 Welcome to VMworld 2021. Two days of virtual discussions on innovation, multi-cloud, application modernization, securing your data, new ways to work, transforming the network, expanding to the edge and loads of content to help build your digital business. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCUBE. And with me today is Carol Carpenter, who's the Chief Marketing Officer of VMware. Carol, great to see you again. Welcome back to the program. Thank you, Dave. It's great to be here. Okay, well, so when we last talked last year at VMworld, I honestly thought we'd be back face to face this year. Seems like we learn more every day, every week, every month. How did this year's event come together? What were your priorities in shaping the program? You know, I'm with you. I really hoped we would be together in person this year and here we are, another year of virtual. We are primarily all virtual again, which has some really big benefits in that we're able to reach new audiences who in the past couldn't afford to fly, couldn't afford to take the days and it's taught us a lot. So we really approached this year as how do we create a VMworld experience that is filled with digestible bites? You know, the notion that any of us are gonna sit still for three, two days, three days and pay attention full time is a pretty antiquated notion. You know, we all like to take little bites and tastes of content here and there. And so we really designed the whole program to do just that. And with this, oh, go ahead. No, please, carry on. No, I was gonna say one of the things we really wanted to do this year with VMworld and the reason the theme is imagine that is we wanted to show the world that VMworld is not about your parents VMworld, that this is a company while we're very proud of our virtualization past, what we offer today really spans the gamut, as you pointed out, everything from networking to security to application development platforms. So it's just a different company with different products and solutions for customers. And I love the whole concept of digestible. I call them snackable bites, I love that. And you've put together a pretty impressive lineup. You got superstar names, you got stars inside of our industry and then you, you know, that tech people might know but you've got well-known celebrities. What are you looking forward to this year? And, you know, especially around customer and partner engagements. Yeah, and thank you for highlighting all of that. Like I am super excited about all the different luminaries who are speaking. I am most excited about the customers and partners. Well, every session we'll have a customer as part of it, either a customer speaking or a customer story or a customer quotes really speaking to the value. And with that, we have hundreds of customers presenting customers like some you might expect like FedEx to new SaaS based customers like Toast who provides restaurant software and they just went public to companies like Space 8 Games who provide online games. So a real, I think a real diversity of customers in terms of their transformations and how they're leveraging the VMware solutions and then our partner ecosystem. Really excited this year. We added a new level of sponsorship to bring in some of the, I would say younger customers and younger partners, partners like Reddit and Couchspace and others who are bringing new solutions to market. Yeah, some great names there. Toast, I think the local Boston company, we've been following them. So excited to hear what they have to say. Now, let's talk a little bit about the virtual world. This is your second virtual VM world. I'm interested in what you're doing differently. I want to talk about learnings, but what are you looking forward to in that sense and how has the event grown? Well, the event has definitely grown in terms of the platform. I think the expectations in terms of numbers of attendees, we're expecting over 100,000 and even in this Zoom fatigued world, we still expect high level of engagement. The biggest changes we have made, one, the more snackable content that we've been talking about. Two, we focused this year on a high level of interactivity. So we have Slack channels set up for almost every session. We expect both speakers, customers, prospects to really engage. And then third area that's different is we amped up all of the different activities. We know that people want to interact and network in other ways. So some of the usual things like the bourbon tasting, the wine tasting, but also yoga classes and opportunities to learn from a magician, even some golf tips for those of us who love golfing, really trying to mix it up and create a higher level of interactivity. In addition to all of the platforms you expect for hands-on learning, hands-on labs, practitioner classes, all that's still there. We just wanted to increase the level of engagement. That's super fun, you're really innovating in that regard. And you're right, it's so easy to just multitask and get lost, but if I know, like if I'm really into yoga or I want some golf tip, I'm going to come back at that time and you'll re-engage me, so I love that. The Cube, we have a unique privilege of participating in a very wide spectrum of events, as you can imagine. And we were deeply integrated, Carol, into one of the industry's first big hybrid events this year at Mobile World Congress this summer. And we thought that was like the light of the end of the tunnel, of course we've seen a pullback of this sorts, but we're still doing some physical, we're doing a lot of virtual, we're doing these hybrid events, we've been involved in events where the host and the guests are there with no audience. So I'm curious as to how you see the evolution of conferences in this post-isolation era, what's the learnings, what's changed and what does the future look like for events? Yeah, I mean, I've talked with a lot of my industry peers about this, including the folks over at Mobile World Congress. I don't think the large, the monolithic event with hundreds of thousands of people is in the cards for our near future. And so we've been rethinking like, what does a physical event look like or a set of physical events look like next year that would have an online component where we've always had an online component. So we certainly are not, we won't be shedding that anytime soon. The ability to reach new audiences, new targets, new user groups, we absolutely will keep that. I think in terms of the physical presence, it's exactly what you said, it will be hybrid. We are looking at a series, don't quote me on this because we haven't finalized, but we are considering a series of in-person, more local, more regional events with smaller groups. People still want that engagement. Customers still want to network and talk with each other. Our users want to talk to each other. Our VMA groups, our new groups, like our DevOps loop group, the DevOps folks, they all still want to network. So we want to provide that, but in a smaller, safer, more localized setting. And I think that's the future for a lot of companies. It puts a bigger toll and makes more work for us as the company who's hosting. Meaning, and you too, Dave, you'll be hopefully traveling with us to more of these locations, but it creates a little more strain on the team who's hosting. You know, it's funny, as you well know, when we first started doing virtual events, like I said, we've always been virtual, but largely it was, okay, here are the keynotes, come watch. And now you're, like you say, you gave great examples of how you're increasing the engagement, getting much more creative. And it was a lot unknown last year, you know, especially like last March, it was like, okay, and virtual events are harder in many respects than physical events. And so much of the process has changed, different roles. And I think we're seeing the same thing now with hybrid. There's a lot that's unknown and a lot of trial and error, a lot of experimentation. And, but I think at the end of the day, you can actually have the best of both worlds. What you described, I would call it a VIP locally, VIP event, maybe even role-based, the technical folks. It used to have conferences within conferences, you'd have your CIO event, you'd have your admin event. And so I see a kind of return to that, maybe like you say smaller and safer. And then a much, much larger audience. And it's different in terms of, you know, converting those into loyal customers and so forth. But I think overall, it's a much, much bigger pond ocean that we're playing in. Absolutely. I think if it is, we are going to bring VMworld to our customers and prospects and partners. And, you know, it's pretty amazing. The other part of this you asked earlier about like speakers and some of the luminaries, the fact is getting everyone to travel to one place at one point in time, always had its share of logistical challenges. And being able to, you know, some of it can be recorded in advance, some of it will be in person. Like one thing we did this year is we recorded our CEO, Ragu, with six other CEOs of hyperscalers, talking about the future of multi-cloud and what it means and the role that VMworld plays in this. That's pretty hard to do. Like to get all six of them together in one place at the same time, you know how everyone's schedule is so compacted. So that's what virtual gives us an opportunity to do. Reach, have more interesting speakers, lots of different speakers who potentially couldn't all travel. You don't want to miss that, that event or replay. Let's talk about your role as chief marketing officer. You're obviously putting your fingerprints on this new era, you had no choice. You could have entered in, yeah, we always talked about digital now. It's like, if you're not a digital business, you're out of business and you're living it now. But I'm interested in your strategy for global marketing, the organization, the brand in the coming decade, like you say, the next 10 years aren't going to be like the last 10 years. That's right. Well, let's talk about the brand. So, you know, VMware, the name itself is so tightly associated to virtualization and VMs, right? Which is an amazing history and the story of success. That was really what we like to talk about is chapter one, we pioneered server virtualization, laying the foundation for what today is, the cloud. And then chapter two, we went bigger and broader and we virtualized the entire data center. And now here we are, we're in chapter three and this is the next phase of our brand and our promise to customers, which has really focused on customer-based innovation and helping our customers innovate. And multi-cloud, we really believe it's the center of gravity for everything we do. It's in our DNA, it's how we take constraints, which is a very, you know, multi-cloud can be complex. There are challenges for our customers operating in a multi-cloud world. How do we take that and help them turn it into an asset? How do we help them take that and give them freedom and control? And that's what our brand is about. It's about the and. It's that you can help your developers move faster and retain enterprise control. It's that you can have enterprise apps on any cloud and you can have control and cost savings and enterprise management. So that's what the brand is about, that power of and. And in terms of, you know, how our marketing team is evolving, a big piece is exactly what you said. You know, just digital everything, digital first. Customers want to learn, try, buy online. And as a company, you know, VMware, we're shifting our business model from on-premise license software to more SaaS and subscription services. And you can see that in our earnings and how we've been shifting. And it's quite exciting because with a SaaS and subscription based model, you know, it's all about customers getting full value in helping customers achieve their value and consumption. So for our marketing team, we have shifted from, okay, we want to get you to the sale and one and done to how do we really drive a full life cycle with a customer? How do we help them land and expand and use the products and get value from them and have a meaningful relationship? It's much more of a full life cycle. So we're really excited. We love what we're doing, particularly on the acquisition side, getting helping customers learn, try, buy more easily in a digital world and then being able to follow them through with some physical engagement, events like VMworld and really helping them get the most value out of the products. VMware is really quite an amazing company. I'm super excited as one individual who's been following this company for a long time to see the next chapter and a couple of things. You mentioned innovation and I see so many companies today, they may have a big customer base, they just, it's easy for them, easy quotes to milk that customer base and put out new products that sort of life cycle products. Multi-Cloud is challenging and one of the hallmarks of VMware is it's always had a leader that deeply understands technology. You've done that again with Ragu. And so engineering really drives that innovation. So when I think about cloud generally, and there was some start stops with VMware's cloud strategy, but then you said, you know what? The cloud is an opportunity, it's a gift. We're going to lean in and then you develop some really interesting partnerships. Like you said, all the big cloud companies up on stage here this year. And so Multi-Cloud is going to require deep engineering and a vision to really bring that together. And I think VMware is one of a handful, small handful of companies that can actually pull that off. Well, thank you, Dave. We think so for sure. I mean, we have the history and the foundation and the relationships to be able to do that. I think that what's hard sometimes is that people may or may not know all the different things we do. This Multi-Cloud chapter is really, it's the reality, 75% of our customers are operating, living in a Multi-Cloud world. And if you look at some of the data, it looks like 80, 90% are going that way. And so how do we help them simplify? How do we help customers simplify and innovate for the future? It's definitely in our DNA. It's how we take constraints and turn them into an asset for our customers. We really believe that it shouldn't be so complex and that we want our customers to have flexibility and choice. You should be able to pick which application for which cloud and at any point in time, change your mind as well when there are new capabilities on those clouds. And for us, you've hit it on the head, we did realize and we did learn that we don't really want to compete with the hyperscalers. What they're doing is pretty unique. What we want to do is help customers consume and accelerate their innovation faster. Well, I love the messages and really appreciate, Carol, your time explaining to our CUBE audience kind of your vision as the CMO. And we look forward to an interesting chapter ahead with hybrid events, hybrid cloud, Multi-Cloud and all the rest. Thanks so much for coming back in theCUBE. Absolutely. Thank you for having me, Dave. You're very welcome. And thank you for watching. Keep it right there with great content theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021, the virtual edition. We'll be right back.