 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware Radio 2019, brought to you by VMware. Welcome to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware Radio 2019, Lisa Martin with John Furrier in San Francisco, talking all sorts of innovation and this innovation long history culture at VMware. Welcome back to theCUBE, Mornay Van Der Waal, VP of R&D in the Explorer Group. Mornay, thank you for joining John and me on theCUBE today. Thank you for having me. So I got to start with Explorer Group, super cool name. Yeah. What is that within R&D? So the origins of the Explorer Group, I've had many roles at VMware and I've been fortunate enough to do a little bit of everything, technical marketing, product development, business development. One of the big things I did before the Explorer Group was created was actually Eva Rale. I was the founder of that, pitched that idea, Regue and Ray and Pat were very supportive. We took that to market, took it to 2.0, handed that off to Dell EMC, the rest is history, right? And then it was, what's next? So Ray, let me look at some special projects, go and look at IoT, go and look at telemetry and did some audits for them and he said, all right, why don't you look at all our innovation programs? Because beyond radio, we actually have, there's four other programs and everyone always, radio gets a lot of airtime and press but it's really the collective. It's the power of those other four programs that support radio that allow us to take an idea from inception to an impactful outcome. So hence the name of the Explorer Group. We're going out there exploring for new ideas, new technologies, what's happening in the market. So what about the R&D management style? You mentioned you got all of these and Radio's one kind of a celebration that's kind of the best of the best come together with papers and submissions, kind of a symposium meets kind of a success event for all the top engineers. There's more as you mentioned. How does all of it work? Because in this modern era of distributed teams, decentralization, decisions around business, decisions on allocating to the portfolio, what gets invested, money, spend, how do you organize? Give a quick minute to explain how R&D is structured. So obviously we have the BU structure, well there's PCS, Rugu and Rajiv head that up and then we've got the Octo organization which Radio Ferrell heads up and the business units are innovating every day to get products out the door, right? And that's something that we've got to be mindful of because I mean that's ultimately what's allowing us to get products into the hands of our customers, solving tough problems. But then in addition to that, we want to give our engineers an avenue to go and explore and, you know, tinker on something that's maybe related to the day job or completely off unrelated to the day job. The other thing that's important is we also want to give because we're such a global R&D, you know, our setup globally, we want to give teams the opportunity to work together, collaborate together, get that diversity of thought going. And so a lot of times, if we do like a hackathon which we call a borathon, we actually give bonus points of teams pulled from outside of their business unit. So you've got an idea, well, let's make it a diverse idea in terms of thought and perspective. Bring in, if you're from the storage business unit, bring in folks from the network business, you know, bring in folks from the cloud business, you know, maybe you've partnered with some folks that are in IT, you know. It's very, you know, sometimes engineers will go, it's just R&D that's innovating, but in reality, there's great innovation coming out of our IT department. There's great innovation coming out of our global support organization. SCs that are on the front line, sometimes are seeing the customers' pain points first hand and then they bring that back and some of that makes it into the product. How much of R&D has applied R&D which is kind of business unit aligned or somewhat aligned versus the wacky crazy ideas go solve a big, hairy problem that's out there that's not kind of related to the current product sets. That's tough to put an actual number on it. Oh, ballpark, I mean. But if I had to say like, if I had to just think about budgets on that, it's probably 10 to 15% is the wacky stuff that's, you know, not tied to a roadmap. That's why we call it off-road innovation and the five programs that my Explorer group ultimately leads, it's all about driving that off-road innovation and eventually you want to find an on-ramp to a roadmap, that's aligned to a business unit or a new emerging technology. How does someone come up with an idea and say, hey, you know, I want to do this. They submit like a form, is there a proposal? Who approves it? I mean, do you get involved? How does that process work? So that's a good question. It really depends on the engineer, right? You take someone who's just a new college grad straight out of college. That's why we have these five programs because some of these folks, they've got a good idea but they don't really know how to frame it, pitch it. And so if you've got a good idea and let's say this is your first rodeo, so to speak, we have a program called Tech Talks where it allows you to actually go and pitch your idea, get some feedback. And that's sometimes where you get the best feedback because you go and present your idea and somebody will come back and say, well, you know, have you met Johnny and Sue over there in this group? They're actually working on something similar. You should go and talk to them. Maybe you guys can bring your ideas together. Folks that are more seasoned, longer tenure, sometimes they just come up and I'm going to pitch an idea to X-Labs. And for X-Labs, for example, that's an internal incubator. There is like a submissions process. We want to obviously make sure that, you know, your ideas, timing in the market's correct. We've got limited funding there. So we want to make sure we're really investing on the right, you know, type of ideas. But if you, you don't want to go and pitch your idea and get feedback, go into a borathon, turn an idea into a little prototype. And we see a lot of that happening and some of the greatest ideas are coming from our borathons, you know, and it's also about tracking the journey. So we have radio here today. I've mentioned X-Labs, Tech Talks. We have another program called Flings. Some of our engineers are shipping product and they've got an idea to augment the product. They put it out as a fling and our customers and the ecosystem download these and it augments the product and then we get great feedback and then that makes it back into the product roadmap. So there's a lot of different ways to do it and radio, the process for radios, there's a lot of rigor in it. It's like, it's run as a research program. It's a call for papers, right? Call for papers, it's, you know, there's a strict format. It's got to be, you know, this many pages. If you go over by one line, you sort of disqualified, so to speak. And then once you've got those papers, like this year we had 560 papers be submitted. Out of those 560, 31 made it onto main stage and another 61 made it as posters, as you can see in the room we're sitting in. I have an idea. Machine learning should vet all those papers. I mean, that's- Funny you say that. We actually have one of our engineers, Josh Simons, is actually using machine learning to go back in time and look at all the submissions. So idea harvesting is something we're paying a lot of attention to because you submit an idea, the market may not be right for it or reality is I just don't have a budget to fund it if it's an X-Lab. It's like a Google search for you're kind of indexing all the- Internally. And sometimes there's a great idea here. You merge that with another idea from another group or another geo and then you can actually- Well I think- Because timing is critical. Most stuff can be early and just incubation, gestation period for that tech or concepts could be in play because it computed other new things, right? Correct. And do you actually have the time, you're an engineer working on a release, the priority is getting that release out the door, right? So put the idea on the back burner, come off the release and then get a couple of colleagues together and maybe there's a borathon being held and you go and move that idea forward that way or it's time for radio submissions, get a couple of colleagues together and submit a radio paper. So we want to have different platforms for our engineers to submit ideas outside of their day job. And it sounds like the different programs that you're talking about, Flings, X-Lab, Borathon, Radio, what it sounds like, there isn't necessarily a hierarchy that ideas have to go through. It really depends on the teams that have the ideas that are collaborating and they can put them forward to any of these programs. And one might get, say, rejected for radio but might be great for a Borathon or a Flings. So they've got options there and there's multiple committees I imagine is that spearheaded out of Ray's Octo Group that's helping to make the selections. Tell us a little bit about that process. Sure, so that's a great point, right? To get an idea out the door, you don't always have to take the same pathway. And so one thing we started tracking was these innovation journeys that will take different pathways. We just published an impact report on innovation for FY19 and we've got the VSAN story in there, right? It was an idea, a group of engineers had an idea back in 2009 and they worked on their idea a little bit. It first made to radio in 2011 and then they came back in 2013 and sort of the rest is history. You know, VSAN launched in 2014. We had a press release this week for Carbon Avoidance Meter. It was an idea that actually started as a calculator many years ago, was used and then sort of died on the vine, so to speak. One of our SES said, you know, this is a good idea, I want to evolve this a little bit further. Came and pitched an XLABS idea and we said, all right, we're going to fund this as an XLABS light. Three to six months project, limited funding, work on one objective, you're still doing your day job. Move the project forward a little bit, then Nicolera cut our sustainability VP got involved, wanted to move the idea a little bit further along. Came back for another round of funding through an XLABS light and then GSS with their Skyline platform picked it up and that's going to be integrated in the coming months into Skyline and we're going to be able to give our customers a carbon sort of readout of their data center and then they'll be able to map that and get a bigger picture because obviously it's not just the servers that are virtualized, there's cooling in the data center plants and all these other factors that you got to take into account when you want to look at your carbon footprint for your facility. So we have lots of examples of how these innovation pathways take different turns and sometimes it's TMA starting with an idea, team B joins in and then there's this convergence at a particular point and then it goes nowhere for a couple of months and then a business unit picks it up. One of the things that's come out Pat Gelser mentioned that a theme outside of the normal product stuff is how people do work. It's been some actual R&D around because you guys have a lot of distributed decentralized operations in R&D because it's global nature. How should companies and R&D be run when the reality is that developers could be anywhere. They could be at a coffee shop, they could be overseas, it could be in any geography. How do you create an environment where you have that kind of innovation? Can you just share some of the best practices that you guys have found? I'm not sure if there's best practices per se but to make sure that the programs are open and inclusive to everybody on the planet. So I'll give you some stats. For example, when radio started in the early days, we were founded in Palo Alto. It was a very Palo Alto centric company and for the first few years, if you looked at the percentage of attendees, it was probably over 75% were coming from Palo Alto. We've now over the years shifted that to where Palo Alto probably represents about 44%. 16% is the rest of North America and then the balance is from across the globe and so that shift has been deliberate. Obviously that impacts the budget a little bit but our programs like a Borathon, you can hack from anywhere. We've got a lot of folks that are remote office workers using collaborative tools. They can be part of a team if the Borathon's happening in China. It doesn't stop somebody in Palo Alto or in Israel or in Bulgaria participating and that's the beautiful nature of being global. If you think about how products get out of the door, sometimes you've got teams and you are literally following the sun and you're doing handoff from team A to B to C but at the end of the day you're delivering one product and so that's just part of our culture. I mean everybody's open to that. We don't say we can't work with those guys because they're in that geo location. It's pretty open. This is also really an essential driver and I think I saw last year's radio there were participants from 25 plus countries but this is an essential, not only as VMware global company but many of your customers are as well and they have very similar operating models so that thought diversity to be able to build that into the R&D process is critical. Absolutely and also think about when you go into Europe, smaller borders, countries, you deploy technology differently and so you want to have that diversity and thought as well because you don't just want to be thinking, all right, we're going to deploy a disaster recovery product in North America where I can fell over from East Coast to West Coast. You go to Europe and typically you're failing over from side A to side B and they're literally three or four miles apart and so just having that perspective as well is very important and we see that when we release certain products, you'll get better uptake in a certain geo and then why is it stalling over here? Well, sometimes it's cultural, right? How do you deploy that technology? Just because it works in the US doesn't mean it's going to work in Europe or in APJ. How is your team involved in the commercialization? You mentioned the sand and the history of that but I'm just wondering, looking at it from an investment standpoint deciding which projects to invest in and then there's also the, if they're ready to go to market, the balance of how much do we need to invest in sales and marketing to be able to get this great idea because if we can't sell it, market it and sell it, then there's obviously no point. So what's that balance like within your organization about how do we commercialize this effectively at scale? So that is ultimately not the responsibility of my group. We'll incubate ideas like, for example, through an XLABS project and sometimes we'll get to a point and we'll work, collaborate with the business unit and we'll say, right, we feel this project's probably a 24 month project if it's an XLABS full. So these folks are truly giving up their day job. But at the end of the day, you want to have an exit and when we say exit, what does that exit mean? Is it an exit into a business unit? Are you exiting the XLABS project because we're now out of funding? Think about a VC, I'm going to fund you to a particular point if there is no market traction. We may sunset the project. And so our goal is to get these ideas, select which ones we want to invest in and then find a sort of off-ramp into a business unit. And sometimes there'll be an off-ramp into a business unit and the project goes on for a couple of months and then we make a decision, right? And it's not a personal decision. It's like, well, we funded that as an XLABS. We're now going to shut it down because we're going to go make an acquisition in this space. And with the talent that's going to come on board, the talent that was working on this XLABS project, we can push the agenda forward. A lot of action going on, so you can move people around. Exactly. Kind of like the cloud elastic resource, yeah. So, and then some of these things, because XLABS is only a two-year-old, we haven't had things exit yet that are running within a business unit where you're seeing this material impact from a revenue point of view. So that's why tracking the journeys is very important. And stay tuned, maybe in about three or four years we have this similar interview and I'll be able to say, yeah, that started as an XLABS and now it's three years into the market and look at the run rate. So this 31, last question for you, this 31 projects that were presented on main stages, are there any that you can kind of see early on? Ooh, those top five, anything that really kind of sticks that you don't have to explain it in detail, but I'm just curious, can you see some of that opportunity in advance? Absolutely, there's been some great papers up on main stage and covering things on the networking side. There's a lot of innovation going in on the storage side. If you think about data, right, the explosion of data because of edge computing, how are you going to manage that data? How are you going to make informed decisions on that data? How can you manipulate that data? What are you going to have to do from a dedupe point of view or a replication point of view because you want to get that to many locations quickly? So I saw some really good papers on data, orchestration, manipulation, get it out to many places. You can take an informed decision. I saw great, there was a great paper on, you want to go and put something in AWS. There's a bull that you get at the end of the month, right? Sometimes those bulls can be a little bit frightening, right? What can you do to, you make sure that you manage those bulls correctly? And sometimes the innovation has got nothing to do with the product per se, but it has to do with how we're going to develop. So we have some innovation on the floor here where an engineer has looked at a different way of basically creating an application. And so there's a ton of these ideas. So after radio, it doesn't stop there. Now the idea of harvesting starts, right? So yes, there were 31 papers that made it on to main stage, 61 that are posters here. During that review process, and you asked that question earlier and I apologize, I didn't answer it. You know, when we look at the papers, there's a team of over 100 folks from across the globe that are reviewing these papers. During that review process, they'll flag things like, this is not going to make it on to main stage, but the idea here is very novel. We should send this off to our IP team. You know, so this year at radio, there were 250 papers that were flagged for further follow-up with our IP team. So do we go and then file it? And IDF and invention disclosure form? Do those then become patents? You know, so if we look at the data last year, it was 210, out of those 210, 74 patents were filed. So there's a lot of work that now will happen post-radio. Some of these papers come in, they don't make it on to main stage, they might become a poster, but at the same time, they're getting flagged for a business unit. So from last year, there were 39 ideas that were submitted that are now being mapped to roadmap across the BUs. Some of these papers are great for academic research programs. So David Tenenhouse's research group will take these papers and then, you know, evolve them a little bit more and then go and present them at academic conferences around the world. So there's a lot of like, the what's next aspect of radio has become a really big deal for us. The potential is massive. Well, Mornay, thank you so much for joining John and me and we've got to follow XLabs. It's just a lot of really, really innovative things that are so collaborative coming forward. We thank you for your time. Thank you. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE exclusive coverage of VMware Radio 2019 from San Francisco. Thanks for watching.