>> Live from Las Vegas, It's theCube. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, this is day three of three days live wall to wall coverage of VMworld 2018. This is theCube, I'm Stu Miniman, and my co-host this morning is Justin Warren. How about I welcome back to our program two Cube Alum's from the VMVare storage and availity business unit. Yanbing Li, second time in The Cube this week, is the senior vice president >> Yes. >> and general manager of the group. And Christos Karamanolis, is the fellow and CTO, thank you both for joining us. >> Great to be here. >> Great to be here. >> Alright, so first of all, congratulations. A lot of news this week, a lot of excitement around it. And we're talking off cameras, there's so much there that people don't understand some of the work that went into this. And some highlights as to things that I know VMWare thinks will be very game changing over the next couple of years. So, we're excited to dig into this. Yanbing, why don't you start us off with a little bit of an overview from your group as to the news this week. >> Yeah, happy to do that. I think, so, we are seeing a lot of customer energy around what we're doing in storage and availability. You know, there's huge momentum behind product like vSan and our customers are truly embracing HCI in very mainstream use cases, and we've seen customer after customer have gone all in, meaning they're taking HCI and made a determination to run that for all of their virtualized workload. So, very exciting time. But what's more interesting is their expanded view on what HCI is about. Certainly, we started with virtualizing computer and storage together on servers. But we're seeing rapid expansion of that definition. You know, we've been a believer that HCI is foundationally a software lab architecture. I think know, there's more recognition in that. And it's also going from just computers and storage to the full stack of the entire software defined data center. It's expanding into the cloud, as you've seen from VMCI WS. It's expanding to the edge, expanding from just traditional apps to cloud native apps. You know, we've announced beta for vSan to become the storage platform for Kubernetes' Navisphere environment. So, a lot of exciting expansion around how customers want to see HCI. And if you look at HCI, hybrid cloud, SDDC, the boundary around these three is not very very clear. I think they're all converging to work, something that's very common. >> Yeah, Christos? I want you to help unpack this a little bit for us. I remember speaking to you a couple of years ago, and your team. We know how many years of effort went into, set the ground work for vSan. with the underlying things that arrived with the API's, and development with your partner ecosystem. Taking vSan as a foundation... Oh, it's going to work with Kubernetes and cloud and everything. It's not a simple port, like, you know, no offense to the hardware people, but putting it on a new platform? Alright, you need to test it, integrate it, make it a couple tweaks, but. The software level, there's a lot of things that go on here. Talk about what the team's been working on, some of the big architectural things that've been happening. >> Oh, yes, absolutely. There are some fundamental changes. We never stop, we never declare that we have finished what we are doing. Obviously, the world is changing around us. Not only the hardware, as you know. There are many important changes there, with NVMe becoming now very prevalent, and renewed aero-technologies appearing, like persistent memory. But, for us, a focal point the last year or so has been, how do we move our entire software stack data on being outlined earlier, into any type of environment, including public clouds? So, you see now, with a few more clouds in AWS, the customers can run applications there without having to re-platform them. It's the exact same environment. So, a keystone of that environment is the storage. How do you virtualize storage? How do you deal with any type of infrastructure? So, vSan was developed for physical devices, SS disc and magnetic disc, more recently NVMe. Now, what we want to give is the option to our customers to use the cost efficiencies of cloud storage. Without the those sacrificing the semantics, the properties the vSphere stack. So, we did a lot of engineering to make vSan work on top of EBS. So, it may sound simple when you announce it at the keynote of VMWorld, but it took lot of hard engineering to adapt a platform. vSphere and vSan was designed for physical hardware, do not work on virtual storage volume. So, that is just one example, there are more examples. For cloud-native use cases, as you said. >> Yeah, I don't think people quite understand the implications of that. The fact that you can use things in the same way in multiple different locations, the whole idea behind multi-cloud-- If you can operate it in the same way as you can on site as you can in whichever cloud you choose. For enterprises who are used to doing things one way, and have made big investments in VMWare, this just opens up an entire universe of opportunity for them. >> Absolutely, and you get the best of both worlds, right? You have the same operational model, the same characteristics I can run now on Amazon applications that use vSphere, ETSI, or the motion pictures that require cell storage. On the cloud, you do not have cell storage. EBS volumes can be accessed by one host at a time, and like stores that need the networks, and vSan brings those stores their networks and semantics, all in software of course, on the cloud. So, I can run my traditional applications, as well as some new generation applications. And for us, strategically, what we've done with EBS? If you think about that is one step into a much bolder vision where vSan becomes this common storage platform that virtualize any type of storage. Physical, or cloud, or virtual, so we expose the same operational model, and the same store semantics to all those who run these three platforms. And this is, you know, just one step. >> And it's not how you-- there is the common operation model that's very appealing to all the enterprise customers. But we are truly marrying the strength and the capabilities of vSan and vSphere and the VMR platform was what EBS uniquely provide. That's elasticity, scalability, but you know, we have a much richer set of data services that we've already viewed into the whole VMR stack. >> Yeah, Yanbing, you bring up some really interesting points. When we put our critical analysis hat on, when the partnership was announced. It was like, "Well, Amazon's got access to 500,000 "VMWare customers, we're going to start "getting customers comfortable with Amazon. Great, they can start moving over." The thing that really caught a lot our attention is, it's some of the Amazon services that are now coming to the VMWare customers. So, EBS is a really good one. When you talk about, you know, the database capabilities that Amazon has, that now I can do on premises, this is a partnership, a two-way street. Its not, you know, just a one way. Maybe speak a little bit about that maturation, and, you know, definitely want to get from Christos, also. There's questions about some of the technical ways of how that works. >> Yeah, what I'm excited is exactly what you described. This is not a one way street, it's really bi-directional. And the levels of collaboration is not just superficial. It's deep levels of integration and leveraging each other to strength, in terms of both technology as well as customer reach. I think that what make the partnership is, you know, people can see that is taking to whole new level. And Christos has been very deeply involved with the various solution architects, and when we examine how we take RDS back on Prime to a VMR environment, I think he can tell a lot more stories behind that. >> For us, actually, it was a great learning experience, I must admit. Because, obviously, we see strongly the desire for our classroom is to start moving from managing the low level, nitty gritty details of the physical IT infrastructure, which we were, you know, traditionally helping them to do, to moving up the starter. Many of them now, they want to have their own users, their own customers, internal customers, to run all those applications. And what are the most critical components of business critical applications? They are the databases, right? So, how can we make the life of our customers easier, how can we provide them the tools to offer data, databases, as a service to their own users? So, this has been our high level objective, and of course, our partnership with AWS helps us deliver some of those properties. >> Christos, I want you to go one level deeper for us. Because some people it's like, >> I'd be happy to. "Wait, RDS, that's, you know, the cool new databases "in Amazon. Wait, I can do something on--" Is that an extension, am I putting things back and forth? Those of us that lived through the virtualization were getting databases just virtualized took years and a lot of hard work. And, I can't just have a database spanning between these, and moving back and forth. This isn't, you know, -- We haven't broken the laws of physics. >> We have not, because here-- >> Help us explain >> What is and isn't possible today. >> Absolutely. First of all, let me highlight what are the main pain points of customers. It's one thing to set up your application and install it and run it. But then there are all the day two operations, right? How do you patch the software, the operating system, the database? How do you scale it, up or down? How do you, even more to the performance, how do you do data protection, backup, disaster recovery? Those are really painful, difficult tasks, that involve a lot of work from expert database administrators that they'd rather be doing some of the important things that address the business earnings, right? So, our objective is to address this. Now, to your point, how do we, you know? What about those laws of physics? How can we have services on the cloud and service on a premise? What we announce here, this RDS, Relational Database Services, on VMWare, it is a fully stand alone service that runs on VMWare environment on premises. There are no dependencies on the public cloud, you have your data sets on your own data centers, and this is actually a major requirement of customers. Whether it's for compliance reasons, or security, or company policy, we insure that your data stays in your data center, while you still get all the benefits of a managed database that you don't need to do all those, you know, little tedious operational tasks I mentioned earlier. Moreover, we support data protection using, actually, underlying vSphere features. Like ETSI and clustering, or even data protection by creating copies of your database in another available domain within your data center. And this is a lot of work that VMWare did to make this happen, as you can imagine. So, that's a lot of infrastructural work, but we support the full range of features that you get on AWS, without having to go over the wire and, you know, break those laws of physics. >> I don't think people have quite understood how profound that is. We're here at a VMWare show, I've spent a lot of time with developers, and the developers are going to love this. Because, now they can use exactly the same way that they operate in public cloud, which they've loved for many years. Being able to do that on site? The way application development is going to happen inside enterprises, where they want to keep it on site, they want to keep it under they're own control, they want their data secured inside their own data centers. The ability for them to do that, and still develop applications in the same way that they could as cloud-native? Cloud-native now means that it runs on site. This is going to be amazing. >> Absolutely. Our customers explicitly tell us that they want to consume, not storage, but data. Those abstractions that matter to the application. So much so, that they have been asking us already, "Hmmm, what is next?", right? "Can you offer us some of this new generation databases?", you know, "the Mongoose or the Cassandra's of the world? "Can we have some similar experience with those "because they're very painful to deploy "and manage in the data centers." So, I cannot make any commitment, of course, but this is an indication of how much interest there is in this type of services. >> Yeah, it really does show you, I think, some of the strategic intent from VMWare. And this is a very clear move for what is going to be possible for customers to actually be able to do on site, it's really quite exciting. >> And for us, you know. Our role providing all the storage related capability, and we've been strongly expanding our application footprint to cover the Hadoop, the Cassandra, the Mango DV type of application as well as containerize the applications. And, you know, we have introduced a lot of new capability or solution that address exactly like that. >> Containerize the applications, for example, against the announcement, I think, didn't receive the attention, that in my opinion, it deserved is supporting natively in vSphere, and with vSan, specifically, cloud-native use cases. Actually, we're introducing a controlled playing, and expanding our store's controlled playing, to manage natively, container volumes. So, now, the same way today, our customers can visit builders through the UI or API's, and have management workflows for virtual machines and virtual disc, VMDK's. Now, they can also manage volumes of containers. And, as you've heard also, we are working with Kubernetes being our main focal point and with PKS to support natively Kubernetes on vSphere, down the road. >> Yeah, great point. I wonder, since we're talking about storage here, you've talked about Kubernetes, we talked about what's in the cloud and on premises. Give us the updated view how VMWare views and how you're helping customers with-- Data can't-- I can't just move, you know, data anywhere, so. While it's good to have similar frameworks, and different-- similar tools there, but still, where data lives, what I move, how I move it, do I move it, how that whole, kind of, data locality is seen today? >> The answer, we have been very keen in defining what we doing in the broader category of data management. From data mobility to protection to analytics, and to life cycle management, the whole slew of that. And we've been starting by building a lot of-- First of all, our job is to make vSan a storage platform that can enable these different demands of data. So, we've expanded vSan's roll from purely from delivering block storage now to offer file, and down the road, object. Cuz a lot of the new data will be consumed in an object like format. And we've also been painting our roadmap for the broader data management, so. >> Yes, exactly. On one hand, we'll provide the platform for primary storage that serves all the needs of the applications, block, file, object, we may even consider a native file interface, actually, for zero data copies, since you were asking about the technical details. I'm very excited about that, you know. We'll see, some of these things will come in the future. But, then, given that you have the platform, what you are building on top of that is data mobility and data protection workflows that are driven by policies. The very first step in that direction is our disaster recovery as a service we offer for hybrid clouds. There, the new model is that, even how you manage your data is as a service. Not a traditional model of installing software and a hundred different bits and pieces that have to integrate with each other and operate. Very simple, you go to a portal, and you manage your data, in this case, starting with disaster recovery use cases. You specify policies, like recovery point objectives. Down the road you may also give the options for recover time objectives. And, also, specify, by policies, what of your data want to be archived and stay on your data center, what of the data can go to the public cloud through your, you know, the hybrid models of cloud model we offer. So, our goal down the road is quite ambitious in offering comprehensive, uniform data management across clouds, that goes all the way from the edge, your Motofy's, your oil rig, all the way to the enterprise, the Cassandra's, to the hybrid clouds. And data mobility there is, you know, using our data transport, our archival capabilities that are coming with vSan Native Snapshot that we also announced at this VMWorld. These will give you the ability to manage your data across all those environments. >> Alright, so, last thing I just want to say. It's interesting to watch this space because we say there's a lot happening under the scenes that people don't understand. I was seeing some research lately saying where AWS lives in the storage ecosystem. I've written an article, couple a years ago. They were the quiet, billion dollar, you know, storage company. And one analyst firm said,"Oh, they're number 3, "and they'll be number 1 in storage." Wikibon actually published a report this month talking about what we call true private cloud. And in our support where we look at the software ecosystem, Yanbing, do you remember who we had number 1 on the list there when you picked >> Ah, yeah... software plus the ecosystem around there for -- >> I remember it clearly, you said it's VMWare. >> Yeah, so, you know, it surprises some people when you look it there, but I'm sure it's no surprise to you and your team, I'm sure. >> So, you know what we've started with vSan is quickly becoming a big way of how all of vSphere customers consume storage. And certainly, that has been our initial focus. But what we are doing for the cloud, what we are doing for the next generation applications. I think we are re-imagining a lot of the things. And it's great to have people like Christos, who started this journey many many years ago, and continue to expand our horizon. Yeah, this is an exciting time for our business unit, and certainly for VMWare, and our customers. >> Christos, in the end, really appreciate us being able to geek out, dig into some of the really important innovations happening in this space. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman, still a full third day live coverage here from VMWorld 2018, thanks for watching theCube.

>> Speaker: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Yeah we're here live the Cube coverage at VMworld 2017. Behind us is the floor of the VMvillage. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Our next two guest Beth Phalen who's the President and General Manager of Data Protection Division at Dell EMC and Yanbing Li who's the Senior Vice President General Management with Storage and Availability at VMware, vSAN, all the greatness; Welcome back to the Cube. Great to see you guys. >> Yeah, great to see you. >> Got the heavy hitters here, data protection, AWS lot of great relationships synergies happening. >> Yeah. >> Give us the update. >> Yeah well go ahead yeah. >> We've been working together for a long time but recently we've really amped it up to the next level. Great discussions around enabling data protection for vSAN and as announced this week you know with Dell EMC will be first vendor to have data protection for VMware cloud on AWS. So it's a really exciting time to be here and I've been in this business for a long time. This is the best VMworld that I've seen so far and so it's just really great to be here with Yanbing. >> It's been very cohesive, I want to just stay on that for a second. This is the big milestone for VMware. >> It is. >> To have this shipping of the general availability especially with on the heels of the vCloud Air and all that controversy. Andy Jassy's on stage from Amazon web services. >> Yeah. >> Really kind of looking right at the audience and saying we got your back, this is a real deal, and the bridge to the future. I'm paraphrasing, he didn't say those exact words. >> Yeah yeah yeah. >> How do you get that data protection? Because that data protection in the cloud is hard. >> Yeah, well the nice thing is that since we've got all of our data protection running in a cloud environment now we could then use that to build the connections with VMC. So we had Data Domain Virtual Edition running, we have Data Protection Suite running in the cloud. So people can use the same technology they used on prem but now in AWS in conjunction with VMC. >> So you kind have hyper converged infrastructure meets cloud data protection. Yanbing, what is the difference? I mean what's the requirement of hyper converged infrastructure data protection? How does it differ from traditional storage and how is it evolving? >> Ah, great questions you know Beth and I we've known each other for quite a few years. I have to say our relationship hasn't been, you know, this close is and it's getting closer and closer. So coming back to your question in terms of hyper converged infrastructure. We're seeing two fundamental shifts around data protection. One is, the blurring of the boundary between backup and DR and these two really coming together as unified data protection. I think there has been a lot of discussion around this for a long time but this become even more compelling; now we talk about hyper converged infrastructure where you know our customers they so enjoy the benefit of having compute and storage combined together in a common management experience, they're looking for the same for data protection. So we're really seeing customers want to see data protection as a feature of hyper converged, as a capability that's part of that rather than yet another silo they have to manage separately. You know they want policy that manage storage, compute, and backup and DR altogether. So that's why you know that's really drive our partnership so much closer. >> You know it's interesting many of the clients that we've worked with over the years they'll have a backup strategy but they don't really have a DR strategy and they sleep with one eye open at night and they're afraid to go to the board because it's so expensive, it's expensive insurance. So you're seeing that there, sounds like they're blending those 2 together kind of killing 2 birds with one stone. Are there trade offs or things that customers should think about in that regard? How do they sort of go from where they are today which is sort of a backup bolt on to that integrated DR and backup? >> I think one of the key is the technology that we're leveraging now and we leverage something that has like CDP continuous data protection you can use that one to have data path to the secondary storage and you can use that same code to also initiate disaster recovery with near 0 RPO and RTO. So another thing that we announced this week is with our DPS for apps next edition that we now have hypervisor direct back up and what that means is that we're integrated directly with ESX and we are leveraging ProtectPoint through VM's to move data to data domain. That same technology is also leverage within RecoverPoint through VM's and so you can see the engine, the internal engine of the data movements, can be applied both to disaster recovery and to back up with different windows of RTO and RPO. >> I'm glad you said near 0 RPO causes no such thing as 0 RPO but you're seeing, more pressure to get as close to 0 as possible. What's driving that pressure and how are you meeting it? >> Well I think with all of us we know that an industry customers are expecting 24 by, you know 24 by 7 up time right. So they have many many applications that they need to have the confidence that if it does go down for any reason they're going to be able to bring it back up within minutes or hours not days. So that's really the drive for continuous availability. Getting as close to that as possible. >> If I may one more John, the challenge in data protection has always been it's, it's largely been a one size fits all and it's either I'm either under protected or I'm spending and breaking the bank. So are you able to through your technology and process improvements improve the level of granularity for different workloads that require different service levels. >> Two things come to mind, One, we're seeing more and more interesting customers integrating data protection directlywith their applications. Whether it SQL or Oracle and or the VM itself. So that's one thing. So we can custom the data protection to particular application and then on the second piece of that is where the different interfaces that VM offers we're able to do either V80P level integration or more fine grained integration like we do with CheckPoint through VM. So we are getting to the point that we can make different choices either application specific or something that is fine tuned based on the level of mission critical capabilities that application requires. >> I will get you guys perspective just a high level ballistic view for a second. We're seeing convergence of two worlds. The cloud native world that have no walls, have no perimeters they operate in a mindset of there's a security holes everywhere. Then the protections hard. >> They think of a differently. >> Yeah On prem the traditional methods, how are those coming together? Because you have customers that run VMware and do stuff with data protection and then one of them VMware in the cloud. What's different, what do customers need to know that are we on either side of that equation? If I'm on prem and I now want to use VMware in the cloud on AWS. How does data protection fit in that? Is it the same, is there tweaks, how they think about it? >> You want to answer that? >> In terms of on prem or VMware in AWS you know a big value prop is reading at the consistency in the operating model. I'm sure you have heard about this a million times said. >> Yes, talking about it all week. >> All week long. From data protection we're trying to do exactly the same. So for example VMware cloud on AWS, the very first data protection that we certify on that platform is from [Vast 00:07:39] organization is Avamar networker being the first set of solution certified and our customers definitely love the continuity of I already have the experience and licensing associated with my own prem protection solution and they want to carry that forward in today's cloud. >> So same operating module, so from the customers perspective I've been doing it this way >> Exactly. >> With VMware and Dell Data Protection, now it's the same in the cloud. No change in. >> Yeah I mean I think that's really the beauty of it, even with DDVE I mean you can have applications or you can do through different; You know you can have application in the cloud as well as another level of protection of your secondary storage. >> I think some of the changes probably not necessary. So RPD model consistency, Dave we touch upon, hyper convergence is driving a lot of functionality into a single control plate as opposed to these different silos and you know we would like to see that happen in the cloud as well and along that line you know best organization and my organizing are really looking at how we viewed the best next generation integrated technology that truly leverages the strengths of both organizations. >> That's simple and easy to use. >> Simple, easy to use, policy base, you know turn key solutions, so this is, you know what we're doing something pretty innovative by truly bring our engineering together and try to boost our next generation solution. >> Since the synergies that Michael was talking about when we interviewed Michael yesterday he's like look, the synergies are well beyond its expectations. Just it seems to be flowing nicely in the culture. When EMC had the federation there was always kind of like an interesting but now things are flowing differently. It seems to be smoother you guys. >> They are. >> Every action. >> I totally agree with what you said. I mean it feels different and I think as we go forward we have even more opportunities but we're not even a year into it and there was a distinct difference in terms of recognition around the joint opportunity and like you said the smoothness of the conversation I think is >> It's clear, it's clarity. >> It's really helpful. >> Well also you know, the rising tide floats all boats, well VMware stock as gone like this. >> It makes us all happy. >> Its got a nice slope to it. >> I definitely want to hackle Beth on that and the type of collaboration we're seeing between our two organizations, might be you is actually having multiple touch point into Dell and Dell EMC organization whether it's our VxRail and you know the vSAN based collaboration or the data protection angle and we're really seeing that happen across different functions. So we are starting from go to market collaboration you know how we provide the best set of solutions to our customers in joint go to market effort. vSAN is gaining a lot of free print in mission critical workloads and a critical requirement is data protection. So so we're doing a lot of joint solution, joint selling together. And really in the next step is that joint engineering effort leveraging the best of both worlds to build next generation products that's optimized for hyper converged, that's optimized for the cloud. >> For the software defined data centers. >> If I dial back a decade let's say as virtualization generally in VMware specifically saw its ascendancy, data protection totally changed. For a number of reasons, you had less physical resources but backup was still very resource intensive application and so; That's really where Avarmar came before. He walked the floor, back up and data protection is exploding again. It's like the hottest area. So two part question. Why is that and then how does Dell EMC with you know its large portfolio, its big install base, how do you maintain competitiveness with all that new emerging innovation? >> Yeah well I think the first question and I want to hear your answer too but what I would say is because the industry is changing so dramatically it's requiring data protection to change just as dramatically. >> Right. >> Right, so that is a lot of people are seeing opportunity there. Where is maybe, I've had people say, you know, well you don't really have to protect data in the cloud it's all stuff that's magically protected, I've had customers say that to me and I think that we're now beyond that, right and people are realizing, wow you know, just as much of a need or more of a need than it was before. So I think there's plenty of you know companies appreciate opportunity and they see opportunity right now as data protection evolves quickly to address the new IT world that we live in. On anything you would add to the first answer? >> Yeah so I think, several years ago VMworld feels like a storage shelf you know. I think there is still a lot of exciting interesting storage company but there has been quite a bit of consolidation you know. Software defined storage it seems like that market's landscape is becoming clearer and clearer and we're definitely seeing that spreading into secondary storage is now right for a disruption and we're also seeing that is disruption around secondary storage isalso impacting data protection software. It's not just the secondary storage element but you know extent to the entire software stack. I think it's very exciting and also thinking about you know what is going to be the economical benefit of cloud and how do we take best advantage of that and this is why you know our AWS relationship. You know we are rejuvenizing our DR effort. We have successful on prem product like SRM but we're seeing tremendous new opportunity to look at that in the context of cloud to truly leveraging the economy is scale of what cloud has to offer. So lots of driving factors to really revitalize that. >> It's a cloud show and you have no cloud. >> Okay Beth second part of my question is how do you keep pace, it's a pretty tremendous innovations going on, how do you keep pace, what are your thoughts on all that? >> So the really cool thing is because where you know we're Dell Technologies we have not only data protection assets, we also have servers, we also have switches, we have everything we need to build a full integrated stack which we now have without EPA. So within a integrated data protection appliance we have the best of data domain, we have the best of our software, we're leveraging also power at servers and dellium C switches. So we have everything that we need to build that end to end best in class integrated appliance and as customers change how they consume data protection to more like a converged consumption model or hyper converged consumption model we have all the pieces that we need to make that a reality and then to continue to move forward. So when you combine that with our relationship with VMware and the ability that we have to drive innovation jointly I have no doubt that we're going to be really moving ahead into you know modern data protection. >> Final question before we rap. R&D comes up, Micheal also mention and so do Pat, billions of dollars now are in R&D. Free cash was a billion dollars. Three billion for VMware. A lot of observations this week that we kind of looked and read the tea leaves one of them was at least for me was the stack a collision between hardware software stacks as IoT and servers and devices, you have hardware stacks and software stacks. Untested scenario certainly in vSAN; You see a lot of activity around untested new use cases and so it's going to put pressure on engineers. So the question is what's the vision for the R&D for you guys around data protection, because it's not just data protection anymore it's a fundamental linchpin in the equation of cloud >> Yeah. >> Thoughts on engineering road map I mean engineering R&D. >> One thing we're doing actually right now this week is we're restructuring our EMC lab dellium c lab back in Hopkinton to move to more of an open shared pivotal type environment. So you know it's clear that as we go forward doing things like pere programming on test driven development. You know enabling continuous always good known stayed like there is definitely advancements happening in software development that are accelerating innovation and so as we take advantage of that, that's how we keep pace with what's going on around us. Because you're right the number of things to get involved in is endless. >> I just want to point out before we end the segment you guys are very inspirational women in tech. I think you guys are amazing. We talk about the engineer resources. >> Thank you John. Your thoughts on the industry, as there's a lot of controversy in Silicon Valley and around the world around STEM and women in tech. Thoughts that you'd like to share to all the men watching and all the folks and young girls who might inspiration. You know it's passionate for us. >> Yeah, I'll start. So I think, first of all I want to tank the Cube for having such awareness in this topic and you know constantly featuring women in tech on your shows. You guys have been doing a great job raising the visibility women leaders. >> Thank you >> Thanks >> in the industry. Thank you. So certainly this is a topic very dear and near to my heart. This week you know we can still see not only our employee base but our customer base is heavily men dominated. But I think we're seeing unprecedented levels of awareness and attention to this topic in Silicon Valley and across the world. Really I do think we are starting to see much better transparency metric. We're seeing increased accountability in business and business leadership. So I think those and we're seeing a lot of social awareness I think those are going to drive a positive change. So let me give you a concrete example of fuzz for example things we do in VMware, we just gone through bonus allocation and compensation adjustment. I would get a report from it make sure, comparing the percentage of what we have done for the men population and women population and so you get a real time feedback in data and when we see the data is actually quite shocking hopefully we do see, unconsciously you know we may be allocating those >> Unconscious bias if you will. >> Yeah those differently. But because of those real time data and feedback we're good able to you know keep ourself accountable. So just you know this is no longer just talk this is a real data you know in the real HR practices that we are already building into our day to day practice. So I think I'm very optimistic, this will take time but this is you know we're moving in the right direction. >> Historical moment in the world if you think about it. This is super important time. The inspiration and also the young women out there too and also for the men. They need to be aware as well because inclusion includes not just women it's everyone. That seems to be >> Absolutely. >> In fact a trend we had an interview on the Cube and our Simpson who works for Mozilla she's doing some work for Tech Nation, she said they're changing it from diversity inclusion to inclusion and diversity. They're flipping it around where inclusion leads diversity cause they want to lead with the message of inclusion; >> Yeah. >> as a primary message with diversity. So it's not just the diversity message it's inclusion. >> Yeah. >> Love that. >> Yeah the only thing I would add would be the phrase "She can be it if she sees it" I think having people like myself and Yanbing be visible role models it's very impactful, especially for young women to see you know women in tech leadership positions. It's hard to imagine yourself in a role if you don't see anyone similar to in a role. So I think the more that people like us and our peers get out there and really put an effort into being visible. >> Do you see the networks forming more, I mean is there more action flowing happen. Can you compare and contrast just even a few years ago is it on the rise significantly? >> I think it's on the rise. >> Yeah I do get us to be involved in a lot of opportunistic situations, yeah. >> And of course your Twitter handle puts it right out there, @ybhighheels. >> Yeah. >> Right, your not shy about it. >> Yeah, there's nothing shy about it. I realize you know Beth and I, we are both addressed in very feminine way. I do think. >> Your capabilities are off to chart you to great and impressive executives. >> Society is increasingly more inclusive about their notions of female tech leader. It's not just one size fits all and I think it's encouraging us to show who we really are and the authentic self and I think that's very important for young girls to see because I remember when I was a young girl I didn't go into tech expecting I do not get to be who I am >> Yeah and that shouldn't reflect your capability of anyway any kind and that seem to be the greater awareness. The Google memo that went around as all of it so getting us some great videos on Silicon Angle on that topic. Again you guys are great inspiration. We love working with you you guys are great executives. >> Thank you. >> Its great content. >> Your welcome. >> We super passionate about it. We'll be at Grace Hopper for our 4th year we do that. >> Fantastic. >> As we show every year, we're learning more and more and we're going to do a podcast for guys too. >> Nice. >> Different angle. >> Love that. >> A lot of guys want to do what to do. >> Okay that's great. >> Inclusion and diversity of course; I need the help. I'm John Furrier With Dave Vellante Here. Live at Vmworld. More coverage coming after this short break.

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube, covering VMworld 2017, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. (bright music) >> Welcome to VMworld 2017. This is the Cube. We are live in Las Vegas on day one of the event, a really exciting, high energy general session kicked things off. I'm Lisa Martin with my cohost, Stu Miniman. We're excited to be joined by two folks from VMware. We've got Cube alumni Yanbing Li, senior VP and GM of the storage and availability BU. Welcome back to the Cube. >> Good to be here. >> Lisa: And we've also got Matt Amdur, your first time on the Cube, principle VMware chief architect. >> Thanks for having me. >> We're excited to have you guys here so been waiting with baited breath, a lot of folks have, for what are VMware and AWS going to actually announce product-wise. Really exciting to see Pat Gelsinger on stage with Andy Jassy today. Talk to us about, as the world of hyper-converged infrastructure is changing, what does VMware cloud on AWS mean for, not just VMware customers, but new opportunities for VMware? >> Yeah, that's a great question Lisa. Let me get it started. You know, I think my biggest takeaway from the exciting keynote, a couple of things. One is private cloud is sexy again. You know, so we've been talking about cloud a lot, but there is so much opportunity and tremendous growth associated with private cloud, and certainly hyper-converged infrastructure being the next generation architecture shift is going to drive a lot of the modernization of our customers' private environment, so that's certainly very exciting. The other aspect of the excitement is how that same architecture and consistent operating model is extending into the cloud with our AWS relationship, and this is also why I have my colleague, Matt, here, because he's been the brain behind a lot of the things we're doing on AWS. >> Yeah, thanks so much, Yanbing, and I tell you, for years, it was like, ah, storage is sexy, storage is hot. Cloud's kind of sexy and hot, so we found a way to kind of connect storage into that. Matt, you know, a lot of people don't really understand what happened here. This isn't just, oh, you know, we're not layering, you know, VMware on top of the infrastructure as a service that they have. Last year, we kind of dug in a little bit with Cloud Foundation. Talk to us, what did it take to get this VMware cloud onto AWS, bring us inside a little bit, the sausage making if you would. >> I think Andy talked about this a little bit at the keynote this morning, where it's really been an incredible, collaborative effort between both engineering organizations, and it's taken a lot of effort from a huge number of people on both sides to really pull this off, and so you know, as we started looking at it, I think one of the challenges that we faced, and Andy mentioned this this morning was there was this really binary decision for customers. If you had vSphere workload, do you want them to bring them to the public cloud? There was nothing that was compatible. And so, we really sat down with Amazon and said, okay, how can we take advantage of the physical infrastructure and scale that Amazon built and provides today, and make it compatible with vSphere, and if you look at what we've done with VSAN on premise as an HCI solution, it's become a sort of ubiquitous storage platform, and it offers customers an operational and a management experience for how they think about managing their storage, and we can take that and uplift it into the cloud by doing the heavy lifting of how do we make VSAN run, scale, and operate on top of AWS's physical infrastructure. >> One of the things that I found was really interesting this morning was seeing the, I couldn't see it from where I was sitting, the sort of NASCAR slide of customers that were in beta. Talk to us a little about some of the pain points that you're helping with VMware cloud and AWS. What are some of those key pain points that those customers were facing that from an engineering perspective you took into the design of the solution? >> Sure, so I think if you look at it, some of the benefits that we see with public cloud infrastructure that our customers really want to take advantage of are flexibility and elasticity. One of the challenges that you have on premise today is if you need new hardware, you have to order it, it's got to ship on a truck, someone's got to rack it and hook it up, and if you're trying to operate and keep pace with your competition, and you have a need to allocate a lot of capacity to drive a project forward, that can be a huge impediment, and so what we wanted to do is make it really easy for our customers to configure, deploy, and provision our software. And so, one of the really interesting things about VMware managed cloud on AWS is that it's a managed service, so some of the things that, you know, we've talked about VCF and the things that we've done on premise to streamline physical infrastructure management is taken to the next level. Customers don't have to worry about managing the vSphere software lifecycle. VMware is now going to do that for them, and Amazon is going to manage the physical infrastructure, and that removes a lot of burdens and gives customers the opportunity to focus on their core business. >> If you think about, you know, Stu, you touched on Cloud Foundation, we were using Cloud Foundation to automate how our customer consumed the entire software-defined data center stack. And you think about moving that same goodness into, you know, the VMware cloud on database, and you know, really removing a lot of the complexity around managing your own infrastructure. And so that customer can truly focus on their value adds, through, you know, developing the next generation of applications that enable their business. It's been a great extension of what we're solving on premise to the public cloud. >> Yeah, I wonder if we can drill in a little bit deeper on this. So you know, most customers I think understand, okay, if I needed to set up a VSAN environment right, I got to get my servers, how long it takes, what skill set I had, virtualization admins have been doing this for a few years now, and congratulations, you've got the number up near 10,000 customers, which is, you know, great milestone there. Walk us through, you know, when we're saying okay, I want to spin it up. If I know, swipe a credit card and turn on a VM, is it as fast? And what is that base configuration, what kind of scale can it go to? >> Sure, so to start with, what was announced today for initial availability, you can come to the VMware portal, so if you come to our portal, you give us your credit card, obviously, and then you can provision between four and 16 nodes. So you pick how many nodes you want. And you give us a little bit of networking-related information so we can understand how to lay out IP address ranges so we're not going to conflict with what you have on premise. And then you click provision, and in a few hours you'll have a fully stood up SDDC. And so that's going to include a vCenter instance that we've installed, all of the ESXOs we've provisioned from Amazon, we install ESX, we configure VSAN for you. And it's basically like getting a brand new vSphere deployment, and you can start provisioning your VM workload as soon as it's ready. And then once it's there, if you want to grow your cluster, you can dynamically add hosts, on the order of about 10 minutes. And if you want to remove capacity, you can remove hosts as well. So it gives you that elasticity and flexibility from the public cloud. >> Awesome, so we're early with some of the early customers. I'm curious, do you have any compare contrast as to what they like about, you know, doing it the Amazon, you know, VMware cloud on Amazon versus my own data center? Of course there's things I could say, okay, I could spin it up faster, but I could turn it off and then not have to pay for it. What, are we at the point we understand some of those use cases to tell why they might do one versus the other? >> Yeah, I think lots of the customers interested in this new model are really liking that common operating experience. It has some of the flex of customers you've heard about this morning, you know, Medtronic for example. They are a VMware Cloud Foundation customer. They are running entire, you know, SDDC through VMware Cloud Foundation, but because they really enjoy that experience and that simplicity that brings, now they're extending that into the cloud. So they're also one of the earlier customers for VMware cloud on AWS. So having that common operational experience is a big value prop to our customers. >> And I think we really see customers wanting both, right? The customers, you mentioned before, the private cloud is sexy again. The customers who have a lot of workloads, that makes sense to run in a private cloud. But they also want the flexibility of how they can take advantage of public cloud resources. And so depending on the problem that they're trying to solve, they view this as a complement to their existing infrastructure. >> And I have to think, some of the services I have available are a little different. Things like disaster recovery, if I'm doing it in kind of that cloud operating model, a little different. I now have Amazon services I can use, and VMware announced a whole, what was it, seven new SaaS services which kind of spanned some of those environments. >> Yeah, so the SaaS services we announced, they are truly across cloud. Cause they not only limit to a vSphere power cloud, they truly are extending into this cross-cloud, multi-cloud world of, you know, heterogeneous type of cloud environments. And now, you know, you spoke about DR, and certainly for someone coming from the storage and availability background, you know, in terms of our, BU's role that we're playing in our cloud relationship, you know, certainly we are trying to provide the best storage infrastructure as part of our cloud service. But we are also looking at what are the next levels of data-related services, whether it's data mobility, application mobility, disaster recovery, or the futures of other aspects of data management. And that's what we've been focusing on. You know, we have lots of customers, you know, even thinking about what's happening with, you know, Hurricane Harvey, I still remember the Hurricane Sandy days. A lot of our site recovery manager customers told us, you know, how SRM has saved their day. We're seeing the power of a disaster recovery solution. And now with the cloud, you can totally leverage the economics and the flexibility and scalability that cloud has to offer. So those are all the directions we're working on. >> So we're coming up on the one-year anniversary of the closure of the Dell acquisition of EMC and its companies. Would love to understand, looking at this great announcement today, VMware cloud on AWS, from a differentiation perspective, what does this provide to VMware as part of Dell EMC, this big partnership with AWS? >> Yeah, so let me, you know, maybe take it back a step, not just the AWS relationship but really look more broadly, what we're doing together with Dell. And certainly, you know, starting with the storage business, we're doing amazing work around our entire portfolio of software defined storage, hyper-converged infrastructure. And the good thing is, as Stu pointed out, we're seeing tremendous growth in our core business around VSAN. You know, 10,000 customers, expanding rapidly. But we're truly firing from multiple cylinders of both consuming it as a software model as well as working with partner like Dell EMC, TurnKey appliance, such VxRail. They're seeing tremendous success. So we are extending into our partnership around data protection. This is why I'll be coming to the Cube with Matt Felon to talk about all the great things we're doing around data protection collaboration, both for on prem as well as in the VMware cloud for AWS. So lots of things happening in different parts of the business unit. So but coming back to VMware on AWS, I think we're thinking about leveraging the strength of our portfolios, say this is not just a full VMware stack, but there is some of the Dell technology IPs we're pulling in. So for example data protection, they're part of our ecosystem, being one of the very first partners, enabling data protection on top of AWS. Yeah, so Matt, anything to add? >> Yeah, I think, you know, when we look to what's made us so successful on premise, it's been that extended storage ecosystem of which Dell EMC is a huge part of. And we continue to see that value as we go to the cloud. Yanbing mentioned backup and disaster recovery as sort of the obvious starting points, but I think beyond that there's a bunch of technology that they have that's equally applicable whether or not you're running on premise or the public cloud. And the tighter we can integrate and the more we can take advantage of it, the more value we can derive for our customers. >> So VSAN 6.6 is now out. You know, any other things that we haven't talked about that you want to highlight there, and any roadmap items that you can share that are being kind of publicly discussed, you know, here at VMworld? >> So yeah, 6.6 was definitely a big hit, you know, with encryption and also lots of the cloud analytics and things we were doing has been really hitting, you know, the hard core of what our customers are looking for. So going forward with VSAN, we talked about AWS, our relationship with AWS for a long time, but the fundamental product-level innovation is happening inside VSAN as well. One of the big focus is really looking at our next generation architecture that truly enables the leverage of all the new device technology. You know, I keep saying, a software defined product is really driven by sometimes hardware innovation, and that's very true for VSAN. So at the foundational layer, we're looking at new hardware innovations and how to best leverage that. But moving up the stack, we're also looking at cloud analytics and, you know, proactive maintenance. I was just talking to one of our customers about what it takes to support, provide support in 2017. It's all these automatic intelligence, proactive, you know, you heard Pat talk about Skyline. This is a new proactive support approach we've provided, and there will be a lot of cloud analytics that's driving technology like that. >> I was going to say, on the analytics side, what are you hearing from customers with respect to what they're needing on analytics as they have this big decision to make about cloud, private, public, hybrid, what are some of the analytics needs that you're starting to hear from customers that would then be incorporated into that roadmap? >> So from our view, we're looking at lots of the infrastructure-level analytics. Certainly there is also lots of the application-level analytics. But from an infrastructure point of view, you know, to Matt's earlier point, customers do not want to really worry about their, you know, the plumbing around their infrastructure. So we're gathering analytics, we're pumping them into the cloud, we're performing, you know, intelligent analysis so that we can proactively provide intelligence and support back to our customers. >> I think it really, it helps customers to understand things about how their using their storage, how they're using their data, what applications are consuming storage, who needs IOPs, who has latency constraints, all that type of data. And being able to package that up and show it to customers in real time and help them both understand what they're currently doing and future planning, we see a lot of value in. >> Matt, I'm curious, one of the challenges you have as a software product is you need to be able to live in lots of different environments. Amazon is kind of a different beast, you know, they hyper-optimize is what I said. There's kind of misconception now. They're oh, they take, you know, white box and do this. I said, no, they will build a very specific architecture and build 10,000 nodes or more. Without sharing any trade secrets, any lessons learned or anything, you know, that kind of is like, wow, this was, you know, an interesting challenge and here's what we learned when you talk cause the challenge of our time is building distributed architectures. And I'd have to think that porting over to Amazon was not a, you know, oh, yeah, I looked at the code and everything worked day one. So what can you share? >> I think goes back to sort of the really interesting and tight collaboration from the engineering aspects. And it's really been phenomenal to see the level of detail that Amazon has in terms of how they operationalize hardware and what they can tell us about the hardware that they're building for us. And so I think it really highlights some of the value that you see in the public cloud, which is, it's not just about having physical infrastructure hosted somewhere else. It's about having a company like AWS that's understood how to deploy, monitor, and operate it at scale. And that goes to everything from how they think about, you know, the clips that are holding power cables into servers to how they think about SSDs and how they roll our firmware changes. And so from an engineering standpoint, it's been a great collaboration to help us see the level of detail that they go to there, and then we're able to take that into account for how we design and build solutions. >> Yeah, we are definitely taking all that learning into, you know, how to build cloud scale solutions that truly empower, you know, cloud scale operations. And lots of the operation learning, you know, that we get from this exercise has been just tremendous. >> Yeah, well one of the bits of news I saw is that VMware's IT is now running predominantly or all on VSAN, right? What can you tell us about that? Are there still storage arrays somewhere inside the IT? >> So we're extremely excited about this, and we have a visionary CIO, Bask Iyer, I know he was a Cube guest as well. So he's been really pushing this notion of VMware running on top of VMware. So we have 119 clusters, you know, 30,000 VMs, probably close to 1,000 hosts, and seven petabytes of data running on VSAN. And so if VSAN as a product doesn't hold up, you know, I get to experience it firsthand. So it's been pretty phenomenal to see that happen. We are also deliberately running a range of different versions of VSAN. There's, you know, some that are GA versions. There are some that are cloud edition that's yet to be made GA to our customers. So this really helps us develop much more robust software. If you see what's happening here in the hands on lab, that's being powered by VSAN as well behind the scenes. >> VMware's done a great job of leveraging kind of core competencies, like VSAN for the software defined data center. As you mentioned, 10,000 customers, I think Pat said adding 100 a week, >> Yanbing: Yeah. not sure if I heard that correctly. Wow, that's phenomenal. So as, and another thing that he said that was interesting, right before we wrap up here, is we're moving from data centers to centers of data. As customers are transitioning and really kind of figuring out what flavors of cloud are ideal for them, are you seeing any industries really leading the charge with respect to, for example, VMware cloud on AWS? Are you seeing it in, you know, we saw Medtronic, but health care, financial services, any industry specificities that you're seeing that are really leading edge that need this type of infrastructure? >> I think it's happening across many different industries. So tomorrow, I'm going to be in a session called Modernizing Data Center, but there is also lots of emphasis what's happening on the edge. So I have been exposed to customers from health care, customers from, airline customers, so we're going to be probably talking about examples of airbus 380, you know, the biggest airplane that's been ever built, and they have 300,000 sensors on the plane that's generating tons of data, and those data are being processed by technology like VSAN. And just, you know, stories across different industry. And I think that data center to edge story is very powerful. And this is also why the next generation architecture such as HCI make it happen. Clearly we've seen tremendous adoption in the data center. Now we're seeing adoption in the cloud. And I have to say, it's not just the VMware cloud on AWS. We have about 300 cloud provider partners to VMware that's adopted and deployed VSAN to different degrees. And now we're seeing it go to the edge. We have some amazing announcement this morning around HCI accelerator kit that is really providing a much more affordable solution to enable really edge use case. >> Fantastic, well tremendous momentum, great growth, we wish you guys the best of luck. Congratulations on everything announced today. And we hope you have a great rest of the show. Yanbing Li, Matt Amdur, thanks so much for joining us on the Cube. >> Thank you very much for having us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Woman: Absolutely. And we want to thank you for watching. I'm Lisa Martin with Stu Miniman, live from day one at VMworld 2017. Stick around, we'll be right back. (bright music)

>> Narrator: Live from Palo Alto, it's theCUBE, covering Women Transforming Technology 2017, brought to you by VMware. >> Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of the Women Transforming Technology conference held at VMware here in beautiful Palo Alto, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight. I'm joined by Yanbing Li, who is the senior vice president and general manager for storage and availability here at VMware. Thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having me, Rebecca. I'm so excited to meet you actually. I've done quite a few CUBE interviews. >> You're a CUBE veteran, yes, I know. >> But you're the first female host I got to talk to, so really excited meeting you. >> Well, the pleasure's all mine. >> Thank you. >> So Business Insider calls you one of the most powerful women engineers in the world, in Silicon Valley. It's exciting to be talking to you. VMware is committed to diversity and inclusion. We're here at a Women Transforming Technology conference. You're hosting the conference. Talk a little bit about your experience and what you're involved in, in terms of that emphasis on diversity and inclusion here. >> Yes, certainly being a part of VMware and certainly being a female engineering leader myself, this is very near and dear to my heart. My experience, actually involvement in women leadership initiative started many years ago when I was actually based in China. My career at VMware, I've been here for nine years. >> You led the Chinese operation for a while. >> Yeah, I was leading the China engineering operation in China for a few years, and when I was based in China, I started a series of women technology conferences in Beijing. So we started in 2011, and that quickly turned into an industry event, kind of very similar to what's going on here at Women Transforming Technology. So this has been certainly close to my heart, and I've been involved in starting the initiative in China. And when I moved back to Palo Alto, I have been part of the VM Women initiative. I was part of a dialogue circle, and this year, we expanded the initiative, or since last year, from just the women focus to now a much broader diversity focus and certainly being Chinese myself, I'm also representing the Chinese community at VMware. We have a Chinese VMware circle that create that community feeling for all the Chinese and Chinese Americans working at VMware. >> Can you talk a little bit about what you've observed with the women in China and the women here in Silicon Valley? Are the issues the same? Is the culture similar? What are your experiences? >> I think there is a lot more similarity than differences. China, there has been a stronger emphasis of women contributing to the society for the past 50, 60 years, so you see a higher percentage of women working. You see a slightly higher percentage of women in tech. But the issues are still the same. You know, how we deal with stereotype of women, especially how we overcome unconscious bias and how we overcome the lack of women in technology and lack of women in leadership. I think these issues definitely transcend culture and community. It was interesting, we hosted an APJ discussion on diversity. >> In China? >> In Sydney. >> Okay. >> So this was part of our APJ initiative. And there were tables of people from different countries talking about the women issue, the gender issue. And the simple question was, is there a glass ceiling in your country? And I guess every country's answer was yes, except for the country, the table of Japan because their answer was they didn't have a glass ceiling, they had a steel ceiling. >> Yeah. (laughs) >> But you get the point is, yeah, this is a issue that's everywhere. >> And did you find that your Chinese colleagues in China were as mobilized to work on them and to make changes? >> Yeah, I think definitely, you see that coming down from the leadership level. I think when you have initiatives like this, often sometimes, you have grassroot initiatives, but it's much more important to up-level that to a business focus. And I think that is what VMware is doing by starting VM Women several years ago and now extending that to VM Inclusion. At VMware, the leadership team definitely see this as a business imperative rather than just something we want to do good to the society. So there is a balance of trying to do good but also trying to do smart. You know, how we move the needle from a business outcome point of view. You know, we've been very open about our diversity data. We've been tracking them as part of leadership MBOs, so I'm excited to see the levels of investment and emphasis that VM as a company is putting on. >> As a leader, you are a senior vice president here. How do you make sure that you are, you're a woman, you're a Chinese woman, but we also know that we're not immune just because we're women to subtle biases, to discrimination. How do you work on yourself in your day-to-day practice as a leader and a manager? >> Yeah, I think it's... Along our career, we've seen a lot of things like sexism or how people apply unconscious bias toward women and certain stereotyped view of women. I think we've all experienced that. And just the, I can think of lots of examples on a daily basis. I was having dinner with a male coworker, which is a very important way for us to build strong relationships. >> Relationships, yeah. >> And as we were eating, we were mistaken as on a date. There's all these subtle things that reminds you somehow people see women not necessarily, even if you're having a business setting, they tend to not assume the same. So I think that's happening all the time. So my approach towards this has been recognizing that it happens and have a good way to defuse it because most people are doing it in a very unconscious way. And when you have a way to defuse it, you help have a positive impact on that person. Give you an example. I think for women, we are constantly introduced as a woman something. One year, I was speaking at an event, and when we were doing the rehearsal, a senior leader was introducing me as a woman engineering leader. So I just gently said, "Hey, look. "People can tell I'm a woman. "You don't have to say it." >> The dress gives it away. >> Yeah, and that made him become aware. Yeah, that's, the merit you're standing on that stage is not because of your gender or shouldn't be limited by your gender, rather than because of the message or the business or the technology that you're bringing to the audience. >> But that's not always easy for people to do, to use humor to defuse the situation. We just heard from Kara Swisher, the founder of Recode, and one of her pieces of advice was to be authentic, be genuine, be an original. Your Twitter handle is ybhighheels. I love it. I love it. >> Yeah. Thank you. >> But it is this mix of professionalism and femininity. Is that hard to do? Is it hard to pull off? >> It is hard, and I have debated over and over. Where I got my Twitter handle actually, one of my coworkers, my team members from many years ago said to me, "Yanbing, you're the high tech girl "in high heels." And I kind of liked it. It felt like very me. But there's been lots of people telling me, Oh, is that really good? Is that insulting? Or is that demeaning of the levels of the position, the type of job you have? And I actually felt otherwise. First of all, it is fairly authentic of me. If people who, I remember when I was leaving one job and my male boss was commenting, saying, "Yanbing, you didn't leave very big shoes to fill. "You leave very high shoes." >> Very tall shoes. (laughs) >> To fill. So I'm known to like high heels. And people, and I've also learned that once you establish your competence, this does not become something that is negative. And I've seen increasingly your colleagues or coworkers, people around you, want to embrace who you are rather than penalize for who you are, as long as you're confident about who you are. So I find that, yeah, having lots of fun with my Twitter handle. >> Right. Right, right. But as you said, as a woman, you have to also have proved yourself and that you are smart and just 'cause you wear high heels and you like high shoes, you also can get the job done. >> Yeah, and it's not just high shoes or whatever shoes of choice that people have. Yeah, and we are most comfortable and most successful when we are truly authentic to ourselves. >> Being who you are at work, at home, and in your private life. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So talk a little bit. The last time you were on the show, you talked about the hyper-converged world. Can you give us a little bit of an overview of what's going on in the software space and what you're working on now? >> Yeah, it's a very exciting time. Certainly as part of the storage business unit, a key initiative that we're working on is vSAN. This is VMware's leading product in a hyper-converging infrastructure. And what we're seeing certainly is this fundamental disruption that's going on in storage and data centers and infrastructure in general. And if you think about what is one of the highest gross market segment that's happening in a data center and infrastructure today is actually hyper-converge. As a market, this is quickly disrupting the traditional way of delivering storage, and it's growing at 60% for the next few years. And we as a business has been growing triple digits. Last year, we almost tripled our the size of the business, and we're seeing tremendous customer momentum and tremendous customer adoption and seeing hyper-converged is really becoming a mainstream way of delivering infrastructure to our customers. So a very exciting time. >> It is exciting, and yet, it's hard to think beyond hyper-converged because if everything then becomes one, what's next? What do you see down the pipeline two, three years from now, in terms of how businesses deal with their storage? >> Yeah, so certainly VMware are, being a leading infrastructure software vendor, we're going through a fundamental transformations of providing not just the best in class software for your data center, you know, how we modernize it, how we provide higher levels of automation in the private cloud but increasingly, there is a shift towards service-based consumption and cloud-based delivery of infrastructure. And I think the same thing is happening in the storage space. You know, certainly, with a hyper-converged infrastructure, not only we see a highly, high degrees of integration, automation, but we're also seeing the same architecture is extending into the cloud. And as we look at the cloud, we also constantly think about how do we take the value prop of just building the best infrastructure, the best storage, take that infrastructure plate now to an application plate or a data plate. And certainly, from a storage side, we're increasingly focusing on how we make data better managed, better governed, how we provide more insights through data. So taking that storage levels of innovation to focus on data. >> Understanding what the data is telling you and making that data work for customers. What are you hearing from customers in terms of what is keeping them up at night? >> Keeping our customers are all facing the challenge of how they keep up with their business demand. As we look at it, every company is now being transformed but into a digital business, and suddenly, the role of IT becomes so much more interesting and exciting and it's really about enabling business. And so, that put demand on how you deliver things in a much more agile fashion, how you keep costs down so that you can invest for really where the business value at is, and how you can ready yourself to adopt a new way of building your application for the future. So these are the typical challenges that we hear from our customer, is really to keep up with their business demand. And we are certainly excited to see VMware is playing a very vital role in helping solving our customers' digital transformation challenges. >> So the role of Silicon Valley looms large in our business world and also just in our imagination. What do you think the media get wrong about Silicon Valley? Or just, what do you think is the line out there that you wish you could dispel in the sense of this is not right, this is not the way it happens? >> Yeah, so I have lived in Silicon Valley for the past 20 years, except for a few years where I was back in Beijing. I decided to move back because I just feel for being someone in tech, this is really just an amazing place to live in. >> To be at the center, yeah. >> And it's definitely the epicenter. I have three children, and I just see how privileged they're growing up, being exposed in this very dynamic, innovative, vibrant environment. So this is what I absolutely love about Silicon Valley. But on the other hand, when you go outside the world, I do think it feels like it's almost like a little ivory tower. You know, there's so much technology, so much access, so much wealth being created here. Sometimes, we tend to forget life is different outside Silicon Valley. And so, I think having that perspective is very, very important. >> In terms of, you mentioned you're a mom, what do you wish for your children? I don't even know if you've got daughters or sons, but in terms of just getting back to why we're here, breaking barriers is a theme of this year's conference, Women Transforming Technology, what barriers do you want to see broken for your kids, for the next generation? >> Right, I'm excited. My kids, certainly being a part of Silicon Valley and being in this very dynamic environment right now, I think there is incredible levels of awareness in them about what's going on in the world. It was funny, I was just talking to my son. He's got a new shirt, and he's 13 years old. And I didn't know where the shirt had come from because I didn't buy it. That turned out, it's the first shirt he bought using his own money, and he bought a pink shirt. And he told me that he wanted to get a pink shirt because he wanted to break the gender stereotype. And I certainly wasn't thinking anything like that when I was 13 years old. And this is just being exposed to certainly what's going on in Silicon Valley, being exposed to working parents and being exposed to what's happening in the political arena, that led him to make a very interesting choice. And I have two 11-year-old girls, and I wish they can grow up, they love technology to begin with. Their Christmas wish was to build all of their Christmas cards using some online language. And so, we all got these electronic animated things from my girls, and they want to write video games. And so, I wish they grow up in an environment feeling when they have that social awareness, being female does not create a barrier for them to pursue what they love because they genuinely are excited and interested in technology. And I'm hoping that's the environment we're going to help create for them, but I'm also very excited to see, at a very young age, they have demonstrated levels of awareness that I certainly didn't experience when I was young. >> And just speaking about that level of awareness and you brought up politics and sort of what's happening on the national stage, so much about this administration really does go against what are core values of Silicon Valley and particularly in terms of immigration, in terms of gender issues, transgender rights, gay rights. Do you feel that Silicon Valley will take a leadership stance on these things and stand up? >> I think we should. We should because Silicon Valley has benefited tremendously from the success of our technology and success of our businesses. And so, with that, we have incredible power, incredible platform that's being. >> And a voice. >> And a voice, being created out of Silicon Valley. I think, yeah, we should play a role in advocating for what we believe in, just like VMware and other partner companies are taking a leadership position to advocating women transforming technology, the role women play in Silicon Valley and in technology at large. I wish all of the companies here have the willingness and you know, to really stand up for what we believe in. Yeah, so given the power that we have and given the influence that we have, not just in this country but all over the world. >> Yanbing Li, thank you so much for joining us. This has been a pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you, Rebecca. I'm so glad to have spoken to you. Thank you for having me back at theCUBE. >> Thank you. I'm Rebecca Knight. We'll be back with theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology here in Palo Alto.

(upbeat techno music) >> Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering VMworld 2018, brought to you by VMware and it's eco-system partners. >> Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage day three of three days of coverage, VMworld 2018 here in Las Vegas, CUBE wall-to-wall coverage, 94 interviews, two sets, our ninth year covering VMworld, I'm John Furrier with my co-host Stuart Miniman on this segment, our next guest is Milin Desai, who is the Vice President and general manager of Cloud Services at VMware, formerly driving the NSX business, been there for multiple years, eight years. Great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So you've seen the evolution, you've been there, you've been in the boat. NSX, on a good path, doing really well, cloud services, very clear visibility on what strategy is. >> Mm-hmm. >> Private and public, hybrid multi-cloud, validated by the leader AWS and Andy Jassy, again for the second year. So pretty clear visibility at least on what the landscape looks like. >> Mm-hmm. Multiple clouds, software driving all the value. What's the cloud services piece that you're running now? Take a minute to explain what the landscape looks like, what's your charter, what are you trying to do, and what's happening with news and announcements? >> Sure, so about two years back we started on this journey around cloud services. And the premise was that, increasingly, there are two trends taking place which is; SaaS delivered experiences for on prem. So how can we deliver SaaS experiences on prem? As well as the partnership with, you know AWS for VMware cloud on AWS. So the two things started coming together both in terms of a product opportunity, which is VMware cloud AWS. But overall delivering our capabilities as SaaS, both hybrid as well as in the public clouds. So cloud services is a portfolio that delivers VMware services from management, to security, to operations, as SaaS services to the private cloud as well as to the public cloud. >> Tom Corn, the Senior Vice President of general security projects, was just on theCUBE today as well before you came on. He said, I asked him for a prediction and I'll ask you at the end too, for a 2019 prediction, but he said, "I see the conversation starting to be "security as a service someday," and he's kind of like connecting the dots a bit. But that proves the point it's a SAS business model. The services need to be consumable and scalable. This is a key design criteria and a product guiding principal right, for you guys? >> Yes, So increasingly SaaS makes it easy. The value benefits on that is I don't need to operate, it just works and I can get the value out of what we are delivering. And that's really what's driving the adoption of SaaS. It's easy to use, it gets you to outcomes quicker, and I don't need to worry about the management elements of that and so whether it's you take our updates to cloud management, we announced Cloud Assembly, Service Broker, and Code Stream, all delivered as SaaS to our hybrid infrastructure as well as if you want to deploy workloads in AWS or Azure, same thing. AppDefense, Tom's product, is delivered as a SaaS service. VMC on AWS is a managed SaaS service. So you're seeing that come together as VMware. The idea is can we bring that experience on prem as well as in the hybrid cloud? >> Yeah, Milin really interesting topic because often what gets lost when we're talking about multi cloud is what really matters, is applications and the data that sits on top of it. Maybe walk through a little bit, my on premises vs my SASified stuff vs the cloud native and PKS. How much of the business is driven from all of these pieces? >> So the majority of our business right now, is on premise software. Where customers are building and operating the infrastructure with our software. Now the first evolution into SAS was actually with our service providers, who are using the subscription model to deliver VMware as a service to their end customers. And then the second iteration of that is VMware cloud on AWS, which is growing really well. Both in terms of adoption as well of number of customers and now you are seeing the next evolution. So I would say from a numbers standpoint it's low, but in terms of number of customers adopting it, that number is high. So whether it's cloud operations with Wavefront or the whole automations suite that was launched, AppDefense. We are starting to see the shift to SAS but I would say the majority of our customers are on on prem software with VMware cloud foundation which includes NSX, and a visualized management portfolio which has been driving the majority of the revenue. >> I got to ask you about NSX relative to the cloud services because one of the things we've been pontificating and analyzing is how multi cloud is really going to work and we always try to compare and contrast to networking because Stu and I love networking and storage and some of the infrastructure stuff but if you go back into the evolution of TCPIP and what that did for the industry and Gelsinger likes to talk about this too, is NSX the kind of enabler that TCPIP was? TCP and then you had IP, created a lot of value, in inter-networking. What does the customer challenge look like when you're doing multi-cloud? It's not trivial it's hard to do. Is there a inter-operability framework, is it NSX? What could that be? >> Great question. I think as we go from private, to public, to the edge the virtual cloud network is what connects it all together and so definitely from within the data center with now the Velo Cloud acquisition the WAN, and then layering it with analytics and observability with visualized network insight, the portfolio of NSX allows you to connect these disparate data islands and operate very seamlessly, in this hybrid cloud world. Now the same construct applies, when you go native public cloud, where you can connect into AWS or an Azure and that's where, again the Velo Cloud acquisition alongside how NSX is extending its security policy, into AWS and Azure so that you can get the same security posture on prem, at the Edge, in VMC on AWS, with our VCP providers, as well as Native AWS and native Azure. So definitely NSX is that connective tissue, that's why we call it the Virtual Cloud Network, connects the Hybrid Cloud to the Multi Cloud. >> Seamlessly? >> Seamlessly. >> One of the feedbacks I get from users is, you know multi-cloud is challenging. There's that big elephant, how do I get my arms around all of the pieces where'll my data lives? Maybe give us an update there. I did have a chat with Joe Kinsella on theCUBE yesterday. So if CloudHealth Technologies fits into that overall cloud management piece, I'm sure it does, and you can give a little bit of guidance? I'd like to understand how that fits. >> Yes, you know we talked a lot about SAS and delivering VMware services as SAS to vSphere customers but there's this other world where people are going native AWS, native Azure, native GCP. The interesting thing I tell folks is it's very easy to consume cloud but as you start consuming it, you start dealing with tens of thousands of objects, across multiple projects, hundreds of projects across thousands of users. And when you start looking at the problem statements, same things, visibility, lack of visibility, resource management, you tend to over provision to in the cloud, right? By now you're paying by the drip so there's a definite impact to the bottom line. End to end observability and then configuration compliance. Think about this, you're operating at 10X in terms of changes, the chances of making a configuration mistake like leaving an S3 bucket open, are quite high. >> We've seen examples of that, too. >> Exactly, many a CIO have been fired because of that issue. So what we've been seeing with our customers is this has become a data problem, right? So the acquisition of CloudHealth allows us to essentially provide a platform that has that data, and then deliver to our customers in the native cloud, visibility, I say cost management so using reserved instances over on demand, resource management, hey your old provision on your elastic block storage we can reduce the storage capacity and save money. I can optimize RDS better. Sequel right sizing in Azure, so resource management becomes very interesting. Returns on a typical customer with CloudHealth are upwards of 60%. When you take that into consideration with real time security configuration, Secure State was just announced in beta, this week so real time security configuration. When that mistake happens with an S3 bucket being open? Sub 10 seconds we will notify the user that there is a mis-configuration in the cloud, please go fix it. >> Yeah, I'm curious, one of the other challenges is when I have, especially using lots of different SAS providers, public cloud, private cloud, data protection is a big challenge there. I know VMware has a lot of ecosystem partners, one of the hottest things over the couple years. Is that primarily an ecosystem play? How does VMware position there? >> Yeah so in the hybrid cloud world, like you said we have a very strong ecosystem, multiple vendors here exhibiting, there will be some default elements that we bring into vSAN to help kind of the basics of data, you know back up and management but we will definitely continue to partner with our ecosystem when it comes to an aggregate stack of data management but there will be pockets of just simple back up capabilities that you'll start seeing in vSAN, I think we announced the beta of that this week. >> Talk about your organization, do the general managers, do you have a profit loss responsibility so do you have revenue? >> Yes. >> Talk about the team, how you guys are set up. How big is the team? What's the focus? >> Our team, there's two elements to my team. One is my team drives cloud service across VMware so there are folks developing services themselves. The size of the team is now 70 strong across product, marketing and engineering. And then I also work with my counterparts like Mark Lohmeyer, AJ Singh who are building services on our common platform, right? And it's an aggregate to the customer, they come to cloud.vmware.com they federate their enterprise identity, they log in, they see our catalog. It's like a Netflix-like catalog. You can subscribe to it, you get a common experience in terms of billing and essentially start using the services. So it's not only what my team builds but an aggregate what VMware is building and offering to our end users. >> And what go to market do you have? Which products are you doing that go to market for? >> It's all of our SAS based cloud services. We collectively drive the go to market for that as a team working with our corporate marketing team. >> Awesome. >> Yep. >> So that would be a combination of VMware on AWS, AppDefense, now Secure State, Wavefront, and very soon CloudHealth. >> Yeah, a lot of pressure. (laughing) >> Do the SAS product share, do they live in like the AWS marketplace, IBM, you know DOC or what? Where can they get all of them? >> Today you go to cloud.vmare.com and subscribe to them. Certain offers are starting to get into AWS Marketplace, so CloudHealth is actually in the AWS marketplace. >> Sure, sure. >> And we are looking at Wavefront, which is a hidden jewel in our portfolio is also we are thinking about how can get it into the respective marketplaces of Azure, GCP, and others. But today if you want to access any of these services, you simply go and trial it by just going to our website and starting a trial. >> So they've given you all the new stuff, make it happen. AWS, VMware, AWS, vice versa. RDS on premises, you doing that as well? >> Yes. RDS on vSphere, since the announce we've had phenomenal conversations over here. >> Yeah, it's really exciting, I think people don't understand how big this is. >> John, I had a phenomenal conversation with Yanbing and Christos from the storage and availability business who just really broke down how all of that worked in detail. >> Yes. >> Yeah. >> The customer interest is high. Someone asked me, why RDS? And they said it's such a hard problem and that was my point exactly, there is such a pain when it comes to managing databases and just like everything else, we started off the conversation, customers want a managed service. They don't want to deal with the intricacies of managing databases, they just want the outcomes from how they access databases. Amazon has solved it very elegantly with RDS, it's one of their most popular services. Why not bring it on prem? So that's been a great engineering partnership we are driving with them, and I'm really excited to bring it to market, shortly. >> Well we're looking forward to keeping in touch, we wanted to actually follow up with you on that. It's a story we're going to be following, certainly developing, it's big news, we love it. Thanks for coming on and spending the time. I got to get you to put a prediction out there for 2019. What do you see happening in 2019 that we're going to be talking about next year at VMworld? Personal prediction, could be a VMware prediction. You've seen a lot of what's going on with NSX, you see what's going on in the big picture, wholistically what is the prediction for 2019? >> It might be a boring prediction, but I fundamentally believe this notion of hybrid being bi-directional in nature. I think you'll see more of that. Even Google announced GKE on vSphere, as an example. So I think you will see more of that come through and it won't be a one way destination conversation that we keep having. And you will see VMware truly be a multicloud company. It won't matter if you're deploying the application in the native cloud, or in a vSphere based cloud. We will help the customer where they land the application. My firm belief is next year when we are here, we'll be talking about stories about how we are helping scale customers in Azure and AWS and GCP on one end, and about how we brought cloud on prem with services like RDS. >> Final question, I'm going to put you on the spot. What do you think is the biggest disruptive enabler for the next 10 years in this bi-directional multi cloud world? Can you point to one this that says, that's going to be the disruptive enabler for the next 10 to 20 years? Is there something out there you can point to, trend, technology, the standard? >> So the way I think about the world is a little bit differently in terms of I truly believe that we are getting inundated by data. I'm not talking about the data that you store in terms of running your business but in terms of the metadata that you run your operations and your infrastructure with. And I believe that the layer that will control that portion, the metadata of infrastructure and applications, we have not even begun to understand where that goes and then you apply AI and ML techniques to that? The idea of, I'll throw a term around here, self driving data centers and self optimizing applications I get really excited but it all begins with that data layer. And we are starting to put the beginning signs with CloudHealth, our private cloud assets to start that process. I'm really excited about how AI/ML meets that data layer to achieve those outcomes. >> It automates IT operations, sounds like automation's coming. Milin, thanks for coming on. Milin Desai, he's the vice president general manager of VMware's cloud services. The hottest area, it's emerging, it's got a lot of attention. We'll be following it, of course, on siliconANGLE and Wikibon and theCUBE. We're day three coverage here in the broadcast booth in Las Vegas in the VM village. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, stay with us for more after this short break. (upbeat techno music)

(intense orchestral music) >> Hi everybody this is Dave Vellante, welcome to this special CUBE presentation, where we're covering the Dell EMC Integrated Data Appliance announcement. You can see we also are running a crowd chat, it's an ask me anything crowd chat you can login with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and ask any question. We've got Dell EMC executives, we're gonna hear from VMware executives, we've got the analyst perspective, we're gonna hear from customers and then of course we're gonna jump into the crowd chat. With me is Beth Phalen, who is the President of Dell's EMC, Dell EMCs Data Protection Division, Beth, great to see you again. >> Good to be here, Dave. >> Okay so, we know that 80% of the workloads are virtualized, we also know that when virtualization came on the scene it caused customers to really rethink their data protection strategies. Cloud is another force that's causing them to change the way in which they approach data protection, but let's start with virtualization. What are you guys doing for those virtualized customers? >> Data protection is crucial for our customers today, and more and more the vAdmins are being expected to protect their own environments. So we've been working very closely with VMware to make sure we're delivering the simplest data protection for VMware, taking into account all of the cloud capabilities that VMware is bringing to market and making sure we're protecting those as well. We have to do that without compromise, and so we have some really exciting innovations to talk about today. The first of those is the DP4400, we announced this a few weeks ago, it is a purpose-built appliance for mid-sized customers that brings forward all of our learnings from enterprise data protection, and makes it simple and easy to use, and at the right price point for our mid-sized customers. We're the extension into VMware environments and extensions into the cloud. >> Okay, so I mentioned up front that cloud is this disruptive force. You know people expect the outcome of cloud to be simplicity, ease of management, but the cloud adds IT complexity. How are you making data protection simpler for the cloud? >> And the cloud has many different ways the customers can leverage it. The two that we're gonna highlight today are for those customers that are using VMware Cloud on AWS, we're now enabling a seamless disaster recovery option, so customers can fail over to VMware Cloud on AWS for their DR configurations. And on top of that, we're very excited to talk about data protection as a service. We all know how wildly popular that is and how rapidly it's growing, and we've now integrated with VMware vCloud Director to allow customers to not have to have a separate backup as a service portal, but provide management for both their VMware environments and their data protection, all integrated within VCD. >> Okay great, so, we know that VMware of course is the leader in virtualization, we're gonna cut away for a moment and hear from VMware executives, we're gonna back here we're gonna do a deep dive, as I say we got great agenda, we're gonna explore some of these things; and then of course there's the crowd chat, the ask me anything crowd chat. So let's cut over to Palo Alto, California, in our studios over there, and let's hear from the VMware perspective and Peter Burris, take it away, Peter. (intense orchestral music) >> Thanks, Dave! And this is Peter Burris, and I can report that in fact we have another beautiful day here in California. And also, we've got a great VMware executive to talk a bit about this important announcement. Yanbing Li is the Senior Vice President and GM for the Storage and Availability Business Unit at Vmware, welcome back to theCUBE Yanbing. >> It's great to be here, thank you for having me Peter. >> Oh absolutely we've got a lot of great stuff to talk about but let's start with the obvious question. Why is it so important to VMware and Dell EMC to work on this question, data availability, data protection? >> You know I have a very simple answer for you. You know Dell EMC has been the marketing leader for the past decade, and they are also a leading solution for all of our VMware environment, it's very natural that we do a lot of collaboration with them. And what's most important, is our collaboration is not only go-to-market collaboration, in labeling our joint customers, but also deep engineering level collaboration, and that is very very exciting. Lots of our solutions are really co-engineered together. >> So, that is in service to something. And now putting all this knowledge, all this product together to create a solution, is in service of data protection but especially as it relates to spanning the cloud. So talk to us a little bit about how this is gonna make it easier for customers to be where they need to be in their infrastructure. >> Certainly VMware has been also on a journey to help with our customers, their transition from data center to the cloud, and data protection is a very crucial aspect of that; and we're looking for simpler, scalable, more robust data protection solutions. You know VMware launched our VMware Cloud on AWS service last year, and Dell EMC has been with us since day one; they're the first solution to be certified as a data protection service for VMware Cloud on AWS. We also work with 4500 VCCP partners, this is the VMware Cloud partner program partners that, you know they are building cloud services based on VMware software defined data center stack. And we are also working with Dell EMC on integrating their data protection source with vCloud, their vCloud Director software, so that you know our customer has integrated data protection for our VCCP partners. So you know across all the cloud initiatives, we are working very closely with Dell EMC. >> So bringing the best of the technology, the best of this massive ecosystem together, to help customers protect their data and give them options about where they operate their infrastructure. >> Definitely. I'm personally very excited about their recent announcement that has been to the Data Domain Virtual Edition, where they're offering a subscription-based data protection bundle that can allow a VMware Cloud on AWS instance to back up their data, you know, using a subscription model, and you can backup 96 terabytes for any single SDC cluster in VMware Cloud on AWS. So they're definitely driving a lot of innovation not only in technology, but also in consumption, how to make it easier for customers to consume. And we're excited to be a partner with Dell EMC together on this. >> Fantastic! Yanbing Li, VMware, back to you, Dave! >> Thanks, Peter. We're back for the deep dive, Beth Phalen and joining us again, and Ruya Barrett, who's the Vice President of Marketing for Dell EMC's Data Protection Division, thanks guys for coming on. Ruya, let me start with you. Why are customers, and what are they telling you, in terms of why they're acquiring your data protection solutions? >> Well, Beth talked a little bit about the engineering effort, and collaboration we've been putting in place, and so did Yanbing with VMware, so whether that's integration into vCenter, or vSphere, or vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Automation or vCloud Director, all of this work, all of this engineering effort, and engineering hours is really to do two things: deliver simply powerful data protection for VMware customers >> But what do you mean by simple? >> Simple. Well, simple comes in two types of approaches, right? Simple is through automation. One of the things that we've done is really automate across the data protection stack for VMware. Where as 99% of the market solutions really leave it off at policy management, so they automate the policy layer. We automate not only the policy layer, but the vProxy deployment, as well as the data movement. We have five types of data movement capabilities that have been automated. Whether you're going directly from storage to protection storage, whether you're doing client to protection storage, whether you're doing application to protection storage, or whether you're doing Hypervisor Direct to application storage. So it really is to automate, and to maximize the performance of to meet the customer's service levels, so automation is critical when you're doing that. The other part of automation could be in how easy cloud is for the admins and users, it really has to do with being able to orchestrate all of the activities, you know very simply and easily. Simplicity is also management. We are hearing more and more that the admins are taking on the role of doing their backups and restores, so, our efforts with VMware have been to really simplify the management so that they can use their native tools. We've integrated with VMware for the vAdmins to be able to take backup and restore just a part of their daily operational tasks. >> So, when you talk about power, is that performance, you reference performance, but is it just performance, or is it more than that? >> That's also a great question, Dave, thank you. Power really, in terms of data protection, is three fold, it's power in making sure that you have a single, powerful solution, that really covers a comprehensive set of applications and requirements, not only for today, but also tomorrow's needs. So that comprehensive coverage, whether you're on-premise, or in the cloud is really critical. Power means performance, of course it means performance. Being able to deliver the highest performing protection, and more importantly restores, is really critical to our customers. Power also means not sacrificing efficiency to get that performance. So efficiency, we have the best source ID duplication technology in the market, that coupled with the performance is really critical to our customers. So all of these, the simplicity, the comprehensive coverage, the performance, the efficiency, also drives the lowest cost to protect for our customers. >> Alright, I wanna bring Beth Phalen into the conversation, Beth, let's talk about cloud a little bit. A lot of people feel as though I can take data, I can dump it into an object store in the cloud, and I'm protected. Your thoughts? >> Yeah, we hear that same misconception, and in fact the exact opposite is true; it's even more important that people have world class data protection when they're bringing cloud into that IT environment, they have to know where their data is, and how is protected and how to restore it. So we have a few innovations that are going on here for a long time, we've had our hyper cloud extensions, you can do cloud tiering directly from Data Domain. And now we've also extended what you can do if you're a VMware Cloud on AWS customer, so that you can use that for you cloud DR configuartion, fail over to AWS with VMware Cloud, and then fail back with vMotion if you choose to; and that's great for customers who don't wanna have a second site, but they do wanna have confidence that they can recover if there's a disaster. On top of that we've also been doing some really great with VMware, with vCloud Director integration. Data protection as a service is growing like crazy, it's highly popular around the globe as a way to consume data protection. And so now you can integrate both your VMware tasks, and your data protection tasks, from one UI in the Cloud Director. These are just a few of the things that we're doing, comprehensively bringing data protection to the cloud, is essential. >> Great, okay. Dell EMC just recently made an announcement, the IDPA DP4400, Ruya what's it all about? Explain. >> Absolutely, so, what we announced is really an integrated data protection appliance, turnkey, purpose-built, to meet the specific requirements of mid-sized customers, it's really, to bring that enterprise sensibility and protection to our mid-sized customers. It's all inclusive in terms of capabilities, so if you're talking about backup, restore, replication, disaster recovery, cloud disaster recovery, and cloud long-term retention, all at your fingertips, all included; as well as all of the capabilities we talked about in terms of enabling VM admins to be able to do all of their daily tasks and operations through their own native tools and UI's. So it's really all about bringing simply powerful protection to mid-sized customers at the lowest cost to protect. And we now also have a guarantee under our future proof loyalty program, we are introducing a 55 to one deduplication guarantee for those exact customers. >> Okay. Beth, could you talk about the motivation for this product? Why did you build it, and why is relevant to mid-sized customers? >> So we're known as number one in enterprise data protection we're known for our world-class dedupe, best in class, best in the world dedupe capabilities. And what we've done is we've taken the learnings and the IP that we have that's served enterprise customers for all of these years, and then we're making that accessible to mid-sized customers And there were so many companies out there that can take advantage of our technology that maybe couldn't before these announcements. So by building this, we've created a product that a mid-sized company, may have a small IT staff, like I said at the beginning, may have VM admins who are also responsible for data protection, that they can have what we bring to the market with best-in-class data protection. >> I wanna follow up with you on simple and powerful. What is your perspective on simple, what does it mean for customers? >> Yeah, I mean if you break it down, simple means simple to deploy, two times faster than traditional data protection, simple means easier to manage with modern HTML5 interfaces that include the data protection day-to-day tasks, also include reporting. Simple means easy to grow, growing in place from 24 terabytes up to 96 terabytes with just a simple software license to add in 12 terabyte increments. So all of those things come together to reduce the amount of time that an IT admin has to spend on data protection. >> So, when I hear powerful and here mid-sized customers, I'm thinking okay I wanna bring enterprise-class data protection down to the mid-sized organization. Is that what you means? Can you actually succeed in doing that? >> Yeah. If I'm an IT admin I wanna make sure that I can protect all of my data as quickly and efficiently as possible. And so, we have the broadest support matrix in the industry, I don't have to bring in multiple products to support protection on my different applications, that's key, that's one thing. The other thing is I wanna be able to scale, and I don't wanna have to be forced to bring in new products with this you have a logical five terabytes on-prem, you can grow to protecting additional 10 terabytes in the cloud, so that's another key piece of it, scalability. >> Petabytes, sorry. >> And then-- >> Sorry. Petabytes-- >> Petabytes. >> You said terabytes. (laughs) >> You live in a petabyte world! >> Of course, yes, what am I thinking. (all laugh) and then last but not least, it's just performance, right? This runs on a 14GB PowerEdge server; you're gonna get the efficiency, you can protect five times as many VMs as you could without this kind of product. So, all of those things come together with power, scalability, support matrix, and performance. >> Great, thank you. Okay, Ruya, let's talk about the business impact. Start with this IT operations person, what does it mean for that individual? >> Yeah, absolutely. So first, you're gonna get your weekends back, right? So, the product is just faster, we talked about it's simpler, you're not gonna have to get a PhD on how to do data protection, to be able to do your business. You're gonna enable your vAdmins to be able to take on some of the tasks. So it's really about freeing up your weekends, having that you know sound mind that data protection's just happening, it works! We've already tried and tested this with some of the most crucial businesses, with the most stringent service-level requirements; it's just gonna work. And, by the way, you're gonna look like a hero, because with this 2U appliance, you're gonna be able to support 15 petabytes across the most comprehensive coverage in the data center, so your boss is gonna think your just a superhero. >> Petabytes. >> Yeah exactly, petabytes, exactly. (all laugh) So it's tremendous for the IT user, and also the business user. >> By the way, what about the boss? What about the line of business, what does it mean to that individual? >> So if I'm the CEO or the CIO, I really wanna think about where am I putting my most skilled personnel? And my most skilled personnel, especially as IT is becoming so core to the business, is probably not best served doing data protection. So just being able to free up those resources to really drive applications or initiatives that are driving revenue for the business is critical. Number two, if I'm the boss, I don't wanna overpay for data protection. Data protection is insurance for the business, you need it, but you don't wanna overpay for it. So I think that lowest cost is a really critical requirement The third one is really minimizing risk and compliance issues for the business. If I have the sound mind, and the trust that this is just gonna work, then I'm gonna be able to recover my business no matter what the scenario; and that it's been tried and true in the biggest accounts across the world. I'm gonna rest assured that I have less exposure to my business. >> Great. Ruya, Beth, thank you very much, don't forget, we have an ask me anything crowd chat at the end of this session, so you can go in, login with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, and ask any question. Alright, let's take a look at the product, and then we're gonna come back and get the analysts perspective, keep it right there. (intense music) >> Organizations today, especially mid-sized organizations, are faced with increased complexity; driving the need for data protection solutions that enable them to do more with less. The Dell EMC IDPA DP4400 packages the proven enterprise class technologies that have made us the number one provider in data protection into a converged appliance specifically designed for mid-sized organizations. While other solutions sacrifice power in the name of simplicity, the IDPA DP4400 delivers simply powerful data protection. The IDPA DP4400 combines protection software and storage, search and analytics, and cloud readiness, in one appliance. To save you time and money, we made it simple for you to deploy and upgrade, and, easily grow in place without disruption, adding capacity with simple license upgrades without buying more hardware. Data protection management is also a snap with the IDPA System Manager. IDPA is optimized for VMware data protection. It is also integrated with vSphere, SQL, and Oracle, to enable a wider IT audience to manage data protection. The IDPA DP4400 provides protection across the largest application ecosystem, deliver breakneck backup speeds, more efficient network usage, and unmatched 55 to one average deduplication. The IDPA DP400 is natively extensible to the cloud for long-term retention. And, also enables simple, and cost effective cloud disaster recovery. Deduplicated data is stored in AWS with minimal footprint, with failover to AWS and failback to on-premises quickly, easily, and cost effectively. The IDPA DP4400 delivers all this at the lowest cost-to-protect. It includes a three year satisfaction guarantee, as well as an up to 55 to one data protection deduplication guarantee. The Dell EMC IDPA DP4400 provides backup, replication, deduplication, search, analytics, instant access for application testing and development, as well as DR and long-term retention to the cloud. Everything you need to deliver enterprise-class data protection, in a small integrated system, optimized for mid-sized environments. It's simply powerful. (upbeat music and rhythmic claps) >> Cool video! Alright, we're back, with Vinny Choinski, who is the Senior Analyst for the Validation Practice at ESG, Enterprise Strategy Group. ESG is a company that does a lot of research, and one of the areas is they have these lab reports, and they basically validate vendor claims, it's an awesome service, they've had it for a number of years and Vinny is an expert in this area. Vinny Choinski, welcome to theCUBE great to see you. >> How you doin' Dave? Great to see you. >> So, when you talk to customers they tell you they hate complexity, first of all, and specifically in the context of data protection, they want high performance, they don't wanna have to mess with this stuff, and they want low cost. What are you seeing in the marketplace? >> So our research is lining up with those challenges; and that's why I've recently done three reports. We talked to how EMC is addressing those challenges and how they are making it easier, faster, and less expensive to do data protection. >> So people don't wanna do a lot of heavy lifting. They worry about the time it takes to do deployment. So, what did you find, hands on, what'd you find with regards to deployment? >> Yeah, so for the deployment, we really yeah, we focused on the DP4400 and you know how that's making it easier for the IT generalist to do data protection deployment, and management. And what we did, I actually walked through the whole process from the delivery truck to first backup. We had it off the truck and racked up and powered up in about 30 minutes, so, it's a service sized appliance, pretty easy, easy to install. Spent 10 minutes in the server room kinda configuring it to the network, and then we went up to an office, and finished the configuration. After that I basically hit go on the configuration button, completely automated. And I simply monitored the process until the appliance was fully configured. Took me about 20 minutes, you know, to add that configuration to the appliance, hit go, and at the end, I had an appliance that was ready for on-site, and backups extended to the cloud. >> So, that met your expectations? It meshed with the vendors claims? >> It was real easy. We actually had to move it around a couple times, and you know, this stuff used to be huge you know, big box, metal gear. >> Refrigerators. (laughs) >> Refrigerators. It was a small appliance, once we installed it, got a note from the IT guy, had to move it. No tools, easy rack, the configuration was automated. We had to set network parameters, that's about it. >> How about your performance testing, what did that show? >> So we did some pretty extensive performance testing. We actually compared the IDPA Dell appliances to the industry recognized server grid scaled architecture. And basically we started by matching the hardware parameters of the box, CPU, memory, disk, network, flash, so once we had the boxes configured apples to apples shall we say, we ran a rigorous set of tests. We scaled the environment from a hundred to a thousand VMs, adding a hundred VMs in between each backup run. And what we found as we were doing the test was that the IDPA reduced the backup window significantly over the competitive solution. A 54 to 68% reduction in the backup window. >> Okay. So again, you're kind of expectations tied into the vendor claims? >> Yep. You know the reduction in backup time was pretty significant that's a pretty good environment, pretty good test environment, right, you got the hundred to a thousand VMs. We also looked at the efficiency of data transfer, and we found that IDPA outperformed the competitor there as well, significantly. And we found that this is do to the the mature data domain deduplication technology. It not only leverages, like most companies will, the VMware Changed Block Tracking API, but it has it's own client-side software that really reduces, significantly reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred over the network for each backup. And we found that reduced the amount of data that needs to be transferred against the competitor by 74%. >> What about the economics, it's the one of the key paying points obviously for IT professionals. What did you see there? >> Yep, so, there's a lot that goes into the economics of a data protection environment. We summed it up into what we call the cost to protect. We actually collected call home data from 15,000 Dell EMC data protection appliances deployed worldwide. >> Oh cool, real data. >> Real data. So, we had the real data, we got it from 15,000 different environments, we took that data and we we used some of the stuff that we analyzed, the price that they paid for it, how long has it been in service, what the deduplication rates they're getting, and then the amount of data. So we had all the components that told us what was happening with that box. So that allowed us to to distill that into this InstaGraphic that we see up here, which takes 12, shows 12 of the customers that we analyzed. Different industries, different architectures, on the far left of this InstaGraphic you're gonna see that we had a data domain box connected to a third-party backup application, still performing economically, quite well. On the far right we have the fully integrated IDPA solution, you'll see that as you put things better together, the economics get even better, right? So, what we found was that both data domain and the IDPA can easily serve data protection environments storage for a fraction of a penny per month. >> Okay. Important to point out this is metadata, no customer data involved here, right, it's just. >> It's metadata that's correct. >> Right, okay. Summarize your impressions based on your research, and your hands on lab work. >> Yeah, so I've been doing this for almost 25 plus years, I've been in the data protection space, I was an end user, I actually ran backup environments, I worked in the reseller space, sold the gear, and now I'm an analyst with ESG, taking a look at all the different solutions that are out there, and, you know data protection has never been easy, and there's always a lot of moving parts, and it gets harder when you really need a solution that backs up everything, right? From your physical, virtual, to the cloud, the legacy stuff, right? Dell EMC has packaged this up, in my opinion, quite well. They've looked at the economics, they've looked at the ease of use, they've looked at the performance, and they've put the right components in there they have the data protection software, they have the target storage, they have the analytics, you can do it with an agent, you can do it without an agent. So I think they've put all the pieces in here, so it's not an easy thing in my opinion, and I think they've nailed this one. >> Excellent. Well Vinny, thanks so much for for comin' on and sharing the results of your research, really appreciate it. Alright, let's hear from the customer, and then we're gonna come back with Beth Phalen and wrap, keep it right there. (upbeat techno music) >> I was a fortune 500 company, a global provider of product solutions and services, and enterprise computing solutions. The DP4400 is attractive because customers have different consumption models. There are those that like to build their own, and there are those that want an integrated solution, they want to focus on their core business as opposed to engineering a solution. So for those customers that are looking for that type of experience, the DP4400 will address a full data protection solution that has a single pane of glass, simplified management, simplified deployment, and also, ease-of-management over time. >> Vollrath is a food service industry manufacturer, it's been in business for 144 years, in some way we probably touch your life everyday. From a semantic perspective, things that weren't meeting our needs really come around to the management of all of your backup sets. We had backup windows for four to eight hours, and we were to the point where when those backups failed, which was fairly regular, we didn't have enough time to run them again. With Dell EMC data protection, we're getting phenomenal returns, shorter times. What took us eight hours is taking under an hour, maybe it's upwards of two at times for even larger sets. It's single interface, really does help. So when you take into account how much time you spend trying to manage with old solutions that's another unparalleled piece. >> I'm the IT Director for Melanson Heath, we are a full service accounting firm. The top three benefits of the DP4400 simplicity of not having to do a lot of research, the ease of deployment, not having to go back or have external resources, it's really designed so that I can rack it, stack it, and get going. Having a data protection solution that works with all of my software and systems is vital. We are completely reliant on our technology infrastructure, and we need to know that if something happens, we have a plan B, that can be deployed quickly and easily. (upbeat techno music) >> We're back, it's always great to hear the customer perspective. We're back with Beth Phalen. Beth let's summarize, bring it home for us, this announcement. >> We are making sure that no matter what the size of your organization, you can protect your data in your VMware environment simply and powerfully without compromise, and have confidence, whether you're on-prem or in the cloud, you can restore your data whenever you need to. >> Awesome, well thanks so much Beth for sharing the innovations, and we're not done yet, so jump into the crowd chat, as I said, you can log in with Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook, ask any questions, we're gonna be teeing up some questions and doing some surveys. So thanks for watching everybody, and we'll see you in the crowd chat.

(electronic music) >> Announcer: From the VMware campus in Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE! Covering women transforming technology. >> Hi, welcome to theCube. Lisa Martin on the ground at the 3rd Annual Women Transforming Technology event at VMware in Palo Alto, and I'm joined by an author and a senior VMware engineer, Pratima Rao Gluckman. Welcome to the Cube, Pratima. >> Thank you, Lisa. It's great to be here >> It's great to have you here. So you have been an engineer here for about ten years. You knew from when you were a kid, love this, engineer, you knew you wanted to be that. You fell in love with your first programming class. It was like a Jerry McGuire, you complete me kind of moment I'm imagining. Tell me a little bit about your career in engineering and specifically as a female. >> Okay, so I was raised, born and raised, in India, and I grew up in an environment where I was gender blind. You know, my oldest sister played cricket for the country. >> Lisa: Wow! >> And it was a man's game! You know and a lot of people kind of talked about that, but it wasn't like she couldn't do it, right? So, I always grew up with this notion that I could do anything, and I could be whoever I wanted to be. And then I came to the United States, and that whole narrative stayed with me, the meritocracy narrative. Like you work hard, you know, society, the world will take care of you, and good things will happen, but it wasn't until 2016 was when I had this aha moment, and that's when I suddenly felt, suddenly I was aware of my gender, and I was like, okay I'm a female in tech, and there's lots of challenges for women in tech. And I didn't quite realize that. It was just that aha moment, and VMware has been a great company. I've been with VMware for nine years, I started as an engineer, and I moved into engineering management. We had Diane Greene who founded the company, the culture was always meritocratic, but I think something in 2016 kind of made me just thinking about my career and thinking about the careers of the women around me, I felt like we were stuck. But at the same time be focused on the women that were successful, for instance Yanbing Li, who's our senior VP and general manager of our storage business. And we were talking about her, and I said, this is what I said, I said, "There are some women who are successful despite everything "that we're dealing with, and I just want "to know their stories, and I'm going to write this book." The moment I said that it just felt right. I felt like this was something I wanted to do, and the stories in this book are inspiring stories of these women, just listening to Laila Ali this morning, her inspirational story, and this book has around 19 stories of these executive women, and they're just not role models, I mean every story offers strategies of how to thrive in the tech world. >> So interesting that first of all I love the title, Pratima, of this book, "Nevertheless She Persisted." So simple, so articulate, and so inspiring. So interesting, though, that you were working as an engineer for quite a few years before you realized, kind of looked around, like, whoa, this is a challenge that I'm actually living in. Yanbing is a CUBE alumni, I love her Twitter handle. So you said all right, I want to talk to some women who have been persistent and successful in their tech careers, as kind of the genesis of the book. Talk to us about, maybe, of those 19 interviews that range from, what, c-levels to VPs to directors. What are some of the stories that you found, what kind of blew your mind of, wow, I didn't know that you came from that kind of background? >> So when I started off I was very ambitious. I said I'd go interview CEO women, and I did a lot of research, and I found some very disturbing facts. You know, Fortune Magazine lists Fortune 500 companies, and they rank them based on their prior year's fiscal revenues, and from that data there were 24 women CEOs in 2014. That number dropped to 21 in 2015, and it dropped again in 2016, but it went up slightly in 2017 to 32 women, which is promising, but back in 2018 we're down to 24. So we have very very few women CEOs, and when I started off I said I'll talk to the CEO women, and I couldn't find any CEO women, my network, my friends' network, And so I dropped one level and I said let me go talk to SVPs and when I looked at VMware and VMware's network, Yanbing was one of them, so she's in the book, and then I reached out to contacts outside of my network. So I have some women from LinkedIn, I have Google, I have Facebook, I have some women from startups. So I have around four CEOs in the book, I've got, and what's great about this book is it's got a diverse set of women. Right? They have different titles; I've got directors, senior directors, VPs, Senior VPs, GMs, and CEOs. And some of them have PhDs, some of them have a Master's Degree, and some actually don't have formal training in computer science. I thought this would be interesting because a woman with any background can relate to it. Right? And so that was helpful. And so that's kind of how I went off and I started to write this book. And when I interviewed these women, there was a common theme that just kept emerging, and that was persistence. And they persisted against gender bias, stereotype threat, just the negative messages from media and society. I mean like Laila Ali was talking about just even the messages she got from her dad. >> Right. >> Right? Someone who was so close to her who basically said "Women can't box." And that didn't stop her; I mean she persisted. When I was listening to her, she didn't use the word, but, you know, she said she was believing in herself and all that, but she persisted through all those negative messages, right? And she said no one can tell her what to do. (laughs) >> Yeah her confidence is very loud and clear, and I think that you do find women, and I imagine some of them are some of the interviewees in your book, who have that natural confidence, and as you were saying when Muhammad Ali was trying to talk her out of it, and trying to, as she said, "He tried to get me think it was my idea," but she just knew, well no, this is what I want to do. And she had that confidence. Did you find that a lot of the women leaders in this book had that natural confidence? Like you grew up in an environment where you just believed "I can do this, my sister's playing cricket." Did you find that was a common thread, or did you find some great examples of women who wanted to do something, but just thought "Can I do this?" And "How do I do that?" What was the kind of confidence level that you saw? >> I was surprised because I had a question on imposter syndrome, and I asked these women, Telle Whiteney, who's the CEO, she was the CEO, ex-CEO >> Lisa: Grace Hopper >> Yes. The founder of Grace Hopper. I asked her about imposter syndrome and this is what she told me, she said "I feel like I'm not good enough" and that actually gave me goosebumps. I remember I was sitting in front of greatness and this is what she was telling me. And then I asked her "How do you overcome it?" and she said "I just show up the next day." And that actually helped me with this book because I am not an author. >> That's persistence. >> I mean I am an author now but 2 years ago when I started to write this, writing is not my forte. I'm a technologist, I build teams, I manage teams, I ship products, I ship technical products, but everyday I woke up and I said, "I'm feeling like an imposter." It was just her voice right? Yanbing also feels the same way, I mean she does feel times where she feels like, "I'm lacking confidence here." Majority of the people actually, pretty much all the women, this one woman, Patty Hatter, didn't feel like she had imposter syndrome but the rest of them face it everyday. Talia Malachi who's a principal engineer at VMWare, it's very hard to be a PE, she said that she fights it every day, and that was surprising to me, right? Because I was sitting in front of all these women, they were confident, they've achieved so much, but they struggle with that every day. But all they do is they persist, they show up the next day. They take those little steps and they have these goals and they're very intentional and purposeful, I mean just like what Layla said, right? She said, "Everything that I've done in the last 20 years "has been intentional and purposeful." And that's what these women did. And I learned so much from them because 20 years ago I was a drifter (laughs) you know I just kind drifted and I didn't realize that I could set a goal and I could reach it and I could do all these amazing things, and I didn't think any of this was possible for me. But I'm hoping that some girl somewhere can read this book and say "You know what this is possible", right? This is possible and you know role models, I think we need lots of these role models. >> We do I think, you know imposter syndrome I've suffered for it for so long before I even knew what it was and I'll be honest with you even finding out that it was a legitimate issue was (exhales) okay I'm not the only one. So I think it's important that you, that these women and youth are your voice, in your book, identified it. This is something I face everyday even though you may look at me on the outside and think, "She's so successful, she's got everything." And we're human. And Laila Ali talked about of having to revisit that inner lawyer, that sometimes she goes silent, sometimes the pilot light goes out and needs to be reignited or turned back up. I think that is just giving people permission, especially women, and I've felt that in the keynote, giving us permission to go, "Ah, you're not going to feel that everyday, "you're not going to feel it everyday." Get up the next day to your point, keep persisting and pursuing your purpose is in and of itself so incredibly empowering. >> Right but also imposter syndrome is good for you and I talk about that a little bit in the book. And you know why it's good for you? It's you getting out of your comfort zone, you're trying something different, and it's natural to feel that way, but once you get over it, you've mastered that, and Laila talked about it too today she said, "You get uncomfortable to the point "where you get comfortable." >> Lisa: Yes. >> So every time that you find that you have this imposter syndrome, just remember that greatness is right around the corner. >> Yep. I always say "Get uncomfortably uncomfortable". >> Pratima: Yes. >> And I loved how she said that today. So one of the big news of the day is VMWare with Stanford announcing that they are investing $15,000,000 in a new Women's Leadership Innovation Lab at Stanford. Phenomenal. >> Pratima: Yes. >> And they're really going to start studying diversity and there's so many different gaps that we face, wage gap, age gap, gender gap, you know mothers vs motherless gap, and one of the things that was really interesting that, I've heard this before, that the press release actually cited a McKinsey report that says, "Companies with diversity "on their executive staff are 21% more profitable." >> Yes. >> And that just seems like a, no duh, Kind of thing to me for organizations like VMWare and your other partners in this consortium of Wt Squared to get on board to say, "Well of course." Thought diversity is so important and it actually is demonstrated to impact a companies' profitability. >> Right, yeah. And that's true, I just hope that more people listen to it and internalize it, and organizations internalize that, and what VMWare's doing is fantastic. I mean I'm so proud to be part of this company that's doing this. And you Shelly talked about change right? She said, "I think, right now the way I feel "about this whole thing, is we need to stop talking about "diversity and inclusion, we just need to say "enough is enough, this is important, let's just do it." >> Lisa: We should make this a part of our DNA. >> Exactly. Just make it, why do we have to fight for all this, right? It's just pointless and you know, men have wives and daughters and mothers and you know, It impacts societies as a whole and organizations, and we have so much research on this and what I like about what the Stanford Research Lab is doing is, they're actually working with woman all the way from middle-school to high-school to the executive suite, and that's amazing because research has now shown, there was a report in March 2014 by a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, for Judith Warner, and so she documented, just with the rate of change, like I talked with all the percentages and the number of women CEOs, just with that rate of change, the equality of men and women at the top will not occur until 2085. >> Lisa: Oh my goodness. >> That's 63 years from now. That means all our daughters would be retired by then. My daughters was born on 2013 and so she won't live in a world of female leaders that's representative of the population. And so that realization actually really, really, really broke my heart and that made me want to write this book, to create these role models. And what Stanford is doing, is they're going to work on this and I'm hoping that they can make that transition sooner. Like we don't have to wait 'till 2085. I want this for my daughter. >> It has to be accelerated, yes. >> It has to be accelerated and I think all of us need to do that, our daughters should be in the 20s, 30s when this happens, not when they're in their 70s. >> Lisa: And retired. >> And retired, I mean we don't want that. And we don't know how that number's going to get pushed further, right? Like if we don't do anything now... It. (exhales) >> Lisa: Right. 2085 becomes, what? >> I know! It's insane. >> In the spirit of being persistent, with the theme of this 3rd annual Wt Squared being Inclusion in Action, you're a manager and in a people or hiring role, tell me about the culture on your team and how your awareness and your passion for creating change here, lasting change. How are you actually creating that inclusion through action in your role at VMWare? >> So what I do is when I have to hire engineers on my team, I talk to my recruiter, have a conversation, I'm like, "I need more diversity." It's just not women, I want diversity with the men too. I want different races, different cultures because I believe that if I have a diverse team I'm going to be successful. So it's almost like I'm being selfish but that is very important. So I have that conversation with my recruiters, so I kind have an expectation set. And then we go through their hiring process and I'm very aware of just the hiring panel, like who I put on the panel, I make sure to have at least a women on the panel and have some diversity. My team right now is not really that diverse and I'm working hard to make that because it is hard, you know the pipeline has to get built at a certain point, and then start getting those resumes, but I try to have at least one female on the panel, and during the selection process the first thing I'll tell them is, let's get the elephant out of the room, age, gender, whatever, like let's take that out, let's just talk about skills and how well this person has done in an interview. And that's how I conducted and you know I've had fairly good success of hiring women on the team. But I've also seen that it's hard to retain women because they tend to drop-out faster than the men and so it's constant, it's just constant work to make that happen. >> Yeah. I wish we had more time to talk about retention because it is a huge issue. So the book is Nevertheless, She Persisted. Where can people get a copy of the book? >> So you can get it on Amazon, that's, I think, the best place to get it. You can also get it from my publisher's site which is FriesenPress. >> Excellent well Pratima thank you so much for stopping by. >> Thank you. >> And sharing your passion, how your persisting, and how you're also helping more of us learn how to find that voice and pursue our passions, thank you. >> Thank you. >> We want to thank you for watching. We are TheCUBE on the ground at VMWare for the Third Annual Women Transforming Technology Event. I'm Lisa Martin thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Palo Alto, it's theCUBE, covering Women Transforming Technology 2017, brought to you by VMware. >> theCUBE's coverage of Women Transforming Technology, held at VMware's campus here in Palo Alto, California. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, joined by Jeff Frick. We are here at the conference. It starts today. It's a one-day event. >> Right. >> And we just heard Kara Swisher, who is a journalistic hero of mine, and she gave a great, rousing, funny, timely, topical, political keynote. What'd you think? >> Well, she's been covering for so long. I read aol.com way back when, and I actually did an internship at AOL, I think in '96, back in the days when they were shipping, shipping CDs, so it's so fun to put her together with kind of that. >> Right. >> Seminal moment in time. >> She's a veteran. Exactly. >> She's terrific. She followed the characteristics that she outlined in her keynote, which is be true to yourself and don't be an asshole but don't really care what other people think. Be true to yourself. And she was that through and through. It's the first time I've actually ever seen her speak. It was a lot of fun. >> She's a great, really dynamic, funny, self-deprecating but also a bit of an ego herself. >> Oh, absolutely. >> I enjoyed particularly, as a fellow journalist, how she took Silicon Valley to task a few times, just talking a little bit about the naval gazing the Silicon Valley does, how badly they want to talk about the products and the process when really, the end users pretty much just care about, does it work, what's it going to do? >> Right, and two, it's kind of good news, bad news. With Trump, it's a never-ending source of good content for journalists, never have to wake up in the morning and think of a hard story to cover. And now, what's going on unfortunately with Uber, which as she said, is like somebody falling down a flight of stairs and they just keep falling and falling and falling. Big post that came out last week on LinkedIn, it got pretty viral, widespread, and then apparently another one and lord knows, I'm sure there's plenty more to go. And she really called out that she's trying to make people take a stand publicly against things that are not right and to really take a position, use your position of power to try to, as she said, help people with afflictions and afflict people that don't need the help. >> Yeah, comfort. >> Yeah, comfort those with afflictions. >> And afflict the comfortable. Yeah, no, I think it's a great point, in terms of here you Silicon Valley captains of industry, you are powerful people, you run powerful companies, act like it. >> Right. >> Act like it. And take up these causes that Trump is certainly taking up and particularly since they are so core to the values of Silicon Valley. These are gender issues, immigration, gay, transgender, and start taking a stance and stand up. >> Right. And so, we're excited to be here. This is, I guess, the second time they've had the Women Transforming Technology conference. We actually covered a VM women at a VMware show a couple years ago, and the Clayman Institute was there. So we're excited to be back. A full day of interviews, really glad to have you out and again, welcome to California from the East Coast. >> Thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here. >> But it's a full line-up. We're going wall to wall and ending the day with I know someone that you're really looking forward to. >> A feminist icon, Gloria Steinem. And I also think that kudos to VMware and to the other sponsors of this conference for choosing her. She's not an obvious choice for a Women Transforming Technology conference closing address, but she really is going to take on so many of these important issues of the day. >> Okay, so any particular guests that you're most excited about today? >> I mean, there's so many. I am excited to talk to the women at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research. >> Yeah, Lori's fantastic. >> Yeah, Lori's going to be fantastic. Yanbing Li, she looks really interesting and a dynamic speaker, I know she's been on theCUBE before. >> Right, right, many times. >> Yeah. >> Alright, super. Well, I think they are just about ready to get out of the keynote, so we should probably. >> Excellent. >> Get ready for our first guest. >> Thank you so much. Great. >> Alright. >> We'll see you back here soon.

>> Narrator: Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas, it's theCube, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. >> Hello, welcome back everyone. We're live here at VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas, the Mandalay Bay Convention Center. We're actually in the hang space, broadcast booth It's theCube's SilliconANGLE's flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier and my co-host Stu Meneman, our next guest, Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware. Great to see you again. Every VMworld, every year that we've done the VMworld, you've been on theCube. >> Well, it's always a pleasure. You guys are fun. You do your homework. I enjoy our time together, and I can't imagine VMworld without theCube. Look, we are really impressed with the vision you've laid out, because the number one question we get asked on theCube and in backchannels like CrowdChat and Twitter, is VMware ecosystem is looking for the straight and narrow, they want that, they want to see the path, the 90-mile stair if you will, so they can actually accelerate their business. >> Pat: Yeah. >> Can you laid that out, and just quickly review what your key points were for the folks that didn't capture the full keynote. >> Well, clearly we said, boy, we gave clear data with regard to what the cloud market looks like, what it's going to look like today, 2021, 2030, crossover points, and really the key summary of that is it's a complex world. It's going to be a multi-cloud environment for our customers, and they want to know, how do I not only build hybrid clouds, private clouds, and how do I take advantage of public clouds? And we gave a comprehensive view of what that looks like, the cross-cloud architecture. Here's a way that we can bring all cloud embodiments into a common framework. Cross-cloud architecture, two big components are part of it, build your private cloud, enable that as a service, that's a cloud foundation, bring it together, vSAN, vSphere, NSX, along with new lifecycle management capabilities, making that easy, do it as a service with IBM and our partnership that we announced there, but we expect many more of those with other vCloud Air Network partners, and then the cool new Cross-Cloud Services. Make those available, embrace any cloud, and then give our enterprise customers the tools to manage in this cross-cloud or multi-cloud environment. >> John: What's the catalyst for this announcement? Was it an epiphany, was it more that the market was ready for it? Because now, multi-cloud, but how you talk about it, any device anywhere, that's been the previous message. But now it catalyzes around this positioning. What was the moment of truth where you said okay, this is, we're going with this. It doesn't seem like you're betting the ranch on this, but it is betting the ranch on this in a way, because this is, as you said, the future, and it's going to be mostly your journey. So why did it come together? >> A couple of things happened. If you remember last year's VMworld, we did this little NSX demo where it says, we can connect NSX onto the cloud, you remember that? >> Yeah. >> Literally, Guido comes into Raghu and I, about two weeks before VMworld last night, and he says "we've got to work it. And can I demo it in my session?" Right, at the thing. Raghu looked at each other and he says, "Okay, let's do it. Let's see how people respond to it." So that was one catalyst. The second catalyst, we had a couple of customer meetings where the customer said to us, and he says, "This is my best. I'm doing this on Amazon, I'm exploring Azure over here, I've got a boatload of VMware, I'm doing this many- help me solve these problems. So it was clearly customer feedback, and there's a vibrant response we had from this little last-minute demo that we did at last year's VMworld, and sort of out of that, we said, "Let's really take this seriously. Let's go dive deeply into it." And as Guido said in the keynote, we've now talked to about a couple hundred customers and a huge response, and some, you know, usually when you do a cool new product, people say let me try that. In this case, the response we've gotten is, I need that now. I mean, it's a very definitive response. These are the kind of things I need to manage today's problems, so I guess Guido's already late in getting it done, so I've got to crack the whip harder and get this in the market. >> So it's not so much retooling, though we did talk about yesterday at the things, you're kind of mid-flight but you're adjusting to the market. >> Absolutely. Absolutely. And clearly our cloud journey's been one where, you know, if you go back and I gave some of the data 2011, no one expected the public cloud to be where it was, where it is today. I mean, it clearly accelerated faster, some of the ease of use, efficiency characteristics, hey, this is a capability that nobody quite expected to grow this rapidly. And it's now permeated Enterprise customers who are starting to take advantage of it. But they don't have the tools to really take advantage of it. >> So some key leads we were reading yesterday in your keynote, you know we always like to read between the lines, kind of like the messaging inside of it. >> Sometimes you get it right, sometimes, you know. >> We get it right most of the time. Your comment, your sit-down with Michael Dell was really interesting, okay. Because this is an open ecosystem play. His first point was about open ecosystem. You've been banging on this from day one since you've been CEO of VMware, since the throw of the first pitch of the NetApp event that got viral with that jersey on. >> I went to the NetApp customer partner event last night, every year I'm there as well. Just like theCube, I go to the NetApp event. >> He could say that you have been hardcore about open ecosystem from day one, and with the merger now set for the 7th, the merger that you can transact on the 7th, you still want to be independent. The open ecosystem is super important to you, and Michael, I heard it right from his mouth. Share some color on why and how that's going to evolve. Will everyone have untempered access to VMware, will all partners have the same level of access and visibility? >> The simple answer is yes. We're going to continue exactly on that strategy as we go forward. And clearly I'm going to do more with Michael and the Dell team, you know, as we see that going forward. But it's incumbent upon us, even as we do more with Dell, that we lean in more aggressively to our HP, to our Lenovo, to our Fujitsu, and our other partners as well. So we see that as a critical part. And I say the VMware ecosystem is evolving. Five years ago, would you have had the cadre of security and networking vendors? No. Would you have expected to have all the system integrators? No. I mean, we're clearly expanding. Service provider partners, our ecosystem has broadened our product portfolio, it's becoming a broader statement as well. So that's a commitment. We're going to remain a platform play, an ecosystem play, and obviously, with Michael's comments onstage, he's cheering us on. He's saying, I'm going to grow my business with VMware faster, and I hope all of the other ecosystem partners grow faster than I do. >> Is this going to be a persona change? Because now, if you look at VMware's ecosystem, which has been robust, there's some good salivation going on, there's a change-up as the ecosystem shifts. vCenter was once the big thing, now you've got NSX and all this other stuff in the cloud. Is there a persona changeover in who the target customers are in the ecosystem? >> Well, clearly, I mean, the customer's the same. It remains sort of that IT buyer, which increasingly, as I talked about in the keynote, is becoming a business buyer, but it's that core IT Enterprise customer. We're not a consumer company, we're not an app company, we're an infrastructure company and we're going to satisfy that broadly across the industry. >> John: Yeah. >> But in that context, I mean, look at it. You know, over here we have the Internet of Things. Wow, you know, we have the NFV zone. We're having a broader and broader set of who is our ecosystem, and that's absolutely going to continue as we go forward because solutions to things that we do are permeating more and more of the entire business landscape as we go forward. It's a really fun time. You know, even though I like to joke with Michael that he was younger when I first met him. And against that, you know, he and I have both been at this for over three decades. But in many regards, it feels like we're just getting started. It really is a fun period. >> So Pat, the management suite has been a challenge for the industry in general. VMware has, as John said, strong presence with vCenter. As you start reaching out to some of these environments, why does VMware kind of have the right to think that it's going to be at the center of this discussion for some of your customers, especially as they talk about like Microsoft, they've got strong pieces there. Big partners like Intel, Amazon in the play, so why VMware? >> Well, I think there's a couple of aspects to it. And, who is better to be a neutral player, to enable people to have cloud freedom? Right? If you just start with that question, and we'd say hey, we enable people to have hardware freedom. It's in our ethos to have this platform play, to have a broader ecosystem, open APIs, it's what we do. And in the cloud world, hmm, Amazon, okay, they have a legitimate role. But are they going to be the best ones to do private and public, or enable Azure or AliCloud? I think we have a very legitimate position there to say, hey, we're a neutral player, we can be cross-player, cross-industry. Secondly, the technology assets that we have, what we demonstrated on stage yesterday with Guido, think if you didn't have NSX and vRealize and some of the storage assets? That was many, many years of engineering and we pulled all of those pieces together for a comprehensive demonstration of all of those pieces in nine months. That's because we have a rich set of technologies that we can bring to this Cross-Cloud Services. >> So VMware's got a pretty sophisticated stack there, lots of customer options. When we look at the cloud native states, things change a lot. You've got a lot of open source in there, most customers don't buy shrink-wrapped software, they take a lot of components, they tend to put some things together. There's been a little open source, but we've talked for many years about, open source isn't one of the primary revenue drivers for VMware. It's not kind of core to the business. Is that changing? How do you keep making money in the open source world? How do you compete? >> I think there's two different aspects to that that I'd like to, you know, one is, essentially our strategy is, enable these new environments on the VMware franchise. So what's my revenue model? I'm going to keep selling vSphere, I'm going to sell NSX, I'm going to sell vSAN, our management tools, et cetera, even as I add more open source components into those environments. And hey, I'm pretty happy. What's the price point of it going to be? It's free, if you're an Enterprise Plus customer. We're just adding it as another set of capabilities on top of it. It's all open source bits, you've, you know, Stu, have you downloaded it yet off GitHub? >> I have not. >> Pat: You have not? I'm disappointed to hear that. Get on it, right? Get back to work. >> You've got to code tonight, Stu. No party. >> Right? You know. Too much partying for you, Stu. But it's going to be available. We're engaging this open source community, in an open source way, but we're adding our industry rock-hard components, and that's important. Because enterprises are going to start deploying containerized applications. And then you're going to start asking questions. Are they secured? Are they managed? Do you have, like it said onstage, are they monitored? How are you going to network them? And all of the sudden, it's not going to be some lightweight stateless application, you're going to start saying, this is a better way to do stateful applications. What about resilience for that? Get back to the rock-hard questions that infrastructure guys know how to handle. So this is a way to saying yes to those problems but also saying yes to these cool new developer things as well. And in our sense, you know, we think we're well-positioned to go do it, but hey, some of it may be open source projects, and hey, we're showing that we're going to support those, we're going to deliver those, we're going to embrace those as well. So I'm sure that we hired Dirk Hohndel, a longtime friend. I hired him before at Intel, so now we brought him over here to VMware. Because we clearly see, we have to enhance our position overall in the open source community. Not a strong point for VMware in the past, and we're quite committed to changing that perception going forward. >> A lot of great code in the open source, but you mentioned those things about the infrastructure. I want to get back to that point. Those complex things. Automations now playing a big role, we saw the demo today with vSAN,Yanbing was just, one push of a button, a lot of policy, automatic policy automation, that's a great direction. >> Pat: Oh, yeah. >> So, I like that direction. But now I want to bring that back to Cross-Cloud. NSX with security and automation, and protection with the vSphere and then Cross-Cloud. How do you look at this? Because I know you're a strategist, so I think we'll get the strategist angle here. It's like the inter-networking data, I was riffing with Stu earlier about inter-networking has spawned because of all these networks needed to be connected together. And that became >> A whole industry. >> A huge industry. A lot of wealth created, a lot of innovation. Inter-clouding, or Cross-Cloud as you call it, is that dynamic. How do you play well? IBM's onstage, there's no Amazon onstage. I didn't see Microsoft. Are we going to see the other clouds come in to the fold, or are you going to go to them and partner with them? >> So let's, you know, one of the architectural principles of Cross-Cloud is public APIs. So I'm not requiring any unique support from Amazon and Azure, and that's an important statement as well, because now I go to a customer who's taken advantage of Amazon, and they can look at some of those Cross-Cloud Services and then says, well, what if Amazon doesn't support you in the future? And we say, these are standard APIs. They're supporting hundreds of customers on those APIs. It's important, right, that we're engaging with, I'll say, the way that the cloud is being presented to customers and giving them better tools to manage. Now that does not mean I'm not going to do more work in integrating more deeply and partnering with them. >> So does that support like the Amazon S3 API then? >> Pat: Of course. >> Okay. >> John: Well, Sling API's a little bit different. >> Management APIs is actually more appropriate to look at it in that respect as well. How do you spawn, how do you stop, how do you manage VMs, how do you do availability cells, those are the things more appropriate to a management tool in that regard. But those are public API, public interfaces, we're taking advantage of all of those. And we are going to work more closely with the Azures and the Amazons as well, we're going to invest in those partnerships. And there may be areas that we compete with them, but we're going to go do as much as we can, because that's what our customers are asking us to do. Give me better support for those environments, which workloads can I put there? Can I network? Can I secure? Maybe in some cases I don't want my groups using nonpub, or non, you know, multi-cloud APIs. Another case is, hey, I am fully comfortable saying, >> Pick the right cloud for the job kind of thing. >> Absolutely. Right >> Is your philosophy. So slinging APIs is pretty trivial relative to interfacing with the cloud, but the customer might want to go deeper, and, because that might create a complexity issue around, and also functionality might not be as robust as, say, deeper stack integration for data management and whatnot. Are you worried, or we're watching, certainly, like Microsoft, if they feel the proprietary aspect of their stack around data for instance, that's the holy grail, it can get sticky, but still be quote 'open' but not proprietary. >> Yeah. >> So the lock inspect is the lack of openness, per se, to say with data. >> And by the way, you know, I mean, in that respect, what we want to do is present to customers the tools that they can manage those decisions. For instance, a customer may say, hey, I love that machine learning API that Google offers. It's giving me a great competitive advantage, it's not available on any other cloud, and we're going to say, hey, it's proprietary API, if you use it and your data's there, you've picked that service, but we're still going to help you manage and secure it. Another workload, the customer might say, Hey, this workload, I want to make sure has multi-cloud landing zones associated with it. So we're going to help him manage those decisions as well, because if you stay in this domain, I can make it run anywhere, I'll be able to do cross-optimize it, maybe geo-optimize it, et cetera. So it's giving them the tools to manage those decisions. Because I think, hey, you know, Microsoft, they're going to do really well with things related to collaboration of 365. I think Google, I think they're going to do really well around data machine learning. IBM Enterprise, great cloud. Amazon, hey, they've won this round of the developer cloud. Each of them has sort of staked turfs that are very clear, they're going to present value to customers, and our view is, we're going to make those all more readily consumer, suitable for enterprises to run, manage, secure, and connect their workloads into those environments. And build the connectivity into their private clouds, their vCloud Air Networks, their manage clouds as well, that's what we can uniquely do. >> Amazon is going strong in the enterprise. I agree they've won the developer cloud, but they're aggressively going after the enterprise. Mainly Oracle for now, but I'm sure they might think about speech ed that you have. >> Oh, sure. Sure, absolutely. But, you know, in that space, moving a lightweight application, okay, done. Right, you do an OEF conversion, you're done, man, you sell it like that. Oh, you've got to move the full network configuration, IP address ability, right? I've got to deal with different- oh my gosh. Those are hard things to do. The easy stuff moves pretty easy. The hard stuff, okay, that's where we're at now as we address Enterprise customers, and you just don't pick those up and relocate those onto Amazon, Azure, or anyplace else. You know, that's really where the strength of VMware lies. >> So Pat, Dave Vellante is, you know, just at this point, he can't be here for the interview, so I'm a surrogate for him. >> I refuse this interview, not having Dave here. >> John: He says, Pat, I love you forever. That's what he says. >> He asked me to have your commentary on the new era of IT. Officially announced today, the Dell EMC deal, September 7th it will go down, you know, of course that has ramifications on VMware. HP split recently. Lots of, I mean, major signal changes to the industry. What's your take? >> Yeah, you know, as I described before, this is a very disruptive period of the IT industry. Consolidation of portions of it, we think as the hardware industry has matured, stabilized, you know, not growing, still cashflow rich but not growing, we think consolidation is a very natural phase of that industry's maturation. And against that, the Dell move, it's a very bold move given the size of it, but if you look at the cashflows of the companies, as Michael says, it's pretty easy math. It wasn't that hard to, you know, this is how much the cashflow is, this is how much the debt payment is, the math works. Do the deal. >> And Michael said, if you don't understand that VMware is hugely important to that, you don't understand the math. >> Right. For that, you know, clearly, having a controlling interest there, he gets it. We have a lot of growth potential as well, evaluation increase, potential strategic role, but he also realizes that the independence of VMware is critical as well. A software company is very different than a hardware company and our position in the industry, the ecosystem, he respects that greatly. We also think that we're far from done with disruptions elsewhere. We just saw Rackspace go private. Wow, you know, that's another structured shift. Changes in the structure of Citrix as a company, at Five, as they go through their transitions in this next phase of growth, Palo Alto, a good friend Mark McLaughlin, they're driving their software and service revenue growth from hardware. Lots of changes in the industry. Collectively, we look at those and we say, boy, this period of change, disruption, radical growth, consolidation of different places, VMware sits now at a very stable and comfortable place. I've got a great battle sheet, I've got a clear path in front of me, going back to the beginning of the interview, and, right, behind my battle sheet, is this huge turbo-charged engines that is cheering for our growth, distributing us, and even a bigger battle sheet behind us. So we sit in a very uniquely wonderful position. >> I have a final question for what a great, I know you've got another point, and thanks for, first of all, thanks for your time again. What's the biggest disruption that you're watching that's motivating you, whether it's lighting a fire under your feet, or just something that you see that's so epic, and get out for that next week, as you said, if you're not out for that next week, you're driftwood. >> Can I give you two? >> John: Yeah. >> So the one that I think is clearly the biggest is the shift to the public cloud. And I'll just say, that's why the Cross-Cloud announcement was so critical. Also, I wanted to demystify some of the numbers in the keynote. So we went out there and said, very specifically, this is where it's going to be, SaaS, and IaaS, and where it's going to be at different points in time, because I think there's been all sorts of numbers floating around the industry of what it's going to look like over time. But clearly, this public cloud's becoming a big deal. If we have to present ourselves as relevant and critical to our customers in that transition, so I'll say that's the one that we have to navigate through to really position VMware for the next couple decades. The other one that I point out is really, as we talked about, the IoT and the device picture. Wow, we're going to have more machine-connected devices in 2019, >> Love that stat, by the way. >> Than human-connected devices. And that presents enormous business opportunity, right, security threats and opportunities, data infrastructure to go with it, IT, as I would say, IT has left the nest. It's now permeated, >> And software's, a primary function of all the new software that has to be written to handle those situations. >> And in that sense, you want to say, even though I'm three and a half decades in the industry, it sort of feels like we're just getting started. >> You had a spring in your step until you had a cast on it, so you still, you've got to be careful you don't break down. As you get older, your bones get a bit more hard to recover. >> That's right. >> Pat, thanks so much for spending the time, great to see you again. >> Always a pleasure. >> Pat Gelsinger, inside theCube, here in VMworld 2016 in Las Vegas. >> Mr. Vellante must be here next year. >> Dave, man date. Stu Miniman and I, Stu, you did good. You held your own. Pat, as usual, great. This is theCube, you're watching theCube at VMworld, I'm John Furrier and Stu Miniman. (techno beat)

[Voiceover] Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas it's The Cube. Covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by Vmware and it's ecosystems sponsors. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Stu Miniman. >> Welcome back everyone we are here live in Las Vegas for VMworld 2016 at the Mandalay Convention Center. We're in the hang space where The Cube is located. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We're here with Chad Sakac the President of EMC's Converged Platform division formerly known as VCE. Welcome back. Great to see you. Fist pump. >> It's good to see you. >> Seven years we've been doing The Cube you've been on it every single year. >> I can't believe it. >> We love having you on. >> The Cube has become a fixture of VMworld for me. Seeing you guys. Your good looking faces. It puts a smile on my face. But I can't believe it's been seven years. That's insane. >> Yeah. The seven year itch as they say in VMworld. So I got to ask you. You're always candid and colorful. But you've seen the transition. You've been in the trenches. Coding. Now you're president of a division. Big division doing great. >> It's terrifying isn't it? (laughs) >> It's interesting. The Cube is bigger. We're all getting bigger. What's your take right now? You've seen the journey. Seven years. Where are we? >> VMworld has always had a huge community. One of the things that's been defining about VMware's whole journey has been the community. And that's one thing that has stayed pretty constant. Right? There's a lot of people here. This time in Vegas. Previously in San Fran. They share a passion and a love for all things that Vmware is doing. That said. It's a very different show. It's a very different context. It's a very different ecosystem. Literally at the beginning it was one product. Right? Now if you look at the keynotes they have to struggle to get all of the awesome into an hour and a half and do it in two days. Right? And they can only hit certain highlights. Sanjay did a great job today. Kit did a great job. My favorite, Yanbing. Yanbing Li has got passion, energy and loves her baby vSAN. But imagine trying to cram all of that stuff in previously in years past. If you go back seven years that would've been all of Vmworld would it had just been on just one thing. Right? And then obviously the other thing that's going on is the entire ecosystem has changed. So we're seeing consolidation in the ecosystem. But we're also seeing, I think Pat actually did the best job I've ever seen of that realistic balance of what's happening in traditional IT, private, public hybrid cloud models. And how that's going to play out over the next few years. But there' no question that public clouds are a huge part of the landscape for here. For now. For tomorrow. Forever. >> Pat got some criticism on Twitter. Also, some blog posts out there said that the keynote was a snoozer. But it was straight talk. And that's what the ecosystem wants and we're hearing. Stu might have his own opinion on this but what I'm hearing is I want to see the path. I want to see where VMware is going to be going so I can get behind that train. Clarify. Show me the straight and narrow roadways so I can turn up the gas a little bit. >> There's the expression that basically says the customer is always right. Or the people are always right. You can trust the people. Sometimes the customer is wrong. And sometimes the people are wrong. So last year they went bananas over vMotioning of VM between two clouds. Because it plays to the base. It plays to the audience who are like I love vMotion. Why wouldn't vMotion between clouds make sense? The reality of it is that while that was cool and technically accurate. This year's demonstration of basically saying no, you're not going to motion vm between on prem and public clouds very often, if at all. But you will need to be able to do things that bridge public clouds. Is actually a much more correct and relevant answer for the market. Now the difficulty is is that sometimes you're telling people things before there ready to fully internalize it. >> Embrace it. (laughs) It's shock of the system almost. Really. So you play the base. It's a lot like politics in that way. But I got to ask you the question. >> By the way. Just like in politics if you constantly play to the base you never move forward. >> Yeah. And this has always been a diverse ecosystem. So let's start with the cloud things. Obviously ecosystem is back on the table, I'd say. It's front and center. It's always been front and center but as it consolidates we're seeing its straight path. The question that people want to know is. Will everyone have fair access to the VMware as an independent company visa the new big mega merger was announced by Michael Dell just minutes ago that September seventh will be the close date. >> What are you talking about? >> Dell Technologies. >> What? (laughter) >> You can talk about it. Dell announced it. Michael tweeted about it. >> We're not bait and switching you. We'll show you his tweets if you want. >> I'm joking. I'm joking. And by the way, I'm so pumped and so excited. Frankly, I think not everybody understands exactly what's going on inside the industry. The server storage and networking ecosystems as stand alones are actually shrinking. As workloads move to SAS. As workloads move to public cloud IOS. The parts of the ecosystem that are growing are customers that are basically saying they want converged, hyper-converged and turnkey software stacks and that's they way they want to consume. They want to simplify stuff down. To be able to pull that off you have to have all the ingredients inside the stack. Increasingly, you will not be able to be competitive without having all the those components in the stack. And this is why I am passionate that convergence hyper-convergence and convergence and also turnkey software stacks will be at the center of Dell Technologies. And I keep telling Michael and he keeps agreeing which is a good thing. Right? The reality of it is is that we cannot, in spite of that statement being true, it is also true that people will continue to want variability. That may a be a declining set but it's a bigger set of customers. And the customers are like I'm all in on turnkey. So this one is smaller but growing faster this one's a much bigger ecosystem of, I'll mix and match whatever I want and put it together. Alright? So if you look at Yanbing's section. So she said HP with vSAN. Then she went VxRail and Yanbing thanks for the shout out during the session. That was awesome. They were powering basically some great events with Di data and powerful things in small packages. That's a highly integrated system. And then they brought up a customer that was totally building it themselves. Right? So it literally in a span of two minutes you had the continuum of build it yourself, a turnkey thing and it build it yourself. So will it be sustained? Yeah. Can you expect that we are going to lean in like crazy on our integrated stack? Yeah. But will we do it in exclusion of the ecosystem? No. >> There's just different use cases. >> Yeah. VxRail is winning in the marketplace because it's a highly opinionated vSphere HCIA. If you don't have vSphere. You don't like VMware it's not the HCIA for you. Right? However, more customers say yes than they say no. And that's awesome. But we know that we're going to need to create a next generation of the Microsoft Azure stack. On prem HCIA. It won't be built by the VxRail team. But there customers want it that way. And we're not talking about it a lot this week. But last week we launched VxRack new treno which is a turnkey open stack KVM SUSE based thing. Choice baby. >> So Chad, first of all the Dell deal is announced. So this is the final nail in the coffin of VCE, correct? >> Absolutely. Of course not. The reason that we are shifting the way we talk about VCE is something really simple. If I say VCE what's the first thing that appears in your brain? >> Stu: vBlock. >> Va-blah vBlock. And that's a good thing in a sense. >> How much revenue did you do last year, Chad? >> Three point five plus billion dollars. Almost entirely in vBlock and VxBlock. >> That would be a nice a public company on it's own. >> On it's own. Right. And growing at 40% cumulative annual growth rates. That is amazing. Right? >> It's not a fail. >> And by the way the thing that's interesting is that hasn't slowed down one iota in spite of the fact that everyone knows the Dell deal is going to close. However, the difficult it is is that we are no longer just he vBlock group. We have these hyper converged appliances that are growing like sync and customers are voting with their feet and their dollars. I think in a short amount of time we'll be the number one by customer, by revenue HCIA player in the market. But furthermore, we also do these turnkey cloud stacks. So realistically VCE is more of a product brand than it is a company brand. And we're no longer a separate company. We're a part of VMC and on the seventh we'll be part of Dell EMC. >> Chad, can you help us connect the dots? We've got the converged infrastructure. The platform. You've got some SUSE team. Talk about SAS and public cloud. How does Dell, EMC, VMware stay relevant going forward and play a part in that whole story? >> So it's a great question. I'm going to try to see if I can do this in an uncharacteristically concise way. Do you believe that hybrid cloud models will win? >> Stu: Sure. >> Chad: Do you really believe it? >> I mean what we have today isn't really good hybrid cloud but that's where we need to go. >> So, by the way, we need to make the on premise clouds as simple and easy to consume in utilized modes as the public clouds are. >> Stu: Love that. >> Chad: Right. However, I think that it is inherent that economics, governance, data gravity will always balance out some workloads biasing toward public. Some biasing towards private. Furthermore, do you think that there will be one cloud model that will win? Will it all be the VMware SDDC cloud? Will it all be Azure? Will it all be Amazon? Will it all be cloud foundry? Will it all be SoftLayer? >> Well Andy Jassy has an answer for you but many people will differ with that. Including Satcha and Michael and everybody else. >> I think that there's never been in the history of all time any sustained period where there's a singularity of a stack. >> VMware has done pretty good for a while. >> Yep. But, by the way, there's never been in all of history any extended period of time when there's been a singularity of a stack. Right? So our point of view is very simple. My mission in the converged platform division today is basically to build turnkey CI and HCI to power VMware powered clouds and Cloud Foundry power clouds. Tomorrow, meaning on the seventh, immediately my strategic posture toward Microsoft pivots. EMC has always had a partnership with Microsoft but nothing like Dell's. Right? So immediately, I'm going to go. Well we must have the best on and off premises version of the Microsoft Azure stack. Dell currently leads in that market but it's very early days of that. We go from having two clouds both on and off premises. To a third one that we add. And then of course there's a fourth one which says if you want to run your most mission critical, business critical, classic apps. Virtustream is the way to go for an SAP legacy landscape. That you want to put in the cloud. That needs to have an on premise variant too. So, four clouds. Each one on and off premises. Each one available in Capex or utilitized models. If we can pull that off we can be the strongest cloud player on the market bar none. I think that's cool. >> With the choice as the key sales pitch to the client which is pick the cloud that does the best job. >> The thing that's interesting is that sometimes choice is a euphemism for blah. Like I have no strategy. I have no opinion. It's just pick whatever you want and assemble it. What I'm describing is something a little different. Which is a choice between four highly opinionated turnkey offers. >> Okay. >> Right? Now of course, we'll enable customers to build there own things but I think that over time less and less customers are going to want to do that. >> And Chad, I think that points to what we've seen in the wave of converged infrastructure and cloud is we need to get out of that heterogenous mess where I've got the poor guy buried in wires. Running around. Trouble tickets and everything else like that. It needs to be simpler. We need to have the management tools. Chad, I want to get your viewpoint on VMware. One of the criticisms I've heard is kind of the cloud management stack. We've been swinging a bunch at this and we don't yet have a solution that customers are happy with. Where do you think we are? Where do we need to go? >> So, you've been around the block on this and customers who are watching this have been around the block on this. Cloud management platforms are tough. Its actually a very, very fragmented market. With very little consolidation in the past or even looking forward. Now inside that space vRealize is actually the strongest. And it's the most deployed. It's the most widely used. But again, I don't want to make it sound like ahh we're number one. Right? Clearly there's a lot of work to be done. Last night I was talking with Sajay who heads up the vRealize suite team. And what we've seen is that the team has done a lot of work out of the 6.x, 6.5 dot and you know 6.X days into the 7.X days. And customer feedback is that it's much closer to the mark. A in terms of core product workflow, upgrade-ability. All of those sorts of things. But also in the fact that it actually has extended out to be able to automate and deploy on top of Azure and AWS. In the beginnings of the extended cloud connects vision. Now that said. In those four opinionated cloud stacks. Now this is my personal opinion, here Stu. So I always have to safe harbor all that jazz. (laughs) I think that what you see is you see those highly opinionated cloud stacks. The CMP layers, the top part of it, being able to speak to each other but always favoring their own ecosystem. Right? I think that we're going to be in that mode for a long time. >> So Chad, some people might not be aware that in addition to the VCE products in there that the solutions piece and the cloud that you have. The progress that you've made. We've talked to some of your team. I think we've got Peter coming on today. Can you talk about the EHC NHC maybe even share a bit of revenue if you can. >> Yeah. Sure. First things first, it's important to understand this at its core. The original idea of VCE, which is now eight years old, was a basic premise that says we have a pile of giblets that are all awesome. However, customers struggled to assemble them. And they want to have a turnkey offer that they can lean on us to not only deploy but sustain, support as a single offering. That was the origination story. Replace server networking compute with hypervisor, IT business operations a CMP all of those things and you have the enterprise hybrid cloud. We started getting lots of feedback from customers. We love vSphere. We love vRealize. We love vRealize automation and operations. We love all of this log-in sites stuff. We're all in with Vmware can you guys give us the easy button? Right? And so we started on version one. Then on version two, version three, 3.5 and this week we announced version 4.0. Right? We're now up to hundreds of customers so it's still in the hundreds. But it is the most curated. The most turnkey way to get the VMware SDDC deployed. Now, I still think we have a long ways to go. Because we need to make it so push button, easy. And cloud foundations that Pat announced on Monday. Is a core part of that. Think of cloud foundations turning to validated designs and the enterprise hybrid cloud being the ultimate manifestations. >> Chad, just a clarification. Hundreds of customers but from a revenue standpoint that's probably bigger than the hyper-converged market. >> So you know what's fascinating. That's actually a fact. So I hadn't really thought about it. But we're currently on a revenue run rate that we don't disclose publicly, but I'm like, how do I tiptoe around this? It is larger than the largest HCIA players by a good market margin. >> Right. >> So you're talking about hundreds of millions of dollars worth of annual revenue. And customers are saying, look I'm in. I saw the keynote. I'm aligned with VM where I want to go. Right? And enterprise hybrid cloud is designed to do that. We keep reiterating on it. On virtual geek there's a whole slew of details on the 4.0 lease. And then the other thing that we started to see is we started to see customers say, I get it. With the enterprise hybrid cloud you've made my IT operations for classic IT better. How do you help my developers build the digital enterprise? Which doesn't start with infrastructure. And it doesn't start with IAS. It starts with the way developers see the world. Which is the platform layer. And we're on version 1.1 now of the native hybrid cloud which is targeted at how do we build a platform for building cloud native apps? And that starts not with infrastructure. Not with VMware. Not with EMC. Not with servers or network. It starts with cloud foundry. >> Chad, we got to wrap. I want to get one final point in and I want to get your thoughts on it. It's more of a historical perspective but also kind of a futuristic. Take your EMC hat off and put the personal Chad hat on. The ecosystem. Where is it going to go? Obviously it's consolidating. Which means it's shifting. So the old ecosystem was great and robust as you mentioned. It's not necessarily dying. It's just shifting. It's consolidating. So that means it's shifting to something else where there will be growth. Where is it moving? Where is that puck going so people can skate to where the puck will be? >> That's a great question, John. I'm always a geek at heart. I'm always going to run that vSphere cluster in my basement. It gives me joy and gratitude on cool new intel NUC. Great stuff. But in my new job. (laughs) as the leader of a big business. The broad landscape picture is fascinating. This isn't actually rocket science. You can decode it remarkably and quickly. In industries that are declining or under pressure. Secular pressure. Consolidation is inevitable and you have to pick your partners wisely. I think people underestimate how much giants that they would think of as safe and secure bets are under pressure. Michael was wise enough to take first mover advantage. Because in those periods no one has shrunk themselves to success. Right? Conversely, you see very diversified ecosystems. When you see a very diversified ecosystem ergo cloud management platforms. Ergo security, like oh my goodness, the number of security startups and players. A hyper converged startups. I count 39 of them at the last turn. Right? They go through a life cycle of explosion of ecosystems and then inevitable consolidation phase. And people look at that consolidation phase and say oh, the fun is all over. No that means that the fun has begun because your actually starting to really move the needle at customers. Right? So you can expect to see consolidation and security space. You can expect to see by the way very disruptive point technologies occur. The container ecosystem is going to explode and then consolidate. And when you see that consolidation happening the container act Sysco acquisition is one of the earlier indications in that space but just one of them. It means that it's moving from sizzle to steak. Again, look at the open stack ecosystem. About a year ago everyone was like, all the fun is over. All of them have consolidated down into the big massive players. It's because people are now getting down- >> John: Rubber is hitting the road. >> Rubber is hitting the road. >> So where is it going now? Where is the fun going to be? >> The fun is definitely going to be very much in new data fabrics and new applications. There's no rocket science there. The space that you saw the tip of the iceberg on the cloud. Cloud connection of how you can bridge. Bridge doesn't mean migrate it means create connective tissue between on premises and off premises clouds. It's going to be really, really interesting. I think one thing that is fascinating is roles for human beings that span functions. That is the new magic mojo. When I find someone who is a developer. Who understands infrastructure they've got mojo. When you find someone who understands the span of what's going on inside the ecosystem that person's got a bright future. >> As they say in baseball, the players have to have multiple tools in their bag. Chad, we got to break but great conversation. Thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it. Good seeing you. Congratulations on all your business success and September seventh is going to be the big close date for the mega transaction. >> It's going to be awesome and by the way guys, congrats to you. Seven years of this is great. I can't wait for next year. It'll be a lot of fun. >> Thanks. Chad Sakac here inside The Cube. Where all the things are happening at VMworld inside the Hang Space at the Mandalay Bay this year for VMworld 2016. I'm John Furrier with Stu Miniman. We'll be right back. You're watching The Cube. (upbeat music)