>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE!
Covering Dell Technologies World 2019.
Brought to you by Dell Technologies
and its ecosystem partners.
>> Hello everyone.
Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage
here in Las Vegas for Dell Technologies World.
I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante.
Dave, we've got Pat Gelsinger back on theCUBE.
He stopped by yesterday, did a flyby after his keynote
to kick off our intro section.
He's back for the sit-down. >> (laughs)
Welcome back.
>> I can't get enough of you, Pat.
>> CEO of VMware, Pat Gelsinger.
>> Yeah, I love to photobomb you guys, so it was great.
>> Anytime.
I know you're super busy, business is going great.
And you know, what a three years its been.
I remember the keynote you gave at VMworld a few years ago.
This was really on a time where,
I would call it the seminal moment for you
because you saw a vision,
and we've talked privately and on theCUBE about,
and you gave this speech of
this is going to be the preferred future,
and it was very visionary-oriented,
but it ended up happening.
That became the beginning of a run for VMware.
And since then, you've been kind of chipping away
and filling in all the tech pieces,
the business model, and deals,
with Amazon and now Azure and others.
How are you feeling about it?
What's the highlights?
What's your perspective of where we are now?
What's the notable accomplishments?
>> Well you know, it's been just great.
And you think about the run that we've been on where we,
five years ago, we described a hybrid future.
And you know, most people said, what are you, stupid?
And you know, student body right to the public cloud.
And now everybody is starting to understand
the difficulty of replatforming, right?
And says wow, this is really hard.
I can spend millions and millions of dollars,
in fact, one customer's estimate
was that they were going to spend almost $1 billion
replatforming all their applications to the cloud.
And when they got them cloud-native, what do they have?
The same apps.
So imagine going to your board and saying
I'm going to spend $1 billion just so I can be on the cloud,
but give you no new business value.
You've got to be kidding!
And that's why this hybrid future,
and as I like to joke, Andy, five years ago,
Andy Jassy said if you're running your own data center,
you're stupid.
And Pat said if you're using Amazon, you're stupid.
And now we're doing bro hugs on stage with each other.
(laughter)
>> And by the way, hybrid,
you picked that trend that was right.
Multi-cloud, though, came out of more a reality,
less of an operating vision,
'cause hybrid cloud, you know, you saw the dots,
connected those dots,
but I think multi-cloud was much more of just a reality.
When people started to realize
that as I started doing stuff on premises,
wow, I got native workloads on the cloud,
and there are benefits for being in the cloud first
for certain workloads.
But then the multi-cloud thing comes up.
>> And I think everybody has started to realize,
and I really, as I would say,
I think every CIO needs a three-cloud strategy.
Making their private data centers
into a proper operating private cloud.
And some of this week's announcements,
I'm sure we'll get back to those a little bit,
to me are just a huge dimension.
You know, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC,
you know, a huge accelerant
of making your private data center
op like a private cloud, right, at scale.
Second, you need a primary public cloud partner.
And I think most people should pick a primary.
Not one, a primary,
and then a secondary cloud, right,
you know, as their partners.
And then you have your range of SAS offerings.
And I think that needs to be the core, right,
of every IT, CIO's strategy for the future.
And our objective is to create an environment
between what we're doing with VMware Cloud Foundation,
and now VMware Cloud on Dimension.
What we're doing with Amazon,
our preferred partner for the public cloud offering.
What we announced this week with Azure, right?
Our 4000 other cloud partners, including, you know,
very successful relationship with IBM.
And saying, okay, that's your infrastructure.
And the bulk of your workloads
should run on a VMware environment
that we can operate across that,
with the same tools, the same interfaces,
the same security, the same management tools,
and then use the other cloud services
as they bring you business value.
You're a fan of Tensorflow?
Go for it, baby.
Right?
You know, and use it in your app.
You love function as a service with Lambda, go for it.
But the bulk of your workload should lay in here
and use these where they have business value.
>> And to follow up on the three legs of the cloud stool,
the CIO's legs, number three is for what?
Is it for risk mitigation, exit strategies,
or more specific best-of-breed, horses-for-courses
type of workloads.
>> Yes, yes, and yes.
To some degree, really it's saying,
nobody wants to say, I'm only in one.
Right?
Nobody wants to lock in for it.
Also you know, clearly, hey, you know,
these are technologies that break.
You get more resilience that way, right?
You want to be able to manage your cost environments.
There's clearly this view of
okay, you know, if I can do one, two, and three,
I can do N.
'Cause most people are also going to end up picking,
oh, I'm in Hong Kong.
Okay, I need a Hong Kong cloud,
because my data can only go there.
You know, I'm in Malaysia,
oh, they require all data to be there.
'Cause a practicality, if you're a big enterprise company,
it's not just going to be three.
You're going to need to be four, five, and six as well,
for regional.
And then you're going to acquire somebody,
they're using a different partner.
It really says, build an operational environment
that works that way.
Give myself business flexibility.
I have application flexibility, and if I've done that,
I really can move to the other environments
that my business requires.
>> I think one of the reasons
why you guys have been so successful,
if I go back five or six years,
I remember you laying out the market,
the market segmentation,
you're obviously close to customers.
You're a very clear thinker.
You've obviously looked at the market for multi-cloud.
How do you describe that,
how do you look at the TAM, how big is it?
>> Well you know, if you think about cloud today, right,
we're closing in on $100 billion of the public cloud.
You add SAS to it, you know,
you got almost another $100 billion at that level.
And you know, the overall data center market
is probably on the order of, you know, $1 trillion-ish.
>> Give or take. (laughs)
>> Yeah, on that order.
And then you know, you throw the operations costs
inside of it,
you're probably looking at something
that's, you know, on the order of $2 trillion as well.
So this is a big market, right?
You know, part of the excitement that people are seeing
in this cloud environment,
is that they can just go faster.
And as I described in the keynote today,
we want to enable every one of our customers
to stop looking down and look up, right?
Spend less time looking down at the infrastructure.
We're going to operationalize it,
we're going to automate it for you,
we're going to take care of it
so that every one of your engineers
can become software engineers
building app and business value.
>> I want to ask you on that point,
because one of the things, I was talkin' last night,
the analyst said at the briefing or the reception was,
having a debate with one of the strategists in Dell,
and I'm like, look it,
outcomes are great at the top of the stack.
Looking up, you want outcomes.
But during the OSI stack days, no one cared about outcomes.
It was either token ring or Ethernet.
Speed won, so certain things have to be speed-driven,
world-class, and keep getting better.
And so that's what we're seeing
as an infrastructure requirement.
Horizontal scalability, operational scale.
So that's a speeds and feeds game.
So the outcome there is faster (laughs), and simpler.
Up the stack, data becomes a big part of that.
That, more, is where we see outcome.
Do you see it that way, Pat?
Because you know, again, infrastructure is often,
that's how they said it on stage.
We want to have whole new-paved,
new infrastructure for this generation,
essentially a refresh of infrastructure.
Okay.
Well, what does it look like?
It's got to be fast, got to be flexible, software-defined.
Your thoughts?
>> So you know, clearly, I mean,
what we're trying to do
is we build this common infrastructure layer.
And build an environment that allows you to be fast,
but also allows you to be in control and cost-effective.
Because if you would say, oh, I just want to be fast,
ah, that doesn't work, right?
We still have limited budgets, and you know,
people, someday there's a CFO day of reckoning.
But you also have to realize,
part of the hybrid cloud laws that I described this morning,
you know, one of those is the laws of physics, right?
Hey, my factory automation for robotics
needs to be 40 milliseconds, period.
And if I round-trip to the cloud at 150 milliseconds,
guess what?
(laughs)
>> Latency.
>> Right.
You know, my image recognition for being able to detect
my autonomous vehicle is less than 50 milliseconds.
I can't round-trip to the cloud.
It has to be fast, right,
but we also need to be able to push more of this data,
more of the inference of my machine learning and AI
closer to the edge.
That's why, you know, you heard Michael talk about,
and Jeff talk about this explosion of data.
Most of that data will be at the edge.
Why?
Because every camera, you know, every sensor
will be developing it,
and I'm not going to round-trip it to the cloud
because of economics.
I can't afford to take all that data to the cloud.
It's not just the latency.
>> Latency matters.
>> Yeah.
And so for that, so I can't take it to the cloud,
I got to be able to compute locally.
I got to be able to apply the inference
of my AI models locally,
but you know, I also then need to scale
aspects of cloud as well.
My third law, of course, was regulation,
where you know, guess what?
I was just with a major customer in Latin America,
and they said they are repatriating 100%
of their data and applications out of the public cloud,
'cause the new president, right,
is assisting on data only in his country
for all of their nationalized resources and assets.
>> So that's driving the change.
This brings up the multi-cloud kind of thing earlier.
You guys got to play in all the ponds out there,
in the industry.
But let's talk about on-stage
here at Dell Technologies World.
You were on-stage with Michael Dell and Satya Nadella,
and I was lookin' up there.
I'm like, man, the generational knowledge
of the three people on-stage, the history.
>> (laughs)
I think that just means I'm getting old. (laughs)
>> Well I mean, you've seen it all.
I mean, from Intel, to EMC, to VMware.
Dave and I, Dave's a historian of tech,
as he'll self-claims,
but I'm up there, I was pretty blown away.
You guys are leading the industry.
What kind of moment was that for you,
because now you've got Microsoft doing a deal with VMware.
Who would've thought that would happen?
>> Well, maybe two different aspects to it.
You know, one is, I've known Satya for over 25 years.
You know, he was sort of going through the Microsoft ranks,
Windows NT, SQL, et cetera.
(laughter)
You know, at the same time I was.
So we got to know each other.
Almost 25 years since our first interactions.
When Michael Dell first came to Intel
to meet Andy Grove to get microprocessors
so he could start his business, I was there.
So I mean, these relationships are decades old.
So in that view, it's sort of like, hey Satya,
how's the wife, you know.
(laughter)
Hey Michael, how's Susan doing?
Really, it--
>> But you haven't even gone anywhere,
you're still in the industry. (laughs)
>> Yeah.
But then to be able,
the announcement was really pretty special
in the sense that I call it 20 years in the making.
You know, not a year or two, 20 years in the making,
'cause VMware and Microsoft
has essentially been at odds with each other
for two decades.
You know, at that level.
And to be able to be on-stage and saying,
that's right, we're cooperating on cloud,
we're cooperating on client,
and we're cooperating on futures,
okay, that's a pretty big statement as well.
And I think customers respond very positively to that.
And you know, I'm--
>> It's been a bold move,
and you also made a bold move with the cloud, too, Pat.
I got to say, that was another good call.
Partnering with Andy Jassy.
Again, once, both idiots, I guess,
calling each other clever,
you know. (laughs)
Hey, public cloud, at odds, partner.
Boom.
>> And I really think this idea,
moving headwinds to tailwinds.
And you know, the Amazon partnership with Andy,
and as we say, it's our preferred cloud partner,
VMware Cloud, our native US hub, VMware-offered service.
You know, super committed to it.
We're closing in on 2000 customers on that now.
>> Clarify the Amazon relation.
I saw some press articles that kind of missed,
skewed a little bit.
They kind of made it sound like the Azure deal
was similar to the Amazon deal.
So just explain the difference
between the VMware deal with AWS and Andy Jassy,
that relationship, and the other cloud ones.
Take a minute to explain that.
>> Yeah, thank you.
And what we're doing with Amazon
is VMware is offering a cloud service
that I operate for customers, that runs on Amazon.
And that is a VMware-delivered service.
They're our preferred partner.
We're not bashful about that,
that if we have the choice, that's the one to go to.
It's going to be best.
But what we've done now with Azure
is we've made the VMware Cloud Foundation,
the same underlying components,
available with CloudSimple and Virtustream,
they're partners,
to have a VMware Cloud Foundation offering
delivered by Microsoft as a first-party service.
So VMware Cloud, VMware is delivering it.
In the Azure for VMware services,
that's being delivered and supported by Microsoft.
>> And that's the same deal you did with IBM.
>> It's very, the same-- >> Google and other ones.
>> Yeah, the same as we've done
with our 4000 other cloud partners, right?
And obviously, Virtustream and CloudSimple
are part of that 4000,
and they're making the VMware Cloud Foundation
available to Azure customers now.
>> And what's the benefits to VMware's customers
for those deals?
>> Well, imagine that you're somebody in,
Walmart was quoted in the press release, as an example.
Walmart's a big VMware customer.
Walmart is also a big Azure customer.
So their ability to say, oh, I can have a hybrid environment
makes a lot of sense for that kind of customer.
So we really do see it as saying, you know--
>> Customer-driven, basically.
>> Absolutely.
And people said, which are you going to sell to us?
Well in most cases, customers have already decided
who their major cloud partners our.
We're saying that VMware offering,
even though we're first and best with Amazon,
we're saying as they make their cloud choices,
we'll have a valid VMware Cloud Foundation
offering available.
>> And best, I want to understand best.
Best is, in part, anyway,
because of the engineering you guys have done.
When we interviewed Andy Jassy in November at re:Invent,
he said you can't have a lot of these types of partnerships.
And it's very deep integration.
Is that why it's best?
And what makes it best?
>> Yeah, I call it first and best for two reasons.
One is because we are engineering, we are co-engineering,
the bits first get done on VMware Cloud,
and then we make 'em available to the other partners.
That's where we're doing the core engineering,
the innovation.
Andy has hundreds of engineers working on this.
I have hundreds of engineers working on it.
So it's first and best from an engineering sense.
And, given it's my service and my offering,
we're selling it aggressively in the marketplace,
positioning it as part of the broader set of solutions
and leveraging that, like you saw this week
with the Dell EMC offering, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC.
It's leveraging all that first and best work
to now bring it on-premise as well.
So it really is both the engineering as as a go-to-market.
>> I'm going to ask some CEO questions. (laughs)
So Tom Sweet has said they're happy
to have the Class V transaction behind them.
I'm sure you're glad, too.
Thank you.
That was very generous of you.
>> (laughs)
>> You've been incredibly good at acquisitions.
I mean, obviously Nicira, Heptio, CloudHealth, AirWatch,
I mean, on and on.
>> VeloCloud.
I mean, most acquisitions, frankly,
don't live up to their objectives.
I think that's not the case for VMware.
So now you're, good news is you draw off a lot of cash,
so you're building up that pot again.
How do you see, going forward, use of that cash?
R and D, M and A, maybe you could make some comments there
to the extent you can?
>> Yeah, and you know, we said the primary ways
we use cash, stock buybacks and M and A.
And that continues.
We did the special one-time dividend,
which helped Dell go public.
Everybody's happy.
The market's responded super positively
on both the Dell side.
They're up, what, 40% since they go public.
VMware up almost 50% this year.
Just tremendous.
>> Tremendous, $80 billion value now, awesome.
>> Yeah, just tremendous.
And, right then, we said going forward,
it's business as usual for us.
We're going to continue to do stock buybacks.
We're going to continue to do M and A's.
As you've said, we're good at this acquisitions stuff.
And part of that is, I call it,
imagine you're a hot startup company.
And you say, do I want to be part of VMware?
And we try to answer these questions.
Do we have vision alignment?
>> (laughs)
>> Second is, can we accelerate your vision?
Because most startups, you know, I mean,
you talk about unicorns and so on like that.
But what really motivates them is their vision.
And if they believe their vision
is going to be accelerated as part of VMware,
so they're on this and we're going to turn 'em to that,
aw man, they get excited.
Do we have a cultural fit?
I mean, with every CEO of our acquisitions, and HR does,
we really, are they going to fit our team?
Because you know, cultural issues,
you can't butt your heads day and night.
Life's too short.
>> Certainly VMware, you guys are (laughs)
that culture's very hardcore.
Work hard, play hard.
(laughter)
>> Yeah, and you know, it has to be this deep drive
for technical innovation, right?
The technical due diligence that we do with our startups.
Right?
It's sort of like, you know, this is like a PhD exam
for these, I mean, they really got to know their stuff.
>> Yeah, so people don't fit in the culture at VMware,
and there--
>> And we've said no to a number of potential acquisitions
over cultural issues as well,
if they're just not going to fit.
And hey, we're not going to be perfect,
but the fact that we can bring these companies in,
accelerate their vision,
give 'em a culture that they're excited about.
You know, we have maybe 90-ish% success rate.
The industry average is below 50%
>> Yeah, fantastic track record.
I mean--
>> And that just gives us the ability
to do organic and inorganic innovation,
which to me is like, a potent recipe.
>> And you got the radio conference coming up.
What will your talk, theCUBE will be there.
Pat, you've created great shareholder value.
You turned those headwinds into tailwinds,
and we were watchin' the whole time.
It's been great to watch.
And what's next?
You have your VMware tattoo still on from VMworld?
(laughter)
Like you have a jail tattoo?
>> No, I'll tell you
>> Cute tattoo. >> a little inside,
I'll tell you a little inside story.
My wife, you know, after the VMworld keynote
with the tattoo on,
we were leavin' on vacation two weeks later.
And all she said to me after the keynote was
what's that tattoo thing, it better be gone
by the time we leave for vacation.
(laughter)
It's like, there was no,
honey, that was a great keynote today,
it's like, that better be gone! (laughs)
>> Nothin's better than watchin' that video
and that CUBE sticker we had on your hand.
Pat, great to see you, as always.
Great commentary, great analysis.
Congratulations on all the success with VMware.
Again, the transformation's just getting started.
We're seeing a lot more good things for you guys as well.
>> Yeah, and you know,
this has been a great week in some ways.
I sort of joked this morning on-stage that,
it almost felt like VMworld.
We talked about VMware technologies
and that Dell partnership accelerating so well.
>> It's not AMCWorld, it's DellWorld now,
it's a whole new vibe.
>> (laughs)
And you know, with that, you know,
I just really believe in the superpowers that I talk about,
we're just getting started.
So we're going to be doing this a long time together.
>> What's on your plate in front of you now?
You got VMworld coming up in a few months.
Priorities, objectives, what's on your plate?
>> Well, I have to leave some of the secrets
for what we're cookin' up for VMworld this year.
But some of these steps clearly,
in the developer container space,
super important for us to really make some progress there.
Obviously, we'll have some
incremental cloud announcements as well.
>> ContainerWare rhymes with VMware. (laughs)
>> Yes, that's very good!
We have an advertisement on that coming out,
so a new ad.
But it really is, I think, that topic area's one that,
how can we really solve that for customers
that really can deploy at scale
containerized environments for an enterprise workload.
So, excited about that area.
And you know, maybe just a few deliverables
from what we announced this week.
>> Alright, take your CEO of VMware hat off,
put your CUBE analyst hat on.
What's the most important story here
at Dell Technologies World, if you were a commentator?
You can't say VMware 'cause that's biased,
but you got to be objective.
You can say VMware if an objective.
What's the most important storyline
here as a backdrop for Dell Technology Worlds,
what's the real net net to customers?
>> Well you know, I think, and I'll say,
as exciting as the Microsoft announcements were,
I think the most important thing
was VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, on-prem.
Because to me, you know, the fact, I go to CIOs,
and I've done this probably five times
since the keynote finished on Monday.
And I say, how many of you have fully updated your hardware,
your firmware, your operating systems,
your networking stack, your compute stack,
your management on the latest releases,
all of them patched, upgraded appropriately
for your environment?
>> And they say, their eyes roll. (laughs)
>> And the answer is none.
Not some, none.
I have customers that are askin' me
to extend support for vSphere 4.5.
It's like, what, that's been EOL'ed for a year and a half,
what are you talking about, right?!
But the reality is that most people go to the cloud,
public cloud,
not because it's more cost-effective
or because it's better, it's because it's easier.
So what we've really said
is we can make easy in the private cloud
and truly deliver that hybrid cloud experience.
And I think the customers really experience
the TCO benefits, the acceleration,
the reductions in their operational environments,
the personnel associated with it,
the security benefits of being always patched,
upgraded the most release.
You know, now you're talkin' about
attacking that other $1 trillion of operational costs
that they're bearing in the personnel and so on.
To me, that is like,
so powerful if we really get that engine going.
>> And the simplicity that comes out of that, is just--
>> You know, and again, the demo that we showed.
That was the VMware Cloud on AWS
being able to demonstrate, now,
a complete picture into the on-premise environment.
That's powerful.
>> Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware.
I know he's got to go.
Thanks for your generous time,
I know you're really busy.
Again, Pat Gelsinger. >> Love you guys, thank you.
>> Thanks, Pat. >> Love you too.
Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware,
creating a lot of shareholder values,
got a lot of tailwinds at their back.
VMworld's coming up, theCUBE, of course,
will be there with two sets.
As usual, theCUBE cannons, two sets here,
firing cannonballs of content here at Dell Technology World.
I'm Jeff Furrier with Dave Vellante, stay with us for more
after this short break.
(electronic music)