>>mm Welcome back to the huge covered cubes coverage of VM world 2021. The virtual edition tom gillis is back on the cube. He's in S. V. P at VM ware and the GM of network and advanced security at the company. Tom. Always a pleasure to see you. Thanks for coming on. >>Hey, thanks for having me. It's always a pleasure to be back here on the cube. I really enjoyed it. We've we've been, we've known each other for I don't want to count how many years but more than a few. Uh it's always an interesting conversation. >>We've had a lot of face to face interactions a couple years in a row were virtual. We'll be back together at some point. I'm >>calling. Yeah. Yeah. I'm actually on the road with customers. So it's starting to happen. >>Yeah, us too. We did uh we did public sector summit in D. C. This week. I'm heading out to Vegas next week for a show. So it is, it is starting to happen. So just a matter of time hey, >>when I start >>with with your your scope of responsibilities? Network and advanced security, you're kind of putting those two areas together. Very important. It makes sense synergistically. But how are you guys thinking about that? Maybe you could add some color. >>Yeah, sure thing. Um So network in advance security means all things security of Myanmar. So it's carbon black with our endpoint product, NsX in the data center. It's our tons of service mesh for cloud native applications to all the security stuff that goes into our anywhere workspace. Um and you know, I think you you probably get the message here dave at the end where there's three big waves that we're trying to ride. You know, multi cloud computing platform, which is our hallmark, is what we're known for running out across every cloud. It's the cloud native applications, building tools for new modern apps. And then really kind of the future of both networking and compute is being defined by this anywhere workspace. Our mission is to put security and connectivity into all of that. That makes it work. That makes it work well at scale. And so it made sense to put all that under one roof. Uh, I'm the guy and that's what we're doing. >>Yeah, you talk about that anywhere workspace, which, You know, it was always kind of a great vision and then it was somewhat aspirational, but then it became not only reality, but a mandate over the past 15, 18 months and that has that ripples through two implications on networking, even getting flatter and the security implications. So, all those things are coming together >>there really are. You know, I think we can't under estimate the profound impact that covid and the kind of work from home has had on our lives on society were still turning through what those implications are, but in networking it's cause for a fundamental rethink and for 20 years I've been doing networking and for 20 years we had this notion of a demarcation point networks defined as something that it was a DMZ, right? And, and on one side of that, TMZ was a dirty, untrusted internet, who would scary the other side is the clean, blissful corporate network where you know, only butterflies and unicorns exist and you know, wherever you were in the world, your traffic would be back hauled through that dems so that it could be scrubbed. And if you ever used tools like we're using now zoom, you know, you realize that that experience of back hauling traffic through traditional VPN is pretty simple. And so, so across the industry, enterprises are saying, you know what, there's got to be a different way instead of moving by traffic to the security services. What if I turn that upside down, That's what we're doing a VM ware, which we're taking those security services that we live in the DFc. We're doing what VM ware does well, which is defined them as software and then running them in hundreds of points of presence around the world. Hundreds. And so we effectively moved the security close to the users wherever the users are instead of the other way around. And that's the way we think we'll be building networks in a post pandemic world. >>Yeah. And that talks to the trend of this hyper decentralized system that's basically everywhere now, you know, even even out to the edge. And so, so you now have this, you know, zero trust used to be a buzzword and, and again, it's become this, this mandate. You guys actually did some, I think it was you who did some really interesting research post the solar winds hack on. Talking about things like island hopping and explaining how malware was getting in self forming and some of the insidious ways in which the, the adversaries and, and that is a function of a lot of things. The adversaries are obviously highly capable. Uh, they're motivated because it's lucrative and, and, and they keep upping the game on the good guys if you will. >>Yeah, it's nuts. But, and so so think about the impact that ransomware has had. Uh, and also to your point about the anywhere workspace. I'm right now in boston, I could, you know, tomorrow I'm going to be in texas and the day after that I'll be in san Francisco. So I'm popping all over the place, you know, we're back meeting customer's going wherever they want us to be. But wherever I am, I'm able to connect and, and my traffic needs to be protected. Now in boston it was a ransomware attack against the ferry. We're not talking about a bank or like a sophisticated, you know, sort of organization, it's a ferry that moves people from Cape Cod to an island across the water and it disrupted that ferry for days. So so at VM ware, we're measuring all the inner workings of what's happening in the data center and we collect more than eight trillion with a T eight trillion events per week and that allows us to be able to identify these anomalies like ransomware. And so just in the last 90 days we've stopped more than a million ransomware attacks. 1.1 million ransomware attacks that we stopped within six seconds, More than a million ransomware attacks in the last 90 days. To give you a sense of the magnitude of this problem it's everywhere. And you you reference Zero Trust. Zero Trust is a concept, it's a philosophy, is not a product by Zero Trust. You implement a Zero Trust model which says in a deep perimeter Rised world in a world where people like tom or hopscotch on all over the place and Dave's in boston and you know, I could be in san Francisco, we have to make the assumption that somehow some way, you know, our machine or a user has been compromised. And so you wrap each little piece of the infrastructure, each little piece of the application, you wrap it a protective armor to assume that everything around it is hostile and that's how we stop somewhere. That's how we can keep your infrastructure safe. And this is something you have and where does very uniquely because of the intrinsic attributes of our platform, our virtualization platform and our multi cloud platform. >>Yeah. You talk about the ferry anybody who's ever taken the ferry to Nantucket knows it's a pretty low tech operation and when that ferry goes down, it's one thing, it's, it's whether you can kind of understand that but people's lives get ruined, their vacations get ruined, they can't get off the island. Commerce comes to a grinding halt. It's extremely, extremely expensive really. >>For days, >>for days it was >>Like it wasn't a 20 minute outage. You know, it was like a fairy is not running for a couple things like that. That is a huge, huge, very high impact thing. And the fact that it was so pedestrian, like they don't have billions of dollars in the bank and you know, sort of super secret defense technologies, it's a ferry, you know, right, come on rental cars everywhere. So everywhere >>talk about your software approach two networking and security a little bit more. How that changes the experience for organizations generally, and developers specifically. >>So in a multi cloud world you can't always count on having physical infrastructure that you can touch. And in fact, do you really want to touch that stuff. And so our idea is that if you think about infrastructure, its job is to support the needs of the application. And so for example, in Kubernetes, we have the ability for developers say, look, here's my cool new application and this peace talks to this peace talks to this piece and nothing else. And so we can implement those types of controls using what we call a service smash, which allows us to, to make those connections smooth and seamless across clouds. Some of it could run on amazon, some of them could be running in a private cloud infrastructure. Some of them could be running in the traditional VM and in fact many complication applications do just that. So we can facilitate that communication back and forth and we have the ability to look for stuff that you just never happened because when you understand how an application is supposed to work, it allows you to spot, hey, wait a minute. That's not right. That's that, that's that, that don't like someone trying to manipulate the ferry system rather than somebody trying to board the ferry and get off. And I think, you know, there's a really interesting observation here, which is when you, when you, if you can see the inner workings of an application, like it looks for example, let's think about a mortgage payment application filed, a mortgage payment application and the Attackers has stolen a credential. They're going to get in. It's really hard to figure out a friend from foe. But once they get into mortgage payment application, I'm not going to pay my mortgage right? They do crazy anomalous things like wildly anomalous things. If you can see them, you can stop them and we have the unique ability to see them because we put the telemetry, the observation into our virtualization platform that runs on every cloud that runs wherever the user is. Right and pulling all that together into a central issue. That's something I think the N word to do uniquely and this is why we're having such success insecurity. >>I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about securing containers. You just sort of reference that but containers are moving target just a few short years ago, containers are ephemeral. You weren't you weren't gonna be running you know, your mission critical or business critical postgres in containers. But now that's changed. You're getting state. But so that's a moving target. How are you thinking about handling? You know, those kind of changes And what about the architecture allows you to be kind of future proof if you will. Sorry to use that >>word? No, no, it's a good question. So you've articulated right. So if you think about a traditional application, we used to always talk about three tiered web app, there's a web server is app server and the database a little more complicated than that. But you can usually go in and you could touch those three tiers. This box is the web tier. This box step here. This big box, is that it. And so security controls were built around this idea that you could you could wrap that relatively easily. We talk about a container based application And all these microservices. It's not three tiers anymore. It's 300 tears or maybe 3000 tears. Bitty little things, these little services that turn up and turn down and they all have a piece and so our view is that the A P is the new endpoint, the ap is where the action happens and not just the ap that faces the internet but all the inner workings, all the internal apps. And so because we put that application together, because we help the developers create those apaches, we have a unique understanding of how those apps are used and we're just introducing the ability to provide visibility around how are these epi is being used and then we can do anomaly detection and we are seeing a whole new set of attacks that are using legitimate apiece. They're not appease that are that are that are broken or malformed but the Attackers are finding ways to extract data from an API that maybe they shouldn't remember some of the facebook stuff where they had these Attackers were profiling users and there's no limit to how they could profile users and they were just expecting huge amounts of data that's an ap breach. These are the kind of problems that we can solve for our customers with these built in Tan Xue uh service mesh and api security controls >>you think about all these trends we're talking about and I want to ask you about how it's affected go to market because kind of the old days you had box sellers, they, you know, they would integrate VM ware or whatever. They you might have a specialist that was really good at ST for instance, S. A. P. And they were good partners. So that kind of value add developers have become a new channel for you and I wonder how you think about that, how they're now influencing their go to market. >>Yeah, that's that's a clear trend in the industry are absolutely right on, we call it moving left, right. So it's getting earlier and earlier in the development process. And so one of the things that renouncing at the show here is that the tons of community edition that makes it super easy for developers without putting down a credit card or making a big expensive commitment. They can start using these tools and get productive right away. And so so on top of that we build security controls that understand the total life cycle. So as the developers writing code, we're checking that code to make sure is this compliant doesn't have any known vulnerabilities. This is gonna break something. If you if you put it out there and then when you go to hit commit and say, all right, I'm ready to go, we've already done the homework to make sure the code is clean, we'll put it in the right place. So placing it into production in a way that is wrapped with the security that it needs the guardrails are in place and now we have this this X ray vision, this ability to look at the inner workings and understand the Ap is what's happening inside the application and identify anomalies. And lastly, once the thing is up and running we actually have the ability to measure we called posture and make sure that it doesn't drift from its intended configuration. All of this is done across every cloud. So this is, this is how we think we have a kind of new and very holistic approach to securing collaborative applications. >>Tom I want to ask you about telco transformation, I mean N F V kind of just barely scratched the surface in my view and now we're seeing with the edge and five G and the cloud there's some oh ransom. Really interesting opportunities going on in in telco say what you want about telcos? Yeah, there, you know the connectivity and Okay, fine. But one thing you say about the telco networks as they work, you know, and it actually did a great job during the pandemic. They had to pivot to landlines and and so when it comes to reliability and rock solid nous, those guys kinda kinda get it but they've got to be more flexible. So you see those two worlds colliding what's going on in in telco and and where does VM ware play? >>Yeah, sure thing. A huge amount of emphasis on telco, we've won some very large telco deals. Five G is not just a faster version of four G. 5G is a new take on what an edge network can do. It has the ability to run extremely high performance network connections and the ability to control the performance. So this idea of what's called network slicing, so you can guarantee a certain amount of latency or a certain amount of bandwidth. So combine that with this explosion of IOT devices. We're going to have an infinite number of devices. Every device you can imagine has a computer in it and it's spitting off giant amounts of data. We keep coming up with new and interesting ways to analyze that data to do things like, you know, control the self driving car to do things like create a customized retail experience to do things like help guide research for an oil company on the oil platform. Okay. These are all examples of edge computing. Now, the infrastructure that you need to protect those workloads is what we're defining and software. And putting it everywhere, Not just in the traditional data center where you might be in 1020 locations, we're talking about hundreds going into thousands of locations. And this is what the industry is calling sassy or secure access services. Edge. So where's your firewall? Your web proxy the controls that you need to protect those apps, where do they live? They're gonna live in the telco infrastructure And that stuff all runs on X 86 servers. So if you put in the data center services into this distributed architecture and you've got tons and tons of data that's being produced produced locally. Why would you want to remove the compute there and we think you can and will and this is this is why VM ware with our telco partners is uniquely suited to build the groundwork for this edge computing infrastructure. And I think edge computing is going to be the next big wave. So we went from private clouds to public clouds and public cloud was built on, you know, the scale out fault tolerant model as we move to edge computing, edge computing is going to be around applications that need huge amounts of data, very low latency and they're highly distributed. So they're going to run not in 10 or 20 locations but in 1000 more. And we can do all of this with our tons of kubernetes with our virtual networking infrastructure and our anywhere workspace and the secure access services, Edge, the pops that we're building and I think VM ware is probably one of the few if any companies that have all of these pieces that we can put together to make the Edge actually work. >>Yeah, exciting times and and all that data ai influencing at the edge of new processor models and you guys are thinking about all that stuff tom we got to leave it there. Thanks so much for coming back in the queue. Great conversation. >>Always a pleasure. Thanks very much. David, Take care >>Alright you to keep it right there, everybody. This is Dave Volonte. For the Cubes coverage of VM World 2021. The virtual edition will be right back.

(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)

>>mm Welcome to VM World 2021 2 days of virtual discussions on innovation. Multi cloud application modernization, securing your data new ways to work transforming the network expanding to the edge and loads of content to help build your digital business. My name is Dave Volonte and you're watching the cube and with me today is Carol Carpenter who's the chief marketing officer of VM. Where carol Great to see you again. Welcome back to the program. >>Thank you Dave. It's great to be here. >>Okay, well, so when we last talked last year at VM World, I honestly thought we'd be back face to face this year. Seems like we learn more every day every week. Every month. How did this year's event come together? What were your priorities in shaping the program? >>You know, I'm with you. I really hoped we would be together in person this year and here we are, another year of virtual. We are primarily all virtual again, which has some really big benefits in that we're able to reach new audiences who in the past couldn't afford to fly, could afford to take the days And it's taught us a lot. So we really approached this year as how do we create a VM world experience that is filled with digestible bites. You know, the notion that any of us are going to sit still for 3-2 days, three days and pay attention full time. This is a pretty antiquated notion. You know, we all like to to take little bites and tastes of content here and there and so we really designed the whole program to do just that. And with this go ahead. >>No, please carry on. >>No, I was going to say one of the things we really wanted to do this year with the M world. The reason the theme is imagined that is we wanted to show the world that VM World is not about your parents, BM world that this is a company while we're very proud of our virtualization past, what we offer today really spans the gamut as you pointed out everything from networking to security to application development platforms. So it's a it's just a different different company with different products and solutions for customers. >>And I love the whole concept of digestible called stackable bites and love that. And you've put together a pretty impressive lineup. You got superstar names, you got, you got stars inside of our industry and then you you know the tech people might know but you've got well known celebrities. What are you looking forward to this year and you know especially around customer and partner engagements. >>Yeah and thank you for highlighting all of that. Like I am super excited about all the different luminaries who are speaking. I am most excited about the customers and partners. Every session will have a customer's part of it. Either a customer speaking or a customer story or customer quotes really speaking to the value and with that we have hundreds of customers presenting customers. Like some you might expect like Fedex to new sas based customers like toast who provides restaurant software and they just went public to companies like space ape games who provide online games. So a real boy, I think a real diversity of customers um, in terms of their transformations and how they're leveraging the VM ware solutions. And then our partner ecosystem really excited. This year we added a new level of sponsorship to bring in some of the um, I would say younger customers and younger partners, partners like, you know, Reddit and um, you know, couch face and others who are bringing new solutions to market. >>We have some great names, they're toast. I think the local boston company, we've, we've been following them so excited to to hear what they have to say. Now let's talk a little bit about the virtual world, This is your second virtual VM world. I'm interested in what you're doing differently. I want to talk about learning, but, but what are you looking forward to in in, in in that sense? And how has the event grown? >>Well, the event has definitely grown in terms of the platform. I think the expectations in terms of numbers of attendees were expecting, you know, over 100,000. Um, and even in this zoom fatigued world, we still expect high level of engagement. The biggest changes. We have made one the more stackable content that we've been talking about two. We focused this year on a high level of interactivity, so we have slack channels set up for almost every session. We expect both speakers, customers prospects to really engage. And and then third area that's different is we amped up all of the different activities. We know that people want to interact and network in other ways. So, you know, some of the usual things like the bourbon tasting, the wine tasting, but also yoga classes and opportunities to learn from a magician, Even golf tips for those of us who love golfing, um really trying to mix it up and create a higher level of interactivity. In addition to all of the platforms you expect for hands on, learning, hands on labs, practitioner classes, All that's still there. We just wanted to increase the level of engagement. >>That's super fun, really innovating in that regard. You're right. I mean it's so easy to just to multitask and get lost. But if I know like if I'm really into yoga or I want some golf tip, I'm gonna come back at that time and it'll, you'll re engage me. So I love that, you know, the cube, we have a unique privilege of participating in a very wide spectrum of events as you can imagine. And we were deeply integrated carol into one of the industry's first big hybrid events this year at mobile world Congress this >>summer. We thought >>that was like the light of the end of the tunnel, but of course we've seen a pullback of sorts but we're still doing some physical, we do a lot of virtual, we were doing these hybrid events. We've been involved in events where they, you know, the host and the guests are there with no audience. So I'm curious as to how you see the evolution of conferences in this post isolation era. What's the learnings? What's changed and what does the future look like for events? >>Yeah, I mean I've talked with a lot of my industry peers about this, including the folks over at Mobile World Congress. Um, I don't think the large, the monolithic event with hundreds of thousands of people um, is in the cards for our near future. And so we've been rethinking like what does a physical event look like or a set of physical events look like next year. That would have an online component. We're we've always had an online component. So we certainly are not. We won't be shedding that anytime soon. The ability to reach new audiences. New targets, new user groups, we absolutely will keep that. I think in terms of the physical presence is exactly what you said. It will be hybrid. Um, we are looking at a series, don't quote me on this because we haven't finalized, but we are considering a series of in person, more local, more regional events with smaller groups. People still want that engagement, customers still want a network and talk with each other. Our users want to talk to each other are vima groups are our new groups like our DEvoPS loop group. The deVOPS folks, they all still want a network, so we want to provide that. But in a smaller, safer, more localized setting. And I think that's the future for a lot of companies. It puts a bigger toll and, and makes more work for us as the company who's hosting, meaning you and you too Dave, you'll be hopefully traveling with us two more of these locations, but it creates a little more strain on the team who is posting. >>You know, it's funny as you well know when we first started doing virtual events, like I said, we've always been been virtual, but largely it was okay. Here are the keynotes, you know, come watch. Uh, and now you're like, say you gave great examples of how you're increasing the engagement, getting much more creative and, and, and it was a lot unknown last year, especially like class March. It was like, okay and virtual events are harder in many respects than physical events and so much of the process has changed different roles. And I think we're seeing the same thing now with with hybrid, there's a lot that's unknown and a lot of trial and error, a lot of experimentation and, but I think at the end of the day, you can actually have the best of both worlds. You can get your what you described, I would, I would call it a VIP locally. V. I. P. Event maybe even role based they have the technical folks, it used to have conferences within conferences, you have your C. I. O. Event, you'd have your event and so I see a kind of return to that maybe I could say smaller and and safer and then a a much much larger audience and in the case it's different in terms of you know converting those into loyal customers and so forth. But but I think overall it's a much much bigger pond ocean that we're playing in. >>Absolutely I think of it as we're going to bring the um world too our customers and prospects and partners and you know it's pretty amazing. The other part of this you asked earlier about like speakers and some of the luminaries the fact is getting everyone to travel to one place at one point in time always had its share of logistical challenges and being able to, you know, some of it can be recorded in advance some of it will be in person. Like one thing we did this year is we recorded our ceo Ragu with six other ceos of hyper scholars talking about the future of multi cloud and what it means and the role that VM ware plays in this. That's pretty hard to do. Like to get all six of them together in one place at the same time. You know how everyone's schedules so compacted so that's what virtual gives us an opportunity to do reach, have more interesting speakers, lots of different speakers who potentially couldn't all travel. >>You don't want to miss that, that event or replay. Um, let's talk about your role as chief marketing officer. You're obviously putting your fingerprints on this new ever you new era. You had no choice you could have entered in. Yeah. We always talked about digital now is like if you're not a digital business, you're out of business and you're, you're living it now. But but I'm interested in in your strategy for global marketing, the organization, The brand in the coming decade. Like you say, the next 10 years are going to be like the last 10 years. >>That's right. Well let's talk about the brand. So VM ware, The name itself is so tightly associated to virtualization and VMS, right, Which is an amazing history and the story of success. That was really what we like to talk about is chapter One, We pioneered server virtualization laying the foundation for what today is the cloud. And then chapter two, we went bigger and broader and we virtualize the entire data center and now here we are, we're in chapter three and this is the next phase of our brand and our promise to customers, which is really focused on customer based innovation and helping our customers innovate and multi cloud. We really believe it's the center of gravity for everything we do. It's in our DNA. It's what how we take constraints which is a very multi cloud can be complex. There are challenges of you know are for customers operating in a multi cloud world. How do we take that help them turn it into an asset, How do we help them take that and give them freedom and control? And that's what our brand is about. It's about the ant is that you can help your developers move faster and retain enterprise control. It's that you can have enterprise apps on any cloud and you can have control and cost savings and enterprise management. So that's what the brand is about. That power of aunt and um and um in terms of how our marketing team is evolving a big piece is exactly what you said. You know just digital everything digital first customers want to learn try buy online and as a company you know VM ware we're shifting our business model from on premise license software to more assassin subscription services And you can see that in our earnings and how we've been shifting and it's quite exciting because with assassin subscription based model you know it's all about customers getting full value in helping customers achieve their value and consumption. So for our marketing team we have shifted from okay we want to get you to the sale and one and done to how do we really drive a full life cycle with a customer, how do we help them land and expand and use the products and get value from them and have a meaningful relationship. It's much more um of a full life cycle. So we're really excited. We, we love what we're doing um particularly on the acquisition side, getting helping customers to learn try by more easily in a digital world and then being able to follow them through with some physical, physical engagement, uh events like the um world and really helping them get the most value out of the products. >>VM ware is really quite an amazing company I'm super excited for as one individual has been following this company for a long time to see the next chapter and the thing a couple of things you mentioned innovation and I see so many companies today, they may have a big customer base, they just, it's easy for them. Easy quotes to milk that customer base and put out new products that sort of lifecycle products. Multi cloud is challenging and one of the hallmarks of VM ware is it's always had a leader that deeply understands technology. You've done that again with with Ragu and so engineering and really drives that innovation. So when I think about cloud generally and you know, there was some start stops with VMware's cloud strategy but then you said, you know what the cloud is an opportunity, it's a gift, we're gonna lean in and then you develop some really interesting partnerships like you said, you got all the big cloud companies up up on stage here this year. And so multi cloud is going to require deep engineering in a vision to really bring that uh, together. And I think, you know, VM ware is, he's one of a handful, you know, small handful of companies that can actually pull that off. >>Well, thank you. Dave, we think so for sure. I mean, we have the history and the foundation and the relationships to be able to do that. I think that um what's what's hard sometimes is that, you know, people may or may not know all the different things we do this multi cloud chapter is really a, It's the reality, 75% of our customers are operating living in a multi cloud world. And if you look at some of the data, it looks like 80, are going that way. And so how do we help them simplify? How do we help customers simplify and innovate for the future? It's definitely in our DNA it's how we take constraints and turn them into an asset for our customers. We, we really believe that it shouldn't be so complex and that we want our customers to have flexibility and choice used to be able to pick which application for which cloud and at any point in time change your mind as well when there are new capabilities on those clouds. And for us, you know, you've hit it on the head, we did realize and we did learn that we don't really want to compete with the hyper scale ear's, what they're doing is pretty unique. What we want to do is help customers consume and accelerate their innovation faster. >>Well, I love the messages and and really appreciate carol your time explaining to our cube audience, going to your vision is the CMO. And you know, we look forward to an interesting chapter ahead with hybrid events, hybrid cloud, multi cloud and all the rest. Thanks so much for coming back in the cube. >>Absolutely. Thank you for having me. Dave >>You're very welcome and thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more great content to cubes coverage of VM World 2021. The virtual edition will be right back. >>Mhm