 Welcome back, everybody, to theCUBE's live coverage here at VMware Explorer 22. We're here on the ground, on the floor of Moscone. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We're at Kit Colbert, CTO of VMware, the star of the show, the headliner at supercloud.world, the event we had just a few weeks ago. Kit, great to see you. Super excited to chat with you. Thanks for coming on. Oh yeah, happy to be here, man. It's been a wild week, tons of excitement. We are jazzed, we're jacked, depending on how you look at this. Jacked up and jazzed, ready to go. So you got on stage, loved your keynote, very CTO oriented, hit to all your marks, cloud-nated, the vSphere 8 intro, more performance, more power, more efficiency, and now the cloud-native over the top. You shipped a white paper a few weeks ago which we discussed at our supercloud event, really laying out the narrative of cloud-native. This is the priority for you, is that true? Is that your only priority? What are the things going on right now for you that are your top priorities? Top priorities, so absolutely, at a high level, it's fleshing out this vision that we're talking about in terms of what we call cross-cloud services. Other people call multi-cloud, you guys have supercloud. But the point is, I think what we see is that there's these different sort of vertical silos, the different public clouds, their on-prem, data center, edge, and what we're looking at is trying to create a new type of cloud, something that's more horizontal in architecture. And I think this is something that we realize we've been doing at VMware for a while and we gave it a name, we call it cross-cloud. But what's important is that while we do bring a lot of value there, we can't possibly do everything. This has to be an industry-wide movement. And so I think what we're really excited about is figuring out, okay, how do we actually build an architecture in a framework such that there's clear sort of lines of responsibility, here's what one company does, here's what another one does, make sure that there's clean sort of APIs between that, basically an overall architecture and structure. So that's probably one of the high-level things that we're doing as an organization right now. What's been the feedback here at VMware Explorer? Obviously the new name, Explore, Raghu laid that out on the keynote. It's about moving forward, not replacing the community, extending the VMworld core and exploring new frontiers, multi-cloud, obviously one of them. Very clever, actually, name, dig into it, it's nuanced. What's been the reaction? You're right, you're crazy, I love it, I need it, it's too early, it's perfect timing. Yeah, it's a little bit of feedback. Always a little bit of everything. You know, I think when it was first announced, people didn't really understand it, I think people were confused about what it was, but now that we're here in person, I think generally speaking, I'm hearing a lot of positive things about it. We've been gone or been apart for three years now, since the last in-person one, and this is an interesting opportunity for recreation, sort of rebirth, right? We've certainly lost some traditions during the COVID pandemic, but it also gives us the opportunity to build new ones. And to your point, VMworld was always associated with virtualization, and of course we're still doing that, we're still doing cloud infrastructure, but we're doing so much more. And given this focus on multi-cloud that I just mentioned, and how it is to go forward focus for VMware, we wanted to evolve the conference to have that focus. And so I've been actually really pleased to see how many folks, it's their first time here, right? They haven't been to VMworlds before, and this broader sort of conference that we're creating to apply to support more disciplines, different focus areas, application development, developers, platform teams, you got cloud management, things with ARIA, public cloud management, networking security, and user computing, all in addition to the core infrastructure bits. So John, all week's been paying homage to Andy Grove talking about let chaos reign and then reign in the chaos, right? And so when you talk to customers, that chaos message, cloud chaos, how is it resonating? Are they aware of that chaos? Are they saying, yes, we have cloud chaos? Are some saying, hey, it's okay, everything's good. And they just maybe have some blind spots. What do you think? I'm actually surprised at how strongly it's resonating. I mean, I think we knew that we were onto something, but people even love the specific term. They're like cloud chaos. They never thought about it that way, but you're like, you're absolutely right. It's a movie. It's a great. Yeah, I know. Sounds like a thriller, but what we sort of, the picture we paint there about these silos across clouds of duplication of technologies, duplication of teams and training, all this stuff, people realize that's where they're at. And it's one of those things where there's this headlong rush into cloud for good reasons. People wanted the speed and the agility, but now they're dealing with some of that complexity that gets built up there. And absolutely it's chaos. And while speed is great, you need to somehow balance that speed with control, things like security, compliance. These are sort of enterprise requirements that are sort of getting left out. I think that's the realization and that's the sort of chaos that we're hitting on. It's almost like in business school, you had the economic lines when break-even hits. Cloud had a lot of great goodness to it. A lot of great value. It still does on the capex side, but as distributed computing architectures become reality, private cloud, obviously instantiation of hybrid cloud operations. Now you got Edge opening up all these new, new net new applications. What are you seeing there? And it's a question we've been asking some of the folks in the partner network. What are some of those new next-gen apps that are going to be enabled by this next wave? Edge specifically, more performance, more application development, more software, more faster, cheaper going on here, kind of a Moore's Law vibe there. What's next? Yeah, so when we look at Edge, so okay, take it today. Today, Edge is oftentimes highly customized software and hardware. It's not general purpose sort of cloud technologies. And while Edge is certainly going to be limited, you can't just infinitely scale like you can in the cloud and the network bandwidth might be a little bit limited. You still want to imagine it or manage it as if it were another cloud location, right? That like, I want to be able to address it just like I address a certain availability zone within AWS, I want to be able to say the specific Edge location that, you know, wherever somewhere here in San Francisco, let's say, right? Now there's a few different things though. The first of which is that you got to manage at scale because you don't have, with cloud you got a small number of very large locations. With Edge you got a large number of very small locations and so the scale is inverted there. So what this means is that you probably can't exactly specify which Edge you want to go to. What instead you want to say is more relational. Like I've got an IoT device out there. I want my app to be and data to be near it. And the system needs to figure out, okay, where do I put that thing and how do I get it near it? And there may be some different constraints you have, cost, security, privacy. It may be your Edge or maybe Telco Edge location, you know, one of these sorts of things, right? And so I think where we're going there is to enable the movement of applications and data to the right place. And this again goes back to the whole cross called architecture, right? You don't want to be limited in terms of where you put an app. You want to have that flexibility. This is the whole, you know, we use the term cloud smart, right? And that's what it means. It's like put the app where it needs to be sort of the right tool for the right job. And so I think the innovation though is going to be huge. You're going to see new application architectures that the app can be placed near a user, near a device, near like an iPhone or near an IoT device, like a video camera. And the way that you manage that is going to be much kind of infrastructure as code base. So I think there's huge possibilities there. And it's really amazing to see just real quick on the Telco side, what's happening there as well. The move to 5G, the move to open ran. Telco is now starting to adopt these data center and cloud technologies, kind of standard building blocks that we use. Now out at the edge. So I think, you know, the amount of innovation that we're going to see there. This is really the first time on Telco they actually have a viable scalable opportunity to put real gear data center like capabilities as location for a specific purpose. The edge function. Yeah. And well, and without building a monster facility. Exactly. Yeah, it's like the base of a cell tower or something. Telephone closets. What we've been able to do is improve these general purpose technologies. Like you look at vSphere and our hypervisor today, we are great at real time workloads, right? Like as a matter of fact, you look at performance on vSphere versus bare metal. Oftentimes that app runs faster on vSphere now because of all the efficiency and scale and so forth we can bring. So it means that these telecom applications that are very latency sensitive can now run fine on there. But hey, guess what? Once you have a general purpose server that can run some of the Telco apps, well hey, you got extra space to run other apps. Maybe you could sell that space to customers or partners. And you know, then you have this new architecture. Is the dev skill set a barrier for the Telcos? Where are we at with that? It is. I think where the barriers are really, how do you provide, I don't know if it's a skill set. I mean, there's probably some skill set aspects. I think in my mind it's more about giving them the APIs to get access to that. Like as I said, you're not going to have developers knowing, okay, here are the specific geographic locations of all the cell towers in San Francisco. And so what you're going to say again, I need to be near this thing. And so use geolocation and figure out, just put it in the right place. I don't really care, right? So again, I think it's an evolution of management, evolution of the APIs that developers use to access. Like today, I'm going to say, okay, I know my app needs to be on the East Coast so I can use US East One. I know the specific AZs. At a cloud level, that makes sense. At an edge level, it doesn't. You're not going to know, okay, like the specific cross streets or whatever. You got to let the system figure that out. Kid, I know you got to go in times tight. Real quick, you had a session here on web three. Yeah. The cube's got the, the cube versus coming soon. We might be having the cube versus coming. Powered by the cube coin. I'm token, we have all kinds of stuff going on. You saw the preview a couple of years ago, we did with the cube coin. Anyway, you did a session on web three and VMware's rolling real quick. What was that about? What's the purpose? What's the direction? That was a fascinating conversation. So I was talking about web three, I was talking about why enterprises haven't really started even to scratch the surface of the potential of web three. So part of it was like, okay, what is web three? It's the buzzwords, we talked through that. We talked through the use of blockchain, how that sits at the core of a lot of web three. Talked about the use of cryptocurrency and how that makes sense. We talked about the consumerization, continuing consumerization of IT. We've seen it with end user devices. We may well see it with some of the web three changes around ownership, individual ownership of data, of assets, et cetera. That's going to have a downstream impact on enterprises, how they go to market, their commercial models. So it was a fascinating discussion that unfortunately it's hard to summarize, but gotten to a lot of the nuances of this and some of the challenges. Are you bullish on it? Very bullish, 100%. Like I think blockchain is a hugely enabling technology and not from a cryptocurrency standpoint, put that aside, all the enterprise use cases. We have customers like Broadbridge Financial today leveraging VMware blockchain, doing 100 billion in transactions a day with a sort of repo market. DeFi is booming. DeFi. So I think we're just starting to get there. But what you find is oftentimes these trends start on the consumer side and then all of a sudden they surprise enterprises. They call it Treadfy, traditional finance. Okay. Are you saying it's the other way around now? No, no. What I'm saying is that these consumer trends will start to impact enterprises. But what I'm saying is that enterprises need to be ready now, or start preparing now for those coming. And what's the preparation for that? Just education, learning? Yeah, education, learning, looking at blockchain use cases, looking at what will this enable consumers to do that they couldn't do before. There is going to be a democratization of access to data. You're still going to want to have gatekeepers. You're still going to want to have enterprises or services that add value on top of that. But it's going to be a bit more of an open ecosystem now. And that's going to change some of the market dynamics in subtle ways. Okay, so we've got one minute left. I want to ask you, what's your impression of the SuperCloud event we had? Also you were headlining in, you guys were big part of bringing a large community of great people together. Are you happy with the outcome? What do you think's next for SuperCloud? No, I was super excited to see how much reception and engagement it got from across the industry, right? So many different industry participants, so many different customers, partners, et cetera, viewing it online. I've had a lot of conversations here at Explorer already. As you know, VM where we put out a white paper, our point of view on what is a multi-cloud service? What is the taxonomy of those services? Again, as I mentioned before, we need to get as an industry to a place where we have alignment about this overall architecture to enable interoperability. And I think that's really the key thing. If we're going to make this industry architectural shift, which is what I see coming, this is what we're going to do. And you're going to be jumping all in with this and helping out if we need you? 100%. All right, all in. I really love your transparency on your white paper. Check out the white paper online on VMware.com. It's the cross-cloud, cloud-native, I call it the mission statement. It's not a Jerry Maguire memo, it's more me than that. It's the direction of cloud-native and multi-cloud. Thanks for coming on, and thanks for doing that too. Of course, and thanks for having me. Love the discussion. Okay, more live coverage here at VMworld Explore, VMware Explore after this short break.