 Welcome back everyone, live CUBE coverage here. Day two, VMware Explore. It's the second year of VMware, so formerly VMworld. Our 13th year covering VMware's events. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We've been to every show, Dave. It's been great to watch the progression of VMware as they had the historic run in the computer industry. You know, they invented enterprise computing shaped with virtualization, HDDC, SDDC, software defined data center, HCI, now multi-cloud, super cloud. We're here, Smith Dewan is the president of VMware. Great to see you, thanks for coming back on theCUBE. Well, thanks for having me. Smith, you gave a talk, we were at the analyst briefing before the event started, and you said okay, here's what we're doing, here's our go-to market. A lot of changes were in the works, efficiency and simplicity. You guys have simplified the story for VMware, given the portfolio. What's been the reaction like? Your keynote was awesome yesterday, we saw that going on. What was the reaction? Are people surprised, happy, expecting it? What was the reaction to your news? Yeah, I think there were two or three things we learned as positive surprises. Number one, the interest in the generative AI is, you know, I had Rajiv Khanna from Aeon, I thought he said it quite well. You know, we're excited, but cautious, so there was a lot of excitement reinforced about what we are bringing forward with private AI. And secondly, we didn't want to tell the world that, hey, just like all we're doing is generative AI. Of course we have a role to play as part of multi-cloud to enable sort of generative AI, but we have to keep pushing forward our multi-cloud portfolio. And so it was good to see products like NSX Plus, VSAN Max, Lifecycle Services, Tanzu Application Engine, things that we did to enhance the multi-cloud portfolio were well received. Almost feel like, you know, we could have talked a little bit more about sort of the basic value proposition of Software Defined Data Center because customers are still on that journey towards multi-cloud. But there was excitement on both fronts and people like what we announced. It's interesting, we've been talking to a lot of people in the hallways and one reaction, I'd say seven out of 10 customers that we've talked to, just straw-polling, we're all excited and very confident about the direction of the multi-cloud vision, we call it super-cloud, because they can see that future in their career and the environment that they want to run. Not just have a collection of things, but like run something across the clouds and operate that. And then about 30% were like, no, no, I'm focusing on prem. So either way you win, because the on-premises story is better now than it's ever been because of the AI data IP focus. It's almost a gift. I think generative AI, I truly believe that for enterprises, this private AI concept is going to be important and private AI doesn't necessarily mean on-premise, but because a lot of the data is on-premise, I believe it will lead to stronger usage adoption and growth of private cloud. But there's also a maturity curve, right? I mean, you hear comments like, oh, only 10% of the data is in the public cloud. It's much, much higher than that. And so you've commented on the growth of your cloud. You have a sizable cloud business and we're defining cloud as the operating model. And so we're reaching a different balance, if you will, and sort of maybe not a full equilibrium, but definitely more toward a balance across clouds. And that's where, to your point about career paths, people, they want a future. And we've been talking to a lot of customers here that are, they're all in on VMware. I mean, in a big way. And so to your point about the core, I think they do want to hear more, but there was a lot, the VSan Max, the NSX Plus, VSphere Plus, I mean, there's a lot of meat on that bone. Yeah, I mean, I think you mentioned the careers. Yeah. What's interesting is we've sort of taken these same people who started with just virtualization. Some of them have grown their careers now to be able to handle things, storage, networking and full enterprise computing, going to infrastructure as a code, sort of being able to sort of truly operate that through more coding models. And now we're taking them to the multi-cloud. Some of them are coming. Some of them are learning. And it's exciting to see how the community has grown with VMware. It's hard to see many places like Explore where you have this community with common objective and career growth coming together. And we were talking about that yesterday, things like Vmug, things like other communities that have been built around it. Coming together at Explore and seeing them careers grow is just fulfilling in a different way. You had a great talk around community and training, the technical community. The ecosystem has changed a lot. It looks a lot different than it did five years ago. And it's probably going to look a lot different going forward as Next Gen Cloud comes in. I mean, we see people with ecosystems that are in your ecosystems. As you guys grow and other companies have platforms, there's an ecosystem within the ecosystem. So what's your vision of how the ecosystem's going and what happens next? And the investment in community and ecosystem, we heard Doc Tansen, billions are going into that area. I'm sure everybody wants a piece of that. Yeah, yeah. Well, first of all, the ecosystem for us has grown. We started with an ecosystem. There was no virtualization without servers. So we started with an ecosystem of systems when to store it, network. And then big thing for us was to build an ecosystem of hyperscalers. There aren't very many conferences where every hyperscaler partner and public cloud partner is there and Explore is one of them. And that's why we call it as the center of multi-cloud universe. But ecosystem for us now has to expand beyond, especially around technical skills. One thing that we haven't done as well is to enable coming back to this career thing. We have sort of really held the information, just go make the information on multi-cloud disseminate faster into our community. We could have done better. Okay, so we're investing heavily in it coming back to some of the investments that Broadcom has committed to make. That's part of it, okay? We don't want to run all of the services that we build as a PNL and as a result keep the IP and knowledge that we create to ourselves and only available to the ones who purchase it. We want that to be disseminated without a PNL and that's the objective. And we're hoping community benefits from it and more importantly that leads to successful adoption. When you think about Tanzu application engine and the direction there, where do the developers come from that are going to take advantage of that? Is it the traditional cloud developers? Is it, are they coming from traditional IT? Is it, again, kind of back to career paths and what is VMware doing to facilitate that? Yeah, listen, the developers continue to spin shortage, okay? The infrastructure wasn't ready for developers. So developers had to learn infrastructure and code it into the applications. It was okay when you have, and these are all developers that are building for the cloud, native cloud, okay? Kubernetes is the platform to operate it. So as a result, they're coding things like security policies, network policies, high availability policies into the application. Every application is coded differently by developers and that's not their core skills. Their core skills are to create experiences, the logic behind it. And now all of a sudden you're asking the same developers who are skilled in creating experiences and logic who also have a deep understanding of the infrastructure. Tanzu application engine is to create, is the job is to create an abstraction. So that cloud developers who are best at creating their experience and logic don't have to code those infrastructure policies into their application. They take their application and they just simply attach it to a space. We call it app space. And these settings are configured by the platform team that understand the infrastructure and can keep them consistent at the time the application is provisioned into the app space and as the application lifecycle continues. There's been actually a lot of positive feedback. Tanzu app engine is promising. It's early, it's promising. We're excited about it. And bringing Aria with Tanzu has been a nice compliment. I mean, Aria last year when we talked about it was very strong single pane of glass management piece. A lot of stuff under the covers as well. Tanzu combined, is it interesting? And it's new. This is a new. Yeah, it's a career development thing. It comes back to that. Think about it. Any of the people who are managing private cloud, they're doing it with Aria today. Aria hub creates a mechanism for them to get intelligence of all the sources of VMware infrastructure, which have now been extended to multi-cloud. So they can take their skills, their operating model and don't have to go through a huge learning curve to the multi-cloud. So because at the end of the day they still have jobs to perform. And that's what helps, Aria helps. Yeah, and why? I mean, this is I think an unsung hero at this event. I think, I was talking to Pranin about this yesterday. Aria and Tanzu, Tanzu was kind of misunderstood, in my opinion, could have been, because we're more developer, more cloud native. Where's the application? Where's the P&L? Bringing them together with the hub, you have an end-to-end life cycle opportunity. And when we talk to your customers, Dave pointed it out yesterday on our wrap up, is that the VMware customers, they don't want to pull VMware out. The switching costs are high. So now they have VMware, it's not going anywhere. But as a foundation, it traverses public on-premise and edge. It actually is a traversal scalable, horizontally scalable backplane. It's kind of already doing this super cloud thing. Yeah, I agree. Now putting it on top of it, you run stuff on it. So if the apps land there, there's prospects that that's a running layer across cloud. That's to me, do you see it the same way? I agree. I think the super cloud as you describe it, right? And if you let's say call it as an operating model, because multi-cloud, we define it as a choice. Super cloud, let's call it as, in addition to choice, an operating model. You need some kind of a framework to have that operating model, right? And I completely agree with you that it was a miss on our part because ARIA Hub becomes a foundation of building that operating model. Because you don't want, see, one thinking is, you're going to have one single pane of glass, one way to manage everything. But the reality is that's, you have to almost think of it the opposite way. You have to think about it. You need one place to get all your data and intelligence because once you have that intelligence, you can always use the appropriate tools that are special purpose to operate that specific infrastructure. ARIA Hub is that one place of getting data, intelligence, insights so that you can continue to optimize things, how you operate it can be custom. That's okay, because there are different teams who are doing it anyway. And customers want best of breed. But they don't want a thousand best of breeds. And so there's a level of consolidation that's appropriate and we're starting to see that form in the industry. The industry, since the PC has always had structural layers, where within that layer you've got the best of breed, customers want to tap that. But if they get out of sync and have security, if there are too many tools, they just can't manage it. So that really is your opportunity across clouds. Look, I guess if the big three clouds got together and said, hey, we're going to make it all work seamlessly, then there wouldn't need. Yeah, that would be the death of them. That's never going to happen. Yeah, because they're interested, we're old school, so we always use the old analogies. Like, IBM used to have systems network architecture, SNA, that was a network protocol. Proprietary, to IBM, Digital Equipment Corporation, had DECnet. These were proprietary noses, network operating systems. Open standards killed that, but they stated it on the physical layer. So I think to your point about having that standard layer is coming. No one wants proprietary. I'm not saying AWS is its own thing, but they're AWS. If the customers say I got multiple things and they're not working well, the clouds have to align or they'll lose their customers. That's their innovators dilemma. Totally agree. I mean, I think to some extent what you've defined as super cloud, right? And I see it as an extension of multi-cloud because it's an operating model concept. To some extent, you have to enable that, right? And there are only two ways to do it. Either everyone adopts the same standard, or you abstract, okay? And we believe at this stage, given there is a competing interest from various parties, even when you have a single standard like Kubernetes, the gap is so high that you need a layer of abstraction. Okay, and that's what Aria and Tanzu are about. Yeah, and I think I'm excited by this because I wrote a little clip on my Facebook page. You know, you put a little quote. Beauty's in the eye of the beholder, okay? And we were talking about this on theCUBE years ago, Dave, that we felt that people should customize their own infrastructure, and DevOps was the beginning of that trend. I got to, I'll make my infrastructure programmable. The devs can do it. I'm not going to take what a vendor says I have to do. The choice was by the, in charge of the developers, made the choice. So with AI and what you guys are proposing, Dave, this could be the first time ever where you have literal personalization options for the company to roll their own abstraction. So why wouldn't I want to control my own destiny with my environment and I'll write my own abstraction? Because DevOps is basically, they're coding everything. They're domain-specific AI, exactly. If I'm a financial bank, I've got my own unique things I need. I'm going to roll my own apps so I need to land them somewhere that's going to let me customize that layer, not be told I'm limited by these constraints that the vendor puts in there. I think AI is a good sort of example of this, right? If you think about how AI started, it was effectively so specific to a use case that it was designed by a persona and it was implemented for the same persona, which was data scientist. So you can have a very verticalized stack that was special purpose designed for it. But now with generative AI, that's a little bit different. The use cases are broad. They're enterprise-wide and there are multiple of them and that's where abstraction becomes critical. That sort of is a very similar sort of, if you wanted to extend the world of super cloud now into maybe a super cloud for AI, that's effectively what we are enabling with our private AI foundation. How about the data play? Because I agree, you got the right vision on cross-cloud, multi-cloud, super cloud, whatever you want to call it. With the VSAN Max, you've now got this ability to disaggregate storage, separate compute from storage. Your data play, VMware has not been thought of as a data play. Does this change that? Either through partnerships or direct IP that you develop to make it more attractive to bring AI to VMware? Yeah, listen, we are going to always on the data play have both components because what we are learning is at this point in time and it's similar to language models to some extent. If you think about generative AI, you're going to need a language model, you're going to need an infrastructure, you're going to need a vector database and you're going to need all the AI tooling. What we have done with our private AI foundation is given you choice on language model, given you choice on systems, and then given you key components needed for you in the middle as a layer of abstraction between the two. That includes a vector database, okay? As private AI foundation, that includes a vector database. We believe it's going to serve many common use cases that these language models can run like customer service, source code development, et cetera. But listen, there are going to be highly customized industry-centric use cases and certain language models that our vector database may not have feature function to use. So as a result, we will have a partner ecosystem that you can choose to use as well. It's not like we're going to close our system and not allow you to use AI tooling or AI ops or vector databases from other ecosystem just because we have provided our foundation. And that's what we will pursue. We will keep learning, just like we have done with vSAN to vSAN Max, we provided more and more options for more and more workloads. We are going to do the same thing for more and more options as part of our system for more and more language models. That's our journey forward with data. But I see another opportunity that's emerging for instance a managed service that is a data play. So I'm hearing you're going to provide the tooling kind of like AWS would. You're not necessarily going to build that managed service but that's an opportunity for partners that actually do that. Well, we introduced a managed service program okay for our partners as well as any of our customers who are saying, you know what? We want our infrastructure to be run as a cloud, as a multi cloud, super cloud, but the skill set required for us to go through with that transformation and run it that way is not there. So now we have our managed services partners who do it in consistent VMware prescribed way that is best practice to get the best costs and security. The same managed services we envision the partners because it's built on the similar technology platform to extend to the GNI workloads as well, which is great for customers and for our partners. And they can go vertical. And you can go vertical. Exactly, exactly. Well, you guys had done a great job. You guys reinvented enterprise to be VMware did a very historic it'll be in the Mount Rushmore of tech icons and Silicon Valley as this chapter closes, Broadcom is going to open up another chapter. We expect it to be more of the same, but with a lot of change, we think VMware could reinvent the future. That's what Jensen said. Yes, there was a nice moment on stage where Jensen, the CEO of NVIDIA and Raghu, almost two kids growing up together. Look what we did. You know, smiling. Hey, we got some nostalgia. I mean, those giveaways were pretty phenomenal. Sure, they're going to be eBay for 10 grand. You're going to get 10 grand for those things. I think I might have one. But you guys know IO, you know the data center, that that LLM stuff and foundation is going to drive a lot of new change. You're real prepared for it. In your opinion, because you've been doing a lot as president, I've seen you, your work. You've done a lot of work within VMware, getting things set up. And now this new opportunity is ahead of it. How prepared are you? Because you got simplified the portfolio. You change some of the go to markets. You've got the pyramid. You can segment the market. A lot of great blocking and tackling, chopping wood, carrying water, setting up how set up are you for the next gen? Because to us on the platform side, we're very bullish on VMware. You know, you trim some things around, but the core engine and the install base, the positioning in the marketplace, really in a pole position at this next turn. I appreciate it. What do you think, how prepared do you think you guys are to go the next level? I feel bullish about our core. We have continued to simplify a streamline and we are on, we have a line of sight on where we are headed and we are making incremental progress. So we are excited about our Tanzu and we still have work to do. We want customers to adopt it fast. We want customers to love it. And I think on generative AI, we have tons of work to do. It's early innings. We think our direction is right, but we are going to learn from customers. So these three things, to some extent, all intersect to make that super cloud happen. There are certain areas we feel great about, but this work in our industry never stops. Staying still means falling off. A lot of people are talking about the whole next chapter and we see it very clearly. It's going to be the VMware lining up in the marketplace, driving results. There's clear mandate from the new, broad call the new owner to produce results. It'll give us more focus, you know? It'll give us more focus. Not that we don't have any pressure from our investors today. But listen, after an event like this, where there is a significant investment going into the company, it means we will be on an even sharper edge in terms of delivering innovation than making our customers successful. And you've got great business units set up to do that. I think you said you're putting the wood behind a few arrows. Very focused execution. Yeah, I mean, listen, focus is important in our industry. There's way too many sort of shiny balls we can touch. So we stay core to infrastructure and we stay core to multi-cloud and we just follow where the applications take the multi-cloud. Genitive AI is the new workload, so we are extending the infrastructure towards it. But as a company, we are focused on that and that's going to be important and we are actually happy that that's the North Star that Broadcom sees as well. Submit, thank you for coming on theCUBE and sharing perspective. Congratulations on a great event and all the success you've had and looking forward to catching up in the next quarter or so and following up. Same thing, thank you for having me. Submit here in theCUBE. President of VMware bringing down 13 years, day two of three days of live coverage. We'll be back with more coverage after the short break you're watching. theCUBE, the leader in tech coverage in SiliconANGLE, extracting the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back.