>> Narrator: From San Francisco, its theCUBE. Covering VMware Radio 2019. Brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome to theCUBE, from San Francisco at the VMware Radio 2019 Event. I am Lisa Martin with John Furrier, welcoming back one of our distinguished CUBE alumni, VMware CTO Ray O'Farrell. Ray, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you, very happy to be here. >> This is the fifteenth annual Radio R and D. >> Yes >> Innovation offsite. >> Correct. >> Really competitive there's about eighteen-hundred engineers here, Over a thousand different projects submitted. >> Yes. >> Only about 15 to 20 percent may be selected to be featured here. >> Correct. >> This is the third day or so, talk to us about some of the projects that really caught your attention as really innovative, that really kind of embody the VMware culture of innovation. >> Okay, so the event is an internal event, and, so, but are treated very much in the same way as you would, you know, a more formal, people submitting papers, being peer reviewed and then as you say. A small number of them make it through to the poster sessions or the presentations here. If you look at the broad swat that come in initially, they are very broad, covering everything from technologies that VMware has a lot of focus on whether that's kubernetes virtualization and so on, but also some that are, you know, for the field like virtual reality, augmented reality. You also get quite a few projects which are, fall into how can we be better as a company, So better ways of, if we developed our software using this technology or this approach we'd see better efficiency or ways of testing in new and interesting ways. And I also, for the first time, I think saw a few projects which were more around, less around the technology and more around ways of working together. How can we build teams that work better globally. There's quite a few poster sessions around here about even how to manage and increase the inclusiveness of your team, right? So you're seeing it beyond the technology and instead, how do we as a company become more successful. >> I think that Virtual first is an interesting dynamic, we call it Virtual first because no one has actually built technology for fully virtual teams. >> Yes. >> It's always been kind of collaboration bolted onto pre-existing on premise activity. >> Yeah yeah its a, so our R&D teams, as most R&D teams you're going to see these days are going to be pretty distributed, you are going to have people working from home, you're going to have people in remote sites, you're going to have many project teams, where the actual project itself, right down to the smallest team of ten to fifteen people may well be distributed, so what you got is very core pieces of code being done by teams who are acting remotely. Now, when you think about it, as we work with more and more open source, you're seeing the exact same thing and like the open source community has worked very well in terms of how do you run those projects and so we get to learn from that and we've actually created an office for open source, open source program office, and a lot of what we're trying to figure is how do we make sure to be able to build and leverage that innovation across multiple teams. >> Well Ray, we want to thank you because I know Ray has been around for a while but this is the second year where presses select presses. >> Correct. >> To be invited to get access to some of the projects so we really appreciate that. >> Great idea. >> As CTO of VMware you got to look at the landscape and just look at the organic innovation inside, bring the acquisitions in, and then bring it through to the company architecture. What's, Where's the intersection point on the organic to the CTO, architecture map because you got a lot of great business model going on now, the cloud's looking good. Cloud foundation, yet the Telco business booming, where is the action on the business side, where is this come in, where's the action happening? on the technical business side. >> Yeah on the technical side, what we're seeing is well you've mentioned two questions in there, one is about the innovation and what we will do, how do we fit acquisitions and so on into that mix, we have a fairly formal, I guess, innovation program if I could put it that way. Which basically focuses on what do we do to make sure that we have a really strong culture of innovation as the company, and this event is one of those things. It's not just a few days event, that lead up to it, the lead off from it and so on, that really is focus on make sure we have a culture of innovation in the company. We can create new products, new features as needed, from that. But we also recognize that some of those innovations are going to come from partnerships and from acquisitions, either from partnerships with an Open-source community or in the case of, you saw yesterday, we made an acquisition of a company, Bitnami, which is part of the broader story of us being focused on cloud native applications, what is the best way to be able to, you know, manage that new type of development, container based, kubernetes based and so on. So we're open to wherever that innovation comes from, In fact, that's one of the things I really like about the company. You know, we will look at all the possibilities. And sometimes, you know, as you saw with even some of the partnerships we struck in the last year, you got to be creative. >> So I got to ask you about 5G, one of the things that we're seeing is a lot of hype around 5G, I mean, I was in Vegas, they said 5G LTAE. (laughs) >> Yes. >> E 5GE evolution it wasn't even real 5G. So there's some skepticism, but certainly it's a catalyst. How is 5G impacting your business opportunity in the industry? >> So the Telco industry in general was not particularly virtualized if you go back you know, about two years or three years ago. So one of the key things as people as Telco's are building out, you know, to deal with the 5G infrastructure, there're also saying okay what do I need to build, do I use the way I used to do it? And more and more are saying hey, I should be able to use virtualization, why can I not leverage that same technology which revolutionized Cloud in the data center. So we're seeing some very good business in that space, much of it is what you call the Telco Core, the you know, core infrastructure before you get to the radio networks themselves, but we're also beginning to see even some of that beginning to move out to the radio networks. >> John: Virtualization or software, or both? >> Well virtualization even in fact, that MobileWorld Congress in February I guess, we did some demos of some pretty advanced technologies around network slicing where you're essentially beginning to virtualize the network all the way from the radio network back into the data center itself. >> And the Telco's are certainly from a business that already have been struggling for decades, trying to figure out what that over the top, what their business model could be, will this help them? >> Yeah, well any time, our experience is that anytime you turn something into a flexible software model within that agility within that flexibility you get to do a whole ton of advantages, because you're able to update, you're able to modify, so it's all around flexibility. And everybody talks about you know, how agile you need to be, well, virtualization software, moving into a more software defined model really helps with that. >> Let's talk about, back to Radio 2019, the R and D innovation offsite Radio. Let's talk about customers, how do customer influence projects say from last year to what some of the engineers put together, are these engineers that are having a lot of interactions with customers, what is that influence that customers deliver to VMware's culture of innovation? >> Yeah, it's rather interesting, with more and more we have customers who come to us and actually are asking the question, not necessarily about products, but about the culture of innovation, a question around how do they repeat that or can they learn something from us, and we learn from them too, but it's interesting that the question that has begin to come up more and more as these customers realize we must be agile, we must innovate or else someone is going to get them, from a competitive point of view. They're trying to understand what we do in that space, so that's one aspect of it. In terms of the projects, and what you see here, we do have our professional services organization here, we do have our customer support organization, we do have a lot of our CTO's, a lot of these projects come from offices of the CTO, they all spend a ton of time with customers. We also do make sure for the most part that we get our senior engineers to have an opportunity to go out and visit customers or when customers come on site, that we will have those discussions. So there's a lot of customer input into the mix, where you actually see it showing out or where you should see it begin to appearing more and more, there's a lot of projects here that are deeply systems projects. You'll also find a lot though around pretty basic customer satisfaction things, like user interfaces, ease of licensing all those types of things. So there's a good balance between the two. >> You know one of the things you guys are really doing well in the market place, obviously with the cloud decision with AWS that was a great message to both your field, customer base, how cloud is going to evolve, then cloud foundation, now you got the edge of the network developing, but the software defined data center NSX is doing well. As you start to get into the networking side because the pitch we heard at Dell technologies world was, don't look down, look up the stack. That's where kubernetes is and where the action is on the abstraction layer. There's still a lot of work to do with the networking and security piece of it. >> Correct. >> Where's the innovation angle there, what are the dots to connect on the networking and security side. >> I think probably the biggest focus is on security, almost every customer as they're becoming completely dependent on digital infrastructure just to get there work done. You know like, everything from a farmer to a hospital, they're all digital now, right? Security pops up over and over again. The key products we have in that space are things like, obviously NSX has a large security component to it, but also app defense and some of the projects we do there. So I think security is probably one of the key areas we see that focus. In some ways, what we're seeing is customers coming to us and saying, I want to be able to worry about my applications, can you somehow figure out how to make the IS and the virtualized infrastructure and the security as policy-driven, as automated as possible. And that's where we're focusing. >> You know, one of the things I see as a trend, obviously a student would love, any man would love to be also talking about is the hyper-converged HDI (mumbles) infrastructure really was a tell sign to what customers want, they want to converge everything into an abstraction. >> Correct. >> Into software model, Cloud's hyper-converging. Cloud's is also another. >> Correct. >> Multi-cloud kind of objective. So this notion of consolidating. >> Yeah. >> And kind of creating abstraction is a trend. >> It is, I actually think its really a decision by most customers to say where do I need to focus all of my bandwidth to be successful, and they're saying I want to focus on the layer which is specific to my company. The applications, my customer relations, please somebody help me with all the other stuff. And that's cloud hyper-converge infrastructure VMware. >> John: Do you feel you got like VMware's positioned well in that area? >> I do, I think that in the end, I think we have an interesting blend of what I sometimes use the word agnost or enterprise pragmatic innovation, we know you want to leverage the latest technologies, we know you want to be able to advance in those spaces, but we also know in the end, you know, you are a bank or a hospital, and you need to manage that transition in a fashion which allows you to keep your business going, I think we've been very good at helping companies do that-- >> If I took you on a sales call and I was say, a VMware sales rep or a competitor, obviously the competitors will try to counter what you guys are doing, as we know, we see Cisco out there and others where there's competition, this industry is evolving but you guys have an advantage, what is that pitch to the customer, why VMware over the competition, because they're certainly saying that they can do things better than you guys (mumbles) and vice versa. >> Yeah, I think there's a few advantages, one of them is our enterprise history, our enterprise readiness, some of our competitors obviously have that as well, but you know we are very very strong across all the global, the worlds global enterprises. The other part that you are going to see of course is in some ways we've got the ability to be a little bit of a Switzerland in many cases, our job is effectively to say abstract virtualize your infrastructure, make it easy to manage and optimize and we don't necessarily care what that infrastructure is, is it a public cloud, is it a private cloud, is it a hyper converge infrastructure. So we're able to offer that unified or essential kind of digital infrastructure that goes across all of those things. And within that you're giving choice and flexibility. If you want to move that work load because you think you'll get a better deal on a different cloud, we will help you to do that, or at least make that easier to do. >> Along the spirit of competitive advantage, besides innovation, which we talked about, this very rich history, twenty plus years of innovation at VMware. What are some of the other elements in your opinion that companies like VMware need to have, to be disruptors, couple that come to mind when I think of VMware are partnerships and diversity, what are some of those core elements that really are essential to drive disruption. >> So I often use the phrase which sounds maybe a little bit opposite to disruption, which is resilience, right? Is your company in a position to be able to take either blows from an economy, from competition, and so on. And actually take advantage of those in some ways. And the other part of that is leveraging that innovation as you're trying to say I want to be able to grow and be successful can I do so in a way which that innovation is, I use that word again, pragmatic it fits well with everything you do. I think VMware in my view has a very strong culture, which leads to that, and sometimes we use the phrase of VMware, as a bit of a why culture, people ask why all the time, right? So if I say we're going to do something with project X, some senior engineer is going to say why, now what's even more important, is that often becomes a why not, so you look at some of the partnerships we've done, some of these, where we get into those conversations and you know, the natural thing, well we're not going to partner there, but then somebody says why not, we could partner there, and after that you get some very interesting-- >> We can integrate this into theCUBE Q and A, so right, why block chain? >> Right. (John laughs) Yeah so, the key area where we look at block chain is what actually part has, made some comments on block chain around it being this key almost like the IP story for the future of financial services, right, IP networking so from networking point of view. So what we see is that this is essentially a foundation layer for applications to be built on, not just for financial services, but we see it also showing up more and more in things like supply chain. That's a hard problem, its a distributed problem, its a problem where you get a bunch of customers saying we want to operate as some sort of a group together but one wants to go on prem, the other wants to go on cloud. And that's what, where we've got a unique-- >> The IP metaphor is interesting, I mean, if you look at what IP networking did. >> This is pre-web, this is internet. >> Correct yeah. >> I mean what happened after that was just an amazing shift in our world. So you guys see block chain as a similar paradigm? >> We do see that, well we see, its a layer for which it's be, kind of somewhat ubiquitous layer that then you build these trust applications on top of, right. And so its almost like a platform layer at that stage. That's why when we look at it, its almost becoming kind of a software infrastructure story. >> Well, you know we'd love block chain. We (mumbles) time We're going to talk more in depth. >> You do I saw some of your stuff on block chain online. >> Yeah, great Thanks. >> Yeah. >> So I saw a tweet from you the other day, that of all these poster presentations behind us you were really trying, with all these stickers and things. How is you sticker collection coming along? >> It's coming pretty well, its kind of funny, what you're, me seeing here is a bunch of engineers who are really passionate about the thing they are presenting. So when I find someone and built little LEGO characters, there's little stickers that they build and so on all trying to push to some degree their passion about what they're doing, right? So yesterday I come in here at 7a.m, thought the place would be empty but there was actually a bunch of engineers here. But I was getting all these stickers, right, it was just surprising to me, wow, people put a lot of even artwork into these projects as they try and describe them. >> Well, and what I think about that is it shows creativity and its one of those, you might call it a softer skill, which I don't know why its called softer skills, but thats essential is, is the ability to express that creativity. And also some of the other skills like collaboration and learning how to present even better, which are also elements that the folks that attend Radio get to work on. >> Correct, many of the engineers who present here, this will be their first maybe or their second time presenting to a large group, now they are presenting in front of two thousand people, and in many cases, two thousand of their peers, who know exactly what technology they're talking about, so you can't just give some high-level, oh it might be better kind of thing. Someone will say, where will it be better, how fast will I be, and so on. So, we make sure that if any engineers are looking for training, or want to get some help to do those presentations, we spend quite a bit of time making sure they can get that because that's part of growing them as engineers and as future professionals or business leaders. >> Absolutely, well Ray thank you so much for joining John and me on theCUBE at Radio 2019, great to talk to you, and excited to hear some exciting things to come out of VMworld 2019 which is just around the corner. >> That's right just coming up, Thank you. >> Absolutely. For John Furrier I am Lisa Martin, you're watching theCUBE from VMware Radio 2019 from San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)