(upbeat music) >> Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got a CUBE alum with me next. Ajay Patel is here, the SVP and GM of Modern Apps and Management at VMware. Ajay, welcome back to the program, it's great to see you. >> Well thank you for having me. It's always great to be here. >> Glad that you're doing well. I want to dig into your role as SVP and GM with Modern Apps and Management. Talk to me about some of the dynamics of your role and then we'll get into the vision and the strategy that VMware has. >> Makes sense. VMware has created a business group called Modern Apps and Management, with the single mission of helping our customers accelerate their digital transformation through software. And we're finding them leveraging both the edge and the multiple clouds they deploy on. So our mission here is helping, them be the cloud diagnostic manager for application development and management through our portfolio of Tazu and VRealize solutions allowing customers to both build and operate applications at speed across these edge data center and cloud deployments And the big thing we hear is all the day two challenges, right of managing costs, risks, security, performance. That's really the essence of what the business group is about. How do we speed idea to production and allow you to operate at scale. >> When we think of speed, we can't help, but think of the acceleration that we've seen in the last 18 months, businesses transforming digitally to first survive the dynamics of the market. But talk to me about how the, the pandemic has influenced catalyzed VMware's vision here. >> You can see in every industry, this need for speed has really accelerated. What used to be weeks and months of planning and execution has materialized into getting something out in production in days. One of great example I can remember is one of my financial services customer that was responsible for getting all the COVID payments out to the small businesses and being able to get that application from idea to production matter of 10 days, it was just truly impressive to see the teams come together, to come up with the idea, put the software together and getting production so that we could start delivering the financial funds the companies needed, to keep them viable. So great social impact and great results in matter of days. >> And again, that acceleration that we've seen there, there's been a lot of silver linings, I think, but I want to get in next to some of the industry trends that are influencing app modernization. What are you seeing in the customer environment? What are some of those key trends that are driving adoption? >> I mean, this move to cloud is here to stay and most of customers have a cloud first strategy, and we rebranded this from VMware the cloud smart strategy, but it's not just about one particular flavor of cloud. We're putting the best workload on the best cloud. But the reality is when I speak to many of the customers is they're way behind on the bar of digital plats. And it's, that's because the simple idea of, you know, lift and shift or completely rewrite. So there's no one fits all and they're struggling with hardware capability, their the development teams, their IT assets, the applications are modernized across these three things. So we see modernization kind of fall in three categories, infrastructure modernization, the practice of development or devops modernization, and the application transform itself. And we are starting to find out that customers are struggling with all three. Well, they want to leverage the best of cloud. They just don't have the skills or the expertise to do that effectively. >> And how does VMware help address that skills gap. >> Yeah, so the way we've looked at it is we put a lot of effort around education. So on the everyone knows containers and Kubernetes is the future. They're looking to build these modern microservices, architectures and applications. A lot of investment in just kind of putting the effort to help customers learn these new tools, techniques, and create best practices. So theCUBE academy and the effort and the investment putting in just enabling the ecosystem now with the skills and capabilities is one big effort that VMware is putting. But more importantly, on the product side, we're delivering solutions that help customers both build design, deliver and operate these applications on Kubernetes across the cloud of choice. I'm most excited about our announcement around this product. We're just launching called Tanzu application platform. It is what we call an application aware platform. It's about making it easy for developers to take the ideas and get into production. It kind of bridging that gap that exists between development and operations. We hear a lot about dev ops, as you know, how do you bring that to life? How do you make that real? That's what Tanzu application platform is about. >> I'm curious of your customer conversations, how they've changed in the last year or so in terms of, app modernization, things like security being board level conversations, are you noticing that that is rising up the chain that app modernization is now a business critical initiative for our businesses? >> So it's what I'm finding is it's the means. It's not that if you think about the board level conversations about digital transformation you know, I'm a financial services company. I need to provide mobile FinTech. I'm competing with this new age application and you're delivering the same service that they offered digitally now, right. Like from a retail bank. I can't go to the store, the retail branch anymore, right. I need to provide the same capability for payments processing all online through my mobile phone. So it's really the digitalization of the traditional processes that we're finding most exciting. In order to do that, we're finding that no applications are in cloud right. They had to take the existing financial applications and put a mobile frontend to it, or put some new business logic or drive some transformation there. So it's really a transformation around existing application to deliver a business outcome. And we're focusing it through our Tanzu lab services, our capabilities of Tanzu application platform, all the way to the operations and management of getting these products in production or these applications in production. So it's the full life cycle from idea to production is what customers are looking for. They're looking to compress the cycle time as you and I spoke about, through this agility they're looking for. >> Right, definitely a compressed cycle time. Talk to me about some of the other announcements that are being made at VMworld with respect to Tanzu and helping customers on the app modernization front, and that aligned to the vision and mission that you talked about. >> Wonderful, I would say they're kind of, I put them in three buckets. One is what are we doing to help developers get access to the new technology. Back to the skills learning part of it, most excited about Tanzu of community edition and Tanzu mission control starter pack. This is really about getting Kubernetes stood up in your favorite deployment of choice and get started building your application very quickly. We're also announcing Tanzu application platform that I spoke about, we're going to beta 2 for that platform, which makes it really easy for developers to get access to Kubernetes capability. It makes development easy. We're also announcing marketplace enhancements, allowing us to take the best of breed IC solutions and making them available to help you build applications faster. So one set of announcements around building applications, delivering value, getting them down to market very quickly. On the management side, we're really excited about the broad portfolio management we've assembled. We're probably in the customer's a way to build a cloud operating model. And in the cloud operating model, it's about how do I do VMs and containers? How do I provide a consistent management control plane so I can deliver applications on the cloud of my choice? How do I provide intrinsic observability, intrinsic security so I can operate at scale. So this combination of development tooling, platform operations, and day two operations, along with enhancements in our cost management solution with CloudHealth or being able to take our universal capabilities for consumption, driving insight and observity that really makes it a powerful story for customers, either on the build or develop or deploy side of the equation. >> You mentioned a couple of things are interesting. Consistency being key from a management perspective, especially given this accelerated time in which we're living, but also you mentioned security. We've seen so much movement on the security front in the last year and a half with the massive rise in ransomware attacks, ransomware now becoming a household word. Talk to me about the security factor and how you're helping customers from a risk mitigation perspective, because now it's not, if we get attacked, it's when. >> And I think it's really starts with, we have this notion of a secure software supply chain. We think of software as a production factory from idea to production. And if you don't start with known good hard attacks to start with, trying to wire in security after attack is just too difficult. So we started with secure content, curated images content catalogs that customers are setting up as best practices. We started with application accelerators. These are best practice that codifies with the right guard rails in place. And then we automate that supply chain so that you have checks in every process, every step of the way, whether it's in the build process and the deploy process or in runtime production. And you had to do this at the application layer because there is no kind of firewall or edge you can protect the application is highly distributed. So things like application security and API security, another area we announced a new offering at VM world around API security, but everything starts with an API endpoint when you have a security. So security is kind of woven in into the design build, deploy and in the runtime operation. And we're kind of wire this in intrinsically to the platform with best of breed security partners now extending in evolving their solution on top of us. >> What's been some of the customer feedback from some of the new technologies that you announced. I'm curious, I imagine knowing how VMware is very customer centric, customers were essential in the development and iteration of the technologies, but just give me some of the idea on customer feedback of this direction that you're going. >> Yeah, there's a great, exciting example where we're working with the army to create a software factory. you would've never imagined right, The US army being a software digital enterprise, we're partnering with what we call the US army futures command in a joint effort to help them build the first ever software development factory where army personnel are actually becoming true cloud native developers, where you're putting the soldiers to do cloud native development, everything in the terms of practice of building software, but also using the Tanzu portfolio in delivering best-in-class capability. This is going to rival some of the top tech companies in Silicon valley. This is a five-year prototype project in which we're picking cohorts of soldiers, making them software developers and helping them build great capability through both combination of classroom based training, but also strong technical foundation and expertise provided by our lab. So this is an example where, you know, the industry is working with the customer to co-innovate, how we build software, but also driving the expertise of these personnel hierarchs. As a soldier, you know, what you need, what if you could start delivering solutions for rest of your members in a productive way. So very exciting, It's an example where we've leapfrogging and delivering the kind of the Silicon valley type innovation to our standard practice. It's traditionally been a procurement driven model. We're trying to speed that and drive it into a more agile delivery factory concept as well. So one of the most exciting projects that I've run into the last six months. >> The army software factory, I love that my dad was an army medic and combat medic in Vietnam. And I'm sure probably wouldn't have been apt to become a software developer. But tell me a little bit about, it's a very cool project and so essential. Talk to me a little bit about the impetus of the army software factory. How did that come about? >> You know, this came back with strong sponsorship from the top. I had an opportunity to be at the opening of the campus in partnership with the local Austin college. And as General Milley and team spoke about it, they just said the next battleground is going to be a digital backup power hub. It's something we're going to have to put our troops in place and have modernized, not just the army, but modernize the way we deliver it through software. It's it speaks so much to the digital transformation we're talking about right. At the very heart of it is about using software to enable whether it's medics, whether it's supplies, either in a real time intelligence on the battlefield to know what's happening. And we're starting to see user technology is going to drive dramatically hopefully the next war, we don't have to fight it more of a defensive mode, but that capability alone is going to be significant. So it's really exciting to see how technology has become pervasive in all aspects, in every format including the US army. And this partnership is a great example of thought leadership from the army command to deliver software as the innovation factory, for the army itself. >> Right, and for the army to rival Silicon valley tech companies, that's pretty impressive. >> Pretty ambitious right. In partnership with one of the local colleges. So that's also starting to show in terms of how to bring new talent out, that shortage of skills we talked about. It's a critical way to kind of invest in the future in our people, right? As we, as we build out this capability. >> That's excellent that investment in the future and helping fill those skills gaps across industries is so needed. Talk to me about some of the things that you're excited about this year's VMworld is again virtual, but what are some of the things that you think are really fantastic for customers and prospects to learn? >> I think as Raghu said, we're in the third act of VM-ware, but more interestingly, but the third act of where the cloud is, the cloud has matured cloud 2.0 was really about shifting and using a public cloud for the IS capabilities. Cloud 3.0 is about to use the cloud of choice for the best application. We are going to increasingly see this distributed nature of application. I asked most customers, where does your application run? It's hard to answer that, right? It's on your mobile device, it's in your storefront, it's in your data center, it's in a particular cloud. And so an application is a collection of services. So what I'm most excited about is all business capables being published as an API, had an opportunity to be part of a company called Sonos and then Apogee. And we talked about API management years ago. I see increasingly this need for being able to expose a business capability as an API, being able to compose these new applications rapidly, being able to secure them, being able to observe what's going on in production and then adjust and automate, you can scale up scale down or deploy the application where it's most needed in minutes. That's a dynamic future that we see, and we're excited that VM was right at the heart of it. Where that in our cloud agnostic software player, that can help you, whether it's your development challenges, your deployment challenges, or your management challenges, in the future of multi-cloud, that's what I'm most excited about, we're set up to help our customers on this cloud journey, regardless of where they're going and what solution they're looking to build. >> Ajay, what are some of the key business outcomes that the cloud is going to deliver across industries as things progress forward? >> I think we're finding the consistent message I hear from our customers is leverage the power of cloud to transform my business. So it's about business outcomes. It's less about technology. It's what outcomes we're driving. Second it's about speed and agility. How do I respond, adjust kind of dynamic contiuness. How do I innovate continuously? How do I adjust to what the business needs? And third thing we're seeing more and more is I need to be able to management costs and I get some predictability and able to optimize how I run my business. what they're finding with the cloud is the costs are running out of control, they need a way, a better way of knowing the value that they're getting and using the best cloud for the right technology. Whether may be a private cloud in some cases, a public cloud or an edge cloud. So they want to able to going to select and move and have that portability. Being able to make those choices optimization is something they're demanding from us. And so we're most excited about this need to have a flexible infrastructure and a cloud agnostic infrastructure that helps them deliver these kinds of business outcomes. >> You mentioned a couple of customer examples and financial services. You mentioned the army software factory. In terms of looking at where we are in 2021. Are there any industries in particular, maybe essential services that you think are really prime targets for the technologies, the new announcements that you're making at VM world. >> You know, what we are trying to see is this is a broad change that's happening. If you're in retail, you know, you're kind of running a hybrid world of digital and physical. So we're seeing this blending of physical and digital reality coming together. You know, FedEx is a great customer of ours and you see them as spoken as example of it, you know, they're continue to both drive operational change in terms of being delivering the packages to you on time at a lower cost, but on the other side, they're also competing with their primary partners and retailers and in some cases, right, from a distribution perspective for Amazon, with Amazon prime. So in every industry, you're starting to see the lines are blurring between traditional partners and competitors. And in doing so, they're looking for a way to innovate, innovate at speed and leverage technology. So I don't think there is a specific industry that's not being disrupted whether it's FinTech, whether it's retail, whether it's transportation logistics, or healthcare telemedicine, right? The way you do pharmaceutical, how you deliver medicine, it's all changing. It's all being driven by data. And so we see a broad application of our technology, but financial services, healthcare, telco, government tend to be a kind of traditional industries that are with us but I think the reaches are pretty broad. >> Yeah, it is all changing. Everything is becoming more and more data-driven and many businesses are becoming data companies or if they're not, they need to otherwise their competition, as you mentioned, is going to be right in the rear view mirror, ready to take their place. But that's something that we see that isn't being talked about. I don't think enough, as some of the great innovations coming as a result of the situation that we're in. We're seeing big transformations in industries where we're all benefiting. I think we need to get that, that word out there a little bit more so we can start showing more of those silver linings. >> Sure. And I think what's happening here is it's about connecting the people to the services at the end of the day, these applications are means for delivering value. And so how do we connect us as consumers or us employees or us as partners to the business to the operator with both digitally and in a physical way. And we bring that in a seamless experience. So we're seeing more and more experience matters, you know, service quality and delivery matter. It's less about the technologies back again to the outcomes. And so very much focused in building that the platform that our customers can use to leverage the best of the cloud, the best of their people, the best of the innovation they have within the organization. >> You're right. It's all about outcomes. Ajay, thank you for joining me today, talking about some of the new things that the mission of your organization, the vision, some of the new products and technologies that are being announced at VM world, we appreciate your time and hopefully next year we'll see you in person. >> Thank you again and look forward to the next VMWorld in person. >> Likewise for Ajay Patel. You're very welcome for Ajay Patel. I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching theCUBEs coverage of VMWorld of 2021. (soft music)

(upbeat techno music) >> Welcome to theCube's coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. Another Cube alum joining me on the program next, Sanjay Uppal is here, the SVP and GM of Service Provider and Edge Business at VMware. Sanjay, it's great to see you. Thanks for coming back on the program. >> Oh yeah. Thank you. Thanks Lisa. And thank you to theCube. >> It's great that we're covering VMworld. I can't wait til they're back in person. This is another event that is virtual for obvious reasons. But I wanted to dig into your role and have you really kind of unpack that for us. Your role is the senior vice president and general manager of the Service Provider and Edge Business. Talk to me about that. >> Yeah, it's a bit of a mouthful, but really what we're doing here is recognizing that the world is shifting and a lot of the workloads are moving to the edge. So that's the edge part of my responsibility. And the other part is the service providers. Service provider of course, is the name for facilities based telecom operators, as they used to be called in the past, but simply called service providers today. So putting those two things together because service provider, 5G and the edge all go together. So I'm running that as a business for VMware. >> Got it. Let's get VMware's definition of the edge. I always like to do that because some companies have a slightly different spin on it. What is it to VMware? >> Yeah, so to VMware, the edge is distributed digital infrastructure. Digital infrastructure of course, is the software stack that you need to run the applications on top, and it's for running workloads. Now, the important part here that we're defining is that the workloads can be in what's known as the underlay, which you can think of as the infrastructure that is needed to run 5G and fiber. But the workloads can also be in the overlay, which is where you find software defined RAN, secure access service edge. And the workloads can be at the edge application layer. These are the new class of applications that we'll talk about. So it's for running workloads. And the other important part of it is, it's across a number of locations. This is not just about being in a few handful of data centers. This is about being in hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of locations, which has its own quirks in terms of how that infrastructure should work. And the important point is that the edge is placed close to where the end points are either producing or consuming data. So that's what the edge is, as we define it at VMware. >> Got it. Talk to me about the strategy and the vision that VMware has for edge. >> That's, you know, we're at a very important inflection point in the industry, as far as the edge is concerned. And I just always link it back into what's happening, as an example, in music. So one of my favorite songs from Aerosmith is, "Living on the Edge," and that's literally where we are right now. We're living on the edge and what Aerosmith says is, "We're looking at the world in a different way because things are changing all the way around." Of course, I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but our strategy at VMware is to take this living at the edge, which is happening across the board, and to capture it into infrastructure that we're building, come up with a common software stack that will support workloads that are running in the underlay, in the overlay or at the application layer, and support this entirely new class of applications that are coming in. And these applications, to contrast it with what has been happening before, these applications are being built for experiences. And I'll dig into this in a little bit, but really essentially VMware strategy is to come up with that common software stack that is going to be placed at all of these edge locations, sometimes millions of them, for different types of workloads, but the commonality of the stack is important because that is what the service providers and the enterprises use to derive the benefits. >> Being designed for experiences. It's so interesting, because that's what we expect in our personal lives, in our business lives. We want to have good experiences, whether we're ordering something on Amazon or we're trying to collaborate via Slack or something like that. Experience matters. It sounds silly to say, but it's absolutely true. Talk to me about some of the things, the edge being core to customer's future in any industry. >> Yeah. So, you know, from an industry standpoint, we always used to talk about, what are the features of your product and what are the benefits for customers? And then we started seeing an evolution from benefits into, what are the outcomes that the customers want? But now we are getting from outcomes to experiences. And you take, just an example of a retail chain that we're working with, what they want to do is not just simply sell a product to a customer, walks into the store. They want that person to have an excellent experience. And in order to get to that experience, as an example of what would happen is, this person walks into a store. They recognize who that person is, what they had purchased before, they look at what are the likelihood that they want to buy something today? Do I have that thing in my inventory? If I don't, can I manufacture it with my third generation printer that I have over here? The 3D printer that is sitting in the back room. And then, once that is produced in the next few minutes, can they have an experienced in playing a game with the sportsmen of their choice, on this massive screen that's in there? That's experience. That's not just walking into a store, buying a product and walking out. Another experience would be, when you look at healthcare, what's going on right now that when you have a symptom, you go to your doctor to get checked out. But what if your body tells you that there's something that you need to get done? So this entire new class of applications are coming in with sensors that have artificial intelligence in them that are metricating what is happening. And these sensors with that intelligence then get fed into the edge infrastructure, because this is voluminous amount of information. As you can imagine, the amount of metrics that your body needs to track, all this voluminous information needs to get correlated. And then you may need to make an inference about it. Again, that's an experience because you're completely changing the nature of health as this is going about. So in every vertical industry, we have these examples of experiences and what this requires is computation, networking and storage to be pushed all the way into the edge. It requires a network to get this done. It requires connectivity. And it requires, as I've spoken about before, this common software stack that VMware is bringing. >> So talk to me about what's being announced and unveiled at VMworld. >> So what we are announcing very simply is the VMware Edge. And what that VMware Edge is, it comprises three common software stacks at different layers of the stack. So the first thing that we're saying is that we are announcing the VMware Edge compute stack. So this is software that companies can use, ISV's can use, to develop Edge native applications. These are applications that are born at the edge. They're not applications that are necessarily being refactored from somewhere else. And this is stack that is available in very small form factors, all the way to large form factors, and it'S stack that's connected together. As I mentioned before, the numbers of locations are very important. So we are packaging this, we're making it available across the board next week. This is the first part of the announcement. The second part of the announcement is the expansion of our secure access service edge offering. And that expansion includes going from software defined RAN, which was the first and highly successful service to include secure access, cloud web security, and then to follow that on in a multi-services approach and add more services as we go along. And the third piece is to take our Telco cloud platform, we are announcing that that platform is being co-opted to now run at the edge. Now, one very important development in that part, is that we've had our ESXI product, which is very successful in running in the data center, we have an edge ready version for this product. We've made a 10X improvement in the overhead and latency of ESXI. So now it can be deployed in edge locations in very small form factors, and it is absolutely equivalent to bare metal overhead. So now when companies are looking at, is there overhead associated with the ESXI hypervisor? We're saying, no. It's equivalent to bare metal. And all the benefits that you get with deploying ESXI, will now accrue to benefits that you would have at the edge. >> Talk to me about how the events of the past 18 months, we've seen massive acceleration in digital transformation. We've seen, you mentioned the retailer, the retailer is having to be able to massively shift curbside delivery, e-commerce. How have the events of the last 18 months influenced or catalyzed VMware Edge? >> Absolutely. So if you take a step back and think what has happened due to the pandemic, all of us are working from locations that are not, we're not going to some centralized location to our offices. We're actually working from our home edges. We are literally living at the edge when we were working from home. And also when you go to do curbside pickup, you're making a decision right there. You're going to where that edge location is for that retail store. So really to me, what has happened with the pandemic, is emphasized the need for moving computation all the way to the edge. Now you take one use case, work from home itself. Work from home has gone up by, in some cases, 5X to 8X compared to what it was before. And we've seen the network come under tremendous strain because of work from home. We've seen that the user experience, if it's not good, then of course your productivity gets hampered. So work from home is one of those use cases that has been focused on, because of the pandemic, and we've come up with the solution that will help people when they're sitting in their home environment, the kids can do homework, someone can be watching, streaming movie, but the business users still continues to function with full productivity. So it's really emphasizing the need for moving computation all the way out to the edge. >> Yeah. The edge exploded in the last year and a half. I'm going to now rethink, instead of working from home or living at work, living on the edge. So thank you for giving me that idea. That definitely changes how I feel about this room right here. Talk to me about some of the customers, customer examples, customers in terms of their feedback, as VMware has been developing this. I know you're very much a customer centric organization, but what were some of the directions on the influences from the field? >> I think, as far as customers go, they're an integral part of our development process. It's not like we develop a product and then we go sell it to the customer. What we do is, we get the customer to be a part of that process. We figured out what are the issues that the customers are facing in their own business. As an example, when the pandemic hit, in the healthcare space we had one acute care hospital that came to us and said, "well, we can't get enough of the telemedicine done because the radiologists and all are not able to come into the office." Well, we came up with a solution So that radiologist sitting at home can still look at very high definition images as they're talking to their patients. Now, once we develop the first part of the solution, we actually brought the customer in, gave them a prototype. And then I tell my team that when the customer gives feedback, it's like they're handing us a flashlight and that flashlight illuminates the path ahead for us. And so we follow that path that the customer has set based on the technology that we've produced. Our responsibility is to iterate on that technology in a very fast cycle, so that as we get the flashlights, we illuminate the path and that gets to building the product. And then we get the product built and then we have a happy, successful customer with good outcomes and experiences. And in the end, VMware has done something positive, not just in terms of our business, but for the world at large. >> Right. I love that. Handing the customer a flashlight. Another one I'm going to steal from you, Sanjay. Thank you. You've given me two good ones today. And also a different look at Aerosmith, which I probably now won't be able to get that song out of my head. Some of the trends that we've seen, trends over the last 18 months, what are some of the things that you think we've had a lot of acceleration, but there's a lot of positivity that's come from that, that I don't think gets enough coverage. All of the capabilities that we now have. If you take even just the work from home use case that you mentioned, that's going to be persisting for quite some time, some amount of it's going to be permanent. But what are some of the trends that you're seeing now that you think are really going to help facilitate the edge and the compute and the network and customers being able to take advantage of that even faster? >> Yeah. I think that one of the really important changes that has come because of the pandemic is giving customers choice. And as a part of it, VMware is really focused on multicloud. So, the cloud has come in, we had a movement of workloads from the private data center into the public cloud, but now what customers are saying is, we want choice. We want to make sure that this infrastructure is always available to us. So we are focusing from a VMware standpoint on multicloud. Now, what does that mean? It means that it gives customers choice. They can go to different cloud providers, including the private data center and run their applications on top. And this, we think, is here to stay. This is a trend that we think is as important as what's happening in the future of work. Because previously it used to be, we used to think of work as a destination. It's not. It's a workspace right now. People could essentially be working from anywhere. And one of the things that we've learned in the pandemic is that, that actually does happen. Human beings, we are flexible enough that we can accommodate to these changes that are coming in. So the future of work is going to be distributed. It's going to be workspaces and not workplaces. And then multicloud and marrying those two things together is what we are focusing on at VMware. >> What are some of the tracks or sessions at VMware where folks can go to learn more about that use case in particular, as well as the VMware Edge and what you're announcing? >> Yeah, so we have some excellent tracks. We have a track about, of course, the distributed edge. We have a track about what's going on with cross-cloud services that we have come up with. We have tracks in terms of what's happening with networking and security, because security obviously goes hand in hand with everything. Zero trust is becoming fundamental in everything that we do. I was talking to one of my customers who owns gas stations, and he was saying, "Sanjay, I have gas stations in places that I would never visit. But there are people who would sit at these gas stations. I still need for them to come into the network, but I can't trust the devices that they're coming in on." So these would be a few of the tracks that I would recommend that people would go and watch. >> Excellent. Yeah. Speaking of zero trust and just the massive changes in the threat landscape in the last year and a half, the things that we've seen with massive rise in ransomware and DDoS attacks and attacks like this becoming a when, not if, kind of a scenario. So everybody needed to ensure that they have, they can trust the people and the devices on the network. Sanjay, thank you so much for joining me, talking to us about VMware Edge. You gave us some great analogies there that I'm going to take forward with me. And I look forward to seeing you, hopefully next year at VMworld, in person. Fingers crossed. >> In-person would be awesome. Thank you so much, Lisa. And thank you to theCube. >> Our pleasure. Sunjay Uppal. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCube's coverage of VMworld 2021. (upbeat techno music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome to VMworld 2021, a two day virtual event, hosted by the company which permanently changed data center operations last decade. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021, where we want to know what VMware and its ecosystem have in store for the next 10 years and how your digital business can survive and thrive in the coming decade, and who better to give us a glimpse as to how that's being done both inside VMware and within its customer base, than Mike Hayes, who is the chief digital transformation officer at VMware. Mike, great to have you on the program. >> No Dave, thank you for having me, we appreciate you and all that you do for this great event. Thank you, sir. >> Oh, I appreciate that. So talk about, what's involved with your role as chief digital transformation officer. What's that all about? >> Yeah thank you for, many people, are chief digital transformation officer in a lot of different places, different things. Here at VMware I'm responsible for worldwide business operations and digital transformation of the firm. Just like first and foremost, we're focused on our customers and how our customers can improve their own business models, whether it's cost, flexibility, speed, imagining new things, that's what gets us really excited. And at the same time, we're transforming internally in order to bring ourselves into our exciting third chapter. >> Yeah, everybody wants to be a SAS company these days, VMware obviously is accelerating its move towards SAS. Maybe you could talk a little bit about your strategy for leading business operations as well as that transformation. >> Absolutely, I think there's a couple of things. And first of all, the most important thing in an organization is agility we have or transforming our own ability to transform. As we all know, everybody listening knows that markets don't sit still, they pivot quickly, and so the organizations that win aren't the organizations that prepare for tomorrow, but they prepare for the ability to change for tomorrow, and as the markets change, they stay ahead of that. So that's what we're doing at VMware and that's what we're really excited about our entire suite of products and services so that we can help organizations do the same. >> Yes so, if I could stay on this for a second, Mike, when you think about what you have to deal with there, and you're moving to that as a service subscription model, you got to the external factors, you mentioned you start with the customer, but you also have internal factors, right? Your salespeople might be used to one and done move on to the next one, more transactional, it's a whole different mindset, isn't it? >> It absolutely is, and so any organization as large as VMware is, should always be staring at itself and saying, how can we be more flexible? And so we just like everywhere else are looking at our foundational data, we're looking at our ERP systems, we're looking at our own internal processes to say, as we pivot to SAS, and the back office becomes closer to the front office. That's really where it's at, there's not a customer in the world that cares about any of their... Where they're buying from, the back offices from where they're buying from don't matter, what matters is that experience, it's that front layer, it's that first touch with the customer. We recognize that, and we're preparing for that, and I'm really excited about how it's going. >> Let's talk about some of the waves that you're riding here, the major trends that are driving digitally. I often call it the forced march to digital in 2020. It was like, we were just thrown into the fire. And it's just the way it was. If you weren't a digital business, you were out of business. And now people are kind of sitting back and saying okay, let's take those learnings, fill those gaps, and really set us on a course over the next decade. So what do you see as the major trends? What are the technologies that are enabling digital business and how are you applying them both in your own business and what you're seeing with your customers? >> We first of all I think what's important is to recognize that every organization needs the ability to scale. So what we're doing at VMware is simplifying our foundation. And so then as we 2x or 5x or 10x, our own business, we're multiplying off a much simpler base. And so as we drive our own transformation, our internal principles of like simplicity and clarity and accountability, and really streamlining is what VMware is doing. And that's what we're also not surprisingly recommending and helping our own customers with. And so that's what gets really exciting for us. I think that, one of the things that you're alluding to with this a forced march to digital which I totally agree with, is really, it is about experience and for us there are a couple of KPIs that are really interesting to us, and it should be for everybody, no surprise here, but the velocity that it takes for operations to go from an idea to a closure, from quote to cash, or from idea to implementation, whatever that front and back end words your own business uses are what's important, but how fast do you get through that? And so for us, we're imagining a touch less future. So no, are we there yet? Absolutely not. Is any organization? Very few are. And so how do we constantly say, ask ourselves what don't we need to be doing? When I walk into a room in a lot of places VMware or otherwise, and you say who's in charge of what we're not doing? That's where all the good ideas are, the good idea spaces, like what organizations aren't doing, so you have that culture of pulling awesome ideas to the front and saying, how do we just prioritize? The hardest thing Dave right now, is that there are so many shiny objects for all of our enterprises, for everybody that's listening. I think one of the hardest things is prioritizing and saying, how do we spend our resources in the smartest way possible, so that we are doing the things that will have the greatest impact for our customers. Something that we feel like we have a great plan for, and we're excited about the execution over the coming year. >> I wonder if you could comment on what you're seeing and just in terms of spending patterns. All throughout last year, we reported that CIO's expected budget contractions of around 5% relative to 2019, and what happened is in the second half, he really saw, companies had to respond to the cyber threats, they had to respond, of course to hybrid work, this whole digital march that we talked about, and it was actually pretty strong. Many people expected that a lot of the traditional companies that relied on data center and on-prem and HQ spend, were really going to get hit and they actually got through it okay. And meanwhile, the cloud is exploding, your cloud businesses exploding, security is exploding. What was interesting is, just this weekend, we published some data that suggested, that is not only continuing into 2021, but CIO's are expecting, more of this in 2022. So we used to have this sort of steady IT spend, refresh cycles, et cetera, but it seems like we're in a step function right now, in terms of investment, and it seems like CEOs are saying, if we don't lead this digital transformation, we're going to become toast. >> Absolutely Dave, yeah, the first thing you mentioned was budget. Let's remember budgets are a function of a company's focus on either short term goals or long-term goals. And so the organizations that are really smartest are thinking three, four, five years out and you're investing now, so that you can always really be high-performing in that 2, 3, 4 year window. Because any organization that mortgages it's future for this current year is not doing itself any favors. So the cycles that I'm seeing that are aligned exactly as you described, organizations are understanding, key leaders get that they need to invest. But the question is, how do you invest in the things that are classically thought of as maybe back office, or let me just say boring, just to be provocative. How do we choke out the boring stuff from a budget standpoint, and then really give a lot of oxygen and energy to the things that are fun and really transformative? And that's what we're seeing, and that's why we feel like our strategy is so great Dave, because we're part of that for the future, and as organizations think about freeing up capital so that they can invest in those fun things that really accelerate their own business models, that's what it's about. >> Now VMware of course has always had an amazing ecosystem, always been very proud of the value that you created, not just free for your own selves, but for your customers, and also your ecosystem partners. So as it relates to your digital transformation role Mike, we talked about customers, we talked about some of the internal stuff and operations. How does the ecosystem fit in? How do you collaborate with them? What kind of learnings do you get from them? How do you plug them into your digital platform if you will? >> Absolutely, I think the most important element you're drawing out, Dave, is the concept of trust. We have incredible partners, and without whom VMware's business and success that we enable in the world would be very limited. So we recognize that we all go through life with friends and partners, it's obviously not just true in business, I was a Navy Seal for 20 years and the most important thing is that foundational element. Now, what we do and what we're always trying to do is be as transparent and fast and helpful as we can. I think that in the partner world, anytime you can reach across the table more than halfway and with another organization, that's easy to intersect. If you're not willing to meet people in places more than halfway, there is no middle. So for us, what we're doing is constantly listening and getting feedback and saying, where can we improve? That's what's really awesome. Sandy Hogan is an incredible colleague of mine who runs our channel, and Sandy runs a board with 30 of our largest partners in the channel, and the first question that she always asks is, what can we be doing better? And that's for us the most important thing is listening. Just like you were in developing an individual product. What's important is product market fit, right? Does your product fit in the market, and then how do you get feedback from it? We apply that as an institution and an enterprise. >> Mike, you mentioned your experience in the military, thank you for your service, I wanted to ask you something about that. So I wrote a piece one time and talked about Frank Slootman, who is becoming a Silicon Valley icon, how he's going to apply his playbook at his new company, Bubba. And he wrote me back, he said, "Dave I learned in the military that, it's not a playbook. I am a situational leader and I learned that in the military." So my question to you is, what did you learn as a Navy Seal to deal with situations, especially in a condition like we are now, where there's a lot unknown. How do you apply that in today's world? >> Yeah Look, the there's the parallels between the Seals and VMware are perfect, right? Because all we're doing is quickly defining an outcome. What's the vision for the organization? What's the outcomes we'd want to achieve? That's the where we're going. Then there's the strategy, which is the how. How are we going to get there? How do you develop strategy? There are a hundred different ways to go achieve the vision, but how do we think about the different risks along the way? And like I said earlier, draw those risks out, so they're known risks. Then we can price them and size them and understand that for our strategy. And then how do we execute well and how do we get feedback throughout the whole thing? But you know Dave, the best thing I would say, the analogy from the Seals in the military, really is what you hit on. A lot of people say that they have a plan, but in the Seals the only plan that we had was for our plan to change, it's that concept I said earlier of transforming our ability to transform. So we go in on any given night with complicated missions and have a plan, but we knew that that plan was going to very quickly change, it's no different than what we're doing here at VMware, with our own customers in this technology market. >> It's a great lesson to apply Mike. I really appreciate you sharing that and appreciate you coming on the queue. >> Thank you for having me, it's such a pleasure. >> Really a pleasure was ours, and thank you for watching over. Keep it right there for more great content from Vmworld 2021, you're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>>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.

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

(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)

(uplifting music) >> Welcome back to The Cube's coverage of VMworld 2021. My name is Dave Vellante and right now we're going to dig into the powerful go-to market and partner network trends within the VMware ecosystem. Sandy Hogan is here. She leads worldwide commercial and partner sales. Hello, Sandy. Welcome. Good to see you. >> Great to see you, Dave. Thanks for having me today. >> It's really our pleasure. We're always excited to cover VMworld virtual, of course, this year, second year in a row. Now you joined VMware right after the lockdown. So you've been with the company now about 18 months. Was that difficult? Starting out completely virtual, such a huge scope of responsibility. And how did you handle that with your team and the partner ecosystem? >> Oh, it's actually one of the most common questions, actually that I get even on a daily basis still. So yes, I started VMware completely virtual and mind you I'm based in Chicago and, as you know, our headquarters is based in Palo Alto. Ironically, I would say, it actually gave me a little bit of an advantage. And here's why. Because when we're such a distributed workforce anyway, before COVID hit, you have people who are in meetings who are in one room, right in a conference room. And those of us, you know, sit on a virtual Zoom or another mechanism somewhere else. So by joining virtually during the COVID era, it actually leveled the playing field, because it allowed me to meet with everybody via video, in their homes. It allowed, albeit virtual, eye to eye contact. And that actually made some of the onboarding easier. But by no means, does it replace at all the personal interaction that's so critical. >> Well, possibly in the middle part of the country, I think it's good. I'm an east coast and we're kind of primarily a west coast firm, so I'm in early. People don't like it when I call them super early, but I get calls at 10 o'clock at night. So that's maybe another advantage. And when you think about VMworld 2021, what were your objectives? I'm specifically interested, you know, based on what you learned last year, how you thought about 2021, what were you must have features of the event? Talk about your role in shaping the event this year and your specific contributions. >> Sure. So, you know, I think a really big shift as you think about VMworld this year, and truly becoming this multi-cloud provider, the role of the partner in this new world is more important than ever. And I think in the past, you know, candidly, it's been more about the technology centricity and then figuring out how we attach partners to that. At the core of this is really around delivering customer for life value. And the role that partners play throughout that entire life cycle becomes critical in helping our customers, jointly, become successful in this multi-cloud world. >> So as the partner chief of VMware and you're early transformationally leading and driving that partner ecosystem evolution, how do you see the next two to three years? What would you say are your top priorities? >> Sure. So I think it's important to know, you know, especially with the pandemic. But I think it's fair to say, not only our transformation, our transformation is also a result of our partners' transformation. I can't think of a partner who I have met with in the last 12 months alone, who has not gone through dramatic change. Where they're expanding their business models, expanding their capabilities to respond and be proactive in this environment. And so, everybody is trying to figure out how to become more relevant and help customers through this, you know, multi-cloud digital transformation. And so that's what I referenced around delivering customer for life value. And, most of the premise in our transformation, we've been primarily transaction oriented. And everything about this new world is about moving to an influence, deploy and consume motion, which is pretty significant. And that's all also about creating a consumerized experience for our partners to bring value wherever they see fit, based on where the customer is in their maturity. And in the end, our partners are really enabling our customers to become cloud smart. And in order to do that, we've actually focused on three key priorities in our partner transformation and evolution. First is really around leading with a partner-led services motion for influence, deploy, and consume. We see that more partners are playing key advisory roles in helping customers become cloud smart and determine their roadmap, the timing of the roadmap, and what they will implement and when. And customer success is a critical element of that. And so that means how we help partners create new capabilities, new certifications, and helping them maximize the investments that they're already making. So that's very essential and core to our strategy. Second is embedding VMware into the DNA of our partner's solutions in a scaled motion. So this really means how we formally jointly innovate with our partners, enabling our partners to build their solutions, their unique IP on top of our cross-cloud services. And that means anything like solution labs, self-serve business innovation, expansion of marketplaces and enabling partners to have another method to transact and offer their solutions. And all of this in the construct of becoming much more use-case based. So really thinking through, as we all know, our customers don't want bespoke, independent technology. They want solutions that are going to solve their business problems. And so we're really adapting and accelerating the way that we help partners build that partner maturity, practice development, and also how we enable that partner to partner acceleration. Because we know in this world today, no one can sell or deliver value alone. And so it's really about how the partners work together and how we enable and accelerate that in a whole new way that we've not done in the past. And so it's really opening up just tremendous opportunities, Dave, that brings unique skillsets and unique scale for our partners. >> Well, I mean, thank you, Sandy, for such a substantive answer. I want to respond a couple of ways. One is, hearing you talk about how your partners have transformed, I was talking to one of your partners at the end of last year, and he said to me, Dave, two things, one is, did you ever think you'd become an expert in COVID? I was like, no. (Sandy and Dave laugh) And the second thing he said, did you ever think that you would forget in one year more than you ever knew about digital transformation? And I think those are two-- I mean the first one is like, wow, well, never. But the second point is everybody talks about the acceleration, but wow, we were sort of forced into it and learned a lot. And now we're stepping back and being a little bit more planful. And then, the other thing that strikes me is, when you talked about joint innovation with your partners, because, you know, kind of the early part of last decade, the VMware ecosystem, it was about, you know, making it kind of work the plumbing of getting recovery to work or storage APIs. And now you're talking about a layer of innovation that is going to be much deeper business integration. And that's exciting. >> Yes, it is so exciting. And what's incredible about it is our customers jointly benefit the most from this. Because our customers are living a very complex world. You know, I've been in the technology space for a long time. And I had titles, you know, in my role description that were all around digital transformation over a decade ago. So that's how long, you know, many of us have been talking about it. But that complexity has not allowed many of our customers to transform. And so, with this evolution of really being, helping our customers be cloud smart, it is forcing all of us in how we work together to bring those solutions in a much more digestible, consumable way that I think is more meaningful and more exciting than it's ever been, frankly. >> Now, I want to ask you, you know, this November marks a big milestone for the company. You've had many milestones, of course, VMware has, but you will once again be completely untethered, from a governance standpoint, and you'll be a purely standalone company. And for the partner ecosystem, I think that's almost a rejuvenation of one of the defining tenants of VMware, the value that's created for customers by partners. What impact do you see the spin having on the partner ecosystem? >> Well, you know, what's great about, I think the opportunity we have is, certainly it gives, you know, flexibility for both parties in our expansion in ecosystem and who we work with. Our strategic partnership is going to be more strategic than ever. And also it's important to note, we share a very robust ecosystem together. And so our partners will continue to be able to leverage the best of Dell and the best of VMware as we continue to jointly solve our customer business problems together. >> Great. So you don't see it as a radical change. It's more of an evolutionary and so that's great, too. So it's not disruptive. Well, Sandy, great to have you on The Cube. Best of luck and look forward to hopefully seeing you face to face and in the near future. >> Wouldn't that be nice? I have not met many people face-to-face, Dave, so that would be fantastic. It was great being on here today. Thank you. >> You're very welcome. And thank you everybody for watching. Keep it right there. More great coverage from The Cube, at VMworld 2021. (uplifting 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

>>mm We're entering the fourth grade era of VM ware Executive management From its beginnings in the late 90s is a Silicon Valley startup. It's five founders quickly built the company and it ended up as one of the greatest acquisitions in the history of enterprise tech when EMC bought VM ware for $625 million as a public company. But still under EMC's governance, paul Maritz was appointed Ceo in 2000 and eight and set the company on a journey to build what he called at the time. The software mainframe meaning the company's platform would run any application at high performance with low overhead and world class recovery. Pat Gelsinger took over the Ceo reins in 2012 and through organic investments and clever m and a set of course for the software defined data center and after some early miscalculations in cloud, realigned the company strategy to successfully partner with hyper scale hours and position the company for the multi cloud future. The hallmarks of VM where over the course of its history have been great engineering that led to great products, loyal customers and a powerful ecosystem. The other telling attribute of VM where is it? CEOs have always had a deep understanding of technology and its latest Ceo is no different. It's our pleasure to welcome raghu Raghuram back to the cube the fourth Ceo of VM ware and yet another Silicon Valley Ceo graduated from the IIttie rgu, great to see you again and congratulations on your new role. >>Thanks. It's great to be here. >>Okay, five months in 1st 100 days what we have focused on that journey to become the Switzerland of multi cloud, tell us about your early experience as ceo >>it's been fantastic. Uh our customers, all our employees, all our partners have been very welcoming and of course I've given me great input. What we've been able to do in the last 100 days is to really crystallize the strategy and focus it around what I'm sure we're gonna be spending a lot of time talking about. And that's about the multi cloud era of computing that most enterprises are going to go through over the next decade. And so that's really what I've been up to and you'll see the results of that in next week's uh we involved and uh where we would be talking about the strategy and some product announcements that go along with the strategy and so it's a very exciting time to be at Vandenberg. >>Yeah, I mean, I referenced it in my intro, it's almost like the light bulb went off when VM ware realized, wow, this cloud build out is just an opportunity for us and that's really what you're doing with the multi cloud as you're building on top of all the infrastructure that the hyper cloud vendors are putting out there. Maybe you can talk about that, that opportunity and what customers are telling you. >>Yeah, it's uh here is how I describe what has happened in the industry. Right, and what will happen in the industry. So, if you look at the the past decade, as cloud became a mainstream thing, most customers pick the cloud, they built their first digital applications into it, the ones that serve their mobile users or end users with digital products and that worked great for them. Then they step back and say, okay, how many modernize everything that we're doing has become a digital company. And when you go from 10, of your portfolio, 100% of your application portfolio being modernized. What has to happen is you got to go from figuring out, okay, how am I gonna put everything in one cloud to what does the application need and how do I put it on the right place? I look at the same time, the industry has also evolved from being uh predominantly supplied by one cloud provider to multiple cloud providers. At the same time, the thanks to companies like IBM where the data center has been transformed into a private cloud. The edges growing up to be its own location for a cloud sovereign clouds are going. So truly what has happened is it's become a multi cloud world. And customers are saying in addition to just being cloud first, I want to be cloud smart. And so this distributed era of computing that we are entering is what we are seeing in the industry. And what the empire is trying to do is to say, look, let's provide customers with the fastest way of getting to this multi cloud era of computing so that they can go fast, they can spend less and most importantly, they can be free, in other words, choose the right application, right cloud for right applications and have control over how they deploy and use their applications and data. That really is a strategy that we are putting in place. This is something that we've been working towards in the last couple of years now. I'm accelerating that and making that the main piece of what we end, where is doing in order to do that, we have a great opportunity to take partner even better with all of our cloud provider partners and that's where the Switzerland of the industry comes in without impending spin, especially, we have great partnership with the cloud players, great partnerships with infrastructure players. We truly can be a neutral partner to the customers as they look at all these choices and make the right choices for their applications. >>So, I want to ask you about this multi cloud when when the early multi cloud narrative came out where I go, I was saying, look, multi cloud is really multi vendor, you you've got workloads and apps running on different, different clouds. And then increasingly, the promise and your promises, we're going to abstract the underlying complexity of those clouds and we're going to give you an experience whether it's on premise, hybrid into a cloud. Across clouds. Eventually out to the edge, it's gonna be a singular, substantially identical, if not identical experience and we're going to manage the whole kit and caboodle. And how where are we in that first of all? Is that the right way to think about it? Where are we in that sort of transition from plugging into any, you know, a cloud? I'm compatible with the cloud to it's a singular sort of VM ware cloud if you will. >>Yeah. So, um, so I wanna clarify something that he said because this tends to be very commonly confused by customers use the word abstraction. And usually when people think of abstraction, they think it hides capabilities of the uh, cloud providers. That's not what we are trying to. In fact, that's the last thing we're trying to do. What we're trying to do is to provide a consistent developer experience regardless of where you want to build your application so that you can use the cloud provider services if that's what you want to use. But the deficit cops toolchain, the runtime environment, which turns out to be Cuban aires and how you control the kubernetes environment. How do you manage and secure and connect all of these things. Those are the places where we are adding the value. Right. And so really the VM ware value proposition is you can build on the cloud of your choice but providing these consistent elements. Number one, you can make better use of us, your scarce developer or operator resources and expertise. Right. And number two, you can move faster and number three can spend less as a result of this. So that's really what we're trying to do, but not. So I just wanted to clarify the word abstraction in terms of their way, we're still, I would say in the early stages, so if you look at what customers are trying to do, they're trying to build these Greenfield applications and there is an entire ecosystem emerging around Campaneris. There is still kubernetes is not a developer platform. The developer experience on top of kubernetes is highly inconsistent. And so those are some of the areas where we are introducing new innovations with our towns, our application platform. And then if you take enterprise applications, what does it take to have enterprise applications running all the time, be entirely secure, etcetera, etcetera. That's where the we ever cloud assets that are traditionally this fear based come into play and we've got this now in all of the clouds but it's still in the early days from uh on Azure and google et cetera. How do you manage and secure those things again? We're in the early days. So that's where we are. I would say, >>yeah, thank you for that clarification, I want to sort of come back to that and just make sure we understand it. So for example, if I'm a developer and I want to take advantage of, let's say graviton uh and build an app on that, that so maybe it's some kind of data intensive app or whatever it is. I can do that. You won't restrict me from doing that at the same time. If I want to use the VM where management experience across all my clouds, I can do that as well. Is that the right way to think about it? >>Yeah, exactly. So the management experience by the way, and this is the other thing that gets missed in the remember dialogue because we've been so phenomenally successful with this fear. There's a misperception that everything we are doing atmosphere today works only on top. So everything we're doing at BM wear works only on top of the sphere. That's not the case. Take management, for example, our management portfolio is modular and independent of these, which means it can manage the Graviton application that you're building, right. It can manage a traditional, these fear based application, it can manage rage application, it can manage VM based applications, can manage computer based applications. Uh so it's truly uh, overall management layer. So that is really what we're trying to do. Same thing with our kubernetes example. Right, So our communities control plane allows you to control these kubernetes clusters. Whether the clusters are utilizing gravity and whether clusters are utilizing these fear based crew binaries environments. >>Okay, that's great. So it's kind of a set up question because my next question relates to project Monterey, Because, you know, I've always said when I write about about these things, when I saw Nitro, I saw Graviton, I saw project monitor, I said uh everybody needs a Nitro Nitro or a graviton because new workloads are coming. It's not just the X 86 can handle everything anymore asap whether it's sequel server, whatever we've got new workloads that are coming ai ml data intensive edge workloads, et cetera. Is that how we should think of? Project Monterrey. Where are you in Project Monterey? Why is it so important? Help people understand that? >>Yeah. Project mantra is super exciting for a couple of different reasons. One is uh in its first iteration and uh we announced project monitoring and last being well, we continue to build and we're making great progress along with the hardware partners that we are working with um in its first hydration it allows um um some of the functions that you would expect in the software defined data center to be offloaded into these montri processors. The smart nick processes. Right. So what that does, is it clears up the core CPU for other application functions. Right, so you get better scalability, more resource utilization, etcetera, etcetera. The second thing it does is because some of the software defined data center functions are done in the smart make um it gets accelerated as well. Because it takes advantage of the special accelerators that are there security functions, manageability functions, networking functions etcetera, etcetera. So that's that what you're alluding to is overall it's the v sphere, the sX Hyper Visor complimentary itself. That's moving into the specialized processors which allows the hyper Visor will be built into these smart mix, which means the main CPU can be an intel. CPU can be an M D C P. You can be an arm. CPU can be whatever it is you want in the future. So truly enables Monte CPU heterogeneous computing. So that's that's why this is exciting. And of course because it is the sphere, it can happen in the data centers, it can happen in Carlos. It can happen in Sovereign clouds. It can happen in the public clouds all over a period of time. And >>and potentially the Edge I would presume in the future. >>Sorry. Yeah, that's a great point. Thanks for pointing that out. In fact, the Edge is one of the most important places that will happen because we need these low latency applications such as in the telco case for example, right. Or we need these applications that have specialized processing the required. If you're setting up a cashier less store and you need to process and you need a lot of influence engines. So, Monterey helps with all of those things. >>I want to make sure our audience understands. It's because the software defined data center was awesome but but it also created waste in the sense that you have all these offload functions in storage and networking and security running on on x 86 processors which may not be the most efficient way. So emerging architectures around arm might be less expensive, maybe more cost effective, lower power. Uh maybe they do memory management differently. So there are these offload use cases. But as well you we talked about the edge there could be a lot of edge use cases that or whatever whether it's arm or in video etcetera. So now you're driving that optionality for customers so you can support more workloads of the future. >>Yeah, so this is exactly if you think about in europe when you talked about the embers evolution, the inverse core DNA has always been to master hydrogen. Itty right. And what we're seeing is this world of heterogeneous hardware coming alive. Right. You talked about Professor hydrogen Itty including GPU chips and so on. There is a memory architecture heterogeneous, their storage architecture heterogeneous. And so the idea is that regardless of what you use, how do you provide the best workload platform and a consistent way of managing all of these things and reducing the complexity while gaining the efficiency benefits and the other benefits that you talked about. >>So speaking of geniality that brings me to Tansu, you know early on people thought, oh wow containers, that's gonna kill VM where this is the opposite happened. You guys leaned in as as you have as a sign of great leadership these days. You don't get defensive, you just, you know, get the trend is your friend, as they say, give us the update on on Tan xue. Why is that so important to the future? >>Yeah. So if you look at any enterprises portfolio right, they are looking at it and saying look, there's a whole set of applications that I need to modernize. Now. The question becomes how do you modernize these applications in a way that it is essentially done with these microservices architectures and so on and so forth. In that context, how do I maximize the developer productivity and provide a great developer experience because there is not enough developers in the world to modernize every application that that's in every enterprise. Right. So, Tan xue is our answer to help enterprises modernize their applications and deliver in a way that the developed makes the developers very productive on the cloud of their choice. So that is really the strategic intent of Tancill and the core building block for Tan xue is of course kubernetes as you well know, Kubernetes has become the common infrastructure abstraction across clouds. So if you want portability for traditional VM based applications, he used this fear, if you want portability for traditional for containerized microservices applications, you assume kubernetes, that's how companies companies are thinking about it. And so that's the first thing that we did now. The second is you've got developers building applications all over the place. So now, just like you used to have physical server sprawl and now and then VM sprawl these days you have cluster sprawl, kubernetes, cluster sprawl and tons of mission control affects as a multi cloud, multi cluster kubernetes control plan works on the chaos and everything else that some of the Sun. The third point of Tanzania is the developer experience and we have introduced Andrew application platform, which is really focused on delivering a great developer experience on top of any Cuban Aires. So that's really how we're building out the towns of portfolio. And then of course we got Spring and uh as you well know a majority of enterprise applications today are java and if you want to modernize java, you use spring boot and so we had tremendous success with our uh spring boot technology and our startup, Springdale Ohio capabilities and so on and so forth. So that's the entirety of the towns of portfolio. It's multi cloud, it's kubernetes agnostic. Of course it runs great on this fear but it's really the approach making developers productive in the enterprise >>awesome. Thank you for that. I know we're tight on time but it's like speed dating with you raghu. So I'm gonna go on to another topic. Really important topic of security, you've made obviously some big acquisitions, there are things like carbon black, you've got a lot of stuff going on with, with, with endpoint, with end user computing, I'm first interested in sort of how you organize it looks like you're putting security and the networking piece together and then what's your swim lane? It seems like you're, you're focused obviously on your infrastructure. You're not trying to be all things to all people. Help us understand your strategy in that regard. >>Yeah, I mean security is a massive space, Right? And you covered very well. Hundreds and thousands of security problems that customers want to be solving. What we are focused on is how do we simplify the security problem for the customers? And we're doing it through three wells. The first one is we are baking security into the platforms that customers used ones. Right. But there are more obvious fear our workspace one, our container platform etcetera, etcetera. Right? Cloud platforms. So that's the first thing that we're doing. The second is we are putting um, bringing together, we're taking an end to end view of security, which is everything from an end user connecting from home to the corporate network or the sassy, sassy applications to the Windows devices they are using to the data center applications they're using to the club. Right? So we're taking a holistic view of security. So which means we want to combine our network security assets with our endpoint security assets with our workload security assets. That is why we bought all of those things together under one roof. And the third is we are instrumental in all of these and collecting signals from all of these and pulling it into the cloud and turning security into a machine learning and the data problem, right? And that is where the problem. Black cloud comes in and by doing that, we are able to provide a holistic view of where uh customer security posture, right? And these sensors can be on BMR platforms, on non BMR platforms etcetera. And so so that's really how we are approaching it. I mean there's the emerging industry term for a policy XDR. You might follow that. So that's really what we're trying to do. >>Outstanding. Last question and I know, I know we got to go. You mentioned the spin that's happening in november. That's an exciting time for a lot of reasons. I think the ecosystem, you know, emphasizing your independence but also gives you control of your balance sheet, regaining control of your balance sheet, tongue in cheek there. But it's important because all this, this cloud build out this multi cloud, exposing the primitives, leveraging the primitives and the A. P. I. S. Of these clouds making them identical across all these estates. That's not trivial and you're obviously gonna need resources to do that. So maybe you can talk about that and how you see the future playing out organic inorganic, maybe a little lemon A in there. What's your approach? How are you thinking about that? >>Yeah. So we are very excited with the impending spain, which like you said is on track to happen early november. Um and if you think about the spin, there are three aspects that we are excited about. The first aspect is uh we have a great relationship with Dell Tech, the company right. What we have done is we have codified that into a framework agreement that covers the gold market and technology collaboration and we are super excited by that and that baselines against what we do today and then as incentives on both sides to continue to grow that tremendously. So we're gonna continue being, doing that and that's going to continue being a great partner at the same time. From a partnership point of view, is truly going to be a Switzerland of the industry. So previously companies that were otherwise a little bit more competitive with dull now no longer have that reservation in partnering very deeply with us. I'm totally, like you said from a capital structure point of view, it gives us the flexibility to use to do em in a should we decide to do so in the future right? And use both equity and cash for them in a so so that's the capital structure, flexibility, the Switzerland positioning and the continuing great relationship with dull Those are the benefits of the spin >>love and the partner ecosystem has always been a source of, of innovation and it's a big part of the flywheel, the power of many versus the resources of one Ragu, Thanks so much for coming back in the queue. Best of luck. We're really excited for you and for the future of VM ware. >>Thank you and thanks for all the great work that you do and look forward to continuing to read your great research, >>appreciate that. And thank you for >>watching the cubes, continuous >>Coverage of VM World 2021. Keep it right there. >>Thank you. Mhm. Yeah.

>>Welcome to the cubes coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, two guests joining me next. Matt Morgan is here. Vice-president cloud infrastructure business group at VMware and Steven Jones joins us as well. Director of services at AWS gentlemen. That's great to have you on the program. >>Thank you, Lisa. >>Glad to see everyone's doing well. Here we are virtual. So we are just around the four year anniversary of VMware cloud on AWS. Can't believe it's been 20 17, 4 years. Matt talked to us about VMware AWS partnership and how it's progressed over that time. >>The partnership has been fantastic and it's evolved. We announced VM-ware cloud on AWS general availability all the way back at VMworld, 2017, we've been releasing new features and capabilities every other week with 16 major platform releases and 300 features as customers have requested. So it's been an incredible co-engineering relationship with AWS. We've also expanded our go to market by announcing a resale program in which AWS can resell VMware cloud on AWS. We did that back in 2019 and in 2020, we've announced that AWS is VMware's preferred public cloud partner for vSphere based workloads. And VMware is AWS's preferred service for vSphere based workloads. >>So as you said, Matt, a tremendous amount of evolution and just a short four year timeframe. Stephen talked to me about the partnership through AWS, this lens. >>Yeah. You bet. Look, I agree with Matt that the partnership has been fantastic and it's just amazing to see how fast four years has gone. I really think that AWS and VMware really are a really good example of how two technology companies can work together for them. The benefit of our mutual customers, um, as Matt indicated, VM-ware is our preferred service for vSphere based workloads. And we're broadly working together as a single team across both engineering and go-to-market functions to help customers drive business value from the, the, the investments they made over the years. And then also as they work to transform their businesses into the future with cloud technology, >>Let's talk about digital transformation. That is a term we've been, we've been talking about that for many years on this program. And at every event we've all been at, right. What we've seen in the last year and a half is a massive acceleration. Now talk to me about how VMware and AWS are helping customers facilitate that digital transformation. >>So our customers see modern it infrastructure as the core pillar of a digital transformation strategy and public cloud has been a digital transformation enabler for organizations. And that's because they have so many benefits when they embraced the public cloud, including the ability to elastically consume infrastructure. That's required the ability to employ a pay as you go financial model and the ability to reduce operational overhead, which helps save both monetary costs, but also provides more flexibility. But the big driver now is the ability to embrace innovative cloud services and those services help accelerate application development, deployment and management VMware cloud on AWS is a prime example of such an offering, which not only provides these benefits, but enhances them with operational consistency working the same way their it architecture works today, giving them familiarity and enterprise robustness that VMware technologies are known for, but being able to maximize the power of the global AWS cloud >>And every year from a customer adoption perspective, that's doubling Steven walked through a couple of customer examples that really highlight the value of VMC on AWS. >>Yeah, I've got a couple here. I think, uh, Kiko Milano is a good one. There a then our Italian company, they sell cosmetics and beauty products through about 900 retail stores in 27 different markets. So quite large, but they found that their on premises data center and outsourcing partner was just too inflexible for the changing needs of their company. And within four months, uh, Kiko actually migrated all of their core workloads to Amazon. Is he too, and particularly surprised how easy it was to migrate over 300 servers to the VMware cloud on AWS offering. And this is, this is key because the actually leveraging the same platform that they were used to, which was BMR. Uh, the Kiko team actually didn't have to perform any testing or modify any other existing applications. They also, they didn't have to actually train their teams again, because again, they were already up-skilled with being able to leverage the BMR technology. >>So again, we think it's the best of both worlds customers like Kiko can come and use VMware cloud on AWS, consolidate their server footprint and also take advantage of, of a hyperscale platform. That's pretty cool. Another customer, uh, SAP global ratings that our company provides a high quality market intelligence in the form of credit ratings, research, and thought leadership to help educate market participants to make better financial decisions who doesn't want to make a better financial decision. Right? So in order to accelerate their business growth and globalization really meet new business capabilities, they knew they needed to move a hundred percent to the cloud and wanted to know how they're actually going to do that. Now they also have an aging data center system outages, which are becoming more frequent, which to them actually concerned that they actually might, um, uh, face in the future, some penalties from the sec. >>So they didn't want to do that. So over the period of about eight months, think about this eight months, they moved to 150 financial apps to AWS leveraging VMware on AWS. Uh, pretty impressive. They reduce technical debt, uh, from legacy systems that were hosted on sun Solaris, Oracle excavator, and a X. And then now actually able to meet the goal demands of their business. The fun part here is they're actually meeting their uptime, uh, needs a hundred percent of the time since it actually moves these workloads to the VMware cloud on AWS. So pretty exciting. See customers link this kind of journey, >>Absolutely impressive journeys. Also short time periods to do a massive change there. It sounds like the familiarity with VMware in the console is a huge facilitator of the speed of migration and folks being able to get up and running. Stephen talked to me about some of the trends that you were seeing in organizations like the customers that you just mentioned. >>Yeah. So there are some emergency transfer store and a lot of customers want to leverage the same cloud operating models, but also in their own data centers. So they can take advantage of agility and innovation of cloud will also meeting requirements that they sometimes have that keep them from adopting cloud. Uh, you can think of workloads that sometimes have low latency requirements, right? Or they need to process large volumes of data locally. Uh, other times customers tell us they really need the flexibility to run data workloads, um, in a particular area that has data sovereignty or residency requirements. So when, as we talk about customers, um, they tell us that not only do they want to minimize their, their need to actually manage and operate infrastructure, um, and focus on business innovation is sometimes need to do this, um, in a, in a data center this close to them, if that makes sense. So they're looking for the best again of both worlds. >>Got it. The best of both worlds and Matt, you have some breaking news to share. What is it? >>So today we're announcing the general availability of VMware cloud on AWS outposts. >>Awesome. Congratulations. Tell me about that. Let's dig into it. >>So for customers looking to extend their AWS centric model to an on-premise location, that data center edge location via more cloud on AWS, outposts delivers the agility and innovation of AWS cloud, but on premises and VMware cloud on AWS outpost is based on VMware cloud, a jointly engineered service. So together we're delivering this service on premises as a service. This gives us the capability to integrate VMware's enterprise class architecture and platform with next generation dedicated Amazon nitro based ECE to bare metal instances. It provides a deeply integrated hybrid cloud operating environment that extends from a customer's data center to these particular services running on premises in the data center, the edge, or to the public cloud and having a unified control plane between all of it. >>A unified control plan is absolutely critical. Uh, Stephen eight, >>We have a detailed plan to offer integrated AWS services, and that capability really enhances the innovation angle for customers as they embraced the modernization of their applications. >>Another great example of how deep the partnership is Steven AWS outpost was announced at reinvent, I think 2019, which was the last time I was at an event in person. So coming up on a couple of years here, when GA talked to me about some of the key use cases that you're seeing, where it really excels. >>Yeah. So Matt, Matt highlighted a number of these, right. And you're right. It was 2019. Uh, we were all together back then and hopefully we can do that, uh, very soon here, um, quickly on apple. So overall, since, since we're talking about outposts, uh, VMware cloud on a post as well. So the thing here and Matt highlighted this is that without posts, we actually live we've leveraged, leveraged literally the same hardware and control plane technology that we leverage in our own data centers so that the customers will come to know and love and expect about the AWS platform and VMC on AWS, uh, uh, is, is, is the exact same thing that we'll be able to get with the Apple's technology. I'll give you a couple of customer examples. I think that that actually speaks to the use cases best. So, um, you remember, I talked a little bit about data locality and residency requirements. >>So first ABI Dhabi bank, uh, is the largest bank in the United Arab Emirates, right? And they were offering corporate investment and personal banking service, and they wanted to deliver a digital banking service, including email and mobile payments, but they had to follow a specific residency and data retention requirements and they had to do it in the UAE. And so what they've done is they've actually leveraged multiple AWS outposts in the UAE to allow them to provide business continuity while also leveraging the same API APIs that they had to come to know about, uh, and love about the AWS services in region, right? Phillips healthcare is another really good example. Um, you can imagine that, uh, what they do every day is, is, uh, very important things like predictive analytics for preventative treatments. And so outposts Phillips has actually taken those and that developed cloud applications, again, deployed on the same infrastructure they were used to within region. Now they can actually do this in clinics at hospitals, and they're in managing that the same tools providing, uh, same end-to-end, um, view and to their own providers, 19 administrators. And so they actually estimate they have over 70,000 servers now distributed across 12,000 locations or 1200 locations. Excuse me. So that's an example of, again, just two use cases that really broadened the reach and the flexibility of customers to run workloads in the cloud, but in a on-premise fashion. Does that make sense? >>Yes, it does. And you mentioned two great stories there. One in financial services, the other one healthcare, two industries that have had to massively pivot in the last 18 months amongst many others, but let's talk a little bit more Steven, about some of the things that you're hearing from some of the early customers of BMC on outpost. What are some of the near term opportunities that you're uncovering? >>Yeah, I've got to say here too, that, uh, customers are VMware customers have been asking us for this for quite some time. I'm sure Matt would agree. Um, so look from, uh, go back to some of the use cases we've discussed low latency compute requirements. So one of our higher education customers today who has migrated workloads to be more cloud on AWS, um, is looking at, uh, extending the same capability to an on-premise experience specifically for, um, uh, school applications that require a low latency, um, uh, integration, um, from a local data processing perspective. Again, one of our VMware on AWS top biopharmaceutical companies, uh, here again in the U S um, is planning to use VMware cloud on AWS outposts for health management applications with patient records that need to be retained locally at the hospital hospital sites. And then finally you can kind of going back to the story around data residency. We have a large telco provider in Europe that is planning to use this particular offering for their applications that need to remain on premises to meet regulatory requirements. So again, you know, we're just super pleased with the amount of interest, not only in VMware cloud on AWS, but also in this new run that we're announcing today. And we're really excited to be able to support the VMware cloud experience really on the AWS Apple's platform for a of these use cases. >>One of the things we've talked about for many years with both VMware and AWS is the dedication to listening to the voice of the customer. Not obviously this is a great example, Steven, as you said, VMware customers have been asking for this for awhile. So while customers have a ton of choice, I want you guys to unpack what the differentiators are of this service. And Matt, if we can start with you to bring you back into the conversation, we'd love to get your, your input on those differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. So people have to look at this for the service that's delivered and on the VMware side of the equation, we're delivering the full VMware cloud infrastructure capability. This is delivered as a service as a cloud service on premises. So why is this valuable? Well, it relieves the it burden of infrastructure management and fully maximizes the value of a fully managed cloud service, giving an organization, the capability to unlock the renovation, budgets, and start to invest truly an innovation. This is all about continuous life cycle management, ongoing service monitoring, automated processes to ensure the health and security the infrastructure. And of course, this is backed by expert VMware site recovery and reliability engineers, to ensure that everything works perfectly. We also enable organizations to leverage best in class enterprise grade capabilities that we've talked about in our compute storage and networking for best-in-class resiliency auto-scaling and intrinsic availability. >>So there's no long procurement cycles to set up these environments. And that means it's developer ready right out of the box. We're also deeply integrated with what customers do today. So end to end hybrid cloud usually requires end-to-end hybrid processes. And with this integration into those processes is instant, no reconfiguration, no conversion, no refactoring, no rearchitecture of existing applications using VMware HDX or B motion organizations can move applications to leverage this cloud service instantly. It allows you to use established on premises governance, security, and operational policies, and ensures that that workload portability I mentioned goes both ways. It's bi-directional as customers need to have portability to meet their business requirements. As we mentioned earlier, there's a unified hybrid control plane with a single pane of glass to manage resources across the end-to-end hybrid cloud environment. And we're giving direct access to 200 plus native AWS services. And that enables an organization to truly modernize their applications, starting where they are today. And so that gives you the real capability to deliver a unique service. One that gives you an organization, the ability to migrate without any downtime have fast, fast cost effective capabilities and a low risk to their hybrid cloud strategy. >>Excellent. That's a pretty jam packed list of differentiators there, but one of the things that it really sounds like not from what you said is how much work has gone on to make the transition smooth for customers, give them that flexibility and that portability that they need. Those are marketing terms you and I know are used very frequently, but it really seems like the work that you've done here will be done straight to that. I want to ask you Stephen, that same question from AWS's perspective, what really differentiates the solution. >>It is a good question. I'll just, uh, I'll agree that there has been a ton of work first that is, has gone, gone into actually making this happen. Right. Um, and to, to all the points that Matt made. And I would just add that again. 80 was outpost is built on the same AWS nitro system and infrastructure. The customers have already come to love in the cloud. And so gone really are the days where customers have to worry about procuring and racking and stacking their own gear layer on all the benefits, the map outline from a VMware perspective. And again, we, we really believe the customers are getting the best of both worlds here. Um, with, with specifically with the compute that comes in the outpost rack, um, customers actually get getting kind of built in redundancy and resiliency, hard security, all those things that customers don't know, they need certain things. >>The customers know they need to pay attention to, but also want some help with. And so we've, we, we put a lot of thought and effort into this. Um, but could I just, uh, explain a little bit about the customer experience, um, when a customer orders and AWS outposts rack, right? AWS actually signs up, uh, to do a fully managed experience here. Like we'll bring people in to actually do site assessments. Um, we'll manage the hardware, setup, the installation and the maintenance of that gear over time. Well, VM-ware also manages the, the software defined data center construct as well as, um, the, the single point for, uh, for support questions. And so together, we really thought through how customers is met, but it get an end to end experience from hardware all the way up through application modernization. It's pretty exciting, >>Very deep partnership there. And we're out of time, but I do want to ask you guys, where can customers go, who are interested in learning more about this new service? >>So at VM world, there are a collection of DMR cloud, AWS sessions, including sessions, dedicated to VMware cloud on AWS outpost. We encourage everyone who's attending VMworld to look up those sessions and you'll learn all about the hardware, the service, the capabilities, the procurement, and how to get started. In addition, on vmware.com, we have a web portal for you to gain additional knowledge through a digital consumption. That's vmware.com/vmc-outposts. >>Awesome. Matt, thank you. I'm sure folks will be just drinking up all of this information at the sessions at VMworld 2021. And I hope to see you in person at next year's VM. I'm crossing my fingers. Great to see you guys Format Morgan and Steve Jones. I'm Lisa Martin, and you're watching the cubes coverage of the em world to 2021.

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

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

>>Hello, I'm John Frey with the queue here for cube conversation with Devon Reed, senior director of apex offer product mentioned Dell technologies. They have a great to see you. Congratulations on apex and the momentum and the big news. >>Yeah. Thank you for having me here, John. It's a, it's a pleasure to be here with you and I can't wait to talk to you about the stuff. >>So we chatted last Dell technologies world about apex in great length. Um, first given update on what's the new news and to where's it come from since Dell tech DEC world. What's, what's the big update on the product and the news you're launching today. >>Yeah, so it's been a, it's been a fantastic journey here, John. And, um, you know, since Dell technologies world, we've learned a ton from our customers and the reception has been extremely positive. We're seeing a ton of interest from our customers. We're building demand, um, and we're learning a lot, but I think if we boil it down to what we're, we're really learning here is that customers are living in a cloud first world. And what that means is that customers want to move, uh, you know, to the public cloud because the public cloud brings simplicity, agility, the ability to pay for only what they use and they don't need to manage their infrastructure. However, what we're hearing from our customers as well is that they're, um, a little hesitant to move all of their workloads to the public cloud, because there are certain performance requirements, latency requirements, and security requirements that are, uh, still, um, held from on-prem infrastructure vendors. And that's, that's the beauty of apex to bring that the, the simplicity of the public cloud and the security and the performance of the private cloud in one with it. >>I want to get your thoughts real quick before I move on to the news, because this comes up a lot in conversations. In fact, I just had a conversation this morning on camera and also off-camera around virtualization of data, right? So, and how on premises? The bare metal growth is there, right? So you starting to see from a performance standpoint, when you security, we get that. There's not a lot of on premises reasons why to be on premises for the security reason, but performance, you brought that up. Talk more about that real quick, because I think this is really becoming quite more traction than people thought there's a performance gain. On-premise with some of the new tech, what's your reaction to that? >>Yeah, exactly. I think that's a, it's a great call out John. And especially as you get into some of these new applications where the computation needs to be directly next to, uh, the data in which is processing latency and performance is extremely important. We hear that day in and day out from our customers. And that's why it's really, it's really important to focus on not only on public cloud environments, but on-premise infrastructure. And that's what apex really, really helps customers, um, bridge that bridge, that gap. >>And for the folks watching there's a great interview, search his name, Devon's name, and look at last year's announcement. We covered it in detail with apex. So some great content there. Go check that out. I got to ask about the news. You had some new announcements at VMworld earlier today. What can you tell us about the news? >>Yeah, yeah, we did. John. This is, this is an amazing year for Dell at VM world in general. Um, there's a ton of announcements that have come out with collaboration with VMware and Dell, but for apex specifically. And that's what I'm here to talk to you about is that we're introducing a new offer to the apex portfolio. And this offer, we call apex cloud services with VMware cloud. And what this really is, is it's a full infrastructure as a service stack and it's utilizing Dell's, uh, hyper-converged infrastructure. So it's integrated storage, networking compute, and we combine that with, um, the virtualization stack from, uh, VMware virtualization stack and the services. It's a solution that's managed by Dell, it's designed for six nines of availability. And again, going back to what customers are asking for, it allows customers, the performance, the security, and it also provides those consistent operations across their multi-cloud environments. >>What's the driver behind the customer requirements than this. Is there a specific use case that jumps out off the page on, on the managed service? Could you share why the traction? >>Yeah. You know, um, this space is growing really rapidly and it's the new space. And as we talk to more and more customers, we learned there's a ton of different use cases, a ton of different deployments that are really coming to the forefront. But if I really boil it down, there are a few that are kind of rising to the top year. And I think first and foremost, we see a lot of deployments in VDI and really the driver behind that is some of those, those environments are complex. And what the customers are trying to do is really offload those it administrative tasks and have companies like Dell manager. And that's what we're doing for them. Another one is, um, you know, really around that latency, latency and security, really trying to drive applications to not suffer from, you know, that hate latency and security kind of benefits. >>Now, um, what we've seen is we have a lot of interest from very large enterprises that actually want to build and modernize their data centers. So they're either consolidating their data centers or they're trying to move to a fully automated, uh, hybrid cloud situation, right. And I'm talking very large deployments of, uh, VMware based, um, private cloud, uh, capabilities. And I say one other place that we're seeing a lot of interest in these sort of capabilities is large distributed kind of edge use cases. So think, um, you know, think use cases where you have, um, hundreds of remote office locations or a thousands of retail locations that is very difficult for customers to manage. And we take that burden away from our customers. >>Uh, thanks for laying out the customer scenarios and the use case. Good stuff I got to ask you about the solution now appears that it was jointly developed with VMware. Is that right? And if so, can you tell me more about that? >>Yeah, yeah, exactly. John, this is, this is amazing. The amount of collaboration that has gone into this solution with VMware is incredible and really it's based on customer feedback. And we saw, you know, based on this feedback, we've saw a real need to basically take the best of VMware software and their services capabilities, and our, you know, Dell's world-leading infrastructure capabilities and really combine it with the simplicity and agility that apex apex provides. So we've been working with VMware very tightly, uh, over the past year and more to really develop the solution. It's been a great journey, been spending a ton of time with the VMware team building this and, um, you know, customers really love what VMware cloud enables and customers love apex. So it's a really powerful combo and we think it's, it's really the next, uh, kind of rocket ship for, you know, the combined companies here. Yeah. >>I think the VDI piece and these use cases, you mentioned only get more relevant and complex at the same time with the whole shifting in the working environments, you know, the work from home, the future of work, you know, you have the blurring of the lines between private, you know, home versus corporate network. It's like, I mean, we thought it was hard before it's going to get even more complicated. So the pressure's on to abstract away the complexity. So, so totally relevant. Yeah. >>And demand for these kinds of solutions we're seeing, you know, the interest is, is doubling. Uh, it seems like almost every six months, you know, there's a lot more interest, especially as we progress through this pandemic and the, and uh, this environment that we're living in you. So, okay. >>So I got to ask you going forward again. Great progress from our last time we chatted at Dell technology worlds last year, um, 2021, um, what's ahead for Dell and the VMware partnership. Tell us more, how does that look? Um, extending is what's the trajectory look like, and you share any specifics, what can we expect? What's the headroom? What should customers expect? >>Yeah, yeah. You know, we get that question a lot and really, um, you know, nothing is really, although we are going to be separating as, as different entities, you know, the collaboration and the, the level of, um, joint development that we have between the two companies, uh, couldn't be stronger now. And we don't, we do not expect that to change. And we're just getting started on this thing and there's a lot more to come for sure. >>What's the biggest thing that you're, you're excited about. Obviously apex has been a good, it's a trajectory. The progress has been great. The market's in your favor, what's, what's exciting for you right now. Where do you see the action? Um, you know, where's, where's the fun for you in this what's that what's, uh, what's your take? >>You know, it always, for me, the fun always comes down to customers and understanding what the customers want, understanding what the solution, where the solution works, where the solution doesn't work, really working with our customers to really understand their problems and really try to work. So that's where I, I get my energy, uh, in this whole thing and to see the, see the pipeline grow and the sales coming in, that's just, it's really exciting for me, you know, as we're kind of embarking on this new, as a service, uh, world for the, for the multicloud world, it's, it's just, it's fantastic, John, >>You know, the one-click buy as you go consumption-based, this is the trend and infrastructure as code, which is a cloud ethos, and you may not have any on premises with security and now performance, it seems like we're seeing the second wave of virtualization kick in on premises where now that you're in a cloud operating model from storage compute, networking, kind of almost a reboot, almost a reset or an extension or a real-life, it seems like it's another second life of, of, of, of, of innovation. What's your reaction to that? >>Yeah. I, I definitely agree with you, John, and, you know, from a, from a vision perspective, we're just, we're just starting to, uh, you know, we're just starting out there and we, you know, if we think about the power, uh, in the breadth of the portfolio that Dell has, it is unmatched in the industry. So first and foremost, you know, there's a lot more from a, from a solution perspective that we can bring to the floor. So I think that's, that's really exciting. I like the position that we have there and in terms of collaboration with VMware, we're just getting started there too. And, uh, I spend, uh, almost a half of my day with VMware employees, which is incredible amount of collaboration. And there's so much more that we've talked about in our roadmap, uh, to really build out this vision when you start thinking about not just virtualization, but you start to talk about, um, you know, these, these new operating environments, including Kubernetes and Tansu capabilities. And, um, you know, how do you, how do you hit different, uh, use cases with, um, not only hyper converged and hyper-converged infrastructure, but different types of infrastructure as well. And then you start to span, uh, not only the prem, but the co-location facilities and, and the edge, and you bring this all together under the apex console. And I like our future >>Console based provisioning, easy, uh, congratulations on the big news apex cloud services with VMware cloud, um, for the folks watching, that's going to come in and maybe adopt the solution, the managed service, what can they expect from Dell? >>Uh, what you can expect is a very simple experience. So, uh, everything starts and ends with what we call our apex console. So a customer from the time they, they want to learn about our services to, um, you know, getting quotes on them, to actually transacting the, uh, the service, um, to operating the infrastructure from that. And then we provide a full set of, uh, services under the cover where a customer doesn't need to worry about the actual infrastructure management. And we provide customer success managers for every account. So we, we are there with you, uh, along every step of the journey to make this as seamless and easy as possible. So it's a fantastic, uh, experience for our customers. And that's, that's one of the things that they really love about the apex is that, um, you know, kind of white glove service that we're providing >>Devin. Great to see you, Devin Marine, senior director of Dell apex offer product management. He's only getting the product to see and congratulatory success, apex cloud services with VMware clouds, the big news here at VMworld with Dell technologies, I'm John furrier cube conversation, breaking it down and bringing the news to you. Thanks for watching.

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

[Music] welcome to thecube's coverage of vmworld 2021 i'm lisa martin pleased to welcome back to the program the cto of vmware kit kohlberg welcome back to the program and congrats on your new role thank you yeah i'm really excited to be here so you've been at vmware for a long time you started as an intern i read yeah yeah it's been uh 18 years as a full-timer but i guess 19 if you count my internship so quite a while it's many lifetimes in silicon valley right many lifetimes in silicon valley well we've seen a lot of innovation from vmware in its 23 years you've been there the vast majority of that we've seen a lot of successful big tech waves ridden by vmware in april vmware pulled tanzu and vmware cloud foundation together vmware cloud you've got some exciting news with respect to that what are you announcing today well we got a lot of exciting announcements happening at vmworld this week but one of the ones i'm really excited about is vmware cloud with tons of services so let me talk about what these things are so we have vmware cloud which is really us taking our vmware cloud foundation technology and delivering that as a service in partnership with our public cloud providers but in particular this one with aws vmware cloud on aws we're combining that with our tanzu portfolio of technologies and these are really technologies focused at developers at folks driving devops building and operating modern applications and what we're doing is really bringing them together to simplify customers moving from their data centers into the cloud and then modernizing their applications it's a pattern that we see very very often this notion of migrate and then modernize right once you're on a modern cloud infrastructure makes it much easier to modernize your applications talk to me about some of the catalysts for this change and this offering of services was it you know catalyzed by some of the events we've seen in the world in the last 18 months and this acceleration of digital adoption yeah absolutely and we saw this across our customer base across many many different industries although as you can imagine those industries that that were really considered essential uh were the ones where we saw the biggest sorts of accelerations we saw a tremendous amount of people needing to support remote workers overnight right and cloud is a perfect use case for that but the challenge a lot of customers had was that they couldn't take the time to retool that they had to use what they already had and so something like vmware cloud was perfect for that because it allowed them to take what they were doing on-prem and seamlessly extend it into the cloud without any changes able to do that you know almost overnight right but at the same time what we also saw was the acceleration of their digital transformation people are now online they're needing to interact with an app over their phone to get something you know remotely delivered or to schedule maybe um an appointment for their pet because you know a lot of people got pets during the pandemic and so you just saw this rush toward digitization and these new applications need to be created and so as customers move their application estate into the cloud with vmware cloud and aws they then had this need to modernize those applications to be able to deliver them faster to respond fast to the very dynamic nature of what was happening during the pandemic so let's talk about uh some of the opportunities and the advantages that vmware cloud with tanzania service is going to deliver to those it admins who have to deliver things even faster yep so let me talk a bit about the tech and then talk about how that fits into uh what the users will experience so vmware cloud with tons of services is really two key components uh the first of which is the tanzu kubernetes grid service the tkg service as we call it so what this is is actually a deep integration of tonsil kubernetes grid with vmware cloud and and the kubernetes we've actually integrated into vmware cloud foundation folks who are familiar with vmware may remember that a couple of years ago we announced project pacific which was a deep integration of kubernetes into vsphere essentially enabling vsphere to have a kubernetes interface to be natively kubernetes and what that did was it enabled the i.t admins to have direct insight inside of kubernetes clusters to understand what was happening in terms of the containers and pods that that their developers were running it also allowed them to leverage uh their existing vsphere and vmware cloud foundation tooling on those workloads so fast forward today we we have this built in now and what we're doing is actually offering that as a service so that the customer doesn't need to deal with managing it installing it updating any of that stuff instead they can just leverage it they can start creating kubernetes clusters and upstream conformant kubernetes clusters to allow their developers to take advantage of those capabilities but also be able to use their native tooling on it so i think that's really really important is that the it admin really can enable their developers to seamlessly start to build and operate modern applications on top of vmware cloud got it and talk to me about how this is going to empower those it admins to become kubernetes operators yeah well i think that's exactly it you know we talk to a lot of these admins and and they're seeing the desire for kubernetes uh from their lines of business from you know from the app teams and the idea is that when you look start looking at the kubernetes ecosystem there's a whole bunch of new tooling and technology out there we find that people have to spend a lot of time figuring out what the right thing to use is and for a lot of these folks they say hey i've already figured out how to operate applications in production i've got the tooling i've got the standardization i got things like security figured out right super important and so the real benefit of this approach and this deep integration is it allows them to take those those tools those operational best practices that they already have and now apply them to these new workloads fairly seamlessly and so this is really about the power of leveraging all the investments they've made to take those forward with modern applications and the total adjustable market here is pretty big i heard your cto referring to that in an interview in september and i was looking at some recent vmware survey numbers where 80 of customers say they're deploying applications in highly distributed environments that include their own data center multiple clouds uh edge and also customers said hey 90 of our application initiatives are focused on modernization so vmware clearly sees the big tam here yeah it's absolutely massive um you know we see uh many customers the vast majority something like 75 percent are using multiple clouds or on-prem in the cloud we have some customers using even more than that and you see this very large application estate that's spread out across this and so you know i think what we're really looking at is how do we enable uh the right sorts of consistency both from an infrastructure perspective enabling things like security but also management across all these environments and by the way it's another exciting thing neglected to mention about this announcement vmware cloud with tonsil services not only includes the tonsil kubernetes grid service giving you that sort of kubernetes uh cluster as a service if you will but it also includes tons of mission control essentials and this is really the next generation of management when you start looking at modern applications and what tons of mission control focuses on is enabling managing kubernetes consistently across clouds and so this is the other really important point is that yes we want to make vmware cloud vmware cloud infrastructure the best place to build and operate applications especially modern ones but we also realize that you know customers are doing all sorts of things right they're in the native cloud whether that's aws or azure or google and they want ways of managing more consistently across all these environments in addition to their vmware environments both in the cloud and on-prem and so tons of mission control really enables that as well and that's another really powerful aspect of this is that it's built in to enable that next level of administration and management that consistency is critical right i mean that's probably one of the biggest benefits that customers are getting is that familiarity with the console the consistency of being able to manage so that they can deploy apps faster um that as businesses are still pivoting and changing direction in light of the pandemics i imagine that that is a huge uh from a business outcomes perspective the workforce productivity there is probably pretty pretty big yeah and i think it's also about managing risk as well you know one of the the biggest worries that we hear from many of the cios uh ctos executives that we talk to at our customers is this uh software supply chain risk like what is it exactly like what are the exact bits that they're running out there right in their applications because the reality is that um those apps are composed of many open source technologies and you know as we saw with solarwinds it's very possible for someone to get in and you know plant malicious code into their source repository such that as it gets built and flows out it'll you know just go out and customers will start using it and it's a huge huge security vulnerability and one thing on that note that customers are particularly worried about is the lack of consistency across their cloud environments that because things are done different ways and the different teams have different processes across different clouds it's easy for small mistakes to creep in there for little openings right that a hacker might be able to go and exploit and so i think this gets back to that notion of consistency and that you're right it's great for productivity but the one i think that's almost in some ways you might say uh for many of these folks more important for is from a security standpoint that they can validate and ensure they're in compliance with their security standards and by the way you know this is uh for most companies a board level discussion right the board is saying hey like do we have the right controls in place because it is um such an important thing and such a critical risk factor it is a critical risk factor we saw you mentioned solar winds but just in the last 18 months the the massive changes to the threat landscape the huge rise in ransomware and ddos attacks you know we had this scatterer everybody went home and you've got you know the edge is booming and you've got folks using uh you know not using their vpns and things when they should be so that the fact that that's a board level discussion and that this is going to help from a risk mitigation perspective that consistency that you talked about is huge i think for a customer in any industry yep yeah and it's pretty interesting as well like you mentioned ransomware so we're doing some work on that one as well actually not specifically with this announcement but it's another vmware cloud service that plugs into this uh seamlessly vmware cloud disaster recovery and one of the really cool features that we're announcing at vmworld this week is the ability to actually support and and maybe uh handle ransomware attacks and so the idea there is that if you do get compromised and what typically happens is that the hackers come in and they encrypt you know some of your data and they say hey if you want to get access to it you got to pay us and we'll decrypt it for you but if you have the right dr solution um that's backing up on a fairly continuous basis it means that whatever data might be encrypted you know would only be a small delta like the last let's say hour or two of data right and so what we're looking at is leveraging that dr solution to be able to very rapidly restore specific individual files uh that may have been compromised and so this is like one way that we're helping customers deal with that like obviously we want to put a whole bunch of other security protections in place and we do when we enable them to do that but one thing when you think about security is that it's very much defense in depth that you have multiple layers of the fail-safes there and so this one being kind of like the end result that hackers do get in they do manage to compromise it they do manage to get a hold of it and encrypt it well you still got unencrypted backups that you control and that you have um a very clean delineation and separation from just like kind of an architectural standpoint that the hackers won't be able to get at right so that you can control that and restore it so again you know this is something very top of mind for us and it's funny because we don't always lead with the security angle maybe we should as i'm saying it here but uh but it's something that's very very top of mind for a lot of our customers it's something that's also top of mind for us and that we're focused on it is because it's no longer if we get attacked it's one and they've got to be able to have the right recovery strategy so that they don't have to pay those ransoms and of course we only hear about the big ones like the solar winds and the colonial pipelines and there's many more going on when i get back to vmware cloud with tanzania services talk to me about how this fits into vmware's bigger picture yeah yeah yeah great question thanks for bringing me back i'd love to geek out on some of these things so um but when you take a step back so what we're really doing uh with vmware cloud is trying to provide this really powerful infrastructure layer uh that is available anywhere customers want to run applications and that could be in the public cloud it could be in the data center it could be at the edge it could be at all those locations and you know you mentioned edge earlier and i think we're seeing explosive growth there as well and so what we're really doing is driving uh broad optionality in terms of how customers want to adopt these technologies and then as i said we're sort of you know we're kind of going broad many locations we're also building up in each of those locations this notion of ponzu services being seamlessly integrated in doing that uh you know starting now with vmware cloud aws but expanding that to every every location that we have in addition you know we're also really excited another thing we're announcing this week called project arctic now the idea with arctic is really to start driving more choice and flexibility into how customers consume vmware cloud do they consume it as software or as a service and where do they do that so traditionally the only way to get it delivered as a service would be in the public cloud right vmware cloud aws you can click a few buttons and you get a software defined data center set up for you automatically now traditionally on-prem we haven't had that we we did do something pretty powerful uh a year or two back with the release of vmware cloud on dell emc we can deliver a service there but that often required new hardware you know new setup for customers and customers are coming back to us and saying hey like we've got these really large vsphere deployments how do we enable them to take advantage of all this great vmware cloud functionality from where they are today right they say hey we can't rebuild all these overnight but we want to take advantage of vmware cloud today so that's what really what project arctic is focused on it's focused on connecting into these brownfield existing vsphere environments and delivering some of the vmware cloud benefits there things like being able to easily well first of all be able to manage those environments through the vmware cloud console so now you have one place where you can see your on-prem deployments your cloud deployments everything being able to really easily move uh applications between on-prem and the cloud leveraging some of the vmware cloud disaster recovery capabilities i just mentioned like the ransomware example you can now do that even on prem as well because keep in mind it's people aren't attacking you know the hackers aren't attacking just the public cloud they're attacking data centers or anywhere else where these applications might be running and so arctic's a great example of where we're saying hey there's a bunch of cool stuff happening here but let's really meet customers where they're at and many of our customers still have a very large data center footprint still want to maintain that that's really strategic for them or as i said may even want to be extending to the edge so it's really about giving them more of that flexibility so in terms of meeting customers where they are i know vmware has been focused on that for probably its entire history we talk about that on the cube in every vmworld where can customers go like what's the right starting point is this targeted for vmware cloud on aws current customers what's kind of the next steps for customers to learn more about this yeah absolutely so there's a bunch of different ways so first of all there's a tremendous amount of activity happening here at vmworld um just all sorts of breakout sessions like you know detailed demos like all sorts of really cool stuff just a ton of content i'm actually kind of i'm in this new role i'm super excited about it but one thing i'm kind of bummed out about is i don't have as much time to go look at all these cool sessions so i highly recommend going and checking those out um you know we have hands-on labs as well which is another great way to test out and try vmware products so hold.vmware.com uh you can go and spin those things up and just kind of take them for a test drive see what they're all about and then if you go to vmc.vmware.com that is vmware cloud right we want to make it very easy to get started whether you're in just a vsphere on-prem customer or whether you already have vmware cloud and aws what you can see is that it's really easy to get started in that there's a ton of value-add services on top of our core infrastructure so it's all about making it accessible making it easy and simple to consume and get started with so there's a ton of options out there and i highly recommend folks go and check out all the things i just mentioned excellent kit thank you for joining me today talking about vmware cloud with tons of services what's new what's exciting the opportunities in it for customers from the i.t admin folks to be empowered to be kubernetes operators to those businesses being able to do essential services in a changing environment and again congratulations on your promotion that's very exciting awesome thank you lisa thank you for having me our pleasure for kit colbert i'm lisa martin you're watching thecube's coverage of vmworld 2021 [Music] you