>> Woman: From San Fransisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware Radio 2019. Brought to you by VMware. >> Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware's Radio 2019, Lisa Martin with John Furrier, John, we started really bright and early this morning with a very excited Pat Gelsinger. VMware, this is the fifteenth Radio, Radio is R&D innovation offsite. There's about 1800 VMware engineers from lots of B.U.s, very competitive event, very passion driven event, and really just is a... what a great manifestation of the VMware culture and the spirit of innovation. >> This is the best of the best event, and the story around Radio 2019 is really a cumulation of multiple years, as you pointed out, of cultural innovation, engineering. VMware has always been an engineering culture, coming out of Stanford, and from day one they've had that guiding principle. They've also been open and transparent, as we heard on theCUBE interviews today, that has created the culture of community. Open Source dives beautifully into it. And so radio is about that cumulation of the talent. It's the best of the best internally, they submit papers, it's a bottoms-up process, so it's truly a meritocracy from an engineering standpoint. But it's a culture of engineering, and their job is to come up with the future, and what's notable about this event is it's the second year now theCUBE's been here. Last year was the first year they've invited press, so three outlets from the media were allowed, were one of them. And we get exposed, we get to look under the hood, and look at the engine of innovation coming down the road for VMware and their partners. So, it's a super exciting event, Radio is a community within VMware that's now global, 50% outside of North America and the United States, all a bottoms-up, a hive mind, we heard that here. Really successful for VMware to continue this, bringing the press in, get the stories out there, take that transparency and open message from the content. We can share it, we get access to the data, it's a beautiful co-creation formula with theCUBE and VMware. It's a success, and their challenge is can they take it global and extend it. >> And this is day four of Radio19 and you can hear the amount of people that are still here, still passionate, these are projects that they're doing outside of their day jobs. So, the transparency that you talked about, I loved when we were talking with David Tennenhouse about the bottoms-up approach, that this is not a set agenda, we're going to talk about Blockchain, and IOT, and security, this is driven as you said, from thousand-plus submissions of people who want to have papers presented here. >> People don't want to leave, because this is like a kid in the candy store, it's like being intoxicated with technology and there's so much content here. Now that's also a bellwether and a barometer of the company. If R&D is weak, you don't have the innovation. There's companies that don't really invest in R&D, they wouldn't have this kind of mojo or this kind of excitement. But VMware prides themselves on doing 15% R&D, that's way outside the box. The rest is all done within the constraints of what they're doing in the market, so relevance is high, but still room to play and dream the future. And again, I've always believed that you can't dream it up, you can't build it. >> Now of course, VMware, all about, as every business should be, we needed to be developing products and solutions and services that the market needs to solve real-world problems. One of the cool things we learned about today, John, is, from the EMEA CTO John Bagley, is the CTO Ambassador program, the CTOA program, where there are folks, and this is also a competitive program, it's a couple, I think you said a four year tenure to get folks through the program, but being out in the field, in customer sights, learning about all these enterprise organizations, what they actually need, so in that spirit of openness that you talked about, they're bringing in customer information, building and fostering relationships, so that what they're investing in from an R&D standpoint, is going to be able to solve customer problems that they don't even know they have today. >> Yeah, that Champion program, that Ambassador CTO program, that Joe mentioned, what's interesting about VMware, and this is what I love, I admire about the company, as well as companies like AWS and Amazon web services, the people are smart and they think about scaling. So, that's kind of a cliché these days, how does it scale, makes you look smarter if you ask that question, but VMware actually thinks about how to scale, and so, the problem that they had was, they had these field CTOs that were out evangelizing with customers half the time, and doing internal real CTO work around architecture with the teams to build great stuff and move that to market, they couldn't scale. So they used their community of their own ecosystem to find people to come in and replicate. You heard Joe Bagley, "I had to be Steve Herrod," cause he can't be everywhere. That's the mindset of this culture, and I think they have real opportunity to crush it at Open Source, they have a real opportunity to take the Radio culture, and superimpose that in as a new way to do work, new way to create distributed, decentralized teams, and ultimately better software, and at the end of the day, they have to attract great engineers and keep them, work on hard problems, because, Pat's ambitious. And we know Pat. What he says, and what's real, they're all catching up to Pat. Pat has this great vision and he's nailing it, but the engineers got to build what Pat says they got to do. When he says "I'm abstracting away Kubernetes, as an abstraction layer," yeah that sounds simple, but it's really hard to do. >> Absolutely, and I want to get your perspective too, on this, not just the culture of innovation, that you talked about, that VMware has had for a very long time, but also in the spirit of VMware leveraging their innovation programs like Radio, to attract and retain this high quality talent, from your perspective, how does a conference like this, which is kind of academic in nature, it's kind of like a science fair for engineers, how does it differ from some of the other companies, like a Google that say "we have innovation programs." In your perspective, how is this different? >> Well, Google actually is fairly similar in the sense that they came out of Stanford, they have that kind of ethos of academic. Facebook is exactly the opposite, he wants to be Bill Gates, and be like Microsoft, as I was saying the other day. Google's internal stuff is pretty strong, they don't externalize it, and that's why Google Cloud's having such a hard time gaining market shares, that they're not good on the external game. Their thing is the SAS offering, it's all programmable. They're awesome at technology, but they're not good at externalizing it. So, I think Google's struggle is not a lot of internal to external translation. What Radio has done successfully, and we heard a little bit here, was they took it from the Palo Alto bubble, which Google lives in, and they've extended it beyond to the rest of the world, so 50% of the Radio attendees here are from outside the United States. So what they got right is, they've actually externalized it better, they're allowing press to come in, the storytelling that we're doing, that's going on, the collaboration here, is about people collaborating, that's why this successful. And it a world where everything's open, and information's freely available, there's a an audience for "high end," tech nerd activity. This is, this meets the high bar of the geeks of the best of the best, and so why isn't it being covered? Well, it is. We are here. >> You're right, we are here. And also, if you look at, it's one thing for companies to have innovative cultures, but it's another thing, some of the key elements that really can catalyze innovation are partnerships, diversity, that come to mind, both of which VMware does very, very well. Big foci on partnerships, which we've seen and heard about here as well, as well as, not just diversity and gender and things, but also thought diversity, and how groups from completely disparate business units can come together, either organically, before Radio, or even probably, can you imagine the hallway conversations that are going on here? Where suddenly, these different ideas are coming together. Partnerships and diversity are really catalysts for VMware's innovation- >> Well that's a great point, one of the first, on the partnership side, clearly a catalyst, because of multi-cloud and cloud native, seeing that. Diversity is a homerun for them, because they are a diverse culture, but look, how many women are here? Not many, I mean still, more than some, still a lot more work to do. But diversity of opinion, the inclusion that VMware has, they're a very inclusive company. So, it's not like, I just don't think there's enough population of women, in my opinion, that are in the community. But they're inclusive, there's different people with different backgrounds, different technical backgrounds, so from so from a quote "diversity" skill set, it's a melting pot. You've got people talking about carbon fiber, sustainability, to kubernetes, all kind of coming together. So I think diversity's a real strength for them. >> So we heard, I know you had a really, really intriguing Blockchain conversation today. We talked a lot about some of those emerging technologies, Vmworld 2019, which theCUBE will be at, for, I believe the tenth year, it's just around the corner. What excites you about some of the things you heard today that you think we might hear more about in August? >> What excited me about VMworld is what Pat Gelsinger said off camera, that it's going to be a ton of news, a ton of activity, and I think if you look at what VMware's doing, again, like I said, Pat Gelsinger's got an amazing vision, and I think he's cleared the runway, or sailed away from the icebergs. VMware's in a really good market position right now. They have great growth going on, and, look, the organic innovation here at Radio, amazing. Content's solid, people are still buzzing for it, they could probably stay here for a week, two weeks. Acquisitions, CloudHealth, Bitnami, again, two smart acquisitions, they're making smart deals, the ecosystem's evolving, it's a new VMware. So I think Vmworld is going to be, have a spring to its step this year, I think you'll see a lot of action, they'll be two CUBE sets again this year, it's going to be a different company next ten years, VMWare, than it was the past ten years. >> Well, I'm excited to be there with theCUBE, two sets as you mentioned, my interest is certainly heightened after some of the things we heard today. John, as always, I had a blast co-hosting with you. You got some awesome swag to go home with. Until next time, right? >> Yeah. >> All right, for John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin, you've been watching our exclusive coverage of VMware Radio2019 from San Fransisco. Thanks for watching.

>> Announcer: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering VMware Radio 2019. Brought to you by VMware. >> Hi, welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware Radio 2019. Lisa Martin with John Furrier, in San Francisco. This is an internal R&D innovation off site that VMware does, lots of innovation going on here from engineers from all over the globe. We're pleased to welcome Joe Baguley, the CTO from EMEA, from VMware. Joe, welcome to theCUBE. >> Hi. >> So we've been having some great conversations this morning about this tremendous amount of innovation, I mean the potential is massive. Not just from Radio, but from all the other innovation programs that VMware has, really speaks very strongly to the culture of innovation that VMware has had. But of course all this innovation has to be able to be harnessed to deliver what customers need. Talk to us about that, you're in the field, field CTO. What is that connection with the innovation that happens within VMware? How do customers help influence that and vice versa? >> Yeah, I think we're very unique in the structure that we've put around that to drive that innovation over the years. So my job as field CTO is, I call it sort of 50, 50. So 50% is Chief Technology Officer, which is this kind of stuff for Radio and 50% is Chief Talking Officer, which is out with our customers and presenting at conferences, et cetera. But the general remit is connecting R&D in the field. And so for eight years now I've been connecting R&D in the field at VMware, I actually did at my previous company as well. And what we've done is, we've built a series of programs over the years to do that, and one of the biggest ones is the CTO Ambassadors. And so that was, you know, you get to a point, you get to a growth size, I've been here eight years, and suddenly you need someone else to help you because I can't be everywhere. And the original role was, back in the day I was hired to scale Steve Herrod, because Steve Herrod couldn't be in Europe all the time, I was like mini Steve Herrod that could be there when needed. But then eventually I can't be in every European country and our major regions as we get bigger and bigger, and we've grown dramatically. So the CTO Ambassadors is to support that. And that's really, we've got 140 of our top customer facing techies from around the globe in this program called the Ambassadors. And they have to be customer facing, and they have to be individual contributors, so like a pre-sales manager or something doesn't count. They're a massively active community, there's a whole bunch of them here at Radio as well. And their job is really that conduit, that source of information, and also a sounding board, a much shorter range sounding board for R&D. So if R&D want to get a feel of what's going on, they don't have to ask everyone they can bounce off the Ambassadors, which is part of what we do, and that makes it easier. >> So like a filter too, they're also also filtering input from the field, packaging it up for R&D. >> Totally. Yeah, and when you're at an organization of our scale, filtering is really important. Because obviously, you can't have every customer directly talking to every engineer, it's never going to work. (laughs) >> I mean another radio project stay right there, a machine learning based champion CTO to go through all the feedback. >> Yeah, so I started my career, with my previous company doing that, I was the filter. So I'd get a hundred questions a day from various people in the field, and 99 of those I'd bounce right back because I knew the answer. But there was the one that I was like, uh. Then I'd turn around to R&D and ask them. But the great thing was that R&D knew that if I was asking then it was a real question, it wasn't the 99. So the CTO Ambassadors, and what we do in Octo Global field is really a method of scaling that. >> I want to ask you about that because that's a great example of here reputation comes in. Because your reputation is on the line if you go back and pull the fire alarm, if you will, send too many lame requests back, you're going to be lame. So you've got to kind of check, balance there. So that begs the question, how do you do the filtering for the champions that work for you? Is there a high bar? Is there a certain line? Like being a kid, you've got to be this tall to ride the roller coaster. Is there criteria? Is there certification? Take us through the filtering there. >> The Ambassador program is a rotating nomination system. So essentially there's a two year tenure. So what happens is, if you're in the field and you want to be an ambassador, which is a really prestigious thing, then you nominate yourself or get nominated and then people vote on you and you put forward your case, et cetera. Essentially it's a democratic process based on your peers and other people in the company. And then after you're allowed a maximum of two years. Sorry, two tenures so you get four years, if that makes sense, I'm not confusing you. >> John: So term limits? >> Yeah there's term limits, right, we have term limits. And after two terms you have to go out for a year to give someone else a chance because otherwise it will just glub- >> It'll turn into the US government. (laughs) >> But no, it's important to maintain freshness, maintain diversity and all those kind of things. And so it comes back to that filter piece we were talking about before. The reputation is massive, of the CTO Ambassadors. I mean when we started this six years ago as a program, most of R&D were like, who are these Ambassador guys? What value are they going to add? Now, if you're in R&D, one of the best things you can say, if you want to get something done, is what the CTO Ambassador said. I mean, literally it is, you can go and we have- >> John: The routine approach to that. Talk about how you guys add in a new category. So, for instance kubernetes, we saw this years ago when KubeCon was started, theCUBE was there present at the creation of that trend we kind of got it right away. Now Gelsinger and the team sees this as a massive traction layer. So that would be an example, where we need an Ambassador. So do you like just create one or how does that work? >> They create themselves, that's the best thing. So we have an annual conference which is in February, held in Paolo Alto where we all get together along with all the chief technologists, which is the level below me. And the principles, which the most senior field people. So literally the best of the best get together. It's about 200 plus get together for a week. And we are an hour and a half on on one with Pat for example, so Pat's there with all of us in a room. But one of the sessions we do is the shark tank, and there's two of them. One of them is, come up with your really cool, crazy, wacky ideas, and the other one is the acquisition shark tank. So there we get the MNA team, include our E-staff sit in, and the Ambassadors, as teams, will come in and present. We think we should acquire, uh because that's making a big difference. The great thing is, not nine times out of 10 but probably seven times out of 10, the E-staff are going, yeah we know about that, when actually we can't really tell you what's going on but yeah we know about them. But there's the two or three times out of 10 that people are like, oh yeah, so tell me more about them. And it might be a company that's just coming up, it might be 2013 and there's this company called Docker that no one's heard of, but the Ambassadors are shouting about Docker, and saying it's a big, you know. So there's that- >> So white space is too emerging you can see it's a telemetry, literally feedback from the field to direct management on business strategy. >> And our customers are pushing our field in directions faster than maybe R&D get pushed if you know what I mean. >> You guys deserve a lot of credit because Pat Gelsinger was just on this morning with Lisa and me, and we were talking about that. He just came back from the Sales President's club cruise, and one of the comments he said was the sales executive said, hey, who does strategy? Because everything's fitting together beautifully. Which kind of highlights how radiance this all progresses, not like magic, there's a process here, and this kind of points to your job is to fit that pieces in, is that correct? >> Yeah. People always say, as a CTO do you all sit down once a week and talk about strategy? And that's not what you do. There's a hive mind, there's a continual interaction, there's conference calls, there's phone calls, there's meetings, there's get togethers of various different types, groups, and levels. And what happens is there's themes that emerge over that. And so my role specifically, as the EMEA CTO is to represent Europe, Middle East, and Africa's voice in those conversations. And maybe the nuances that we might have around particular product requirements or whatever, to remind people that maybe sit in a bubble in Silicon Valley. >> John: I'm sure you raised your hand on privacy and GDPR? (laughs) >> Just a couple of times, yeah. Yeah, now and again. >> The canary in the coal mine is a really big point that helps companies, if they're not listening to the signals coming in. >> Well you do, and you see a lot. There's a lot of the tech companies that I see, it's often defined as the three bubbles, or your Massimo Re Ferrè, who's now at Amazon. When he was here, did this fantastic blog post talking about the first bubble is Silicon Valley, and the second bubble is North America, and the third bubble is everywhere else. And so you kind of watch these things emerge. And my job is to jump over that pop into the Silicon Valley bubble before something happens and say, no you should be thinking about X, you should think about Y. At an event like Radio I've got a force multiplier because I've got 40 plus Ambassadors with me all popping up at all these little booths you see behind you, and the shows, and the talks. >> And the goal here is not to be a bubble, but to be completely one hive mind. >> And the diversity at VMware just blows my mind, it really does. I think a lot of people comment on it quite often, and in fact I've been asked to be a non-exec director of other companies, to help them advise on their culture. Which is not in tech, in culture, which is quite interesting. And so the diversity that we have here is really infusing people to innovate in a way that they've not done before. It's that diverse set of opinions really helps. >> Well it does. And this, from what we've heard, Radio is a very, there's a lot of internal competition, it's like a badge of honor to be able to respond to the call for papers, let alone get selected. Touch on the synergies, the symbiosis that I feel like I'm hearing between the things that are presented here, the CTO Ambassadors and the customers. Like maybe a favorite example of a product or service that came from, maybe a CTO Ambassador, to Radio, to market. >> Yeah, I'm just trying to think of any one specific one. There are always bits and pieces, and things here and there. I think I should have thought of that before I came on really. I think what you're looking at here is, it's much more about an informed conversation and so it's those ideas around the fact. And also, quite often someone will have a cool idea, and they'll go to the Ambassadors, can you find me five customers that want to try this? Bang, we've got it. So if you're out there on a customer, and someone comes to you as an ambassador and says, I've got a really cool thing I'd like you to try. It might be before, we have a thing called Fling, so it might even be before it's made a fling. You probably heard from Morney how that process goes. Then engage fast, because you're probably getting that conduit direct into the core of R&D. So a lot of the features that people see and functions and products et cetera, that people see. A lot of the work you see, we're doing with the next version if you realized our management platform, a lot of that has been driven by work that's been done by Ambassadors in the field, and what we're doing there. All the stuff you'll see, I've got my jacket over there with NANO EDGE written on it. A lot of the EDGE stuff that you see, a lot of the stuff around ESXi on Arm, a lot of the stuff around that is driven specifically around a particular product range. So a really good example is, a few years ago, probably around four, myself and Ray sat down and had a meeting in VMware Barcelona, with a retail customer, and the retail customer was talking about could we get them an STDC, but small enough to fit in every store. They didn't say that at the time, but that's how we kind of got to it. So that started off a whole process in our minds, and then I went back and we, the easiest actual way for me to do it was to then get a bunch of the Ambassadors to present that as one of their innovation ideas, which became NANO EDGE. I originally called it VX Nook, because we were going to do it on intel Nooks. (laughs) Unfortunately the naming committee wouldn't allow VX Nook, so it became NANO EDGE. And that drove a whole change within the company, I think within R&D. So if you think up until that point, four years ago, most of what we were doing was, how do we run things bigger and faster? It was all like Monster VM, remember that? All those kinds of things, right? How do we get these SAP HANA 12 terabyte VMs running? And really NANO EDGE was not necessarily a product, per se but it was more of a movement driven by a particular individual, Simon Richardson, who had got promoted to Principle as a result, through the Ambassador program. That was driven through our R&D to get them to think small as well as big, you know. So next time you're building that thing, how small can you run your SX, how small can we get an SX? >> John: Small, at scale. Which is EDGE, right? >> And, you know, so get small, at scale, which was EDGE. And so suddenly everyone starts talking about EDGE, and I'm like, hang on I've been talking about this for a while now, but we just didn't really call it that. And then along comes technology like Kubernetes, which is how do you manage thousands of small things. And it's kind of, these things come together. But yes, totally, you can almost say our EDGE strategy, and a lot of the early EDGE work was done and driven out of stuff that was done from CTO Ambassadors. It's just one of the examples. >> What are some of the Kubernetes service mesh? Because one of the things we heard from Pat, and we've heard this before, but most recently at Dell Technologies World, in the last couple of weeks, was don't look down, look up. Which basically means we're automating the infrastructure. I get that, I've covered ad nauseam. But looking up the stack means you're talking about kubernetes app developers, you've got cloud native, you've got services meshes, microservices, new kinds of challenges around instrumentation. How are you guys inside Radio looking at that trend? Because there's some commercial impact, You've got Heptio, you've got Craig and the team, some of the original guys. >> Yeah, yeah. >> As well as you have a future state coming out, with state, pun intended, data, stateless. (laughs) These are new dynamics. >> Yeah, yeah. >> What's the R&D take on this? >> So there's two ways that I really talk to people about this. The first one is, I've got a concept that I talk about called application chromatography. Which sounds mental, but you remember from high school probably, chromatography was where you had that really special paper and you put the dot of liquid on and it spread it to all it's constituent parts. That's actually what's happening with our applications right now. So, we've gone through a history of re-platform. You know, mainframe, blah blah blah blah blah. So then when we got to x86, everything's on x86, along comes cloud, and as you know John, for the last 10 years it's been everything's going to cloud because we think that's the next platform. It's not, but then everything's not going to SAS, it's not all going to paths, it's not all going to Functions, it's not all going to containers. What you're seeing is those applications are coming off that one big server, and they're spreading themselves out to the right places. So I talk to customers now and they say, okay, well actually I need a management plan, and a strategy and an architecture for infrastructure as a service, containers as a service, functions as a service platform as a service and SAS, and I need a structure for that on premises and off premises. So that's truly driving R&D thinking is not how do we help our customers get from one of those to the other? They're going to all of them. >> It sounds like a green screen for media. >> It is, and then the other side of that is I've just had a conversation with some of the best, you know, what these events are like? Some of the best conversations in the water cooler, in the- >> In the hallway, yup exactly. >> I've just had a fascinating conversation with one of our guys has been talking about, oh it's really cool if we got kubernetes cause I could use it right down at the edge. I could use it to manage thousands as a tiny EDGE things. And as I'm talking to him and sort of saying, you know what he's doing, I suddenly went, hang on a second, how does a developer talk to that? He's like, well I've not really thought about that. I said, well that's your problem. We need to stop thinking about things from how can that framework help me? But how can I extend that framework? And so a lot of that- >> Moving beyond just standing up kubernetes, for what purpose? Or is that what you know, the why, what? >> So if the developers there, it shouldn't be all. I'm going to use this new framework to solve my problem or the EDGE if an R&D person would, but people like myself are there to drive them to think of the bigger picture. So ultimately at some point a developer in the future is going to want to sit there and through an API, push out software SQL server, a bit of Mongo over here, some stuff on AWS, go and use the service on our Azure at the same time pushing stuff into their own data center and maybe push a container to every store if they're a retailer and they want to do that through one place. That's what we're building. And you know, driving that, all these bits and pieces you see behind you pulling those all together into this sort of consistent operations model. As I'm sure you've heard many of- >> And it's dynamics not static, so it's not like provisioning the old way. You got to track what's being turned on and off because how do you log off? What goes turns on? What services get turned on? Turned off, turned on. >> If you don't get a theme of really, I suppose not only Radio, but our industry of the last few years, people have always said if that cliche change is constant, right? Oh, change is constant. Yet still architects build systems that are static, right? You guys that just, I'm designing an architect in this new system for the next three years. I'm like, that's stupid. What you need to do is design a system that you know is going to change before you've even finished starting it. More or less started going half way through it. So actually, as I see, I was in a fantastic session yesterday with the Architects around ESXi and VCenter, which might be boring to most, but where we architecting that for scale at a huge way. >> Well, I think that's the key thing I mean this is, first of all, we'd love this conversation because, if you can make it programmable with API and have data available, that's the architecture because it's programmable, it's not static. So you let it morph into however the application, because I think I mentioned green screen, you know chroma keys as we have those concepts here, but that's what you're saying. The apps are going to have this notion of, I need an app right now and then it goes away. Services are going to be provisioning and turning on and off. >> There is a transience, there's a transience to infrastructure, there's a transience to applications, there's a transience to components that traditional mechanisms aren't built to do. So if you look at actually, what are we building here? And what's that sort of hive mind message? It's how do we provide that platform going forward that supports transience? that allows customers to come, I mean people used to use the term agile, but it's been over years and it's not right. It's the fact that literally it's a situation of constant change. And what your deploying onto, it's constantly changing and what you're deploying is constantly changing. So we're trying to work out how do we put that piece in the middle, that is also changing but allows you some kind of constancy in what you're doing, right? So we can plug new things in the bottom, a new cloud here, a new piece of software there, a new piece of hardware there or whatever. And at the same time, there's new ways of doing architecture coming on top. That's the challenge of this, the software defined data centers, almost like an operating system for clouds or the future operating system for all apps on all clouds and all of- >> It's a systems thinking for sure, absolutely. >> Let's put your Chief Talking Officer hat on for a second as we look- >> I thought I've been doing that for the last fifteen minutes. (laughs) >> At VMWorld 2019, which is just around the corner. Any cool ANEA customers that are going to be on stage that we should be excited to hear about it? >> Actually, I was having a meeting yesterday morning about that, so I can't really say, but there's some exciting stuff we're lining up right now. We're obviously now is the time we start thinking about the keynotes, now at the time you start thinking about who's on stage. Myself and a few others are responsible for what those demos are, you know the cool demos you see on stage every year. So we literally had the meeting yesterday morning at Radio to discuss what's going to be the wow at VMWorld this year. So I'm not going to give anything away to you. I'll just say make sure you're there to watch it because it's going to be good. And we're also making sure there's a big difference between what we're doing in Moscone now and what we're going to be doing it in Barcelona when we- >> And when expand theCUBE outside of the United States certainly, we'd love to have you guys plug in and localize some of these unique challenges. Like you said, I agree bubble now the west of the world has different challenges content different. >> Definitely, I think to that end, multicloud is probably more of a thing in Europe than it was necessarily in, in North America for a longer time because those privacy laws you talked about before, people have always been looking at the fact that maybe they had to use a local cloud for some things. You know, a German cloud run by German people in a German data center and they could use another cloud like Amazon for other things. And you know, we have UK cloud who provide a specific government based cloud, et cetera. Whereas in America there was, you could use an American cloud and that was fine. So I think actually in Europe we've already been at the forefront of that multicloud thinking for a while. So it's worth watching. >> It is worth watching, I wish we had more time to, so you're just going to have to come back. >> Definitely, anytime tell me when. >> We look forward to seeing you at VMWorld. We thank you for sharing some insights with John and me on theCUBE today. >> Cool, thank you. >> For John Ferrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware Radio 2019, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Female Voice: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware RADIO 2019, brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware RADIO 2019, Lisa Martin with John Furrier in San Francisco, talking all sorts of innovation in this innovation long history culture at VMware, welcoming back to theCUBE, Mornay Van Der Walt, VP of R&D in the Explorer Group. Mornay, thank you for joining John and me on theCUBE today. >> Thank you for having me. >> So, I got to start with Explorer Group. Super cool name. >> Yeah. >> What is that within R&D? >> So the origins of the Explorer Group. I've had many roles at VMware, and I've been fortunate enough to do a little bit of everything. Technical marketing; product development; business development; one of the big things I did before the Explorer group was created was actually EVO:RAIL. I was the founder of that, pitched that idea. Raghu and Ray and Pat were very supportive. We took that to market, took it to (inaudible), handed that off to Dell EMC, the rest is history, right? And then was, "what's next?" So Ray and me look at some special projects, go and look at IoT, go and look at Telemetry, and did some orders for them, and then said "Alright, why don't you look at all our innovation programs." Because beyond RADIO, we actually have four other programs. And everyone, was -- RADIO gets a lot of airtime and press, but it's really the collective. It's the power of those other four programs that support RADIO that allow us to take an idea from inception to an impactful outcome. So hence the name, the Explorer Group. We're going out there, we're exploring for new ideas, new technologies, what's happening in the market. >> Talk about the R&D management style. You've actually got all these-- RADIO's one-- kind of a celebration, it's kind of the best of the best come together, with papers and submissions. Kind of a symposium meets kind of a, you know, successive end for all the top engineers. There's more, as you've mentioned. How does all of it work? Because, in this modern era of distributed teams, decentralization, decisions around business, decisions on allocating to the portfolio, what gets invested, money, spend, how do you organize? Give a quick minute to explain how R&D is structured. >> So, obviously, we have the BUs structured-- well there's PCS, Raghu and Rajeev head that up. And then we've got the OCTO organization, which Ray O'Farrell heads up. And the business, you know, it's innovating every day to get products out the door, right, and that's something that we've got to be mindful of because, I mean, that's ultimately what's allowing us to get products into the hands of our customers, solving tough problems. But then in addition to that, we want to give our engineers an avenue to go and explore, and, you know, tinker on something that's maybe related to their day job, or completely off, unrelated to their day job. The other thing that's important is, we also want to give, because we're such a global R&D, you know, our setup globally, we want to give teams the opportunity to work together, collaborate together, get that diversity of thought going, and so a lot of times, if we do a Hackathon, which we call a Borathon, we actually give bonus points if teams pull from outside of their business units. So you've got an idea, well, let's make it a diverse idea in terms of thought and perspective. If you're from the storage business unit, bring in folks from the network business unit. Bring in folks from the cloud business unit. Maybe you've partnered with some folks that are in IT. It's very, you know, sometimes engineers will go, "Ah, it's just R&D that's innovating." But in reality, there's great innovation coming out of our IT department. There's great innovation coming out of our global support organization. Our SEs that are on the front lines, sometimes are seeing the customers' pain points firsthand, and then they bring that back, and some of that makes it into the product. >> How much of R&D is applied R&D, which is kind of business unit aligned, or somewhat aligned, versus the wacky, crazy ideas: "Go solve a big, hairy problem", that's out there, that's not, kind of, related to the current product sets? >> Ah, that's tough to put an actual number on it, >> John: Well ballpark, I mean. >> But if I just say, like, if I had to just think about budgets and that, it's probably ten to fifteen percent is the wacky stuff, that's, you know, not tied to a roadmap, that's why we call it "off-road innovation", and the five programs that my Explorer Group ultimately leads is all about driving that off-road innovation. And eventually you want to find an on-ramp, >> Yeah. >> to a roadmap, you know, that's aligned to a business unit, or a new emerging, you know, technology. >> How does someone come up with an idea and say, "Hey, you know, I want to do this"? Do they submit, like, a form? Is there a proposal? Who approves it? I mean, do you get involved? How does that process work? >> So that's a good question. It really depends on the engineer, right? You take someone who's just a new college grad, straight out of, you know, college. That's why we have these five programs. Because some of these folks, they've got a good idea, but they don't really know how to frame it, pitch it. And so if you've got a good idea, and let's say, this is your first rodeo, so to speak, We have a program called TechTalks where it allows you to actually go and pitch your idea; get some feedback. And that's sometimes where you get the best feedback, because you go and, you know, present your idea, and somebody will come back and say, "Well, you know, have you met, you know, Johnny and Sue over there, in this group? They're actually working on something similar. You should go and talk to them, maybe you guys can bring your ideas together." Folks that are, you know, more seasoned, you know, longer tenure, sometimes they just come up, and-- "I'm going to pitch an idea to xLabs," and for xLabs, for example --that's an internal incubator-- there is, like, a submissions process. We want to obviously make sure, that, you know, your idea's timing in the market's correct, we've got limited funding there so we're going to make sure we're really investing on the right, you know, type of ideas. But if you don't want to go and pitch your idea and get feedback, go and do a Borathon. Turn an idea into a little prototype. And we see a lot of that happening, and some of the greatest ideas are coming from our Borathons, you know? And it's also about tracking the journey. So, we have RADIO here today, we have mentioned xLabs, TechTalks, we have another program called Flings. Some of our engineers are shipping product, and they've got an idea to augment the product. They put it out as a Fling, and our customers and the ecosystem download these, and it augments the product. And then we get great feedback. And then that makes it back into the product roadmap. So there's a lot of different ways to do it, and RADIO, the process for RADIO, there's a lot of rigor in it. It's, like, it's run as a research program. >> Lisa: It's a call for papers, right? >> Call for papers, you know, there's a strict format, it's got to be, you know, this many pages; if you go over about one line, you're sort of, disqualified, so to speak. And then once you've got those papers, like this year we had 560 papers be submitted, out of those 560, 31 made it onto mainstage, and another 61 made it as posters, as you can see in the room we're sitting in. >> I have an idea. Machine learning should get all those papers. (laughs) I mean, that's-- >> Funny you say that. We actually have, one of our engineers, Josh Simons, is actually using machine learning to go back in time and look at all the submissions. So idea harvesting is something we're paying a lot of attention to, because you submit an idea, >> Interesting. >> the market may not be right for it, or reality is, I just don't have a budget to fund it if it's an xLab. >> John: So it's like a Google search for your, kind of, the indexing all those workers. >> Internally, yeah, and sometimes it's-- there's a great idea here, you merge that with another idea from another group or another geo, and then you can actually go and fund something. >> Well, that's important because timing is critical, in these early-- most stuff can be early in just incubation, gestation period for that tech or concept, could be in play because the computer-- all the new things, right? >> Correct. And, do you actually have the time? You're an engineer working on a release, the priority is getting that release out the door, right? >> (laughs) >> So, put the idea on the back burner, come off the release, and then, you know, get a couple of colleagues together and maybe there's a Borathon being held and you go and move that idea forward that way. Or, it's time for RADIO submissions, get a couple of colleagues together and submit a RADIO paper. So we want to have different platforms for our engineers to submit ideas outside of their day job. >> And it sounds like, the different programs that you're talking about: Flings, xLab, Borathon, RADIO, what it sounds like is, there isn't necessarily a hierarchy that ideas have to go through. It really depends on the teams that have the ideas, that are collaborating, and they can put them forward to any of these programs, >> Correct, yeah. >> and one might get, say, rejected for RADIO, but might be great for a Borathon or a Fling? >> Correct. >> So they've got options there, and there's multiple committees, I imagine? Is that spearheaded out of Ray's OCTO group, >> Yep. >> that's helping to make the selections? Tell us a little bit about that process. >> Sure, so. That's a great point, right? To get an idea out the door, you don't always have to take the same pathway. And so one thing we started tracking was these innovation journeys that all take different pathways. We just published an impact report on innovation for FY19, and we've got the vSAN story in there, right? It was an idea. A group of engineers had an idea, like, in 2009, and they worked on their idea a little bit-- it first made it to RADIO in 2011. And then they came back in 2013, and, sort of, the rest is history, you know. vSAN launched in 2014. We had a press release this week for Carbon Avoidance Meter. It was an idea that actually started as a calculator many years ago. Was used, and then sort of died on the vine, so to speak? One of our SEs said, "You know, this is a good idea. I want to evolve this a little bit further." Came and pitched an xLabs idea, and we said, "Alright, we're going to fund this as an xLabs Lite. Three to six months project, limited funding, work on one objective --you're still doing your day job-- move the project forward a little bit." Then Nicola Acutt, our Sustainability VP, got involved, wanted to move the idea a little bit further along, came back for another round of funding through an xLabs Lite, and then GSS, with their Skyline platform, picked it up, and that's going to be integrated in the coming months into Skyline, and we're going to be able to give our customers a carbon, sort of, readout of their data center. And then they'll be able to, you know, map that, and get a bigger picture, because obviously, it's not just the servers that are virtualized, there's cooling in the data center plants, and all these other factors that you've got to, you know, take into account when you want to look at your carbon footprint for your facility. So, we have lots of examples of how these innovation pathways take different turns, and sometimes it's Team A starting with an idea, Team B joins in, and then there's this convergence at a particular point, and then it goes nowhere for a couple of months, and then, a business unit picks it up. >> One of the things that's come out-- Pat Gelsinger mentioned that a theme outside of the normal product stuff is how people do work. There's been some actual R&D around it, because you guys have a lot of distributed, decentralized operations in R&D because of the global nature. >> Yeah. >> How should companies and R&D be run when the reality is that developers could be anywhere? They could be at a coffee shop, they could be overseas, they could be in any geography, how do you create an environment where you have that kind of innovation? Can you just share some of the best practices that you guys have found? >> I'm not sure if there's 'best practices', per se, but to make sure that the programs are open and inclusive to everybody on the planet. So, I'll give you some stats. For example, when RADIO started in the early days, we were founded in Palo Alto. It was a very Palo Alto-centric company. And for the first few years, if you looked at the percentage of attendees, it was probably over 75% were coming from Palo Alto. We've now over the years shifted that, to where Palo Alto probably represents about 44%, 16% is the rest of North America, and then the balance is from across the globe. And so that shift has been deliberate, obviously that impacts the budget a little bit, but in our programs, like a Borathon, you can hack from anywhere. We've got a lot of folks that are remote office workers, using, you know, collaborative tools, they can be part of a team. If the Borathon's happening in China, it doesn't stop somebody in Palo Alto or in Israel or in Bulgaria, participating. And, you know, that's the beautiful nature of being global, right? If you think about how products get out of the door, sometimes you've got teams and you are literally following the sun, and you're doing handoff, you know, from Team A to B to C, but at the end of the day you're delivering one product. And so that's just part of our culture, I mean, everybody's open to that, we don't say, "Oh, we can't work with those guys because they're in that geo-location." It's pretty open. >> This is also, really, an essential driver, and I think I saw last year's RADIO, there were participants from 25+ countries. But this is an essential-- not only is VMware a global company, but many of your customers are as well, and they have very similar operating models. So that thought diversity, to be able to build that into the R&D process is critical. >> Absolutely. And also, think about, you know, when you're going to Europe. Smaller borders, countries, you deploy technology differently. And so, you want to have that diversity in thought as well, because you don't just want to be thinking, "Alright, we're going to deploy a disaster recovery product in North America where they can fail over from, you know, East Coast to West Coast. You go to Europe, and typically you're failing over from, you know, site A to site B, and they're literally three or four miles apart. And so, just having that perspective as well, is very important. And we see that, you know, when we release certain products, you'll get, you know, better uptick in a certain geo, and then, "Why is it stalling over here?" well it's, sometimes it's cultural, right? How do you deploy that technology? Just because it works in the US, doesn't mean it's going to work in Europe or in APJ. >> How was your team involved in the commercialization? You mentioned vSAN and the history of that, but I'm just wondering, looking at it from an investment standpoint of deciding which projects to invest in, and then there's also the-- if they're ready to go to market, the balance of "How much do we need to invest in sales and marketing to be able to get this great idea-- because if we can't market it and sell it, you know, then there's obviously no point." So what's that balance like, within your organization, about, "how do we commercialize this effectively, at scale"? >> So that is ultimately not the responsibility of my group. We'll incubate ideas, like, for example, through an xLabs project. And, you know, sometimes we'll get to a point and we'll work, collaborate with a business unit, and we'll say, "Alright, we feel this project's probably a 24 months project", if it's an xLabs Full. So these folks are truly giving up their day job. But at the end of the day, you want to have an exit and when we say exit, what does that exit mean? Is that an exit into a business unit? Are you exiting the xLabs project because we're now out of funding? You know, think about a VC, I'm going to fund you to, you know, to a particular point; if there is no market traction, >> Right. >> we may, you know, sunset the project. And, you know, so our goal is to get these ideas, select which ones we want to invest in, and then find a sort of off-ramp into a business unit. And sometimes there'll be an off-ramp into a business unit, and the project goes on for a couple of months, and then we make a decision, right? And it's not a personal decision, it's like, "Well we funded that as an xLabs; we're now going to shut it down because, you know, we're going to go and make an acquisition in this space. And with the talent that's going to come onboard, the talent that was working on this xLab project, we can push the agenda forward." >> John: You have a lot of action going on so you move people around. >> Exactly. >> Kind of like the cloud, elastic resource, yeah? (laughs) >> So, then, some of these things, because xLabs is only a two-year-old, you know, we haven't had things exit yet that are, you know, running within a business unit that we're seeing this material impact. You know, from a revenue point of view. So that's why tracking the journeys is very important. And, you know, stay tuned, maybe in about three or four years we'll have this, similar, you know, interview, and I'll be able to say, "Yeah, you know, that started as an xLab, and now it's three years into the market, and look at the run rate. >> So there's 31-- last question for you-- there's 31 projects that were presented on mainstage. Are there any that you could kind of see, early on, "ooh", you know, those top five? Anything that really kind of sticks out-- you don't have to explain it in detail, but I'm just curious, can you see some of that opportunity in advance? >> Absolutely. There's been some great papers up on mainstage. And covering, you know, things on the networking side, there's a lot of innovation going in on the storage side. If you think about data, right, the explosion of data because of edge computing, how are you going to manage that data? How are you going to take, you know, make informed decisions on that data? How can you manipulate that data? What are you going to have to do from a dedupe point of view, or a replication point of view, because you want to get that to many locations, quickly? So, I saw some really good papers on data orchestration, manipulation, get it out to many places, it can take an informed decision. I saw great-- there was a great paper on, you know, you want to go and put something in AWS. There's a bull that you get at the end of the month, right? Sometimes those bulls can be a little bit frightening, right? You know, what can you do to make sure that you manage those bulls correctly? And sometimes, the innovation has got nothing to do with the product per se, but it has to do with how we're going to develop. So we have some innovation on the floor here where an engineer has looked at a different way of, basically, creating an application. And so, there's a ton of these ideas, so after RADIO, it doesn't stop there. Now the idea harvesting starts, right? So yes, there were 31 papers that made it onto mainstage, 61 that are posters here. During that review process, and you asked that question earlier and I apologize, I didn't answer it-- you know, when we look at the papers, there's a team of over 100 folks from across the globe that are reviewing these papers. During that review process, they'll flag things like "This is not going to make it onto mainstage, but the idea here is very novel; we should send this off to our IP team," you know. So this year at RADIO, there were 250 papers that were flagged for further followup with our IP team, so, do we go and then file an IDF, Invention Disclosure Form, do those then become patents, you know? So if we look at the data last year, it was 210. Out of those 210, 74 patents were filed. So there's a lot of work that now will happen post-RADIO. Some of these papers come in, they don't make it onto mainstage; they might become a poster. But at the same time they're getting flagged for a business unit. So from last year, there were 39 ideas that were submitted that are now being mapped to roadmap across the BUs. Some of these papers are great for academic research programs, so David Tennenhouse's research group will take these papers and then, you know, evolve them a little bit more, and then go and present them at academic conferences around the world. So there's a lot of, like, the "what's next?" aspect of RADIO has become a really big deal for us. >> The potential is massive. Well, Mornay, thank you so much for joining John and me, >> Thank you. >> and I've got to follow xLabs, there's just a lot of >> (laughs) >> really, really, innovative things that are so collaborative, coming forward. We thank you for your time. >> Thank you. >> For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin; you're watching theCUBE, exclusive coverage of VMware RADIO 2019, from San Francisco. Thanks for watching.

>> Host: From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware Radio 2019! Brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin in San Francisco, at VMware Radio 2019. This is a really cool internal R&D innovation off-site with about 1800 engineers across many business units at VMware, and we're pleased to welcome back to theCUBE the VP of the sustainability strategy at VMware, Nicola Acutt. Nicola, it's great to have you back on theCUBE! >> Thank you, Lisa, it's wonderful to be here and welcome back to Radio! >> This is only the second year that press has been allowed so this is an exclusive for theCUBE, we appreciate being here. So, sustainability. It's a word that is talked about so globally in so many industries, but it has different meanings. When I think of sustainability, the first thing that comes to my mind is energy, but it's more than that. What is sustainability to VMware? >> Great, thank you Lisa. And you're right, sustainability means a lot of things to different people. In its holistic sense, we think of sustainability as the capacity to endure, the ability to endure over time, and it has environmental dimensions, it has social dimensions and of course it has economic dimensions. The way we think about sustainability at VMware is through the lens of innovation, because we really do believe that solving many of the sustainability challenges in the world today is about innovation, and so we're really excited to be able to do that work and to pursue that mission in the office of the CTO. >> So talk a little bit more about that, with the sustainability strategy being within the office of the CTO. What sort of superpowers does that give VMware to amplify what it's doing and really also, in the eyes of your customers and partners, leverage sustainability as a differentiator? >> Yeah, I love that you used the word superpowers. I think of it exactly that. For me, it's about how do we connect our tech superpowers with this vision and foresight around solving really challenging problems? So for us, how we approach that problem, is really in three dimensions. So we think about sustainability and innovation around our operation, so that's walking the talk, first and foremost, right, getting things right internally, and from an innovation perspective, that's not just about innovation in terms of energy management, you used the energy example, right, but it's also about processes. How do we think about our engineering processes, to make sure that our engineering productivity is as efficient as possible. Yesterday our chief research officer David Tennenhouse made a comment to our 18,000 engineers that it's two sides of the same coin when we're talking about innovation for good, we also have to talk about good engineering so it's both, right? So that's one. Innovation in our operations. The second lens that we think about is innovation in terms of what we do, our products and how our products serve our customers and help them achieve their sustainability goals. Also at Radio we were really pleased this year to announce a new product initiative called CAM, the Carbon Awareness Meter, and this is a product feature in Skyline which will be available to our customers later on this year, which will allow them, through the Skyline platform, to derive almost real-time carbon scores and provide them with more information, more transparency into what's happening in their infrastructure, and then serve up information that can make choices around whether it's virtual machine density or opportunities to optimize their hardware, and then also even provide them information about the grid that their data center is operating on, and that then, we hope, will empower them, our huge customer base, to think about what they can do possibly as a result. >> Oh absolutely, I can't imagine what having that insight into their own grid will allow them to do in terms of resource optimization, to be able to use resources better, to identify new products and services. I'm curious about CAM, though, being announced at Radio 2019. Was this a product, or an idea that spun out of a past Radio event, since this is the 15th annual? >> I'm so glad you asked that question. Exactly why I think this is such an exciting announcement, not only is it a really cool product feature, but it tells the story of innovation at VMware and the path that an idea can track through from an idea in someone's head to a product in our customer's system. So that journey at VMware started with this idea going back, gosh, more than three years. In fact it was round about the time that we introduced sustainability to the office of the CTO and this was a challenge we put out to engineers around how can we innovate around sustainability? It first was discussed as a tech talk and then the idea came to Radio, here, as one of these poster papers. It was then also a birds of a feather, a talk, a breakout talk. Later on, the idea then gained more momentum, it was funded as part of X-Labs which is one of our innovation programs. In fact it was so popular it got funded a second time and developed, and now it has graduated from the office of the CTO and the innovation programs into the BU. So that's a great example of this journey that our innovators, our engineers, can take with an idea, from concept to impact. >> One of the things Ray O'Farrell mentioned to John Furrier and me this morning was that this year's Radio, he said, it's kind of surprising that there's a lot of projects around proposals around collaboration. So talk about how CAM was developed, I mean, the spirit of different BUs collaborating, different minds, different engineering minds coming together with ideas that really over time and through not just Radio but the other innovation programs, you mentioned X-Labs, that this idea became something that is now enabling your customers to make big decisions and save a considerable amount of resources. How does collaboration between BUs really get VMware's innovation culture dialed way up? >> That's actually really important, this concept of collaboration. The way I think about it is connecting dots, and a key role that the office of the CTO plays is to do just that, to create the spaces like this event, which you increase the probability that people are going to have a conversation or people are thinking about something and you give them a platform to share that idea and that's where the spark comes from. You hear it in the conversations, you hear it in the energy, but that is critical. I don't think you can create a culture of innovation without creating a culture of collaboration. >> Absolutely, they're hand-in-hand. So you talked about CAM. What are some of the technological changes, improvements that VMware has made to its technologies to become, to really deliver on your sustainability goals? >> Yeah, I think it goes back to our roots, right? The very beginning of VMware, and the legacy of our core product and our core innovation has been a massive contribution to the computing field of course, and to industry and to the world, but it's also been a great, what I call one of the greatest positive externalities in terms of saving energy and resources. So that was a great start to build on, and the announcement of the CAM project today was another step in that journey to now be really intentional about connecting sustainability with innovation, just like we do with quality and with security, and really thinking about this as part of what we do. So what that journey looks like is continuing to invest in, I talked about operational innovation, I talked about our product, the third area of our strategy is really around future bets and the products that are currently off road map but on our radar. You've probably heard, a great example of that is our work on blockchain, and so we're being intentional about developing that software to be energy efficient, number one. You'll hear more about that, I hope, later in the year. We have an intern coming in the summer to help the team work on the sustainability dimensions of our blockchain approach. We just did a demo actually at Radio this week, there was a live demo on stage with our blockchain team testing out a use case in sustainability and sustainable supply to our supply chain custody, with the example of ocean plastics and making sure that we were able to really track that supply chain and blockchain was a really powerful application for a solution like that. So that's just an example of where we're thinking about applying this lens of sustainability and innovation to our future products, as well as to some of the big challenges we face as a global society. >> Right, globally and environmentally, we look at within the data center, outside the data center from the core to the edge. Where does code sustainability fit in, and how does that facilitate reducing carbon footprint at VMware, enabling that for your customers, how does that factor into becoming more efficient and more aware globally and societally as well? >> Right, well it starts with what you do, right? For us, writing code is the core of all of the applications, everything, all of the powerful things that we can do starts with the integrity of the code, and so at Radio we have one of our sessions with principal engineers and the sustainability team is working on a project to define what does that mean for us? So, it's about efficiency, it's about really thinking about how do we optimize? How do we design and pay attention to the very core of what we do? From the get-go, as a priority. >> Last question, from the customer's perspective, what is one of the many VMware customer stories that comes to mind when you think about VMware as an enabler, as a catalyst for helping an organization really dramatically reduce carbon footprint, leverage your technology for their sustainability? >> Such a great question, and y'know something interesting, I'll tell you a story. We recently looked at some of the companies that are making very serious commitments to sustainability, putting their money where their mouth is and, for example, organizations that are committing to being carbon neutral, to being RE100 which is renewable energy 100 powering their organizations through clean power, as well as committing to science-based targets around their operations, and when we looked at the data it was absolutely fascinating to see that many of VMware's best and biggest customers are in that category of leaders and so for us that represents a billion dollars of revenue so this is important, not just to us but to our customers, and so this is a journey. We're working within the office of the CTO with our field teams to really help connect the dots more intentionally and to drive additional value for our customers through their use of our products and their relationship with VMware as a solution provider. >> And it just shows and speaks to the great synergies that VMware has developed over its history with its customers. Nicola, thank you so much for joining me at Radio 2019, and sharing with our audience the massive impact, both internally and externally, that VMware's sustainability strategy is having on the world. Thank you! >> Thank you, Lisa, absolute pleasure. >> Likewise! I'm Lisa Martin, with John Furrier joining me at VMware Radio 2019 in San Francisco. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

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