>> Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE!
Covering VMworld 2018, brought to you
by VMware and its ecosystem partners.
>> Hello everyone, welcome back,
this is theCUBE's live coverage here
at VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas, I'm John Furrier,
your host, with Dave Vellante my co-host,
our next guest, CUBE alumni, special guest,
Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMWare, always comes
on every year to share, and talk about the keynote,
talk about the news, all the great stuff.
VMWare, great, per it's financial performance,
great product portfolio, great R&D,
pumping on all cylinders, congratulations,
welcome to theCUBE, great to see you.
>> Thank you.
Always great to see you guys,
thanks John, thanks Dave, y'know.
>> Y'know, it's fun, this is our ninth year doing VMWorld,
you've been as the president of EMC
and six years ago CEO of VMWare.
We've been there, we've been following your journey.
>> Hey, y'know, we've been on this
path together, so it's been good.
>> And, y'know, we've talked candidly around
what was going on with Cloud at the time,
your vision, getting sorted in.
You made some real quick, decisive,
decisions on Cloud, okay, Andy Jassy comes on stage,
you're personally involved with Andy on the
Amazon announcement, which is,
I think people don't know how big that's going to be.
But VMware and Amazon are seriously deep in a partnership.
>> Yeah, absolutely.
>> This is a big deal, this feels like a little
Windtell kind of easy, cynergies across the board.
(Pat laughs)
>> Well, you know, in some ways,
we'll say number one in public coming together
with number one in private, that's a big deal.
Yesterday's announcement of RDS on premise
to me, sort of finishes the strategic
picture that we were trying to paint,
where it really is a hybrid world.
Where we're taking workloads, and giving people the access
to this phenomenal, rapidly-growing public Cloud, but
we're also demonstrating that we can seamlessly connect
it to the private Cloud and now
we're bringing services back from the public Cloud
onto the private and your own data centers.
And that is so profound because now customers can say,
Oh I like the RDSAPI's, I like the RDS management model.
I can now put the data wherever I
need it for my business purposes.
That hybrid, bi-directional highway is something we're
uniquely building with Amazon.
And, hey, we're obviously working with other
Cloud providers, but they are our preferred
partner and we're pretty thrilled.
>> Now we'll be talking about last
year and what entailing that was.
The clarity that allowed customers now to say,
okay now I get the Cloud strategy,
'cause it wasn't clear before and boom, double down.
>> Yeah, it's just been absolutely great.
Customers get it now, and obviously
seeing Andy here again this year,
you've got a number of customers sort of
dipping their toes in the water, you know.
Now it's sort of like, okay, I'm ready to go.
When we laid the one and a half year road map of
availability zones, everybody sort of looking at that.
I had a couple of customers saying, hey,
you know I would really like that in Q1 rather than Q2.
It sort of like okay, let's just sign
the deal, we'll figure it out.
>> Gov Cloud, we saw that in June.
>> Yeah, in the public sector.
>> Talk about Andy, because we got to
know Andy over the years as well.
A great executive, both you guys are great
leaders of your team, both great managers.
You're kind of both no-nonsense kind of
executives, you get stuff done.
If this block is in the way, you kind of
remove them, you do the right thing.
Andy's committed, he's committed to this, you're committed,
this in for the, you're in it to win it,
that kind of loyalty plus he's
also customer-driven, heavily Amazon.
You guys are, too, this deal is not just
Amazon trying to do hybrid, it's customers.
Can you share some inside baseball around the
kind of customer demand around Cloud on premise
with VM, with specifically Amazon website.
This is new for Amazon, they've never done this.
>> Yeah.
>> They've never done this kind of of deal.
>> It really is unique in that way, and because
it was unique we went into it kind of
trepidously, How's this going to work?"
We committed ourselves, we do quarterly
business reviews with Andy and I.
You know, hey a lot of little action items,
they get finished the week before the Andy-Pat meeting.
(laughs)
>> You know, there we are, every quarter,
coming together and really building the teamwork
down the teams, right, as well, down the organizations
into the field, and just finding all sorts of you know.
We're super excited about the RDS announcement,
but hey, we have a pipeline of projects behind that.
>> We're reporting that customers want this.
>> Oh, Absolutely.
>> This is a customer, not a kind of like you guys want to
take over the Cloud, this is a customer-driven thing.
>> Absolutely, Amazon don't do anything, I mean nothing,
unless they believe there is meaningful customer demand.
They are extraordinarily customer-focused in that respect,
you know I think there's something we can all learn
from their myopic focus on that aspect.
They're engaging with customers, building things
that customers like and the response obviously
from the RDS announcement was really quite overwhelming.
>> So, we've been asking people all week,
and I'll ask for your commentary.
The conventional wisdom on that deal is it was a one-way
trip to the Hotel Cloud-ifornia and
it's become boon for the data center.
Why the misconceptions, why are you confident that
it continues to be a boon for both companies?
>> Yeah, hey, and we got to go prove it.
At the end of the day, we have to go prove it.
The analysts were sort of viewing it,
there's this big sucking sound in the
public Cloud where everything congregates.
Point one, and three years ago, that was the prevailing
wisdom, right, that that was going to be the case.
Now, everybody, like I had the big CIO who basically said,
hey, I've got 200 apps, I tried to move them to
the public Cloud, I got two done.
I can build new things there, but this moving was
really hard until we had the VMC service.
So this ability to move things to the Cloud
and from the Cloud, I call it the three laws.
The laws of physics, the laws of
economics, and the laws of the land.
The laws of physics, hey if I need 500 millisecond
round-trip through the Cloud and
the robotic arm needs a decision
in 200 milliseconds, eh, you know, physics.
Economics, I'm not going send
every surveillance picture of
the cat to the Cloud, bandwidth still costs, right?
Then laws of the land, right, where people say,
governance issues, GDPR, other things.
Because of that, we see this hybrid world, in particularly
as Edge and IOT becomes more prominent we fully expect
that there's going to be more of that, not less.
As I showed in my keynote last year, this pendulum of
centralization and decentralization has been
swinging through the industry for 40 years.
And we don't see that stopping and Edge will be a
force of more data, and computers pushing to the Edge, and
that's obviously part of our keynote, as well.
>> I wanted to get in a comment about how
you talk about bridging technology gaps, or
>> Yeah.
>> Or segments with that VMware.
Before I want to just point out that you're wearing a
VMware tattoo for the folks who can see it.
Pat is making all his employees have a VMware tattoo.
(laughs)
Yeah we got a tattoo machine, yeah, we're in Vegas, so.
>> Ought to order some more CUBE stickers.
What happens in Vegas stays on your arm, remember that.
(laughing)
You ought to keep the tattoos up, it's funny and clever.
Let's get back to the keynote.
You said a couple things I want to get your reaction to.
One, the bridging of technology successfully
has been a transformational gift that VMWare has had
with good technologists and good engineers.
So I want you to talk about that.
Also, you had a quote around the old adage of
the network is the computer, that's old,
the new adage is the application
is a network, I think is what you said.
>> Precisely.
>> Tell about this bridging and why that quote,
that was a really good quote, I want to expand on that.
>> Clearly, we think about the history of VMware and
it started with this idea of HP, Dell, IBM, et cetera and
all of a sudden it became VMWare
with different hardware underneath it.
We bridged across those hardware islands.
Those hardware islands, when they started, weren't bad.
Extraordinary innovation but all of sudden customers want
to start using them together and VMware bridged that gap.
We talked about the device guy, and BYOD, and
the iPhone showing up and all of a sudden
IT wasn't ready to manage it, but customers wanted it.
So we see Windows devices, Macs, and IOS, and
Google, and Chromes and so on.
How do you bridge it, VMware is doing that.
We saw many of the networks, boy,
you know what my protocols are about.
Okay, Again, we're bridging across that, and
that's clearly where NXS is uniquely playing.
So this idea of bridging across these elements,
right, is deep in our heritage.
Right, we do it in an ecosystem-friendly hardware
independent now, Cloud-independent way, right.
Where we're now saying in the Cloud health acquisition,
we're going to bridge across these worlds and
make them easier for our customers to
consume them, wherever they may be.
These are powerful innovations, capabilities that are
emerging, but customers say, oh you know,
where is that workload running?
Increasingly, in the future, I'm going to say,
Oh VMware is running it for me, and not actually say,
oh where did you run that VMWare?
Because we are going to meet their policies,
we're going to meet their business needs.
>> And that bridges what, the Cloud?
The current bridge is what, the Cloud, or ?
>> Oh yeah, absolutely.
Right, but the Cloud will now be my private data centers
as well as different public resources.
I think one of the next big challenges that we'll have to
lean into more aggressively is the data challenge.
Hmmm, where's my data?
In a Cloud world, in a SAAS world, I want to be able
to use my data for different purposes, I don't
want to necessarily locked in a particular
SAAS application when I built up an S3 bucket.
Maybe I want to run some of my private analytics on that.
Oh, the laws changed and I now need to bring that
back on premise, and you know...
>> Is it going to cost anything?
Yeah, and you know, bridging across those worlds.
It's both an application statement, a networking
statement, and a data center.
>> So application is a network?
>> Yes.
>> I think if it were a network, not the network.
>> Yes.
>> What do you mean by that?
>> I gave you an example, a heads-up display in a
construction hat, as you're wearing a hard hat.
This AR-VR application running in my display for my
hardhat and I'm a factory worker now, right,
I'm getting cool new x-ray vision
into the machine of what's going on.
I'm able to look through walls at what's going on.
Wow, that's pretty cool, and I'm getting real-time safety
information of what's going...
oh, that's incredible.
Now think about the application behind that.
I'm accessing 30 year old building plan databases,
I'm accessing systems of record, system designs that are
coming from my equipment suppliers and cool new
container-ized AR-VR applications.
That's my application, when I
think about it in that environment.
And what a complex network of different services, legacy
applications, modern, new, microservice,
>> Data sources, those kind of things.
>> All of those things are brought together
into my application, and in that sense,
the application is a network of these
different services, data sources, et cetera.
We believe in that, bridging across silos isn't
important, its essential to do that because,
as you say, security models across that.
When that application isn't performing like
I expect it to, how do I go, even debug it?
Because now, a flag went off, saying the hardhat AR
application is not performing well and I have upsets.
You know, manufacturing people on the floor not being
able to get real-time data:
I got to go debug that.
You know, what's not working right?
It's this network that needs to be able
to be analyzed, any metrics across all of those.
I need security models, you know, the ability to
essentially load-balance across
a complex network of services.
That's the world we're headed to and we think we have
some pretty good opportunities to help customers get there.
>> So, Pat, explain how technically does the platform
of VMWare change and evolve to meet those needs?
Is it sort of embracing those new services or is it
rewriting at the core, can you explain that?
>> Yeah, it's some of both, I'll give two examples of that:
one is that we're embracing the Kubernetes layer.
Right?
That's what you heard us say.
I'm going to make Kubernetes a new
dial-tone for the VMWare layer.
I didn't create Kubernetes, it's part of open-source
community, but I tell you what, we are going to help evolve it,
standardize it, make it part of that infrastructure.
So that Kubernetes dial-tone, right,
(laughs)
Hopefully, everybody is old enough to
understand what that means, right?
You know, boom, it is always there and
we're going to make sure it's always there.
So I'll say in some cases we're embracing new industry
innovations and that one happens to be CN-CF, the Cloud,
native computing foundation in that community, so we're
participating, we're contributing.
In other cases, we got to go rewrite things.
You know, NXS, the current version of NXS was primarily
bound to V-sphere and customers have increasingly said,
oh I need to make NXS much bigger then we ever conceived
for the first NXS, and I need it to work on all these
other environments, including non-V sphere.
So that's why we did what we called NXS-T, which is
a fundamental re-architecture of NXS.
There's probably three or four lines of code that we
re-used, but that's about it.
(laughing)
I mean it is a major architectural redo because now we're
saying I need to scale this, essentially, across the planet.
I need it to work in VMWare and non-VMWare environments.
I need it to be native in multiple public Clouds and
I need to stretch it into the container level.
That was a big re-architecture project that we undertook.
In some cases it will be both, and like in Cloud health,
it will be things inorganically go acquire and then
figure out how to meld them into the
infrastructure that we build and offer.
>> So, do you, as the CEO and a technologist,
you have a very interesting organizational
ownership, governing structure.
Do you ever feel constrained writing
an 11 billion dollar dividend,
do you ever feel constrained in terms of your ability
to fund the R and D necessary to do some of those things?
>> No.
>> Grayson said the same thing off
camera, I'm asking you on-camera.
>> Generally, no.
Am I constrained in how much RND I can do?
Well, hey, I've got a budget, we build a PNL, we communicate
it to the street and every day possible,
I'm pushing to grow the business faster so I can shove
more dollars into one of two places.
More dollars into RND or more dollars
into sales and customer facing.
If Robin Matlock is here, I keep giving her
the table scraps at the end of those things.
Build products that are innovative,
radical, and break through.
Sell products and support our customers using them.
That's the two things we're ...
>> That's the golden rule.
>> And, by the way, you made some MNA, you've got
Cloud health, which is a good thing.
That was a vertical focus in health care.
>> Yeah, and not just healthcare.
Cloud health is a multi-Cloud management platform.
They've built their initial focus primarily in cost
management of multiple Clouds, but, you know, we're going
to build that platform out for every aspect of
compliance management, performance management, et cetera.
>> Multi-Cloud play, Boston-based.
>> So, final question for you:
as you look at NXS,
it's becoming kind of that feels like a TCPIP moment.
Okay, we thought you Andy gotcha to sign a baptism.
He was very complimentary of NXS.
I asked him what TCPIP did to connecting, inter-networking,
creating, and boom, the OSA model stopped at TCPNIP,
that created a lot of opportunities and,
welp, that's where we are today.
Is there a disruptive enable as powerful as TCPIP that
you see coming, and is that an NXS mindset?
What's your vision on this, because this is what the
Cloud needed, it needs interoperability,
it needs to go to a level to create goodness
in the ecosystem, wealth creation for entrepreneurs.
This is the new era, where is that disruptive enabler?
>> Well, a couple of comments, and one is:
if Andy says it, it's right.
(laughs)
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah, you remember, this is the one Rembrandt
of systems design for the last 30 years.
Andy is that profound in his contributions to the industry.
In terms of technical leadership, visionary
leadership, he's very high on my list of
seminal figures of Silicone Valley.
At the systems level, it's just hard to get better than
Andy, so you know, he honored you by coming on theCUBE.
He honored us by being here at VMworld.
>> He is complimentary of NXS in his position in the
marketplace as a leader, he's very candid about that.
>> Now with NXS we really are, I think, in this moment where
you're saying okay, the old model of
networking simply doesn't work.
It must all be done from a software level.
This isn't just like putting a few APIs on top of my
hardware and saying it's now software-based,
it is conceiving a globally-distributed control plane
that allows you to essentially span multiple Clouds,
multiple data centers, multiple services anywhere on the
planet, totally consumable for services that run on top of
it, transforming every aspect of a layer four through seven
service, low balancing, fire wall it, all of those,
routing, all of those need to be reconceived in a totally
distributive fashion and underneath saying, we support a
very, very broad range of different hardware.
The hardware can never constrain what you do at that SDN
ladder, and that's the core of our
virtual Cloud network strategy.
Obviously, Velocloud, hot product.
ST WAN, branch transformation, pushing that
edge of the network out in a fully
Cloud-based way, very excited about that capability.
>> We know you're probably under a lot of
time pressures so we're going to let you go.
Five seconds, summarize VMWorld 2018,
what's this about, what's the vibe here in five seconds, go.
>> Five seconds?
>> Or 15, 20, 30, whatever you need, go.
(laughs)
Alright, take 10.
>> It is, the seminal moment where the industry
is seeing the value of the multi-Cloud era.
Right, and now we're giving them the tools to embrace it.
>> And two leaders have, on stage, Andy Jassy C of A WS, Pat
Gelsinger, CEO of VMWare, are talking about multi-Cloud
validation from customers and strong technology teams in
business.
Congratulations on your success, okay.
>> Thank you.
(laughing)
>> Pat Gelsinger, we pay you for theCUBE sticker, we
get royalties on that.
Thank you so much, Pat Gelsinger
inside theCUBE, CEO of VM here, breaking it down, great
vibe here, VMworld 2018.
Stay tuned after this short break,
I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante we'll be right back.
(techno music)