 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. This is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host, Stu Miniman. Day one, wall-to-wall coverage of VMworld 2018. Yan Bing Li is here. She's the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Storage and Availability at VMware. Great to see you again, long-time CUBE alum and Beth Phalen, President of the Data Protection Division at Dell EMC. Also a many-time CUBE alum and alum of the Malboro Studios. Great to see we just saw each other a couple weeks ago, so welcome back to theCUBE. Big day, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Yan Bing, let's start with you. We heard Pat Gelsinger this morning talking about the superstars. Things like AI, these megatrends. What are you seeing, particularly in your world, of the megatrends? What are the tailwinds? Yeah, I love how Pat described the megatrends, whether it's cloud, mobile, IOT, and AI. And really, I think the common theme of everything at the very center of it is data. Data is the live blood of all of these megatrends. And certainly for being someone working in a storage space, we definitely are excited to see that how that's not only going to drive a storage consumption, new technology demand, new requirement into storage, but really make data an extremely important angle. So certainly from the storage and the availability business point of view, we're excited about the growth of our business around VCN hyper-converged infrastructure. We have some exciting announcement done by NDGSE this morning. And we're taking VCN, not only putting it in the cloud, but truly deeply integrated with technology in the cloud and leverage the elasticity and the massive scale of the cloud. So I do think what's exciting to me is looking at those four megatrends. I think the common thread is about data. And when I look at what Beth and I do together, we do a lots of collaboration around data protection, data management. Yeah, so Beth, you don't bet against the data, do you? You've been in this business for most of your career, right? I mean, it's been a good bet. But what are you seeing from your perspective? I mean, the same megatrends all impact data protection. And they bring new twists to the requirements of ensuring that you can still have access to your data no matter what happens. But when you move to a multi-cloud environment, when you move to the edge, when you start thinking about IoT, there's a whole nother set of attributes that are required to make sure you can still have that same kind of confidence. So it's a really fascinating time to be in data protection. You know, this morning we talked about in one of our announcements how we now have data protection integrated with vCloud Director. We also have Cloud DR to VMware Cloud on AWS. So we're continuing to overlay the use cases that we all know well, disaster recovery, backup, data management, but now overlaying them onto these new, these new deployment models and new configurations. And data protection is more important than ever. I mean, it just, you can't want a business without having confidence you're going to be able to get your data back. One of the things I find pretty interesting because I've lived in engineering is people look at this and say, oh, well, I'm going to live in a lot of different environments. Oh, we'll just port it here, report it there. Oh, you know, VMware takes the stuff and pushes the cloud. There's a lot of engineering work. Maybe give us a little bit of insight as to how these joint solutions, what kind of joint efforts are involved and how much really work needs to go in for these various environments. Yeah, so maybe I'll start. I think first of all, VMware is transitioning from a software company to truly embrace cloud as our core DNA. And even the experience of taking our entire software defined data center software stack into the cloud was quite an eye-opening experience. I remember, Stu, last year, we spoke with one of our principal engineers about the early days of VMC on AWS. So I think we've seen, we have to transform our software development practice fundamentally, truly adopt a CI-CD type of practice. And a lot of these things is what can keep us on this very rapid cadence of cloud-like delivery. So transforming our engineering culture, that's an important angle. The other thing is also to truly understand the difference of the cloud requirements versus what the enterprise customer may be looking for and to be able to adapt our product and technology toward that. I think some of these unique requirements, like when we did the VCN backed by EBS projects, we have to truly be able to characterize the performance cost trade-off between EBS and the old-flash environment before we make the right architectural decision on how we build the product. We're very excited to see how cloud is not only driving our company culture but fundamentally changing how we build products. Yeah, that's great. Yeah, I mean, I agree with everything that you said and what we find is while people want to take advantage of a multi-cloud configuration, they want to continue to be simple and seamless and so doing things like a failover to the cloud with two clicks and then failing back with three clicks, it's the same expectation, right? If moving to the cloud required a lot of manual steps was something that became more onerous or affected performance, then it would lose the benefits and so you have to continue to strive to engineer things that meet all of those requirements on performance, simplicity, reliability but now in this more diverse multi-cloud environment with more distribution, so it's a very interesting engineering problem and in terms of collaboration, we've been, you know, our teams talk regularly, we are up at the, we have people who are at the offices in VMware and really the only way to do it is just some good old-fashioned engineering discussions, right? There's nothing that can replace that, right? Sometimes you just have to get people in front of a whiteboard and talk it through. Yeah, and I want to give a real examples of that. We announced as a beta, the native VCEN integrated data protection, this is essentially building a highly scalable set of high-performance snapshots natively out of VCEN but as we think about how we build that into a full data protection solution we're collaborating with a best team with real co-engineering, co-located engineering teams together and building our solutions. That's going to be natively integrated into VCEN and certainly in the future, that will also go to VMC on AWS. Actually, we've also adopted a cloud-first mentality, you know, we're not shipping this capability first to on-prem customers, we're actually pushing it to VMC first. So... That's great, Yung Ving. So, okay, so that's a choice of where you're going to deploy, does it also have implications on how you develop the underlying code and the approach you take? It does, I mean, what are the nuances there? Yeah, I mean, a couple of things, one, truly transitioning to a scrum, to an agile process with scrum development processes and that's more than a simple transition, that requires a whole different mindset and moving towards the concept of microservices instead of a monolithic sort of old school but enabling something that can one in a cloud environment, one in AWS, can also one on-prem. So, it does require a significant change. So, we're tight on time. I want to talk a little bit about the power women of tech. First of all, you guys both engineers? Yeah. You are, okay. Started that way. Yes, yes. That's interesting, maybe come back to it. You're very comfortable, both of you, because I've talked to you both before about the whole women in tech piece of it. Last year at this time, we had a discussion that was pretty open and transparent. There was the poor, misguided soul from Google who wrote the Jerry Maguire letter and that whole thing. It seems like quite a long time ago where Satya Nadella at the Grace Hopper Conference had stuck his foot in his mouth. But I wonder if you guys can give us the state of the state from your perspective. Right. The state of the state. I think we are not quite there yet but there is a tremendous effort going on. So yesterday I kick off my experience at the show actually speaking to our hands-on lab staff, speaking to the women's staff at the hands-on lab. If you think about what happens at hands-on lab, it's super technical. I mean, these are the people who support our customers doing deeply hands-on technical experiments with our products. And we've been trying to push for a higher level of women representation in those hands-on lab staff. And we successfully increased the participation women by 100% from like 20 last year to over 40 this year. I mean, these are the folks that really are what we call the hidden figures of VMworld. They're the one that make VMworld a great experience for our customers. I think, yeah, there are lots of efforts like this happening at this event, certainly in our respective organizations. But I have to say, you know, the numbers still don't seem to move the needle yet. And this is also what make it so important for Bess and I to call up here, because this is probably one of your only... Is it the only? Right, interviews. So I want to ask you, so I asked another executive earlier this year about that. So, and I asked him about quotas, and that's kind of a bad word, right? So I said, but how do you actually change the balance without quotas? And I thought, well, I got a great answer. I'd love to hear yours, but she said to me, you got to look outside your traditional networks. That's how. You can't just go to the people that you know. You have to dig deeper. You have to work harder, Dave. I thought that was a good answer. You know, sort of enlightening, maybe obvious. What do you think? What I find encouraging is when I visit the engineering sites, there's always young women in the intern population and the recent college grads. So I can see a difference, you know? Like it's unusual for me to go somewhere and not interact with, you know, at least a few women who are part of our summer interns or our recent college graduates, whereas you go with the people who are more my age and it's in a very, very unusual. So I'm encouraged by the number of young women going into computer science, but I do absolutely agree with you on being, and you know, there is more, it is definitely a required focus to really move the needle, because it's not going to happen without discipline and focus. I've never asked this, but what's the gaming culture like? Are young girls and women, are they gamers or not so much? I don't think as much, no. Yeah, so that's another concern, right? Yeah. A lot of the gamers are into crypto, they're into... Yeah, that's a, you know, that play out in my household because I have two girls and a boy. I see, for example, my daughters at a very young age, they were, you know, they're naturally good with all the STEM topics, and they were very into computer science. So I'll give you an example, my girl attended a kind of an expo, and she approached the guy who's demoing a robot demanded to see the source code. It's like when she's like nine or 10. But now they're like early in high school. I think I see some of that went away. You know, on the other hand, you know, here is my son into crypto, he's doing Bitcoin mining, he's, you know, hosting services and making money with advertisement, you know, trying to do blockchain-based storage offering. Yeah, I definitely see that play out right in my household, you know, that, you know... Have your son give me a call, will you? Yeah. No, but it's true. My 14-year-old boy is similar, maybe not as advanced, but my girls are like, no way, I'm not interested in that. So that's a bit of a concerning trend. I mean, we can say, though, maybe just to, that Dell Technologies and VMware truly are putting an effort into this. For sure. It is something that matters, and there's a recognition that having more women in all ranks of engineering does help. It brings more creative solutions, it gives different perspectives. So it is, you know, good to work for a company that takes it seriously. Well, it's always great having you guys on. You're so comfortable talking about this topic. You're both great leaders, and I really appreciate you coming back on theCUBE. It's always fun. We always have a good time. Thank you, Steve. All right, keep it right there, everybody. We'll be back to wrap day one from theCUBE at VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas. We'll be right back.