 Welcome back everyone, live coverage here at theCUBE in Las Vegas for VMware Explore 2023, our 13th year theCUBE coverage of VMware's conference, formerly VMworld, I didn't say it at all today, Rob. Rob Stretches, my co-host, I'm John Furrier, our next guest, Brad Parks, CUBE alumni, good friend theCUBE, also the chief product office of Morpheus data, great solution, the timing of what we've talked about before in theCUBE is now prime time, the inflection point of the hockey stick of multi-cloud, as multiple environments come together in cloud-native, perfect tailwind for you and your business. Congratulations, great to see you. Yeah, nice to see you, timing is everything. Is there like a swear jar for like, every time you say VMworld, you have to add a thing or not? I did it twice yesterday. Muscle memory, yeah. It will always be a VMworld to us, right? Yeah, we do so many interviews on theCUBE, but on the intro, it's like, okay, we're live here at VMworld, oh, damn, I find that. Anyway, love the colors here, I got to say, VMware Explore's colors are popping, great on the photos here with the artwork. We got the blue shirt memo. Great, great stuff. Well, let's get into Morpheus. So a lot of action. Obviously, multi-cloud's been percolating and sauteing around as an industry direction. Everyone's got multiple things. They're not always working together at all. And as customers realize that the clouds have their agenda and everyone vendors have their agenda, that they have to kind of lean in a little bit. And that's something that we've observed and all the insight is now seeing it, but now everyone's trying to realize that, you know, to make stuff run, it's hard. Okay, but there's now new things coming to the table. This is something that you're involved in. Give us the update on Morpheus data, where you guys are obviously on the floor, we put your booth. What's going on with you guys? What's the current state of Morpheus? Yeah, we've grown probably 40, 50% year-over-year over the last several years. And I think one of the best things for our business has been the ever-increasing complexity of IT. We're still trying to solve the same problem 25, 35 years later. But now, like IT was supposed to get simpler, you got VMware, new TNX, Microsoft, you got Terraform, you got Ansible, you got OpenShift or Rancher. Like there's a poor platform operations, platform engineering person in the middle of the enterprise who's trying to string all that together. And that's where we fit. And I think why we've had the success is, like a joke sometimes our engineering co-founders, a people pleaser, and just wants everyone to get along because there's a need for an abstraction and an integration point to take all those technologies and just help the customer move faster with less inefficiency. It's actually that people pleases a good angle because that's actually the operational model. They got to work together. And it's hard. What's the big problem that you're solving? Because again, there are a lot of blockers that are mostly either some sort of industry or some sort of infrastructure or product. Are there blockers that you guys are taking away or what has to happen next for the kind of the hockey stick inflection point for multi-environment environments to work and run? Yeah, for sure. I haven't changed my stick in a few years, but I think what's led to a lot of that growth is now enterprises are realizing that. All right, I've done cloud-enabled technologies in my HCI and my integrated converged infrastructure. The real problem as IT, I need to enable the business. I need my developers, my product teams to move faster. I don't want IT to be a bottleneck. So enabling developer self-service is the core of our DNA. So we integrate all those technologies I mentioned so that IT can deliver a unified API, a service portal, a Terraform provider. So Dev gets what they want on demand while IT, finance and security get to secretly put guardrails around everything and then everyone gets along. Yeah, I think what's interesting is, and I love the multi-cloud-ness of this explorer. I almost said it. Now that it's in my head, but when I look at multi-cloud, I now have asked some of the people from VMware about this is that when they mean multi-cloud, they mean AVS, VMC and things of that age. VMware on X. Yeah, which is fair, very fair. And I think it's a good control plane from their perspective of ESX and vSphere being everywhere. But one of the things that I think is interesting is, and one of the hard parts is networking and bringing it all together and all the different pieces that go, hey, I have ALB and ELBs in addition to having a VM running SQL or something of that that I brought up into VMC for that matter. Is that what you're seeing is that customers are really looking for you to have, their apps are spanning not just or not contained only in VMC. They're also using the AWS components as well. Absolutely, and I mean, and where our wheelhouse is that Fortune 2000, big, messy, heterogeneous enterprise and even kind of not just individual apps. I like talking to people who have forest problems. I often use the analogy like leaves, trees and forests, right? There'll be a product team who has an affinity for VMware. They love it. That's where that workload needs to run. That same company will do an acquisition and that's a Google company or there's a product group that's big fans of AWS but when it comes to that provisioning experience, the governance, cost management, that's a forest problem. You shouldn't be doing that differently across every environment. So let those teams use the tools they want but don't reinvent the wheel or try and skill everybody up on everything. There's a need for that abstraction layer and that's really, I think what has led to that is that's how we reduce complexity. And the consequence of not doing what your model is, keeping the old way is slow, takes people's time but you got to chase after everything. Someone has to like make sure rules of engagement or things are in line, you're constantly chasing. You've got to chase it and then skills gaps. We were all joking, we all have kids in college. I'm just going to tell my daughter like go be an automation engineer who knows VMware and AWS and you'll print money because there just aren't enough smart people who get that platform engineering automation. And so being an abstraction, okay, do one API, one control point and we'll handle all the interdependencies. Brad, I want to ask you something. We've been riffing on the cube on this topic and I think you're perfect to kind of contribute to it. We were saying the following, developers open source, you see KubeCon, CNCF, we love the momentum in cloud native. Developers pretty much have become the de facto body with their choice. You see selections of code, someone says, hey, I got a better product. Well, if they don't adopt it, then the world is voted. The collective intelligence of developers weighed in and people figure it out, okay, it's a better product based on my crowd and not just friends. So check, love that. Now the platform engineering world is booming. Rob and I have been observing and talking about since KubeCon of publicly, like this group is kind of the SRE got rid of that SRE word, okay, that's Google, site reliant, what does that mean? But platform engineers kind of become that job, hardcore engineer, infrastructure, play together. I got a lot of stuff, abstractions coming. They seem to be the folks that are going to be looking at this hard. And our thesis is that this group of people will be the de facto standards bodies. What they like will probably decide who gets to be in that role managing that abstraction because it's so important. What's your reaction to that? Do you have a comment? Is that true? Are we just overthinking it? What's your vision? I mean, if developers can make sure it's at the coding level, there might be an opportunity with open source and open conversations to, what's your take? I mean, that's actually how we came to be. We were created by a team of 25 of the top 1% developers on the planet who had one IT guy to go modernize applications and dozens of companies. They were doing platform engineering and platform operations before it was cool. We productized that and became a company. That role, if I fast forward seven years, now there's a head of platform whose job it is to enable those development teams. But there aren't enough talented people to hand carve CICD pipelines and build that. So that platform layer you're spot on, that's the new IT, right? I mean, we love our storage guys, the inware people, but solving that platform problem. Cloud is IT. Cloud and platform. Yes, yes. Rob, this is what I was saying. CoopCon, what's your take on it? Yeah, I think that's exactly the right way to think about it is that platform engineering has subsumed a lot of those other roles. And I think you kind of mentioned this a little bit earlier, but it really is an ecosystem. I mean, you guys have a lot of partners. I mean, I've seen the little wheels that you have out there with all the different logos. I did just spend our office. Yeah, I was going to say, I've even been one of those when I was at Zerto. We did integration with you guys or you actually did integration with us. And so you do it with a lot of different pieces around there. How does that go over from your ecosystem and then what are you seeing from like the VMware ecosystem as you're here? Yeah, I think one of the big pieces, we talked about IT being complex and platform being the center of all these, trying to grab all these vines. And so whether it's us plus VMware or us plus Terraform or Ansible or ServiceNow, our job is to help be that self leveling cement for that platform team bring everybody into the party so you can automate the handoffs and just eliminate the technical debt, which means you have to have an ecosystem. So we actually spent the last year and a half building a plugin framework that lets people play together. And now we've got Oracle, we've got NutanaX, we've got Cohesity, we've got people doing their own Morpheus plugins. And it's truly what separates a tool from a platform. So we have a platform. You have to have a successful ecosystem. Oh, absolutely. To be a platform without ecosystem is not a platform. For sure. Okay, so let's take it one step further. How do you guys, because any part of Ansible automation, that's awesome. What's the risk for platforms when you see moves like AshiCorp with their license change in the middle of the game, which I think is disingenuous in nature, in my opinion, making a rule change in ports. Okay, fourth inning, we're going to play Polo. Wait, what, wait, wrong game. Like what are you talking about? So, I mean, they did it weird. I didn't like how they did that just for the record. But people do change licenses. Are you impacted by that? Yeah, we can take that concept of abstraction technically and also apply that to your vendor relationships or anything else, I think. And technically. Did you guys have a relationship with Terraform? Yeah, we actually have a lot of companies who use us as their front end for some Terraform because you need to spin up a VPC or a network or something else, but you also need to run an Ansible playbook and push a CI record into service now. So we fill those gaps. And so for Terraform specifically, we can tie into the provider. We weren't impacted. Oh, you were not impacted on the license. Yeah, we don't manage it. We don't embed it. We don't require it. We just make it better. And we do all the things that it doesn't do by tying the pieces together. So we want to be that platform hub that bring us your Terraform, bring us your Ansible, bring us your VMware. So you're still using the free version of Terraform. We don't use it. Customer, let's pick an example. Customer installs it. They're running it. You go into your Morpheus settings. You're like, yep, there's where I'm at. Here's my Git repo. You need us to automate running that and then spinning up a VM and doing the lifecycle management of that application. That's where we come in. So you're not impacted. You're not even working when the customers are. You're cool. We love it. We have our own provider. There's a rich provider ecosystem. The IP in that is the providers. I mean, the core, it's not that many lines of code. I mean, it's great. It's fantastic. The provider ecosystem is where a lot of the work and the value is. So we want to use it. And now that VMware has got this chapter closing with the original, I call the original VMware. I mean, Historic Company, I call them the Mount Rushmore of tech industries. Virtualization impact is going to well document. Jensen on stage, really. Hat tip to, you know, the little gesture, kind of a hat tip to Ragu's was a personal kind of a nice vibe. But now you have the Broadcom era coming in, which we're expecting. We announced yesterday in the queue, we think it's going to be a $5 billion cut coming and they're going to it's Dave three and give two back to the ecosystem. So nice math there in favor of Broadcom, but that's their, they're shrewd their business. They're very clear. They're not, look at Broadcom has been very clear about what they're going to do. Some people chose not to listen to it, but they've done everything they said they're going to do. Even in numbers, Dave Vellante tracks us down. I love his analysis of Dave. Dave nailed this from day one, but Broadcom hasn't changed anything. He said, we're going to buy VMware. We're going to just make it efficient. Get the numbers in line with how we do business, which means they have to perform. I think you'll see them amp up their business units and they're going to go all in. How does that impact the ecosystem and you specifically, do you have a vision on that? Yeah. We've all seen Jerry McGuire right? Great movie. Like our little company had a very big day. Like was one is like when, when Broadcom made that announcement, it was a very big day for us. Like we love VM. I have nearly a million VMs under management. We've won best of VMworld at this show twice. We have deep, deep integration with VMware. But the amount of CIOs, heads of procurement who've come to us today. I remember we talked to you a year ago. Are you remind me, you can help us blueprint and provision into VMware today and you love it. Might be KVM tomorrow and might be cloud native AWS the next day. Like is that, is that what you do? Like that's what we do. So I think it is an ecosystem play. All the boats are going to rise. Broadcom is going to continue to be a powerful force in the industry, but then again, it just shines a light on the need for an abstraction layer and something that can pull the pieces together. That's a good, I want to ask that on customer question. You don't mind because this comes up a lot in our conversation on our analyst review around relevance. VMware was the most relevant brand for many, many years. And, you know, when you look at the cloud spend, we have data that shows that in some cases in the big accounts, you know, Amazon is getting $100 for every dollar VMware, I guess. Which means that's an extreme example. Those are numbers we heard from the joint customers. In some cases it might be different. But what it means is the attention and the enthusiasm is not on VMware. That's on cloud. That's what the spend is. But VMware's got to get back on the game. They are still relevant, but they're at the risk of mind share relevance. What can they do with their partners to bring that back? I think, I mean, one of the things VMware did fantastic for many years was develop and maintain the ecosystem, right? You'd go to a VMAG or you'd go to hands on labs and it was all about everybody working together. I mean, I really, truly love VMware. A lot of our friends are there. If Broadcom doesn't keep the ecosystem going, I think they're gonna have a challenge because, yeah, like we started, IT's complex. We all have to play together and we can all solve customer problems if we do that right. Yeah, I think, again, they have to undo. And I think VMware has started to do some of it, undo what happened during the EMC and Dell years where it became a more insular closed system. I mean, we were briefly talking about how I even had examples where I was building hands on labs. We built a hands on lab and then we were told, oh, we're not having partners in the hands on lab. And this year, I mean, right now, they literally have five partners and it's just the hyperscalers. So I think, again, I look at the same way that if Broadcom doesn't really embrace the ecosystem, it's going to be tough. I mean, I've said on theCUBE publicly here on this show and before, and Dave and I were riffing when he asked me about what I think Broadcom's going to do. If they're motivated by numbers, which they are, and I think they're going to be true to the brand. They're going to give people some chance to run. I don't think it's going to be as bad as people think. There'll be some cuts, trim the fat, whatever you want to call it in business. But when you look at the numbers, they have to get results. Results are licensed renewals. So when you look at licensed, so you got to look at how many licensed are out there. They got vSphere, they got the core products. But if they have shelfware out there, not installed, you can't charge a license for something that's not installed. And the customer could say, you know what, we're not going to renew that anymore. It's like a domain name when I don't, I don't use it anymore. I'm not going to renew that. I've parked that for a while. You know how to let that go. They got to get their stuff in. I would be focused 100% of my energy on getting my partners engaged in more stuff. And then you go back, then you can renew the license. And then the pricing strategy comes in, but initially more surface area of pricing options, the more renewals you get. I think one of the things we hear from a lot of customers is, yeah, there's so much stuff in my ELA, right? And I pay for it and I got my value, but I don't use it all. And I had a nice chat with a big SI earlier. They said, well, free isn't free just because it's in your ELA. If it takes an army of services people and a bunch of work and you're not really using it, is it a thing? It's Schrodinger's license model. I guess it doesn't exist. So for us, we want to help pull the pieces together, get sticky, provide value to customers so that they can get back to the business of innovation and getting those developers doing what they do. Brad Parks, Chief President of Morpheus Data here in theCUBE, great to have you on. Thanks for taking the time to riff with us and share the story. For the last minute that we have, give a plug for the company. What are you working on? Are you hiring? What's the pitch? Give a plug for Morpheus for the folks watching. Yeah, so again, we're that platform and kind of three lanes I see evolving for us. We work with all the infrastructure providers, right? The Delves and the Lenovo's and the HPEs and we help make their stuff better. We work with the services companies, the Accentures, the Deloids, the others, and then we work with the adjacent software companies. So keep an eye on kind of the middle of all those paths coming together. All right, Brad Parks here in theCUBE, always bringing the A game. Of course, day two of three days of wall-to-wall coverage. Lot more, we got two sets. Dave Vellante's on the other set. I'm here with Rob Strecham, John Furrier. Stay with us for more after this short break.