EUC has been growing double digits, taking a lot of share from company's like Citrix and MobileIron and others. And now, also still growing double digits at much bigger paces, and some of those businesses are well over a billion. Compute, management, end-user computing. We talked about NSX on our queue forming called being a 1.4 billion. So when you get businesses to scale, about a billion dollar type businesses and their sort of four, training five that are in that area, and they all get to grow faster than the market. That's the key, you got to get them going fast. That's how you get growth. So we focus on those on those top five businesses and then add a few more. Like VMware Cloud on AWS, right now our goal is customer logo count. Revenue will come but we talked on our earnings call about a few hundred customers of VMware Cloud and AWS. As that gets into the thousands, and there's absolutely that option, why? Because there's 500,000 customers of VMware and two million customers of Amazon, so there's got to be a lot of commonality between those two to get a few thousand. Then we'll start caring about revenue there too, but once you have logos, you have references. Containers, I'd like to see PKS have a few hundred customers and then, we put one on stage today. National Commercial Bank of Jamaica. Fantastic story of PKS. I even got my PKS socks for this interview. (John laughs) >> So that give you a sense as to how we think, there will be four, five that our businesses had scale and then a few are starting to get there, and they become business to scale. The nature of software is we'll always be doing this show because there will be new businesses to talk about. >> Yeah, hardware is easy. Software is hard, as Andy Patchenstien said on theCUBE yesterday. Congratulations Sanjay and all the success, you guys are doing great financially. Products looking really good coming out, the bloom is rising from the fruit you guys have harvested, coming together. >> John if I can say one last thing, I shared a picture of a plane today and I put two engines behind it. There's something I've learned over the last years about focus of a company, and I joked about different ways that my name's are pronounced but at the core of me there's a DNA. I said on stage I'd rather not be known as smart or stupid but having a big heart. VMware, I hope is known by our customers as having these two engines. An engine of innovation, innovating product and a variety of other things. And focused on customer obsession. We do those, the plane will go a long way. >> And it's looking good you guys, we can say we've been to Radio Event, we've been doing a lot of great stuff. Congratulations on the initiative, and a great interview with you today on doing Tech for Good and sharing your story. Getting more exposure to the kind of narratives people want to hear. More women in tech, more girls in tech, more democratization. Congratulations and thanks so much for sharing. >> Thank you John and Dave. >> Appreciate you being here. >> Sanjay Poonen, COO of VMware. Friend of theCUBE, Cube Alumni, overall great guy. Big heart and competitive too, we know that from his Twitter stream. Follow Sanjay on Twitter. You'll have a great time. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, stay with us for more coverage from day two live, here in Las Vegas for VMware 2018. Stay with us. (tech music)