>> [Narrator] From San Francisco, it's theCUBE.
Covering Radio 2018, brought to you by VMware.
>> Hey, welcome back everyone.
This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Radio 2018.
We are in San Francisco for their VMware's Radio 2018.
It's their R&D fiesta, party.
As Steve Harris said, former CTO,
it's like a sales kickoff for engineers.
It's a great time, but it's also serious.
A lot of real serious discussion
and of course people are flexing their
technical muscle and stretching their minds.
And I'm here with one of the chief operator, one of the
main principals and legend in VMware, Raghu Raghuram.
Chief Operating Officer, new title.
Chief Operating Officer, Products and Cloud Services.
>> That's right. >> Great to see you.
>> Great to see you, John.
>> What year did you join VMware?
>> 2003
(chuckling)
>> 15 years
>> So, you've seen many of these radios.
>> Yes, it's one of the highlights of the year for me.
>> Yeah, super important architect of VMware, great part of
the community, leader, architect of the AWS relationship.
>> [Raghu] Sure
>> Part of that movement with Andy Jassy, Sanjay Poonen.
This is the 14th year of radio
and VMware has changed a lot since you joined.
It's now a world class organization.
Getting check marks for one of the best places to work.
Certainly for engineers it's like a great party environment.
Take a minute to explain the radio culture,
it's 14th year, there's t-shirts behind us,
to commemorate the key milestones, where it's come from,
where it's gone, your thoughts on the program
and the community.
>> Yeah, I mean this is in fact one of the
unique characteristics of VMware.
I have checked around with my peers in the industry
and I don't think any other tech company
of our size does this.
Radio stands for R&D innovation offsite.
Like you said, we started fourteen years ago
just to take a bunch of engineers out
from their daily grinds and say,
"what could we be building fundamentally
that's groundbreaking?"
So, I would say it's a cross between
a wild science fair and a research conference.
In fact, both of these go hand in hand at this place.
People publish papers and there is a selection committee
just like in serious conferences.
In fact, Ray had some amazing stats
for this year's submissions
and the selection is very very rigorous.
At the same time, you'll go upstairs
and you'll see the exhibition hall
where there are all kinds of things that are displayed.
Things that could be very well incremental things
in the next release and things that are wild
and wacky off the wall that we might never ever do.
So, it's really the full gamut.
Another interesting thing is we've gone bigger.
We are getting people from pretty much all parts
of the Emirate.
I think there is representation from 25 companies.
>> [John] How many engineering centers are there roughly?
I mean, there's core centers
and then you have engineers all over the world.
How many engineers, ballpark?
>> I would say, in terms of medium to big size centers,
there are probably over a dozen across the globe
and literally every continent.
Clearly, in the US we have four big centers.
In Europe, we have three at least.
In Asia, we have another three or four.
So, we definitely have over 10.
>> I mean everyone who knows the VMware
and also knows theCUBE, for nine years,
well this is our ninth year covering VMworld,
all you gotta do is look at VMworld
and you can tell one thing right out of the gate.
Very community oriented.
All the decisions are made in the community.
Also, people who know VMware know
you're highly an engineering organization.
>> [Raghu] Yep.
>> This is not like a lot of marketing fluff.
Although, you do have some good marketing
here and there, but the point is
it's an engineering culture with community.
This is unique.
I've seen companies that don't walk the talk
on "community engineering".
They have silos, there's a lot of infighting.
How have you-
How has VMware preserved a culture
of innovation amongst their peers when
it's competitive as hell inside VMware?
One to be smart, achieve the success.
But, also, VMware has always been in always a moving market.
How do you guys do it?
What's the secret sauce?
>> I mean, there's not a single thing.
Like you said, culture is something
that happens over time and is preserved over time
and is preserved through people.
It's not like anything you can write down, right?
Of course you can write it down.
But, it won't be worth the paper
it's written down on unless it's practiced
everyday by other people.
And so, I think that is the key thing here.
Right from the get go, customer centric innovation
has ruled the rules here.
So, the question to ask always
is great innovation, look at it
from a customer end point of view.
I think that matters a lot here.
Secondly,
there is a lot of emphasis on breaking the rules in terms
of doing something disruptive, right?
And, the engineers that come here tend
to be the kind to respond to that, right?
And then lots of venues.
Like this is not the only thing that we do, right?
We do these things called borathons,
which is our internal version of hackathons.
We do regional versions of these things.
Each of the teams, like the business units,
have their own little R&D innovation
activities that go on.
>> They have a playground.
They can basically go outside the scope of their job.
>> Exactly.
>> Get an idea, a passion, an idea and go after it
and not have to worry about anything.
>> Yup, exactly.
>> [John] With a path to commercialization, if it hits.
>> Yeah, that's what I was gonna say.
We have a fairly high success rate, I would say,
of taking things that we see here
and turning them into product and eventually
into monetizable businesses.
All the things that go into the product features.
>> Give some examples of historically, successes,
notables, and then also talk about some ones
that aren't notable that have come out.
I know a lot has come out of this, the numbers are clear.
What are some highlights that have come out
of the radio event that have been blockbuster successes?
>> A lot of the things that you see
in the networking today came out of radio.
Things about doing security and networking
from the hypervisor up, came from here.
What you see today as vSAN, had its roots here.
What you see today with the app defense
and the security stuff, had its roots here.
A lot of the features that are in vSphere today,
especially the storage vMotion
and so on and so forth, was first showcased here.
This goes on and on and on.
We also have a lot of things
that have shown up here that we have not pursued.
For example, almost like an eBay for VM capacity.
We didn't pursue it.
God knows, that could've been a huge idea.
(laughing)
>> It's the misses too.
>> Yeah, there's the misses too.
But, that's the whole point of this.
>> Yeah.
There's parts to creativity.
How much creativity goes on at this event?
I mean there's certainly a lot of barnstorming,
brainstorming, or whatever you wanna call it.
A lot of interaction, physical face to face.
How much creativity is happening you think here?
>> Yeah, so a few years back
they introduced a couple of things.
One is a instant birds of a feather.
Where you can literally go to a whiteboard
and say, "hey let's discuss this topic,"
and set up a time and then people show up.
There's this other one they call Lightning Rounds,
which literally happens over drinks
I think tomorrow or something.
Where people come in and it's lots
of the mini gauntlet where nothing is scripted.
All sorts of crazy ideas keep flowing.
I would say those are two examples
where there's a lot of on the spot creativity.
As a company, the R&D teams have gotten more dispersed.
This is the opportunity for people to get together
even within the same business unit
or across business units and say
let's go solve this problem.
You and I have been talking about this on email,
let's talk about it face to face.
Hey, let's bring somebody else in
that's relevant to this conversation as well.
So, those are the kind of things that go on here
that spark the creativity.
And then of course, the exhibits.
When people start thinking about these exhibits
and talking to people that are showing there,
other ideas get spawned off as well.
>> Raghu, talk about just from your experience,
you got a great track record,
and certainly it was in VMware,
it goes back to the early 2000s.
What is your observation on the innovation formula?
What's been the consistent constant of innovation?
As the waves have changed-
I mean, I've been in Palo Alto for 19 years now,
in my 20th year.
Even Palo Alto's changed.
So, the world's changed, modern.
And we'll get to the Amazon deal in a second.
Certainly cloud's here.
What have you seen as the constant innovation variable?
>> What I would say is this.
Fundamentally the people that we tend
to recruit into VMware are by large what we call,
or at least I call, platform thinkers.
So, they think of building a fundamental piece
of technology that can be possibly be used
in 10 different ways, and they build it
for one particular use case.
And then, the questions goes back to,
now we've done this, what else can we do
with this foundational technology?
If you look at vSphere, does the same thing.
If you look at networking, same thing.
Storage is the same thing.
So, I would say that is the constant.
That's one constant here.
Which is, how do you build fundamentally a platform
that could be used in very different ways.
>> Some will also say systems thinking.
>> Exactly, so that's a compliment.
>> The cloud is a system.
>> (mumbles) I think Paul Maritz is a 2010 picture.
Although, some of the calls didn't come out.
He kind of generally had the architecture.
>> Yeah, yeah
>> He nailed it (laughs)
>> There are a few people like Paul in the world
and absolutely he nailed it.
>> Dave and I would give him a lot of credit for that.
Okay, let's talk about Amazon Web Services.
Certainly Radio's now 14th year.
At what point did the cloud start clicking in?
You said there's some misses, the eBay for VMs.
Certainly cloud is on the radar.
>> Yeah
>> And vCloud, we know what happened there.
Pat talked about how you guys really took
that opportunity, which is,
you made lemonade out of some lemons there
with that product.
That's my words, not his.
When did cloud first appear on the horizon in Radio
and how do you see that happening now
as we talk multi-cloud?
>> You missed the alumni session today.
One of the early engineers said
when he was interviewed by Mendel,
which was in 1999, Mendel is of course
the founder and first chief scientist here.
He said he foresaw the event.
When the engineer asked him,
"how are we gonna make money on this?"
He thought there would be a day when people
just rent computer capacity from a data center
instead of going out and buying gear.
In some ways-
>> He predicted >> He predicted
>> Cloud operations
>> Back in the company's starting days.
But really I think we saw this in 2005, 2006, 2007.
At the same time actually as Amazon saw this.
But, the big difference was we
were growing 100% a year on core business
and we had our hands full that way.
We felt like as a software company
the way to play it was by delivering technology
to other people to build it.
So, that's when it really made it's way here,
in Radio and in the products.
>> And by the way, it wasn't obvious
to many people in the industry at that time,
to Amazon.
I've had many conversations with Andy Chassy
and he now uses the term being misunderstood.
They were completely misunderstood
unless you were an entrepreneur who was using EC-2
just to avoid seed money.
'Cause it was a dream for entrepreneur's at that time.
I remember that clearly.
That was not obvious.
It really wasn't obvious until about 2010, nine, 10.
So you guys were growing.
Missed that.
Radio is not about missing it.
It's about identifying.
>> Exactly.
>> So, how does it translate today for Amazon?
>> The Amazon relationship, if you think about the
technical underpinnings of it,
clearly we did a vCloud error.
We learned a lot on that.
Within some of our engineers, the question
that was asked was, "what if we could run a cloud
on top of other peoples clouds?"
And we did experiments with nested virtualization.
We did experiments with bare metal.
And then we chose the start of our model.
So, that's one of the technical early indicators
of what we could do on other people's clouds.
So, that's a big thing.
The rest of the things we're doing
with respect to elastically growing capacity
and all those things, came from experiments
that were shown up here.
So, that was the connection back to Radio.
In terms of the Amazon partnership itself,
a lot of it was driven from the customer end.
As we were thinking about VCN not working
the way we wanted it to work,
we went back to the customers and said,
"what is wrong with this picture?"
And, the answer that came back was very clear.
They said, we like the hybrid idea,
but we want the hybrid to be VMware on prem
and Amazon in the cloud because 70%
of our customers turned out to be AWS customers.
And at the same time AWS was hearing the same thing.
Why don't you guys team up instead of being either or?
That's what led to the partnership.
>> Your team at VMware came as the cloud native piece?
>> Yeah >> Aspect of it.
So Kubernetes is on the horizon.
Not on the horizon, in your face.
And you've got service mesh over the top.
>> Yep, yep >> That's up the stack.
It's networking.
>> Yep, exactly.
>> Still needs to do networking.
>> Yeah, exactly.
>> It's like, you guys must be like,
hey we love what's going on up there.
Come down to the store.
>> Yeah.
So, the boundary between what is application platform
and infrastructure platform is constantly changing.
Kubernetes, when it started out people said
oh it's an application platform.
Now it turns out its actually infrastructure.
Same thing in networking.
So what we see is, things were the lower level
of the infrastructure constructs,
the same idea is applied at the next level up.
That's why we love Kubernetes.
We love Service Mesh.
We love similar concepts that are coming about in storage
and security it's one-
>> A unified stack is coming.
>> Yep, exactly.
>> Just someone fix networking
and then the holy grail, programmable networks.
>> Yep >> When are they coming?
>> At the application level.
>> Let's go
>> Yeah >> Holy grail is finally here.
It's not where you thought it was gonna be.
>> It is at both places, right.
I mean, it's tying back to the conventional layer,
two layer, three stuff because that's also important still.
>> Raghu, I love having a chat with you.
It's great to chat. >> Good to see you again John.
>> Super impressive with the work you've been doing.
Love the cloud deal with Amazon,
you know that.
Love what's going on at Kubernetes
and containerization.
Love what's going on with Service Mesh, unified stack.
Love cryptocurrency, which I didn't get to ask you.
>> Yep >> Thumbs up?
>> Crazy things going on there too
>> Thumbs up, okay, thumbs up.
>> We're watching the cryptocurrency.
>> Watching, token economics coming right behind it.
It's theCUBE bringing you all the action here at Radio.
We're the signal.
2018, Radio 2018.
I'm theCUBE with Raghu.
I'll be right back with more coverage
after this short break.
(upbeat music)