(upbeat techno music) >> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld2018 brought to by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to theCUBE, I am Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante, John Furrier, Stu Miniman at the end of day two of our continuing coverage, guys, of VMworld 2018, huge event, 25+ thousand people here, 100,000+ expected to be engaging with the on demand and the live experiences. Our biggest show, right? 94 interviews over the next three days, two of them down. Let's go, John, to you, some of the takeaways from today from the guests we've had on both sets, what are some of the things that stick out in your mind? Really interesting? >> Well we had Michael Dell on so that's always a great interview, he comes on every year and he's very candid and this year he added a little bit more color commentary. That was great, it was one of my highlights. I thought the keynote that Sanjay Poonen did, he had an amazing guest, Nobel Peace Prize winner, the youngest ever and her story was so inspirational and I think that sets a tone for VMware putting a cultural stake in the ground around tech for good. We've done a lot of AI for good with Intel and there's always been these initiatives but I think there's now a cultural validation that people generally want to work for and buy from companies that are mission driven and mission driven is now part of it and people can be judged on that front so it's good to see VMware get some leadership there and put the stake in the ground. I thought that was the big news today, at least from my standpoint. The rest were like point product announcements. Sanjay Poonen went into great detail on that. Pat Gelsinger also came on, another great highlight and again we didn't have a lot of time, he was running a bit late, he had a tight schedule but it shows how smart he is, he's really super technical and he actually understands at a root level what's going on so he's actually a great CEO right now, the financial performance is there and he's also very technical, and I think it encapsulates all of it that Dell Technologies, under Michael Dell, he's making so much more money, he's going to be richer and richer. (laughing) He took an entrepreneurial bet, it wasn't hurting at the time but Dell was kind of boring, Dave. I wouldn't call it like an innovative company at the time when they were public using the 90 day shot clock. They had some things going on but they were a hardware company, a supplier to IT footprints-- >> Whoa, whoa, they were 60 billion dollars in revenue and a 20 billion dollar market gap, so something was broken. >> Well I mean it was working numbers wise but he seemed-- >> No that's opposite, a 20 billion dollar value on a 60 billion of revenue, is you're sort of a failure, so anyway, at the time. >> Market conditions aside, right, at the time, he seemed like he wanted to do something entrepreneurial and the takeaway from my interview with him, our interview with him, was he took an entrepreneurial bet put his own cash on the table and it's paying off, that horse is coming in. He's going to make more money on this transaction and takes EMC out of the game, folds it into the operations, it really is going to be, I think, a financial success story if market conditions continue to be the way they are. Michael Dell will go down as a great financial maneuver and he'll be in the top epsilon of deals. >> The story people might forget is that Carl Icahn tried to take the company away from him. Michael Dell beat the great Carl Icahn, which doesn't happen often. Why did Carl Icahn want to take Dell private? Because he knew he could make a boatload of money off of it and Michael Dell said, "No way you're taking my company. "I'm going to do my thing and change the industry." >> He's going to have 90% voting control with Silver Lake Partners when the deal is all said and done and taking a company private and the executing the financial engineering plus execution is really hard to do, look at Elon Musk in the news today. He's trying to take Tesla private, he got his butt handed to him. Now he's saying, "No, we're going to stay public." (laughing) >> Wait, guys, are you saying Michael, after he gets all this money from VMware that it will help them go public, he's not going to sell off VMware or get rid of that, right? >> Well that's a joke that he would sell VMware, I mean-- >> Unless the cash is going to be good? >> No, he won't do it. >> I don't think it'll happen. I mean, maybe some day he sells some of the portion of it but you're not going to give up control of it, why would he? It's throwing off so much cash. He's got Silver Lake as a private equity company, they understand this inside and out. I mean this transaction goes down in history as one of the greatest trades ever. >> Yeah. >> Let me ask you guys a question, because I think is one we brought up in the interview because at that time, the pundits, we were actually right on this deal. We were very bullish on it, and we actually analyzed it. You guys did a good job at Wikibon and we on theCUBE pretty much laid out what happened. He executed it, we put the risks out there, but at the time people were saying, "This is a bad deal, EMC." The current state of IT at that time looked like it was dismal but the market forces that changed were cloud, and so what were those sideways impact points that no one understood, that really helped him lift this up? What's your thoughts, Dave, on that? >> First of all the desktop business did way better than anybody thought it would, which is amazing and actually EMC did pretty poorly for a while and so that was kind of a head fake. And then as we knew, VMware crushed it and crushed it even more than anybody expected so that threw off so much cash they were able to deliver, they did Pivotal, they did a Pivotal IPO, sold some software assets. I mean basically Michael Dell and his team did everything they said they said they were going to do and it's worked out, as he said today, even better than they possibly thought. >> Well and the commentary I'd give here is when the acquisition of EMC by Dell happened, the big turn we had is the impact of cloud and we said, "Well, okay they've got VMware over there "and they've got Pivotal but Dell's "just going to be a boring infrastructure company "with server, network and storage." The message that we heard at Dell World and maturing even more here is that this portfolio of families. Yes, VMware's a big piece of it, NSX and the networking, but Pivotal with PKS, all of those tie in to what's Dell's selling. Every time they're selling VxRail, you know that has a big VMware piece. They do the networking piece that extends across multi clouds, so Dell has a much better multi cloud story than I expected them to have when they bought EMC. >> But now, VMware hides a lot of warts. >> Yeah. >> Right? >> Absolutely. >> Let's be honest about that. >> What are they? >> Okay. I still think the client business is exposed. I mean as great as it is, you got to gain share in that business if you want to keep winning, number one. Number two is, the big question I have is can the core of Dell EMC continue to innovate or will it just make incremental improvements, have to do acquisitions to do innovation, inorganic acquisitions, and end up with more stovepipes? That's always been, Stu used to work there, that was always EMC's biggest challenge. Jeff Clark came in and said, "Okay, we're going to rationalize the portfolio." That has backlash as customer's say, "Well wait a minute, does that mean "you're not going to support my products?" No, no, we're going to support your products. So they've got to continue to innovate. As I say, VMware, because of how much cash it throws off, it's 50% of the company's profits, hides a lot of those exposures. >> And if VMware takes a turn, if market conditions change, the debt looming is exposed so again, the game's not over for Dell. He can see the finish line, but. (laughing) >> Buy low, sell high, guess who's selling right now? >> So a lot of financial impact, continued innovation but at the end of the day, guys, this is all about impacting customer's businesses. Not just from we've got to enable them to be successful in this multi cloud era, that's the norm today. They need to facilitate successful digital transformations, business outcomes, but they also have VMware, Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, great power to help customer's transform their cultures. I'd love to get perspective from you guys because I love the voice to the customer, what are some of your favorite Dell EMC, VMware, partner, customer stories that you've heard the last couple days that really articulate the value of this financial successful company that they're achieving? >> Well the first thing I'll say before we get to the customer stories is on your point about what VMware's doing, is they're a technology, Robin Matlock, the CMO was on theCUBE talking about they're a technology company, they have the hands on labs, they're a very geeky audience, which we love. But they have to get leadership on the product side, they got to maintain the R and D, they got to have best in class technical products that actually are relevant. You look at companies like Tintri that went bankrupt, great technology, cul-de-sac market. There's no market there, the world's going cloud. So to me VMware has to start pumping out really strong products and technologies that the customer's are going to buy, right? (laughing) >> In conjunction with the customer to help co-develop what the customer's need. >> So I was talking to a customer and he said, "Look, I'm 10 years behind where the cloud guys are "with Amazon so all I want is VMware "to make my life easier, continue to cut my costs. "I like the way I'm operating, "I just get constant pressure to cut cost, "so if they keep doing that, I'm going to stay with them "for a long, long time." Pete Townsend said it best, companies like VMware, Dell EMC, they move at the speed of the CIO and as long as they can move at the speed of the CIO, I've said this a million times, the rich get richer and it's why competent management that led by founders like Larry Ellison, like Michael Dell, continue to do well in this industry. >> And Andy Jassy technically, I would say, a found of AWS because he started it. >> Absolutely. >> A key, the other thing I would also say from a customer, we hear a lot of customer, I won't name names because a lot of our data's in hallway conversations and at night when we go out and get the real stories. On theCUBE it's mostly, oh we've been very successful at VM, we use virtualization, blah, blah, blah and it's an IT story, but the customers in the hallways that are off the record are saying essentially this, I'm paraphrasing, look it, we have an operation to run. I love this cloud stuff and I'd love to just blink my fingers and be in the cloud and just get rid of all this and operate at a level of cloud native, I just can't. I can't get there. They see Amazon's relationship with VMware as a bridge to the future and takes away a lot of cognitive dissonance around the feelings around VMware's lack of cloud, if you will. In this case, now that's satisfied with the AWS deal and they're focused on operations on premises and how to get their app more closed, like modernize so a lot of the blocking and tackling of the customer is I got virtualization and that's great but I don't want to miss out on the next lever of innovation. Okay, I'm looking at it going slow but no one's instantly migrating to the cloud. >> No way, no way. >> They're either born in the cloud or you're on migration schedules now, really evaluating the financial impact, economic impact, headcount impact of cloud. That's the reality of the cloud. >> You got to throw a flag on some of that messaging of how easy it is to migrate. I mean it's just not that easy. I've talked to customers that said, "Well we started it and we just kind of gave up. "There was no point in it. "The new stuff we're going to do in the cloud, "but we're not going to migrate all of our apps to the cloud, "it just makes no sense, there's no business case for it." >> This is where NSX and containers and Kubernetes bet is big, I think, I think if NSX can connect the clouds with some sort of interoperable layer for whatever workloads are going to move on either Amazon or the clouds, that's good. If they want to get the developers off virtualization, into a new drug, if you will, it's going to be services, micro services, Kubernetes because you can throw containers around those old workloads, modernize with the new stuff without killing the old and Stu and I heard this clear at the CNCF and the Lennox Foundation, that this has changed the mindset because you don't have to kill the old to bring in the new. You can bring in the new, containerize the old and manage on your speed of the CIO. >> And that's Amazon's bet isn't it? I mean, look, even Sanjay even said, if you go back five, six years, the original reinvent that was sweep the floor, bring it all into the cloud? I think that's in Amazon's DNA. I mean ultimately that's their vision. That's what they want to have happen and the way they get there is how you just described it, John. >> That's where this partnership between Amazon and VMware is so important because, right, Amazon has a lot of the developers but needs to be able to get deeper into the enterprise and VMware, starting to make some progress with the developers, they've got a code initiative, they've got all of these cool projects that they announced with everything from server less and Kubernetes and many others, Edge going to be a key use case there but you know, VMware is not, this is not the developer show. Most of the conversations that I had with customers, we're talking IT things, I mean customers doing some cool things but it's about simplifying in my environment, it's about helping operations. Most of the conversations are not about this cool new micro services building these things out. >> Cisco really is the only legacy, traditional enterprise company that's crushing developers. You give IBM some chops, too, but I wouldn't say they're crushing it. We saw that at Cisco Live, Cisco is doing a phenomenal job with developers. >> Well the thing about the cloud, one thing I've been pointing out, observation that I have is if you look at the future of the cloud and you can look for metaphors and/or real examples, I think Amazon Web Services, obviously we know them well but Google Cloud to me is a picture of the future. Not in the sense of what they have for the customer's today it's the way they've run their business from day one. They have developers and they have SREs, Site Reliability Engineers. This VMworld community is going down two paths. Developers are going to be rapidly iterating on real apps and operators who are going to be running systems. That's network storage, all integrated. That's like an SRE at Google. Google's running massive scale and they perfected it, hence Kubernetes, hence some of the tools coming in to services like Istio and things that we're seeing in the Lennox Foundation. To me that's the future model, it's an operator and set of developers. Whoever can make that easy, completely seamless, is the winner of it all. >> And the linchpin, a linchpin, maybe not the linchpin, but a linchpin is still the database, right? We've seen that with Oracle. Why is Amazon going so hard after the database? I mean it's blatantly obvious what their strategy is. >> Database is the hill that everyone is trying to take down. Capture the hill, you get the high ground with the database. >> Come on Dave, when you used to do the financial models of how much money is spent by the enterprise, that database was a big chunk. We've seen the erosion of lots of licensing out there. When I talked to Microsoft, they're like, pushing a lot of open source, they're going to cloud. Microsoft licensing isn't as much. VMware licensing is something that customers would like to shrink over time but database is even bigger. >> It's a strategic fulcrum, obviously Oracle has it. Microsoft clearly has it with Sequel Server. IBM, a big part of IBM's success to this day, is DB2 running on mainframe. (laughing) So Amazon wants a piece of that action, they understand to be a major player in this business you have to have database infrastructure. >> I mean costs are going down, it's going to come down to economics. End of the day the operating models as I said, some things about DB2 on mainframe, the bottom line's going to come down to when the cost numbers to run at the value and cost expense involved in running the tech that's going to be the ultimate way that things are either going to be cleared out or replaced or expanded so the bottom line is it's going to be a cost equation at that level and then the upside's going to be revenue. >> And just a great thing for VMware, since they don't own the application, when they do things like RDS in their environment they are freeing up dollars that customers are then going to be more likely to want to spend with VMware. >> Great point. I want to make real quick, three things we've been watching this week. Is the Amazon VMware deal a one way trip to the cloud? I think it's clear not in the near term, anyway. And the second is what about the edge? The edge to me is all about data, it's like the wild, wild west. It's very unclear that there's a winner there but there's a new type of cloud emerging. And three is the Dell structure. We asked Pat, we asked VMware Ray O'Farrell, we asked Michael, if that 11 billion dollar special dividend was going to impact VMware's ability to fund it's future? Consistent answer there, no. You know, we'll see, we'll see. >> I mean what are they going to say? Yeah, that really limits my ability to buy companies, on theCUBE? No, that's the messaging so of course, 11 billion dollars gone means they can't do MNA with the cash, that means, yeah it's going to be R and D, what does that mean? Investment, so I think the answer is yes it does limit them a little bit. >> Has to. >> It's cash going out the door. >> But VMware just spent, it is rumored, around 500 million dollars for CloudHealth Technologies, Dave, Boston based company, with about 200 people You know, hey, have a billion-- >> They're going to put back a dividend anyway and do stock buybacks but I'm not sure 11 out of the 13 billion is what they would choose to do that for, so going forward, we'll see how it all plays out, obviously. I think, Floyer wrote about this, more has to go toward VMware, less toward-- >> I think it's the other way around. >> Well I think it's really good that we have one more day tomorrow. >> I think it's a one way trip to the cloud in a lot of instances, I think a lot of VMware customers are going to go off virtualization, not hypervisor and end up being in the cloud most of the business. It's going to be interesting, I think the size of customers that Amazon has now, versus VMware is what? Does VMware have more customers than Amazon right now? >> It's pretty close, right? VMware's 500,000? >> 500,000 for VMware. >> And Amazon's-- >> Over a million. >> Are they over a million, really? >> Yeah. >> A lot of smaller customers, but still. >> Yeah. >> Customer's a customer. >> But VMware might have bigger customers, see that's-- >> No question the ASP is higher, but-- >> It's not conflict, I'm just thinking like cloud is natural, right? Why wouldn't you want to use the cloud, right? I mean. >> So guys-- >> So the debate continues. >> Exactly. Good news is we have more time tomorrow to talk more about all this innovation as well as see more real world examples of how VMware is going to be enabling tech for good. Guys, thanks so much for your commentary and letting me be a part of the wrap. >> Thank you. >> Thanks, Lisa. >> Looking forward to day three tomorrow. For Dave, Stu and John, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching our coverage of day two VMworld 2018. We look forward to you joining us tomorrow, for day three. (upbeat techno music)

>> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its eco-system partners. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2018, three days live coverage, kicking-off day two. On the right set, Michael Dell himself is talking. But I'm even more excited, because when we get to talk to the users here. That's what we love doing; talking, peers talking to their peers. I'm Stu Miniman, my guest host for this segment is, Joep Piscaer. Who's actually a user himself, and joining me, first time on the program, is PJ Romero who is the Principal IT Engineer at Turnitin, out of Oakland. >> Out of Oakland. >> Thanks for joining us. >> Thanks for having me, Stu. >> All right, so, PJ, first of all, your forth year at VMworld. Give us your initial impressions, and what brings you back to VMworld? >> VMworld is just getting, re-upping my education, so I'm learning more stuff, seeing what's new on the horizon, to get implemented in my situation. >> All right, you talk about learning more stuff. Tell us about Turnitin. Explain what this is and, you know, I think it'll resonate with a lot of our audience. >> Right. Turnitin is plagiarism detection software. So we're probably in most major universities throughout the world, really big in Europe and here at major universities. >> Okay. >> And we are also in the high school, high school down. >> Okay. Ya, I was wondering about that. My daughter actually starts high school tomorrow, so, make sure she understands that this is serious stuff. I mean, talk about education, I mean, heck, in this community when you talk about certification people are always worried about you know, tests getting out. >> Exactly. >> Things like that. >> Exactly. >> We take education seriously. >> Exactly. >> As a community, as we should. And your role at the company? >> My role; I'm the Principal IT Engineer, so basically I architect the corporate infrastructure, aside from the Turnitin papers. So I manage global infrastructure. >> Before we get into, you know, kind of the infrastructure itself, the business itself. How long has it been around? How long have you been in there? And what is the kind of, you know, mobile-web, digital-transformation impact your business? >> Oh, so everything's mobile now. Everything's on the web. We've migrated out there. We've moved out to the Cloud. And how it's migrated us, so, Turnitin's been around for about 20 years. We just uploaded our billionth paper a few weeks ago. So we have about nine petabytes worth of data to pull from. >> Oh wow. >> So you can imagine how we're getting that from our data centers into the Cloud. With nine petabytes, it's been a challenge. So recently we virtualized some VMware and to make that transition, we had rows and rows of servers to move them out; to virtualize. >> So nine terabytes. That's a lot of data. >> Petabytes. >> Petabytes even. >> Petabytes, ya. >> So tell me, how does that work from a tech perspective? What are you, what are you running, what's that tech stack look like? >> Well, Turnitin is actually a home-grown infrastructure from the ground for the storage. So it's highly available, it's highly redundant, we have multiple data centers new with the GDPR requirements. Now we have data centers in Europe, and we're moving all over the country. We're looking at EMA, APAC, and then South America. (laughing) Get it out there somewhere. >> So you're running your own data centers? >> Yes. >> I presume. >> Yes, we're running our own data centers. >> What does that mean for your hybrid cloud strategy? How much is in your data center? What are you considering to move to the Cloud? How does that impact your business? >> So right now we're probably 75%, 25% and, you know, with the Cloud being elastic as it is, as term papers come up, we're spinning them out. You know, so we're moving. >> Great, okay. So you're virtualized. Do you know what percentage of your applications are virtualized? And maybe walk us through a little bit about the stacks that you have, both on premises, as well as who you use for a public cloud. >> Oh, so we're using AWS and we're also, I think we use, some Google stuff. And Desrrve for some of the development. So we're using all of them, basically; to make sure we're fluid that way. We also do, all the applications, all the web servers are virtualized, and put up in the Cloud. But the main guts of it is still on premise. >> Okay, and what's that stack look like on premises? Who are you using today? >> As far as. >> Like, your whole infrastructure stacks? >> All the infrastructure has been super micro. >> Okay. >> Ya. >> But you're using like, an HCI solution? >> The corporate is. >> Okay. >> The corporate. Ya, I manage the corporate infrastructure. >> Right. >> Ya, we use HCI Solution. >> So whose are you're using. >> I'm using Nutanix. >> Okay. >> Ya. >> Great. So why don't you tell us a little bit about how you got to Nutanix. What apps you use that for? What apps you don't use that for? Maybe help to ease that out a little bit for us. >> Ya, of course. So I have the corporate infrastructure started out when I got there three years ago. I had server-sprawl. I had all physical serves. They weren't virtualizing yet and I got in there and was like, why not? So I did a small PoC with a couple of servers in a NAS that I built homemade and put VMware on it and said, look, this stuff works great. I can move stuff back. I can kill this box. And they were like, wow, that's pretty cool! And then I got a business intelligence project for the financial services. So they were doing some really high-end modeling based on Oracle database, and needed something redundant, powerful and fast to deploy. Well, that was the problem. It was going to take six weeks to get servers in, get them configured, stacked. I got Nutanix in within two weeks. So got Nutanix in there, I think I spent more time convincing them that this is really a to you box and I'm going to stick all our stuff in there, we started out with the three node unit, and got VMware on there to show them what I was doing, and then we deployed our Oracle stack in no time. >> So tell a little about the cost-model behind it. Has it changed the way, using HCI, has it changed the way you do business? Has is made it easier, cheaper faster? >> It's made it cheaper and faster. For me, easier, I don't say the easy part too much 'cause then they wonder what I'm doing. But it's really easy. (laughing) >> Yeah, that's interesting. When you talk about you've had homegrown stuff before. >> Yeah. >> Verses now. I've talked to some Nutanix customers they say, like hey, I got my nights and weekends back. >> Yeah. >> I don't have to worry about so many of the other pieces, maybe you talk a little bit about that dynamic. Did you have any change in personnel? Or who manages what after, or is it you? >> So I'm it. But with the ability to put Nutanix in there and ease of use, I give them access to the dashboards and show them how things work. It's been really simple, especially for some of my newer guys, the younger sys admins, who don't understand virtualization and it's still kind of magic for everybody. But now they got one dashboard. Green heart means good. Everything else, look at it. >> So you're saying you're the wizard now. >> I'm the wizard. >> Pay no attention behind the curtain. (laughing) It got really easy, but I'll just keep that behind. I can do more stuff and I'll just be the superhero. >> Yeah, exactly, exactly. It made my monitoring easier for them and my guys love it. They really love it. >> Tell a little bit about how you're using Nutanix. So Nutanix started-out as a virtualization, pure HCI company, but they've broadened their portfolio. So tell us a little bit about how you're using the Nutanix solution inside of your data centers. >> Right, so originally I put Nutanix with a virtualization product or the financial product. I was able to get a forth node. So I was able to use their analytics in there and say, hey, we're going to run out of space. So I'm running 47 machines on four nodes and I still have high redundancy. But I had no back-ups. So what do we do? So I got a second box, I put it inside of one of my other data centers and used that for replication in the back. And now with the Zy coming out, I'm going to start pushing that up to the Cloud, and start moving my single data center, toothpick as it were, it's going to be in the Cloud quickly. >> And you mentioned Oracle's, the application that catalyzed this. All certified, didn't have any issues. >> No issues. >> That's awesome. >> It was great. >> Those of us in the virtualization community, how many years did we spend just virtualizing Oracle, let alone, every new platform. It's challenging. >> Exactly. >> Your peers? All clear? They don't have to worry about it? >> Oh ya, they love it, they love it. They can't believe I got it all in the to you box. I like to take the picture of it and say, here's their stuff. I don't need this big stack, I just need the little box. (laughing) >> So basically, your whole operational model changed I'm guessing? You're not spending as much time anymore on operational issues. >> No. It's more of architecture now. We start moving the Cloud. I'm getting away from virtualizing more of the applications that we use. We just use basic active directory and DNS and that stuff. So it's all fine but, I'm going to start moving it so I push the button it will be in the Cloud, and I can literally lose my data center. >> Talk a little bit about the Zy. We've heard a lot the vision, so what's the roadmap for you to kind of embrace, adopt that? What's interesting to you about it? >> For me, I'm going to take the financial stack and really moving it right now in the tip is re-iping, it's a lot of back-end work. With the Zy, it should be a click and I mean, I've seen the database, so we're talking right now to get that done. It should be a click of the button and it's going to spin me up an AWS. So that's where I'm going next with my next project. That looks pretty cool. >> Okay, the rest of your applications, will you expand your Nutanix environment? Is this something to help you deal with that hybrid cloud environment? >> Yeah. >> What does the future look like? >> If I have my way, as I age-out my remote sites, we'll be putting more Nutanix out there. And then I can do more three to one back-ups. >> That frees-up even more time to be spending on future architecture. >> Yep, exactly. >> Instead of just the operational stuff. >> Yep, I'm making it so we can lose any leg and we're going to be fine. >> One of the things that everyone's poking at at this show is that whole multi-cloud environment. We said, I can make my data center kind of simple today. >> Yeah. >> But, multi-cloud, most people, at least I talked to, it's not simple. The Cloud is a little bit complex, it's not just swipe a credit card anymore. Managing between multiple environments, depending on how many clouds you have. What have you seen today? What would you like to see get even better over time? >> I'd like to see where Nutanix is going really, with the single-environment. I want to go one-spot. And right now I'm going to one-spot for my virtualization and all my on-prem stuff, but as I move up to the Cloud and spin stuff up, I want to go to the same spot. I don't want to have to think about it so much. Simple is good for me. I'm big in the KISS system. (laughing) >> Absolutely. Keep it simple. >> That's right. >> Engineering design, absolutely. >> I imagine your role is changing as well, right? It is becoming simpler, you get to spend more time on new projects. How is your role changing as an IT Engineer? >> I'm getting to think more. I'm not reactive anymore at all. When I got there it was a very reactive environment. And now it is more on design and how we can make sure we can tighten-up securities. We went through a whole bunch of new sox audits. And it's made it simple. It's made it simple for me. We're all in compliance now within the physical hardware and security and now, some of the other touches I'm able to think about and get those implemented. >> So outside of the Nutanix stuff, at VMworld, what kind of things are you digging into, learning, anything excite you that you either heard from your peers or announcements or sessions you've been in? >> VDI is still exciting to me. I'm still looking at those projects, and I have just enough space to do a PoC on my stuff, so I'm talking to management about that. As soon as I can show them they can do anything, from a web browser, I'd like to give them Chrome Books, and say, have a nice day. (laughing) >> It's funny you say that, because most people think of the HCI space and like, you start with VDI. And now you're like, oh well now I've got some fair capacity, I'm guessing. I can put in environment, manage it. Yeah, do some of the dynamics inside the company sounds like they're some of the bigger challenges. Always for VDI, has been a challenge. >> Yeah, it's always a challenge but so far, everything I've said's worked for them, so I've got a good trust-base. >> PJ Romero, really appreciate you talking about Turnitin. No plagiarism at this show, right? (laughing) >> That's right. We'll check. (laughing) >> PJ Romero, Turnitin, really appreciate you joining us. For you, Piscaer, I'm Stu Miniman. Lots more coverage. Wall-to-wall, here at VMworld2018. Thanks so much for watching theCUBE. (techno music)