 Welcome to this special CUBE conversation where we're going to unpack and have a casual conversation around the big news that VMware just announced the Sphere 7.0 or the VSphere 7, Chris Prasad, Senior Vice President, General Manager of VSphere, Cloud Platform Business Unit, Paul Turner, VP, VSphere Product Manager. Guys, we just chatted about the big news, congratulations. The bottom line, if I'm a customer, I'm moving into the cloud. I see this as really either an enabler or a blocker. You guys actually think it's an enabler. I'm not saying it's a blocker, but as a customer, I just need to know, is it going to help me go faster? I'm going cloud, which means I've been told I got to get on the cloud. I got Amazon, I might have Azure or multiple clouds. With workloads sitting around, I got to pull them all together and make them work, but right now I just got to get my operations cloud native. This is really kind of a pressure point. Oh, for sure. One of the biggest drivers that you see happen in the industry right now is Kubernetes. Why is Kubernetes taking off? Kubernetes is taking off because it gives you cloud independence. It gives you the ability to run with the same operating model, whether it's in Google cloud, Amazon's cloud, Microsoft cloud, or any other cloud service. What we're doing with version seven is we're actually bringing that same Kubernetes cloud independent operating model directly into VSphere. So now all of your infrastructure platforms that are out there, 90% of IT environments, are all Kubernetes ready platforms, and that's really powerful. So what we've done is just taken a totally different kind of a scope on how cloud should be. Cloud should be any cloud. It should be independent of one particular flavor of it, and developers should be able to work then in a much more agile way. You know, just saying, I've been following VMware for all my career since it was founded, and you know, with theCUBE coverage over the years, as you can see the innovation. You guys do a lot of great stuff. Of course, Wikibon, our team's Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante, made some good calls with VSAN. We saw the early stuff with VCloud Air, kind of saw that kind of going in this direction, but there's been real innovation going on around you guys. Obviously with NSX's exploded, and VSphere's been kind of the core thing. As you guys look at the cloud model, you guys made some good moves with Amazon. I've always felt that you guys could be that Switzerland, that layer of connection points between, as enterprise, really move from old way of provisioning, to much more seamless operating model where they got to deal with cybersecurity, they got to deal with all this stuff, and that's going to come from apps. That's going to come from the apps. So when you bought Heptio, I was like, hmm, that's actually really smart move. You're starting to bring in that cloud native vibe into VSphere. Into VSphere, yes. That's what's essentially happening here, isn't it? No, exactly. This is like the coming out party for that rate. It's VSphere having all the Heptio goodness embedded in it. And what you would see is that because we have such a huge presence in the on-prem space, this provides the fastest path for customers to get to the cloud. So today, I mean, I don't want this point to be lost. Today, we are running the same VMware Cloud Foundation on-prem, on Amazon, in Google, and many other... Same code base. Same code base, right? It's the exact same thing. So now, what does that give you as a customer? It gives you the same operational model across all these clouds. Because customers today, without that, they are setting up a set of processes and tools for Amazon. Then you go to Azure, you're doing a different set and you're training people to do that. And you could get into compliance and other issues where things fall through the cracks when you do that. Here, you have the same platform. You set your policies once. It applies to all the clouds. You can move your workloads between clouds. It's VMotion, essentially, between all the clouds. Yeah, there's been a lot of skeptics on that one, but that's ideal and would be perfect. We will do it today. I mean, it is happening today. And we have thousands of other partners, which are the tier two service providers who are also offering that. So we have a huge web of these providers on which we run the same platform. Yeah, I want to add something else actually to that as well, which is, this is an open platform, which is really powerful, right? This is based on Kubernetes for developers, which means you can run on the vSphere platform and that is a hybrid infrastructure that is the most ubiquitous infrastructure out there. But if you actually want to take your application and actually deploy it onto a native cloud, you can do that as well. And so it's very important for us to keep the platform open while making it the broadest available. Well, DevOps is, I mean, first of all, I totally agree. I think open wins. But at the end of the day, I think this operating consistency is a big story because I mean, it's kind of like nuance, but it is really the most important thing customers care about because if you're operating successfully seamlessly across cloud, it's better. So the question I have on the DevOps side because the dream has always been infrastructure as code. So are you guys there with this? Do you consider this vSphere seven kind of infrastructure as code? If I'm a developer, is it all being taken care of? How close are we in your mind's eye to infrastructure as code? No, it's a hundred percent there. I mean, we made the announcement around Tanzu, which is a set of other products and capabilities that we add to what vSphere has. And that whole stack and the solution is what is targeted at the modern developer. So we have all the capabilities that the developers need to do infrastructure as code, to deploy their applications and deploy it across all these clouds. And I want to add to that that infrastructure as code really has two parts to it. We look at how do I provide the developers infrastructure as code, which is what we're doing with Kubernetes enablement. And we have our vSAN product is available. In fact, all storage services from vSphere are available through that and our NSX services are available through Kubernetes. So you've got full infrastructure as code for developers, but infrastructure as code also means, how do you deploy large scale infrastructures and manage them as code? How do people actually manage the operations and the deployment of services? And so your IT and your admin team actually have a full layer of enhanced life cycle management, provisioning of configurations and settings across infrastructure. All of that is now managed as in. That's almost under the hood kind of stuff, but it's important because networking is going to play a big role in all this security standpoint and also compute and storage pretty much looking good, but networking becomes a huge part of what's under the hood. Yeah, I mean, networking is what enables us to connect all these clouds together, right? And NSX being the underlying platform for us enables us to have one single layer across all these clouds with the same operating model. So NSX is very critical for this. I want to get your guys' thoughts on some little history lesson here or SCAR tissue as we say in the industry. You know, I remember back during the Hadoop days, 2010, the big data movement hit and it was just going to save us all, right? It was going to be great. But what ended up happening was this very hard to stand up these clusters. And what happened was the commitment, the vision was there, but it was just really hard to manage and stand up clusters and hire people to do this. So it had some use cases, but it just really kind of fell down. And we saw OpenStack have a similar trajectory where good on paper things had use cases, but it was just so hard to manage. The trends were moving very, very fast. Cloud was here. The cloud computing kind of took everyone by storm and just got rid of all those things. And so they ended up kind of dying. No, but if you think about why OpenStack didn't go anywhere in the end, it's because of the operational complexity, right? It took a lot to set it up and you had to essentially invest a lot more in keeping it running, right? And then what we are doing is saying, you don't have to worry about that aspect because it's built into the platform that you already know, right? So we have taken that complexity out completely. And so you just have vSphere, the administrator doesn't know how to set up and run and do lifecycle on vSphere and you get Kubernetes with it. So back to my original question. If that's the case, which by the way, I think that's the way to think about it. Then if I'm the customer, the acceleration, I can draft up with the movement of cloud as fast as I can go. Versus having any kind of blockers. Fastest ramp to the cloud. Fastest ramp to the cloud, awesome. And fastest ramp to a cloud operating model, which means that all of your developers can now actually run as quickly as they can building their applications independent of IT in a much more dynamic way. So you want to move to that cloud operating model. That's why Kubernetes is so important. On the infrastructure side, we've actually of course made it a much easier platform to manage, but it's the agility that matters. You guys have done some great innovation. I think you've got a good ear to the market, made some good moves, looking good. This is a great vision. I got to get your guys take on the edge. Big discussion, 5G, certain heirs, love that kind of vision. But at the end of the day, an edge now, if you're talking about cloud operations, everything's an edge, right? So what does edge mean for vSphere? How do you guys look at the edge of the network and as these applications, whether it's sensors or whatever happening at the edges, how does vSphere look at that? How do you guys look at it? Yeah, so, let me just, I would say that we have data center edge, right? We just think of it as retail stores, Starbucks, right? They have kind of a mini data center application running there, right? That's one kind of edge that people talk about. Then you have the kind of the telco edge, where a lot of the processing of the 5G data is happening, right? Where the cell towers are and whatnot. And then you have the device edge, which is the cars, what do you have at home and whatnot, right? And then we can play across all of these because we have the platform, I don't know if you know, but vSphere as a platform is embedded in many devices today. It's in the army, it's in parking meters. So it has a form factor that can live in all these devices. We certainly play in the data center. So we are well suited to play at the edge. So vSphere anywhere is strategy. Yeah, that is exactly our strategy. Well, I think we're already at the data center edge, as we've talked about. It's a very common deployment use case for earlier versions of vSphere, and it will continue to be. It's not new to you guys at all. It's not new at all. I think the telco edge is actually a very interesting one, particularly with the 5G switchover. So what's happening there is there's a whole radio access networks, and you're looking at the V-RAN as a big initiative there, which is how do we bring virtualization as a service there into those networks? Container deployments becomes very important as well. So we actually have a platform with version seven that actually can give the telco edge and 5G network deployments a much more secure, predictable runtime environment. So that's really powerful as well. And it's containers and VMs, because many of those applications that are deployed at telco edge are container-based applications. It's interesting, you know, we talked about stacks in our last segment, and you guys talked about the news and not having all these stacks laying around. But if you think about the evolution of the industry with cloud, a whole new set of services are emerging. You mentioned telco edge. So it just looks different, but it's the same kind of open model that open systems brought us. Yes. But just a little bit different. It's a distributed cloud, it's a distributed computer. Yeah. It's just same concepts, new capabilities. No, just to add to that, I mean, the biggest innovation John is happening in the hardware layer, right? The computers are getting desegregated, right? There is a lot of acceleration that is going on. There are specialized chips, ASICs, FPGAs that are being built into these servers. And memory is getting pulled outside because the interconnect is getting fast enough for those things to happen. And so a lot of the innovation that we do as a platform that we didn't talk about much today is really at that layer because we have to virtualize all of that and provide it to the developers. Yeah. It's great. It's a great architecture. I think I just add more of the complexity that's coming that you guys can help abstract away is, you know, just looking at cybersecurity and the role of data. You got to get in front of all these trends to get that automation DevOps going because without any automation and software it's just people can't handle the in-bounds. It's a big problem. Yeah, you really need your platforms to provide intrinsic security. It shouldn't be an option. It shouldn't be something that the developers need to worry about. It should be something that's just part of the platform. And that's one of the things that we see is critical and actually built into vSphere 7. And you've seen that we've made a number of acquisitions recently, actually in the security piece. It's so that we can purposely build into your runtime environment, which is your VM environment, your container environment that we are running. We actually build in intrinsic security. We build in dynamic checking of the scope of an application in real time while those applications are running, which is very key. Well, Paul, thanks for sharing all that great stuff. I want to get one final thought for both of you before we wrap up is we've been seeing and we've been reporting kind of the three waves of the cloud. Wave one was public. We all kind of know how that turned out. It's awesome. Cloud-native, born in the cloud. Wave two is where we're at now with a lot of intensity hybrid. And that's got a range of definitions. And then the third wave that's coming fast is multi-cloud. So I want to get your thoughts on hybrid. A lot of energy, a lot of spend, a lot of dollars, investment in hard costs and people in hybrid. I know we have different definitions. There's also different versions of hybrid. How do you define hybrid? And how does that become a path to the next wave? Or is it a path to the next wave? What's your take? Oh, it's absolutely the path to the next wave. I would say the hybrid in our view is the same platform running on whichever cloud you want to choose, right? And our platform, as we talked about, spans all the major clouds today, giving the same operating model. And that's what we view as the hybrid cloud story, right? The next one is the ability to mix native cloud workloads and services with that. And we already have a set of products and services that target that. It's the tons of portfolio that I talked about is all focused on the multi-cloud journey. So we kind of support both and we are looking forward and aggressively going after the multi-cloud. I think it's important to think of them as completely complementary of each other, right? A hybrid infrastructure platform is so that, you know, a single IT organization can actually have one operating experience for their entire infrastructure, independent of cloud, private cloud, public cloud services. But multi-cloud is about developers. It's about developers able to deploy their applications on any cloud environment that they need to and they don't need to worry about infrastructure. So hybrid cloud is really about a hybrid infrastructure that we can deploy everywhere. Multi-cloud and the services that we're providing to developers is all about how you can be independent of any cloud deployment that you want. It could be a hybrid infrastructure you deploy on. It could be on a standard public cloud service. And what's interesting is not all clouds are created equal. I mean, Amazon has much more capabilities than Azure and Google, but they're finding their swim lanes. But again, it's all about the workload. The workload decides which cloud to work on and you guys just are agnostic for the operating model. Well, thanks for the insight guys. I appreciate you doing a little post-Rapida news. Thanks for sharing. Thank you. Big news, vSphere 7 Cube Breakdown here. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.