(upbeat techno music)
>> Welcome to theCube's coverage of VMworld 2021.
I'm Lisa Martin.
Another Cube alum joining me on the program next,
Sanjay Uppal is here,
the SVP and GM of Service Provider
and Edge Business at VMware.
Sanjay, it's great to see you.
Thanks for coming back on the program.
>> Oh yeah. Thank you.
Thanks Lisa.
And thank you to theCube.
>> It's great that we're covering VMworld.
I can't wait til they're back in person.
This is another event that is virtual for obvious reasons.
But I wanted to dig into your role
and have you really kind of unpack that for us.
Your role is the senior vice president and general manager
of the Service Provider and Edge Business.
Talk to me about that.
>> Yeah, it's a bit of a mouthful,
but really what we're doing here is recognizing
that the world is shifting
and a lot of the workloads are moving to the edge.
So that's the edge part of my responsibility.
And the other part is the service providers.
Service provider of course,
is the name for facilities based telecom operators,
as they used to be called in the past,
but simply called service providers today.
So putting those two things together
because service provider, 5G and the edge all go together.
So I'm running that as a business for VMware.
>> Got it.
Let's get VMware's definition of the edge.
I always like to do that
because some companies have a slightly different spin on it.
What is it to VMware?
>> Yeah, so to VMware,
the edge is distributed digital infrastructure.
Digital infrastructure of course, is the software stack
that you need to run the applications on top,
and it's for running workloads.
Now, the important part here that we're defining
is that the workloads can be in
what's known as the underlay,
which you can think of as the infrastructure
that is needed to run 5G and fiber.
But the workloads can also be in the overlay,
which is where you find software defined RAN,
secure access service edge.
And the workloads can be at the edge application layer.
These are the new class of applications
that we'll talk about.
So it's for running workloads.
And the other important part of it is,
it's across a number of locations.
This is not just about
being in a few handful of data centers.
This is about being in hundreds of thousands,
sometimes millions of locations,
which has its own quirks in terms of
how that infrastructure should work.
And the important point is that the edge is placed close to
where the end points are either producing or consuming data.
So that's what the edge is, as we define it at VMware.
>> Got it.
Talk to me about the strategy and the vision
that VMware has for edge.
>> That's, you know,
we're at a very important inflection point in the industry,
as far as the edge is concerned.
And I just always link it back into what's happening,
as an example, in music.
So one of my favorite songs from Aerosmith is,
"Living on the Edge,"
and that's literally where we are right now.
We're living on the edge
and what Aerosmith says is,
"We're looking at the world in a different way
because things are changing all the way around."
Of course, I'm paraphrasing a little bit,
but our strategy at VMware
is to take this living at the edge,
which is happening across the board,
and to capture it into infrastructure that we're building,
come up with a common software stack
that will support workloads
that are running in the underlay,
in the overlay or at the application layer,
and support this entirely new class of applications
that are coming in.
And these applications,
to contrast it with what has been happening before,
these applications are being built for experiences.
And I'll dig into this in a little bit,
but really essentially VMware strategy
is to come up with that common software stack
that is going to be placed at all of these edge locations,
sometimes millions of them,
for different types of workloads,
but the commonality of the stack is important
because that is what the service providers
and the enterprises use to derive the benefits.
>> Being designed for experiences.
It's so interesting,
because that's what we expect in our personal lives,
in our business lives.
We want to have good experiences,
whether we're ordering something on Amazon
or we're trying to collaborate via Slack
or something like that.
Experience matters.
It sounds silly to say, but it's absolutely true.
Talk to me about some of the things,
the edge being core to customer's future in any industry.
>> Yeah. So, you know, from an industry standpoint,
we always used to talk about,
what are the features of your product
and what are the benefits for customers?
And then we started seeing an evolution from benefits
into, what are the outcomes that the customers want?
But now we are getting from outcomes to experiences.
And you take,
just an example of a retail chain that we're working with,
what they want to do is not just
simply sell a product to a customer, walks into the store.
They want that person to have an excellent experience.
And in order to get to that experience,
as an example of what would happen is,
this person walks into a store.
They recognize who that person is,
what they had purchased before,
they look at what are the likelihood
that they want to buy something today?
Do I have that thing in my inventory?
If I don't,
can I manufacture it with my third generation printer
that I have over here?
The 3D printer that is sitting in the back room.
And then, once that is produced in the next few minutes,
can they have an experienced in playing a game
with the sportsmen of their choice,
on this massive screen that's in there?
That's experience.
That's not just walking into a store,
buying a product and walking out.
Another experience would be, when you look at healthcare,
what's going on right now that when you have a symptom,
you go to your doctor to get checked out.
But what if your body tells you
that there's something that you need to get done?
So this entire new class of applications are coming in
with sensors that have artificial intelligence in them
that are metricating what is happening.
And these sensors with that intelligence
then get fed into the edge infrastructure,
because this is voluminous amount of information.
As you can imagine,
the amount of metrics that your body needs to track,
all this voluminous information needs to get correlated.
And then you may need to make an inference about it.
Again, that's an experience
because you're completely changing the nature of health
as this is going about.
So in every vertical industry,
we have these examples of experiences
and what this requires is computation,
networking and storage to be pushed all the way
into the edge.
It requires a network to get this done.
It requires connectivity.
And it requires, as I've spoken about before,
this common software stack that VMware is bringing.
>> So talk to me about what's being announced
and unveiled at VMworld.
>> So what we are announcing very simply is the VMware Edge.
And what that VMware Edge is,
it comprises three common software stacks
at different layers of the stack.
So the first thing that we're saying
is that we are announcing the VMware Edge compute stack.
So this is software that companies can use,
ISV's can use, to develop Edge native applications.
These are applications that are born at the edge.
They're not applications that are necessarily being
refactored from somewhere else.
And this is stack that is available
in very small form factors,
all the way to large form factors,
and it'S stack that's connected together.
As I mentioned before,
the numbers of locations are very important.
So we are packaging this,
we're making it available across the board next week.
This is the first part of the announcement.
The second part of the announcement is
the expansion of our secure access service edge offering.
And that expansion includes going from software defined RAN,
which was the first and highly successful service
to include secure access, cloud web security,
and then to follow that on in a multi-services approach
and add more services as we go along.
And the third piece is
to take our Telco cloud platform,
we are announcing that that platform is being co-opted
to now run at the edge.
Now, one very important development in that part,
is that we've had our ESXI product,
which is very successful in running in the data center,
we have an edge ready version for this product.
We've made a 10X improvement in the overhead
and latency of ESXI.
So now it can be deployed in edge locations
in very small form factors,
and it is absolutely equivalent to bare metal overhead.
So now when companies are looking at,
is there overhead associated with the ESXI hypervisor?
We're saying, no.
It's equivalent to bare metal.
And all the benefits that you get with deploying ESXI,
will now accrue to benefits that you would have at the edge.
>> Talk to me about how the events of the past 18 months,
we've seen massive acceleration in digital transformation.
We've seen, you mentioned the retailer,
the retailer is having to be able to massively shift
curbside delivery, e-commerce.
How have the events of the last 18 months
influenced or catalyzed VMware Edge?
>> Absolutely.
So if you take a step back
and think what has happened due to the pandemic,
all of us are working from locations that are not,
we're not going to some centralized location to our offices.
We're actually working from our home edges.
We are literally living at the edge
when we were working from home.
And also when you go to do curbside pickup,
you're making a decision right there.
You're going to where that edge location is
for that retail store.
So really to me,
what has happened with the pandemic,
is emphasized the need for moving computation
all the way to the edge.
Now you take one use case, work from home itself.
Work from home has gone up by,
in some cases, 5X to 8X compared to what it was before.
And we've seen the network come under tremendous strain
because of work from home.
We've seen that the user experience, if it's not good,
then of course your productivity gets hampered.
So work from home is one of those use cases
that has been focused on,
because of the pandemic,
and we've come up with the solution that will help people
when they're sitting in their home environment,
the kids can do homework, someone can be watching,
streaming movie,
but the business users still continues to function
with full productivity.
So it's really emphasizing the need for moving computation
all the way out to the edge.
>> Yeah.
The edge exploded in the last year and a half.
I'm going to now rethink, instead of working from home
or living at work,
living on the edge.
So thank you for giving me that idea.
That definitely changes how I feel
about this room right here.
Talk to me about some of the customers,
customer examples, customers in terms of their feedback,
as VMware has been developing this.
I know you're very much a customer centric organization,
but what were some of the directions on the influences
from the field?
>> I think, as far as customers go,
they're an integral part of our development process.
It's not like we develop a product
and then we go sell it to the customer.
What we do is,
we get the customer to be a part of that process.
We figured out what are the issues
that the customers are facing in their own business.
As an example,
when the pandemic hit,
in the healthcare space we had one acute care hospital
that came to us and said,
"well, we can't get enough of the telemedicine done
because the radiologists and all
are not able to come into the office."
Well, we came up with a solution
So that radiologist sitting at home can still look at
very high definition images
as they're talking to their patients.
Now, once we develop the first part of the solution,
we actually brought the customer in,
gave them a prototype.
And then I tell my team
that when the customer gives feedback,
it's like they're handing us a flashlight
and that flashlight illuminates the path ahead for us.
And so we follow that path that the customer has set
based on the technology that we've produced.
Our responsibility is to iterate on that technology
in a very fast cycle,
so that as we get the flashlights,
we illuminate the path
and that gets to building the product.
And then we get the product built
and then we have a happy, successful customer
with good outcomes and experiences.
And in the end, VMware has done something positive,
not just in terms of our business,
but for the world at large.
>> Right. I love that.
Handing the customer a flashlight.
Another one I'm going to steal from you, Sanjay.
Thank you.
You've given me two good ones today.
And also a different look at Aerosmith,
which I probably now won't be able to get
that song out of my head.
Some of the trends that we've seen,
trends over the last 18 months,
what are some of the things
that you think we've had a lot of acceleration,
but there's a lot of positivity that's come from that,
that I don't think gets enough coverage.
All of the capabilities that we now have.
If you take even just the work from home use case
that you mentioned,
that's going to be persisting for quite some time,
some amount of it's going to be permanent.
But what are some of the trends that you're seeing now
that you think are really going to help facilitate the edge
and the compute and the network
and customers being able to take advantage of that
even faster?
>> Yeah.
I think that one of the really important changes
that has come because of the pandemic
is giving customers choice.
And as a part of it,
VMware is really focused on multicloud.
So, the cloud has come in,
we had a movement of workloads from the private data center
into the public cloud,
but now what customers are saying is, we want choice.
We want to make sure that this infrastructure
is always available to us.
So we are focusing from a VMware standpoint on multicloud.
Now, what does that mean?
It means that it gives customers choice.
They can go to different cloud providers,
including the private data center
and run their applications on top.
And this, we think, is here to stay.
This is a trend that we think is as important as
what's happening in the future of work.
Because previously it used to be,
we used to think of work as a destination.
It's not.
It's a workspace right now.
People could essentially be working from anywhere.
And one of the things that we've learned in the pandemic
is that, that actually does happen.
Human beings, we are flexible enough
that we can accommodate to these changes that are coming in.
So the future of work is going to be distributed.
It's going to be workspaces and not workplaces.
And then multicloud and marrying those two things together
is what we are focusing on at VMware.
>> What are some of the tracks or sessions at VMware
where folks can go to learn more about
that use case in particular,
as well as the VMware Edge and what you're announcing?
>> Yeah, so we have some excellent tracks.
We have a track about, of course, the distributed edge.
We have a track about what's going on
with cross-cloud services that we have come up with.
We have tracks in terms of what's happening with networking
and security,
because security obviously goes hand in hand
with everything.
Zero trust is becoming fundamental
in everything that we do.
I was talking to one of my customers
who owns gas stations,
and he was saying, "Sanjay,
I have gas stations in places that I would never visit.
But there are people who would sit at these gas stations.
I still need for them to come into the network,
but I can't trust the devices that they're coming in on."
So these would be a few of the tracks that I would recommend
that people would go and watch.
>> Excellent. Yeah.
Speaking of zero trust
and just the massive changes in the threat landscape
in the last year and a half,
the things that we've seen with massive rise in ransomware
and DDoS attacks
and attacks like this becoming a when,
not if, kind of a scenario.
So everybody needed to ensure that they have,
they can trust the people
and the devices on the network.
Sanjay, thank you so much for joining me,
talking to us about VMware Edge.
You gave us some great analogies there
that I'm going to take forward with me.
And I look forward to seeing you,
hopefully next year at VMworld, in person.
Fingers crossed.
>> In-person would be awesome.
Thank you so much, Lisa.
And thank you to theCube.
>> Our pleasure.
Sunjay Uppal.
I'm Lisa Martin.
You're watching theCube's coverage of VMworld 2021.
(upbeat techno music)