(funky music) >> Announcer: Live from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage it's "theCUBE" covering Vmworld 2019 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners >> John: Hey welcome back everyone its "theCUBE" live coverage here of VMworld 2019. We're in Moscone North in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Our tenth year covering VMworlds. The last show that's still around since "theCUBE" started. EMC World's now a part of Dell Technology World so VMworld was our first show of "theCUBE" in 2010 and we're here with then the Senior Director now the CMO of VMware Robin Matlock. Great to have you. Thanks for coming. 10 years ago we were across the street at the South. The first ever "CUBE", now 10 years later, what a run. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Robin: Well how 'about the fact that this is number 11 VMworld for me so I think we're on, like, number 16 or so for VMworld so, yeah, we've driving been this ship for a while and it's still going strong. >> John: And, you know, when you came in the studio we did a little preview video and one of the things we talked about and you jumped on was this notion of resiliency around VMware. I want to get into that because the keynote this year I thought really used some of his primetime real estate to highlight Tech for Good and really some of the efforts around that so 1. Shareholder value, you guys have been doing great. Stock prices up. But in this era of, you know, corporate responsibility and accountability, this Tech for Good message is real. You guys have been doing it for a while. It's not new, it's not like you're doing it for fashion, it's the real deal and it was a big part of the keynote. >> Robin: It was. In fact, it was really a highlight for part of the keynote for me personally. I mean, I think when it's in our DNA, and that is consistent with our values, and we've been at that for some time. We have values that are all about, you know, customer and community and that's who we are. We also have very high aspirations that of course we have to be performant. We have to perform well as a business and deliver shareholder value but that isn't enough. You know, I do think that Pat leads this narrative that we as a company have to think about giving back more than we take. And it's not just PowerPoint slides, it's real. We empower our employees. I hope you enjoyed the story about Callum Eade swimming the English Channel all for a cause that he chose. He raised the money, he drove that and VMware just opens up those opportunities to allow our employees to do that so I think, we think it's a really important topic, we tried to give it a lot of air time, and give a way for the attendees to connect with it and see what they could take action against. >> John: And also, you guys are also voted one of the best places to work. Your campus in Palo Alto, beautiful and it is a great place to work. But this is the ethos, but it's still competitive and had Carl Eschenbach recently in our studios in Palo Alto and he made a comment he's like, "You know, I've been at VMware "for many, many years", now he's a VC at Sequoia Capital, and Carl said, "You know, everyone's been "trying to kill VMware. This is going to VMware, "that's going to kill virtuals." The resiliency just around the staying power of the product and technology leadership happens. This year it's containers, the attendees are excited by it, the numbers are up, 20,000 people here. Still evolution on the technology side, still great community. >> Robin: Yeah, I mean I think, you know resiliency is in the fabric of VMware but I think innovation is what is the secret sauce and we know in Silicon Valley you better innovate and keep moving forward or you're going to find yourself kind of, left out and, you know, Pat's been an incredible visionary. He's got a team of leaders that are very confident, strong technological disrupters. I mean some of the big acquisitions that we announced just last Thursday at earnings that we are educating folks here about, the intent to acquire Pivotal, the intent to acquire Carbon Black, you know, further that we'll either do it organically or we will acquire interesting combinations of companies to drive unique value to our customers. So I think there was a whole bunch of that today. >> Dave: We were talking in "theCUBE" earlier, Robin, about how now it's a post-virtual machine world and if we go back to 2009, which was my first VMworld as well, Paul Maritz at the time said we're building this software mainframe. Now, of course, you got promoted and I'm sure killed that mainframe from all marketing but (laughs) so well done but you kind of evolved the software-defined data center vision. But one of the takeaways for me from the keynote was this notion of any workload, any app , which was kind of the vision back then and now in a cloud which the cloud wasn't as prominent then. And so from a marketing standpoint you've really, the vision has been consistent but now with all these acquisitions you're making you're really embracing a much broader vision and your marketing message has to evolve as well. >> Robin: To support that, I think the fact that our vision has been incredibly consistent for many years now, I mean, that's Pat's leadership kind of setting that foundation for the company. My job as a marketer is to help find the way to articulate that in a way that's consumable and people understand. But what's happened over the years is we deliver on that vision 'cause, you know, a vision it's not all perfect, we don't have every piece of it or it's not all optimized. All of these moves year after year are just validating and supporting the delivery of that vision to our customers and I think the big moves this year are no different, whether it's Tanzu for Kubernetes, whether it's the Carbon Black acquisition idea, whether it's Pivotal, these are just steps along a journey that's going to deliver on our vision which is delivering any application on any cloud consumed by any device, all with security intrinsically built in the fabric. >> Dave: Well and the gauntlet that you lay down this year in talking to your practitioner audience was that technologists who master multi-cloud will own the next decade. Okay. That kind of says it all, right? And that is a strong message that you're sending to your buyers, to your practitioners so. >> Robin: Yeah, and I think the people that are right here at VMworld, these are the kinds of technologists that have that opportunity in front of them. That's why this whole notion of make your mark it's like, lean into this opportunity. Betting on VMware, building your career on virtualization has opened up many opportunities. It went from compute to storage to networking. It's now into multi-cloud. These are incredible opportunities and these technologists are the ones that can deliver this value for their enterprises. >> Dave: And there's diversity in the messages, you know, all the major cloud players say, "Well no. Just our cloud." You guys are pushing in a new direction. I mean that's what leaders are supposed to do, right? >> Robin: Our strategy has always been about choice, you know, we've really been advocates of letting customers choose the path that's right for them and we know in this cloud war that we're all a part of that customers they are choosing. Some are leaning into AWS, some are leaning into Azure, some are biased towards IBM. Our job is really to enable them to have a rich, powerful experience without friction, efficiently, and operate those workloads in any of those environments. >> John: Have you seen any demographic shift in your primary audience because obviously the operating side, even with Kubernetes, they love it, containers, a messaging channel that's in and of itself but still containers seems to be that next step function with Kubernetes that VM's brought to computing. But when you bring in the dev and the ops that's where it starts to get magical when the operating's got to meet up with the developers. That's been the theme. cloud-Native. All this enablement's coming in. Has there been a shift in demographics to your audience? >> Robin: Well it is an evolving journey, if you will, and yes but it's still, I think we have a long ways to go. We are largely still have an infrastructure audience here, there's a mobility crowd here, there's a cloud architect crowd here. The new audiences are going to be the platform architects that dev/ops community and we do have shifts in that but I would say that's part of the value as we bring Pivotal into the family, we can now merge these audiences and, I think, do a much formidable job at that. >> John: It's interesting, Telco will have them on later. 5G was a big part of the keynote as well >> Robin: Yeah. >> John: A new opportunity, a new affinity group there. >> Robin: Without a doubt, I mean, the whole Edge and Telco clouds are really opening up new entirely new markets. The Telco, the 5G, we do think that's going to be a very significant wave and is going to create new opportunity for new application types, new fundamental architectures that we can now merge between Telco and Enterprise so we think it's really a rich ground for innovation. >> John: You mentioned Pivotal, I think that's more of they were already in the fold, now they're officially in the fold with Dell Technologies but your other acquisitions, there's a lot of them. You got to kind of bring them into the fold so is there the marketing playbook do you have an off-site meeting and you just give them the playbook? How do you handle all the integrations? 'Cause that's always a big challenge. IT integration, messaging integration, again it helps if they're on the fault line of the value proposition but >> Yeah. >> John: What's your strategy to integrate all these companies? >> Robin: Well, you know, any time you're doing a lot of mergers and acquisitions you definitely have to think very strategically about integration and then sometimes you want to integrate fully, right away and sometimes you want to let an acquired company be stand-alone for a little while. Got to get used to the culture a bit-- >> John: Like Velocloud? >> Robin: Velocloud is kind of independent-- >> John: They've got their own building. >> Robin: within the networking team. AirWatch was held very independent for a couple of years. Some other ones are just tuck-ins. You just bring 'em right into the family, you just merge 'em in, it just depends on the size, the scope, the culture and the strategy. I think we take a very purposeful approach to M&A integration and we don't really have a one-size-fits-all strategy. Depends on the circumstances. >> Dave: So follow up on that because clearly there's an engineering culture here at VMware and take the Carbon Black example for instance you talked about how you guys have sort of pretested it with AppDefense but from your standpoint, how do you think about the architecture of the marketing and the messaging? I think you answered it in part. It was sometimes it makes sense to keep it separate sometimes but when you think about the vision do you look at it and say, "Okay this plugs nicely into the vision "and so here's what I'm going to do?" How integrated is it with the rest of the sort of decision-making process? >> Robin: Well, you know, I would take the position that all these acquisitions are plugging into the vision. They are that's why we're buying them because they are very aligned to our strategy and vision. Now I have the challenge as a marketer to deal with a lot of different brands that are coming into the family. I mean, how and when do I consolidate and kind of unite the brands and that is a journey that we're going to be on. We'll take some time to do that. You don't want to rush things in that regard. I think it's very important that the market sees one VMware, one vision and strategy, you know, if it's delivered in a product and it's through an acquisition as a different brand that's okay, we can work on that over time but as long as we're laying out one strategy and vision to the marketplace and just showing these are evidence of proof points of that journey. >> John: Yeah. I mean, you guys, you're pretty clear. Your strategy is to evaluate, understand where they are in the value chain of what you're trying to do. Unlike others like IBM which brings companies in quickly, makes them IBM, you guys are a little bit different, You'll play with whatever the market will give you. That's pretty much what I hear you're saying. >> Robin: Well for example, Carbon Black, experts in security, you know. I think we want to capitalize on that expertise. We want to protect that expertise. They've already been partnering with AppDefense now for some period of time rather than, you know, it's like which one is >> Right. >> Robin: consuming the other (laughing) so our strategy is let's combine AppDefense with Carbon Black and then start working with Patrick and Carbon Black to merge that into the-- >> Yeah. >> Dave: Organizationally, I think that's, at least what I read >> Yeah. >> Dave: was you can set up essentially a cloud security division, right, that Patrick is going to >> That Patrick is going to run. >> Dave: run, so >> That's right. >> John: Okay so VMworld 2019, what's the update here? Give us some factoids, some of the exciting things happening here. We're in the meadow, there's birds chirping here. This is Moscone North, nice build-out, always good build-outs here. Moscone, we're back in from Vegas but what's going on? Labs, activities-- >> Robin: We've got it >> Give the-- >> Robin: all, John >> Give us the highlights. >> Dave: Klingons >> That's right. >> Robin: First of all you've got two great days of keynotes, right, those are really important highlights. Tomorrow we're going to do some really interesting things, demo, technical, deep dive. Great guest celebrity speakers, right, We're going with the sports theme this year and elite athletes and what they're giving back to the world with Lindsey Vonn and Steve Young. But here for the program we have the Hands-On Labs are on fire. They broke records on Sunday so I know they've been really well-attended and consumed. We have over 600 break-outs, so many it's mind-boggling. We have 230 sponsors in the Solutions Exchange and that's probably a place where you can go not just to get the VMware stuff but get that good exposure and lay of the land of the entire ecosystem. And they're all showcasing their innovation. What's new, what's the latest. So I think those give people a really good quick snapshot in one week, you can pretty much get an overview of the entire industry. >> John: Are there any must-sees in your opinion? >> Robin: (breathing in) Oh-- >> John: Or that people are talking about? >> Robin: I think for sure you got to get into this Kubernetes stuff. If you don't come out of this week of VMworld with a good handle on what is Tanzu, what's Tanzu Mission Control, what are we doing with the Heptio acquisition, what is PKS evolution happening, I think you would be missing something if you don't really grok that. Project Pacific work, Kubernetes in vSphere, tightly integrated, so that's a must-do. I think there's a lot happening in the networking space, right. Pat was pretty bold up there about, you know, what is the opportunity relative to network virtualization and the time is now so I think you've really got to get into that from the data center to the Edge to the cloud. Network transformation's hot. And then of course I think the cloud and I think we're really clear on hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud and how to really think about those environments and how, if you're architecting cloud for your company, what you want to be thinking about, what are we doing across multi-cloud, and, you know, I think all that hybrid-cloud stuff, it's all there. >> Dave: As we move to this, you know, this post-VMworld, VMware world how do you-- >> Robin: Is there a post-VMware world? >> Dave: What role, post-virtual-- >> John: Oh look at that, there we go. (laughing) >> Robin: I don't think there's a post-VMware world. >> Dave: Post-VM. I mean virtual machines. >> Robin: Virtualization. >> John: Are you changing the name to container world? >> Robin: No. (laughing) >> Dave: Right, exactly. So what (laughing) yeah what specifically are you guys doing to sort of educate folks, I mean, obviously you've got a lot of Kubernetes sessions, et cetera but just in terms of helping people sort of transform their skill sets into infrastructures of code, being able to take advantage of Kubernetes, you know, we've seen some things in the industry at events like this where you know, guys learn how to program in Python or, you know, whatever it is >> Right. >> Dave: Are there specific plans to do that? Is that actually happening at the event or? >> Robin: Well that's part of what all this content is about, I mean, you know, 600 break-out sessions aren't about, you know, compute virtualization. You can find those but this is about all these different dimensions, right? Whether it's what is Kubernetes, fundamentals, how you think about that in what kind of environment you're running. And I think that's the spirit of what VMworld is about. It's about hands-on, it's about meet the experts, it's about sessions, it's about the ecosystem, it's about having that all at your disposal in one week. >> You forgot something. >> Oh did I? >> The parties. >> The party? >> Everyone >> Well that's not helping your technical-- >> Everyone >> Aptitude >> Everyone knows VMworld has great parties at night and that's where all the action, you guys work hard/play hard one of the ethos of VMware culture. >> Robin: That's right, that's right. Well, we do work hard/play hard because this is intense, right? These guys are trying to jam as much as they can into four days and so we got to let off a little steam and OneRepublic is on stage on Wednesday night. We're going to have a great time. But I do think it's on the back drop of them here they are just like sponges trying to absorb this information. >> John: My final question is, and you guys brought it up in the keynote, around the tech industry good, bad, and Pat says neutral, it's how you shape the technology. Really a call to action and a strategic imperative to be more proactive in accountability and driving change for good. So I got to ask you about the word trust. I've seen a lot of marketing around companies always try to market around trust. Now more than ever the trust, whether it's fake news, company responsibility to security, which is a big part of what you guys do. How do you see that a marketer and what's the conscience of VMware because trust is certainly a big part of what you guys do. Is that a marketing, going to be a marketing ethos? Is it built into everything? Just curious how you personally feel about the word trust. >> Robin: Yeah, well first of all, I think it's foundational to doing good, healthy business. I think you got to be very careful as a marketer to market trust. I think you need to demonstrate your trustworthiness. You need to be consistent. You need to be credible. You need to be there when the times are tough. You need to be, you know, not always asking for something in return and if you earn trust you don't really have to say it. I believe we can position our validity and our credibility proven, you know, having customers say that we're trustworthy, having customers articulate >> Yeah >> Robin: why they depend on us, I believe that's more effective for our customers and, at the end of the day, probably more authentic. >> John: Yeah, and I think people, yeah that tends to be the track record of people who say it maybe haven't earned it, right, earning it's the better marketing strategy-- Yeah, I think these 20,000 (laughing) people are saying it as they show up here with their time and energy and investment. And I think our customers, you heard from a lot of customers on stage today. Gap, Freddie Mac, Verizon, there'll be more tomorrow. You know, I think there's over 100 customers in these sessions here and they're here advocating because they trust VMware. >> John: Well they run their business on you guys. Dave had a survey hey did, just published it yesterday, the spend is not going down. I mean the cloud impacts your business, you're getting into the cloud so that's pretty obvious but just overall the business is healthy >> Oh very >> John: for VMware (laughing) >> Robin: Very healthy. And you know we do that by really trying to have a balanced approach. It is about shareholder value but it's about tech as a force for good, we're passionate about that and ultimately we put customers at the center of our thinking, of our decisions, of our behaviors, and I think that ultimately keeps rewarding us. >> John: Well, Robin, it's been great to work with you over the past 10 years. Continue on. I think you guys have earned the trust, certainly the proof is in the results, and, you know, it is what it is, and the community votes with their wallet on the product and their participation so congratulations. >> Robin: Well if that's an indicator, I think we're getting a pretty good report card. >> John: Thanks, yeah. (laughing) >> Thanks for inviting me. Love being here, guys. Take care. >> John: Alright, Robin Matlock, CMO of VMware here inside "theCUBE" for our 10th year but also as VMware goes to the next level step function with virtualization to containers, Kubernetes, big theme here, I'm John with Dave Vallente, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (funky music)

(upbeat music) >> Announcer: From our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California, this is a CUBE Conversation. >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Conversation here in Palo Alto, California at theCUBE studios. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here for a special conversation with Michael Letschin who's the Director of Technical Advocacy at Cohesity, and John Troyer, Chief Reckoner at TechReckoning, also does a CUBE host, co-host's with us some events, certainly VMworld. Guys welcome to this conversation. >> Thank you. >> The title is Work-Life Balance: Is It Really That Simple? A topic that Cohesity, you guys are donating your session at VMworld on, to kind of give back and share data around, really an important issue, around work which is burnout, you know mental stability. There's always been a stigma, but that stigma now people are recognizing that, hey, you know what? if you need to take some time off, why not? >> Exactly. People are just getting just completely overworked at this point in IT. So we really talked about it about it and we thought it was a good thing to do something different than standard for tech companies nowadays sometimes. >> John, you and I have talked off-camera with The CUBE sets around the old IT adage, 'Do more with less!' Almost like banging people hard to do, and squeeze more profits out of it. You guys, VMware, certainly. When you were there, you had virtualization changed the game on the server landscape. But the old IT, they work hard. There's a lot of technical people working hard, and they're asked to do so many different things. And now as careers start to change, more pressure. >> Right, right. We're in a 24/7 world. The cloud is there. IT only really only gets noticed sometimes when things go wrong, and that's kind of a resume generating event. So people in our society, I think, there's a lot of pressure. >> So, tell about the session. I know it's a teaser, I wouldn't want to reveal too many cards here on the video, but what's going to be talked about in the session? What's the topic? What's some of the data? >> Well, we did a survey, we didn't even really promote it very much, out for IT professionals. We got 360 responses from IT professionals all over the world: North America, Europe, and beyond, from, ya know, people doing cabling in data centers, all the way to CEO's of companies, talking about IT burnout. And about what they're feeling, what they're experiencing, what symptoms they're having. And burnout is really not just being tired. Right, we think, ugh, I didn't get enough sleep, I'm burnt out. It is really a psychological disconnection from your work, from your purpose, from your coworkers. It's a feeling, I don't want to do this. It's really an F-U moment. Excuse me. [Laughing] >> You can, we're digital, you can say that. We have no FTC to worry about. Yeah, but this is important. I mean, people do want to do the good job, and we hear all this stuff, oh, 'admission driven companies,' but at the end of the day, if the work environment is not going to be conducive to people feeling good about themselves or being, ya know, kind of together, that's just huge. >> Exactly, and I think there's something to be said about getting that time. Not just enjoying what you're doing every day, but to keep doing that, sometimes you have to get away from that. And, I think that's a lot of what we found when we did the survey was people weren't always seeing that they could get away from it. They really felt pretty pressured to stay in. And sometimes it wasn't just from their management, either. We saw a lot of people that came back with comments even that some of the issues they had were, the community actually kind of pushed them into, they need to do more, they need to be out in the community. So, they were doing their day job, and now I've still got to do more, still got to go out and do more blogging, and I've got to do more training, I've got to do more certifications. Is it really helping your career? Is it helping your life? Is it helping your family? >> Work-Life balance has always been a topic, and you mentioned the community. Also, you add open source to that, too. There's more pressure there. That's like its own company. So you have the work-life balance, what are some of the pressure points you guys see? 'Cause I know living in Silicon valley, for me personally, the past 20 years, I know people personally, as well as stories from friends. This huge burnout, as entrepreneurs, CEO's, start up founders, they burn out a lot, there's failure involved, and you see depression and mental illness become a big topic, people are talking about it. And it's out in the open now, it's not hidden, it's not one those things. What's the IT equivalent, what's going on in the world that you guys have uncovered in the survey? >> Well, certainly some pretty similar, a lot of it is hours worked, right? You're on call a lot, you're traveling a lot. Pressures get worse as you get higher in the organization. We in the survey, we just saw, there's a lot of science to say you shouldn't be working more than 40 hours a week, 50 hours a week, once you get over that you're actual overall work productivity plummets. And we saw a lot both in Europe and the U.S., people work not only more than 40 hours a week, but outside of business hours as well. And they are even connected on vacation. >> And, interestingly, a lot of them weren't because they had to. Like, it wasn't, they were oncall or a shift job. So, you kind of expect, you're going to work weird hours. If you're an early on help desk person, you're on call, you have that two weekends a month, or whatever, you kind of expect that it's kind of the norm. But a lot of these people are management, director level, VP level, that are still working all these extra hours and are working 40, 50, 60 hours a week, and feel like that's what they have to do. >> And often they don't feel like they're in control. So, even the executives, so it's a normal, right, if you're, again, if you're an individual contributor, a lot of stuff is out of your control, if you're a middle manager. But even the folks who are senior said 'I don't feel like I can control my work.' And that seems to be a big part of psychological fulfillment that you need to have the strength to keep, you know, to keep working hard every day. >> And the digital tools make us more connected, it's only compounds that I think. Because, you could be at the sideline of your kids soccer event or sport, you're still checking your email, still the distractions of the screen are there. >> Well, I think that was something, one of the things that came out of it was the number of people that do not disconnect, and are on 24/7, with their personal and their work, especially in North America, was incredibly high on it. You get into Europe, it was a pretty significant difference. Pretty much across the board, I think it was like 85% stay connected on their personal and everything 24/7. >> Instagram, Facebook... >> People aren't giving up their Instagram or their Facebook when they're on vacation. But, they definitely for work side, I mean we saw 70-80% of people that were still somewhat connected for, even when, especially in North America, whether it was just their email, or they check their email once a day. And that's if they even took the vacations, cause that was something that I thought was pretty shocking on how little people took vacation. I mean, I just saw another study that just came out the other day, that there was somewhere like, 270 billion dollars worth of vacation hours wasted last year in the U.S. >> Yeah >> You mean not used up? >> Not used. I think it was 270 billion, I think was the number I saw. Which is an absurd number of days off that people aren't using. >> It's a fascinating topic, and I think it's one of these cutting-edge societal challenges of the tech industry, needs to kind of put on the table. Because, you think about all the stuff we talk about in these conferences like DevOps. You automate away the heavy lifting, the undifferentiated heavy lifting. In life, you see that same kind of potential, I mean, if you can, if we can be more creative, you're seeing projects being more project based, less hourly work. So, is the working changing, does IT shift, what do you guys see there, what's the survey, is there any anecdotal data, or data around, how the types of jobs are changing? Is there more flex time, is there more project basis, more team oriented? Is there any shifts in, kind of, what you're seeing there? >> Well, in the survey we asked about are people talking about it at work? And are there programs? Are people acknowledging that this is happening? And for the most part people aren't really talking about it. I think there is more automation as we grow our data centers up and our cloud, but I don't see people, it just means people are doing more, which is where we started they're doing more with less. >> Well I do know that one of the things that we often see, from my previous shop as well as for here, with Cohesity it's the simplicity of what we can do, does tend to make those projects and those jobs easier, so it frees up some of that time that we weren't getting otherwise. I think, kind of going back, you mentioned a comment about the start up founders, and how quickly they burn out in Silicon Valley. I think it's not just the CEO, the people look at it and they see a startup founder and they think it's the CEO and the three people, but in all reality, if you're a startup that's 50 people and below, you're probably doing just as much time and you have that commit, like, it feels personal to you. I mean, it did to me. And I know for sure when I started at Nexenta, when it was pretty small when we there and as we grew, but also man, I felt some ownership in it. Which meant I did more, and I did more. I definitely got to a point where I was burnt out, I was very much burnt out and it became very obvious. I ended up on a, I hate to say it's a bender, but I was definitely on a bender for a nice long week for a vacation. >> Well, startups are kind of addicting but also so is the dopamine effect with digital and also work. Is there anything that you guys gleaned out of the surveys that were potential solutions to the problem on burnout? Were there any kind of unsolicited [Laughs], like, you know, this needs to change, was there any kind of obvious mandate that came out of the survey? >> So, I think there was some definites on management needs to be more prescriptive. That, that chaos is a big issue. If people don't know what they are there for and what they're doing it's a big issue on it. There was a lot of things about mindfulness, surprised we got quite a few comments on you just have to find that time to step away. There is going to be a little giveaway that I'm not going to give away at the session yet. But so if they are at the session, we have a little giveaway to help people with the mindfulness. >> What time is the session? What day? Where do they find the location? >> So it's on Wednesday at VMworld at 12:30. The location, I actually don't know the room yet because I don't think VMware has told us the room yet. >> Well, VMware World is moving back to Moscone from Vegas after the reconstruction is done out in San Francisco, so that's new. So check the location for the session Wednesday at 12:30. Any other burn out characteristics that we missed that you could share that's important? >> Well, I think the prescriptive thing, the management being more prescriptive is important. Taking, actually taking vacation. Unlimited vacation in some ways can backfire against you, because people don't take it, they don't have their two weeks. You know, the other thing is, I think, just, management has to build in enough profit to let people take some time off. >> It's an HR planning challenge too. >> Yes >> Did work at home come out at all on the survey? People working at home did that come into play? >> So I think it came more into play around the travel side of things than it did the work from home. We did see some interesting things on the travel, it seemed like if you did not travel at all those people tend to get burnt out at a higher rate. The people that travel all the time, really were pretty low on the ones that felt like they were getting burnt out. >> They were numb, they didn't know they were burnt out. >> I mean it could be because they didn't have the life part of the work-life balance, because they were always on a plane, I know that feeling, but I try to find the time. >> Yeah, people who work hard always have a spouse 'hey get off the computer,' or you know, there's paying attention to the things that are right in front of you like family for instance comes up a lot, that I see. >> Connecting to your purpose, whether that's your family purpose or your work purpose was a big part of it. Being able to kind of split your attention that way or get your attention back. >> Well, thanks for doing the survey, and that's a great service to the industry that Cohesity is doing, to use the session up rather than plugging the company's products and gear, to give back. >> Really I think it's super important for companies to have that social responsibility on it. And I think it's, it was a pleasure for me and our team to be able to talk to management and to be able to say, 'this makes sense,' and them agree. Which I don't think there's a lot of companies out there will, so I'm super excited to be able to have it. >> When you start getting the therapy going let me know I'll be the first customer. I need all the help I can get, everyone knows that here. Burnout's tough, it's an important issue to be talked about, and there shouldn't be a stigma associated with it. People can perform best if they are rested. That's well proven. So, congratulations on a great survey. While I've got you guys here I want to get your thoughts on VMworld 2019, it's theCUBE's 10th year covering it. John, you were working at VMWare, running the community, social media, podcasting, blogging, tweeting. >> Laughs: Some of those, yeah. >> When we there for the first year, you were there from the beginning, you've been with us the whole time, I want to personally thank you for being part of our journey, it's been great. A lot's changed in ten years and if you look back at the industry, two acquisitions today by VMWare, Paul Maritz took over the helm that year in 2010 from Diane Greene, laid out essentially Cloud, although it kind of didn't happen the way they thought it would happen, but, guys what's your take on ten years looking back at VMworld? What's the big moments of good, bad, and the ugly? >> To me, VMworld has been a great connecting point for the community. I don't think there has been another community and another network that has grown nearly like VM, where has done and what has happened with it. And VMworld's been a big part of that, I mean it was, whether it was VMworld in one part of the year and Partner Exchange in the other half, but it was that chance to actually see all those people that you talk to so often. I think it's been a world of difference for me. I think I've missed the first one, I think, is all I, maybe the first two. >> Yeah. >> If I remember right? So I've been at pretty much all of them along the way, but it's been unbelievable what VMworld has done for technology on making other companies realize how much bringing the network, your community together, really matters. >> The community piece, John, I want to give thoughts, was to me my observation in the past ten years has been, resiliency comes up, all the different changes in the landscape that we've seen, from the early days of theCUBE, now, to now, much different world. But you look at some of the things, the v0dgeball, the vBrownBags, the vundergrounds, all these things that were organic. VMworlds community when they find something that's good they double down on it, it hangs around, it doesn't really go away, you've got all these cool things happening. >> Well that's the secret of bringing people together both as a community of practice around their professional activity and raising the bar in their profession, their domain, and all that other good stuff happens. I think there's definitely some Vschool and PhD case studies to be written about the value of relationships and trust and ecosystem within VMware. Sure, Microsoft exists, there's other conversations going on in technology. But I think VMWare's is particularly interesting. I wanted to say though, from ten years, I mean ten years ago there was a lot of talk about private cloud, and true cloud, and all that sort of stuff, and you guys handle that at Wikibon, and SiliconANGLE, and theCUBE. But, the funny thing is now there's still a conversation going on around how dumb multicloud is and hybrid cloud is for this certain set of people. On the flip side there's trillions of dollars, much of whom is showing up, will be showing up in San Francisco next week. Trillions of dollars of business, you know, this year, solving real world problems today and not being such a pure architecturally or, I don't know, it just seems like, it's just, I'm just mystified that there's still all this multicloud is bad conversation. >> Well I think you brought up a point. The survey we were just talking about really kind of highlights what is becoming a thousand flower blooming kind of enablement happening. The societal challenges that are out there are being solved by software. And if you look at the focus this year of applications, microservices, it's really an application conversation. And it's so much that the infrastructure has to enable that, so finally, maybe this next ten years will be not about the under pinnings. >> So you're saying the next ten won't be the year of VDI? >> Laughing: I think that already kind of happened didn't it? >> It's a huge success, it's called the internet, right, smartphones. Good stuff guys. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it, good survey. >> Thanks for having us. >> Thank you. >> John, thanks for coming on. A special CUBE conversation here previewing VMworld 2019 and the survey that they are talking about on Wednesday at 12:30 looking at burn out, check it out, by Cohesity, and John Troyer, TechReckoning, great survey. It's theCUBE, CUBE Conversation, I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching. [upbeat music]

>> From San Francisco, it's theCUBE. Covering Radio 2018. Brought to you by VMware. (lively electronic music) Hello everyone and welcome to special Cube coverage here in San Francisco, California. We're at VMware's Radio 2018 event. This is their annual R&D event where all the best people, smartest people, come together to collaborate on new projects, new innovations. Not imitation, innovation. Had great speakers up there. They had Steve Herrick, Cube alumni, now a venture capitalist, formerly CTO of VMware. And our first guest here today is Ray O'Farrell, executive vice president and CTO of VMware, been on theCUBE before. Great to see you, thanks for joining us. >> Great to see you, good morning. >> So I love this event 'cause it's, like you mentioned before we came on camera, Steve Herrick said it's like a sales kick-off for engineers. >> Correct yeah, yep. >> Which is like a rah, rah but also, you know, really motivating, but also putting out the north star. >> [Ray] Yep. >> Which is the innovation message. >> [Ray] Correct. >> So take minute to talk about what this event is. Explain to the folks, what is Radio 2018? There's a lot of history involved here. >> [Ray] Yep. >> Behind us is a t-shirt row of, you know, key milestones of VMware history. You know, think inside the box, now it's, think inside the cloud. What's this event about? >> So, um, the event has quite a few years. This is like the 14th year we've done this, right? And when it started, what it was really focused on was, in some ways, a recognition that, as the company begins to grow, as you begin to build new products and engage in new partnerships, In order to keep innovation alive, you almost need to manage it. The problem is you can't manage innovation. Almost by, you know, by definition it's something chaotic. It's an inspirational idea. It's something that was not expected. That's what makes it innovation. But what you can do, is you can create a culture which promotes that innovation or creates opportunities for those ideas to emerge. Or when those ideas do emerge, make sure there's a place for them to be heard and there's an opportunity for a network to build around them. And Radio is a part of that. We have lots of other programs in VMware to help keep driving that culture of innovation, but Radio is probably the primary one. >> Talk about some of the history from this event. What has come out of these events? 'Cause I wanna get into some of the specific questions around how R&D works these days vis-a-vis how it used to work. But, specifically, what has come out of these events? Can you point to any things that kind of popped out? Because R&D, I won't say hit or miss, but it's the idea is to experiment and try new things and nail it. What has come out of VMware's Radio years of history? >> Yeah, so, very practically, we get a lot of patents out of Radio. That's just a very practical sense. As people are building up the papers, as they're looking at the ideas they want to drive, as they work with different teams to build prototypes. Quite a few times people do that at Radio when they're making a presentation. They'll generate ideas, invention disclosures, which generate new patents. This show alone, even though we just actually entering the show at this stage, has already generated about nearly 240 IDFs. A lot of those have the potential to become patents. So it's very, very practical and pragmatic about the generation of patents and new ideas. When you look at the products side of things, quite often what you see at Radio is not necessarily a new product in a whole new area. What you tend to see is, we have existing technologies bubbling in different spaces and now, because you're able to bring these teams together, somebody gets an idea that says, Oh, I can combine machine learning with what we're doing in terms of logging and now I've got an interesting product to help support our customers, you know, deal with real world problems. >> So, it's not take that hill, build me a blockchain product, it's more of, take a step back, zoom back, look at the big picture, understand the fusion of where things are coming together, look at architecture. Is that kind of the-- >> Yeah, actually, sometimes there is the, take that hill, take the blockchain product, but quite often, it starts as something small. You have a Radio event where somebody will say blockchain is cool and interesting. Here's how you run it in a more efficient fashion on vSphere, something like that. And that would be a poster session. And it's only then when somebody sees that that says, I can really run blockchain on vSphere? Can I do it better even now it's physical in some way? And that's when the story emerges. So you don't necessarily see the product announcement coming from Radio itself. What you see is the core of that idea and then a few months later, or the next major VMWorld, or two VMWorlds out, you begin to see these things emerging. >> It's like you're creating sparks of innovation, throw onto the fire, create some action. >> That's exactly the way it works. You know, things like, a lot of stuff what we do in containers. You know, the VMware integrated containers, the combination of containers and VMs from a security point of view. You can trace a lot of that back to ideas that were generated for Radio. And it's pretty rigorous. People have to go through, submit papers, there's a submit ideas. And, you know, our most senior engineers crawl all over those and critique them and so, you know-- >> So it's competitive? >> Oh, it's very competitive. That it is, in many ways, it's a mark of honor to be invited to Radio or to present a paper and so people fight very hard to do so. >> Built in gamifications called just be smart and show some good papers. >> Yes, it's a little bit tougher today. >> How much goes into the prep for this? Because obviously that's a great bar. You guys set a high bar, high is great. And it's a great place here for people to stretch and flex their technical muscle. >> Yep. >> What's the process? How do people get to that bar? Do they collaborate? Is there meet-ups? Is there organic processes of top-down? How do you guys handle it? >> So we've a lot of different processes or programs around driving innovation, but when you look at Radio itself, and it leverages some of those others, but when you look at Radio itself, basically we create a Radio committee. The one for next year will be starting somewhere in the next couple of weeks, right? We create a Radio committee. It is typically driven by members of the office of the CTO, but works and pulls in our fellows, our principle engineers, and we form a committee which really splits into two different directions. One of which is all around the technical papers, the presentations which are gonna be presented later here today. And another one which focuses around how do you do the keynotes? How do you get invited speakers? How do you create this inspirational, you know pervasive sense of innovation. And so you have those two groups working, while cooperating somewhat independently of each other. And it takes a long time. So for instance, only about 15% of the papers which are actually submitted are presented here. So there's a lot of work going through, scanning those, combining those. One of the most exciting things you can do at VMware is, if you go back somewhere in around the February timeframe, all of our most senior engineers sit in one of our largest conference rooms with a bunch of engineers submitting papers and so on, and there is a lively debate working through paper after paper, idea after idea, and saying is this a good thing for Radio? Is this original? Hey, nobody else thought of that. What we gonna be able to do to do that? Or, in some cases, saying these two people, one from Bangalore, one from Bulgaria, we've earned these sites all over the world, these ideas look similar. Can we get those guys to talk to each other? And see what comes out of that. >> So it's kind of a team-building exercise. At the same time, pre-innovation, but it's interesting. You've mentioned you've got the challenge of the papers, which is, you know, get the accuracy on the facts, original content, original ideas. >> [Ray] Correct. >> And then the content program for the event has to be inspiring and motivating at the same time Two different things, but two design standards for you guys. >> Yeah. And, you know, we need to combine them both and, 80% to 90% of the people who are here are hardcore R&D engineers. Their day job is to write code, produce product, archetype product, right? And, you know, if you haven't worked with a group of senior engineers, they are not going to be tolerant of presentations which, oh, we saw that before-- >> [John] Or fluff. >> Or fluff, right. They want to get hardcore into the meat. In fact, the presentations that you see that get some of the highest ratings, tend to be those that are deeply technical in nature. You know VMware's software base is primarily systems software, systems engineering. They expect to see deeply technical solutions to how to attack some real world problems. >> You guys do have some smart people. It's great to have you on theCUBE. This is our ninth year doing VMWorld. Great to start coming in to the more technical events. It's fantastic. The question I gotta ask for you is, Pat Gelsinger always says on theCUBE, he's says on theCUBE a few times, but consistent theme, you gotta get out in front of that next wave or you're driftwood. To the point of, don't just take that point product at view, jump on the wave. And the wave is all about the next 10 years or 20 years. What is the wave that you guys are, that you would categorize, obviously Cloud is key, but as you have the hyper-convergence and the on-premise private cloud boom and VSAN's great. We've seen great results from that. The cloud's right there. You've got Amazon, you got Microsoft, kicking butt on the numbers. As the R&D tries not to get caught up into the fashionable day to day, you can have the long view. >> [Ray] Yeah. >> What's the wave for the long view? >> So I think there's two waves we're looking at. One of them is you need to spend a lot of time with customers and understand what their agenda is. What their innovation agenda is. You look at that, you see, you know, products popping up. How will I leverage AI in a new and interesting way? How will I do something with Blockchain? You know, I want to run AI algorithms, I need different hardware and different management software to do that. So we focus on those and make sure we're doing that. But perhaps, more importantly, I think when you begin to look at what's happening with the industry right now, you know, you saw private cloud, you saw public cloud, you see how you connect these together. It's actually that connectivity is going to be important. You know, I believe you're going to see the emergence of Edge infrastructure, but isolated? That's not powerful. Now combine that Edge infrastructure with how you can leverage what's going into the public cloud or how you're going to be able to secure all these in a way that falls back into, you know, even Teleco in some way. You're now beginning to see this synergy across all of those things. And I think, you know, that's where our sweet spot is. We know how to deal with those hard, how do I connect things together? How do I manage complex different piece of systems software? So that's where we're gonna see it. >> Well, it's great stuff. One of the benefits of being so close to VMware over the past nine years, and I was showing you some of our online data analysis. When I look at the VMware ecosystem, the interesting see the evolution and kind of the journey, 14 years. And looking at the milestones. Clearly, infrastructure, on-premise data center. And then you saw that emergence of clouds. You start to see these markets emerge. Cloud, big data comes on the scene. Data warehouse in the infrastructure. Now, that's AI, cloud is bigger. All kind of taking a little bit off the infrastructure, kind of squeezing that down, but it moves up into the Cloud. And now you've got that, over the top, Blockchain, cryptocurrency, decentralized applications. In the middle of these circles, is security, IOT, and data. >> Correct. >> You guys are right there, so I have to ask you, because they're all, the confluence of all of those are coming together. You're not up here playing Blockchain, although there's some stuff we can get into. You got some AI influencing. So, in the center of infrastructure, Cloud, AI, and Blockchain, etc. is security data, IOT. How is that coming together? What's the R&D task? >> So, actually, I think the key word you used there was confluence. You cannot really look at these as independent things. And, you know, so our focus is what does it mean to be, essentially, the infrastructure. The infrastructure management story for that new form of multi-Cloud, Edge, IOT type of narrative. So our role there is, we believe security is one of the key things to focus on. And we believe that, in that new world, connectivity is a key part of what goes on. The Edge was taught to the Cloud. The Cloud was taught to the Teleco. The Teleco was taught to the IOT. >> [John] They need power. >> Right. They need power, they need communication. They need those things. So a lot of the time, a lot of where we focus comes back to intersects. We do believe that software-defined networking is a key way of being able to deliver a new fluidity of when you get that confluence. And intersects very quickly brings you into security. That's how you begin to understand how you isolate those components, understand what you need to do to detect. When that Edge IOT device is not even the device you think it is. Somebody might have replaced it. That's where you begin to be able to see the communications as a result sort of from that. So security is key, interconnectivity is key, and you know, when we speak about IOT itself, I've got kind of a dual role at VMware. While I'm the CTO at VMware, I also focus on IOT for Dell Technologies. And when we look at that, you know, today many of the examples of IOT are very narrow, almost point, solutions. The real power will come when you begin to combine across those solutions. You know, the thing that tells you the weather, the thing that tells you the traffic, and then the thing that tells you, you know, what's the best way to get there in your car, or whatever it is. Combine those things, now you gotta secure all that. 'Cause you're sharing information. >> [John] It's super exciting. It's probably the best time to be doing R&D because Dave Vellante and I always talk about on theCUBE all the time, that, you know, if everything was Cloud operations, because the confluence is happening, what is IOT? >> [Ray] Yep. >> You have a thin Edge, could be a windfarm, traffic signal, sensor network, or it could be a data center. The data center could be an Edge. I mean, you could look at it any way, it depends on how you look at it. >> One of the biggest questions that comes up all the time is what exactly is the edge, right? And I think, you know, it means different things within different industries. It's very clear on the extreme edge. That's a device, it's a windfarm, it's measuring the behavior of a robot, or something like that. And it's very clear on the other side. That's a Cloud, I run a bunch of analytics over there. It's the interesting piece in the middle where it is both, you know, a lot of opportunity and a lot of, you know, difficulty defining it. Is the SD1 server inside of an office, is that edge? Yeah, that looks like edge, it's at the edge of the network. But it's not controlling something physical. But that SD1 server inside in a retail store, may well also be doing something with the refrigerators or the cold chain or something in that store. And now you begin to see it more as kind of an IOT device. >> That's awesome, and it's great conversation. Certainly fodder for more R&D and more innovation and the management site's key. And, I think the holy grail on all this is programmable networks, right? Come on, we've been waiting. How fast is that coming, pedal harder, come on. I know you've got to go thanks for coming on. >> But I do wanna ask you, you guys are, I wanna give you some props and just get your thoughts on obviously Blockchain. We see things like Filecoin had a very huge ICO on the IPFs side, but, you know, they didn't really have a product, but they're promising, hey, store using decentralized, we have them in the Blockchain. Obviously, it's a network storage infrastructure, it's not so much selling tokens with token economics, although it does have a piece of it. That's gonna impact you guys on the horizon. What's the current state of you guys view, your view, the team's view of Blockchain-- >> Of Blockchain? Obviously, a lot of the hype and even some of the valuations and things you see are tied to what's happening on the financial side. Bitcoin, and so on. We're not focused on that at all. What we're saying is Blockchain, or more specifically, a distributed hyper-ledger, forms the basis of a community of companies or organizations being able to, essentially, look at trust as a service. I've got a contract with you, we're now able to look across a group of companies and say we all agree, that contract is valid because of our leverage of this blockchain. That then becomes an application story. How do I run it more efficiently? How do I make sure I run it securely? How do I make sure that that community is able to leverage that service in a shared fashion? And that's what we're focused on. In fact, one of the more interesting things is when you look at things like Blockchain, when it's used in the context of something like Bitcoin, there's a degree what people value is an anonymity. We don't know who bought it, but somebody bought it. But when you look at it from a trust point of view, we actually want to be able to see who exactly did the contract. I agree that you put the contract, we worked the contract together, and we're all agreeing with that. So you see these changes when you begin to bring these technologies into enterprise. >> Efficiencies come, big time-- >> Correct. >> On supply chain. >> Exactly. Actually, we've put a lot of focus on efficiencies. We've got a research team whose job has been very focused on, given Blockchain, how do I improve the core algorithms? How do I make them more applicable to something that'd be run by a typical enterprise, or by a group of enterprises? And, you know, that's a little bit unusual for us because we're entering a kind of an application space, but what's good about this application space, it is hard systems engineering. And that's what we know how to do and that's why we think this is a great application space for us to be able to deliver real value. >> And the key word is engineering, you also mentioned earlier, community. Open Source has brought this community dynamic together where there's no middle men. This is the beautiful thing of the future infrastructure. How do you manage it? How do you make it secure trust as a service. >> Yes. >> You guys are doing a great job. Based on our data, you are on the ecosystem. You guys have all the waves covered. >> Okay. >> Ray thanks for coming on. >> Great, thank you very much. >> I appreciate the conversation. I'm John Furrier, here in San Francisco for VMware's Radio 2018. 14th year of their annual engineering kick-off, motivation, hardcore engineering critique, and also collaboration where the sparks of innovation are happening. Be right back with more. Thanks for watching. (lively electronic music)

>> Announcer: Live from Nice, France, It's theCUBE, covering .Next Conference 2017 Europe brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and you're watching SiliconANGLE Media's production of The Cube here inside the Acropolis Conference Center in Nice, France. Beautiful location, happy to welcome back to the program off the keynote stage this morning, Sudheesh Nair, President with Nutanix, and a first-time guest, someone I've gotten to know through the industry, Dan McConnell, Vice-President of the CPSD group inside DELL EMC. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. >> Dan: Thanks for having us. Sudheesh needs no introduction, but Dan, why don't you tell us a little bit about your background, your role inside of DELL EMC. Sure, I guess, I've been at DELL for about, I don't know, 18 years, in various forms, engineering, CTO, product management. Nowadays I've got a collection of the CPSD businesses. Chad will refer to it as the horizontal businesses but basically all the things that are multi-hypervisor in nature. XC series, clearly one of those products, one of the long relationships we've had with Nutanix, very successful. Matter of fact, coming off Q2 was our strongest quarter ever. We're still closing Q3 so I can't talk about that, but safe to say these last six months will be six months of the strongest we've had with Nutanix and the XC series. I've got a collection of products from Block to FlexTech C Series. Yeah, so you come from what was the DELL side of DELL EMC, in through, of course, the DELL VMware relationship, been a strong one, driven a lot of joint revenue for the companies, yeah. Yep, absolutely, it's been great. Been good getting to know Sudheesh over the years. It's been multiple years at this point. >> Sudheesh: Almost four years now. But it's been a great relationship. Sudheesh, please. Yeah, first of all, thank you for having us. It's always nice to see you. And I still am amazed by all this equipment and how professional you are when it comes to doing these sort of things. It's very nice to be here with Dan. He's one of the nicest guys in the company and I'm not just saying because he's sitting here. A very good human being, it's always been a pleasure. It's almost four years we've been working together. Sudheesh, our audience loves when, they're looking forward to this session because, come on, DELL EMC, Nutanix, wait, they're friends, no they're competitors. No, yeah, they're, you know, it's a mix together. They say it's like the macaroons. It's, a couple of pieces go together, some of the flavors you like, some maybe you don't as much. Probably a bad analogy. Bring us up to speed as to kind of the Dell relationship. You know, how important is it to Nutanix? I know it's something that I talk to customers that are running Dell EMC and say, "Does it concern you at all?" And it is something that at least is on the radar for most customers. I'll try to give a shorter answer. It's a long answer question. The first thing is, this is a relationship that is built to last. I know that it is not an easy relationship, but let me also be honest about, look inside the industry and tell me a single relationship that is absolutely black and white. I mean, it's not that long ago when in one of the VMworlds, I don't remember who exactly, but someone from VMware actually said, "We're not going to lose to a bookseller," right? And then in the last-- >> Stu: Yeah, he's a VC now, so doing quite well for himself. Yeah, he's a great guy, it was his call, yeah. Again, it's a point in time of opinion, and I would do the same thing because we all compete with our heart and mind. It's not about that point. The fact that the company evolved, and in the last VMworld I think the CEOs of both AWS and VMware were hugging it out. Does that mean they've built a relationship that will not have conflicts? Absolutely not. I fundamentally don't think that the relationships in IT industry specifically will no longer be black and white, and it will always be shades of gray. The question is, should we be focused on customers who wants us to stop bickering and deliver what's right for them, and continue to focus on the overlaps of interest as opposed to focus on the conflicts that will arise. Absolutely well said. It's clear, and Dell's always been focused on a strategy of customer choice and flexibility. One of our key strengths at DELL EMC now is the portfolio, the fact that we've got multiple offers, the fact that it's a focus on the customer, what the customer wants, giving them flexibility as opposed to always trying to pigeonhole a specific product. It's interesting because I've been watching since the first days of the relationship. Dell's goal is to be leader in infrastructure. Nutanix's goal, be an iconic software company. Well, you're not going to be a server manufacturer, there's room there. So, Dan, why is Nutanix best on Dell? That's a great question. So one, the long relationship, right? So, we actually have teams of people who focus on integrating the platform and the software. There's a software stack in there, we call Power Tools internally that, long story short, manages all of the firmware stacks as well as, essentially lifecycle management of the hardware up underneath Nutanix. So, one piece is the hardware integration. The second piece, which we talked about a year ago at .Next, that we would be focused on integrating the broader Dell EMC portfolio, namely data protection. So, you'll see in upcoming weeks, we've already announced it formally, it gets turned on here in a few weeks, tight integration of Data Domain and Avamar with the XC series. Not just to reference architecture, but actual integration into the management. So, full lifecycle integration of data protection leveraging Data Domain, Avamar, tightly integrated into XC series, keeping that focus of ease of use, lifecycle management not only around the infrastructure, but also from data protection. So, hardware integration as well as tight integration of other pieces of the ecosystem. One other piece there, not to take too long, but not only data protection but we're also leveraging our relationship with Microsoft, and you'll see us integrate XC series into Azure with things like OMS, with our Log Analytics solution, so building out that ecosystem around the infrastructure. Yeah, Sudheesh, the Microsoft relationship's an interesting one, of course. You know, Dell, very long, strong relationship. I remember Satya Nadella up onstage with Michael Dell at Dell World years ago. It seems like a good opportunity for even deeper partnership. I think it's not just Microsoft. I think Dell EMC is the single largest vendor in this space and ecosystem, for example Pivotal. The innovative things that Pivotal is doing, Nutanix has an opportunity to partner with that because of the ecosystem. The global support, the global reach that Dell has, we have access to that. Customers get choice. Pretty much every customer who's buying anything in this industry probably have a contract with Dell. We have access to that. So, it requires a level of maturity for the business to sort of turn off the noise and listen to the music. We have been able to do that, and I know that people would love to see a fight, and yes, sometimes we have friction, and I think that is healthy. But by and large both companies have figured out the most important thing is to focus on customers, do right by them. So, Sudheesh, I think it would be fair to say that both companies have a sales culture that many outside call a bit aggressive. And especially where it's been interesting and sometimes challenging to watch is when it hits the channel. So, I know a number of channel providers, love Dell, love Nutanix, and have felt pressure sometimes from the Dell side to move to some of the other products, many have stuck. How do you balance that to kind of keep the channel happy, keep them working on that? You're absolutely right. I think both companies have a sales-driven culture, no question about it. And Nutanix, even though we are a younger company, much smaller in size, I don't think our aspirations and the fighting spirit is any less. In fact, in some cases it might even be out there. However, what we have done is we always focused on partners as part of the customer in the same ecosystem. That is, do right by the customer, do right by the partner. And I think that applies to both companies. What we have done early on is actually put together some guard rails between companies, how do we approach when those sort of conflicts arises, number one. Number two, we put together processes in the field when it comes to dual registration which is somewhat convoluted on the back end, but extremely delightful on the front end. Now, that doesn't mean there won't be friction. What we've done is we made sure that number one, the frictions are exceptions, not an example always, and second, when it comes up, we talk. So, he's on my WhatsApp. When something really blows up he will say, "Sudheesh, what's going on?" It's less and less now because our people have actually done a pretty good job of managing it. But ultimately, the one thing that'll continue to sustain and grow this relationship would be trust and communication. In the last four years, we know the people. We have built the communication, we speak the language, and because of that we are able to overcome all those problems. Yeah, the key is when those arise, getting the right people involved and ultimately doing right by the customer. There's always going to be conflict, this, that in the field. It's getting the right people involved early managing it and making sure we're putting customers first, not getting them in the middle of it. >> Sudheesh: Absolutely. Alright, so Dan, one of the things we heard from Nutanix today and I've been hearing all week, Intel Skylake. You've got 14 Gs available. Since it's not announced yet as the date, what kind of guidance can you give, and how's that rollout going to look for customers? Especially, I love your viewpoint as you know the server world forever, and you've got a broad portfolio. How does customer adoption across the various buying modes happen? I'll dance around this a bit and say stay tuned, very soon you'll hear some announcement around the 14th Generation PowerEdge. >> Stu: If you're watching the replay, call your rep now, it might be ready. Exactly right, so yes, stay tuned, very, very soon. We've already talked about it back at Dell EMC World. You can expect us to fully embrace the 14th Generation PowerEdge. We've already having some conversations with folks in the field. Obviously, we've got the PowerEdge line out there already. It's actually, the adoption of 14 G has been very, very strong, so we expect that to pick up here on the XC series very shortly. So, like I said, stay tuned. I have to dance around a little bit, but it'll be very, very soon. But one point, it's not available any later on the XC than it is on the other hyperconverged offerings that you have, correct? Correct. Yeah, so that's, I think, kind of the main thing. But that also tells you that we don't just take the same server and ship it out. We actually go through a different process to make sure that this can actually run mission critical applications. That's part of the problem as well, we have to do this right. Take a lot of time hardening that, what we would call standard server, so that's what's in process now, and almost done. I'd like to give you both a last word. Talk about customers, talk about anything we should be looking at down the road from the partnership. Dan, we'll start with you. Sure, you'll see continued, what I'll say tight integration, focus on the ecosystem. I think big steps with data protection integration, focus on Microsoft. You'll see more integration in that vein filling out that overall ecosystem. Partnership continues to be strong. I think it's a very good combination of software, hardware, and ecosystem. So, on the Dell EMC side you'll see us bring that ecosystem focus, and continue working with these guys. Obvious integrations on the hardware side with some exciting technologies like NVNE and RDMA. So, we'll continue to leverage the hardware technology to promote HCI and to drive HCI, make it stronger, and continue to focus on the overall ecosystem. So, we're excited for the relationship, and I'll hand it over to Sudheesh. Yeah, I think, see Nutanix, we always were a software company. But taking a product like this without the help of an appliance form factor would not be feasible, because any problem happened, it would be our problems. But now that we have the last five years behind us, we know how to make it work. What sort of products do we need to build to support the installation process, the upgrade process, lifecycle management, all of those things are done. Now starting next year, you'll see Nutanix making a conscious decision to become a truly software company, without the reliance of being, pushing through hardware. Our sales organization will be retooled and restructured to become, and incentivized to focus more and more on software, and less and less on appliances, which will bring companies like Dell EMC and Nutanix closer, because they have the footprint. Some of the conflicts used to arise basically because we had our own appliances as well. And once the sales organization is differently incentivized, you will see the trust building faster between the resellers and the companies. So, I am very optimistic because of not just the technology vision. Nutanix with hyperconverged, and the Calm and Xi, and everything else that we laid out. We know that for us, hyperconverged is just the foundation, and the support for everything that we're building. That fully aligns with Dell EMC's aspirations on how Nutanix should proceed. So, we're pretty excited, but always cautious about what could go wrong, focused on those things. As long as we talk and communicate, and we focus on customers and partners, I am pretty confident on the future. Sudheesh Nair, Dan McConnell, thank you so much for catching up. Welcome to The Cube alumni. Much appreciated. He's a pro already. We'll be back with lots more coverage here from Nutanix .Next in Nice, France. I'm Stu Miniman, you're watching The Cube. (electronic music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE. Covering VMWorld 2017. Brought to you by vmware and it's ecosystem partners. (bright pop music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE on day three of our continuing coverage of VMWorld 2017. I'm Lisa Martin. My co-host for this segment is John Troyer and we're excited to be joined by Rob Young, who is a CUBE alumni and the manager of product and strategy at Red Hat. Welcome back to theCUBE, Rob. >> Thanks, Lisa. It's great to be here. >> So, Red Hat and VMware. You've got a lot of customers in common. I imagine you've been to many many VMworlds. What are you hearing from some of the folks that you're talking to during the show this week? >> So, a lot of the interest that we're seeing is how Red Hat can help customers, VMware or otherwise, continue to maintain mode one applications, legacy applications, while planning for mode two, more cloud-based deployments. We're seeing a large interest in open-source technologies and how that model could work for them to lower cost, to innovate more quickly, deliver things in a more agile way, so there's a mixture of messages that we're getting, but we're receiving them loud and clear. >> Excellent. You guys have a big investment in OpenStack. >> Yes we do and even back in the early days when OpenStack was struggling as a technology, we recognized that it was an enabler for customers, partners, large enterprises that wanted to create and maintain their own private clouds or even to have a hybrid cloud environment to where they maintained and managed, controlled some aspect of it, while having some of the workloads on a public cloud environment as well so Red Hat has invested heavily in OpenStack to this point. We're now in our 11th version of Red Hat OpenStack platform and we continue to lead that market as far as OpenStack development, innovation, and contributions. >> Rob, we were with theCUBE at the last OpenStack summit in Boston. Big Red Hat presence there, obviously. I was very impressed at the maturity of the OpenStack market and community. I mean, we're past the hype cycle now, right? We're down to real people, real uses, real people using it. A lot of very, people with a strong business critical investment in OpenStack and many different use cases. Can you kind of give us a picture of the state of the OpenStack market and userbase now that we are past that hype cycle? >> So, I think what we're witnessing now in the market is that there's a thirst for OpenStack. One, because it's a very efficient architecture. It's very extensible. There's a tremendous ecosystem around the Red Hat distribution of OpenStack and what we're seeing from enterprises, specifically the TelCo industry, is that they see OpenStack as a way to lower their cost, raise their margins in a very competitive environment, so anywhere you see an industry or a vertical where there's very heavy competition for customers and eyeballs, that type of thing. OpenStack is going to play a role and if it's not already doing so, it's going to be there at some point because of the simplification of what was once complex but also in the cost savings, it could be realized by managing your own cloud within a hybrid cloud environment. >> You mention TelCo and specifically OpenStack kind of value for companies that need to compete for customers. Besides TelCo, what other industries are really kind of primed for embracing OpenStack technologies? >> So, we're seeing it across many industries, finance and banking, healthcare, public sector, anywhere where there's an emphasis on the move to open source and to open compute environment, open APIs. We're seeing a tremendous growth in traction and because Red Hat has been the leader in Linux, many of these same customers who trust us for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, are now looking to us for the very same reason on OpenStack platform, because much like we have done with Enterprise Linux, we have adopted an upstream community-driven project. We have made it safe to use within an environment in an enterprise way, in a supported way as well, the subscription. So, many industries, many verticals. We expect to see more, but primary-use cases, NFE and TelCo, healthcare, banking, public sector are among the top dogs out there. >> Is there a customer story that kind of stands out in your mind as really a hallmark that showcases the success of working with Red Hat and OpenStack? >> Well there are many customers, there are many partners that we have out there that we work with, but I would say that if you look at some of the, four of out of five of the large TelCos - Orange, Ericsson, Nokia, others that we've recently done business with would be really good examples of not only customer use cases but how they're using OpenStack to enable their customers to have better experience with their cell networks, with their billing, with their availability, that type of thing. And we had two press announcements that came out in May, one is an educational institution of a consortium, a very high profile Northeast learning institutions, public institutions, that are now standardized on OpenStack and that are contributing, and we've also got Oakridge, forgive me, it escapes me, but there's a case study out there on the Red Hat website that was posted on May the eighth that depicts how they're using our product and how others can do the same. >> Rob, switching over a little bit to talking a little bit more about the tech and how the levers get pulled, right, we're talking about cloud, right, another term, "past the hype cycle," right? It's a reality. And when you're talking about cloud, you're talking about scale. >> Rob: Yes. >> We mentioned Linux, OpenStack, and Red Hat kind of built on a foundation of Linux, it's super solid, super huge community, super rich, super long history, but can you talk about scale up, scale out, data center, public cloud, private, how are you seeing enterprises of various sizes address the scale problem and using technologies like the Red Hat and CloudStack to address that? >> So there's a couple things, there's many aspects to that question but what we have seen from OpenStack is when we first got involved with the project, it was very much bounded by the number of servers that you needed to deploy an OpenStack infrastructure on. What Red Hat has done, or what we've done as a company is we've looked at the components and we have unshackled them from each other, so that you can scale individual storage, individual network, individual high availability, on the number of servers that best fit your needs. So if you want to have a very large footprint with you know, many nodes of storage, you can do that. If you want to scale that just when peak season hits, you can do that as well. But we have led the community efforts to de-shackle the dependencies between components so from that aspect we have scaled the technology, now scaling operational capabilities and skillsets as well. We've also led the effort to create open APIs for management tools. We've created communities around the different components of OpenStack and other outsourced technologies - >> Automation a big part of that as well, right? >> Automation as well, so if you look at Ansible, as an example, Red Hat has a major stake in Ansible, and it is predominantly the management scripting language of choice, or the management platform of choice, so we have baked that into our products, we have made it very simple for customers to not only deploy things like OpenStack but OpenShift, CloudForms, other management capabilities that we have, but we've also added APIs to these products so that even if you choose not to use a Red Hat solution, you can easily plug in a third-party solution or a home-grown solution into our framework or our stack so that you can use our toolset, single pane of glass, to manage it all. >> So with that, can you tell us a little bit about the partner ecosystem that Red Hat has, and what you've done sounds like to expand that to make your customers successful in OpenStack deployments. >> Absolutely, so as you're aware, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we certified most of the hardware, or all of the hardware, OEMs on Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We have a tremendous ecosystem around Enterprise Linux. For OpenStack, this is probably one of the most exciting aspects of Red Hat right now. If you look at the ecosystem and the partners that are just around OpenStack on its own, we've got an entire catalog of hundreds of partners, some at a deeper level than others, integration-wise, business-wise, whatever, but the ecosystem is growing and it's not because of Red Hat's efforts. We have customers and partners that are coming to us saying, we need a storage solution, we're using, you know, NetAMP as an example. You need to figure out a way to integrate with these guys, and certify it, make sure that it's something that we've already invested in, it's going to work with your product as well as it works with our legacy stuff. So the ecosystem around OpenStack is growing, we're also looking at growing the ecosystem around OpenShift, around Red Hat virtualization as well, so I think you'll see a tremendous amount of overlap in those ecosystem as well, which is a great thing for us. The synergies are there, and I just think it's only going to help us multiply our efforts in the market. >> Go ahead John. >> Oh Rob, talking again, partnerships, I've always been intrigued at the role of open source upstream, the open source community, and the role of the people that take that open source and then package it for customers and do the training, enablement. So can you talk maybe a little bit about some of the open source partners and maybe how the role of Red Hat in translating all that upstream code into a product that is integrated and has training, and is available for consumption from the IT side. >> Sure. So at Red Hat, we partner not only with open source community members and providers but also with proprietaries. So I just want to make sure that everybody understands we're not exclusive to who we partner with. Upstream, we look for partners that have the open source spirit and mind, so everything that they're doing that they're asking us to either consider as a component within our solution or to integrate with, we're going to make sure that they're to the letter of the law, contributing their code back, and there's no hooks or strings attached. Really the value comes in, are they providing value to their customers with the contribution and also to our combined customers, and what we're seeing in our partnerships is that many of our partners, even proprietary partners like Microsoft as an example, are looking at open source in a different way. They're providing open source options for their customers and subscription-based, consumption-based models as well, so we hope that we're having a positive impact in that way, because if you look at our industry it's really headed toward the open source, open API, open model and the proprietary model still has the place and time I believe but I think it's going to diminish over time and open source is going to be just the way people do business together. >> One of the things that you were talking about kind of reminded me of one of the things Michael Dell said yesterday during the keynote with Pat Gelsinger and that was about innovation and that you really got to, companies to be successful need to be innovating with their customers and it sounds like that's definitely one of the core elements of what you're doing with customers. You said customers and partners are bringing us together to really drive that innovation. >> Yeah, I couldn't agree more. It's an honor to be mentioned in the same breath as Michael Dell, by the way. But what we see is because of the open source model, you can release early and often, and you can fail early, and what that does is encourage innovation. So it's not only corporations like Red Hat that are contributing to upstream projects, OpenStack as an example or Linux as an example, or KVM as an example. There's also college students, there's people out there who work for Bank of America. Across the fruited plains all over the world. And the one thing that unites us is this ability to recognize the value of our contributions to an open source community, and we think that that really helps with agile development, agile delivery, and if you look at our project deliveries for OpenStack as an example, OpenStack releases a major version of its product every six months. And because of contributions that we get from our community, we're able to release our - and testing, it's not just, contributions come in many forms. Testing is a huge part of that. Because of the testing we get from a worldwide community, we're able to release shortly after a major version of upstream OpenStack because that innovation. In a pure waterfall model, it's not even possible. In an open source model, it's just the way of life . >> So as we're kind of wrapping up VMworld day three, what are some of the key takeaways for you personally from the event and that Red Hat has observed in the last couple of days here in Las Vegas. >> So there's a couple of observations that have kind of been burned into my brain. One is we believe at Red Hat, our opinion is that virtualization as a model will remain core, not only to legacy applications, mode one, but also to mode two, and the trend that we see in the model, that we see is that for mode two, virtualization is going to be a commodity feature. People are going to expect it to be baked into the operating system or into the infrastructure that they're running the operating system or their applications on. So we see that trend and we've suspected it, but coming to VMworld this week helped confirm that. And I say that because of the folks I've talked to, after sessions, at dinner, in the partner pavilion. I really see that as a trend. The other thing I see is that there's a tremendous thirst within the VMware customer base to learn more about open source and learn more about how they can, you know, leverage some of this not only to lower their total cost of ownership and not to replace VMware, but how they can complement what they've already invested in with faster, more agile-based mode two development. And that's where we see the market from a Red Hat standpoint. >> Excellent. Well there's a great TEI study that you guys did recently, Total Economic Impact, on virtualization that folks can find on the website. And Rob, we thank you for sticking around and sharing some of your insights and innovations that Red Hat is pioneering and we look forward to having you back on the show. >> Great to be here. Thanks. >> Absolutely, and for my co-host John Troyer, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching theCUBE's continuing coverage, day three, of VMworld 2017. Stick around, we'll be right back. (bright pop music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's The Cube covering VMworld 2017 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to The Cube on day three of our continuing coverage of Vmworld 2017. I'm Lisa Martin, our cohost for this segment is John Troyer and we're excited to be joined by Rob Young, who is a Cube alumni, and the manager of product and strategy at RedHat. Welcome back to the Cube, Rob. >> Thanks, Lisa, it's great to be here. >> So RedHat and VM where you, you get a lot of customers in common. I imagine you've been to many, many Vmworlds. What are you hearing from some of the folks you were talking to on during the show this week? >> So a lot of the interest that we're seeing is how RedHat can help customers, VMware or otherwise, continue to maintain mode one applications, like Z applications while planning for mode two, more cloud based deployments. And we're seeing a large interest in open source technologies and how that model could work for them to lower cost, to innovate more quickly, deliver things in a more agile way. So there's a mixture of messages that we're getting, but we're receiving them loud and clear. >> Excellent. You guys have a big investment in OpenStack. >> Yes we do, and even back in the early days when OpenStack was struggling as a technology, we recognized that it was an enabler for customers, partners, large enterprises that wanted to create, maintain their own private clouds or even to maintain a hybrid cloud environment where they maintained and managed controlled some aspect of it while having some of it, some of the work loads on a public cloud environment as well, so RedHat has invested heavily in OpenStack to this point. We're now in our 11th version of RedHat/OpenStack platform and we continue to lead that market as far as OpenStack development, animation, and contributions. >> Rob, we were with the Cube at the last Openstack summit in Boston, big Redhat presence there obviously, I was very impressed with the maturity of the Openstack market and community, I mean we're past the hype cycle now, we're down to real people, real uses, real people using it, a lot of varied people with strong business critical investment in Openstack in many different use cases. Can you kind of give us a picture of the state of the Openstack market and the userbase now that we are past that hype cycle. >> So I think what we're witnessing now in the market is a thirst for Openstack, one because it's a very efficient architecture, it's very extensible, there's a tremendous ecosystem around the Redhat distribution of Openstack, and what we're seeing from enterprises, specifically in the telecom industry is that they see Openstack as away to lower their costs, raise their margins in a very competitive environment, so anywhere you see an industry where there's very heavy competition for customers, that type of thing, Openstack is going to play a role, if it's not already doing so, it's going to be there at some point because of the simplification of what was once complex, but also In the cost savings can be realized by managing your own cloud within a hybrid cloud environment. >> You mentioned Telco, and specifically Openstack and the value for companies that need to compete for customers, besides Telco, what other industries are really primed for embracing Openstack technologies? >> So we're seeing across many industries, finance and banking, healthcare, public sector, anywhere where there is a emphasis on the move to opensource and to open compute environments, open APIs we're seeing a tremendous growth in traction, and because Redhat has been later than Linux, many of these same customers, who trust for Redhat Enterprise Linux and now looking to us for the very same reason on Openstack platform, because we much like we have done with Enterprise Linux, we have adopted an upstream community driven project we have made it safe to use within an environment, in an enterprise way, in a supported way as well, via subscription, so many industries, many versicles, we expect to see more, but primary use cases in FE, in Telco, healthcare, banking, public sector are among the top dogs out there. >> IS there a customer story that sort of stands out in you mind as a hallmark that showcases the success of working with Redhat and Openstack? >> Well there are many customers, many partners out there that we work with, if you look at four out of the five large Telcos, Orange, Ericsson, Nokia, others that we've recently done business with, would be really good examples, of not only customer use cases, but how they're using Openstack to allow their customers to have better experience with their cell networks with their billing with their availability, that type of thing, and we had two press announcements that came out in May, one of them is an educational institution of a consortium of very high profile Northeast learning institutions, public institutions that are now standardized on Openstack and are contributing, and we've also got Oakridge, forgive me, it escapes me, but there's a case study out there on the Redhat website that was posted on May 8th that depicts how they're using our product and how others can do the same. >> Rob, switching over a little bit to talking a little bit more about the tech and how the levers get pulled, we're talking about cloud, another term past the hype cycle, it's a reality, but when you're talking about cloud you're talking about scale, we mentioned Linux and Openstack and Redhat, built on a foundation of Linux, super solid super huge community, super rich, super long history, but can you talk about scale up, scale out, data center, public cloud, private, how are you seeing enterprises of various seizes address the scale problem and using technologies like the Redhat cloud stack to address that? >> So there's a couple of things, there's many aspects to that question, but what we have seen from Openstack, is when we first got involved with the project, it was very much bounded by the number of servers that you needed to deploy an Openstack infrastructure on, what we're done as a company is we've looked at the components and we have unshackled them from each other, so that you can scale individual storage, individual network, individual high availability on the number of servers that best for your needs, so if you want to have a very large footprint with many nodes of storage, you can do that, if you want to scale that just when peak season hits you can do that as well, but we have led the community efforts to deshackle the dependencies between components, so from that aspect we have scaled the technology, now scaling operational capabilities and skillsets as well, we've also led the effort to create open APIS for management tools, we've created communities around Openstack and other Opensource technologies. >> Automation a big part of that. >> Automation as well. So if you look at Anserable, Redhat has a major stake in Anserable, and it is predominately the management scripting language of choice, or the management platform of choice, so we have baked that in our products, we have made it very simple for customers to not only deploy things like openstack but Openshift Cloudforms, other management capabilities that we have, but we've also added APIs to these products, so that if you choose not to use a Redhat solution, you can easily plugin a third party solution, or a homegrown solution, into our framework for our stack so that you can use our toolset, single pane of glass to manage it all. >> So with that, can you tell us a little bit about the partner ecosystem that Redhat has, and what you've done to expand that to make your customers successful in Openstack environments? >> Absolutely, as you're aware, Redhat Enterprise Linux, we certified most of the hardware, all of of the hardware OEMs on Redhat Enterprise Linux, we have a tremendous ecosystem around Enterprise Linux for Openstack, this is probably one of the most exciting aspects of Redhat right now, if you look at the ecosystem and the partners that are around Openstack on its own, we've got an entire catalog of hundreds of partners, some at a deeper level than others, integration wise, business wise whatever, but the ecosystem is growing and it's not because of Redhat's efforts, we have customers and partners that are coming to us, we need a storage solution, we're using Netapp as an example, you need to figure out a way to integrate with these guys, and certify, and make sure that it's something that we've already invested in is going to work with your product as well as it works with our legacy stuff, so the ecosystem around openstack is growing, we're also looking at growing the ecosystem around Openshift, around Rethat virtualization as well, so I think you'll see a tremendous amount of overlap in those ecosystems as well, which his a great thing for us, the synergies are there, and I think it's only going to help us multiply our efforts in the market. >> Go on John. >> So Rob, taking again partnerships, I've always been intrigued at the role of Opensource Upstream, the Opensource community, and the people who then take that Opensource and then package for customers and do the training enablement, so can you maybe talk a little bit about some of the Opensource training partners, and how the role of Redhat in translating all that upstream code into a product that is integrated and has training and is available for consumption for the IT side. >> Sure, so at Redhat we partner not only with opensource community member and providers, but also with proprietary, so I just wanted to make sure everybody understands, we're not exclusive to who we partner with. Upstream, we look for partners that have the opensource spirit in mind, so everything that they're asking us to either consider as a component within our solution or to integrate with we want to make sure that they are to the letter of the law, contributing their code back, and there's no strings attached, really the value comes in, are they providing value to their customers, with the contribution, and also to our combined customers, and what we're seeing in our partnerships, is that many of our partners even proprietary partners such as Microsoft for example, are looking at opensource in a different way, and they're providing opensource options for their customers and consumption based models as well, so we hope that we're having a positive impact in that way, because if you look at our industry, it's really headed towards the opensource openAPI open model and the proprietary model still has a time and place I believe, but I think it's going to diminish over time, and opensource is going to be the way people do business together. >> One of the things that you were talking about reminded me of one of the things that Michael Delft said yesterday, during the keynote with Pat Gelsinger, and that was about innovation, and that you really got companies to be successfully innovating with their customers, and that sounds like that definitely one of the core elements of what you're doing with customers, he said customers and partners are bringing us together to really drive that innovation. >> Yeah, I couldn't agree more, and it's an honor to be mentioned in the same breath as Michael Delft by the way, but what we see is because of the opensource model, you can release early and often, and you can fail early, and what that does is it encourages innovation, so its not only corporations like Redhat that are contributing to upstream projects, Openstack as an example, or Linux as an example, or KBM as an example, there's also college students, there's people out there who work for Bank of America, across the plains all over the world, and the one thing that unites us is to recognize the value of our contributions to an opensource community, and we think that really helps with agile development, agile delivery, and if you look a tour project deliveries for Openstack as an example, Openstack releases a major version of its product every six months, and because of contributions that we get from our community, we're able to release our, in testing, it's not just, contributions come in many forms, testing is a huge part of that, because of the testing we get from a world wide community, we're able to release shorty after a major version of upstream Openstack because that innovation in a pure waterfall model, its not even possible, in an opensource model, it's just a way of life. >> So as we're kind of wrapping up VM World day three, what are some of the key takeaways for you personally from the event and that Redhat has observed in the last couple of days here in Las Vegas? >> So there's a couple of observations that have been burned into my brain, one is we believe at Redhat, that virtualization as a model will remain core, not only to legacy application, Mode one, but also to Mode two, and the trend that we see in the model, for mode two virtualization is going to be a commodity feature, people are going to expect it to be baked into the operating system, or into the infrastructure where they're running the operating system where their application's on, so we see that trend, and we suspected, but coming to VMware this week helped confirm that, and I say that because the folks I've talked to after sessions, at dinner, in the partner pavilion, so I really se that as a trend, the other thing I see is that there's a tremendous thirst within the VMware customer base to learn more about opensource and learn more about how they can leverage this, not only to lower their total cost of ownership, and to to replace VMware, but how they can compliment what they've already invested in with faster more agile based Mode two development, and that's where we see the market from a Redhat standpoint. >> Thanks Dan, well there's a great TEI study that you guys did recently, Total Economic Impact on virtualization that you can find on the website, and Rob we thank you for sticking around and sharing some of your insights and innovations that Redhat is pioneering, and we look forward to having you back on the show. >> It's great to be here, thanks. >> Absolutely, and for my co-host John, I am Lisa Martin, you're watching the Cube continuing coverage, day three of VMware 2017

(light peppy electronic music) >> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE! Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman And I'm here with John Troyer. And you're watching theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media's live production of VMworld 2017. We're in Las Vegas. Happy to have back to the program Alastair Cooke, who is the Chief Video Officer of vBrownBag. Al, great to see you, thanks so much. It is of course not only great to see you, but great to see vBrownBag here at VMworld which was for I think 24 or 48 hours, actually in question. >> It was probably the most stressful 48 hours of my life when it looked like we might not be as welcome on the floor here at VMworld as we have been for the last five years prior. >> Yeah, you know, Pat Gelsinger last year said I couldn't imagine VMworld without theCUBE. I think most of the community couldn't imagine the show without vBrownBag. So we don't need to hash through all of it. Everybody in IT knows that sometimes you get those stressful periods and you look back and say we went through it. The outcome worked. >> The outcome is awesome. So for those who have not come across what we do, vBrownBag is a community podcast. You guys have followed the rise, and John's been instrumental in part of the rise. The podcast is about education for the practitioner of IT, the person working in data centers or designing solutions to go into data centers. We focus on education, so we're a video podcast. I was looking at our stats. There's a couple of thousand videos sitting in our YouTube channel that we've produced over the last six or seven years. And in the last six years at VMworld, we've had an open stage. We sort of set a little bit of a parallel to the rise of theCUBE at VMworld, the massive estate that you have here now. We also have grown over the years, not nearly as massive, but we have an open stage for those same IT practitioners, the hands-on engineering people to come and share the things they've learned with the rest of the community. >> Could you speak a little on the breadth and depth of the offering that you'll do during this week here? One of the differences here, we get a lot of people that come take photos, they'll come watch for a few minutes. You guys have an audience coming through the entire time, participating and the like. >> Well this year, we have a big upswing in our audience because all of our sessions are listed in the schedule folder. So normal attendees at the show are seeking out our content and saying that's interesting, I want to hear about that. And that's always been previously our issue, was discoverability. Nobody knew that there were these really awesome speakers who were presenting at VMworld. Now they're in the schedule folder, and so we have a space for 50 people. We've had a few talks where pretty much every seat's been full. And the walkway past our stage has been filled with another 30 people wanting to see and consume the content that we produce. >> That's super nice. How many videos over the course of the week? >> We have 77 booked in for this week. >> I think you'll have more than us then. >> Yes, so we're already at 16. We do a much lower production standard than you do here on theCUBE. But we do a really high velocity. So as I walked away from my station to come to yours, I'd already uploaded the previous presenter's videos up onto YouTube. So as I walked away, 16 presentations were complete, 16 videos were on YouTube. My awesome crew still manning the stage while I'm away, and while I've been here I think we're now into the second video that's been produced as I've been watching you guys talking with your previous guest. >> Come on, video's all in. As long as the internet's solid, we get 'em up pretty fast too. >> Oh yeah. The key thing for us is that we do it with next to nothing. We do it on a shoestring compared to what... Your rent and people bill here is probably larger than my equipment bill. >> Well hey, that's the beautiful thing about tech, right? I started filming stuff at VMworld years ago, right? And you just buy a consumer camera and just go. And you can stream, and you built it up from there. It's a sort of affordable tech that anybody can do. And even, you use CommonWeb, GoToMeeting, and things like that on your weekly podcast. This is super. You don't need a lot of money to reach a global audience. What are some of the themes that you're seeing this year at VMworld in terms of the tech talks? >> It's a little challenging to try and work out a theme out of the 77... Because there isn't so much coherence to what we get. We don't have streams or anything like that. On the stage, we accept everything that comes in. And my acceptance criteria is chronology. The order in which you submit your session is the priority in which it's scheduled, rather than doing a lot of reviewing. I've seen quite a bit of container stuff in there. There's a lot of interest in AWS, and vSphere on AWS. And there's quite a lot of interest in free tools. So we had two sessions today on free tools for vSphere adminstrators. They're things that can get you going in your job without having to go asking cap-in-hand for money to buy a new tool. >> Which is nice, because these are things that might not be in an official session at VMworld with 800 people in it, but free tools are very relevant to the technical community. >> And that's the thing. Our audience is all about that engineer who's going to be hands on the keyboard, building things. Quite possibly you're still going to be racking and stacking hardware. And configuring the products that are being bought that are being chosen by somebody further up the management chain. >> I know some of the more popular sessions are when you touch on certification type issues. Did those happen here, or is that different pieces? Maybe speak a bit to the broader charter of vBrownBag. >> So the broader objective is that the virtualization community and the data center infrastructure community can teach one another. We all feel like we know a little tiny amount of this vast amount that everyone around us knows. The reality is that each of us has our own little island. And if I share my island of knowledge with you, and you share your island of knowledge with me, then we all learn more. And the internet and the use of podcasts and the rise of iTunes has given us the ability to do that at massive scale. We only need a very small number of people who are prepared to share their circle of knowledge, to be able to educate a vast number of people. >> But what I also think is interesting, you started with VMware certs, right? >> We did. >> That was a brownbag to learn and study for our certifications together. And now, over the years, it's brought OpenStack, it's brought AWS, containers. Can you talk about some of all the different topics that you're dealing with? >> So we absolutely cover as far as I'm aware, every released VMware certification we've got some content for. And have done since ESX 3. Those kinds of days. And that's how long the podcast has been running. We've always been helping community members to study for their VMware certifications. And then we found that VMware didn't release certifications as fast as we could produce training for them. And so we started looking broader, and started looking at, well, you work in virtualization, you need to know storage, you need to know networking. And so we started covering some elements of those. And then, oh, there are certifications in these things! And that's good for career advancement for the engineer. And so we started covering some of the Cisco certifications. And we did have the foray into OpenStack, because Cody Bunch, the guy who started the podcast, who I refer to as the Podfather, his work took him from building a product based on vSPhere, for a large hosting provider, to a product based on OpenStack. And so he was very much keen on OpenStack. Unfortunately our audience weren't so keen. So the OpenStack series went for a little while and didn't get a huge traction. But we started doing AWS last year. We covered the Solution Architect Associate certification early last year. Huge interest from the community! Really popular content. Another popular certification content is NSX. One of the top videos for a long time was Frank Buchsel doing an introduction to VMware's NSX. We're covering the VCP-NV certification. >> That's really interesting. What kind of people attend a vBrownBag? What are the characteristics? Obviously there are people who, some are of sort of driven, they want to expand their horizons, they want to advance their careers. I mean, any comments on that? >> I see a split between those of us who produce the content who are very much forward looking, getting excited about the next thing, and so now we're doing Kubernetes, and we're just starting a series on API's. Every Christmas we do a thing called Commitmas where we cover source code management in Git. With Git commits. So we've got this whole group of forward thinking, telling the infrastructure people, these are the skills we're going to need to be relevant in the future. If the cloud is eating your lunch in your data center, here's a whole set of skills that you're going to need in order to still be able to learn. What we see is there's a huge middle audience who are just starting virtualization. So crazy as it seems, there are customers who are just starting to virtualize now. And they're not all in Southeast Asia. >> Stu: Laggards! >> But the people who are coming into the industry, also younger people coming into the industry who don't have 20 years of virtualization or 200 years of virtualization in their back pockets. Using the vBrownBags is a way of getting some education and getting education that they don't need to get a purchase order for. >> John: This is all free, right? Everything you do is free. >> Everything we do is free to consume. That's one of our core principles. All the content we produce is free to consume. We do produce... in a typical month we'll produce six hours of video training content. And stack that up over a few years. >> So Al, put your consultant hat on. What so far, I mean we're only day one here. But what's your take on what VMware is saying, Pat Gelsinger gave his morning keynote, applause for Andy Jassy coming out. We spend a lot of time talking about VMware and AWS. But kind of across the board, what's your take so far? What are you liking, what aren't you liking? >> Well I'm liking that the video production on the vBrownBag stage has been really smooth so far and that I have an awesome team of volunteers there. To be honest, that's been the biggest thing because that's what I'm here for. The keynote... To an engineer the keynote's not hugely interesting because the keynote is a business-focused message. And I want to know, when I am deploying a vSphere on AWS environment, what does it look like? So there's some quiet briefings going on that you can book in for if you get the invitation to see how it's actually going to work. That's the stuff that would, if I were still doing regular day-to-day working for a company, that's the stuff I'd be wanting to get while I was here at VMworld. Yes, we've got Andy Jassy here, well that's great, there's a serious commitment from AWS to the conference. >> Pivoting back a little bit to new technology, video is really democratizing at some level. The affordability of the equipment and the ability to do it from anywhere. vBrownBag to support itself does have sponsors. You have some sponsors here. So the webinar's all free, and mostly very educational. You're here on site. You also do several tech events throughout the year, all around the world. And you've actually started a new exercise where you go and you work with a vendor or something as a technologist, and basically it's build day, where you build something with your hands, some system, some rack of something, and stream the whole thing live. Can you talk a little... Again, fascinating from a production and technology point of view. But can you talk a little bit about what you're trying to bring as a trainer and an educator and a community member with that kind of an offering. >> Sure, so vBrownBag's content is all free to consume, but it's not free to produce. And so we have wonderful sponsors that help us to be here, make sure I can bring a crew of people here to be able to make those 77 videos. And I haven't done the count of how many we're doing in Barcelona, but I'm doing an outrageous number of miles in a month because I'm going home to New Zealand in between the two VMworlds. I've got to pick up my wife and take her to Barcelona. So awesome sponsors for that, and we go to other events. This is I think the second event in Vegas where we've been making TechTalks this year. But John you're talking about the wonderful new thing we started doing this year of the vBrownBag build days. And the objective is really to show day one experience of implementing a piece of technology. And it's the engineer's day one experience. So we're very used to seeing keynote demonstrations. I'll show you this wonderful new technology, and it is an awesome piece of technology. It's just that A, you're not going to get it fr two years' time. And B, when you do get it, it's going to be possibly very difficult to deploy, or possibly really easy. A lot of vendors say, our technology's really easy. And so we put them to the test on that. We work with a vendor, they bring us in to usually their site. The two that we've done, we go to their site. I bring in a customer's vSphere environment. So I have a pelican case full of servers, and we turn up with that, and then on top of that vSphere environment we deploy whatever the technology is. Be it a hyper-converged platform, a storage platform, management platform. And we livestream that process. So the requirement for them is we need to start as it arrives to the customer from the factory. And we need to go through the actual deployment process. We need to hit the fissures that real customers are going to hit. Because I've been the engineer who turns up on site thinking he's going to deploy Product A, when the salesman said he was going to be deploying Product A, and in fact he's deploying Product Cucumber. And that's what he's got to go and push out. And that terror, of I've got to not make this go wrong, I've got to look good deploying this and give my customer a good experience, when I've not really had any preparation. Now it wouldn't help me if it was the day that I arrived, but often it's a new piece of technology. The first time we deploy it, we're rather concerned. And we don't believe what's in the marketing, and we don't necessarily believe that the steps in the installation guide are current. So vBrownBag's objective is to go through that process and take an educational approach to showing you how that first day goes. And as you mentioned John, my background is as a trainer. I taught VMware's public sector training courses for years. And so I very much like to go into this process as training. And you can see that reflected out in what we do with vBrownBag. It's all about education. That's part of what attracted me. >> One last question I have for you is vBrownBag has been doing this for many years. Any major shifts, changes... Of course the scope has broadened quite a bit, you're talking about things like NSX and everything like that. Anything else in kind of the community, in educating, and what people look for from your organization that you could share? >> So there's sort of different angles on that. We definitely have seen that move from being, I really need to get my VCP or my VCAP certifications, and then my career will be complete. Which of course we know is a little naive. Now we've seen a diversification that there are additional skills required. The other thing that we're seeing is that although VMworld is home base for this community, it's not the only place this community is. And so as I go to other conferences, I'm often surprised by the proportion of the people there that are actually my friends from the virtualization, the VMware community are at other things. And I suspect if I was to go to AWS re:Invent I would find a fair few of my friends there. >> Absolutely. Lots of them. Especially I'd say last year was where I saw a significant uptick. Are we going to see you at re:Invent this year? >> I've not had any interest from AWS to bring me there and I can't afford to come out to these conferences on my own dime until I sell a few more build days. >> I really appreciate everything that vBrownBag's been doing here with the community. Always a pleasure to catch up with you. Here on theCUBE we always love to support the community and many of those organizations. We will be at AWS re:Invent. Definitely lots of need for education there, lots of growth in what's happening there. And here, so for John Troyer, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here at VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (light peppy electronic music)