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

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

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

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

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

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's, ongoing coverage of VMworld 2021. My name is Dave Volante. You know, I've been following VMware since the early days. And what is the one of, one of the most interesting stories in the history of enterprise tech? One of the hallmarks of VMware over the course of its long history has been a strong number two leader, an individual who looked after operations or advanced corporate development and enhanced, if you will, expanded the eyes, the ears, the heart, and the mind of the CEO. You know, at one point last decade, VMware actually had four co presidents. Some of the most accomplished individuals in Silicon valley have held this role. And it's our pleasure to welcome in VMware's newest president, Sumit Dhawan. Sumit welcome back to the cube, good to see you. >> Thank you, Dave. Great to be here. >> Okay, so you've been in this role for just over a hundred days after a 16 month stint as chief customer officer. So that's certainly a nice dovetail into your new role as president, but give us an overview of your new role here at VMware. What are your priorities? What are the key areas of focus? You know, SAS transformation, you got a lot going on, share with us. >> Yeah. You know, I think the main focus for me is to make sure our company's priorities are aligned with our customers. And in the first hundred days, my first objective was to spend as much time as possible with customers because it's, it's a source of learning for us. It's, it's clear speaking with customers, what their challenges are and what we ought to be doing to assist them in addressing those challenges. So I, really my responsibility, obviously I've got all the operations part of the business, which enable our customers to be successful, starting from, you know, ensuring that we chart the right path for them in success, in the sales organization, all the way to making sure that they are successful with the adoption of our solutions, with our services and support organizations. So, so spending time with the customers has been critical. And Dave, what I've learned is that customers are looking for VMware, just like they have in the past, be this trusted foundation for all of their innovation in the prior era pre cloud era to their data center and mobility technologies take that forward into the multicloud era, which is where now is where they're building new applications, taking their existing applications to the power of the cloud and across multiple clouds. And our objective is to make sure we keep providing that trusted foundation for them, for the new multi-cloud era. And I'm excited about it. >> Yeah, me too. Let's do it. We're going to dig into that a little bit. So you're obviously spending time getting close to the customers, of course, remotely, for the most part, some of those big themes you've mentioned, but I'd like to sort of peel the onion on that. Maybe some of the challenges that your customers are facing in terms of actually bringing forth that multi-cloud vision and specifically what's your approach to solving those challenges. >> Yeah. So, you know, as we all know, customers start out with this adopt started out adoption of the cloud. They started building some applications on the cloud. A lot of times these were the applications that were built, which were customer facing. And there was this cloud first thinking at that point of time. But soon the customers have realized and now customers have realized that power of building new innovation doesn't just lie in one cloud because there are certain capabilities like AI and ML that maybe they get from a cloud like Google. There are certain capabilities that may be storage and compute where maybe they prefer AWS productivity and identity maybe coming from Microsoft cloud. So the power comes in by adopting all of these services across cloud. It has lots of benefits, innovation at the fastest possible speed for our customers. Secondly, it helps customers not necessarily risk locking in and helps manage them, manage their costs. But in this multicloud world, it's a fairly complicated, and it can get very complex. Think about all the security networking developer experience control. Now this is where our customers need freedom and yet control to be able to have this multicloud environment managed and enabled for developer experience as best as possible. That's the problem we are committed to solving, and our solution and we call that across cloud services. >> I want to stay on this for a minute because I've been talking about multi-cloud this abstraction layer. This is really your opportunity on the cube last year with John farrier. You said the following quote multicloud doesn't mean you're running two different architectures on two different clouds. That's not multicloud. Multicloud means running a singular architecture on multiple clouds. Now Sumit, you're a technologist at the core. What you described is not trivial, it's a huge technical challenge. Can you talk about what VMware has to do to make that single architecture a reality? >> That's exactly the challenge team because you can adopt multiple clouds, but if you're doing so with different architectures, you're not getting the benefits of the velocity of building new applications fast, security is done in a unified fashion operations, at scale. To me, I would call that not a smart path to multi multiple clouds. The smart path to multiple cloud would be through a unified experience for developers, a control layer, which helps you orchestrate your applications in a unified fashion for your operators and security done in an, in a unified or a consistent fashion so that you know that you have the right governance. That's what I consider the smart path to multicloud. Doing any other way would actually be not fruitful. And that's what customers have had to face with without a solution like VMs. So we provide, that's what I call the smart path to multicloud. >> All right. So don't hate me for this, but I want to, I want to push on this and get your point of view on record if I can, because it's an important topic and you've intimated that choosing a single cloud provider, it's, it's problematic for customers, it's it, it limits the customers flexibility and choice. And I want to unpack that a bit and if I'm mischaracterizing your view, please correct me, but, but I want to understand why this is limiting. For example, if I go to AWS, I got access to primitives and API APIs. I got a range of compute storage, networking options, dozens of databases, open source, I get VMware cloud and AWS. So explain why this is a constraint for a customer. >> Yeah, it's a, it's a constraint for really three major reasons. Number one, different services are available across cloud that provide different capabilities. Sure, AWS provides a very rich set of primitives. So does Azure. So does Google. And in certain cases, when you're dealing with data sovereignty requirements across different countries, so to those clouds. So the, but if you are really looking for the best possible solution for AI and ML that may or may not sit in the cloud that you may have preferred for your compute and storage. If you're looking for identity solutions that integrate really well with the productivity applications that you have, that may not be the same cloud that you may have booked picked for AI and ML. You don't need to make compromises. In fact, developers don't want to make those compromises, but because by making those compromises, you're increasing your cost and lowering their customer experience. That's the power of leveraging innovation across cloud. Secondly, think about now, if you just build all your applications, buy services from one cloud and your entire business gets dependent on it. If there's risk there's cost. And that's why customers are telling us that they have made a decision for multicloud. In fact, we did a recent study Dave, and in the recent study, we found out that 73% of our customers are already running their applications on multi-cloud. If this is no longer a something of a future it's here today, they're just facing these challenges today with multicloud. >> And am I right? That there they're running applications on multiple clouds, but it's your job and your challenge now, to be able to abstract the underlying complexity of those multiple clouds and make it appear as one, I'm assuming that's not fully happening today, maybe that's an understatement, but that is your opportunity and your customer's opportunity, is that a fair statement? >> That's exactly our mission. We are providing our customers that foundation so that they can enable multicloud and drive their own innovation agenda at the pace that they want to. We did that in the past for data center technologies or mobile devices. Remember mobile devices come in different operating systems, different formats and data centers, hardware from servers, storage and network has always come in different flavors. We have abstracted that complexity for our customers in the past to deliver innovation three cloud, we're bringing the same value proposition. Now in the world of multicloud, obviously the applications have changed. They're no longer traditional applications. Now they are more and more cloud native applications. So we have solutions for cloud native enterprise applications that continue to be the heartbeat of more, more, most customers. We have solutions for traditional enterprise applications and the new and emerging edge native applications because of just now people and workforce being anywhere. We have solutions for providing security and providing additional functions for edge native applications. So that's what we are bringing to our customers as a platform that abstracts this complexity of multicloud. >> So much to talk to you about because you're right, the application is, are evolving. It's not just the standard SAP windows, et cetera. There's cloud native applications, there's data intensive applications. But, but I want to ask you, so in order for you to achieve that, you have to be able to exploit those primitives that we were talking about, whether it's AWS or Google Azure, Alibaba, you've got to understand as engineers, how to take advantage of whatever the cloud provider is offering, and then hide that complexity from the customer, and then build that, that layer and to do that it, to accommodate all these new applications. Not only do you have to have traditional, you have to have processor optionality, you got edge, you see arm coming in. If my understanding is, that's a big part of what project Monterrey is all about is offering that optionality around different workloads. Can you, can we dig into that a little bit? >> Yeah. So I think first of all, the people under appreciated or under estimate what it would be required for making sure that the applicant, the complexity of all of these different cloud platforms is, is, you know, abstracted by VMware solution. So customers don't have to think about, you know, what are the-- what is the different storage or server or primitives that are needed on Azure versus AWS? All of that gets hidden from customers in a simplified fashion, so with our solution, okay. So, and yet at the same time, there's no compromise that customers have. They can still leverage all the native primitives and services that the different cloud providers are using seamlessly. So that's very important. Now, in addition, what we are doing is we are continually making sure our platform can run the next generation of applications we are continually innovating to do so. And that's where project Monterey comes in. As customers build new applications, when they want to build those new applications and run emerging services that are highly sort of compute centric or network centric, or are providing rich amount of data. This is where project Monterey comes in. It enables our customers to, A, take all of the traditional applications onto VMware cloud, run it on across any cloud. And then B, when they are trying to expand those capabilities into the applications, the project Monterey enables them to do so by enabling new capabilities being powered in to the VMware cloud foundation. >> Yeah. So essentially you're, you're, you're building what I would look at as a new type of cloud that, that comprises on prem connections to public, to public cloud, across public clouds. And then out to the edge, you've talked a lot about telco, the specialized needs of the telco. Clearly there's different processing requirements. You've talked about 5G where we might not always have connectivity out there. Developers need to be able to write code for that edge. So it's an entirely new world you're essentially building out your own cloud. So you have to build in all that optionality all the tools. And at the same time, if, if just like the big cloud providers, you have to provide your own tooling, but also be open to providing other people's tooling. Am I getting that right? >> Yeah, I think you're right. In terms of the tooling part there, what has happened is standards for controlling. All of the infrastructure has, you know, has become Kubernetes. Okay. So we have embraced that in fact, most the talent that has created the best Kubernetes at this point in time, we have it at VMware. Okay. The most contributions that are being made in terms of that standard, the most interesting ones are coming from VMware. So in terms of Kubernetes, we have embraced it. And what we are seeing is a tooling needs to be done in a way so that our customers can manage from infrastructure to their platform, all via code, all the standard like Kubernetes. And that's what we have embraced while at the same time, this tooling is done in a fashion so that the entire VM-ware cloud and the entire VMware Tansu platform can be controlled in a fashion that fits into customer's entire environment on how they manage it overall. >> Okay. So let's take that conversation to security. I don't know if you're familiar with the Optiva, it's this mind blowing, eye bleeding chart with all the different security tools in there, and I've been watching the moves that you guys have been making, you know, Carbon Black's an obvious one, what you're doing with end user computing and a number of other applications, creating a security, you know, cloud group within VMware. So that's a good example, but at the same time, customers are using all kinds of different, different toolings based on that chart. So are you saying it's the Kubernetes is the, is the secret their API APIs that allow you to, if a customer wants to use Octa or CrowdStrike or whatever it is, you can, you can incorporate that into the framework, or if they want to go all VMware, they can do that as well. Can you help us understand that? >> Yeah, I think our philosophy is that there are two components that are critical for making a solution, help our customers take the smartest path to multicloud, networking and security. So on security front, the philosophy is quite simple. You know, these days when you're going out and buying a car, you're not getting buying the car and outfitting it with airbags and, you know, AB, ABS, and any other sort of safety features, okay, why do we do that in the world of infrastructure and technology? It should just come as an, as an, even an option or a required component within the infrastructure itself, that's our philosophy. And so coming back to, if, if customers say they want to take an approach to multicloud, they want to make sure their developer experience their DevOps capabilities and their infrastructure management capabilities are there across all types of three applications, I mentioned, you know, the, the, the modern apps, the traditional enterprise apps and edge edge native apps. Our approach is quite simple, networking and security. Firstly is built in, okay, it's integrated in, you're not installing agents, you're not managing security thing on top. You're not putting air bags into the car after the purchase, they come with the purchase, you can choose to activate them or not activate them based on your price sensitivity. Second, we tell, we have, they're consistent once you learn them how to do it for traditional enterprise applications, the same capabilities, the same security workbench, the same detection and response capabilities carry forward to cloud native applications and edge native applications. That's the way we are thinking about for security for in our portfolio. >> It is the strategy summit to sort of be an end to end supplier of security, in other words, when you touch all parts of the stack, I mean, obviously with carbon black could do an end point, but, but things like identity and privilege, access and governance, I mean, there's just so many pieces to the value chain. Ca, will you try to try to be best of breed across that chain? Or do you see yourself picking this picking spots? >> No, Our focus is to pick the areas that we have focused on which is to enable customers to run, build and run and secure those, those applications that I mentioned, you know, the cloud native applications, edge native applications and enterprise applications. And our focus is to, to be able to secure those applications in, A, a consistent fashion and, B, built into the infrastructure, so it's not boarded on. So that's a focus on strategy and we still have great partnerships in the ecosystem for the rest of the portfolio, for the security technology to fit in with the rest of it. We just don't think that for the infrastructure that's running these critical business applications, you need, you should have, you know, a requirement to build these applications, build a security on top of it. And that's sort of our commitment to our customers. >> Got it. That makes sense. I mean, you've got a pretty clear swim lane in your infrastructure space. There might be a little gray area there, but you'll let the ecosystem take care of that if it makes sense. So I guess I would say I look back and if it was, first of all, VMware has had amazing engineering over the years, you're, you're very well known for that. You just, you just mentioned some of the best Kubernetes engineers on the planet. And of course, November is a big milestone for VMware, with the spin, you now will become a completely independent company again. And, and that's a big deal in my mind because I think, I think this is going to be expensive. I mean, to actually do this, these are big investments that you have to make. And I've, I feel like you finally going to get control of your own balance sheet, so you can make these investments as you see fit. So that's got to be an exciting time for you. And because I think you're going to need that free cash flow to really drive this in, in addition to the other things that you're going to do with buybacks and stock options, et cetera. >> I think we had excited about this whole upcoming, you know, spin off from Dell. Dell will continue to be a very important partner of ours. In fact, we have quoted and quantified what we are doing with them on innovation, as well as on sales and distribution perspective together. And I think, you know, to be candid just through that agreements that we have put in place without, I think the partnership could even get stronger because we have 15 statements of work where we have defined new innovation projects with Dell, for example. Okay. But at the same time, like you mentioned, we get a little bit more flexibility to be able to chart our own course, which is critical in the world of multicloud. Okay. We need, we are able to, not, not that we were constrained on, but customers still always asked us about how would you continue to sustain the partnerships with the cloud and hyperscalers? That's no longer a question in customers' eyes once you're independent. And secondly, it does give us flexibility on balance sheet to be able to make investments as needed within the agenda that we have on multicloud without having to, you know, sort of negotiate that. >> Yeah, I think it's an awesome move, of course, because I mean, I've certainly since the, the, the Dell acquisition of EMC, your business has even grown more with those combined companies. So we've seen that, but I, you know, I liken it to the, to the coach who has a kid on the team and the coach is extra hard on the kid, you know, and that's kind of almost the way it had to be in that relationship because your posture with the ecosystem had to be, hey, we're an open ecosystem. And so, and that was sometimes kind of weird and uncomfortable. Now it's clean, it's transparent. So I'm really looking forward to the innovation that you can create with Dell, of course, but with other parts of the ecosystem, which you always have, but I'm hoping the ecosystem now leans in even more. It's always had too, because you've got half a million customers and you've got a, such a huge presence in the market, but, but I think now there's going to be a little more comfort level there. So I'm really excited for that Sumit. >> Great. >> Hey, so this was great conversation. I can't wait to have you back really appreciate your time and insights. >> Well, thank you so much, Dave, from our perspective at VMware, you know, as I started with customers, I'm going to end sort of this thing with customers as well, always great times, great to spend time with customers. And we truly believe we have the best platform to give our customers the smartest path to multicloud. And I know, I know the feedback so far has been great. It's always great spending time with you. Thank you for having me. >> It's our pleasure, and we wish you the best. And thank you everybody for watching. This is Dave Volante for the cubes, continuous coverage of VM world 2021. Keep it right there. (upbeat music)

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

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

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

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

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm still minimum and this is the Cubes coverage of VM World 2020 our 11th year doing the Cube. First year. We're doing it, of course, virtually globally. Happy to welcome back to the program. One of our Cube alumni, Shannon Champion, and she is the director of product marketing with Dell Technologies. Shannon, Nice to see you and thanks so much for joining us. >>Thanks for having me. Good to see you as well. >>Alright, So big thing, of course, at VM World, talking about building off of what was Project Pacific at last year's show? Talking about how kubernetes all the wonderful cloud native pieces go in. So let's let's talk about application modernization. Shannon, you know, with a theme I've talked about for a number of years, is you know, we need to modernize the platform, and then we can modernize the applications on top of those. So tell us what you're hearing from your customers and how Delon vm, where then, are bringing the solutions to help customers really along that journey. >>Yeah, I'd love Thio. It's fun stuff. So, um, enterprises are telling us that especially now more than ever, they're really looking for how they must digitally transform. And they need to do that so they can drive innovation and get a competitive advantage on one way. That they're able to do that is by finding ways to flexibly and rapidly move work loads to where they make sense, whether that's on premises or in the public cloud. And the new standard for doing this is becoming cloud native applications. There was a recent I. D. C. Future Escape that predicted that by 2025 2 3rd of enterprises will be prolific software producers with code being deployed on a daily basis, and over 90% of applications at that time will be delivered with cognitive approaches. So it's just kind of crazy to think, and what's really impressive to is that the sheer volume of applications that are anticipated to be produced with these cloud native approaches Ah, it's expected to be over 500 million new APS created with cognitive approaches by 2024 just kind of putting that into perspective 500 million. APS is the same number that's been created over the last 40 years. So it's a fun, fun trend to be part of. >>Yeah, it's really amazing. When I talked to customers, there's some It's like, Oh, let me show you how Maney APs I've done and created in the last 18 months. It was like, Great. How does that compare before? And they're like, we weren't creating APS. We were buying APS. We were buying software. We had outsourced some of those pieces. So you know that that that trend we've been talking about for a number of years is kind of everyone's a software company, Um, does not mean that, you know, we're getting rid of the old business models. But Shannon, there are challenges there either expanding and moving faster or, you know, making sure that I have the talent in house. So bring us inside. What if some of the big things that your customers are telling you, uh, maybe that's holding them back from unlocking that central? >>Yeah, totally. You hit on a couple of them, you know, we're definitely seeing a lot of interest in adoption of kubernetes and clearly VM Ware is leading the way with Changzhou. But we're also hearing that they're underestimating the challenges on how toe quote unquote get to kubernetes. Right? How do you stand up that full cloud native staff and particularly at scale Thio? How do you manage the ongoing operations and maintain that infrastructure? How do you support the various stakeholders? How do you bring I t operators and developers together? Eso There's really a wide range of challenges that, um businesses air facing. And the other thing is that you hit on, you know, they're going to be producing mawr and Mawr cloud native applications, but they still need to maintain legacy applications, many of which are driving business, critical applications and workloads. So they're going to need to look for solutions that help them manage both and allow them to re factor or retire those legacy ones at their own pace so they can maintain business continuity. >>Yeah, and of course, Shannon, we know as infrastructure people, our job was always toe, you know, give the environment to allow the applications to run in virtualization. For years, it was Well, I knew if I virtualized something, I could leave it there and it wasn't going to. It didn't have to worry about the underlying hardware changes. Help us understand How does kubernetes fit into this environment? Because, as I said that people don't want to even worry about it. And the infrastructure people now need to be able to change, expand and, you know, respond to the business so much faster than we might have in times past. >>Yeah, so from an infrastructure perspective, working with VM ware based on tons of really the essence of that is to bring I t operators and developers together. The infrastructure has a common set of management that, you know, each the developer and the I t operators can work in the language there most familiar with. And, you know, the communication of the translation all happens within Tan Xue so that they're more speaking the same, um, language when it comes Thio, you know, managing the infrastructure in particular with VM ware tansy on VX rail. We are delivering kind of a range of infrastructure options because we know people are still trying to figure out you know, where they are in their kubernetes readiness path. Some people have really developed mature capabilities in house for who were Netease for software defined networking. And for those customers, they still may want Thio. You know, use a reference architecture er and build on top of the ex rail for, you know, a custom cloud native specific application. What we're finding is more and more customers, though, don't have that level of kubernetes expertise, especially at scale. And so VM ware v sphere with Tan Xue on VX rail as well as via more cloud foundation on VX rail are ways Thio get a fast start on kubernetes with directly on these fair or kind of go with the full Monty of VM or Cloud Foundation on VX rail. >>Well, we're bringing up VX rail. Of course. The whole wave of h C I was How do we enable simplicity? We don't wanna have to think about these. We wanna, uh, just make it so that customers can just buy a solution. Of course. VX rail joint solution, you know, heavily partnership with VM ware. So, Shannon, there's a few options. VM has been moving very fast toe expand out that the into portfolio, uh, back at the beginning of the year when the sphere seven came out. You needed the BMR Cloud Foundation. Which, of course, what was an option for for for the VX rail. So help us understand you laid out a little bit some of those options there. But what should I know as Adele customer, Uh, you know what my options are? How the fault Kansas Wheat fits into it. >>Yeah, eso We like to call it kubernetes your way with the ex rail. So we have a range of options to fit your operational or kubernetes scale requirements or your level of expertise. So the three options, our first for customers that are looking for that tested, validated, multi configuration reference architectures er that will deliver platform as a service or containers is a service. We've got Tom to architecture for VX rail, which is a new name for what was known as pivot already architecture er and then for customers that may have minimum scaling requirements. They may have some of that expertise in house to manage at scale. The fastest path to get started with kubernetes is the new VM ware V sphere with Changzhou on VX rail. And then last I mentioned kind of that full highly automated turnkey on promises Cloud platform. That's the VM, or Cloud Foundation, on VX rail, which is also known as Dell Technologies Cloud Platform. And that option supports Tan Xue with software defined networking and security built in with that automated lifecycle management across the full stack. So there's really three paths to it from a reference architecture approach to a fast path on the actual clusters all the way to the full Deltek Cloud platform. And Dell Technologies is the first and only really offering this breath of tans. You infrastructure deployment options. Eso customers can really, uh, choose the best path for them. >>Yeah, So, Shannon, if if I If I think back to what we saw in the keynote, you know, VM Ware lays out there, they're hybrid and multi cloud solution. So of course they're they're public cloud the VM ware cloud on a W s. They have that solution. They have extended extended partnerships. Now, with azure uh, the the the offering with Oracle. Uh, that's coming, and I guess I could think to just think of the delta cloud on VX rail as just one of those other clouds in that hybrid and multi cloud solutions. Do I have that right? Same stack. Same management. If I'm if I'm living in that VM world world. >>Yeah. So the Deltek Cloud platform is an on premises hybrid cloud. So, you know, ah, lot of customers were looking to reduce complexity really quickly especially, you know, with some of the work from home initiatives that were sprung upon us and trying to pivot, um to respond to that. And, you know, the answer to solving some of that complexity is to jump into public cloud. What we found is a lot of customers actually are driving a hybrid cloud strategy and approach. And we know many customers sort of have that executive mandate. There's value in, um, driving that are on prem hybrid cloud approach. And that's what Dell Technologies Cloud platform is. So you get the consistent operations in the consistent infrastructure and more of the public cloud like consumption experience while having the infrastructure on Prem for security data locality. Other, um, you know, cost reasons like that. Eso That's really where VM or Cloud Foundation on VF Trail comes into play eso leveraging the VM ware technologies you have on Prem Hybrid cloud. It can connect all those public cloud providers that you talked about. So you have, you know, core to cloud on Dwan. Of the new capabilities that VM or Cloud Foundation, is announced support for is remote clusters. So that takes us kind of from cloud all the way toe edge because you now have the same VCF operational capabilities and operational efficiency with centralized management for remote locations. >>Wonderful. I'm glad you brought up the edge piece. Of course, you talk to the emerging space vm ware talking about ai talking about EJ, so help us understand. How much is it? The similar operational model? Is it even eyes that part of the VX rail family? What's the What's the state of the state in 2020 when it comes to how edge fits into that cloud core edge discussion that you just raised? >>Yeah, when you look at trends, especially for hyper converged edge and cloud native are kind of taking up a lot of the airwaves right now. Eso hyper converge is gonna play a big role in Theodore option of both cloud native Band Edge. And I think the intersection of those two comes into play with things like the remote cluster support for VM Ware Cloud Foundation on VX rail, where you can run cloud, you know, cloud native based modern applications with Tan Xue alongside traditional workloads at the edge, which traditionally have more stringent requirements. Less resource is maybe they need a more hardened environment, power and cooling, you know, um, constraints. So with VCF on VX rail, you have all the operational goodness that comes from the partnership in the levels of integration that we have with VM Ware. And customers can sort of realize that promise of full workload management mobility in a true hybrid cloud environment. >>Shannon I'm wondering what general feedback you're getting from your customers is as they look at a zoo, said these cloud native solutions. You know what's what's the big take away? Is this a continuation of the HD I wave that you've seen? Do they just pull this into their hybrid environments? Um, I'm wondering if you have any either any specific examples that you've been anonymized or just the general gestalt that you're getting from your customers. Is that how they're doing expanding, uh, into these, you know, new environments that kind of stretch them in different ways. >>Yeah, it's interesting because you know, there's there's customers that run the gamut when we look at those that are sort of the farther down their digital transformation journey. Those are the ones that were already planning for cloud native applications or had some in development. Uh, there's also some trends that we're seeing based on, you know, the the size of cluster deployments and the range of, you know, various configurations that are an indicator of those customers that are more modernized in terms of their approach to cloud native. And what we find from those customers, especially over the last six months, is that they're more prepared to respond to the unknown on bond. That was a big lesson for some of the other customers that you know, had new. The digital transformation was the way of the future, but hadn't yet sort of come up with a strategy on how to get there themselves were finding those customers are inhibiting their investments to areas that can help them be more ready for the unknown in the future. In Cloud native is top of that list. >>Absolutely. Shannon Day Volante showed a few times There's the people in the office, you know, with their white board doing everything. And there's the wrecking ball of covert 19. Kind of like Well, if you weren't ready and you weren't already down this path, you better move fast. Wonderful. All right, Shannon. So we know, uh, from past years, you know, VX rail. Usually it's all over the show. So in the digital world, what do you want to he takeaways. What are some of the key? You know, hands on demos, sessions that that people should check out. >>Thank you. Yeah. So hopefully your take away is that the X ray is a great infrastructure to support modern applications. First and foremost, we have, you know, a jointly engineered system built with VM ware, four VM ware environments to enhance fam. Where, and we do that with our the extra LHC I system software, which I didn't give a shout out to yet, which extends that native capabilities and really is the secret behind how we do seamless automated operational experience with the ex rail. And that's the case, whether it's traditional or modern applications. So that's my little commercial for VX rail at the show. Please tune into our VM World session on this topic. We also have hands on labs. We are launching a fun augmented reality game. Eso Please check that out on. We have a new Web page as well that you could get access to all the latest assets and guides that help you, you know, navigate your journey for cloud native. And that's at dell technologies dot com slash Hangzhou. >>Wonderful. Well, Shannon Champion, thanks so much. Great to see you again. And be short. Uh, we look forward to hearing more in the future. >>Thanks to >>stay with us. Lots more coverage from VM World 2020. I'm stew. Minimum is always thank you for watching the Cube.

>> From around the globe, it's theCUBE, with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by the VMworld and its ecosystem partners. >> I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome back to theCUBES coverage of VMworld 2020, our 11th year doing this show, of course, the global virtual event. And what do we love talking about on theCUBE? We love talking to customers. It is a user conference, of course, so really happy to welcome to the program. From the University of Pisa, the Chief Technology Officer Maurizio Davini and joining him is Thierry Pellegrini, one of our theCUBE alumni. He's the vice president of worldwide, I'm sorry, Workload Solutions and HPC with Dell Technologies. Thierry, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thanks too. >> Thanks to you. >> Alright, so let, let's start. The University of Pisa, obviously, you know, everyone knows Pisa, one of the, you know, famous city iconic out there. I know, you know, we all know things in Europe are a little bit longer when you talk about, you know, some of the venerable institutions here in the United States, yeah. It's a, you know, it's a couple of hundred years, you know, how they're using technology and everything. I have to imagine the University of Pisa has a long storied history. So just, if you could start before we dig into all the tech, give us our audience a little bit, you know, if they were looking up on Wikipedia, what's the history of the university? >> So University of Pisa is one of the oldest in the world because there has been founded in 1343 by a pope. We were authorized to do a university teaching by a pope during the latest Middle Ages. So it's really one of the, is not the oldest of course, but the one of the oldest in the world. It has a long history, but as never stopped innovating. So anything in Pisa has always been good for innovating. So either for the teaching or now for the technology applied to a remote teaching or a calculation or scientific computing, So never stop innovating, never try to leverage new technologies and new kind of approach to science and teaching. >> You know, one of your historical teachers Galileo, you know, taught at the university. So, you know, phenomenal history help us understand, you know, you're the CTO there. What does that encompass? How, you know, how many students, you know, are there certain areas of research that are done today before we kind of get into the, you know, the specific use case today? >> So consider that the University of Pisa is a campus in the sense that the university faculties are spread all over the town. Medieval like Pisa poses a lot of problems from the infrastructural point of view. So, we have bought a lot in the past to try to adapt the Medieval town to the latest technologies advancement. Now, we have 50,000 students and consider that Pisa is a general partners university. So, we cover science, like we cover letters in engineering, medicine, and so on. So, during the, the latest 20 years, the university has done a lot of effort to build an infrastructure that was able to develop and deploy the latest technologies for the students. So for example, we have a private fiber network covering all the town, 65 kilometers of a dark fiber that belongs to the university, four data centers, one big and three little center connected today at 200 gigabit ethernet. We have a big data center, big for an Italian University, of course, and not Poland and U.S. university, where is, but also hold infrastructure for the enterprise services and the scientific computing. >> Yep, Maurizio, it's great that you've had that technology foundation. I have to imagine the global pandemic COVID-19 had an impact. What's it been? You know, how's the university dealing with things like work from home and then, you know, Thierry would love your commentary too. >> You know, we, of course we were not ready. So we were eaten by the pandemic and we have to adapt our service software to transform from imperson to remote services. So we did a lot of work, but we are able, thanks to the technology that we have chosen to serve almost a 100% of our curriculum studies program. We did a lot of work in the past to move to virtualization, to enable our users to work for remote, either for a workstation or DC or remote laboratories or remote calculation. So virtualization has designed in the past our services. And of course when we were eaten by the pandemic, we were almost ready to transform our service from in person to remote. >> Yeah, I think it's, it's true, like Maurizio said, nobody really was preparing for this pandemic. And even for, for Dell Technologies, it was an interesting transition. And as you can probably realize a lot of the way that we connect with customers is in person. And we've had to transition over to modes or digitally connecting with customers. We've also spent a lot of our energy trying to help the community HPC and AI community fight the COVID pandemic. We've made some of our own clusters that we use in our HPC and AI innovation center here in Austin available to genomic research or other companies that are fighting the the virus. And it's been an interesting transition. I can't believe that it's already been over six months now, but we've found a new normal. >> Detailed, let's get in specifically to how you're partnering with Dell. You've got a strong background in the HPC space, working with supercomputers. What is it that you're turning to Dell in their ecosystem to help the university with? >> So we are, we have a long history in HPC. Of course, like you can imagine not to the biggest HPC like is done in the U.S. so in the biggest supercomputer center in Europe. We have several system for doing HPC. Traditionally, HPC that are based on a Dell Technologies offer. We typically host all kind of technology's best, but now it's available, of course not in a big scale but in a small, medium scale that we are offering to our researcher, student. We have a strong relationship with Dell Technologies developing together solution to leverage the latest technologies, to the scientific computing, and this has a lot during the research that has been done during this pandemic. >> Yeah, and it's true. I mean, Maurizio is humble, but every time we have new technologies that are to be evaluated, of course we spend time evaluating in our labs, but we make it a point to share that technology with Maurizio and the team at the University of Pisa, That's how we find some of the better usage models for customers, help tuning some configurations, whether it's on the processor side, the GPU side, the storage and the interconnect. And then the topic of today, of course, with our partners at VMware, we've had some really great advancements Maurizio and the team are what we call a center of excellence. We have a few of them across the world where we have a unique relationship sharing technology and collaborating on advancement. And recently Maurizio and the team have even become one of the VMware certified centers. So it's a great marriage for this new world where virtual is becoming the norm. >> But well, Thierry, you and I had a conversation to talk earlier in the year when VMware was really geering their full kind of GPU suite and, you know, big topic in the keynote, you know, Jensen, the CEO of Nvidia was up on stage. VMware was talking a lot about AI solutions and how this is going to help. So help us bring us in you work with a lot of the customers theory. What is it that this enables for them and how to, you know, Dell and VMware bring, bring those solutions to bear? >> Yes, absolutely. It's one statistic I'll start with. Can you believe that only on average, 15 to 20% of GPU are fully utilized? So, when you think about the amount of technology that's are at our fingertips and especially in a world today where we need that technology to advance research and scientistic discoveries. Wouldn't it be fantastic to utilize those GPU's to the best of our ability? And it's not just GPU's , I think the industry has in the IT world, leverage virtualization to get to the maximum recycles for CPU's and storage and networking. Now you're bringing the GPU in the fold and you have a perfect utilization and also flexibility across all those resources. So what we've seen is that convergence between the IT world that was highly virtualized, and then this highly optimized world of HPC and AI because of the resources out there and researchers, but also data scientists and company want to be able to run their day to day activities on that infrastructure. But then when they have a big surge need for research or a data science use that same environment and then seamlessly move things around workload wise. >> Yeah, okay I do believe your stat. You know, the joke we always have is, you know, anybody from a networking background, there's no such thing as eliminating a bottleneck, you just move it. And if you talk about utilization, we've been playing the shell game for my entire career of, let's try to optimize one thing and then, oh, there's something else that we're not doing. So,you know, so important. Retail, I want to hear from your standpoint, you know, virtualization and HPC, you know, AI type of uses there. What value does this bring to you and, you know, and key learnings you've had in your organization? >> So, we as a university are a big users of the VMware technologies starting from the traditional enterprise workload and VPI. We started from there in the sense that we have an installation quite significant. But also almost all the services that the university gives to our internal users, either personnel or staff or students. At a certain point that we decided to try to understand the, if a VMware virtualization would be good also for scientific computing. Why? Because at the end of the day, their request that we have from our internal users is flexibility. Flexibility in the sense of be fast in deploying, be fast to reconfiguring, try to have the latest beats on the software side, especially on the AI research. At the end of the day we designed a VMware solution like you, I can say like a whiteboard. We have a whiteboard, and we are able to design a new solution of this whiteboard and to deploy as fast as possible. Okay, what we face as IT is not a request of the maximum performance. Our researchers ask us for flexibility then, and want to be able to have the maximum possible flexibility in configuring the systems. How can I say I, we can deploy as more test cluster on the visual infrastructure in minutes or we can use GPU inside the infrastructure tests, of test of new algorithm for deep learning. And we can use faster storage inside the virtualization to see how certain algorithm would vary with our internal developer can leverage the latest, the beat in storage like NVME, MVMS or so. And this is why at the certain point, we decided to try visualization as a base for HPC and scientific computing, and we are happy. >> Yeah, I think Maurizio described it it's flexibility. And of course, if you think optimal performance, you're looking at the bare medal, but in this day and age, as I stated at the beginning, there's so much technology, so much infrastructure available that flexibility at times trump the raw performance. So, when you have two different research departments, two different portions, two different parts of the company looking for an environment. No two environments are going to be exactly the same. So you have to be flexible in how you aggregate the different components of the infrastructure. And then think about today it's actually fantastic. Maurizio was sharing with me earlier this year, that at some point, as we all know, there was a lot down. You could really get into a data center and move different cables around or reconfigure servers to have the right ratio of memory, to CPU, to storage, to accelerators, and having been at the forefront of this enablement has really benefited University of Pisa and given them that flexibility that they really need. >> Wonderful, well, Maurizio my understanding, I believe you're giving a presentation as part of the activities this week. Give us a final glimpses to, you know, what you want your peers to be taking away from what you've done? >> What we have done that is something that is very simple in the sense that we adapt some open source software to our infrastructure in order to enable our system managers and users to deploy HPC and AI solution fastly and in an easy way to our VMware infrastructure. We started doing a sort of POC. We designed the test infrastructure early this year and then we go fastly to production because we had about the results. And so this is what we present in the sense that you can have a lot of way to deploy Vitola HPC, Barto. We went for a simple and open source solution. Also, thanks to our friends of Dell Technologies in some parts that enabled us to do the works and now to go in production. And that's theory told before you talked to has a lot during the pandemic due to the effect that stay at home >> Wonderful, Thierry, I'll let you have the final word. What things are you drawing customers to, to really dig in? Obviously there's a cost savings, or are there any other things that this unlocks for them? >> Yeah, I mean, cost savings. We talked about flexibility. We talked about utilization. You don't want to have a lot of infrastructure sitting there and just waiting for a job to come in once every two months. And then there's also the world we live in, and we all live our life here through a video conference, or at times through the interface of our phone and being able to have this web based interaction with a lot of infrastructure. And at times the best infrastructure in the world, makes things simpler, easier, and hopefully bring science at the finger tip of data scientists without having to worry about knowing every single detail on how to build up that infrastructure. And with the help of the University of Pisa, one of our centers of excellence in Europe, we've been innovating and everything that's been accomplished for, you know at Pisa can be accomplished by our customers and our partners around the world. >> Thierry, Maurizio, thank you much for so much for sharing and congratulations on all I know you've done building up that COE. >> Thanks to you. >> Thank you. >> Stay with us, lots more covered from VMworld 2020. I'm Stu Miniman as always. Thank you for watching the theCUBE. 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>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back to the cubes. Virtual coverage of VM World 2020 Virtual I'm John for your host of the Cube, our 11th year covering V emeralds. Not in person. It's virtual. I'm with my coast, Dave. A lot, of course. Ah, guest has been on every year since the cubes existed. Sanjay Putin, who is now the chief operating officer for VM Ware Sanjay, Great to see you. It's our 11th years. Virtual. We're not in person. Usually high five are going around. But hey, virtual fist pump, >>virtual pissed bump to you, John and Dave, always a pleasure to talk to you. I give you more than a virtual pistol. Here's a virtual hug. >>Well, so >>great. Back at great. >>Great to have you on. First of all, a lot more people attending the emerald this year because it's virtual again, it doesn't have the face to face. It is a community and technical events, so people do value that face to face. Um, but it is virtually a ton of content, great guests. You guys have a great program here, Very customer centric. Kind of. The theme is, you know, unpredictable future eyes is really what it's all about. We've talked about covert you've been on before. What's going on in your perspective? What's the theme of your main talks? >>Ah, yeah. Thank you, John. It's always a pleasure to talk to you folks. We we felt as we thought, about how we could make this content dynamic. We always want to make it fresh. You know, a virtual show of this kind and program of this kind. We all are becoming experts at many Ted talks or ESPN. Whatever your favorite program is 60 minutes on becoming digital producers of content. So it has to be crisp, and everybody I think was doing this has found ways by which you reduce the content. You know, Pat and I would have normally given 90 minute keynotes on day one and then 90 minutes again on day two. So 180 minutes worth of content were reduced that now into something that is that entire 180 minutes in something that is but 60 minutes. You you get a chance to use as you've seen from the keynote an incredible, incredible, you know, packed array of both announcements from Pat myself. So we really thought about how we could organize this in a way where the content was clear, crisp and compelling. Thekla's piece of it needed also be concise, but then supplemented with hundreds of sessions that were as often as possible, made it a goal that if you're gonna do a break out session that has to be incorporate or lead with the customer, so you'll see not just that we have some incredible sea level speakers from customers that have featured in in our pattern, Mikey notes like John Donahoe, CEO of Nike or Lorry beer C I, a global sea of JPMorgan Chase partner Baba, who is CEO of Zuma Jensen Wang, who is CEO of video. Incredible people. Then we also had some luminaries. We're gonna be talking in our vision track people like in the annuity. I mean, one of the most powerful women the world many years ranked by Fortune magazine, chairman, CEO Pepsi or Bryan Stevenson, the person who start in just mercy. If you watch that movie, he's a really key fighter for social justice and criminal. You know, reform and jails and the incarceration systems. And Malala made an appearance. Do I asked her personally, I got to know her and her dad's and she spoke two years ago. I asked her toe making appearance with us. So it's a really, really exciting until we get to do some creative stuff in terms of digital content this year. >>So on the product side and the momentum side, you have great decisions you guys have made in the past. We covered that with Pat Gelsinger, but the business performance has been very strong with VM. Where, uh, props to you guys, Where does this all tie together for in your mind? Because you have the transformation going on in a highly accelerated rate. You know, cov were not in person, but Cove in 19 has proven, uh, customers that they have to move faster. It's a highly accelerated world, a lot. Lots changing. Multi cloud has been on the radar. You got security. All the things you guys are doing, you got the AI announcements that have been pumping. Thean video thing was pretty solid. That project Monterey. What does the customer walk away from this year and and with VM where? What is the main theme? What what's their call to action? What's what do they need to be doing? >>I think there's sort of three things we would encourage customers to really think about. Number one is, as they think about everything in infrastructure, serves APS as they think about their APS. We want them to really push the frontier of how they modernize their athletic applications. And we think that whole initiative off how you modernized applications driven by containers. You know, 20 years ago when I was a developer coming out of college C, C plus, plus Java and then emerge, these companies have worked on J two ee frameworks. Web Logic, Be Aware logic and IBM Web Street. It made the development off. Whatever is e commerce applications of portals? Whatever was in the late nineties, early two thousands much, much easier. That entire world has gotten even easier and much more Micro service based now with containers. We've been talking about kubernetes for a while, but now we've become the leading enterprise, contain a platform making some incredible investments, but we want to not just broaden this platform. We simplified. It is You've heard everything in the end. What works in threes, right? It's sort of like almost t shirt sizing small, medium, large. So we now have tens Ooh, in the standard. The advanced the enterprise editions with lots of packaging behind that. That makes it a very broad and deep platform. We also have a basic version of it. So in some sense it's sort of like an extra small. In addition to the small medium large so tends to and everything around at modernization, I think would be message number one number two alongside modernization. You're also thinking about migration of your workloads and the breadth and depth of, um, er Cloud Foundation now of being able to really solve, not just use cases, you are traditionally done, but also new ai use cases. Was the reason Jensen and us kind of partner that, and I mean what a great company and video has become. You know, the king maker of these ai driven applications? Why not run those AI applications on the best infrastructure on the planet? Remember, that's a coming together of both of our platforms to help customers. You know automotive banking fraud detection is a number of AI use cases that now get our best and we want it. And the same thing then applies to Project Monterey, which takes the B c f e m A Cloud Foundation proposition to smart Knicks on Dell, HP Lenovo are embracing the in video Intel's and Pen Sandoz in that smart make architectural, however, that so that entire world of multi cloud being operative Phobia Macleod Foundation on Prem and all of its extended use cases like AI or Smart Knicks or Edge, but then also into the AWS Azure, Google Multi Cloud world. We obviously had a preferred relationship with Amazon that's going incredibly well, but you also saw some announcements last week from, uh, Microsoft Azure about azure BMR solutions at their conference ignite. So we feel very good about the migration opportunity alongside of modernization on the third priority, gentlemen would be security. It's obviously a topic that I most recently taken uninterested in my day job is CEO of the company running the front office customer facing revenue functions by night job by Joe Coffin has been driving. The security strategy for the company has been incredibly enlightening to talk, to see SOS and drive this intrinsic security or zero trust from the network to end point and workload and cloud security. And we made some exciting announcements there around bringing together MAWR capabilities with NSX and Z scaler and a problem black and workload security. And of course, Lassiter wouldn't cover all of this. But I would say if I was a attendee of the conference those the three things I want them to take away what BMR is doing in the future of APS what you're doing, the future of a multi cloud world and how we're making security relevant for distributed workforce. >>I know David >>so much to talk about here, Sanjay. So, uh, talk about modern APS? That's one of the five franchise platforms VM Ware has a history of going from, you know, Challenger toe dominant player. You saw that with end user computing, and there's many, many other examples, so you are clearly one of the top, you know. Let's call it five or six platforms out there. We know what those are, uh, and but critical to that modern APS. Focus is developers, and I think it's fair to say that that's not your wheelhouse today, but you're making moves there. You agree that that is, that is a critical part of modern APS, and you update us on what you're doing for that community to really take a leadership position there. >>Yeah, no, I think it's a very good point, David. We way seek to constantly say humble and hungry. There's never any assumption from us that VM Ware is completely earned anyplace off rightful leadership until we get thousands, tens of thousands. You know, we have a half a million customers running on our virtualization sets of products that have made us successful for 20 years 70 million virtual machines. But we have toe earn that right and containers, and I think there will be probably 10 times as many containers is their virtual machines. So if it took us 20 years to not just become the leader in in virtual machines but have 70 million virtual machines, I don't think it will be 20 years before there's a billion containers and we seek to be the leader in that platform. Now, why, Why VM Where and why do you think we can win in their long term. What are we doing with developers Number one? We do think there is a container capability independent of virtual machine. And that's what you know, this entire world of what hefty on pivotal brought to us on. You know, many of the hundreds of customers that are using what was formerly pivotal and FDR now what's called Tan Xue have I mean the the case. Studies of what those customers are doing are absolutely incredible. When I listen to them, you take Dick's sporting goods. I mean, they are building curbside, pick up a lot of the world. Now the pandemic is doing e commerce and curbside pick up people are going to the store, That's all based on Tan Xue. We've had companies within this sort of world of pandemic working on contact, tracing app. Some of the diagnostic tools built without they were the lab services and on the 10 zoo platform banks. Large banks are increasingly standardizing on a lot of their consumer facing or wealth management type of applications, anything that they're building rapidly on this container platform. So it's incredible the use cases I'm hearing public sector. The U. S. Air Force was talking about how they've done this. Many of them are not public about how they're modernizing dams, and I tend to learn the best from these vertical use case studies. I mean, I spend a significant part of my life is you know, it s a P and increasingly I want to help the company become a lot more vertical. Use case in banking, public sector, telco manufacturing, CPG retail top four or five where we're seeing a lot of recurrence of these. The Tan Xue portfolio actually brings us closest to almost that s a P type of dialogue because we're having an apse dialogue in the in the speak of an industry as opposed to bits and bytes Notice I haven't talked at all about kubernetes or containers. I'm talking about the business problem being solved in a retailer or a bank or public sector or whatever have you now from a developer audience, which was the second part of your question? Dave, you know, we talked about this, I think a year or two ago. We have five million developers today that we've been able to, you know, as bringing these acquisitions earn some audience with about two or three million from from the spring community and two or three million from the economic community. So think of those five million people who don't know us because of two acquisitions we don't. Obviously spring was inside Vienna where went out of pivotal and then came back. So we really have spent a lot of time with that community. A few weeks ago, we had spring one. You guys are aware of that? That conference record number of attendees okay, Registered, I think of all 40 or 50,000, which is, you know, much bigger than the physical event. And then a substantial number of them attended live physical. So we saw a great momentum out of spring one, and we're really going to take care of that, That that community base of developers as they care about Java Manami also doing really, really well. But then I think the rial audience it now has to come from us becoming part of the conversation. That coupon at AWS re invent at ignite not just the world, I mean via world is not gonna be the only place where infrastructure and developers come to. We're gonna have to be at other events which are very prominent and then have a developer marketplace. So it's gonna be a multiyear effort. We're okay with that. To grow that group of about five million developers that we today Kate or two on then I think there will be three or four other companies that also play very prominently to developers AWS, Microsoft and Google. And if we're one among those three or four companies and remembers including that list, we feel very good about our ability to be in a place where this is a shared community, takes a village to approach and an appeal to those developers. I think there will be one of those four companies that's doing this for many years to >>come. Santa, I got to get your take on. I love your reference to the Web days and how the development environment change and how the simplicity came along very relevant to how we're seeing this digital transformation. But I want to get your thoughts on how you guys were doing pre and now during and Post Cove it. You already had a complicated thing coming on. You had multi cloud. You guys were expanding your into end you had acquisitions, you mentioned a few of them. And then cove it hit. Okay, so now you have Everything is changing you got. He's got more complex city. You have more solutions, and then the customer psychology is change. You got to spectrums of customers, people trying to save their business because it's changed, their customer behavior has changed. And you have other customers that are doubling down because they have a tailwind from Cove it, whether it's a modern app, you know, coming like Zoom and others are doing well because of the environment. So you got your customers air in this in this in this, in this storm, you know, they're trying to save down, modernized or or or go faster. How are you guys changing? Because it's impacted how you sell. People are selling differently, how you implement and how you support customers, because you already had kind of the whole multi cloud going on with the modern APS. I get that, but Cove, it has changed things. How are you guys adopting and changing to meet the customer needs who are just trying to save their business on re factor or double down and continue >>John. Great question. I think I also talked about some of this in one of your previous digital events that you and I talked about. I mean, you go back to the last week of February 1st week of March, actually back up, even in January, my last trip on a plane. Ah, major trip outside this country was the World Economic Forum in Davos. And, you know, there were thousands of us packed into the small digits in Switzerland. I was sitting having dinner with Andy Jassy in a restaurant one night that day. Little did we know. A month later, everything would change on DWhite. We began to do in late February. Early March was first. Take care of employees. You always wanna have the pulse, check employees and be in touch with them. Because the health and safety of employees is much more important than the profits of, um, where you know. So we took care of that. Make sure that folks were taking care of older parents were in good place. We fortunately not lost anyone to death. Covert. We had some covert cases, but they've recovered on. This is an incredible pandemic that connects all of us in the human fabric. It has no separation off skin color or ethnicity or gender, a little bit of difference in people who are older, who might be more affected or prone to it. But we just have to, and it's taught me to be a significantly more empathetic. I began to do certain things that I didn't do before, but I felt was the right thing to do. For example, I've begun to do 25 30 minute calls with every one of my key countries. You know, as I know you, I run customer operations, all of the go to market field teams reporting to me on. I felt it was important for me to be showing up, not just in the big company meetings. We do that and big town halls where you know, some fractions. 30,000 people of VM ware attend, but, you know, go on, do a town hall for everybody in a virtual zoom session in Japan. But in their time zone. So 10 o'clock my time in the night, uh, then do one in China and Australia kind of almost travel around the world virtually, and it's not long calls 25 30 minutes, where 1st 10 or 15 minutes I'm sharing with them what I'm seeing across other countries, the world encouraging them to focus on a few priorities, which I'll talk about in a second and then listening to them for 10 15 minutes and be, uh and then the call on time or maybe even a little earlier, because every one of us is going to resume button going from call to call the call. We're tired of T. There's also mental, you know, fatigue that we've gotta worry about. Mental well, being long term. So that's one that I personally began to change. I began to also get energy because in the past, you know, I would travel to Europe or Asia. You know, 40 50%. My life has travel. It takes a day out of your life on either end, your jet lag. And then even when you get to a Tokyo or Beijing or to Bangalore or the London, getting between sites of these customers is like a 45 minute, sometimes in our commute. Now I'm able to do many of these 25 30 minute call, so I set myself a goal to talk to 1000 chief security officers. I know a lot of CEOs and CFOs from my times at S A P and VM ware, but I didn't know many security officers who often either work for a CEO or report directly to the legal counsel on accountable to the audit committee of the board. And I got a list of these 1,002,000 people we called email them. Man, I gotta tell you, people willing to talk to me just coming, you know, into this I'm about 500 into that. And it was role modeling to my teams that the top of the company is willing to spend as much time as possible. And I have probably gotten a lot more productive in customer conversations now than ever before. And then the final piece of your question, which is what do we tell the customer in terms about portfolio? So these were just more the practices that I was able to adapt during this time that have given me energy on dial, kind of get scared of two things from the portfolio perspective. I think we began to don't notice two things. One is Theo entire move of migration and modernization around the cloud. I describe that as you know, for example, moving to Amazon is a migration opportunity to azure modernization. Is that whole Tan Xue Eminem? Migration of modernization is highly relevant right now. In fact, taking more speed data center spending might be on hold on freeze as people kind of holding till depend, emmick or the GDP recovers. But migration of modernization is accelerating, so we wanna accelerate that part of our portfolio. One of the products we have a cloud on Amazon or Cloud Health or Tan Xue and maybe the other offerings for the other public dog. The second part about portfolio that we're seeing acceleration around is distributed workforce security work from home work from anywhere. And that's that combination off workspace, one for both endpoint management, virtual desktops, common black envelope loud and the announcements we've now made with Z scaler for, uh, distributed work for security or what the analysts called secure access. So message. That's beautiful because everyone working from home, even if they come back to the office, needs a very different model of security and were now becoming a leader in that area. of security. So these two parts of the portfolio you take the five franchise pillars and put them into these two buckets. We began to see momentum. And the final thing, I would say, Guys, just on a soft note. You know, I've had to just think about ways in which I balance work and family. It's just really easy. You know what, 67 months into this pandemic to burn out? Ah, now I've encouraged my team. We've got to think about this as a marathon, not a sprint. Do the personal things that you wanna do that will make your life better through this pandemic. That in practice is that you keep after it. I'll give you one example. I began biking with my kids and during the summer months were able to bike later. Even now in the fall, we're able to do that often, and I hope that's a practice I'm able to do much more often, even after the pandemic. So develop some activities with your family or with the people that you love the most that are seeing you a lot more and hopefully enjoying that time with them that you will keep even after this pandemic ends. >>So, Sanjay, I love that you're spending all this time with CSOs. I mean, I have a Well, maybe not not 1000 but dozens. And they're such smart people. They're really, you know, in the thick of things you mentioned, you know, your partnership with the scale ahead. Scott Stricklin on who is the C. C so of Wyndham? He was talking about the security club. But since the pandemic, there's really three waves. There's the cloud security, the identity, access management and endpoint security. And one of the things that CSOs will tell you is the lack of talent is their biggest challenge. And they're drowning in all these products. And so how should we think about your approach to security and potentially simplifying their lives? >>Yeah. You know, Dave, we talked about this, I think last year, maybe the year before, and what we were trying to do in security was really simplified because the security industry is like 5000 vendors, and it's like, you know, going to a doctor and she tells you to stay healthy. You gotta have 5000 tablets. You just cannot eat that many tablets you take you days, weeks, maybe a month to eat that many tablets. So ah, grand simplification has to happen where that health becomes part of your diet. You eat your proteins and vegetables, you drink your water, do your exercise. And the analogy and security is we cannot deploy dozens of agents and hundreds of alerts and many, many consoles. Uh, infrastructure players like us that have control points. We have 70 million virtual machines. We have 75 million virtual switches. We have, you know, tens of million's off workspace, one of carbon black endpoints that we manage and secure its incumbent enough to take security and making a lot more part of the infrastructure. Reduce the need for dozens and dozens of point tools. And with that comes a grand simplification of both the labor involved in learning all these tools. Andi, eventually also the cost of ownership off those particular tool. So that's one other thing we're seeking to do is increasingly be apart off that education off security professionals were both investing in ah, lot of off, you know, kind of threat protection research on many of our folks you know who are in a threat. Behavioral analytics, you know, kind of thread research. And people have come out of deep hacking experience with the government and others give back to the community and teaching classes. Um, in universities, there are a couple of non profits that are really investing in security, transfer education off CSOs and their teams were contributing to that from the standpoint off the ways in which we can give back both in time talent and also a treasure. So I think is we think about this. You're going to see us making this a long term play. We have a billion dollar security business today. There's not many companies that have, you know, a billion dollar plus of security is probably just two or three, and some of them have hit a wall in terms of their progress sport. We want to be one of the leaders in cybersecurity, and we think we need to do this both in building great product satisfying customers. But then also investing in the learning, the training enable remember, one of the things of B M worlds bright is thes hands on labs and all the training enable that happened at this event. So we will use both our platform. We in world in a variety of about the virtual environments to ensure that we get the best education of security to professional. >>So >>that's gonna be exciting, Because if you look at some of the evaluations of some of the pure plays I mean, you're a cloud security business growing a triple digits and, you know, you see some of these guys with, you know, $30 billion valuations, But I wanted to ask you about the market, E v m. Where used to be so simple Right now, you guys have expanded your tam dramatically. How are you thinking about, you know, the market opportunity? You've got your five franchise platforms. I know you're very disciplined about identifying markets, and then, you know, saying, Okay, now we're gonna go compete. But how do you look at the market and the market data? Give us the update there. >>Yeah, I think. Dave, listen, you know, I like davinci statement. You know, simplicity is the greatest form of sophistication, and I think you've touched on something that which is cos we get bigger. You know, I've had the great privilege of working for two great companies. s a P and B M where the bulk of my last 15 plus years And if something I've learned, you know, it's very easy. Both companies was to throw these TLS three letter acronyms, okay? And I use an acronym and describing the three letter acronyms like er or s ex. I mean, they're all acronyms and a new employee who comes to this company. You know, Carol Property, for example. We just hired her from Google. Is our CMO her first comments like, My goodness, there is a lot of off acronyms here. I've gotta you need a glossary? I had the same reaction when I joined B. M or seven years ago and had the same reaction when I joined the S A. P 15 years ago. Now, of course, two or three years into it, you learn everything and it becomes part of your speed. We have toe constantly. It's like an accordion like you expanded by making it mawr of luminous and deep. But as you do that it gets complex, you then have to simplify it. And that's the job of all of us leaders and I this year, just exemplifying that I don't have it perfect. One of the gifts I do have this communication being able to simplify things. I recorded a five minute video off our five franchise pill. It's just so that the casual person didn't know VM where it could understand on. Then, when I'm on your shore and when on with Jim Cramer and CNBC, I try to simplify, simplify, simplify, simplify because the more you can talk and analogies and pictures, the more the casual user. I mean, of course, and some other audiences. I'm talking to investors. Get it on. Then, Of course, as you go deeper, it should be like progressive layers or feeling of an onion. You can get deeper. It's not like the entire discussion with Sanjay Putin on my team is like, you know, empty suit. It's a superficial discussion. We could go deeper, but you don't have to begin the discussion in the bowels off that, and that's really what we don't do. And then the other part of your question was, how do we think about new markets? You know, we always start with Listen, you sort of core in contact our borough come sort of Jeffrey Moore, Andi in the Jeffrey more context. You think about things that you do really well and then ask yourself outside of that what the Jason sees that are closest to you, that your customers are asking you to advance into on that, either organically to partnerships or through acquisitions. I think John and I talked about in the previous dialogue about the framework of build partner and by, and we always think about it in that order. Where do we advance and any of the moves we've made six years ago, seven years ago and I joined the I felt VM are needed to make a move into mobile to really cement opposition in end user computing. And it took me some time to convince my peers and then the board that we should by Air One, which at that time was the biggest acquisition we've ever done. Okay. Similarly, I'm sure prior to me about Joe Tucci, Pat Nelson. We're thinking about nice here, and I'm moving to networking. Those were too big, inorganic moves. +78 years of Raghu was very involved in that. The decisions we moved to the make the move in the public cloud myself. Rgu pack very involved in the decision. Their toe partner with Amazon, the change and divest be cloud air and then invested in organic effort around what's become the Claudia. That's an organic effort that was an acquisition fast forward to last year. It took me a while to really Are you internally convinced people and then make the move off the second biggest acquisition we made in carbon black and endpoint security cement the security story that we're talking about? Rgu did a similar piece of good work around ad monetization to justify that pivotal needed to come back in. So but you could see all these pieces being adjacent to the core, right? And then you ask yourself, Is that context meaning we could leave it to a partner like you don't see us get into the hardware game we're partnering with. Obviously, the players like Dell and HP, Lenovo and the smart Knick players like Intel in video. In Pensando, you see that as part of the Project Monterey announcement. But the adjacent seas, for example, last year into app modernization up the stack and into security, which I'd say Maura's adjacent horizontal to us. We're now made a lot more logical. And as we then convince ourselves that we could do it, convince our board, make the move, We then have to go and tell our customers. Right? And this entire effort of talking to CSOs What am I doing is doing the same thing that I did to my board last year, simplified to 15 minutes and get thousands of them to understand it. Received feedback, improve it, invest further. And actually, some of the moves were now making this year around our partnership in distributed Workforce Security and Cloud Security and Z scaler. What we're announcing an XDR and Security Analytics. All of the big announcements of security of this conference came from what we heard last year between the last 12 months of my last year. Well, you know, keynote around security, and now, and I predict next year it'll be even further. That's how you advance the puck every year. >>Sanjay, I want to get your thoughts. So now we have a couple minutes left. But we did pull the audience and the community to get some questions for you, since it's virtually wanted to get some representation there. So I got three questions for you. First question, what comes after Cloud and number two is VM Ware security company. And three. What company had you wish you had acquired? >>Oh, my goodness. Okay, the third one eyes gonna be the turkey is one, I think. Listen, because I'm gonna give you my personal opinion, and some of it was probably predates me, so I could probably safely So do that. And maybe put the blame on Joe Tucci or somebody else is no longer here. But let me kind of give you the first two. What comes after cloud? I think clouds gonna be with us for a long time. First off this multi cloud world, you just look at the moment, um, that AWS and azure and the other clouds all have. It's incredible on I think this that multi cloud from phenomenon. But if there's an adapt ation of it, it's gonna be three forms of cloud. People are really only focus today in private public cloud. You have to remember the edge and Telco Cloud and this pendulum off the right balance of workloads between the data center called it a private cloud. The public cloud on one end and the telco edge on the other end. I think we're in a really good position for workloads to really swing between all three of those locations. Three other part that I think comes as a sequel to Cloud is cloud native. All of the capabilities a serverless functions but also containers that you know. Obviously the one could think of that a sister topics to cloud but the entire world of containers. The other seat, uh, then cloud a cloud native will also be topics, but these were all fairly connected. That's how I'd answer the first question. A security company? Absolutely. We you know, we aspire to be one of the leading companies in cyber security. I don't think they will be only one. We have to show this by the wealth on breath of our customers. The revenue momentum we have Gartner ranking us or the analysts ranking us in top rights of magic quadrants being viewed as an innovator simplifying the stack. But listen, we weren't even on the radar. We weren't speaking of the security conferences years ago. Now we are. We have a billion dollar security business, 20,000 plus customers, really strong presences and network endpoint and workload and Cloud Security. The three Coppola's a lot more coming in Security analytics, Cloud Security distributed workforce Security. So we're here to stay. And if anything, BMR persist through this, we're planning for multi your five or 10 year timeframe. And in that course I mean, the competition is smaller. Companies that don't have the breadth and depth of the n words are Andy muscle and are going market. We just have to keep building great products and serving customer on the third man. There's so many. But I mean, I think Listen, when I was looking back, I always wondered this is before I joined so I could say the summit speculatively on. Don't you know, make this This is BMR. Sorry. This is Sanjay one's opinion. Not VM. I gotta make very, very clear. Well, listen, I would have if I was at BMO in 2012 or 2013. I would love to about service now then service. It was a great company. I don't even know maybe the company's talk, but then talk about a very successful company at that time now. Maybe their priorities were different. I wasn't at the company at the time, but I can speculate if that had happened, that would have been an interesting Now I think that was during the time of Paul Maritz here and and so on. So for them, maybe there were other priorities the company need to get done. But at that time, of course, today s so it's not as big of a even slightly bigger market cap than us. So that's not happening. But that's a great example of a good company that I think would have at that time fit very well with VM Ware. And then there's probably we don't look back and regret we move forward. I mean, I think about the acquisitions we have made the big ones. Okay, Nice era air watch pop in black. Pivotal. The big moves we've made in terms of partnership. Amazon. What? We're announcing this This, you know, this week within video and Z scaler. So you never look back and regret. You always look for >>follow up on that To follow up on that from a developer, entrepreneurial or partner Perspective. Can you share where the white spaces for people to innovate around vm Where where where can people partner and play. Whether I'm an entrepreneur in a garage or venture back, funded or say a partner pivoting and or resetting with Govind, where's the white spaces with them? >>I think that, you know, there's gonna be a number off places where the Tan Xue platform develops, as it kind of makes it relevant to developers. I mean, there's, I think the first way we think about this is to make ourselves relevant toe all of that ecosystem around the C I. C. D type apply platform. They're really good partners of ours. They're like, get lab, You know, all of the ways in which open source communities, you know will play alongside that Hash E Corp. Jay frog there number of these companies that are partnering with us and we're excited about all of their relevancy to tend to, and it's our job to go and make that marketplace better and better. You're going to hear more about that coming up from us on. Then there's the set of data companies, you know, con fluent. You know, of course, you've seen a big I p o of a snowflake. All of those data companies, we'll need a very natural synergy. If you think about the old days of middleware, middleware is always sort of separate from the database. I think that's starting to kind of coalesce. And Data and analytics placed on top of the modern day middleware, which is containers I think it's gonna be now does VM or play physically is a data company. We don't know today we're gonna partner very heavily. But picking the right set of partners been fluent is a good example of one on. There's many of the next generation database companies that you're going to see us partner with that will become part of that marketplace influence. And I think, as you see us certainly produce out the VM Ware marketplace for developers. I think this is gonna be a game changing opportunity for us to really take those five million developers and work with the leading companies. You know, I use the example of get Lab is an example get help there. Others that appeal to developers tie them into our developer framework. The one thing you learn about developers, you can't have a mindset. With that, you all come to just us. It's a very mingled village off multiple ecosystems and Venn diagrams that are coalescing. If you try to take over the world, the developer community just basically shuns you. You have to have a very vibrant way in which you are mingling, which is why I described. It's like, Listen, we want our developers to come to our conferences and reinvent and ignite and get the best experience of all those provide tools that coincide with everybody. You have to take a holistic view of this on if you do that over many years, just like the security topic. This is a multi year pursuit for us to be relevant. Developers. We feel good about the future being bright. >>David got five minutes e. >>I thought you were gonna say Zoom, Sanjay, that was That was my wildcard. >>Well, listen, you know, I think it was more recently and very fast catapult Thio success, and I don't know that that's clearly in the complete, you know, sweet spot of the anywhere. I mean, you know, unified collaboration would have probably put us in much more competition with teams and, well, back someone you always have to think about what's in the in the bailiwick of what's closest to us, but zooms a great partner. Uh, I mean, obviously you love to acquire anybody that's hot, but Eric's doing really well. I mean, Erica, I'm sure he had many people try to come to buy him. I'm just so proud of him as a friend of all that he was named to Time magazine Top 100. But what he's done is phenomenon. I think he could build a company that's just his important, his Facebook. So, you know, I encourage him. Don't sell, keep building the company and you'll build a company that's going to be, you know, the enterprise version of Facebook. And I think that's a tremendous opportunity to do this better than anybody else is doing. And you know, I'm as an immigrant. He's, you know, China. Born now American, I'm Indian born, American, assim immigrants. We both have a similar story. I learned a lot from him. I learned a lot from him, from on speed on speed and how to move fast, he tells me he learns a thing to do for me on scale. We teach each other. It's a beautiful friendship. >>We'll make sure you put in a good word for the Kiwi. One more zoom integration >>for a final word or the zoom that is the future Facebook of the enterprise. Whatever, Sanjay, Thank >>you for connecting with us. Virtually. It is a digital foundation. It is an unpredictable world. Um, it's gonna change. It could be software to find the operating models or changing you guys. We're changing how you serve customers with new chief up commercial customer officer you have in place, which is a new hire. Congratulations. And you guys were flexing with the market and you got a tailwind. So congratulations, >>John and Dave. Always a pleasure. We couldn't do this without the partnership. Also with you. Congratulations of Successful Cube. And in its new digital format, Thank you for being with us With VM world here on. Do you know all that you're doing to get the story out? The guests that you have on the show, they look forward, including the nonviable people like, Hey, can I get on the Cuban like, Absolutely. Because they look at your platform is away. I'm telling this story. Thanks for all you're doing. I wish you health and safety. >>I'm gonna bring more community. And Dave is, you know, and Sanjay, and it's easier without the travel. Get more interviews, tell more stories and tell the most important stories. And thank you for telling your story and VM World story here of the emerald 2020. Sanjay Poon in the chief operating officer here on the Cube I'm John for a day Volonte. Thanks for watching Cube Virtual. Thanks for watching.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of VM World 2020 brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back. I'm stew Minuteman, and this is we've actually reached the end of the cubes coverage of VM World 2020. Hard to believe. 11 years we've done lots of interviews here has been great to be able to engage with the audience talk, talk to the executives, talk some customers, but saving one more for you. So happy to welcome to the program is the first time on the Cube. But we've been talking to him since they came out of stealth. So I have the co founder and CEO of Minhai. Oh, and that is a non Babu Harry Asami A B. So nice to see you. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank >>you too. Thank you for having me on the show. >>Alright. So we love when we get to talk to the founders of companies were gonna dig into your company. But before we do just frame for us, you're not really high performance. I Oh, I oh, is in the name of your company. Um, men might make me think that there's some miniaturization, but give us the VM Ware connection. Obviously, VM Ware talked a lot about Cloud this week. They've talked about going deep into a I and computing. So we know this ecosystem has changed a lot in the 11 years that we've been covering it. Tell us how you and your company high end >>sounds good. Yeah. So men in many of those stands for minimalism right somehow in the enterprise like it has always been like shiny, heavy, complex things, find complex solutions to simple problems and charge them a lot. That has been the trend in the past, right? That's what Cloud has recent in the Enterprise and men on mini Iot is actually about solving that data storage problem. A very large scale. And the solution is like find simple solutions to complex problems. And we grew in the cloud in the both in the public and Private Cloud, and we are now the fastest growing object storage for the private cloud. And now we, um, we're coming into the government, the territory we actually CVM where is set to lead the kubernetes race. And in the Cooper Natives, if you look for an object storage pretty much, many ways standard. And this is where we bring our ecosystem toe. Be aware. And we, um where brings the enterprise market of cloud And this is the start off the private cloud. In the long run, I think public and private cloud will look alike. >>Yeah, absolutely. We've We've been writing about this for for for for many years a b We saw the enterprises taking on more of the characteristics of the hyper scholars, the hyper scholars. Of course, they're coming more to the enterprise. Ah, lot of discussion about hybrid and multi cloud these days. But what I want you to explain a little bit when? When When when your company was formed. You talk about, you know, doing these kubernetes environment. You do partner with AWS and azure, but ah, lot of what you do is on premises and that strikes people as a little bit unconventional in the thing. Or definitely 2017 and even for 2020. So help us understand. You know what it is exactly that you know the technology bring and why you think it's the fit for if you extend making private cloud on par with public. >>Yeah, it's not surprising to us at all, but it made no sense when we started with the rest of the world, right? Even the investors like not our other investors but the typical venture community toe the rest of the world. They thought that an object storage if it is not useful inside AWS, there is no use but an object storage at all. And we our question was very simple that the amount of data the world will produce in the next 10 years bulk off the data. Where is it going to be? Right? And it's not going to be in the public cloud. And it didn't sound obvious back then, right? And we saw that in the long run, public and private cloud will look alike but bulk of the data if it's going to be generated outside AWS while AWS s three sets the standard, the rest of the world what are they going to do? So many who was raised to be the S three for the rest of the world and the rest of the world is the biggest market. And back then there was no private cloud. There was public cloud and public cloud. What meant only AWS, right? And this was not so long ago. We're talking like 56 years, right? And then soon multi cloud came from multi cloud private cloud came what really accelerated. This is basically kubernetes and containers, right? In fact, containers started the trend and then Coburn It has accelerated it further nowadays. If you if you see why it's no longer a dream, are a faith based model, right, it's actually we're we're talking about, like a $540,000. Actually, 540,000 doctors pulled a day, right? And 400 like 400 well million or so Dr Pools in aggregate. That shows that the entire industry has changed, and it's already the Coburn. It is even public or private cloud. It is the one hybrid infrastructure layer, and now it has now it's no longer private Cloud is that question right? And customers are now able to move between public and private cloud. The trend is hybrid hybrid cloud. I think it's irreversible. >>Alright, you talked about Dr Poles and the code there, so let's make sure our audience understand exactly what you are. Sounds like your software sounds like open source is a piece of it. Help us understand. You know how you fit with Because if we're talking about object storage, there's gotta be some infrastructure underneath that. What does mean I owe provide and where do you turn to the partners? >>Yeah, so just like server less, it means that it's not like there is no server, right? It's about a software problem. Similarly, storage right When store when object storage is containerized, we still need drives, right? That is where VM ware V Sand comes. Descends Job is to virtualized the physical layer toe the basically container layer. But end of the day if you see the it is a software problem and what may I would just like a database would solve the metadata data store problem. I mean, I will solve the blob data problem. And in the public, cloud object storage is the foundational piece. It is the primary storage, but we saw this as a software problem, and when customers started building these applications, they actually containerized their application and use Cooper notice to roll out their application infrastructure. And when they do that, they cannot possibly by a hardware appliance on the public cloud. And even on the on the private cloud, they when they when they completely orchestrate two containers, they cannot roll out hardware appliances. This is where the the industry the cloud native community always saw this as a software problem. It was obvious to them for the enterprise I t it was not so clear. And the storage industry giants, if you see everyone off them is a hardware appliance play, and they are in for a total shock. And we were basically as a as reset with their seven or to update one, if there is a lot of interesting things to come. >>All right, So if if I understand Here you sit from a VM Ware environment, I've got V sand underneath. I've got Tangguh above, and you're you're providing that object service in between. So for our for our friends in the in the channel market on when thinking about gear, anything that V san can sit on, you just can come along for the ride. Do I have that right? >>Yeah. So underneath the sand is basically bunch of J boards, right? These are like Dell and HP servers with the drives in them on This is not a hardware appliance anymore, right? You look at the storage market, it is. Stand our NASA plans. That is how the enterprise I t operated not in the club world. And as we and we're moves into the cloud world, everything looks cloud native and in this case, the sand. NASA plans have no role to play. Even the object storage hardware appliance has no role to play because we and we're becomes the end where Visa becomes the new block storage layer. And then they have positioned object storage database. Everything as a data data store are a data persist since layer. So only this software only the software that is contained race gets to play on top of, um, where in the new World, including the storage itself. And it's No, there is no appliance here. >>All right, so and your your solution is is listed as kubernetes kubernetes native. So now you mentioned VCR seven, VCR seven, update one Now house full kubernetes support. I'm assuming Then you can plug into tansy you you can plug into, uh, Amazon Azure. Other kubernetes options out there. Is that the case? >>Yeah, So from a customer point of view, right? If you are on the enterprise, I d. Environment Now from I t administrator point off you. Nothing changes much other than from the V Center console itself. You now get to see me, and I will in in the first suspend data services. You click and deploy entirely as a software without even learning to spell Cooper notice. You can build a private cloud storage multi tenant exactly like how public cloud storage outrage. And that is from the private cloud point a few right, and it's purely software. You're not waiting for six months, but the hardware to arrive and long procurement cycles and provisioning all that is now provisioned as a software container. In just five minutes, you can actually set up a private cloud in Prospector. That's for the private cloud, right? But why? The reason why customers want this to be a software problem is they roll out their software on the on the private cloud on the public cloud for burst, wear clothes and sustained work clothes on private cloud burst workloads on public cloud. Noncritical jobs are anything that is fast moving on, convenience based. They push it to public cloud. Customers do want tohave one leg here and one like there. And nowadays even the edge on decentralized on the from the telco space toe video on other other areas even the edges now growing toe. They want a your software solution. The entire data center software is now containerized. They can roll out Public cloud Our private cloud are on the edge On with me No, we solve the data side the compute side Then we're already has done a wonderful job on the networking side. They have done it on on the beast on the storage site dated the physical toe container layer movies. And now the data storage part is what we solved. Now what does this do to the end user? Now they can build software and truly deploy on public private our age without any modification on entirely it is a software problem. This >>great. What do you find? Or some of the more prevalent use cases, you know, sitting on top, What applications or the key ones that people are deploying your solution for >>Yeah, So in the public cloud, if you see, that's that. That's actually a good place to start if you see in the public cloud, right, starting from even simple static website hosting toe aml, big data, workloads toe. Even the modern databases like Snowflake, for example is built on object storage in the public cloud. It has become a truly horizontal play. And that is how it started right there. W started with history and then came everything else. And now that trend is beginning to percolate into the enterprise. And surprisingly, we found that the enterprise was the explosion of data. Growth is actually not about like cat videos, right? What? What are these touring? Mostly We found that bulk of the data that is drowning that crisis messing generated data. And these are basically like some kind of log data event data data streams that are continuously produced on that actually can grow from 10 terabytes to 10 petabytes in a very short time. This is where clearly object storage has become the right choice, just like in the public cloud. But customers are now adopting object storage as the primary storage and now multiple applications. Whether it is the cloud native applications in like the Hangzhou Application Service like spring boot and like all the clothes on re stack from their toe. So all the m l big data workloads pretty much everybody has been verging to object storage as there foundation. >>Yeah, absolutely. You seen some of those use cases very prevalent here in the VM Ware community. I heard you talking about it. I was expecting to hear you talk about Splunk data protection, something that's been a big topic of conversation in the last few years. Obviously, VM Ware has a number of key partners. So I'm assuming many of those air who you are also working with. >>Look, it felt good broad Splunk Splunk itself is actually is an important move that what we did recently with VM where finally we can run Splunk natively on BM where at large scale and without any performance penalty and at a price point that it becomes really attractive Now comparing Splunk Cloud, where's the Splunk on Prem? We can actually show like at least like one third off what it would cost to run on Splunk load. So I don't know Splunk themselves would like it, But I think Splunk as a company would like what customers like, right? And this is where Splunk actually now can sit on many, many us, all the all their data stores. They call it smart store underneath underneath me. I will now, when the previous original Visa incarnation, we couldn't actually your huge amounts of data. But now, with the visa and direct, we actually have access to the local drives and you can attach as many drives as you want. Then if you want more capacity, more more number of servers so you can pack thousands and thousands off drives at a price point that even public cloud cannot be anywhere closer. And this is actually important. Yeah, environment for the Splunk customers. Because for them, not only the cost right, even the data is sensitive for them. They cannot really, really push it to the public cloud data generated outside of the public cloud. If data generated inside Public Cloud, probably Amazon has their own solution, and Splunk cloud makes sense. But when data is produced outside, these are sensitive data and it's huge volume, and they produce on an average, like the kind of users VCs center about. It's a day on on, then it's only growing at an accelerated pace. And this is where the Visa and Direct and Mini Oh, you can now bring that workload onto the number. Finally, the ICTY can control the control, the Splunk deployments. This is something important for I t right in the past, if you see big data workloads always ran on bare metal and silos, something I d hated right This time it is flexible that it's not just flexible, exactly gets better. >>Well, it sure sounds like the technology maturation has finally caught up on the VM ware standpoint with the vision that you and the team had. So give us a little bit. Look forward now that you've got kubernetes really being embraced by VM where on and starting to see maturation in this space. Where do we go from here? >>So we were actually, If you see what they brought to the table this time, they didn't actually catch up with others, right? Typically, the innovation in the recent times happened in the open source space and then the large vendors will come and innovate. Startups and open source started the innovation large, large. When the large winters come in later. But this time around, remember, actually did the innovation part and these and direct. It's actually a big step forward in the Covenant of CSE space. And the reason why it's a big step is C s A. Traditionally is designed for the sand gnats vendors and using the same C s. A model, remember, was able to bring in large work clothes and that allowed entirely to use the local drive possibility. Right now it moving forward. What What we will see. What were said to see is the cloud native workload. Actually a ran as a silo in the Enterprise, right? There was big data workloads. There was the applications team that ran Cooper knitters and containers on their own. There are on their on their own develop shop on enterprise. I'd ran the idea introspect These three were not connected on finally this time around. By bringing cover natives native into the I T infrastructure, there is going to be a convergence. You will not. The silos will get eliminated. Big data, big data workloads, ml wear clothes on bare metal will now come toe come toe. Then I will be aware that the Governor disk combination and you will see the the coordinative applications space. They will hand over the physical layer infrastructure onto the VM Ware e and everybody coming together. I think it's the best. Big step forward. >>Well, maybe. I sure hope you're right. We love to see the breaking down of silos. Things coming together. We've been a little bit concerned over the last few years that we're rebuilding the silos in the cloud. We've got different skill sets different there, but we always love some good tech optimism here, uh, to say that we're gonna move these sorts of Thank you so much. Great to catch up with you and definitely look forward to hearing more from you and your customers in the future. >>Thank you to this. Wonderful to be on your show. >>All right. We want to thank everybody for joining VM World 2020 for day. Volonte John, for your big thanks to the whole production team and of course, VM Ware and our sponsors for helping us to bring this content to you. As always, I'm stew Minuteman and thank you for joining us on the Cube