 Extracting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in San Francisco for VMworld 2015. This is SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the event and extract the signals from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I feel my co-host and partner Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibon.com, SiliconANGLE's research on our next guest is Sanjay Poonan, Executive Vice President General Manager of VMware's end-user computing. Great to see you again. Welcome back to theCUBE. John, it's a pleasure to be here, but I got to say one thing. I'm waiting for the day when you have the tie and Dave has the non-tie low. I mean, seriously, you got to put that purple tie on. No, I'm just kidding. A pleasure to be on your show. I'm happy to wear a tie, but people would know it's phony baloney, but I'm happy to get them. Cave looks good. Dave looks good in the tie on me. But I'm California. I got to be chillaxed a little bit here. Are you relaxed? You feeling good? I'm feeling great. Okay, so you got a big day. My two-year anniversary at VMware this month. Wow. Excited to be here at the show, always. So give us the state of the union. I'll say SAP to VMware now two years, air wash, huge acquisition. We saw your event you had here in San Francisco with all the top customers. You have big name, box. Big time players working with you guys. Cloud native is a theme that you guys are really driving hard. What's this all about? Where are we right now in your group? And user computing is all the rage. Developer attraction in DevOps kind of connects the dots. Where are we with this? Yeah, no, I think it's been a fabulous two years. We've hired a fantastic team. I talked about this in my last show here. Some of the new people that joined us. Sumit Devan, Bob Schultz, Noah Wassmer, and some of the people we promoted from within Kit Colberg, Eric Freeberg, and then many of the people in the field. We've really, really put together, I think the best end user computing team in the industry, Barnan. And it always starts with the people. You know, my people values where it all starts. Secondly, we really started to innovate on product that differentiates us from the competition and made the bold move in mobile. Because mobile is the new desktop. We joked internally that you could end user computing without a strategy in mobile. You got that? Yeah, we can end it, you know. So that's in essence what we've done. So making it invisible and taking up the complexities away. That's really the key. What you mean by that. Yeah, absolutely. And making yourself relevant to where the world is going in this digitization of the workplace. So we see this as a phenomenal opportunity for us to become the de facto brand in a Switzerland set of proposition. You've got Apple, iOS, you've got Google Android, you've got Windows, Microsoft, Windows 10. VMware's proposition is to be a Switzerland type of company that can manage and secure all of those devices in very transparent fashion. And lead, and lead with that mobile story, right? I mean, isn't that part of it? Yeah, no, absolutely. Mobile is the new desktop. So it does become the key outcome that people are looking for. And our proposition that we talked about last year, working at the speed of life, being able to go all the way from desktop to Tesla. Many of those things are really starting to resonate now as we talk to CIOs and customers. You know, at 2010, when we first did theCUBE six years ago, Paul Moritz laid out the whole manifesto. End user computing had a lot of disparate parts. Some have gone, some have left. Explain to the folks out there how to clarify the positioning of end user computing. Vis-a-vis all the turmoil in the marketplace with customers, cloud has got obviously hybrid cloud. People are trying to get their arms around that. Virtualization, a lot of plumbing going on with SDN, I saw some growth there. A lot of stuff going on underneath your layer that's going to affect you. How do you manage that? Clarify the positioning and then talk about how you respond to the growth that's going to come out of underneath you and the infrastructure. Yeah, no, I think Paul Moritz had it right down. He's one of the visionaries of our time. And as he talked in 2010, that was around the time we actually coined the term workspace. VMware was one of the companies that coined the term mobile workspace. And now, many of those technologies are coming to bear. So much of the demos that Paul actually know was here at the time. Steve Herrod showed, you know, I'm actually sort of sitting on the shoulders of many of those giants in terms of driving this. So the time has come now where the desktop virtualization market now is less costly and less complex. So we've taken cost and complexity out of them. That's why now we're taking market share from Citrix and other players in that market. In the mobile place, we weren't moving fast enough. We acquired the leader, AirWatch, in mobile security. And we've now created an ecosystem out of that of the leading application providers that are all partnering with us. Salesforce, Workday, Adobe, SAP, everyone in the app space. The telco providers, players like AT&T, Vodafone, Singtel partnering with us. And then the security players like Palo Alto Networks have all embraced AirWatch. And then we actually created some blue technologies that really bring the desktop and the mobile together like identity management. Identity as a service is becoming one of those very critical items that's a lifeblood that ties desktop and mobile together because your device now becomes your second factor of authentication, right? You can use your fingerprint or retina scan. All of these now really coming in a mature fashion. So we're seeing huge growth out of particularly the AirWatch side. I think 60% last quarter, path to profitability. I believe in 2016, Pat's talking about it. Carl's talking about it. Jonathan's talking about it. Joe Tucci's talking about it. Everybody's talking about your business. So what's driving that growth? You just talked about that ecosystem. That's got to be a lot of the leverage. But maybe help us unpack that growth a little bit. I think it has been, and I'm biased obviously, next to VMware being acquired by EMC, one of the best acquisitions of modern, last 18 months in enterprise software. We were diligent just the same way EMC had treated VMware to be somewhat separate and independent. We kept AirWatch fairly independent for the first six months and gradually began the integration because there was a motion that Alan DeBurion and John Marshall had in the context, the way they ran the AirWatch that we did not want to break. And then over time, in the second half of last year and the first half of this year, we began to get two parts of VMware that we do well into play. The value side of big deals. So we start to participate in ELA's now. We're larger conversations with customers of the big accounts. The volume side are the transaction partners where channel partners, 75,000 partners of VMware now have an opportunity to take this mobile solution as a door opener to the CIO. But remember now, we're bringing together Horizon on the desktop side, AirWatch on the mobile side with glue types of technologies like Identity. So the proposition just got like one plus one equals like 111 and that's a huge opportunity. And you mentioned ELA, I mean, huge year, renewal year in 2016. So that's going to be a tailwind. It's a cloud based solution. Remember, one of the reasons we acquired AirWatch was they were the leader in cloud based mobile. John and Alan were very smart in creating a cloud based solution. Not to say that they can't deploy on premise, but it's cloud first. So think Salesforce in a world where everyone else looks like a Siebel. So we were very astute and basically saying we want to look at a way by which the subscription revenue starts to become a flywheel. So I want to ask you about business mobility. That's a theme that you guys have been big on. Your ACE application configuration, I think it's called, or after configuration. Yeah, after config for the enterprise. You had Salesforce box, Cisco, Workday, and a bunch of other partners showing NSX identity, the hard stuff, the stuff that people don't think about. I was there at the event. And I want you to compare that vis-a-vis some news that hit today with Apple and Cisco quote partnering on iOS traffic, then prioritizing traffic for iOS apps on Cisco hardware. Which essentially deep packet inspection, looking at the routes and giving them a fast lane, if you will. That seems to be the trend, it's consumerization where Apple examples saying, okay, differentiate with Apple stuff versus Android. Are the business people thinking about that that way? Are we looking at NSX innovating under the hood, explain the consumerization of business mobility? Why that's relevant and how hard it is and one of some things that you guys are doing. We coined the term, John, consumer simple meets enterprise secure. And you hear about that more tomorrow in my keynote, which I encourage all your viewers to come to tomorrow at nine o'clock or dial. At nine o'clock, there's some very special news. Huge news. Hint at in a little bit. But let's bring that together because who is one of the best at consumer simplicity today, Apple? And we basically are Googling much of what they do too. But we took basically the strong partnership with Apple and dialed it further. And as Apple's talked about publicly, they have a group of enterprise partners. We're one among a very few 30, 40, 50 that they're working with in the EMM space. And we invest in enterprise mobile management. Okay, got it. As we did that, we also then looked at all the apps players that were very key to this mobile cloud ecosystem. Box, you know, cell native people. Exactly, these are folks who are building a cloud based mobile set of applications. And we signed all of them up to this native integration called app config with enterprise that the device operating system vendors like Apple and Google and us invented. Now what's happening is you're starting to see that ecosystem getting stronger. So actually it's awesome because the apps that were announced today in the Cisco Apple announcement were WebEx, Spark, the same applications that we built app config for. So we actually see this- They're kind of copying you guys. Well no, they're actually joining the ecosystem. So I think it's awesome when you have an IBM in the ecosystem, a VMware in the ecosystem, now a Cisco in the ecosystem, major there. There's lots of players we partnered with SAP last year. You're going to see us doing more with them. So our goal is to ensure that the lead players, whether it's an applications world, whether it's the networking world, whether it's the security world, start plugging into appropriate platforms. Now remember the proposition of VMware though is to be Switzerland. So we have to build strong relationships with Apple, with Google and Microsoft Windows 10 because they're all viable ecosystems in the post-PC world. Well of course you want to be neutral because you want to have a rising tide as you said. But your announcement also highlighted box, DocuSign was in there, AT&T, you talked about some cool things that you can split out, expenditure for us by having an AI phone, just a random example. But it highlights a new way of doing things, right? But I got to ask you the question, those are cloud native companies. I mean box, Workday, I mean, they were born in the cloud, if you will. But what about the enterprises that aren't? They have a lot of legacy. That's a problem, right? So it's not easy to be cloud native. Talk about the challenges there and the opportunities and how you guys are addressing it. I love that word because each side of that coin is challenging the opportunity. So when we go to traditional enterprises, they have client server applications or all browser applications that they want us to be able to deploy. And you'll hear in my keynote tomorrow a very key phrase, any application on any device. So you've got a client server application and all browser application or a native mobile app we can deliver to any device. You pick your device. You've got a traditional Windows laptop, a thin client, a Mac OS, an Android, an iOS, or a Tesla with running some kind of, maybe Android inside it. We can deploy those applications onto any device and that requires the combination, the technology we have from a horizon and air watch. So what do we do in those traditional applications? We virtualize them. We can either virtualize the desktop or the app and deploy them onto a thin client. We think, John, the future is thin client computing where your glass that you present on is going to be like the glass that Corning makes us projectable. And this phone becomes your remote control into your entire life. So I love this conversation because there's so much talk in this business. Gartner has bimodal IT. IDC has the third platform. But what you just described is doesn't say old stuff over here and new stuff over there. It says extend the client server apps, the 19 year old legacy apps and allow them to participate in this cloud native. Cloud native doesn't mean throw away the old stuff and start with a blank piece of paper. I wonder if you could, first of all, do you agree with that? And I wonder if you could talk about that as a strategy. It's a very important strategy because if you are a new company, like an Uber or Netflix, you don't have legacy infrastructure, you can start completely new on a cloud native, all cloud apps. But for the majority of global 2000 companies, they have existing applications, clients over primarily, some running in old browsers, IE 8, IE 9, and you've got to bring those apps to the new world. So we see the world moving clearly to mobile and HTML5 long term, but there's still going to be many of those applications, 3D applications. For example, you go to many of our large manufacturing customers. They've got jet engine parts or parts of various different manufacturing processes that are still not yet HTML5 or mobile apps. So bringing those old world of apps to a Chromebook or to an iOS device is something we can magically do. But for these native mobile apps, you want to make it one touch. So the benefit of what we had with App Config is now with one touch secured by AirWatch, you can now automatically get access to Salesforce or DocuSign or Box. This is the best of both worlds. For the new apps, single touch, easy, seamless access to those apps, for the old world of apps, you can seamlessly virtualize them, in other words, abstract them, and then send them over to the device. The ecosystem is critical in all of this. And a lot of times we see this trend toward vertical integration, where you watch what Oracle's doing, you see what Amazon's doing. The ecosystem, I'm hearing, the ecosystem is still vital to your strategy. Absolutely. And the ecosystem takes various different forms. The device operating system players, the system integrators, the security players, people like Paul Alton, and then in this world, the apps players are really, really important. I talked last year about SAP. We had many new apps in that. And just a small little hint, tomorrow at nine o'clock, you're going to see a major ecosystem player on stage with us, never in the history of VMworld. I don't want to blow the cat out of the bag, but I want every one of your viewers to dial in tomorrow. This is going to be huge, so you've got to come there. Okay, so ecosystem, just real quick. Profitable, good economics, people making money, how does that economics work? Yeah, you know, VMworld's all about ecosystem, right? You go to the show floor, and VMworld has got thousands, including companies that compete with us. What you've got to do is ensure that you're open and you allow even competitors to integrate with you. Okay, I've got competitors that I compete with in my part of the business. They've got to integrate with vSphere. Vice versa, I've got to make sure that I can play in a heterogeneous world with a variety of companies that might compete in the SDDC world. And part of the magic of doing this is to ensure that the ecosystem is proliferating, but you have some platform play. That's what's made VMware a successful 600,000, greatest infrastructure company of all time. So I have, I was getting the rap here, so I have a final question, and then I have a final, final question because I need to get two questions in. First, API, APIification is a term that we've been kicking around in the OpenStack cloud community coined by Google's Craig Mclucky on theCUBE. I mean, it's been kicked around, but API, making your APIs available, if you overdo it, you could cause some problems that you're mentioning interacting with all these apps. Your take on that, and the second final, final question is, how do you view DevOps? Do you care? Are you looking down at it saying go faster or you're agnostic? What are you guys doing specifically around this APIification trend? And then DevOps in particular. They're both very related questions, so let me cover them in sort of a quick sequence. Everything that we should do as a platform, you're a platform if you create a service-oriented architecture that allows others to plug into you. So when we talk about app config for the enterprise, part of what we did was create an API set with the device operating system players like Apple, Google, it's an open, it's an open standard that all EMMs can embrace. And now then we natively integrate Salesforce or Workday or SAP into that. So the APIs are absolutely important in every layer of VMR, whether it's the desktop side, whether it's the mobile side, whether it's SDDC, we live by those principles as a platform company, no doubt. Then as you think about DevOps, there's aspects of now the management complexity in the cloud world that needs to be rethought because this isn't systems management the old way in which the clients are where we're looked at it. DevOps really has a very key way which you can go from test to dev to production, where you've got multiple clouds, you've got federated clouds, and we've got to make sure, and this is something that we use internally, a lot of our AirWatch solutions that are deployed because they're cloud first, have DevOps build into them, build integration built between AirWatch and the management tools of VMware, their customers who ask us to integrate into service now. This whole management platform, the next generation mobile cloud management platform is going to have DevOps at the key, at the heart of it. And we think that's a huge opportunity for VMware and for our ecosystem. So yes or no question, senior management is behind DevOps at VMware. We are absolutely behind everything that drives an ecosystem, DevOps is one key part of it, but there are many other aspects. This is one key part of where the management platform is going and we're very, very committed to making that success. I know you got to run to your meeting. Thanks so much, Sanjay Poon and the general manager, EVP of the end-users community. Big announcement tomorrow, watch his keynote tomorrow at 9AM here on SiliconANGLE.tv. The Cube is going to be covering all the keynotes and keep watching. We'll be right back more with live coverage from San Francisco VMworld 2015. This is the Cube with John Furrier and Dave Vellante. We'll be right back. Thanks John.