 Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage, day two here at VMware Explorer. They're a 12th year covering VMware's annual conference, formerly called VMworld, now it's VMware Explorer, exploring new frontiers, multi-cloud, and also burying some of the fruit from all the investments in cloud native, Tanzu, and others, I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We have the man who's in charge of a lot of that business, a lot of stuff coming out of the oven, hitting the market, A.J. Patel, Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Modern Applications and Management Group at VMware. Basically, the modern apps, that's the Tanzu, all the good stuff. And Aria now. And Aria, the management platform, which has got social graph and all kinds of graph databases. Welcome back. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. Great to see you in person. It's been 2019 when you're on. So, a lot's happened since 2019 in your area. Again, things get, the way VMware does it, as we all know, you announce something and then you build it and then you ship it and then you announce it. I don't know if it's extreme, but okay. So, you guys had announced a lot of cool stuff. You bought Heptio, we saw that Kubernetes investment in all the cloud native goodness around it. Bearing fruit now, what's the status? Give us the update on the modern applications of the management. Obviously, the area is a big announcement here on the management side, but in general, holistically, what's the update? I think the first update is just the speed and momentum that containers and Kubernetes are getting in the marketplace. So, if you take the market context, you know, over 70% of organizations now have Kubernetes in production. Not one or two clusters, but hundreds of clusters, sometimes tens of clusters. So, to me, that is a market opportunity that's coming to fruition. You know, sometimes people will come and say, isn't you late to the market? I said, no, I'm just perfectly timing it. Because where does our value come in? It's enterprise readiness. Where the company that people look to when you have complexity, you have scale, you need performance, you need security, you need the robustness. And so, Tanzu is really about making modern applications real. Helping you design, develop, build and run these applications. And with ARIA, we're fundamentally changing the game around multi-cloud management. So, the one, two punch of Tanzu and ARIA is I'm most excited about. Isn't it true that most of the Kubernetes today is people pulling down open source and banging away and now they're looking for, you know, like I say, more robust management capability? You know, last two years when I would go to many of the largest customers are like, you know, we're doing good. We've got a DIY platform. We're building this. And then you go to the customer a year later, he's got not 30, 40 teams. And he has Lock 4J happen. And all of a sudden he's like, oh, I don't want to be in the business of batching this thing or updating it. And you know, when's the next shoe going to fall? So, that maturity curve is what I was talking about. Free like a puppy. A.J., you know, you mentioned readiness, enterprise readiness and the timing's perfect. You kind of alluded, not the exact words, but I'm paraphrasing. That's a lot to do with what's going on. I mean, I'll say cloud-native, IWS, like the high-risk scale partner, big partner and Google. And even Google said it today, you know, the world's spinning in their direction, especially with respect to VMware. You get the relationship with the hyperscalers. Cloud's been on everyone's agenda for a long time. So, it's always been ready. But enterprise, your customer base at VMware, very cloud savvy in the sense they know it's there. There's some dabbling, there's some endeavors in the cloud, no problem. But from a business perspective, truly transforming the VMware value proposition, is a ready, it's a ready time now for them. You can see the movement. And so, can you explain the timing of that? I mean, I get enterprise readiness, so we're ready to scale, a lot of good stuff. But the timing of product-market fit is important here. I think, you know, when Raghu talks about that cloud-first to cloud-chaos to cloud-smart, that's the transition we're seeing. And what I mean by that is, they're hitting that inflection point where it's not just about a single team. One of the guys, basically, I talked to the CIO, he was like, look, let's assume I hypothetically have 1,000 developers. 100 can talk about microservices, maybe 50 has built a microservice and three are really good at it. So how do I get my 1,000 developers productive? Yeah. Right? And the other CIO says, this team comes to me and said, I should be able to develop directly to the public cloud. And he goes, absolutely, you can do that. You don't have to come through IT. But here's the book of security and compliance that you need to enforce to get that thing in production. Go for it. Go for it. Good luck with that. The reality of how do I scale my developers is turning into a developer experience problem. We now have titles which says, head of developer experience. Imagine that two years ago. We didn't talk about it. People said, hey, I got containers, Kubernetes, I'm good to go. Well, I can go get all the open source now you talked about and now they're saying no. And also software supply chains and other words that you're seeing. This is a symptom of the growth of, I mean, open source is the software industry. That is. That is, I don't think debatable. Okay, that's cool. Now integration becomes vetting, trust, trusting codes. It's very interesting software time right now. And how is that impacting the cloud native momentum in your mind? Accelerating it, what inning are we in? How would you peg the progress? You know, on the scale of one to 10, I think we're halfway marked now. And that moved pretty quickly. It really did. And, you know, if you sit back today, the kinds of applications we're involved in, I have a Chicago wealth management company. We're building the next generation wealth management application. It's a fundamental refactoring of the legacy application. If you go to a prescription company, they're building a brand new prescription platform. These are not just trivial. What they're learning is the lift and shift doesn't work for these major applications. They're having to refactor them. This is the modern age. So how specifically are they putting some kind of abstraction layer on that? Are they actually gutting it and rewriting it? There's always going to be brownfields. Like, remember the old days of SOA? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The APIs in front of their main systems. They're not rewriting the core banking or the core platform, but the user experience, the business logic, the AI and ML capability to bring intelligence into the platform. It's the surrounding the capability to make it much more intuitive, much more usable, much more declarative. That's where things are going. And so I'm seeing this mix of integration all over again. You're not showing my age now, but, you know, the new EAI SOA is now microservices and messaging and events. But it's the same patterns, but again, being much more accelerated with cloud-native services. And it is, to the point, it's accelerated today. They're not having to freeze the code for six months or nine months, which would kill the whole recipe for failure. So they're able to now to fast-track their modernization. They have to prioritize because they've got limited resources, but how are you guys helping? But the practice is changing as well, right? The old days, it was 12, 18-month cycle or living software. If you heard the CVS-CIO Rohan, three months where they started to engage with us in getting an app in production, right? If you look at the COVID, 10 days to get a new application for getting small loans going with Pfizer, right? These are dramatically short-term, but it's not rewriting the entire app. It's just putting these newer experiences, newer capability in front with newer modern developer practices. And they're saying, I need to do not just once, but for 100, 200, 5,000 members of my team. JPMC has 50,000 developers. 50,000. It's not a bad thing anymore. We just had thousands of apps. A.J., I want to get your thoughts on something that we've been talking about on our SuperCloud event. I know we had an event, a couple of weeks ago with you guys, one of our sponsors, VMware, was called SuperCloud, where we're defining that this next gen environment is a SuperCloud and every company will have a SuperCloud capability. You guys, and underneath that is CrossCloud capability. So SuperCloud's like a super set on top of a multi-cloud. And a little word play or play on words is, ecosystem partners versus partners in the ecosystem. Because if you're coming down to the integration side of things, it's about knowing what goes what. It's almost like building an OS if you're a coder or an operating systems person. You got to put the pieces together right, not just go to the directory and saying, okay, who's got the cheapest price in DR or air gapping or something or some solution. So ecosystem partners are truly partners. Partners in the ecosystem are a bunch of people out on a list. How do you see that? Because the trend we're seeing is the development process includes partners at day one. Not bolt on. Completely agree. Share your thoughts on that. So let's look at that. The first thing I'm hearing from my customers is they're trying to use all the public clouds as a new IS. That's the first API or contract. Infrastructure as code, IS. From then on they're saying, I want more and more portable services. And if you see the success of some of the data vendors and the messaging vendors, you're starting to see best of breed becoming part of the platform. So you have to identify which of these are truly, you know, getting market momentum and becoming kind of de facto leaders. So Kafka goes hand in hand with streaming. RabbitMQ from my portfolio goes with messaging. Postgres for database. So these are kind of the, in your definition, ecosystem partners are foundational. In the security space, you know, it's sneak is a common player in terms of scanning or Aqua and Prisma, even though we have carbon black, those become partners from the container security perspective. So what's happening is the industry stabilizing on a handful of critical players that are becoming multi cloud preference of choice in this environment. And our job is to bring it all together in a coordinated orchestrated manner to give them a platform. You guys always had ecosystem. I think that priority more than ever, it wasn't really your job at VMware even gave 10 years ago to say, hey, this is the strategic role that you might play one partner. It was pretty much the partners all kind of fed off the momentum of VMware, virtualization. And there's not a lot of nuance there. There's pretty much, they plug in and you get. So what we're doing here is, since we're not the center of the universe, unfortunately for the application world, things like Backstage is a developer portal from Spotify that became open source. That's becoming the place where everyone wants to provide a plugin. And so we took Backstage and we said, let's provide enterprise support for Backstage, right? If you take a technology like what we have with Spring, every Java developer uses Spring. How do we make it modern with Spring Cloud? We work with Microsoft to launch a service with Azure Spring Enterprise for Spring. So you're starting to see us taking communities where they have momentum and bringing the ecosystem around those technologies. Cluster API for Kubernetes for how you manage stuff. So it's about standards. Because the developers are voting with their clicks and their code repos. And so you're identifying the patterns that they like and aligning with them and connecting with them rather than trying to sell against it. Exactly. It's the end story with everyone. I say stop competing. So before we sort of think Tanzu is Kubernetes. It's really Tanzu is the app, modern application platform that runs on any Kubernetes. So I've changed the narrative. When HEPQ was here, we were trying to be a Kubernetes player. I'm like, Kubernetes is just another dial tone. You can use mine. You can use OpenShift. So this week we announced support for OpenShift, my Tanzu application platform. The value is moving up. It's around outcomes. So industry standards, taking lead. We had a panel, a super cloud debut. I know you got a question I'll get to you in a second, but the panel was the innovators dilemma. And then during the event, one of the panelists, Chris Hoff, knows VMware very well, Beaker on Twitter said it should be called the integrators dilemma. Because the innovations here, but the integration of the, putting the piece parts together, building the thing is the innovation. And we come back and say, it's a secure software supply chain. It starts with great content. Did you know I publish most of the open source content on every hyperscaler through my Bitnami acquisition? So I start with great content that's curated. Then I allow you to create your own golden images. Then I have a bill service that secures and so on and so forth. And we bring the parts. That opinionated solution, but batteries included, but you can change it. It's been one of our key differences. We recognize the roles is going to be modular. Come back and solve for it. So I want to understand sort of relationship, Tanzu and Aria. John was talking about, super cloud before we had our event. We had an earlier session where we helped people understand that Aria was not, V realized rebranded. And the reason I bring that up is because we had said around super cloud that one of the defining characteristics was, sorry, super pass, which is a specific purpose built pass layer designed to support your objective for multi cloud. And in speaking to a lot of people this week, there's a federated architecture. There's graph relationships, there's real time ability to ingest and analyze. That's unique. And that's IP that is purpose built for what you're doing. Absolutely. I think what came out of all the learning is after 20 years of pivotal and BA. Well, we learned that you still need some abstraction layer. Kubernetes is low to low level. So what are the developer problems? What are the delivery problems? What are the operations and management problem? Aria solves all the operations and management problem. Tanzu solves the super pass problems. Yes. Of providing a consistent way to build great software and the secure software supply chain to run on any infrastructure. So the combination of Tanzu and Aria complete the value chain. And it's different. Again, we get a lot of heat for this, but we're saying, look, we're trying to describe that it's not just I ask PaaS and SaaS of last decade. It's not. There's something new that's happening and we chose the name super cloud. And what's the difference? It's modular. It's pluggable. It fits into the way you operate. And it's running. PaaS was very prescriptive. If you couldn't fit, you couldn't jump down to the next level. This is very much, you can stay at the abstraction level or go lower level. But we got to add that to the attributes. Yeah, we're going to get, we're recruiting you right now. I mean, you make me credit. I mean, funny, all the web services background, you look at an app server, you well, you know all about app servers. Basically the company is an app now. So if you believe that, say, Capital One is an application as a company and Amazon is providing all the capex. That's it. Okay. And they run all their quote, old IT spend, millions, billions of dollars on operating expenses. That's going to translate to the top line called the income statement. So Dave was always on the balance sheet, but now they're going to go to the top line. So we're seeing dynamic agent. You want to get your reaction to this where the business model shift if everything's tech enabled, the company is like an app server. So therefore the revenue that's generated from the technology making the app work has to get recognized in the income. Okay. But Amazon's doing all, all either, or the cloud hyperscale is doing all the heavy lifting on the capex. So technically it's the cloud on top of a cloud. Yes or no. The way, the way I call that, I call that super cloud Dave. So I like the idea of super cloud, but I think we're mixing two different constructs. One is the cloud is a new hardware, right? In terms of dynamic, elastic, always available, et cetera. And I believe one of them, one customer I talked about, there's a service catalog of infrastructure services. That's emerging. This super cloud is the next set of paths, super paths services. And the management service is to use the cloud. We spend so much time as being we're building clouds. The problem's sitting around, how do you effectively use the cloud? What problems do we solve around digital? Where every company is a digital company and the product is this application, as you said. So everything starts with an application and you look at from the lens of how do you run the application, what it costs the application, what impact it's driving. And I think that's the change. So I agree with you in strategy. That is a digital strategy. And that's the company. There's the application. The application is the company. That's a t-shirt. An API is the currency. So Asia, yeah, first of all, we'd love having you in the queue because you're like a master class in multiple dimensions. So I want to get yourself to this abstraction layer because we were also talking earlier on the cube here as well as before, but abstraction layers happen when you have major movements in markets that are game changing or major inflection points because you reach a complexity point where it's working so great, this new thing that is too complex to rein it in. And we were quoting Andy Grove by saying, let chaos reign, then reign in the chaos. So all major industry moments go back 30, 40 years, happen with abstractions. So the question is, is that you can't be a vendor, we've observed, you can't be a vendor and be the abstraction. Like if Cisco's running routers, they can't be the abstraction layer. They have to be the benefit of the abstraction layer. And if you're on the other side of the abstraction layer, you can't be running that either. I like the way you're thinking about it, yeah? Do you agree? I completely agree. And you know, I'm an old middle-ware guy. And when I used to say this to my CEO, he's like, no, this is not middle-ware. I said, it's just a new middle-ware. And what's middle-ware, right? It's a thing between app and infrastructure. You could define it whatever we want, right? And so this is the new distributed middle-ware. Yeah. And it has a metaphor and it's a good one because it does a purpose. It's a purpose. It creates a separation, but then you have, it's like a DMZ zone or whatever you want to call it. It's an area that things happen. But the difference between last time was, you could always deploy it to a thing. The thing is now the cloud. Yeah. The thing is a set of services. So now it's as much of a networking problem at the application layer is as much a security problem. It's how you build software, how we design. So APIs become part of your development. You can't think about APIs after the fact, right? When you build an API, you've got to publish the API. Because the minute you publish it, if you change it, the API's out of, so you can't have it as a documentation problem. So the way you build software, you use software consume is all about. So to me, digital product with an API as a currency is where we're headed. Yeah, that's a great observation. We want to make a meaningful note of that and make that a clip. Well, I want to get your thoughts on software development. You mentioned that, you know, obviously software development. Life cycles are changing. Obviously open source is now. I mean, it's unlimited code, supply chain. It says, what's in the code? I get that verified code's going to happen. Is software development coding as much, or is coding changing the notion of like writing code? Because, or is it more glue layers you're writing? I think you're onto something. I call software development's composition now. You know, my son's at Facebook or Google. They have so many libraries. Yeah. So you don't no longer start with the very similar primitive. You start with building blocks, components, services, libraries, open source technology. What are you really doing? You're composing these things from multiple artifacts. And how do you make sure those artifacts are good artifacts? So someone's not sticking in security, you know, vulnerability into it. So the world is moving towards composition. And there are few experts who build the core components. Most of the time we're just using those to build solutions. And so the art here is how do you provide that set of best practices? We call them patterns, or building blocks, or services that you can compose. You can build these next year. It's interesting. It's interesting. You're cooking meals. I agree with you 100% what you're thinking. I agree with that worldview. Here's a dilemma that I'm seeing. You have in the security world, you've got zero trust, you know, which is I don't know you, I don't trust you at all. And if you're going to go down this compose, we're going to have an orchestra of players, with the instrument, say to speak, Dave, metaphor. That's trust involved. So you have two spectrums of issues. If software's going trust, and you're seeing Docker containers getting more verifications, software supply chain, and then you've got hardware, I call it networking guys, love zero trust. Where's the balance? How do you reconcile that? Is it just decoupled nuance? I mean, what's the point? No, no, I think it all comes together. And I want to mean by that is it starts with left shifting it all the way to the hand of the developers. So are you starting with good content? You have provenance of the stuff you're using. Are you building it correctly? So you're not interested in bad things like solar events along the process. Are you testing it along the way of the development process? And then once in production, do you know half the time it's configurations of where you're running the stuff versus the software itself? So you can think of the two coming together. And the network security is protecting people from going laterally once they've got in there. So a whole security solution requires all of the above. The secure software supply chain. They're going to kind of monitor and look at configuration. We call posture management or workload management and the network security of SASE for zero trust. That's a hard thing. And the boundary is the application. All right. So is it an earned trust model? Sort of over time? No, it's designed in. It's built in. Okay, so it's not a... Because it's not... We can bolt in afterwards. Because the developers are driving it. They got to know what they're doing. And it's changing every week. If I'm putting a new code out every week, you can't, you can't be changing the image. Well, you guys got guard rails. The guard rails constant is a good example. It stops on the configuration side, but I also need the software. So Tanzu is all about the secure chain is about the development side of the house. Guard rails are on the operational side of the house. You got to make sure the developers don't stop. That's right. They want to keep them... Things will always get out there. And I find out there's a CV that I use a library I found after the fact. Okay. So again, while I got you here again, this is great. I want to get test this thesis. So we've been sitting on the cube talking about the new ops, the new kind of ops that are emerging. DevOps, which we believe is cloud native. So DevOps movement, infrastructure as code. That's happened. It's all good, open source is growing. DevOps is done deal. It's done deal. Developers are doing that. That ops was IT. That on the server, clouds my hardware. Check. That balances. The new ops is data and security, which has to match up to the velocity of the developers. Do you believe that? That's why we call it DevSecOps. And the sec is where all the action is. Yeah. And data. And data too. And data is about making the data available where the app meets. So the problem was, you know, we had to move the logic to where the data is. Or you're going to move the data where the logic is. So data fabrics are going to become more and more interesting. I'll give you a simple example. I published content today in a service catalog. My customer's saying, but my content catalog needs to be in 300 locations. How do I get the content in each of the repos that are running in 300 locations? So I have a content distribution problem. So you call that a data problem? Yes. It's about getting the right data. It's simple as even content. Images available for use for deployment. So when I think about the application development stack and the analytics stack, the data stack, if I can call it that, they're separate, right? Are those worlds, I mean, people say I want to inject data and AI intelligence into apps. Those worlds have to come together. I think about the insight from the historical being projected in the operational versus they're coming together. I have a Green Plum platform. It's a great analytics platform. I have a transactional platform. Do my customers buy the same? No, they're different buyers. They're different users. The insight from that is being now plugged in so that at real time I can ask the question. So even this information is being made available on demand. So that's where I see it. I don't see the worlds coming together, but the insight is being incorporated in the operational use. So I can say, do I give the risk score? Do I give you credit? It's based on a whole bunch of historical analytics done. At the real time, processing is happening with the intelligence. It's a mind shift for sure because the old model was I have a database, we're good. Now you have time series database, you got graphs. Each one has a role in the overall construct of the new thing. Right, but it's about at the end, how do I make use of it? Someone built a smart AI model. I don't know how it was built, but I want to apply it for that particular purpose. Okay, so the final question for you, at least from my standpoint, is here at VMware Explorer, okay? You have a lot of the customers and some new people coming in that we've heard about. What's their core order of operations right now? Get on the bandwagon for modern apps. How do you see their world unfolding as they go back to the ranch, their places and go back to their boss? Okay, we got the modern application, we're on the right track boss, full steam ahead or what change do they make? I think the biggest thing I saw was with some of the branding changes as well and some of the new offerings. The same leader had two teams, the VMware team and the public cloud team. And they're saying, hey, maybe VMware's going to be the answer for both and that's the world model. So that's the biggest change I'm seeing. They were only thinking of us on the left column. Now they see us as the unifying player to play across cloud native and VMware, they're uniquely set up to bring it all together. That's been really exciting this week. All right, AJ, great to have you on. Great perspective, good hand, worthy of great stuff. Congratulations on the success of all that investment coming to bear. Thank you. And on the new management platform. Yeah, thank you. And thanks always for giving us all the support you need. We love it. Always great. All right, keep coverage here. Getting all the data, getting inside the heads, getting all the specifics and all the new trends and actually connecting the dots here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more coverage from day two, two sets, three days, CUBE at VMware Explorer. We'll be right back.