 Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now here's your host, John Furrier. Hey, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas at the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in the hang space at VMworld 2016. I'm John Furrier with SiliconANGLES, our flagship program. The CUBE where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. This is our seventh year covering VMworld and every year it gets bigger and better of the CUBE and the guests and the content. And I'm here with the person who's made it happen from day one, Robin Matlock, who's the CMO of VMware. First of all, congratulations on a great event and thank you for supporting theCUBE for seven years. It's been fantastic and it gets better every year. Thanks to you. Well, I'm thrilled to be here and you know I'm a huge fan of theCUBE. You're an integral part of the program. So here we go again, John. We're ingesting all the data, we're analyzing it, we're providing great videos, a lot of volume. But one interesting thing I want to get your take on because you have ridden the VMworld bus for a very many long time. And it's changed and grown. And one of the conversations we've had all week is what I've been calling ecosystem 2.0. What is the ecosystem going to evolve into for VMware and VMworld? And it's been interesting. And so I want to get your take on it. And one of the things that it was striking was what Pat Gelsinger said to me yesterday in the CUBE interview was, VMware is not only not one product company anymore, it has grown to be a multiple set of products and technologies, which has created a diverse and growing community. So can you add some color to that? Because it's always been the community is very strong in VMworld and VMware. But it's evolving. It's not just like shifting and changing it in bad way. It's just growing and morphing. Can you comment on that? Yeah, I think it's a really interesting topic. It's a rich topic because as VMware's business is changing, first of all, our value about the community has never changed. I mean, we really value an ecosystem. Our customers wanted to expect that we work and play really well with the variety of technologies that are in their environments. But of course, as our business and portfolio has grown and expanded, the nature of the types of companies that are engaged in and around us shifts and changes too. And if it doesn't, then we're probably all going to have some issues down the road. I think it's a lot driven from customers. What do they want all of us vendors to do to work together so their life is easier? Yeah, and the other thing, David Floyd was the CTO of Wikibon, who's very technical comment that it's the best VMworld ever from a statement of direction standpoint is very clear that the data center role that VMware has and this inter-clouding, which we call, and Pat calls it cross-cloud, is a real rich area for innovation and growth. Oh, I think we're just on the cusp of the potential of that. So you heard us talk about the cross-cloud architecture and we broke that down into a few things like the VMware cloud foundation. That's essentially the software defined data center stack all with life cycle management that you can consume on-premise and off-premises, the IBM partnership, the opportunity for the VCloud Air network partners. I mean, there's just so many, the CISOs are involved in this. There's just really, it's almost like a whole economy that can integrate into this broader offering. Like I said, with all that in mind, how are you managing the logistics? Because it's pretty obvious that VMworld is back in Vegas, Moscone is pretty much under construction for the next few years. You're going to be here for a couple more years? Yes, we're here for a couple more years. And you're going to manage this growth in this community. What's, how do you do that? What's the key keys to that? You know, I think first of all, it's about really making sure you're connecting with your customers and your partners. And it's about experiences, right? It's making sure that you're getting them the rich content. This is a technical conference. So we're going to be measured by, did we showcase and engage our audience with the right kind of technical information, give them hands-on access to the things that they want to learn and further their careers? And you know, I always use that. It's like we got to stay close to our customers. So any feedback that you've heard, positive areas to work on, what are your thoughts? And as you look back now, it's day three looking out over the past few days and weekend. I'd say one of the things I'm most proud of, and I am seeing it in the Twitter sphere, is the fact that we had a lot of customers do the talking, customers do the showing. There were over 100 customers here this week on panels, in labs, in keynotes, on videos, all talking about their experiences. And this group of people, they want to hear from their colleagues and their peers. So I think customers really helped us this time, tell our story and help people understand what does this mean for their business. So I think that was good. A lot of customers coming on today on theCUBE, so continue to watch if you're out there. I got to ask you the question because one of the things that every CUBE event, I always have my little puzzle pieces I want to try to figure out where the puzzle corners are. And I've been asking all the VMware executives, kind of hidden question, but it's basically this. What does VMware stand for? And I've been getting a couple different answers, so you're obviously seeing most, so you're going to be right on message. I want to get your thoughts on that. But before your answer, the best answer came from a former VMware employee, Steve Herod, who is a CTO now as a venture capitalist, and just off the cuff, he just said, VMware likes to make complexity go away. They want to simplify complexity, create abstraction layers. And that's essentially the theme of the show here. So is that, how do you guys talk about that? Because the customers want to see the direction of VMware. What is the official messaging? What is, is that, is he on target? I mean, he's kind of made it a comment like it's in the DNA of VMware. I would agree that, you know, simplifying complexity is in our DNA. I think it's a little bit hard to say that today's IT world though is simple. I think we all have a long journey to really make IT simple. I think we're about unleashing the innovation from IT. And in order to do that, you have to simplify the complicated so they can focus on the strategic, right? But I would say at our core, what we're really about is how do we unleash that potential and remove obstacles, simplify complexity to ensure they can contribute to their businesses with the most impact at the accelerated pace as possible. And that's why I think paths cross cloud is interesting because that is certainly probably one of the most complex things to do. Absolutely. To the cross cloud. And only getting more complicated. I think that's what we're seeing now. You know, fast forward, the cloud era is maturing. But what we're finding now is businesses have many clouds. They have SaaS applications. They have their private cloud. They have multiple public clouds. They have managed cloud services. And we know we've been down this route before in the old compute server world. Managing these silos can become extremely complicated. So I think right now we're already thinking about how do we drive this and simplify this? So other comment from our analysts kick off this morning and breaking down kind of the VM world ecosystem and VMware. And I'd like to get your thoughts on kind of the internal VMware conversation. Because I know obviously the Dell transaction with EMC is going to be on the seventh. So that's public now. So, but VMware seems as David Floyd has said is unleash and Michael Dell is making a commitment to VMware that's pretty sincere about being independent and partnering. Well, I'm glad. And it kind of seemed like EMC kind of had that invisible hand as I didn't say this, David Floyd said this, but share some of the VMware. Because this is in the DNA is to be independent, right? You're right. It is definitely in our culture. And I think Michael has been extremely consistent. I've been with him in many meetings, both public, private, and he has never wavered from his commitment to support VMware's independence, to support our ecosystem and to really open up opportunities for us to grow at our full potential. And we all have partnered with Dell for a decade, right? This is not new to us and we have a great relationship with him regardless of this acquisition. I think the opportunities in the doors are going to open even further. There's a lot more we can do together, but I really feel we've got a really good balance. He knows that our ecosystem is the core success factor for us. So ecosystem is a big part of the success. So in your definition, what is the ecosystem 2.0? I think the ecosystem involves a variety of things. First of all, there's emerging technologies, there's service providers, there's CISOs, there's the telcos, there's ISVs, there's the SaaS providers, there's the two-tier distribution, the channel partners, the people who touch the customers, there's the consultants. I mean, I think it's just all evolving with us, kind of in one big tornado, you know? I think it's all those things together. It's a lot of growth. It's not a moving parts. No, and how about containers? That's a whole another dimension, right? Stu and I were saying the container buzz was talking to Jerry Chen last night and he said, last year's all about containers. Only one session, the cloud native session yesterday, they did talk about it, but it didn't dominate the show like it did last year. The cross cloud really kind of was great and obviously the end user computing stuff seems really compelling. Yeah, I think things kind of even flow, it depends what's really new and so you know there's kind of different focuses each year. So give us the internal or marketing philosophy now that you have stuff clicking together now with the product side, you see the NSX with vSphere playing nicely. So a lot of stuff, vSan is exploding. The product, the products are clicking. Absolutely. So there's some people where that Pat announced, okay, we'll deal with that later, but how does that get marketed now? Product team's going to do it. Cause it's interesting, they're standalone products, but also work well integrated. Yeah. You know, we're at this very interesting chasm and I would say we're kind of in our teenage years right now in my analogy and that when these products, let's take virtual san or NSX, when they're first coming out the door, they need to be incubated and they need almost like startup attention. And as marketers, we wanted to give them that really dedicated focus, but it's time for us now to grow into our 20s. And what we need to do is to be more solution oriented and we need to be more industry oriented, look at verticals and help our customers associate, what's the impact in my world? Whether it's retail or it's government or it's healthcare. So you'll see marketing at VMware shift to solutions. A more vertical solution. And verticals, yes. And by line of business kind of thing going on. More mature market. Well, across businesses, I think it's really at the end of the day, our customers don't think about our line of businesses. They think about what business problems are they trying to solve. And they, you know, whatever business units we have is irrelevant to them. I was talking to some of the VCs last night at the Lightspeed party and then a lot of Silicon Valley VCs were there. And I said, you know, there's no Gartner Magic Quadrant for this horizontal solution set. So, you know, usually you have the Magic Quadrant with you know, the leaderships by categories, but now you have this new kind of disruptive solution set which could be a vSphere here there and kind of stuff kind of cobble together, integrated. There's no Magic Quadrant for that. So it's really hard for customers to find out the playbook. Right, and we have to make that really simple for customers. I also think that's the potential that VMware has, which maybe is unique to a point product startup that they have one product. We can put these things together for even more impact, more value and a more seamless experience. Cause I think that's key. It's got to come together as an experience. Final question, Robin. What are you going to take away from VMworld this year? What are you going to take back to the ranch? What are you going to digest? What are you going to share with your team and your colleagues that you've learned from this show? You know, I think we're really, we're executing. I think we've created a great experience. I think we've attracted the right kinds of attendees. You know, this is just the first of many cause we roll this program into Barcelona in six weeks. Then we roll the following week all over Asia. I'm off to Mumbai, vented Beijing. We're just going to roll through Asia through December. So the key is we're onto this, right? The content is right. The cross-cloud architecture is really resonating. The cloud foundation, it makes sense. Workspace one, we just got to stay the course, help make this stuff really simple and clear for our customers and partners. That's great stuff. It does make a lot of sense. And it's got clarity and you can see the 20 mile stare, the straight and narrow, and congratulations on a great VMworld. Don, thank you so much. Appreciate it. Robin Matlock, CMO here inside theCUBE live at the hang space in the Mandalay Bay Convention for VMworld 2016. You're watching theCUBE.