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