(bright music) >> Welcome back everyone. theCube's live coverage here. Day two, of two sets, three days of theCube coverage here at VMware Explore. This is our 12th year covering VMware's annual conference, formerly called VM World. I'm John Furrier, with Dave Vellante. We'd love seeing the progress and we've got great security comes Tom Gill, senior vices, president general manager, networking and advanced security business group at VMware. Great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks. for having me. >> Yeah, really happy we could have you on. >> I think this is my sixth edition on the theCube. Do I get frequent flyer points or anything? >> Yeah. >> You first get the VIP badge. We'll make that happen. You can start getting credits. >> Okay, there we go. >> We won't interrupt you. Seriously, you got a great story in security here. The security story is kind of embedded everywhere, so it's not called out and blown up and talked specifically about on stage. It's kind of in all the narratives in the VM World for this year. But you guys have an amazing security story. So let's just step back and to set context. Tell us the security story for what's going on here at VMware and what that means to this supercloud, multi-cloud and ongoing innovation with VMware. >> Yeah, sure thing. So probably the first thing I'll point out is that security's not just built in at VMware. It's built differently. So, we're not just taking existing security controls and cut and pasting them into our software. But we can do things because of our platform, because of the virtualization layer that you really can't do with other security tools. And where we're very, very focused is what we call lateral security or East-West movement of an attacker. 'Cause frankly, that's the name of the game these days. Attackers, you've got to assume that they're already in your network. Already assume that they're there. Then how do we make it hard for them to get to the stuff that you really want? Which is the data that they're going after. And that's where we really should. >> All right. So we've been talking a lot, coming into VMware Explore, and here, the event. About two things. Security, as a state. >> Yeah. >> I'm secure right now. >> Yeah. >> Or I think I'm secure right now, even though someone might be in my network or in my environment. To the notion of being defensible. >> Yeah. >> Meaning I have to defend and be ready at a moment's notice to attack, fight, push back, red team, blue team. Whatever you're going to call it. But something's happening. I got to be able to defend. >> Yeah. So what you're talking about is the principle of Zero Trust. When I first started doing security, the model was we have a perimeter. And everything on one side of the perimeter is dirty, ugly, old internet. And everything on this side, known good, trusted. What could possibly go wrong. And I think we've seen that no matter how good you make that perimeter, bad guys find a way in. So Zero Trust says, you know what? Let's just assume they're already in. Let's assume they're there. How do we make it hard for them to move around within the infrastructure and get to the really valuable assets? 'Cause for example, if they bust into your laptop, you click on a link and they get code running on your machine. They might find some interesting things on your machine. But they're not going to find 250 million credit cards. >> Right. >> Or the script of a new movie or the super secret aircraft plans. That lives in a database somewhere. And so it's that movement from your laptop to that database. That's where the damage is done and that's where VMware shines. >> So if they don't have the right to get to that database, they're not in. >> And it's not even just the right. So they're so clever and so sneaky that they'll steal a credential off your machine, go to another machine, steal a credential off of that. So, it's like they have the key to unlock each one of these doors. And we've gotten good enough where we can look at that lateral movement, even though it has a credential and a key, we're like wait a minute. That's not a real CIS Admin making a change. That's ransomware. And that's where you. >> You have to earn your way in. >> That's right. That's right. Yeah. >> And we're all kinds of configuration errors. But also some user problems. I've heard one story where there's so many passwords and username and passwords and systems that the bad guys scour, the dark web for passwords that have been exposed. >> Correct. >> And go test them against different accounts. Oh one hit over here. >> Correct. >> And people don't change their passwords all the time. >> Correct. >> That's a known vector. >> Just the idea that users are going to be perfect and never make a mistake. How long have we been doing this? Humans are the weakest link. So people are going to make mistakes. Attackers are going to be in. Here's another way of thinking about it. Remember log4j? Remember that whole fiasco? Remember that was at Christmas time. That was nine months ago. And whoever came up with that vulnerability, they basically had a skeleton key that could access every network on the planet. I don't know if a single customer that said, "Oh yeah, I wasn't impacted by log4j." So here's some organized entity had access to every network on the planet. What was the big breach? What was that movie script that got stolen? So there wasn't one, right? We haven't heard anything. So the point is, the goal of attackers is to get in and stay in. Imagine someone breaks into your house, steals your laptop and runs. That's a breach. Imagine someone breaks into your house and stays for nine months. It's untenable, in the real world, right? >> Right. >> We don't know in there, hiding in the closet. >> They're still in. >> They're watching everything. >> Hiding in your closet, exactly. >> Moving around, nibbling on your cookies. >> Drinking your beer. >> Yeah. >> So let's talk about how this translates into the new reality of cloud-native. Because now you hear about automated pentesting is a new hot thing right now. You got antivirus on data is hot within APIs, for instance. >> Yeah. >> API security. So all kinds of new hot areas. Cloud-native is very iterative. You know, you can't do a pentest every week. >> Right. >> You got to do it every second. >> So this is where it's going. It's not so much simulation. It's actually real testing. >> Right. Right. >> How do you view that? How does that fit into this? 'cause that seems like a good direction to me. >> Yeah. If it's right in, and you were talking to my buddy, Ahjay, earlier about what VMware can do to help our customers build cloud native applications with Tanzu. My team is focused on how do we secure those applications? So where VMware wants to be the best in the world is securing these applications from within. Looking at the individual piece parts and how they talk to each other and figuring out, wait a minute, that should never happen. By almost having an x-ray machine on the innards of the application. So we do it for both for VMs and for container based applications. So traditional apps are VM based. Modern apps are container based. And we have a slightly different insertion mechanism. It's the same idea. So for VMs, we do it with a hypervisor with NSX. We see all the inner workings. In a container world we have this thing called a service mesh that lets us look at each little snippet of code and how they talk to each other. And once you can see that stuff, then you can actually apply. It's almost like common sense logic of like, wait a minute. This API is giving back credit card numbers and it gives five an hour. All of a sudden, it's now asking for 20,000 or a million credit cards. That doesn't make any sense. The anomalies stick out like a sore thumb. If you can see them. At VMware, our unique focus in the infrastructure is that we can see each one of these little transactions and understand the conversation. That's what makes us so good at that East-West or lateral security. >> You don't belong in this room, get out or that that's some weird call from an in memory database, something over here. >> Exactly. Where other security solutions won't even see that. It's not like there algorithms aren't as good as ours or better or worse. It's the access to the data. We see the inner plumbing of the app and therefore we can protect the app from. >> And there's another dimension that I want to get in the table here. 'Cause to my knowledge only AWS, Google, I believe Microsoft and Alibaba and VMware have this. >> Correct >> It's Nitro. The equivalent of a Nitro. >> Yes. >> Project Monterey. >> Yeah. >> That's unique. It's the future of computing architectures. Everybody needs a Nitro. I've written about this. >> Yeah. >> Right. So explain your version. >> Yeah. >> It's now real. >> Yeah. >> It's now in the market, right? >> Yeah. >> Or soon will be. >> Here's our mission. >> Salient aspects. >> Yeah. Here's our mission of VMware. Is that we want to make every one of our enterprise customers. We want their private cloud to be as nimble, as agile, as efficient as the public cloud. >> And secure. >> And secure. In fact, I'll argue, we can make it actually more secure because we're thinking about putting security everywhere in this infrastructure. Not just on the edges of it. Okay. How do we go on that journey? As you pointed out, the public cloud providers realized five years ago that the right way to build computers was not just a CPU and a graphics process unit, GPU. But there's this third thing that the industry's calling a DPU, data processing unit. And so there's kind of three pieces of a computer. And the DPU is sometimes called a Smartnic. It's the network interface card. It does all that network handling and analytics and it takes it off the CPU. So they've been building and deploying those systems themselves. That's what Nitro is. And so we have been working with the major Silicon vendors to bring that architecture to everybody. So with vSphere 8, we have the ability to take the network processing, that East-West inspection I talked about, take it off of the CPU and put it into this dedicated processing element called the DPU and free up the CPU to run the applications that Ahjay and team are building. >> So no performance degradation at all? >> Correct. To CPU offload. >> So even the opposite, right? I mean you're running it basically Bare Metal speeds. >> Yes, yes and yes. >> And you're also isolating the storage from the security, the management, and. >> There's an isolation angle to this, which is that firewall, that we're putting everywhere. Not just that the perimeter, but we put it in each little piece of the server is running when it runs on one of these DPUs it's a different memory space. So even if an attacker gets to root in the OS, they it's very, very, never say never, but it's very difficult. >> So who has access to that resource? >> Pretty much just the infrastructure layer, the cloud provider. So it's Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and the enterprise. >> Application can't get in. >> Can't get in there. Cause you would've to literally bridge from one memory space to another. Never say never, but it would be very. >> But it hasn't earned the trust to get. >> It's more than barbwire. It's multiple walls. >> Yes. And it's like an air gap. It puts an air gap in the server itself so that if the server is compromised, it's not going to get into the network. Really powerful. >> What's the big thing that you're seeing with this supercloud transition. We're seeing multi-cloud and this new, not just SaaS hosted on the cloud. >> Yeah. >> You're seeing a much different dynamic of, combination of large scale CapEx, cloud-native, and then now cloud-native drills on premises and edge. Kind of changing what a cloud looks like if the cloud's on a cloud. >> Yeah. >> So we're the customer, I'm building on a cloud and I have on premise stuff. So, I'm getting scale CapEx relief from the hyperscalers. >> I think there's an important nuance on what you're talking about. Which is in the early days of the cloud customers. Remember those first skepticism? Oh, it'll never work. Oh, that's consumer grade. Oh, that's not really going to work. Oh some people realize. >> It's not secure. >> Yeah. It's not secure. >> That one's like, no, no, no it's secure. It works. And it's good. So then there was this sort of over rush. Let's put everything on the cloud. And I had a lot of customers that took VM based applications said, I'm going to move those onto the cloud. You got to take them all apart, put them on the cloud and put them all back together again. And little tiny details like changing an IP address. It's actually much harder than it looks. So my argument is, for existing workloads for VM based workloads, we are VMware. We're so good at running VM based workloads. And now we run them on anybody's cloud. So whether it's your east coast data center, your west coast data center, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Alibaba, IBM keep going. We pretty much every. >> And the benefit of the customer is what. >> You can literally VMotion and just pick it up and move it from private to public, public to private, private to public, Back and forth. >> Remember when we called Vmotion BS, years ago? >> Yeah. Yeah. >> VMotion is powerful. >> We were very skeptical. We're like, that'll never happen. I mean we were. This supposed to be pat ourselves on the back. >> Well because alchemy. It seems like what you can't possibly do that. And now we do it across clouds. So it's not quite VMotion, but it's the same idea. You can just move these things over. I have one customer that had a production data center in the Ukraine. Things got super tense, super fast and they had to go from their private cloud data center in the Ukraine, to a public cloud data center out of harm's way. They did it over a weekend. 48 hours. If you've ever migrated a data center, that's usually six months. Right. And a lot of heartburn and a lot of angst. Boop. They just drag and dropped and moved it on over. That's the power of what we call the cloud operating model. And you can only do this when all your infrastructures defined in software. If you're relying on hardware, load balancers, hardware, firewalls, you can't move those. They're like a boat anchor. You're stuck with them. And by the way, they're really, really expensive. And by the way, they eat a lot of power. So that was an architecture from the 90's. In the cloud operating model your data center. And this comes back to what you were talking about is just racks and racks of X86 with these magic DPUs, or smart nics, to make any individual node go blisteringly fast and do all the functions that you used to do in network appliances. >> We just had Ahjay taking us to school, and everyone else to school on applications, middleware, abstraction layer. And Kit Culbert was also talking about this across cloud. We're talking supercloud, super pass. If this continues to happen, which we would think it will happen. What does the security posture look like? It feels to me, and again, this is your wheelhouse. If supercloud happens with this kind of past layer where there's vMotioning going on. All kinds of spanning applications and data across environments. >> Yeah. Assume there's an operating system working on behind the scenes. >> Right. >> What's the security posture in all this? >> Yeah. So remember my narrative about the bad guys are getting in and they're moving around and they're so sneaky that they're using legitimate pathways. The only way to stop that stuff, is you've got to understand it at what we call Layer 7. At the application layer. Trying to do security to the infrastructure layer. It was interesting 20 years ago, kind of less interesting 10 years ago. And now it's becoming irrelevant because the infrastructure is oftentimes not even visible. It's buried in some cloud provider. So Layer 7 understanding, application awareness, understanding the APIs and reading the content. That's the name of the game in security. That's what we've been focused on. Nothing to do with the infrastructure. >> And where's the progress bar on that paradigm. One to ten. Ten being everyone's doing it. >> Right now. Well, okay. So we as a vendor can do this today. All the stuff I talked about, reading APIs, understanding the individual services looking at, Hey, wait a minute this credit card anomalies, that's all shipping production code. Where is it in customer adoption life cycle? Early days 10%. So there's a whole lot of headroom for people to understand, Hey, I can put these controls in place. They're software based. They don't require appliances. It's Layer 7, so it has contextual awareness and it's works on every single cloud. >> We talked about the pandemic being an accelerator. It really was a catalyst to really rethink. Remember we used to talk about Pat as a security do over. He's like, yes, if it's the last thing I do, I'm going to fix security. Well, he decided to go try to fix Intel instead. >> He's getting some help from the government. >> But it seems like CISOs have totally rethought their security strategy. And at least in part, as a function of the pandemic. >> When I started at VMware four years ago, Pat sat me down in his office and he said to me what he said to you, which is like, "Tom," he said, "I feel like we have fundamentally changed servers. We fundamentally change storage. We fundamentally change networking. The last piece of the puzzle of security. I want you to go fundamentally change it." And I'll argue that the work that we're doing with this horizontal security, understanding the lateral movement. East- West inspection. It fundamentally changes how security works. It's got nothing to do with firewalls. It's got nothing to do with Endpoint. It's a unique capability that VMware is uniquely suited to deliver on. And so Pat, thanks for the mission. We delivered it and it's available now. >> Those WET web applications firewall for instance are around, I mean. But to your point, the perimeter's gone. >> Exactly. >> And so you got to get, there's no perimeter. so it's a surface area problem. >> Correct. And access. And entry. >> Correct. >> They're entering here easy from some manual error, or misconfiguration or bad password that shouldn't be there. They're in. >> Think about it this way. You put the front door of your house, you put a big strong door and a big lock. That's a firewall. Bad guys come in the window. >> And then the windows open. With a ladder. >> Oh my God. Cause it's hot, bad user behavior trumps good security every time. >> And then they move around room to room. We're the room to room people. We see each little piece of the thing. Wait, that shouldn't happen. Right. >> I want to get you a question that we've been seeing and maybe we're early on this or it might be just a false data point. A lot of CSOs and we're talking to are, and people in industry in the customer environment are looking at CISOs and CSOs, two roles. Chief information security officer, and then chief security officer. Amazon, actually Steven Schmidt is now CSO at Reinforce. They actually called that out. And the interesting point that he made, we had some other situations that verified this, is that physical security is now tied to online, to your point about the service area. If I get a password, I still got the keys to the physical goods too. >> Right. So physical security, whether it's warehouse for them or store or retail. Digital is coming in there. >> Yeah. So is there a CISO anymore? Is it just CSO? What's the role? Or are there two roles you see that evolving? Or is that just circumstance. >> I think it's just one. And I think that the stakes are incredibly high in security. Just look at the impact that these security attacks are having on. Companies get taken down. Equifax market cap was cut 80% with a security breach. So security's gone from being sort of a nuisance to being something that can impact your whole kind of business operation. And then there's a whole nother domain where politics get involved. It determines the fate of nations. I know that sounds grand, but it's true. And so companies care so much about it they're looking for one leader, one throat to choke. One person that's going to lead security in the virtual domain, in the physical domain, in the cyber domain, in the actual. >> I mean, you mention that, but I mean, you look at Ukraine. I mean that cyber is a component of that war. I mean, it's very clear. I mean, that's new. We've never seen. this. >> And in my opinion, the stuff that we see happening in the Ukraine is small potatoes compared to what could happen. >> Yeah. >> So the US, we have a policy of strategic deterrence. Where we develop some of the most sophisticated cyber weapons in the world. We don't use them. And we hope never to use them. Because our adversaries, who could do stuff like, I don't know, wipe out every bank account in North America. Or turn off the lights in New York City. They know that if they were to do something like that, we could do something back. >> This is the red line conversation I want to go there. So, I had this discussion with Robert Gates in 2016 and he said, "We have a lot more to lose." Which is really your point. >> So this brand. >> I agree that there's to have freedom and liberty, you got to strike back with divorce. And that's been our way to balance things out. But with cyber, the red line, people are already in banks. So they're are operating below the red line line. Red line meaning before we know you're in there. So do we move the red line down because, hey, Sony got hacked. The movie. Because they don't have their own militia. >> Yeah. >> If their were physical troops on the shores of LA breaking into the file cabinets. The government would've intervened. >> I agree with you that it creates tension for us in the US because our adversaries don't have the clear delineation between public and private sector. Here you're very, very clear if you're working for the government. Or you work for an private entity. There's no ambiguity on that. >> Collaboration, Tom, and the vendor community. I mean, we've seen efforts to try to. >> That's a good question. >> Monetize private data and private reports. >> So at VMware, I'm very proud of the security capabilities we've built. But we also partner with people that I think of as direct competitors. We've got firewall vendors and Endpoint vendors that we work with and integrate. And so coopetition is something that exists. It's hard. Because when you have these kind of competing. So, could we do more? Of course we probably could. But I do think we've done a fair amount of cooperation, data sharing, product integration, et cetera. And as the threats get worse, you'll probably see us continue to do more. >> And the government is going to trying to force that too. >> And the government also drives standards. So let's talk about crypto. Okay. So there's a new form of encryption coming out called processing quantum. >> Quantum. Quantum computers have the potential to crack any crypto cipher we have today. That's bad. Okay. That's not good at all because our whole system is built around these private communications. So the industry is having conversations about crypto agility. How can we put in place the ability to rapidly iterate the ciphers in encryption. So, when the day quantum becomes available, we can change them and stay ahead of these quantum people. >> Well, didn't NIST just put out a quantum proof algo that's being tested right now by the community? >> There's a lot of work around that. Correct. And NIST is taking the lead on this, but Google's working on it. VMware's working on it. We're very, very active in how do we keep ahead of the attackers and the bad guys? Because this quantum thing is a, it's an x-ray machine. It's like a dilithium crystal that can power a whole ship. It's a really, really, really powerful tool. >> Bad things will happen. >> Bad things could happen. >> Well, Tom, great to have you on the theCube. Thanks for coming on. Take the last minute to just give a plug for what's going on for you here at VMWorld this year, just VMware Explore this year. >> Yeah. We announced a bunch of exciting things. We announced enhancements to our NSX family, with our advanced load balancer. With our edge firewall. And they're all in service of one thing, which is helping our customers make their private cloud like the public cloud. So I like to say 0, 0, 0. If you are in the cloud operating model, you have zero proprietary appliances. You have zero tickets to launch a workload. You have zero network taps and Zero Trust built into everything you do. And that's what we're working on. Pushing that further and further. >> Tom Gill, senior vices president, head of the networking at VMware. Thanks for coming on. We do appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Always getting the security data. That's killer data and security of the two ops that get the most conversations around DevOps and Cloud Native. This is The theCube bringing you all the action here in San Francisco for VMware Explore 2022. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

(upbeat music) >> Good morning, everyone. Welcome back to "theCUBE." Lisa Martin here with John Furrier. This is day three of our wall-to-wall coverage of VMware Explore. John and I are pleased to welcome back one of our alumni, Muddu Sudhakar, the CEO of AISERA. Welcome to the program, Muddu. It's great to meet you. >> Thank you, Lisa. Thanks for having me. Thank you, John. >> Great to see you again. You're like an industry analyst coming on "theCUBE". You should be like a guest analyst, breaking down. I know you got your own company to run, and by the way, the recent funding you had, congratulations. >> Thank you. >> In a market that's not getting a lot of funding. You get an up around. Congratulations on that. >> Thank you. >> Business is good? >> Very good, thank you. Look, Goldman Sachs Investing, along with Zoom and Thoma Bravo, it was great for us. >> Great stuff. Well, I'm glad we could get you in. This day three, Lisa and I and Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson have all been talking to everyone for two days here at VMware Explore, formerly VMworld, our 12th year covering their annual conference, as you know, and we've been telling the executives, but day three is more of, we're going to mix it up. We're going to bring people in and get their opinions about Supercloud, does VMware go post-Broadcom? Obviously, that's going to happen. Looks like nothing's going to stop that from happening. What's next? What's the impact? Who wins? Who loses? VMware certainly not acting like they're going to get gutted. They're all full throttle ahead. They're laying down some announcements, vSphere 8, you got vSAN 8, they got cloud-native, they're talking multi-cloud. VMware's not looking like they're flinching. What's going on, in your view, outside of the bubble that we're here in San Francisco, out in the real world, in the trenches. What are people talking about? What do you see? >> Lot to unpack. (all laugh) >> Start at wherever you want. >> Yes. You know, I was a VMware alumni too. >> Yes >> You sold the company to VMware. You know the inside. Okay, So then, even then- >> I worked with Paul and Pat and Raghu. It's great to be back at VMware now. I think there's a lot going on in VMware. VMware is here to stay. The brand will stay. The VMware customers will stay for years to come. I think Broadcom and VMware, I think it's a great industry consolidation, the way in which I see it. And it is going to help all the customers too, right? Broadcom, having such a large foot play into both CA, the software business, the hardware business. I think what will happen is that Broadcom will try to create a hybrid cloud of their own with VMware. So there'll be a fourth player in the cloud industry. And then back to John, your Supercloud. The Supercloud by definition, there'll be private clouds, public clouds, hybrid clouds. I think Broadcom with VMware will help your vision of the Supercloud and what your customers are asking. >> Yeah, one of the things I want to get your thoughts on, Lisa and I were talking yesterday with the executives, AJ Patel in particular, he's a middleware guy. >> Right. >> So what he did was Oracle. He did a lot of the fusion stuff at Oracle. He now runs Modern Apps. And you came in at the time, I think, when they were just getting that app vision going, and Paul Moritz actually had it early with his 2010 vision, but too early on the app side. But that ended up happening too. So the question is, is Broadcom going to be this middleware layer, and treat the cloud like hardware. And then, apps or apps. Companies are apps. In a digital transformation, technology is the company. >> Right >> So the company is the app. >> That's right, >> Is an application. So apps and hardware, middle, a middleware model emerging. Do you think they're going for that? Or am I just making this up in my head? >> No, I think to me, I see Broadcom as much more, they're like a peer company at the high level. So they're funded by- >> Like a private equity company. >> Private equity company. >> You mean from a dollar standpoint. >> From a dollar standpoint. So Broadcom is going to fund companies. They're going to buy companies. They bought CA, they bought all the other assets. So Broadcom will have always hardware. The middle level could be VMware, but they also have CA, right? They have a bunch of apps here. So I see the Broadcom is also using VMware to run applications. So the consolidation will be they'll create a Supercloud using VMware. They're going to own their own apps. I don't think Broadcom's story is stopped. Its journey to come. They're going to buy more acquisitions, more apps companies. I won't be surprised, in the future, they buy Zendesk. I won't be surprised, in the future, they buy other apps companies, SaaS companies and cloud enterprise companies. Right? So that's where the P is coming. So the broad conversion is, I need a base middleware, like you're saying. There's no other middleware on top of hardware better than VMware. >> So do you think that they'll keep the stuff that's coming out of the other? 'Cause we've been speculating on "theCUBE" this week. They have the core business, but there's all this stuff that's kind of coming out of the oven that's not EBITDA-oriented yet. Do you think they keep that or they let it go? >> I think that's a great question to hang their CEO of Broadcom. But to me, I think, knowing them, they're going to keep, and if you look at Symantec, they kept parts of Symantec, this whole parts of it. So I think all options are on the table for them, right? They'll do whatever it is. But I think it has to be the ones that high growth companies they may give it. It all goes back to is it a profitability to it or not? But his vision is very good. I want to own the middleware, right? He will own the middleware using VMware to your vision, create a Supercloud and own the apps. So I think you'll see Broadcom is the fourth vendor in the cloud race. You have Microsoft, AWS, Google, and Broadcom is actually going to compete with this four. >> So you think there'll be a hyper scale? They'll be in the top three or four. >> There'll be top four. >> Okay. >> Along with Oracle. So now, we are talking about the five vendors will be Amazon, Azure, Google, Oracle, and Broadcom. >> We had Amazon guy on, Steve Jones. I should have asked him that question. I just don't see that happening yet. They have to have the full hardware side. How do you see that coming in? 'Cause Amazon's innovating at the atom level and they're working on stuff that's physical, transit, physics stuff, like down to the root level. >> I think Broadcom figure, look, they own the chips out right, at the end of the day. They also have a lot of chips such to supply to both mobile and this. So if there's anybody who can figure out the hardware, it will be Broadcom. That is their core of area. They didn't have the core in the software and the middleware. VMware is going to give them the OS, the Kubernetes, the VMs. Once you have that layer, I think you can innovate both up and below, right? So I think, John, I think Broadcom VMware will be a force to reckon with and I think these guys are going to get into healthcare space though. So if you see the way they battle, you and me are talking Lisa, like Microsoft bought new ones, Oracle bought Cerner. So they all paid 30 billion each. So the next battle ground will be, they'll start in the healthcare industry. Somebody's going to go look at the healthcare apps like Epic, right? They're going to look at how we can do the hospitals. They're going to look at hospital healthcare professionals. That area will be disrupted a lot in the same. >> What other industries do you think, besides healthcare, are ripe for disruption with Broadcom VMware? >> I think endpoint management, like remember VMware bought AirWatch when I was there back then, right? That whole area is called digital experience management. So that endpoint mainly will be disrupted. So Broadcom with VMware will go again into endpoint. I'm talking endpoint could be the servers, desktops, VMware Max, right? Virtual Desktop VDI. So that whole management of mobile devices to desktop, that whole industry will be disrupted. A lot of players are there trying to do more consulting services. I think VMware is a great assets and tools. If I'm Broadcom, my chip sets are going into the endpoint. So that area will be disrupted a lot with Broadcom in VMware. >> Yeah, one of the things that VMware, people have been talking about, is that the CA acquisition that Broadcom did was the playbooks public. Everyone saw what they did. They killed sales and market and they killed all the execs, metaphorically speaking. They fired them. VMware's got a different vibe here. I'm feeling like it could go one way or the other. I think they should keep them, personally. But you don't know. If they're a PE company, they EBIDA driven, maybe it's just simply numbers. >> Right. >> If that's the case, then I'm worried. But VMware's got pride, they got mojo, and they've got expertise in software. Maybe a little bit different circumstance? What's take on this? Or do you think it's going to be black and white to the numbers? >> I think, knowing Hank's playbook, if he knows what he's going to do, right? His playbook will be consistent with Symantec. >> You think he already knows what he wants to do? >> I think so. I think at that level, both with Simulink and Broadcom, they already know the playbook. At this stage the games, people already know their game. It's like a chess move. They already know. They'll look at VMware and see which assets to keep, which one not to keep, which organization, but I think Hank is a master at this one. To me, I'm personally excited with the VMware Broadcom combination. It's a great thing for the industry. It's great for VMware and VMware customers and partners. >> Well, John, you and Dave had a chance to sit down with Raghu. What were some of the things that he unpacked about the Broadcom acquisition? >> He was on talking points. He was on message. He was saying the things that any CEO was going to make a lot of cash on this deal. And he's proud. I think it wasn't about the money for him. I sensed that he's certainly going to make a lot of cash on this deal as an executive, but he's a long time VMware employee and a well loved and revered person. He's done a lot of great work, technically set the agenda. So I think their mindset is we're going to just continue to do an amazing job as VMware as we are and then let Broadcom, let the chips fall where they may, and hopefully, if they do a good job, maybe they'll either refactor some of their base plans or they laid it all out in the field, so to speak. So that's my vibe. Now specifically, he made some comments, like, "Yeah, we're really proud." And he staying technical. He's still like, "This is really happening." So I think he's going to, essentially, to the very end, be like, "Cross cloud and hybrid cloud. This is our third generation." So there he's hanging onto the VMware third act that they're saying, and he hopes that it comes home. And I think he's going to just deal with it. He didn't seem flustered and he didn't seem overly confident. >> Okay. >> I guess that's my opinion. What do you think? >> Personally worked with Raghu, worked for Raghu, so I think of him as the greatest CEO for VMware ever could have, right? It's a journey. It was Paul Maritz, then Pat Gelsinger, now Raghu. I think he's in the right place, right time to lead VMware, and Raghu's doing a fantastic job. And personally, getting these two companies married, I think Raghu did the right partnership with Broadcom. >> Well, I think if this event's any indication if they're just sitting back and waiting, they're not, and this event was well done, it was pulled off. The branding's amazing. I thought they did a good job with the name change. And then in light of all the Broadcom issues, the execution was great. It was not a bad show here. It was a good show. It wasn't terrible at all. People were excited. I think the ecosystem also felt that Broadcom, like an electronic shock to the system, like something's going to happen. Let's wait and see. I'm going to go to the event to see if it's going to be around and kind of getting a feel first party, in person, what's happening. Again, remember VMware didn't have an event since 2019. This is a community that thrives on physical, face to face camaraderie, community. And so, I think the show was a success. And I think that's a result of Raghu and his team. >> Because we have a booth there for AISERA, my company, we have a booth. We are offering coffee and donuts. You guys should come by and tell people. You'll get a free coffee and a donut, but it's one of the best shows I've seen. Well, I think people after pandemic are back, people are interacting. We have 500 people in one day at our booth. So for a startup company like us, getting that much crowd is unheard of. So it's great. We're very excited. >> The vibe from the partner community, I had a chance to talk with a lot of partners, AWS, NetApp, Rackspace, really seems like the partnerships side of VMware is very, very strong and the partners are excited about what's next for VMware. Did you have a chance to talk with any of the partners? >> Actually, look. I'm actually meeting with Karen. So Karen Egan is my contact at VMware too, and Sumit, (indistinct) a bunch of the customer success organization. We talk to people in their digital experience management team. We are very excited to be partner with both VMware's customer, partner, and all experts, right? I'll need the VMware ecosystem for my company to thrive. So for us, VMware customers are my customers and leveraging VMware APIs into VMware, that's that's important for us. >> Lisa, that's a great question because that brings us to the question of, okay, clearly this show also proves to us from our conversations and exploring the floor, the wave is coming. This next cloud wave is here. We're calling it Supercloud, whatever you want to call it, it's coming and it's real, and people know it. And also the lines of sight into economics around where people can fit in this next level ecosystem is becoming clear. So I think people kind of know what's the right side of the street to be on in this next shift. So that's coming. That's independent of Broadcom. So the floor represents to me the excitement for not only the VMware workload powering software, with or without Broadcom, but the next wave. So the question is if Broadcom goes down their path and Hank does what he does, who wins and who loses on where things flow? Because this energy is going to flow somewhere. Is it going to flow to AWS? Is it going to flow to Microsoft? Is it going to flow to HPE with Green Lake getting some great traction? NetApp's doing great. We just heard from them. So the partners aren't hurting. It's only going to get better. re:Invent's right around the corner. That's a packed house. Their ecosystem's growing like a weed. Who wins? 'Cause the customers at VMware are enterprise customers. They're used to being serviced. They have sales reps from Microsoft, they got sales reps from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, real senior enterprise stakeholders there. So someone's going to end up filling in as VMware settles into their broad composition. Who wins and who loses, in your mind? >> A Very good question. So my thing is, I think it's... Well, I put Microsoft and Amazon the winners. In that way, actually mean Microsoft will win because in a true Supercloud, your vision, back to hybrid cloud on-prem and public cloud, VMware disruption with Broadcom, as if there's any bridge in the market, Microsoft will take advantage of it. Azure, right? Amazon VMware is there. Then, you have Google and VMware. So I think Azure will probably try to take advantage of this, but very next will be Amazon, right away there. That leaves you with Google Cloud, right? Google Cloud is the one. So they're the people that are able to figure out what to do in this equation. And then, obviously, the other one is Oracle. Oracle has no hearts in this game. So to me, the people who are going to probably lose impact model will be Oracle if the Broadcom and VMware will happen. So it's Azure, Amazon winning the race, probably Google is right behind them. Oracle will be distinct. Other side is Dell. Actually, Dell has no game in this. Our Broadcom and VMware, Dell should be the one. >> Dell might have a little secret sauce on the table with Michael Dell. >> That's true. >> If he convert his shares, he might be the largest shareholder at Broadcom. >> That's true. >> He could end up owning all the back. >> So he may be the winner all the time. (all laugh) >> Don't count him out. Well, this is a good question. I want to just double click on this. So you get customer dynamic. Where do they go? You get the community, which is a big force multiplier in this world, and if you had to bet on community between Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, Amazon trumps Microsoft on force multiplier community. Ecosystem, AWS beats Microsoft on that one. So it's interesting because it's now multiple dimensions we're talking about here. It's customers. That's the top order, right? The customers. But also, you got community, the people who put on sessions, the people in the community that are the influencers that are leading the trends, and developers are very trending, relative to what kind of code they use, what's their environments? So the developers is changing that landscape and, ultimately, the ecosystem of partners, right? 'Cause there's a lot more overlap between AWS and VMware's ecosystem than there is between Microsoft and that. And HPE is just starting an ecosystem. So it's going to be very interesting. >> It is. It is. I think Broadcom and VMware cannot be any best time for the industry, right? As you said. HP is coming in. Oracle is coming in. And to your point, VMware and AWS are another best partners. Now, this going to create any gap for Microsoft to enter for Azure? I think that's where the market is saying that it's going to open up a hybrid cloud player for Microsoft to enter what is to be a tight relationship with VMware and Amazon. Right? So people will rethink through their apps. And more importantly, the end point to me. See, the key is, like you talk about with Supercloud, nobody's talking about Supercloud for the endpoint. >> You mean Edge or security? >> Not an Edge endpoint. Endpoint could be your devices, laptop, desktop. >> Or a building or a light bulb or whatever. >> Desktop or VDI desktop services servers, right? So we call it endpoint cloud. There's no endpoint Supercloud. John, that's an area that you should double click on. Super cloud for the servers is different from Supercloud for endpoint. >> Well, SuperCloud.World is the URL out there. If you're interested in Supercloud, we are adding tracks to that body of work. So we had our event on August 9th. It was virtual event, where Dave and I are going to add a data track, we're going to add a security track, and we should add, maybe, an endpoint workspace, work. >> That's a VMware brand, Workspace and Horizon. So that whole workspace endpoint for Supercloud is going to happen. >> Yes. >> Right. That kind of deviates from- >> Do you like Supercloud? Are you bullish on Supercloud? >> I'm very bullish on Supercloud because I, myself, is running on-prem in VPCs, public clouds, private clouds. Supercloud kind of composites it so app should be designed. 'Cause I don't want to design an app for one cloud. It's not going to work. So it's like how Java came and I can run it on any platform. The ideas you build it on Supercloud, run it, whatever you want. Right? >> That's exactly it. So what would you want to see in Supercloud as it evolves? And we were part of this open conversation. This is our point for today. We're going to have a great panel come up later today. We're going to have the influencers come on to debate what Supercloud should or shouldn't be. If you want to add to the contribution, we'll add this into the work, what should what's needed in Supercloud? What's table stakes. >> I think we need a Java compiler that will happen for Supercloud. I build it once, execute in any place I want, right? Using the Terraform, HashiCorp (indistinct) So what I don't want is keep building this thing for every cloud. I want to abstract that out. The whole idea of Supercloud is how Java gave me the abstraction for hardware 20 years back or 30 years back, we need the same abstraction for the cloud today. Otherwise, I'm customizing for VM Cloud, I'm customizing for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud. We, as an application vendor, it's too hard to keep doing it. I have now thousand tuners. I don't need thousand DevOps people. I need maybe 10 DevOps people. So there's a clear abstraction complexity that industry should develop, and your concept Supercloud with everybody thinking that, and it has to start from the grassroots with ecosystem. >> What do you think about the participants in this abstraction layer? Because someone said on "theCUBE" here this week, the people in the abstraction layer shouldn't be participants in the below or above the abstraction. >> I think it should be everybody, right? It's all inclusive. You need the apps guys to come in. You need the OS players to come in. You need the cloud vendors to come in, infrastructure. So you need everybody. >> Okay, let's just say that you were the spokesperson for the Supercloud organization, Supercloud.World. How would you sell AWS on why it's important for them? >> It's because they can build it and sell it in AWS and multiple AWS Gov Cloud, AWS On-prem, VPCs. It's even important for them, their expansion, their market time upfront. If I'm (indistinct), if I'm built on Supercloud, I can increase my time share. Otherwise I'm bringing only to public cloud. >> Okay, so I'll say, I'm Amazon and we have a concept called "One Way Doors." We don't want to go through a one way door. Is Supercloud a one way door for them? What's in it for them? Do they make more? Does it help their ecosystem? And the same question from Microsoft Azure and Google cloud. >> They're make more money. They're making their apps run in multiple places. It's a natural expansion. You are solving your customer problems for Amazon and DGC, right? My job is give people choices. I give choice to Lisa. Lisa can run it on public cloud. John, you can run it on VPC, AWS. >> So you're saying, so you think customers are asking for this right now? >> Everybody's asking. >> But don't really know how to say it? >> Customers are asking. Partners are asking. All of us are asking. >> Okay, what's the ask? >> Ask is give me a one place to build applications and run it anywhere without adding the complexity. >> Okay. Done. That's Supercloud. It'll ship tomorrow. (Lisa laughs) Well done. (John laughs) All right, well done. Final question for you. Lisa and I have been talking with folks here. What advice would you give the folks that are in here? 'Cause we have a lot of activity, people with marketing their solutions and products. They're trying to put a voice out there around thought leadership and trying to figure out what side of the street they should be on relative to the next 10 years as they're here at VMware Explore, as the next gen cloud comes around. What's the right narrative? What's the right positioning for companies to be on right now to be the most relevant and in the flow? >> I don't know about 10 years, but right now we are in difficult economic times, right? Markets are down. Inflation is up. So I think the fastest cost, people should focus on cost. How can it take cost? Automation is the key, right? Whether you use AI or automation , like you and me talking, John, last week, right? That's important. Every CEO I talk to is focused on cost. How do I cut my cost? How can I do with fewer resources? How can I do with fewer people, right? So the new budget right now is cut your budget in half. So every company, every exec should think about how can you be a good citizen? How can I get growth and scale? How can I do more with less? And that should be the next 12 months. >> That was a lot of the theme of conversations that I had with the VMware ecosystem, doing more with less. So that's definitely on everyone's minds. >> Right, and that's what my company is fully focused on. AISERA is all about AI automation. How can we solve your thing? We want to be solving customer problem. We are like your automation engine for your enterprise, right? We are a platform of platform. That's why I like the Supercloud. I can run AISERA as a platform on top of Supercloud. >> Excellent. >> Wow! If only we had more time! I know that you guys could really dig into Supercloud and take it even further. So you have to come back, Muddu. >> I will. >> He always wants to come back. >> I will be back. >> He's on the team. He's has contributed to the open source effort of Supercloud. Thank you. >> Yes. >> All right, thank you so much for joining John and me and kind of breaking down your vision on VMware Broadcom and the future. Next step, we've got to get some customers on here. I really want to understand what the customer experience is going to be like, but we'll have to another segment on that one. >> We will do that. Thank you, Lisa, for having me. >> My pleasure. >> John. >> Thank you very much. Thank you. >> For our guest and John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE" live on day three of our coverage of VMware Explore. We'll be back after a short break. (upbeat corporate music)

(modern music) >> Welcome back, everyone to theCUBE's live coverage here in San Francisco for VMware Explore, formerly VMworld. theCUBE's been here 12 years today, we've been watching the evolution of the user conference. It's been quite a journey to see and, you know, virtualization just explode. We got two great guests here, we're going to break it all down. Ash McCarty, director of Multicloud Product Management Dell Technologies, no stranger to the VMworld, now VMware Explore, and Josh Prewitt, Chief Product Officer at Rackspace Technology. Great to see you guys, thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah, thanks so much, thanks for having us. >> So, you know, the theme this year is multicloud, but it's really all about vSphere 8's out, you got VxRail, you got containers, you got the magic going on around cloud native, which it really points to the future state of where this is going, which is agile enterprises, infrastructure as code, high performance under the hood, I mean, all the things that you guys have been doing for many, many years and decades and business, but now with VMware putting it all together, it feels like, this year, it's like you got visibility into the value proposition, people have clear line of sight into where the performances are from the hardware software and now Cloud, it's kind of coming together, feels like it's coming together. Let's talk about that and the relationship between you guys, Rackspace and Dell and VMware. >> Perfect. That sounds great. Well, thanks so much for having us. You know, I'll sort of kick that off. We've got a huge lifelong partnership and relationship with Dell and VMware and the technologies that these guys create that we're able to put in front of our customers are really what allows us to go drive those business outcomes. So, yeah, happy to dive into it. >> Yeah, and I think to add to that, we understand that customers have a tremendously complex challenge ahead of them on managing their infrastructure. That's why with VxRail, we have intelligent infrastructure. We want it to simplify the outcomes for customers no matter if they're managing VMware or if they're managing the actual hardware infrastructure underneath it. >> Yeah, one of the things that we always talk about, you know, you read about it on the blogs and the news and the startup world, is "Oh, product-market fit," and, well, it kind of applies here, if you think about what's going on on the product side with the Edge emerging, hybrid cloud on pace with private cloud, and obviously, cloud native is great too if you have native applications in there, but now, putting it all together, you're hearing things like the telco cloud, I hear buzzwords like that, I hear supercloud, which we promoting, which you see in companies becoming cloud themselves, with the CapEx being handled by either public cloud or optimized on premise or hosted hardware. I mean, this is now, this is not all about everything's going to the cloud, this is now cloud operations on premise and in hosting hardware, so I'd love to get your perspective on that because you guys are huge hosting, you've got huge experience there, modernizing all the time. What does the modern era look like for the customer? >> Yeah, yeah, so, I mean, I think it's very clear to everybody that it's a multicloud world, right? I think the main question is, are you multicloud as a strategy, or are you multicloud as a situation? Because everybody's multicloud. That ship has sailed, right? >> Yeah, exactly. >> And so, when I look at the capabilities that we have with the partnership with Dell and the VxRail technologies, you know, life-cycle management that you have to go and perform across your fleet can be extremely difficult, and whenever you take something like the VxRail and you add, you know, you have the hardware and you have the software all fully integrated there, it makes it much easier to do life-cycle management, so for a company like Rackspace, where we have tens of thousands of nodes that we're managing for customers across 29 global data centers, and we're all over the place, the ability to have that strength with Dell's hardware, the VMware platform improve life-cycle management makes it so much easier for us to manage our fleet and be able to deliver those outcomes even faster for customers. >> So assuming that VxRail isn't a virtual railroad that delivers data to Rackspace data centers, if it's not that, what is it, Ash? Give us a little premier on what VxRail is. >> Well, VxRail is the first and only jointly engineered HCI system with VMware, so everything we do with VMware is better. >> So hyperconverged infrastructure. >> Hyperconverged infrastructure. >> What we used to call a server because all the bits are in the box, right? >> All the storage is computed in there. >> Everything's in there. Right. >> Simplifies management. And we built in with the VxRail HCI system software, which is really our secret sauce, we built in to actually add those automation capabilities with VMware, so it allows you to scale out very quickly, scale up very quickly. And one of our big capabilities is our life-cycle management, which is full stack, meaning it life-cycles the entire vSphere stack as well as the hardware infrastructure underneath as one continuously validated state, meaning that customers can focus more on their business outcomes and driving their business forward versus spending time managing their infrastructure. >> And when you talk about customers, it's also the value proposition that's flowing through Rackspace because Rackspace, when you install these systems, how long does it take to spin up to have a VM available for use when you install one of these systems? >> Oh, so you can have the system up and running very quickly. So we automate all the day one deployment, so you can have the system up and running in your labs, in your data centers in 45 minutes, and you can have VMs up in provision very shortly after that. >> So what do you do with that kind of agility? >> Oh my gosh, so we've actually taken that, and we've taken the VxRail platform and we've created what we call Rackspace Services for VMware Cloud, and this is our platform that is based on VxRail, it's based on vCloud Director from VMware, and by having the VxRail is already RackStacked, ready to go for our customers, we're able to sign a customer up today, and then, within a matter of minutes, give them access to a vCloud Director portal where they can go in and spin up a new VM anytime they want, but then, it also integrates into all of those cloud management platforms and tools, right? It integrates into your Terraform, so you've got, you know, your full CI/CD pipeline, and so you have that full end-to-end capability. If you want to go click around on a portal, you can using vCloud Director and using vSphere and all that great stuff. If you want to automate it, you can do that too. And we do it all in the backs of that VxRail hyperconverged infrastructure. >> Talk about the DPU dynamic. We're hearing a lot about DPUs. VxRail, you guys have some HCI-like vibe there with DPUs. How is that impacting performance, can you guys see? 'Cause we're hearing a lot of buzz around the VxRail and the VMware DPUs really making things much faster. >> I mean, it's the thing we talk about most with customers now is their challenges with scaling their infrastructure, and VxRail is going to be the first and only jointly engineered system that will have vSphere 8 with DPUs functionality and will have the full life-cycle management, and what this really empowers customers to do is, as they're growing their environments that they're scaling out their workloads in the data center, they need a way to scale to that next generation of networking and network security, and that's what DPUs allow you to do. They give you that offload and that high performance capability. >> Talk about the... I'd love to get your guys' perspective, while we're just riffing on this real quick sidebar for a second, if VxRail has these capabilities which you guys are promoting it does and some of the things go on in the modern era, the next gen apps are going to look a lot different. We're kind of calling it supercloud, if you will, for lack of a better description. Yeah, multicloud is a state, I agree. It's a situation and a state, but supercloud is really the functionality of what cloud does. So what do you guys see as, maybe it's tea leaves reading now or dots connecting, what are some of those next gen apps? I mean the Edge is there with, "Oh, the Edge is going to explode," and I can see the Edge having new kinds of apps that we've never seen before, whether it's on premise building lights and however they work or IoT changing. What do you guys see as the next gen app/apps coming out that's not looking the same as now, or how are apps today changing for next gen? 'Cause you get more performance at the Edge, you get more action, you get more co-locations in GEOS, so it's clear multicloud multi-presence is happening too, right? So what are you guys seeing? What's this... >> Yeah, I would say two areas that resonate most with customers is customers transitioning to their cloud native journey, so beginning it and using things like Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations, which we fully support and have a white paper out there list for customers, another area is really in the AIML space, so we've been partnering with both VMware and Nvidia to simplify how customers deploy new AIML infrastructure. I mean, it's challenging, complex, a lot of customers are wanting to dive in because it really enables them to better operate and operate on insights and analytics they get from running their business. >> Josh? >> And, you know, I think it really comes down to, whether you want to call it Edge or IoT or, you know, smart things, whatever, right? It all comes down to how we are expected, now, to capture all of the data to create a better user experience, and that's what we're seeing the modern applications being built around, right, is how do you leverage all of the data that's now at your fingertips, whether it's from wearables, machine vision, whatever it may be, and drive that improved user experience. And so that's the apps that we're seeing now, right? You know, of course, you still have all your business apps, all your ERP capabilities that need to exist and all of that great stuff, but at the same time, I also expect that, whenever, you know, now, whenever I'm walking into a store and their machine vision picks me up and they're pinging my phone and pushing me push notifications, I expect to have a better user experience. >> And do a database search on you too, by the way. >> Yeah, exactly, right? >> No search warrants out for 'em, you know, you're good. >> That's exactly it, so, you know, you kind of expect that better user experience and that's where I'm seeing a lot of the new app development. >> Yeah, it's fun, as these cases are intoxicating to think about all the weird coolness around it. The thing that I want to get your thoughts on is, we were just talking on the analyst session earlier in theCUBE, if DevOps is here and won, which we believe it has and infrastructure as code is happening, the cloud native discussion, shifting left CI/CD pipeline, that's DevOps in my mind, that's like cloud native developers, that's like traditional IT in my mind, so that's all part of the coding. DataOps and Security Ops seem to be the most robust areas of conversations where that's the new Ops, right? So, I mean, I made the term up, but new Ops, in terms of the focus, what are you making more efficient? What are you optimizing for? What's your guys reaction to that? Because all the conversations that we talk about is data, security, and then the rest seems to be cool, all good on the developer's side. Yeah, shift left events happening up there, Kubernetes containers, but all the action on the Ops side seems to be data and security. >> Yeah. >> What's your reaction to that? Is that right? >> So personally, I do think that it's right. I think that, you know with great power comes great responsibility, right? And so the clouds have brought that to us, all of your infrastructure as code has brought that to us. We have that great power now, right? But then you start to see, kind of, the pipeline attacks that are starting to become more and more popular. And so how you secure something that is as complex as, you know, a cloud native development pipeline is really hard, it's really challenging, so I do think that it warrants the attention. Then on the data side, I think that that matters because when I talked about those examples of a better user experience, I don't want my better user experience tomorrow, I don't want it 20 minutes from now. I want that real time capability, and so with that comes massive requirements from a compute and hardware perspective, massive requirements from a software perspective, and from, you know, what folks are now calling DataOps perspective >> Data addressability, having the data available to be delivered in real time. >> You know, there there's been a lot of talk, here at the conference, about the disaggregation of, you know, the brainularism, if we're going to make up words, you know, the horsepower that's involved, CPU, DPU, GPU. I'll make up another word. We're familiar with the thermometers used during COVID to measure temperature. Pretend that I've invented a device called a Care-o-meter and I'm pointing at various people's foreheads, who needs to care about DPUs and GPUs and CPUs? You know, John was referencing the idea of security at the Edge, data. Well, wow, we've got GPUs that can do things. Who needs to care about that? Obviously, we care about it. You care about it. You care about it. You're building this stuff, you're deploying this stuff, but at what level in the customer stack do they need to care about it? Are you going in, is RackSpace engaging customers and saying, "Look, here's the value proposition: we understand your mission to be this. We believe we can achieve your mission." How far down in the organization do you go before you get to someone where you have to have the DPU conversation? 'Cause we didn't even define DPU yet here, which is always offensive to me. >> I think I defined it actually. >> Did you define DPU? Good. Thank you John. >> Yeah, yeah. >> But so who should care? Who should really care about that? >> Oh, that's such a complex question, right? Because everybody, Rackspace included >> But a good one. But a good question. >> Oh, it's a great question. >> Thank you. >> Great question. (laughing) >> Everybody, Rackspace included, is talking about selling business outcomes, right? And ultimately, that is what matters. It is what matters, is selling those business outcomes to the customer. And so of course we're dealing with our business buyers who are just looking for, "Hey, improve my KPIs, make this run faster, better, stronger, all of that great stuff," but ultimately you get down to an IT staff, and to the IT staff, these things matter because the IT staff, they all have budgets that they have to hit. The realities start to hit them and they can't just go and spend whatever they want, you know, trying to hit the KPIs of the marketing department or the finance department, right? And so you have your business buyers that do care significantly about buying their outcomes, and so we're having, you know, the business outcomes conversations with them and then, oftentimes, they will come back to us and say, "Okay, but now we need you to talk to this person over in our IT organization. We need you to talk with our CIO, with our VP of infrastructure," whatever that may be, where we really get down to the nuts and bolts and we talk about how, you know, we can stretch the hardware coming from Dell, we can stretch the software coming from VMware, and we can deliver a higher caliber experience, a lower TCO, by taking advantage of some of the new technologies coming out. >> Yeah, so there's a reason why I ask that awesome question, and it's because I can imagine a scenario where, and this speaks to RackSpace's position in the market today and moving forward and what your history has been, people want to know, "Well, why should I work with Rackspace instead of some mega-hyper-monster-cloud?" If part of the answer is: well, it's because, for very specific application environments, like healthcare we talked about earlier, that might be a conversation where you're actually bringing in Dell to have a conversation about how you are specifically optimizing hardware and software to achieve things that otherwise can't be achieved with t-shirt sizes of servers in a hyperscale cloud. I mean, is that part of the Rackspace value proposition moving forward, that you can do things like that with partners like Dell that the other folks aren't going to focus on? >> Absolutely, it is, right? And a lot of the power of Rackspace is that, you know, we're the best-in-class pure play cloud solutions provider, and we can talk to you about your AWS, your Azure, your GCP, all of that great stuff, but we can also talk to you about private cloud solutions that are built on the backs of Dell Technologies, and in this multicloud world, you don't have that one size fits all for every single application. There are some things that run great in a hyperscale provider, and we can help you get there, but just exactly like you said, there are these verticals where you have applications that don't necessarily run all that well or they're not modernized, they haven't been refactored to be able to take advantage of cloud native services. And if all you're going to do is run that on bare metal in VMs, a hosted private cloud is, by far, the best way to do that, right? And Rackspace provides that hosted private cloud on the backs of Dell technology, on the backs of VMware technology, and we can go deliver those custom bespoke solutions to customers. >> So the infrastructure and the hardware still matters, Ash, yes? >> Absolutely, and I think he just highlighted, while what he does with his customers and what's important to his internal organization is being to deliver faster outcomes, better outcomes, give those customers, to meet those KPIs of those customers consuming their infrastructure at Rackspace, so I think, really, what the DPU and the underlying infrastructure enables is all that full stack integration to allow them to quickly scale to the demands of those customers and what they need in their infrastructure. >> Guys, while we got you here, what do you think about this year's VMware Explore, a lot of anticipation around how many people are going to show up and, you know, all kinds of things around the new name and Broadcom. Big attendance here, I mean, I was very surprised about the size of the attendance and the show floor, the ecosystem, this train is not stopping. I mean, this is VMware's third act, no matter what the contextual situation is. What's your observation of the show? Do you agree, or is there anything that you could want to share about for folks who didn't make it, what they missed? >> Yeah, I mean it really highlights, I mean, you've seen the breadth of the show, I know people that aren't here that aren't able to see it are really missing the excitement. So there's a lot of great announcements around multicloud, around all the announcements, around the vSphere 8 with the DPUs, the vSAN Express Storage architecture, ton of new exciting technologies that are really empowering how customers, you know, the future of how customers are going to consume their workloads in their data centers. >> Josh, they're not short on products and stuff. A lot of moving parts. vSphere 8, a bunch of new stuff. And the cloud native stuff's looking pretty good too, off the tee. >> You know, it does feel like a focus on the core, though, in a way. So I don't think there's been a lot of peripheral noise at the show. Sometimes it's, you know, "And we got this, and this, and this, and this." It's vSphere 8, vSAN 8, cloud software, you know, really hammering it home and refining it. >> But you don't think of it as a little bit of a circus act. I mean the general keynote was theatrical, I thought, I mean, I thought they did a good job on that. I think vSphere 8 was buried a little bit, I thought they could have... They checked the box at the beginning. >> That's true, that's true. >> I mean, they mentioned it, but we didn't see the demos. You know? Demos are usually great. But that's my only criticism. >> Well, that's why we supplemented it with the VxRail announcements, right? With our big announcements around vSphere 8 and with the DPUs as well as the vSAN Express Storage architecture being integrated into VxRail, so I think, you know, it's always that ongoing partnership and, you know, doing what's best for our customers, showing them the next generation and how they consume that technology. >> Yeah, you guys got good props on VxRail. We had a great chat about it yesterday. Rackspace, you guys doing good? Quick update on what's happening with you guys. Give a quick plug. What's going on at Rackspace? What's hot? What's going on? Give a quick plug for what the services are and the products you got going on there. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we are that end-to-end cloud provider, right? And so we've got really exciting offers in market, helping customers take advantage of all the hyperscale providers, and then giving them that private cloud experience. We've got everything from single-tenant running in our data centers on the backs of vSphere, vCloud Director, and VxRails, all the way through to, like, multi-tenant burstable capability that runs within our own data centers as well. It's a really exciting time for technology, a really exciting time for Rackspace. >> Congratulations, we've been following your journey for a long time. Dell, you guys do continue to do a great job and end-to-end phenomenal work. The telco thing's a huge opportunity, we didn't even go there. But Ash, thanks. Josh, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. >> Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks for having us. >> Thank you very much. >> Okay, thanks for watching theCUBE. We're live, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Two sets here in Moscone West on the ground level, in the lobby, checking out all the action. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (modern music)

(soft joyful music) >> Welcome back everyone to the live CUBE coverage here in San Francisco for VMware Explore '22. I'm John Furrier with my host Dave Vellante. Three days of wall to wall live coverage. Two sets here at the CUBE, here on the ground floor in Moscone, and we got VMware and HPE back on the CUBE. Paul Turner, VP of products at vSphere and cloud infrastructure at VMware. Great to see you. And Mark Nickerson, Director of Go to Mark for Compute Solutions at Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Great to see you guys. Thanks for coming on. >> Yeah. >> Thank you for having us. >> So we, we are seeing a lot of traction with GreenLake, congratulations over there at HPE. The customers changing their business model consumption, starting to see that accelerate. You guys have the deep partnership, we've had you guys on earlier yesterday. Talked about the technology partnership. Now, on the business side, where's the action at with the HP and you guys with the customer? Because, now as they go cloud native, third phase of the inflection point, >> Yep. >> Multi-cloud, hybrid-cloud, steady state. Where's the action at? >> So I think the action comes in a couple of places. Um, one, we see increased scrutiny around, kind of not only the cost model and the reasons for moving to GreenLake that we've all talked about there, but it's really the operational efficiencies as well. And, this is an area where the long term partnership with VMware has really been a huge benefit. We've actually done a lot of joint engineering over the years, continuing to do that co-development as we bring products like Project Monterey, or next generations of VCF solutions, to live in a GreenLake environment. That's an area where customers not only see the benefits of GreenLake from a business standpoint, um, on a consumption model, but also around the efficiency operationally as well. >> Paul, I want to, I want to bring up something that we always talk about on the CUBE, which is experience in the enterprise. Usually it's around, you know, technology strategy, making the right product market fit, but HPE and VMware, I mean, have exceptional depth and experience in the enterprise. You guys have a huge customer base, doesn't churn much, steady state there, you got vSphere, killer product, with a new release coming out, HP, unprecedented, great sales force. Everyone knows that you guys have great experience serving customers. And, it seems like now the fog is clearing, we're seeing clear line of sight into value proposition, you know, what it's worth, how do you make money with it, how do partners make money? So, it seems like the puzzle's coming together right now with consumption, self-service, developer focus. It just seems to be clicking. What's your take on all this because... >> Oh, absolutely. >> you got that engine there at VMware. >> Yeah. I think what customers are looking for, customers want that cloud kind of experience, but they want it on their terms. So, the work that we're actually doing with the GreenLake offerings that we've done, we've released, of course, our subscription offerings that go along with that. But, so, customers can now get cloud on their terms. They can get systems services. They know that they've got the confidence that we have integrated those services really well. We look at something like vSphere 8, we just released it, right? Well, immediately, day zero, we come out, we've got trusted integrated servers from HPE, Mark and his team have done a phenomenal job. We make sure that it's not just the vSphere releases but VSAN and we get VSAN ready nodes available. So, the customers get that trusted side of things. And, you know, just think about it. We've... 200,000 joined customers. >> Yeah, that's a lot. >> We've a hundred thousand kind of enabled partners out there. We've an enormous kind of install base of customers. But also, those customers want us to modernize. And, you know, the fact that we can do that with GreenLake, and then of course with our new features, and our new releases. >> Yeah. And it's nice that the products market fits going well on both sides. But can you guys share, both of you share, the cadence of the relationship? I mean, we're talking about vSphere, every two years, a major release. Now since 6, vSphere 6, you guys are doing three months' releases, which is amazing. So you guys got your act together there, doing great. But, you guys, so many joint customers, what's the cadence? As stuff comes out, how do you guys put that together? How tightly integrated? Can you share a quick... insight into that dynamic? >> Yeah, sure. So, I mean Mark can and add to this too, but the teams actually work very closely, where it's every release that we do is jointly qualified. So that's a really, really important thing. But it's more interesting is this... the innovation side of things. Right? If you just think about it, 'cause it's no use to just qualify. That's not that interesting. But, like I said, we've released with vSphere 8 you know... the new enhanced storage architecture. All right? The new, next generation of vSphere. We've got that immediately qualified, ready on HPE equipment. We built out new AI servers, actually with Invidia and with HPE. And, we're able to actually push the extremes of... AI and intelligence... on systems. So that's kind of work. And then, of course, our Project Monterey work. Project Monterey Distributed Services Engine. That's something we're really excited about, because we're not just building a new server anymore, we're actually going to change the way servers are built. Monterey gives us a new platform to build from that we're actually jointly working. >> So double click on that, and then to explain how HPE is taking advantage of it. I mean, obvious you have more diversity of XPU's, you've got isolation, you've got now better security, and confidential computing, all that stuff. Explain that in some detail, and how does HPE take advantage of that? >> Yeah, definitely. So, if you think about vSphere 8, vSphere 8 I can now virtualize anything. I can virtualize your CPU's, your GPU's, and now what we call DPU's, or data processing units. A data processing unit, it's... think of it as we're running, actually, effectively another version of ESX, sitting down on this processor. But, that gives us an ability to run applications, and some of the virtualization services, actually down on that DPU. It's separated away from where you run your application. So, all your applications get to consume all your CPU. It's all available to you. Your DPU is used for that virtualization and virtualization services. And that's what we've done. We've been working with HPE and HPE and Pensando. Maybe you can talk some of the new systems that we've built around this too. >> Yeah. So, I mean, that's one of the... you talked about the cadence and that... back to the cadence question real briefly. Paul hit on it. Yeah, there's a certain element of, "Let's make sure that we're certified, we're qualified, we're there day zero." But, that cadence goes a lot beyond it. And, I think Project Monterey is a great example of where that cadence expands into really understanding the solutioning that goes into what the customer's expecting from us. So, to Paul's point, yeah, we could have just qualified the ESX version to go run on a DPU and put that in the market and said, "Okay, great. Customers, We know that it works." We've actually worked very tightly with VMware to really understand the use case, what the customer needs out of that operating environment, and then provide, in the first instantiation, three very discrete product solutions aimed at different use cases, whether that's a more robust use case for customers who are looking at data intensive, analytic intensive, environments, other customers might be looking at VDI or even edge applications. And so, we've worked really closely with VMware to engineer solutions specific to those use cases, not just to a qualification of an operating environment, not just a qualification of certain software stack, but really into an understanding of the use case, the customer solution, and how we take that to market with a very distinct point of view alongside our partners. >> And you can configure the processors based on that workload. Is that right? And match the workload characteristics with the infrastructure is that what I'm getting? >> You do, and actually, well, you've got the same flexibility that we've actually built in why you love virtualization, why people love it, right? You've got the ability to kind of bring harness hardware towards your application needs in a very dynamic way. Right? So if you even think about what we built in vSphere 8 from an AI point of view, we're able to scale. We built the ability to actually take network device cards, and GPU cards, you're to able to build those into a kind of composed device. And, you're able to provision those as you're provisioning out VM's. And, the cool thing about that, is you want to be able to get extreme IO performance when you're doing deep learning applications, and you can now do that, and you can do it very dynamically, as part of the provisioning. So, that's the kind of stuff. You've got to really think, like, what's the use case? What's the applications? How do we build it? And, for the DPU side of things, yes, we've looked at how do we take some of our security services, some of our networking services, and we push those services down onto the SmartNIC. It frees up processors. I think the most interesting thing, that you probably saw on the keynote, was we did benchmarks with Reddit databases. We were seeing 20 plus, I'm sure the exact number, I think it was 27%, I have to get exact number, but a 27% latency improvement, to me... I came from the database background, latency's everything. Latency's king. It's not just... >> Well it's... it's number one conversation. >> I mean, we talk about multi-cloud, and as you start getting into hybrid. >> Right. >> Latency, data movement, efficiency, I mean, this is all in the workload mindset that the workhorses that you guys have been working at HPE with the compute, vSphere, this is heart center of the discussion. I mean, it is under the hood, and we're talking about the engine here, right? >> Sure. >> And people care about this stuff, Mark. This is like... Kubernetes only helps this better with containers. I mean, it's all kind of coming together. Where's that developer piece? 'Cause remember, infrastructure is code, what everybody wants. That's the reality. >> Right. Well, I think if you take a look at... at where the Genesis of the desire to have this capability came from, it came directly out of the fact that you take a look at the big cloud providers, and sure, the ability to have a part of that operating environment, separated out of the CPU, free up as much processing as you possibly can, but it was all in this very lockdown proprietary, can't touch it, can't develop on it. The big cloud guys owned it. VMware has come along and said, "Okay, we're going to democratize that. We're going to make this available for the masses. We're opening this up so that developers can optimize workloads, can optimize applications to run in this kind of environment." And so, really it's about bringing that cloud experience, that demand that customers have for that simplicity, that flexibility, that efficiency, and then marrying it with the agility and security of having your on premises or hybrid cloud environment. And VMware is kind of helping with that... >> That's resonating with the customer, I got to imagine. >> Yeah. >> What's the feedback you're hearing? When you talk to customers about that, the like, "Wait a minute, we'd have to like... How long is that going to take? 'Cause that sounds like a one off." >> Yeah. I'll tell you what... >> Everything is a one off now. You could do a one off. It scales. >> What I hear is give me more. We love where we're going in the first instantiation of what we can do with the Distributed Services Engine. We love what we're seeing. How do we do more? How do we drive more workloads in here? How do we get more efficiency? How can we take more of the overhead out of the CPU, free up more cores. And so, it's a tremendously positive response. And then, it's a response that's resonating with, "Love it. Give me more." >> Oh, if you're democratizing, I love that word because it means democratization, but someone's being democratized. Who's... What's... Something when... that means good things are happening, which means someone's not going to be winning out. Who's that? What... >> Well it, it's not necessarily that someone's not winning out. (laughs) What you read, it comes down to... Democratizing means you've got to look at it, making it widely available. It's available to all. And these things... >> No silos. No gatekeepers. Kind of that kind of thing. >> It's a little operationally difficult to use. You've got... Think about the DPU market. It was a divergent market with different vendors going into that market with different kind of operating systems, and that doesn't work. Right? You've got to actually go and virtualize those DPU's. So then, we can actually bring application innovation onto those DPU's. We can actually start using them in smart ways. We did the same thing with GPU's. We made them incredibly easy to use. We virtualized those GPU's, we're able to, you know, you can provision them in a very simple way. And, we did the same thing with Kubernetes. You mentioned about container based applications and modern apps in the one platform now, you can just set a cluster and you can just say, "Hey I want that as a modern apps enabled cluster." And boom. It's done. And, all of the configurations, set up, Kubernetes, it's done for you. >> But the thing that just GreenLake too, the democratization aspect of how that changed the business model unleashes... >> Right. >> ...efficiency and just simplicity. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. >> But the other thing was the 20% savings on the Reddit's benchmark, with no change required at the application level, correct? >> No change at the application level. In the vCenter, you have to set a little flag. >> Okay. You got to tick a box. >> You got to tick a little box... >> So I can live with that. But the point I'm making is that traditionally, we've had... We have an increasing amount of waste to do offloads, and now you're doing them much more efficiently, right? >> Yes. >> Instead of using the traditional x86 way of doing stuff, you're now doing purpose built, applying that to be much more efficient >> Totally agree. And I think it's becoming, it's going to become even more important. Look at, we are... our run times for our applications, We've got to move to a world where we're building completely confidential applications at all time. And that means that they are secured, encrypted, all traffic is encrypted, whether it's storage traffic, whether it's IO traffic, we've got to make sure we've got complete route of trust of the applications. And so, to do all of that is actually a... compute intensive. It just is. And so, I think as we move forward and people build much more complete, confidential, compute secured environments, you're going to be encrypting all traffic all the time. You're going to be doing micro-zoning and firewalling down at the VM level so that you've got the protection. You can take a VM, you can move it up to the cloud, it will inherit all of its policies, will move with it. All of that will take compute capacity. >> Yup. >> The great thing is that the DPU's give us this ability to offload and to use some of that spare compute capacity. >> And isolate so the application chance can't just tunnel in and get access to that >> You guys got so much going on. You can have your own CUBE show, just on the updating, what's going on between the two companies, and then the innovation. We got one minute left. Just quickly, what's the goal in the partnership? What's next? You guys going to be in the field together, doing joint customer work? Is there bigger plans? Is there events out there? What are some of your plans together in the marketplace? >> That's you. >> Yup. So, I think, Paul kind of alluded to it. Talk about the fact that you've got a hundred thousand partners in common. The venn diagram of looking at the HPE channel and the VMware channel, clearly there's an opportunity there to continue to drive a joint, go to market message, through both of our sales organizations, and through our shared channel. We have a 25,000 strong... solution architect... force that we can leverage. So as we get these exciting things to talk about, I mean, you talk about Project Monterey, the Distributed Services Engine. That's big news. There's big news around vSphere 8. And so, having those great things to go talk about with that strong sales team, with that strong channel organization, I think you're going to see a lot stronger partnership between VMware and HPE as we continue to do this joint development and joint selling >> Lots to get enthused about, pretty much there. >> Oh yeah! >> Yeah, I would just add in that we're actually in a very interesting point as well, where Intel's just coming out with Next Rev systems, we're building the next gen of these systems. I think this is a great time for customers to look at that aging infrastructure that they have in place. Now is a time we can look at upgrading it, but when they're moving it, they can move it also to a cloud subscription based model, you know can modernize not just what you have in terms of the capabilities and densify and get much better efficiency, but you can also modernize the way you buy from us and actually move to... >> Real positive change transformation. Checks the boxes there. And put some position for... >> You got it. >> ... cloud native development. >> Absolutely. >> Guys, thanks for coming on the CUBE. Really appreciate you coming out of that busy schedule and coming on and give us the up... But again, we can do a whole show some... all the moving parts and innovation going on with you guys. So thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thank you. I'm John Dave Vellante we're back with more live coverage day two, two sets, three days of wall to wall coverage. This is the CUBE at VMware Explorer. We'll be right back.

welcome back everyone to thecube's live coverage in san francisco for vmware explorer 2022 formerly vmworld i'm john furrier david live dave 12 years we've been covering this event formerly vmware first time in west now it's explore we've been in north we've been in south we've been in vegas multi-cloud is now the exploration vmware community is coming in john siegel svp at dell cube alumni dave mccraw vp at vmware guys thanks for coming back both cube alumni it's great to see you very senior organizations senior roles in the organizations of vmware and dell one year since the split great partnership continuing i mean some of the conversations we've been having over the past few years is that control plane the management layer making everything work together it's essentially been the multi-cloud hybrid cloud story what's the update what's how's the partnership look yeah i you know i just to start off i mean i would say i don't think our partnership's been any has ever been any better um if you look at you mention our vision very much a shared vision in terms of the multi-cloud world and i don't think we've ever had more joint innovation projects at one time i think we have over 40 now dave that are going on across multi-cloud ai cyber security uh modern applications and and uh you know here just at you just vmworld vmware explorer we have over 30 uh vmware sessions that are featuring dell um and this is i think more than we've ever had so look i think um there's a lot of momentum there and we're really looking forward to what's to come so you guys obviously spent a lot of time together when vmware was part of dell and then you've been it's been a year since the spin and then you codified i think it was a five-year agreement you know so you had some time to figure that out and then put it into paper so you just kind of quantified some of the stuff that's going on but now we're entering a yet another phase so that that that that agreement's probably more important than ever now i mean list in terms of getting it documented and an understanding right yeah that agreement really defines a framework for solution development and for go to market so we've been doing it and refining it for the last five years so now you know putting and codifying it into a written signed agreement it basically is instantiating what we've been doing that we know works uh where we can drive uh solution development we can drive deep architectural co-innovation together as well and as john said across multiple you know project and solution areas so we we've been talking to years to you know a lot of these strat guys guys like matt baker about things like you know you see aws do nitro and then of course project monterey and and i know that you guys have had a you know a big sort of input into that and so now to see it come to fruition is is huge because you know from our view it's the future of computing architectures how do you handle you know data rich applications ai applications that's what are your thoughts on here i couldn't agree more uh project monterey is a great example of how we're innovating together we just talked about i mean first of all it's all so we have vxrail which let's let's start there right we have over 19 000 joint customers right now we continue to innovate more and more on the vxrail architecture great example of that as our partnership with project monterey and taking essentially vsphere 8 and running it for the first time on an hci system directly on the dp used itself right on the dpus ability now to offload nsxt from from the cpus to the dpus uh hope you know in the short term first of all great benefits for customers in terms of better performance but as you just mentioned it's game changing in terms of laying the foundation for the future architectures that we plan on together helping out customers there's one other dynamic for you on is um and it's not unique to dell but dell's the biggest you know supply supplier partner etc but you're able to take vmware software and drive it through your business and and that enables you to get more subscription revenue and makes it stickier and that's a really important change from you know 10 years ago yeah and it's it's a combination as you know of dell software and vmware software together absolutely and i think what's with this is a game-changing innovation that you can run on top of our joint system vxrail if you will um and now what our customers can expect is life cycle automation of now you know the dpus as well as tanzu as well as everything else we layer on top of that core foundation that we have over 19 000 customers running today so i mean like that 19 000 number i want to get back up to the vx rail and you mentioned vsphere that's big news here this year vsphere 8 big release a lot of going on what's the hci angle you mentioned that what's in it for the customer what does that mean for the folks here because let's face it the vsphere aids got everyone in that they've all the v-sections are going going crazy right another vsphere release getting training they have the labs here what's it mean for the customers what's the value there with that hci solution with the gpus well first of all vsphere 8 as we know it has a lot of goodies in it but you know what what i think to me what's been most powerful about this is the ability to run vsphere 8 uh and and specifically on the dpus now you can run it it is open up all new possibilities now and so that nsxt that i mentioned you know running that on gpus opens up a whole new uh architecture now for our customers going forward and now really sets us up for modern distributed architecture for the future so like edge okay yeah and vsphere 8 brings in you know cloud connectivity as well so you know customers can run in a cloud disconnected mode they can run in a cloud connected mode so you know that's going to bring in the ability to do specialized things on security cycle management there's a whole series of services that can now be added as well as you know leveraging you know vcenter management capabilities so what's happening at the edge we had i think it was lows on hotel tech world right okay good not the other one um but so so that's got to be exploding now with that with that because it just changes the game for for these stores there's i mean retail uh manufacturing maybe you can give us an update on there's so much happening on the edge side as you know i mean that's where most of the a lot of the innovations happening right now is at the edge and a lot of the companies we talked to 8x right 8x expectation of increase in uh edge workloads over the next and the data challenge too and the data challenge is huge so you heard about the innovations with vsphere 8. in addition to that we just introduced today as well the smallest vx rail for the edge ever this thing is it's like think picture a couple eight and a half by 11 notebooks not much not much you know maybe a little wider than that but not much more um you know these these are stacked on top of each other these are you can rack and stack and mount these things anywhere and it also is the first aci system that has you know a built-in hardware witness so this helps set it up for environments that are you know network bandwidth constrained or have high high latency no longer an issue next gen app is going to want to have a local data server at the edge right and with compute there right high performance right right so now you're getting it across the wire yes you get racket stack a couple of these small things i mean they can they can fit into like a you know clark kent's briefcase right these things are so small um you want to do the analytics on site and return responses back you don't want to be moving massive data payloads off the egg so you got to have the right level of compute to run machine learning algorithms and and do the analytics type work that you want to do to make local decisions yeah i mean we just had david lithimon who was one of the keynote speakers here at the event and we've been talking about super cloud and multi-cloud meta cloud all the different versions of what we see as this next-gen and this brings up a point of like his advice to young people learn how multi-cloud learn about system architecture because if you can figure out how to put it together you're going to have to make more money anyway that this whole edge piece opens up huge challenges and opportunities around how do you configure these next-gen apps what does the ai look like what's the data architecture this is not like get some training curriculum online and you get you know 101 and you're getting a job no this is more complicated but with the hardware you guys make it easier so where's the complexity shift between having a powerful edge device like the vxrail with the vsphere what's the ec button on that like how do you guys what's the vision because this is going to be a major battleground this whole edge piece yeah it's going to be huge well i think when you look at the innovation that dell is bringing to market with technologies like outlander and then designing that into vxrail and then you combine that with our tonzu capabilities to manage development and deployment of applications this is about heterogeneous deployment and management at scale of applications with technologies like tons of mission control then deploying service mesh right for security being able to use sassy to be able to secure you know with cloud security over the wire so it's bringing together multiple technologies to deliver simplicity to the customer the ability to go one to many you know in terms of being able to deploy and manage and update whether that's a security patch or an application update and do that very rapidly at a low cost so the benefit with this solution now just putting this together is i can ship a box small and or stack them and essentially it's done remotely it's that's provision the provisioning issues not a truck roll as they say or professional services enabled you can just drop that out there and this is where the customers need to be yeah that absolutely is that the vision don't get that right exactly you don't you don't need the you don't need the skills yeah you don't need the specialized skills you don't need a lot of space you don't need you know high network bandwidth all these things right all these innovations that we're talking about here um really combined into really enabling a whole new whole new future here for edge is are you doing apex now is that i think thickest part sure part of yours okay so um is apex fitting into the to the edge how does it fit yeah i mean well first of all you know a lot of what we talked with apex is really about a consumption a way to ensure there's a common cloud experience wherever the data is and where the applications are and so absolutely edge fits into this as well and so we have we have common ways to consume our infrastructure today our joint infrastructure whether it's in the data center at the edge um or you know uh in the cloud usain ragu when he was on i said it was great keynote loved it one of the things that i didn't think there was enough of was security and he's like yeah we only had so much time but vmware is a very strong security story we heard a really strong security story at dell tech world i mean half the innovations and the new you know storage products were security and the new os's and it was impressive what what's how are you guys working together on security is that one of those let me give you a few key things you know our teams are working together at the engineer to engineer level you know reference architectures for zero trust as an example being able to look you know hardware root of trust up into the application layer right so we're looking at really defense in depth here you know i mentioned what we're doing with sassy right with cloud security capabilities so you really have to look at this from the edge to the core with the you know from a networking perspective getting the network the insights on things that maybe anomalies that may be happening on the network so using our network insight technology you know uh nsx and then being able to ultimately uh have a secure development pipeline as well i mean you we all know about the supply chain attacks that happen right and so being able to have a you know secure pipeline for development is critical for both of our companies working together i think the tan zoo and you mentioned the developer self-service that experience combined with kind of the power of the dell you know let's face it the boxes are awesome hardware matters and software matters so bringing that expertise together michael daley always used to say on thecube better together in respect to vmware and dell a lot of fruit has been born from that labor right specifically around and now when you add the tan zoo and you get vsphere you got the operational excellence you got the you got the performance and scale with the dell boxes and hardware and software and now you've got the tan zoo what's missing or is it all there now i mean where how would you how would you guys peg the progress bar is it like it's all rocking right now or or i'd say you're never done first of all but i you know i look at some of the innovations that we've brought to market recently where we've are combining and stacking these technologies into a more defense in-depth like solution you know bringing nsx onto vxrail so that you can flip a switch easily and light up the firewall the new plug-in yeah that's a great example simple simple um carbon black workload another example where we're taking carbon black technology that was typically on endpoints you know on pcs bringing that into the data center right and leveraging all the analytics and insights around you know being able to identify anomalies and then remediate those anomalies so we're seeing very good traction with those and the cloud native developers containers they're all native container working with compute and container storage object store in the cloud kubernetes we've embraced it yeah i mean yeah containers running containers and vms on the same infrastructure common way to manage it all i mean that that's been a big part of it as well obviously a lot of the focus that dell's bringing here as well is is the inability to run that stack easily right you heard the announcement on uh tanzu for kubernetes operators right earlier today tko we call it uh you know that running on vxrail now is really targeted at the i.t operator in allowing them to easily stand up a self-service developer devops environment on vxrail going forward and then a piece that might be invisible to them is back to monterey isolation right encryption and data moving you know absolutely storage the security the compute right the management right that's that's a complete and it's about reducing attack services as well right the security perspective as well when you when you're moving nsxt onto a dpu you're doing that as well so there's it takes the little things right at the end of the day security is a mindset up across both companies in terms of how we approach our architectures um and it's the you know a lot of times it's the little things as well that we make sure right so shared vision working at the engineering levels together for many many years know that you guys are validating more of that coming what's next take us through okay we're here 2022 we got super cloud multi-cloud hybrid full throttle right now it's hybrid's a steady state that's cloud operations infrastructure as code has happened it's happening what's next for you guys in the relationship can you share a little bit that you can if you can what we can expect what you see uh with monterrey is the start of a re-architecting of i.t infrastructure not just in the data center but also at the edge right these technologies will move out and be pervasive you know across i think edge to colo to core data center to cloud right and so that's a starting point now we're looking at memory tiering right i think we talked last time about capitola and memory tiering and you know being able to bring that forward uh being able to do more with confidential computing as an example right secure enclaves and confidential computing so you know a lot of this is focused around simplicity and security going forward and ease of management around take the heavy lifting away from the customer abstract that in offer the power and performance that's right and it's going to come down to delivering time to value for our customers you know can we cut that time to value by 25 50 percent so they can be in production faster yeah i think project monterey is something we'll be building on for a long time right i mean this is the start of a major new future architecture of these companies so if you had to pick one we have 40 initiatives that are joined together real literally project monterey is one of my favorites for sure in terms of what it's going to do not just for that common cloud experience but for the edge and and we talked a lot about the edge today and where that's headed you think it's going to explode up new apps i really do think so well it's going to put you in a new it's going to put in curve yeah absolutely right and operationally uh security wise um from a modern apps perspective i mean all it checks all the boxes and it's going to allow us to to help and take our existing customers on that journey as well what's great about this conversation we've been following both you guys for a long time and your companies and and technology upgrades and and the business impact and open source and all doing all this for customers but the wave that's coming we're seeing the expo hall here i mean it's people are really excited they're enthused they're committed highly confident that this this wave is coming they kind of see it people kind of seeing the fog lift they're seeing money making value creation people kind of feeling more comfortable but still a little nervous around you know what's coming next because it's still uncertainty but pretty good ecosystem i'd have to say that's pretty pretty interesting yeah a lot of them are excited about you know what they can do at the edge and how they can differentiate their businesses i mean that's right well congratulations guys thanks for coming on thecube and sharing the update thank you it more innovation it's not stopping here at vmware explorer dell and vm we're continuing to have that kind of relationship joint engineering it's all coming together and you can mix and match this and the stack but it's ultimately going to be cloud operations edge is the action of course hybrid cloud as well it's thecube thanks for watching [Music] you

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore '22, formerly VMworld. This is our 12th year covering it. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellente. Two sets, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We're starting to get the execs rolling in from VMware. Sumit Dhawan, president of VMware's here. Great to see you. Great keynote, day one. >> Great to be here, John. Great to see you, Dave. Day one, super exciting. We're pumped. >> And you had no problem with the keynotes. We're back in person. Smooth as silk up there. >> We were talking about it. We had to like dust off a cobweb to make some of these inputs. >> It's not like riding a bike. >> No, it's not. We had about 40% of our agencies that we had to change out because they're no longer in business. So, I have to give kudos to the team who pulled it together. They did a fabulous job. >> You do a great check, great presentation. I know you had a lot to crack in there. Raghu set the table. I know this is for him, this was a big moment to lay out the narrative, address the Broadcom thing right out of the gate, wave from Hock Tan in the audience, and then got into the top big news. Still a lot of meat on the bone. You get up there, you got to talk about the use cases, vSphere 8, big release, a lot of stuff. Take us through the keynote. What was the important highlights for you to share, the folks watching that didn't see the keynote or wanted to get your perspective? >> Well, first of all, did any of you notice that Raghu was running on the stage? He did not do that in rehearsal. (John chuckles) I was a little bit worried, but he really did it. >> I said, I betcha that was real. (everyone chuckles) >> Anyways, the jokes aside, he did fabulous. Lays out the strategy. My thinking, as you said, was to first of all speak with their customers and explain how every enterprise is facing with this concept of cloud chaos that Raghu laid out and CVS Health story sort of exemplifies the situation that every customer is facing. They go in, they start with cloud first, which is needed, I think that's the absolutely right approach. Very quickly build out a model of getting a cloud ops team and a platform engineering team which oftentimes be a parallel work stream to a private cloud infrastructure. Great start. But as Roshan, the CIO at CVS Health laid out, there's an inflection point. And that's when you have to converge these because the use cases are where stakeholders, this is the lines of businesses, app developers, finance teams, and security teams, they don't need this stove piped information coming at 'em. And the converge model is how he opted to organize his team. So we called it a multi-cloud team, just like a workspace team. And listen, our commitment and innovations are to solve the problems of those teams so that the stakeholders get what they need. That's the rest of the keynote. >> Yeah, first of all, great point. I want to call out that inflection point comment because we've been reporting coming into VMworld with super cloud and other things across open source and down into the weeds and into the hood. The chaos is real. So, good call. I love how you guys brought that up there. But all industry inflection points, if you go back in history of the tech industry, at every single major inflection point, there was chaos, complexity, or an enemy proprietary. However you want to look at it, there was a situation where you needed to kind of reign in the chaos as Andy Grove would say. So we're at that inflection point, I think that's consistent. And also the ecosystem floor yesterday, the expo floor here in San Francisco with your partners, it was vibrant. They're all on this wave. There is a wave and an inflection point. So, okay. I buy that. So, if you buy the inflection point, what has to happen next? Because this is where we're at. People are feeling it. Some say, I don't have a problem but they're cut chaos such is the problem. So, where do you see that? How does VMware's team organizing in the industry and for customers specifically to solve the chaos, to reign it in and cross over? >> Yeah, you're a 100% right. Every inflection point is associated with some kind of a chaos that had to be reigned in. So we are focused on two major things right now which we have made progress in. And maybe third, we are still work in-progress. Number one is technology. Today's technology announcements are directly to address how that streamlining of chaos can be done through a cloud smart approach that we laid out. Our Aria, a brand new solution for management, significant enhancements to Tanzu, all of these for public cloud based workloads that also extend to private cloud. And then our cloud infrastructure with newer capabilities with AWS, Azure, as well as with new innovations on vSphere 8 and vSAN 8. And then last but not the least, our continuous automation to enable anywhere workspace. All these are simple innovation that have to address because without those innovations, the problem is that the chaos oftentimes is created because lack of technology and as a result structure has to be put in place because tooling and technology is not there. So, number one goal we see is providing that. Second is we have to be independent, provide support for every possible cloud but not without being a partner of theirs. That's not an easy thing to do but we have the DNA as a company, we have done that with data centers in the past, even though being part of Dell we did that in the data center in the past, we have done that in mobility. And so we have taken the challenge of doing that with the cloud. So we are continually building newer innovation and stronger and stronger partnerships with cloud provider which is the basis of our commercial relationships with Microsoft Azure too, where we have brought Azure VMware solution into VMware cloud universal. Again, that strengthens the value of us being neutral because it's very important to have a Switzerland party that can provide these multi-cloud solutions that doesn't have an agenda of a specific cloud, yet an ecosystem, or at least an influence with the ecosystem that can bring going forward. >> Okay, so technology, I get that. Open, not going to be too competitive, but more open. So the question I got to ask you is what is the disruptive enabler to make that happen? 'Cause you got customers, partners and team of VMware, what's the disruptive enabler that's going to get you to that level? >> Over the hump. I mean, listen, our value is this community. All this community has one of two paths to go. Either, they become stove piped into just the public-private cloud infrastructure or they step up as this convergence that's happening around them to say, "You know what? I have the solution to tame this multi-cloud complexity, to reign the chaos," as you mentioned because tooling and technologies are available. And I know they work with the ecosystem. And our objective is to bring this community to that point. And to me, that is the best path to overcome it. >> You are the connective tissue. I was able to sit into the analyst meeting today. You were sort of the proxy for CVS Health where you talked about the private that's where you started, the public cloud ops team, bringing that together. The platform is the glue. That is the connective tissue. That's where Tanzu comes in. That's where Aria comes in. And that is the disruptive technology which it's hard to build that. >> From a technology perspective, it's an enabler of something that has never been done before in that level of comprehensiveness, from a more of a infrastructure side thinking perspective. Yes, infrastructure teams have enabled self-service portals. Yes, infrastructure teams have given APIs to developers, but what we are enabling through Tanzu is completely next level where you have a lot richer experience for developers so that they never ever have to think about the infrastructure at all. Because even when you enable infrastructure as API, that's still an API of the infrastructure. We go straight to the application tier where they're just thinking about authorized set of microservices. Containers can be orchestrated and built automatically, shifting security left where we're truly checking them or enabling them to check the security vulnerabilities as they're developing the application, not going into the production when they have to touch the infrastructure. To me, that's an enabler of a special power that this new multi-cloud team can have across cloud which they haven't had in the past. >> Yeah, it's funny, John, I'd say very challenging technically. The challenge in 2010 was the software mainframe, remember the marketing people killed that term. >> Yeah, exactly. >> But you think about that. We're going to make virtualization and the overhead associated with that irrelevant. We're going to be able to run any workload and VMware achieved that. Now you're saying we run anything anywhere, any Kubernete, any container. >> That's the reality. That's the chaos. >> And the cloud and that's a new, real problem. Real challenging problem that requires serious engineering. >> Well, I mean it's aspirational, right? Let's get the reality, right? So true spanning cloud, not yet there. You guys, I think your vision is definitely right on in the sense that we'd like the chaos and multicloud's a reality. The question is AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, other clouds, they're not going to sit still. No one's going to let VMware just come up and take everything. You got to enable so the market- >> True, true. I don't think this is the case of us versus them because there is so much that they have to express in terms of the value of every cloud. And this happened in the case of, by the way, whether you go into infrastructure or even workspace solutions, as long as the richest of the experience and richest of the controls are provided, for their cloud to the developers that makes the adoption of their cloud simpler. It's a win-win for every party. >> That's the key. I think the simplest. So, I want to ask you, this comes up a lot and I love that you brought that up, simple and self-service has proven developers who are driving the change, cloud DevOps developers. They're driving the change. They're in charge more than ever. They want self-service, easier to deploy. I want a test, if I don't like it, I want to throw it away. But if I like something, I want to stick with it. So it's got to be self-service. Now that's antithetical to the old enterprise model of solve complexity with more complexity. >> Yeah, yeah. >> So the question for you is as the president of VMware, do you feel good that you guys are looking out over the landscape where you're riding into the valley of the future with the demand being automation, completely invisible, abstraction layer, new use case scenarios for IT and whatever IT becomes. Take us through your mindset there, because I think that's what I'm hearing here at this year, VMware Explorer is that you guys have recognized the shift in demographics on the developer side, but ops isn't going away either. They're connecting. >> They're connected. Yeah, so our vision is, if you think about the role of developers, they have a huge influence. And most importantly they're the ones who are driving innovation, just the amount of application development, the number of developers that have emerged, yet remains the scarcest resource for the enterprise are critical. So developers often time have taken control over decision on infrastructure and ops. Why? Because infrastructure and ops haven't shown up. Not because they like it. In fact, they hate it. (John chuckles) Developers like being developers. They like writing code. They don't really want to get into the day to day operations. In fact, here's what we see with almost all our customers. They start taking control of the ops until they go into production. And at that point in time, they start requesting one by one functions of ops, move to ops because they don't like it. So with our approach and this sort of, as we are driving into the beautiful valley of multi-cloud like you laid out, in our approach with the cross cloud services, what we are saying is that why don't we enable this new team which is a reformatted version of the traditional ops, it has the platform engineering in it, the key skill that enables the developer in it, through a platform that becomes an interface to the developers. It creates that secure workflows that developers need. So that developers think and do what they really love. And the infrastructure is seamless and invisible. It's bound to happen, John. Think about it this way. >> Infrastructure is code. >> Infrastructure has code, and even next year, it's invisible because they're just dealing with the services that they need. >> So it's self-service infrastructure. And then you've got to have that capability to simplified, I'll even say automated or computational governance and security. So Chris Wolf is coming on Thursday. >> Yeah. >> Unfortunately I won't be here. And he's going to talk about all the future projects. 'Cause you're not done yet. The project narrows, it's kind of one of these boring, but important. >> Yeah, there's a lot of stuff in the oven coming out. >> There's really critical projects coming down the pipeline that support this multi-cloud vision, is it's early days. >> Well, this is the thing that we were talking about. I want to get your thoughts on. And we were commenting on the keynote review, Hock Tan bought VMware. He's a lot more there than he thought. I mean, I got to imagine him sitting in the front row going there's some stuff coming out of the oven. I didn't even, might not have known. >> He'd be like, "Hmm, this extra value." (everyone chuckles) >> He's got to be pretty stoked, don't you think? >> He is, he is. >> There's a lot of headroom on the margin. >> I mean, independent to that, I think the strategy that he sees is something that's compelling to customers which is what, in my assessment, speaking with him, he bought VMware because it's strategic to customers and the strategic value of VMware becomes even higher as we take our multi-cloud portfolio. So it's all great. >> Well, plus the ecosystem is now re-energize. It's always been energized, but energized cuz it's sort of had to be, cuz it's such a strong- >> And there was the Dell history there too. >> But, yeah it was always EMC, and then Dell, and now it's like, wow, the ecosystem's- >> Really it's released almost. I like this new team, we've been calling this new ops kind of vibe going refactored ops, as you said, that's where the action's happening because the developers want to go faster. >> They want to go faster. >> They want to go fast cuz the velocity's paying off of them. They don't want to have to wait. They don't want security reviews. They want policy. They want some guardrails. Show me the track. >> That's it. >> And let me drive this car. >> That's it because I mean think about it, if you were a developer, listen, I've been a developer. I never really wanted to see how to operate the code in production because it took time away for developing. I like developing and I like to spend my time building the applications and that's the goal of Aria and Tanzu. >> And then I got to mention the props of seeing project Monterey actually come out to fruition is huge because that's the future of computing architecture. >> I mean at this stage, if a customer from here on is modernizing their infrastructure and they're not investing in a holistic new infrastructure from a hardware and software perspective, they're missing out an opportunity on leveraging the numbers that we were showing, 20% increase in calls. Why would you not just make that investment on both the hardware and the software layer now to get the benefits for the next five-six years. >> You would and if I don't have to make any changes and I get 20% automatically. And the other thing, I don't know if people really appreciate the new curve that the Silicon industry is on. It blows away the history of Moore's law which was whatever, 35-40% a year, we're talking about 100% a year price performance or performance improvements. >> I think when you have an inflection point as we said earlier, there's going to be some things that you know is going to happen, but I think there's going to be a lot that's going to surprise people. New brands will emerge, new startups, new talent, new functionality, new use cases. So, we're going to watch that carefully. And for the folks watching that know that theCUBE's been 12 years with covering VMware VMworld, now VMware Explore, we've kind of met everybody over the years, but I want to point out a little nuance, Raghu thing in the keynote. During the end, before the collective responsibility sustainment commitment he had, he made a comment, "As proud as we are," which is a word he used, there's a lot of pride here at VMware. Raghu kind of weaved that in there, I noticed that, I want to call that out there because Raghu's proud. He's a proud product guy. He said, "I'm a product guy." He's delivering keynote. >> Almost 20 years. >> As proud as we are, there's a lot of pride at VMware, Sumit, talk about that dynamic because you mentioned customers, your customer is not a lot of churn. They've been there for a long time. They're embedded in every single company out there, pretty much VMware is in every enterprise, if not all, I mean 99%, whatever percentage it is, it's huge penetration. >> We are proud of three things. It comes down to number one, we are proud of our innovations. You can see it, you can see the tone from Raghu or myself, or other executives changes with excitement when we're talking about our technologies, we're just proud. We're just proud of it. We are a technology and product centric company. The second thing that sort of gets us excited and be proud of is exactly what you mentioned, which is the customers. The customers like us. It's a pleasure when I bring Roshan on stage and he talks about how he's expecting certain relationship and what he's viewing VMware in this new world of multi-cloud, that makes us proud. And then third, we're proud of our talent. I mean, I was jokingly talking to just the events team alone. Of course our engineers do amazing job, our sellers do amazing job, our support teams do amazing job, but we brought this team and we said, "We are going to get you to run an event after three years from not they doing one, we're going to change the name on you, we're going to change the attendees you're going to invite, we're going to change the fact that it's going to be new speakers who have never been on the stage and done that kind of presentation. >> You're also going to serve a virtual audience. >> And we're going to have a virtual audience. And you know what? They embraced it and they surprised us and it looks beautiful. So I'm proud of the talent. >> The VMware team always steps up. You never slight it, you've got great talent over there. The big thing I want to highlight as we end this day, the segment, and I'll get your thoughts and reactions, Sumit, is again, you guys were early on hybrid. We have theCUBE tape to go back into the video data lake and find the word hybrid mentioned 2013, 2014, 2015. Even when nobody was talking about hybrid. >> Yeah, yeah. >> Multicloud, Raghu, I talked to Raghu in 2016 when he did the Pat Gelsinger, I mean Raghu, Pat and Andy Jassy. >> Yeah. >> When that cloud thing got cleared up, he cleared that up. He mentioned multicloud, even then 2016, so this is not new. >> Yeah. >> You had the vision, there's a lot of stuff in the oven. You guys make announcements directionally, and then start chipping away at it. Now you got Broadcom buys VMware, what's in the oven? How much goodness is coming out that's like just hitting the fruits are starting to bear on the tree. There's a lot of good stuff and just put that, contextualize and scale that for us. What's in the oven? >> First of all, I think the vision, you have to be early to be first and we believe in it. Okay, so that's number one. Now having said that what's in the oven, you would see us actually do more controls across cloud. We are not done on networking side. Okay, we announced something as project Northstar with networking portfolio, that's not generally available. That's in the oven. We are going to come up with more capability on supporting any Kubernetes on any cloud. We did some previews of supporting, for example, EKS. You're going to see more of those cluster controls across any Kubernetes. We have more work happening on our telco partners for enablement of O-RAN as well as our edge solutions, along with the ecosystem. So more to come on those fronts. But they're all aligned with enabling customers multi-cloud through these five cross cloud services. They're all really, some of them where we have put a big sort of a version one of solution out there such as Aria continuation, some of them where even the version one's not out and you're going to see that very soon. >> All right. Sumit, what's next for you as the president? You're proud of your team, we got that. Great oven description of what's coming out for the next meal. What's next for you guys, the team? >> I think for us, two things, first of all, this is our momentum season as we call it. So for the first time, after three years, we are now being in, I think we've expanded, explored to five cities. So getting this orchestrated properly, we are expecting nearly 50,000 customers to be engaging in person and maybe a same number virtually. So a significant touchpoint, cuz we have been missing. Our customers have departed their strategy formulation and we have departed our strategy formulation. Getting them connected together is our number one priority. And number two, we are focused on getting better and better at making customers successful. There is work needed for us. We learn, then we code it and then we repeat it. And to me, those are the two key things here in the next six months. >> Sumit, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for your valuable time, sharing what's going on. Appreciate it. >> Always great to have chatting. >> Here with the president, the CEO's coming up next in theCUBE. Of course, we're John and Dave. More coverage after the short breaks, stay with us. (upbeat music)

(gentle music intro) >> Okay, we're back. We're live here at theCUBE and at VMworld, VMware Explore, formally VMworld. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Three days of wall to wall coverage, we've got Vittorio Viarengo, the vice president of Cross-Cloud Services at VMware. Vittorio, great to see you, and thanks for coming on theCUBE right after your keynote. I can't get that off my tongue, VMworld. 12 years of CUBE coverage. This is the first year of VMware Explore, formerly VMworld. Raghu said in his keynote, he explained the VMworld community now with multi-clouds that you're in charge of at VMworld, VMware, is now the Explore brand's going to explore the multi-cloud, that's a big part of Raghu's vision and VMware. You're driving it and you are on the stage just now. What's, what's going on? >> Yeah, what I said at my keynote note is that our customers have been the explorer of IT, new IT frontier, always challenging the status quo. And we've been, our legendary engineering team, been behind the scenes, providing them with the tools of the technology to be successful in that journey to the private cloud. And Kelsey said it. What we built was the foundation for the cloud. And now it's time to start a new journey in the multi-cloud. >> Now, one of the things that we heard today clearly was: multi-cloud's a reality. Cloud chaos, Kit Colbert was talking about that and we've been saying, you know, people are chaotic. We believe that. Andy Grove once said, "Reign in the chaos. Let chaos reign, then reign in the chaos." That's the opportunity. The complexity of cross-cloud is being solved. You guys have a vision, take us through how you see that happening. A lot of people want to see this cross-cloud abstraction happen. What's the story from your standpoint, how you see that evolving? >> I think that IT history repeats itself, right? Every starts nice and neat. "Oh, I'm going to buy a bunch of HP servers and my life is going to be good, and oh, this store." >> Spin up an EC2. >> Yeah. Eventually everything goes like this in IT because every vendor do what they do, they innovate. And so that could create complexity. And in the cloud is the complexity on steroid because you have six major cloud, all the local clouds, the cloud pro- local cloud providers, and each of these cloud brings their own way of doing management security. And I think now it's time. Every customer that I talk to, they want more simplicity. You know, how do I go fast but be able to manage the complexity? So that's where cross-cloud services- Last year, we launched a vision, with a sprinkle of software behind it, of building a set of cloud-native services that allow our customers to build, run, manage, secure, and access any application consistently across any cloud. >> Yeah, so you're a year in now, it's not like, I mean, you know, when you come together in a physical event like this, it resonates more, you got the attention. When you're watching the virtual events, you get doing a lot of different things. So it's not like you just stumbled upon this last week. Okay, so what have you learned in the last year in terms of post that launch. >> What we learned is what we have been building for the last five years, right? Because we started, we saw multi-cloud happening before anybody else, I would argue. With our announcement with AWS five, six years ago, right? And then our first journey to multi-cloud was let's bring vSphere on all the clouds. And that's a great purpose to help our customers accelerate their journey of their "legacy" application. Their application actually deliver business to the cloud. But then around two, three years ago, I think Raghu realized that to add value, we needed- customers were already in the cloud, we needed to embrace the native cloud. And that's where Tanzu came in as a way to build application. Tanzu manage, way to secure manage application. And now with Aria, we now have more differentiated software to actually manage this application across- >> Yeah, and Aria is the management plane. That's the rebrand. It's not a new product per se. It's a collection of the VMware stuff, right? Isn't it like- >> No, it's, it's a... >> It's a new product? >> There is a new innovation there because basically they, the engineering team built this graph and Raghu compared it to the graph that Google builds up around about the web. So we go out and crawl all your assets across any cloud and we'll build you this model that now allows you to see what are your assets, how you can manage them, what are the performance and all that, so. No, it's more than a brand. It's, it's a new innovation and integration of a technology that we had. >> And that's a critical component of cross-cloud. So I want to get back to what you said about Raghu and what he's been focused on. You know, I remember interviewing him in 2016 with Andy Jassy at AWS, and that helped clear up the cloud game. But even before that Raghu and I had talked, Dave, on theCUBE, I think it was like 2014? >> Yeah. >> Pat Gelson was just getting on board as the CEO of VMware. Hybrid was very much on the conversation then. Even then it was early. Hybrid was early, you guys are seeing multi-cloud early. >> It was private cloud. >> Totally give you props on that. So VMware gets total props on that, being right on that. Where are we in that journey? 'Cause super cloud, as we're talking about, you were contributing to that initiative in the open with our open source project. What is multi-cloud? Where is it in the status of the customer? I think everyone will agree, multi-cloud is an outcome that's going to happen. It's happening. Everyone has multiple clouds and they configure things differently. Where are we on the progress bar in your mind? >> I think I want to answer that question and go back to your question, which I didn't address, you know, what we are learning from customers. I think that most customers are at the very, very beginning. They're either in the denial stage, like yesterday talked to a customer, I said, "Are you multi-cloud, are you on your multi-cloud journey?" And he said, "Oh we are on-prem and a little bit of Azure." I said, "Oh really? So the bus- "Oh no, well the business unit is using AWS, right? And we are required company that is using-" I said, "Okay, so you are... that customer is in cloud first stage." >> Like you said, we've seen this movie before. It comes around, right? >> Yeah. >> Somebody's going to have to clean that up at some point. >> Yeah, I think a lot, a lot of- the majority customers are either in denial or in the cloud chaos. And some customers are pushing the envelope like SMP. SMP Global, we heard this morning. Somebody has done all the journey in the private cloud with us, and now I said, and I talked to him a few months ago, he told me, "I had to get in front of my developers. Enough of this, you know, wild west. I had to lay down the tracks and galleries for them to build multi-cloud in a way that was, give them choice, but for me, as an operator and a security person, being able to manage it and secure it." And so I think most customers are in that chaos phase right now. Very early. >> So at our Supercloud22 event, we were riffing and I was asking you about, are you going to hide the complexity, yes. But you're also going to give access to the, to the developers if they want access to the primitives. And I said to you, "It sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too." And you said, "And want to lose weight." And I never followed up with you, so I want to follow up now. By "lose weight," I presume you mean be essentially that platform of choice, right? So you're going to, you're going to simplify, but you're going to give access to the developers for those primitives, if in fact they want one. And you're going to be the super cloud, my word of choice. So my question to you is why, first of all, is that correct, your "lose weight"? And why VMware? >> When I say you, you want a cake, eat it and lose weight, I, and I'm going to sound a little arrogant, it's hard to be humble when you're good. But now I work for a company, I work for a company that does that. Has done it over and over and over again. We have done stuff, I... Sometimes when I go before customers, I say, "And our technology does this." Then the customer gets on stage and I go, "Oh my God, oh my God." And then the customers say, "Yeah, plus I realize that I could also do this." So that's, you know, that's the kind of company that we are. And I think that we were so busy being successful with on-prem and that, you know, that we kind of... the cloud happened. Under our eyes. But now with the multi-cloud, I think there is opportunity for VMware to do it all over again. And we are the right company to do it for two reasons. One, we have the right DNA. We have those engineers that know how to make stuff that was not designed to work together work together and the right partnership because everybody partners with us. >> But, you know, a lot of companies like, oh, they missed cloud, they missed mobile. They missed that, whatever it was. VMware was very much aware of this. You made an effort to do kind of your own cloud initiative, backed off from- and everybody was like, this is a disaster waiting to happen and of course it was. And so then you realize that, you learn from your mistakes, and then you embraced the AWS deal. And that changed everything, it changed... It cleared it up for your customers. I'm not hearing anybody saying that the cross-cloud services strategy, what we call multi, uh, super cloud is wrong. Nobody's saying that's like a failed, you know, strategy. Now the execution obviously is very important. So that's why I'm saying it's different this time around. It's not like you don't have your pulse on it. I mean, you tried before, okay, the strategy wasn't right, it backfired, okay, and then you embraced it. But now people are generally in agreement that there's either a problem or there's going to be a problem. And so you kind of just addressed why VMware, because you've always been in the catbird seat to solve those problems. >> But it is a testament to the pragmatism of the company. Right? You try- In technology, you cannot always get it right, right? When you don't get it right, say, "Okay, that didn't work. What is the next?" And I think now we're onto something. It's a very ambitious vision for sure. But I think if you look at the companies out there that have the muscles and the DNA and the resources to do it, I think VMware is one. >> One of the risks to the success, what's been, you know you watch the Twitter chatter is, "Oh, can VMware actually attract the developers?" John chimed in and said, >> Yeah. >> It's not just the devs. I mean, just devs. But also when you think of DevOps, the ops, right? When you think about securing and having that consistent platform. So when you think about the critical factors for you to execute, you have to have that pass platform, no question. Well, how do you think about, okay, where are the gaps that we really have to get right? >> I think that for us to go and get the developers on board, it's too late. And it's too late for most companies. Developers go with the open source, they go with the path of least resistance. So our way into that, and as Kelsey Hightower said, building new application, more applications, is a team sport. And part of that team is the Ops team. And there we have an entry, I think. Because that's what- >> I think it possible. I think you, I think you're hitting it. And my dev comment, by the way, I've been kind of snarky on Twitter about this, but I say, "Oh, Dev's got it easy. They're sitting in the beach with sunglasses on, you know, having focaccia. >> Doing whatever they want. >> Happy doing whatever they want. No, it's better life for the developer now. Open source is the software industry, that's going great. Shift left in CI/CD pipeline. Developers are faster than ever, they're innovating. It's all self-service, it's all DevOps. It's looking good for the developers right now. And that's why everyone's focused on that. They're driving the change. The Ops team, that was traditional IT Ops, is now DevOps with developers. So the seed change of data and security, which is core, we're hearing a lot of those. And if you look at all the big successes, Snowflake, Databricks, MinIO, who was on earlier with the S3 cloud storage anywhere, this is the new connective tissue that VMware can connect to and extend the operational platform of IT and connect developers. You don't need to win them all over. You just connect to them. >> You just have to embrace the tools that they're using. >> Exactly. >> You just got to connect to them. >> You know, you bring up an interesting point. Snowflake has to win the developers, 'cause they're basically saying, "Hey, we're building an application development platform on top of our proprietary system." You're not saying that. You're saying we're embracing the open source tools that developers are using, so use them. >> Well, we gave it a single pane of glass to manage your application everywhere. And going back to your point about not hiding the underlying primitives, we manage that application, right? That application could be moving around, but nobody prevents that application to use that API underneath. I mean, that's, that can always do that. >> Right, right. >> And, and one of the reason why we had Kelsey Hightower and my keynote and the main keynote was that I think he shows that the template, the blueprint for our customers, our operators, if you want to have- even propel your career forward, look at what he did, right? VI admin, going up the stack storage and everything else, and then eventually embrace Kubernetes, became an expert. Really took the time to understand how modern application were- are built. And now he's a luminary in the industry. So we don't have, all have to become luminary, but you can- our customers right here, doing the labs upstairs, they can propel the career forward in this. >> So summarize what you guys are announcing around cross cloud-services. Obviously Aria, another version, 1.3 of Tanzu. Lay out the sort of news. >> Yeah, so we- With Tanzu, we have one step forward with our developer experience so that, speaking of meeting where they are, with application templates, with ability to plug into their idea of choice. So a lot of innovation there. Then on the IR side, I think that's the name of the game in multi-cloud, is having that object model allows you to manage anything across anything. And then, we talk about cross-cloud services being a vision last year, I, when I launched it, I thought security and networking up there as a cloud, but it was still down here as ploy technology. And now with NSX, the latest version, we brought that control plane in the cloud as a cloud native cross-cloud service. So, lot of meat around the three pillars, development, the management, and security. >> And then the complementary component of vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 and the whole DPU thing, 'cause that's, 'cause that's cloud, right? I mean, we saw what AWS did with Nitro. >> Yeah. >> Five, seven years ago. >> That's the consumption model cloud. >> That's the future of computing architecture. >> And the licensing model underneath. >> Oh yeah, explain that. Right, the universal licensing model. >> Yeah, so basically what we did when we launch cloud universal was, okay, you can buy our software using credit that you have on AWS. And I said, okay, that's kind of hybrid cloud, it's not multi-cloud, right? But then we brought in Google and now the latest was Microsoft. Now you can buy our software for credits and investment that our customers already have with these great partners of ours and use it to consume as a subscription. >> So that kind of changes your go-to-market and you're not just chasing an ELA renewal now. You're sort of thinking, you're probably talking to different people within the organizations as well, right? So if I can use credits for whatever, Google, for Azure, for on-prem, for AWS, right? Those are different factions necessarily in the organization. >> So not just the technology's multi-cloud, but also the consumption model is truly multi-cloud. >> Okay, Vittorio, what's next? What's the game plan? What do you have going on? It's getting good traction here again, like Dave said, no one's poo-pooing cross-cloud services. It is kind of a timing market forces. We were just talking before you came on. Oh, customers don't- may not think they have a problem, whether they're the frog boiling water or not, they will have the problem coming up or they don't think they have a problem, but they have chaos reigning. So what's next? What are you doing? Is it going to be new tech, new market? What is the plan? >> So I think for, if I take my bombastic kind of marketing side of me hat off and I look at the technology, I think the customers in these scales wants to be told what to do. And so I think what we need to do going forward is articulate these cross-cloud services use cases. Like okay, what does mean to have an application that uses a service over here, a service over there, and then show the value of getting this component from one company? Because cross-cloud services at your event, how many vendors were there? 20? 30? >> Yeah. >> So the market is there. I mean, these are all revenue-generating companies, right, but they provide a piece of the puzzle. Our ambition is to provide a platform approach. And so we need to articulate better, what are the advantages of getting these components management, security, from- >> And Kit, Kit was saying, it's a hybrid kind of scenario. I was kind of saying, oh, putting my little business school scenario hat on, oh yeah, you go hardcore competitive, best product wins, kill or be killed, compete and win. Or you go open and you create a keiretsu, create a consortium, and get support, standardize or defacto standardize a bunch of it, and then let everyone monetize or participate. >> Yeah, we cannot do it alone. >> What's the approach? What's the approach you guys want to take? >> So I think whatever possible, first of all, we're not going to do it alone. Right, so the ecosystem is going to play a part and if the ecosystem can come together around the consortium or a standard that makes sense for customers? Absolutely. >> Well, and you say, nobody's poo-pooing it, and I stand by that. But they are saying, and I think it is true, it's hard, right? It's a very challenging, ambitious goal that you have. But yeah, you've got a track record of- >> I mean the old playbook, >> Exactly! >> The old playbooks are out. I mean, I always say, the old kill and be highly competitive strategy. Proprietary is dead. And then if you look at the old way of winning was, okay, you know, we're going to lock customers in- >> What do you mean proprietary is dead? Proprietary's not dead. >> No, I mean like, I'm talking- Okay, I'm talking about how people sell. Enterprise companies love to create, simplify, create value with chaos like okay, complexity with more complexity. So that's over, you think that's how people are marketing? >> No, no, it's true. But I mean, we see a lot of proprietary out there. >> Like what? >> It's still happening. Snowflake. (laughing) >> Tell that to the entire open store software industry. >> Right, well, but that's not your play. I mean, you have to have some kind of proprietary advantage. >> The enterprise playbook used to be solve complexity with complexity, lock the customers in. Cloud changed all that with open. You're a seasoned marketer, you're also an executive. You have an interesting new wave. How do you market to the enterprise in this new open way? How do you win? >> For us, I think we have that relationship with the C-level and we have delivered for them over and over again. So our challenge from a marketing perspective is to educate these executives about all that. And the fact that we didn't have this user conference in person didn't help, right? And then show that value to the operator so that they can help us just like we did in the past. I mean, our sales motion in the past was we made these people- I told them today, you were the heroes. When you virtualized, when you brought down 1000 servers to 80, you were the hero, right? So we need to empower them with the technology and the know-how to be heroes again in multi-cloud. And I think the business will take care of itself. >> Okay final question from me, and Dave might have another one of his, everybody wanted to know this year at VMworld, VMware Explore, which is the new name, what would it look like? What would the vibe be? Would people show up? Would it be vibrant? Would cross-cloud hunt? Would super cloud be relevant? I got to say looking at the floor last night, looking at the keynotes, looking at the perspective, it seems to look like, oh, people are on board. What is your take on this? You've been talking to customers, you're talking to people in the hallways. You've been brief talking to all the analysts. What is the vibe about this year's Explore? >> I think, you've been covering us for a long time, this is a religious following we have. And we don't take it for granted. I told the audience today, this to us is a family reunion and we couldn't be, so we got a sense of like, that's what I feels like the family is back together. >> And there's a wave coming too. It's not like business is dying. It's like a whole 'nother. Another wave is coming. >> It's funny you mention about the heroes. 'Cause I go back, I don't really have my last question, but it's just the last thought is, I remember the first time I saw a demo of VMware and I went, "Holy crap, wow. This is totally game changing." I was blown away. Right, like you said, 80 servers down to just a couple of handfuls. This is going to change everything. And that's where it all started. You know, I mean, I know it started in workstations, but that's when it really became transformational. >> Yeah, so I think we have an opportunity to do it over again with the family that is here today, of which you guys consider family as well. >> All right, favorite part of the keynote and then we'll wrap up. What was your favorite part of the keynote today? >> I think the excitement from the developer people that were up there. Kelsey- >> The guy who came after Kelsey, what was his name? I didn't catch it, but he was really good. >> Yeah, I mean, it's, what it's all about, right? People that are passionate about solving hard problems and then cannot wait to share it with the community, with the family. >> Yeah. I love the one line, "You kids have it easy today. We walk to school barefoot in the snow back in the day." >> Uphill, both ways. >> Broke the ice to wash our face. >> Vittorio, great to see you, great friend of theCUBE, CUBE alumni, vice president of cross-cloud serves at VMware. A critical new area that's harvesting the fruits coming off the tree as VMware invested in cloud native many years ago. It's all coming to the market, let's see how it develops. Congratulations, good luck, and we'll be back with more coverage here at VMware Explore. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us after the short break. (gentle music)

(gentle music) >> Hello, everyone welcome to "theCUBE's" live coverage here in San Francisco, California for VMware Explore not VMworld, it's VMware Explore. I'm John Furrier, your host of "theCUBE" with Dave Vellante. We're here with two sets. 12th year, Dave, covering VMworld, now VMware Explore, what a journey? I had a little reminiscing from Paul Maritz in 2010, who predicted the future but the timing was off. Raghu predicting the future, but is his timing right with multi-cloud or super-cloud? We're going to get into it. We got three days of wall to wall CUBE coverage, two sets. All the top execs from VMware coming on, including the CEO Raghu himself, Vittorio, Kit Colbert, the whole kit and caboodle of the executive group to talk about the future of VMware, where it's going, and of course the appearance of Hock Tan here from Broadcom, Dave, made an appearance. Michael Dell was also in presence. I get the vibe that there's something going on with Broadcom and VMware beyond just the acquisition. So a lot of people are curious. This event again is notable and historic from the sense of it's VMware Explore not VMworld, so they changed the name, and Broadcom's intent, and they're going to be buying VMworld. Dave, the keynote was anticipated by all, how it was going to go down, what was going to be said. Raghu set the table, I got a ton of notes, I know you do. What's your take? >> Well, you have to start with the Broadcom acquisition. You're right, Hock Tan was in the audience, he stood up, he got a little clap. >> Golf clap. >> He's paying $60 billion for VMware, he better be able to be recognized. And he was here yesterday with Michael Dell at the executive sessions. And their purpose I'm sure, they didn't let us in, but I'm sure the purpose was to make sure that customers were calm, they were comfortable with the direction. Of course, the narrative coming out of VMware is that, hey, they're investigating, they're going deep into our portfolio, and they like what they see, it's going to be all good, it's not going to be like the CA acquisition and de-levering and all that stuff. I still stand by what I wrote in my breaking analysis back in May. The fact is, Broadcom has promised $8.5 billion in EBITDA within three years. That's the only way they get there, is to cut, so that's going to happen. But the interesting dynamic in the market, I don't know if you've noticed this, VMware stock is trading at a 20% discount to what Broadcom is paying for it. So there's a big amount of fluff, if you want to do some arbitration. And I think it's due to the fact that it's a stock and a cash deal, it's a combination deal, and it's not going to close for a year. So there's maybe some skepticism around that. But that was an interesting dynamic. The keynote we'll get into it, but it's all around multi-cloud and what we call super-cloud. >> I have my conspiracy theories on Broadcom, actually they make chips. Looking at all the waves right now in the technology industry, silicon is hot, anyone who's doing custom silicon and putting software on the chip, making purpose built vertical applications is seeing performance gains in cloud and in these applications. So one, I'm really excited by the dots connecting there. But also the VMware story, Dave, is pretty interesting in the sense that timing's everything, the Broadcom acquisition, EBITDA focus might drive behavior. But notable for VMware, is Raghu has been on this vision for years. I remember in 2016 when I interviewed him with Andy Jassy, who was then the CEO of AWS, they had moved everything to Amazon Web Services. And that was the beginning of the vision of multi-cloud and cloud-native. VMware invested a ton, and so we're seeing some fruit come off the tree. If you will, bearing some fruit from that VMware investment in cloud-native across the board which was their bet prior to Broadcom buying them out. So the question is, does Broadcom harvest that, continue that nurturing of that "plantation of goodness" that could come out of that VMware? And again, it's probability, it's not guaranteed. Commentary on Twitter is pretty heavy on, can they win the Devs? Can the new Ops bringing around the front? So, VMware's and Broadcom in a tough position, they bought more than they thought in my opinion. And I think a lot of people are saying, does Broadcom recognize the strategic value of what's coming out of the oven, so to speak, or what's blowing off the tree from VMware? And is it real? That is the number one question. I talk to people in the hallway, that's what they're saying. They want to know what's going to happen with what's around the corner, that's on top of mind of everybody. >> It's a really important question because VMware's future is multi-cloud management, what we call super-cloud. And without Tanzu, and I speculated that Tanzu was probably going to be under the microscope and potentially on the chopping block because they spend a lot of money marketing it, but they're probably not today getting a lot of returns. But without Tanzu, without a cross-cloud PaaS we sometimes call a super PaaS. their strategy doesn't work, it basically fails. And I think what a lot of people are missing, and I saw you chime in on Twitter, is can they win the Devs? Can they win the Devs? This is table stakes. If you don't have a cross-cloud PaaS, and it's really about not necessarily just the Devs, it's about the ops, right? Because now it's about security. Yes, shift left, but shield right. But the DevOps team, the Ops team needs consistency. It's like Adrian Cockcroft says, the Devs, they love to get married, the Ops, they got to clean up after the divorce. And so they need standard- >> You're implying that they'll use any tool for the job and not really worry about lock in. And I think today on the keynote, Deshaun was up there who submitted a comment, "You kids have it easy these days." Implying us old guys, when we coded, you had to do everything yourself. Kelsey Hightower mentioned her support pack desktop edition. The old days when had to build everything by hand, now it's all automated, all goodness. But in all seriousness, the focus there was DevOps has won, DevOps is what the developers are doing. The developers are in the clear right now, as far as I'm concerned. They're sitting on the beach right now, sunglasses on, sun shining, everything's shift left, CI/CD pipeline, cloud-native goodness. If you're a dev, things are much rosier than an Ops person. So DevOps is developer, security and DataOps, is where the action is. So it's not so much IT operations as it is security and data leveling up to the velocity demand of developers and also ease of use. So self-service in the motion of coding, in the pipelining, that's what the developers have to have. And if people don't build that experience from the upside, the new ops is not going to enable the develop, it won't be adopted in my opinion. >> You mentioned Paul Maritz before, his whole thing was any workload, any cloud, the software mainframe, they're talking about any Kubernetes, any cloud. And we got to go through some of the announcements real quick here. VMware Aria is the new multi-cloud management platform. That is the fundamental strategy for going cross-cloud or what we call super-cloud. The vSphere and vSAN 8 are big deals. And as relates to compute with vSphere, they're really pushing that whole DPU. You might remember Project Monterey. Well, Project Monterey is essentially like AWS Nitro, it's the future of computing architecture seven years after AWS introduced it. So AWS has a huge lead here. But it's critical that a company like VMware is able to offer that capability with XPU optionality, GPU, CPU, Arm based, Pensando capabilities, eventually NPUs, other capabilities to bring in and support new workloads, new data driven workloads. So the lot of talk about the whole DPU thing. As I mentioned, Tanzu new version of Tanzu, they talked about edge. They're basically bringing VMware to the edge with an eventual consistency model. >> Hold on, the vSphere thing, just to jump in there real quick. I always thought that that'd be higher up in the keynote. Clearly in the keynote, they flexed their cloud-native positioning, they had to address the Broadcom thing, talk about modern applications. So it felt like they were selling the dream on the front end. And they buried the lead in my opinion, which is vSphere 8. They don't do a lot of vSphere 8 announcements. If you look at the history of VMworld, every few years they got a new release. This was packed with a lot of goodness. And I thought they'd buried that in the keynote. >> I don't know, Raghu mentioned it. Yeah, they had a lot to cover. And then the other thing was they announced support for Red Hat OpenShift. So everybody's like, "Ooh, wow." And then Tanzu for all the Kubernetes versions from the cloud guys. So a lot of announcements, you got to always give VMware props. It's not like they stopped engineering, they have a great engineering culture. And so it's nice to see Project Monterey in particular, go from R&D to actual product. And so we like to see that. >> Even towards the end, now that we're doing the keynote review, Raghu said, "As proud as we are," this is when they started talking about the sustainability, implying they're real proud engineering, and that's a good call out there. I think that's what were trying to get across to Hock Tan, who was sitting in the front row. But Dave, in terms of keynote, my analysis is clear. Raghu was nervous, you can tell. But he's a product guy, he even said that on stage. He set the table at the beginning, I thought really well with modern applications. He had to address the name change, and I thought that was interesting. He actually said, "We built a community with VMworld, but now with multi-cloud, we're going to recall it Explore." Not sure I agree with that. I think VMworld community is still vibrant, and that's why they're here. So I thought that was nice, the way he balance that out, the messaging is good, the graphics and the branding of Explore is world class, I think it's phenomenal. I'm not a big fan of the name change, but I never go well with change there. Hock Tan didn't speak, he did stand up and wave. >> There's no way he's going to get up to speak. >> He didn't speak. So I thought that was interesting front end, so they got that right out of the way. And absolutely you saying last night. And then they got into this digitally smart concept, which I thought was on point. Did not like the great replatforming message. I'm not a big fan of that because it reminded me of the great resignation. And I think there's going to be a lot of memes on that. So not a big fan of the great replatforming. I did like the Cloud Universal pitch. But this whole multi-cloud pitch seems to me, and I want to get your thoughts on this, is that that's what it reminded me of, Paul Maritz. So when Raghu is clearly betting the ranch on multi-cloud, the question is timing. Paul Maritz in 2010 here at VMworld Moscone, he laid out the vision, he was right. But timing was off, the top of the stack didn't materialize. But at the end of the day, ended up being the right architecture. Is VMware too early with multi-cloud, Dave? And that's the question, that's the question on the table. >> Well, so a couple things. So Maritz, the one mistake Maritz made was he really tried to go into apps, remember? So now at least I think Raghu, the current VMware thinking is, we're going to enable apps to be developed. And that is the right thinking. Are they too early or too late with multi-cloud? I think technically it just wasn't feasible, the customers weren't ready for it. VMware moves at the speed of the CIO we like to say. So I think the timing is actually really good because the technical capabilities are now there. You've got to have across-cloud paths, which Tanzu is about. And I think Tanzu was too immature before. They've got the pieces on the DPU side. And the other thing about the timing is now with Broadcom acquiring VMware, the whole non Dell ecosystem has got to be a lot happier. NetApp, guys like that, Cisco. >> Why is that? >> Because Dell, their thumb on the scale, they had the thing rigged, Dell was first in line for everything. When EMC owned VMware, that was the case. But they were required about it, Dell made no concessions. And they just came out and said, "We are going to be VMware first, we are the preferred partner, we do more business with anybody." They really drove a truck through that. And I think it caused a lot of the ecosystem to pull back, like HPE and others to say, "Okay, we're going to find some alternatives here." Now they can really lean in. It's like when HP broken two, that really changed the ecosystem posture with HPE. This is like that, but times 10. >> What did you think about the ecosystem floor last night? When I did a walk of the floor, I thought it was very vibrant, it was not a ghost town at all. >> No, not at all, we saw Alibaba Cloud was there, we saw a lot of- >> AWS. >> Smaller companies >> Microsoft. >> And so I thought it was better than I thought it would be. There's probably what, 7,000 people here I would say? So well off from the 15,000 pre-COVID highs, but still very robust, it's a good crowd. People are excited to be back in person obviously. And I think the messaging was right, John. I think cross-cloud, multi-cloud, super-cloud, that is the future. Well, David Floid took a stab at it and said, "I think it's going to be $100 billion market by the end of the decade." >> Super-cloud is a thing for sure. And I think that came out in Aria announcement, which was basically a rebranding. It's not a new product, essentially it's a cobble together management platform. I thought the Cloud Universal notes here were interesting. The Cloud Universal is the commercial cloud smart component. Meaning they're trying to make that the frame, Dave, for the hyperscalers to come in to a de facto consortium movement. I feel like that's next here. If this Cloud Universal could become the super-cloud consortium, that might give them a better shot. The ecosystem is buzzing, attendance is strong. It's interesting a lot of people were speculating, will this be an event? I thought they did a great job and I thought they came through well with this. >> You were saying about consortium, because have to have the cloud guys in any consortium. But is any one cloud going to drive it? VMware could be- >> AWS >> Could be the driver. >> I'm thinking if I had to make a prediction, looking at what I just saw in the keynote, we'll see what the VMware execs say, If I had to make a guess, I think you're going to have customers, "Let's still double down on VMware stuff." They're going to settle into vSphere and networking compute and storage, the normal stuff that they've got, the software to find data center core as a cloud operational platform. And then you're going to see a lot more AWS migration. You might see that if Broadcom doesn't nurture the fruit coming off the tree, as we mentioned earlier, I think you might see people go more cloud-native. But I think VMware's prepared for that with the hybrid. So it's going to be very interesting to see. I think the winners coming out of this will be AWS, maybe a little bit of trickle into Azure, Alibaba mostly for the European, I mean the China side. But I don't see them playing. Google is a wild card, we'll see it from them. >> I think the other big thing about the timing, to your earlier point is, VMware used to go to market with very bespoke, We got vSAN, we got NSX, we got vSphere, and now they're trying to bring that together. And essentially remember, they used to go to market and say, "Okay, hey, your ELA is up, time to renew." And they're talking to the wrong people. So now they're going forth with the Azure service model, they're going to move to a subscription model. And I think the timing is right for that. I would've liked to see it a little bit before hand, maybe pre COVID would have been better timing. But I think technically, the time is right now for that. >> And I think looking at the acquisition, speculating on that, I think let's discuss how we see things, how they might move forward. Again, we'll ask the guests as much as best as we can and the best they could answer. But let's take this forward. Okay, based upon what I'm seeing here, if I'm Hock Tan in the audience, I'm saying to myself, "Okay, I got more here than I thought I was buying." Maybe I thought I was getting some great EBITDA. I wonder if his outlook changed on how he goes to market with the new VMware post acquisition. So that means in the around February timeframe, I would probably, if I was advising him to say, "Okay, let's keep it as is, let's not do the cut, cut, cut. Maybe trim a little bit here and there." But for the most part, he's got the solid customer base and he's going to have to keep the event. >> Here's the problem with that. They have a very high do-say ratio. They do what they say they're going to do. And as a result, they've promised 8.5 billion in EBITDA within three years out of VMware. And they return 50% of their free cash flow to investors. If they break that promise, their stock will get crushed. I don't think they're going to break that promise. So I think they're going to run. That's something I believe in their playbook that they're not going to change. Now, could they get there without massive cuts? I think it's going to be hard. Can they get there with price increases? Yes. And better efficiency, yes. But they don't have a lot of go to market synergies, John. Broadcom doesn't have a big sales force that they can say, "Okay, we're going to fire all the VMware sales force and you're going to go to market through our channel." Like Oracle would do with their big sales force or a Dell would do with an acquisition, they can't. And so I just don't see how they're going to around it. The only other thing I would say is, to me, I thought the application development piece, the Tanzu piece was very appropriate. And I think they got it. Whether or not they're going to succeed there, we can debate that. But I thought what was missing was there wasn't enough, in my opinion, on their security posture, their security strategy. I thought they gave it lip service with, "Oh yeah, we're going to shift left and dev security, et cetera." They did not go in depth. I think when you talk to someone like Tom Gillis, who really can go deep, I think talking about Barry and the lead, that was not, security is the number one issue of CIOs, CSO. >> Data and security >> At boards, it's number one. And data is the second thing. And those two stories in the keynote where quasi non-existent or/and weak. >> Again, the reason why I believe, and you're discussing it publicly at a high level, is super-cloud is real because it's not just SaaS on cloud, it's hybrid, it's DevOps, it's developer. And security and data operations are just absolutely now leveling up, and the edge is a complete wild card. We met a company last night, they're doing the edge cloud. The edge is going to open up all kinds of new use cases and challenges. And that's on the DataOps, data security side. DevOps, IT operations is already in the dev cycle. If companies aren't doing that, in my opinion, they're not really doing it right. So I think it'll shift to security and Ops and DataOps, that's going to be the action. In the cloud operational framework, that's super-cloud. To me, if I'm Hock Tan, I'm saying, "VMworld, VMware Explore, VMware has to be a core component of super-cloud of the future. Not multi-cloud just a state." I think multi-cloud will be a description of a state, of an architecture, and an outcome, but that's not super-cloud, that's not a functioning operating system, that's not a functioning business driven technology. So I think VMware has the opportunity. So I look at that and say, I got cheap options all the way up to the top of the stack. And super-cloud paths layer, as you describe, that I think is the way to go. >> When you think about how VMware got here, VMware was a $13 billion trailing 12 month revenue company. There aren't a lot of $13 billion software companies. And the way VMware got here, is through great software engineering. They identified problems that the customers had and they went and solved them. They did it with virtualization, they did it with private cloud, they figured out their public cloud strategy. So I think the question for Broadcom is going to be okay, how fast can we monetize that engineering? Can we turn that engineering R&D into dollars? And how fast can we do that? They have two choices in my opinion, keep innovating, which of course we hope that's the case, or act like a private equity firm and just squeeze as much cash out of VMware as possible. Which I don't think would be the right strategy because eventually that says, okay, what's going to happen to Broadcom? How are they going to continue to grow? Are they're going to have to just keep growing through acquisitions? So I think R&D is a really good spend when it's VMware. >> And I think as we wrap up our keynote analysis, one of the things that's going to come out of this as the conversation, no doubt in my mind will be, VMware isn't CA. And the question is, does Broadcom go off their playbook with VMware because of the fact that you look at the sponsorships for the show, we got a robust set of sponsorships for "theCUBE." With two sets, we're booked, fully loaded. Conversation's high, the floor is all about next level cloud operations. This is not a dying market, this is a growth wave coming. So the question, as super-cloud becomes that growth, and everyone's talking about super-cloud there. Some people who don't like the name, which is good, keep grace debate. But there's no doubt that that next wave is the super-cloud philosophy, the super-cloud mindset and architecture, and development environment. And we've documented that on supercloud.world if anyone's interested. But that wave is coming, and you can see it on the floor. Look at the sponsors, look at what people are talking about, Dave. This is not like Broadcom buying VMware and tucking it under and saying, "Okay, hope we can service the customer." There's a real market growth here story. So the question is, what do you do with that? >> Well, so you start with the base. VMware is a very good platform. The reason why they don't have a ton of competition and the reason why, okay, Nutanix can maybe trickle some away, but VMware is really good, it works, it's stable, it recovers from failures, it's got a super strong ecosystem. So you start by building there and then you identify the places where you can spend a dollar and make it 10. >> Well, I was very excited that when we had our super-cloud event, which was a virtual event as a test, we had great VMware support. And a lot of the catalog sessions up here, on Moscone West, where we're sitting, upstairs is all the sessions, they're crowded. And they overlay, Dave, with our narrative and the industry narrative. On the influencer side, you're starting to see the influencers meeting our editorial and pursuing a super-cloud with VMware and their ecosystem. Kind of agreeing super-cloud is real. And I think that is an important note because just last December, when we coined the term at Reinvent, I think it was Reinvent look what's happened. I want to get your thoughts and your reaction to why super-cloud has got so much traction, it's a great buzz with the name. But why is it that our super-cloud, the VMware, and the ecosystem are all aligning with this? Why do you think that's happening? Why do you think that the momentum is accelerating? >> The reason is that, as everybody knows, organizations have multiple clouds, it's a function of shadow Devs, M&A. And so they end up with all these different clouds, all these different projects, different primitives, different APIs, different tool sets. And they called it cloud chaos today. It's accurate, it is cloud chaos. So what's the problem with that? Well, that makes it harder to secure, it makes it harder to govern, it makes it harder to share data, it creates data silos. What's the answer? Well, if you can create a layer that's an abstraction layer that simplifies all that cross cloud data sharing and development and have a consistent set of APIs through a PaaS layer, we call it super PaaS and you are going to have a metadata intelligence that says, "Okay, I'm going to put this here or put that there. And I'm going to deal with latency, I'm going to optimize for whatever purpose, data sharing, or performance or whatever it is." You're going to solve a lot of problems. And you're going to make the CIO's life easier so that they can invest in their own business and their digital transformation and their digital strategy. So that's why people agree. They might not agree with the name, but they certainly agree with the concept of that abstraction layer. >> The name is certainly a better name than multi-cloud, multi-cloud sounds broken. But I think CIOs and CXOs, CISO, CSOs have to get buy-in from their teams. The organic dev relationship with Ops and SecOps and DataOps has to be symbiotic, not conflicting. And I love the chaos story because as Andy Grove, the legend at Intel once said, "Let chaos reign and then reign in the chaos." >> Chaos is cash. >> So in any innovation inflection point, chaos becomes the complexity, abstraction layers, and or innovation takes that complexity away. This is the formula for success. And I think VMware is right in the middle of it. And I think if I'm looking at VMware right now, I'm saying, hey, reign in that chaos right now and you win. So chaos is not a bad thing if you can reign it in, Dave. >> And that's what they've done. You think about what they did with virtualization, it was chaotic, it was wasteful. I think of what they did with private cloud. They said, "Hey IT guys, we're going to help you not get cloudified. We're going to cloudify your presence on-prem and not just throw everything into the cloud." They did a great job there. And now it's all about multi-cloud. >> Well, we're going to reign in the chaos, extract the signal from the noise. Super CUBE here at super-cloud event VMware Explore. Dave, great to kick it off again. Again, 12th year of CUBE coverage. It seems like a lifetime, Dave. Just yesterday we were 2010 >> Amazing, right. We've been in Moscone South, we've been in North, we've been in Las Vegas. Now we're here West, first time in west. >> Some of these developers were in elementary school when we started "theCUBE" here, I was just feeling old relics. Anyway, we're going to bring more action, three days of coverage, thecube.net, check it out. Join our community, join the conversation. As the influences are coming more onto the market, you're seeing a lot more conversations on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on the internet, check it out. Join the conversation. I'm John Furrier and Dave Vellante. We'll be back with more coverage here in San Francisco after this break. (gentle music)