 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of VMworld 2019 in San Francisco, California. We're here at Moscone North Lobby Tube Sets. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, 10 years, our 10th season of theCUBE coming up on our 10-year anniversary, May of 2020. But this is, we're in our 10 years of theCUBE. Our next guest is Sanjay Poonan, Chief Operating Officer of VMware, who took the time out of his busy schedule to help us do a commemorative look back. Thanks for coming to our studio and follow us. What a missus, John. Dave, great fans of yours and congratulations on the 10-year mark with VMworld. We really appreciate your partnership. We really appreciate it. One of the things we love doing is covering, as we call that thing, Dave and I coined the term, tech athletes, you know, kind of with the whole joke of ESPN of tech that we've been called. And really tech athlete is just someone who's strong in tech, always fighting for that extra inch, always putting in the hard work, discipline, smart, competitive. You fit all that above. Plus you interviewed athletes today on stage. Real athletes. Real athletes at a tech show. So I guess they would qualify as tech athletes. Dave, John. That's pretty funny. It was a great time. We've been trying to, you know, VMworld is now, the first time was 2004. So it's our 16th season here. And traditionally many of these tech conferences are really boring because it's just PowerPoint, dead by PowerPoint. Lots of tech, tech, tech, tech breakout sessions. And we're like, you know, last year we thought, why don't we mix it up and have something that's inspirational education. We had Malala and it was a huge hit. People were crying at the end of the session. We said, well, let's try something different this year. And we thought the combination of Steve Young and Lindsay Vaughn would be great. And you know, listen, just like you guys prepped for these interviews, I did a lot of prep. I mean, I'm not, I'm a skier, but I'm nowhere close to an avid skier. I watched her during the Olympics. Huge fan of Steve Young. So that part was easy, but preparing for Lindsay was tough. There were many dynamics of that interview that I had to really think through. You want to get both of them to converse. You know, he's, she's 34, he's 55. You want to get them to really feel like it's a good, and I think it kind of played out well. And I'm very grateful for that. And you were watching videos, a great prep. Congratulations. I tried to. I tried. It's a culture of bringing the humanization aspect that was a theme about tech for good. Also, you believe in culture too. And I want to get your thoughts on that. You recently promoted one of your persons that she has a chief communication officer. Or Joan Stone. Joan Stone. One of our stars. You promoted from within. This is the culture you believe in. Talk about your ethos around culture. Yeah, Joan's a rock star. We love her. She's just hardworking, credible, well-respected inside VMware. And when we had an opening in that area a few months ago, I remember going to her team meeting and announcing, and the team erupted in cheers. I mean, that to me tells me that somebody who was well-liked from within, respected from within, and pure level and the organization support for a promotion of that kind, a battlefield promotion is great. Big fan of hers. And this is obviously her first show at VMware along with Robin Matlock. So we kind of, both of them as the chief marketing officer, Robin and Joan Stone. And Robin, the same story with Carl made her interim first, but then she became CEO. You made it permanent? Yeah, you made it permanent. We want them to both do well. They have different disciplines. Susan Nash, who does our alliances, you know, if you include my chief of staff, four out of the six of my direct reports are women. And I'm a big believer in more women in tech. Why? Because I want my Sophia, who's 13 year old, to not feel like the tech industry is something that is not welcome to women in tech. So, you know, we really want to see more of them. And I hope that the folks who are reporting to me in senior positions, senior vice president as an example, can be a role model to other women who are aspiring and say, one day I want to be like a Joan Stone or Robin Matlock or Susan Nash. John and I both have daughters, so we're passionate about this. And tech is everywhere. So virtually whatever industry they go into. But I've asked this question, Sanjay, of women before on theCUBE. I've never asked a man. And because you have a track record of hiring women, how do you succeed in hiring women? Sometimes we have challenges because we go into our little network, it's convenient. What's your approach? You've got to blow up that network and basically say, first off, if that network is only male or sometimes unfortunately white male or just Indian male, which is sometimes the nature of tech. I mean, if you're looking for a new position, tell the recruiters to find you something that's different. Find me a woman. Find me an underrepresented minority like an African-American Latino. And those people exist. You just have to go either build a network yourself so you've got those people on your radar or go look. And that's more work on us as leaders, but we should be doing that work. We should be cultivating those people because the more you promote capable, first off, you have to be capable. This is not some kind of affirmative action approach. We want a capable people. Someone shouldn't get the job just because they're a woman, just because they're a minority. That's not the way we work. We want capable people to do it, but if we have to go a little further to find them, we'll go do it, that's okay. They exist. So part of my desire is to cultivate relationships with women and underrepresented minorities in the world that can actually, in the world of tech, and maintain those relationships because you never know, you're not going to hire them immediately, but at some point in time, you might need to have them on your radar. Sanjay, I want to ask you a big picture question. I didn't get a chance to ask Pat this morning. I was at the bar last night, just having a little dinner, and I was checking out Twitter and he said, the time has never been, it's never been a greater time, or more important time to be a technologist. Now I saw that and I went, interesting, what does that mean? Economic impact, social impact, and I know we often say that, and I don't say this to disparage the comment. It's just to provide historical context and get an open discussion about what is actually achievable with tech in this era and what we actually believe. So I started to do some research and I started to write down. First of all, I presume you believe that, right? On your trusty napkin at the bar, I can tell. So there's never been a more important time to be a technologist. And it's your company, it's your, Pat, so I presume you agree with it, yes? I agree, absolutely. So I slipped it back to the 1900s, electricity, autos, airplanes, telephones. So you, we as an industry are up against some pretty major innovations. With that historical context, do you feel as though we can have a similar or greater economic and social impact? Let's start with economic first and social next time. Maybe we should do the opposite, but economic, absolutely. All those inventions that you have are all being reinvented with technology. The airplanes are all being driven by software. Telephones are all driving through 5G, which is all software in the future. So tech is really reinventing every industry, including the mundane non-tech industries like agriculture. If you look at what's happening in agriculture, IOT devices are monitoring the amount of water that should go to a particular plant in Brazil. Or the way in which you're able to use big data to kind of figure out what's the right way to think about healthcare, which is becoming very much tech-oriented. Financial services, every industry is becoming a tech industry. People are putting tech executives on their boards because they need an advice on what is the digital transformation's impact on them. Cyber security, everyone's threatened by this. Part of the reason we made these big moves in security, including the acquisition of carbon black is because that's a fundamental topic. Now, social, we have to really use this as a platform for good. So just the same way that a matchstick could help warm a house and could also tear down a house is fire good or bad. That's been the perennial debate since people first discovered fire. Technology's just the same way. It can be used for good, it could be bad. And our job as leaders is to channel the good and use examples of where tech is making a bit of force for good. And then, listen, some parts of it may not be tech, but just our influence in society. One of the things that pains me about San Francisco is homelessness. And all of the executives that are partnered to help rid this wonderful city of homelessness may have nothing to do with tech. It might be a lot of our philanthropy that helps solve that. And those of us who have much, I mean, I grew up in a poor upbringing from Bangalore, India, but now I have much more than I have than I grew up. My obligation is to give back. And that may have nothing to do with tech, but it may have to do all with my philanthropy. Those are just principles by which I think when you live it, you're a happier man, happier woman, and you build a happier society. Sanjay, I want to get your thoughts on a comment. I asked a random set of college students, thanks to my son, tapped the network, as you said, your daughter, to look at Pat's commentary on theCUBE here this morning. Pat was talking about tech for good. And here's some of the comments back. I like the part about tech for good and humanity. Tech with no purpose is meaningless. Tech backed by purpose is more impactful is what Pat said. And then the final comment was, and Pat's point about quality engineering, backing, quality purpose was great. So again, this is Gen Z, not millennials. But again, this is the purpose where it's not just window dressing on an industry. It's neutral fire. I like that argument with fire, because that's a good one. I'm talking about Facebook, weaponizing Facebook. Could be good or bad, right? Same thing. But the younger generation, your new demographics that are coming into cloud native, this is what they think. No, and I think that's absolutely right. We have to build a purpose-driven company. That's purpose is much more than just being the world's best software infrastructure company or being the most profitable. We have to obviously deliver results to our shareholders. But I think if you look at the Milton Friedman quote and paper that was written that said, the sole purpose of a company is just making profits. And every business school student is made to read that. I think even he would probably agree that, listen, today, while that's important, the modern company has to also have an appropriate good that they are focused on, whether it's social good or not. And I don't think it's a trade-off of being able to have a purpose-driven culture that makes an impact on society and being profitable. And Dave pointed out yesterday on our intro analysis, the old term was, because I was going, oh yeah, Michael Dell and Pat, shareholder value. Dave pointed out it's stakeholder value because now the stakeholders are employees and society, so congratulations can keep it going. And the millennial generation, just like your son and our kids, want a purpose-driven company. They want to know that the company they're working for is having an impact. It's not just making an impression. You know, you do that at shows like, but having an impact. And you know, fire is the most popular icon on Instagram. Is that right? Yeah, fire means good, like you're fire, you're hot. I don't know, guess whatever. Fire, comment there was good. Sanjay, now on business front, okay. Again, a lot of inflection points happen over 10 years. We look back at some of Nasirah, the ABIS relationship which you know all about. But Dave also brought up a nuance which we talked about in the intro, AirWatch. You were part of that acquisition. Again, a big part of it. So what Nasirah did for the networking SDDC movement that shaped VMware as it is today, your acquisition and you were involved in also shaping the end user computing, which is also going to kind of come together with the cloud native stuff. How is this coming to market? I mean, you, I forget. My comparison with Carbon Black, because AirWatch wasn't number one. I know, I'll build on that. So very good. Carbon Black is not considered. Yeah, no, let's talk about it openly. And we talked about it some in the earnings call because we got that question. Listen, I was very fortunate and blessed to work on the revitalization of end user computing. That was turbocharged through the acquisition of AirWatch. At that time was the biggest acquisition we did. And both Nasirah and AirWatch put us into core new markets, networking and enterprise mobility what we call now the digital workspace. And they've been successful thanks to not just me. It was a team of village that made those successful. There's a lot of parallels to what we're doing with Carbon Black and security. As we look to the security industry, we feel it's broken. I alluded to this, but if I could replay just 30 seconds of what I said on stage, very important for your viewers to know this. If I went to my doctor, my mom's a doctor and I asked her, how do I get well? And she proposed 5,000 tablets to me. It would take me if I had 30 seconds of pop to eat a tablet, a couple of weeks to eat 5,000 tablets. That's not how you stay healthy. And the analogy is 5,000 vendors and security all saying that they're important. In fact, they use similar words to the healthcare industry, viruses. I mean, you know, and what do you do instead to stay healthy? You have a good diet. You eat your vegetables, your fruit, your proteins, drink water. So part of a diet is making security intrinsic to the platform. So the more that we can make security intrinsic to the platform, we avoid the bloatware of agents, the number of different consoles, all of this plethora of tools that's led to this morass. And what happens at the end of that is you've got these point vendors, okay, who get gobbled up by hardware companies that's happening, spattered by hardware companies and sold to private equity companies. What happens to talent, they all leave. We look at this landscape as it's ripe for disruption. Much the same way we saw things with AirWatch and, you know, we had only companies focused on VDI and we revitalized and innovated that space. So what we're going to do in security is make it intrinsic and take a modern cloud security company, Carbon Black, and make that part of our end point security and security analytics strategy. Yes, they're one of two companies that focuses on the space and when we did AirWatch, they were number three. Good was number one, Mobile Iron was number two, and AirWatch was number three and in VMware's hands we've got number one. The perception in this space is, you know, Carbon Black's number two and CrowdStrike's number one. That's okay, you know, that might be placed from multiple vendors, but that's the state of it today and we're not going point against CrowdStrike. Our competition's not just an end point security point tool. We're reshaping the entire security industry and we believe with the integration that we have planned with Carbon Black, that product is really good. I would say just as good in some areas ahead of Carbon Black, not even counting the things we're going to integrate with it. It's just that they didn't have the go-to-market muscle. I mean, the sales and marketing of that company was not as further ahead. That we changed at VMware, we've got an incredible distribution. We'll bundle that also with the Dell distribution and that can change and it doesn't take long for that to change. A lot of customers here want Carbon Black, so that's the way in which we roll. There's a lot of growth there. Yeah, it's plenty of opportunity. To follow up on that, because you've obviously looked at a lot of companies and CrowdStrike, I mean, huge valuation compared to what you guys paid for Carbon Black. I mean, I'm a buyer. I mean, if I'm a buyer, I like what we paid. Well, I had some color to it. I mean, just when you line up the, was it really go-to-market? I mean, some functions maybe not there. There was a few product gaps, but it's not. They're very nominal. But when you add what we announced in our roadmap, app defense, volume management, the integration of works-based one, this category is going to be reshared very quickly. Nobody, I mean, the place we're probably going to compete more is Symantec and McAfee, because most of those companies are kind of decaying assets. You know, they've gotten acquired by the companies and they're not innovating. So I'd say the bulk of the market will be eating up the leftover fossils of those sort of companies as companies decide that they want to invest in legacy technologies are more modern. But I think the differentiation from CrowdStrike will be very clear as we integrate these technologies in the v-sphere. Let me give you an example. With app defense, we can make that workload security agentless. Nobody can do that. Nobody. And that's app defense with Carbon Black. Huge innovation. I described on stage workspace one plus Carbon Black is like peanut butter and jelly. Management security should go together. Nobody can do that as good as us. What we do inside NSX. So those four areas that I outlined in our plans with Carbon Black pending the close of the transaction. Into v-sphere, agentless. With workspace one, unified. With NSX integrated and into secure state, you know, in the cloud security area. If we take that and then send it through the VMware, the Dell and other ecosystem channels like, you know, IBM security, Optiv, CDW, you know, I think dimension data, all the security savvy partners here. I think the distribution and the innovation of VMware takes over. And long-term, yeah, CrowdStrike may have a very legitimate place, but our strategy is very different. We're not going point tool against point tool. We're shaping the security industry. Yeah, we're platforming it. But you're not done building that platform. Yeah, there's going to be a lot more to do. So my obvious question is, are there other assets inside of RSA and secure works that you'd like to get your hands on? I mean, listen, at this point in time, we are good. I mean, it's the same thing like asking me when we acquired AirWatch and ICR, are you going to do more networking and mobility? Yeah, but right now we've got enough to digest. In due course, yeah, four or five years later, we did acquire Arcane for network analytics. We acquired VeloCloud for SD-WAN. We are cloud recently, Avi. So the approach we take at VMware to innovation is first, if you're going to have an anchor acquisition, make sure it's got critical mass. I mean, buying a small startup with only three, five people, 10 people doesn't really work for us. So we've got 1,100 people with carbon black. We're going to build on it. But let's build, build, build. Build, partner and then acquire. So we will partner a lot with a lot of players that complement carbon black and we'll build a lot around this. And years from now, we need to add another token acquisition, but we feel we get a lot in this acquisition for both end point security and security analytics. Okay? It's too early to say how much more we will need and when we will need that. But you know, our goal would be, let's go plot away, build a billion-dollar business and then take it from there. I have one more security question, if I may. Okay, sure. So, and I'm not trying to pit you against your friends at AWS, but there are some clear areas where you're counter poised. Steven, this runs on AWS. Carbon black, natural partnership over cloud. It helps your cloud SaaS business. I like the acquisition. But Steven Schmidt at Reinforce, the cloud security conference at AWS, said, you know, this narrative in the industry that security is broken is not the right one. Now, we, by the way, agree with this. Security's a do-over. Pat Gelsinger, we talked about that four or five years ago. But in AWS as the shared security model, when you talk to the practitioners, they're like, oh yeah, they cover the S3 and the compute, but we have the real work to do. So help me square that circle. Yeah, I think if AWS builds security services that are intrinsic to their platform and they open up APIs, we should leverage it. But I don't think AWS is going to build workload security for Azure compute, or for Google compute. That's again, you come back to VMware's or into vSphere, like app defense. That's not their core DNA. And they were like, well, that's not our goal. You go do it VMware. So from my perspective, come back to heterogeneity. If there's a workload security problem that's going to require security at the kernel of the hypervisor, EC2, Azure compute, containers, Google compute, who's going to do that? VMware, hopefully. Hopefully better than anyone because we understand the server workloads. Okay, now get to the client side. There's Windows endpoints. There's Mac, there's Linux. Who should do that? We've been doing that for a while in the client side and added with Workspace One. So I think if you believe there is a Switzerland case for security, just like there was a Switzerland case for management, endpoint management. I described endpoint management, endpoint security, going together like peanut butter and jelly, whatever your favorite analogy is. If we do that well, we will prove to the market just like we did with AirWatch and endpoint management. There is a new way of doing endpoint security that has been done ever before. None of these guys, let me give an example. I've worked at Symantec 15 years ago. I know a lot about this space. None of these guys built a really strategic partnership with the laptop vendors. Dell was not partnering strategically on their laptops with Symantec, but why? Because this wasn't a priority. Then they were, you know, and a key part to what we're doing here is going to be able to do endpoint management and endpoint security and partner with Dell. They announced unified workspace integrated into the silicon of Dell laptops. Okay? We can add endpoint security to that capability next. Why not? I mean, if you can do management security, so you know, we think that Workspace One will get standard to Workspace Security with the combination of Workspace One and security. We're very, and carbon black. Sanjay, we talked about this on our little preview and it's really, really done to us. We don't need to go into it. The Amazon relationship cleared the way for the strategy and the stock price since October 2016 has been up. But one of the things I remember from that announcement that I heard from the field, sales folks that were salespeople for VMware, as well as customers was, oh, finally, clarity around what the hell we're doing with cloud. So I bring up the go to market and the business side. The business results are still strong, doing great, you guys doing a great job. How do you keep your field troops motivated? I know, you know, Michael Dell says these are all on a strategy line. So when we do these acquisitions, you got a lot of new stuff coming in. I mean, how do you keep them trained, motivated? You have to constantly simplify. Whenever you get complex because you add into your portfolio, you go back and simplify, simplify, simplify, make it Sesame Street simple. So we go back to that any cloud, any app, any device diagram, if you would, which had security on the side and we say, now let's tell you, looking at this diagram, how the new moves that we've made, whether it's Pivotal and what we're announcing with Tanzu in the container layer, that's in that any app layer. It's carbon black and the security layer, but the core strategy of VMware stays the same. So the any cloud strategy now with the relevance now, what AWS, who's our first and preferred partner, but if you watched on stage, Freddie Mac was an incredible story of moving 600 apps into VMware Cloud and AWS. And Tim Snider talked about that very eloquently. This is the deputy CTO there. Ratty Murthy at CTO of Gap basically goes out and says, listen, I got 800 apps. I'm going to invest a lot on premise. And when I go to the cloud, I'm actually going to Azure. But keep winning, keep winning, keep motivated through winning. And you articulate a strategy that constantly tells people, listen, it's their choice of how they run in the data center, in the cloud. It's their choice. And we basically play on top of all those. In the any cloud app world, that's how we play on the same with the device and the security. A lot of great things, having Sanjay, thanks. Well, wait, you know what a cricket fan I am. Congratulations, India won by 318 goals. Is that what they're called goals? I guess the West Indies run. I think you should stick to football, man. And be a 49er fan for a change. When you get Tom Brady, when you get Tom Brady's a keynote, we'll know we'll be in good shape. Wasn't Steve Young and Lindsay Watt are awesome today? So inspirational and we just love them. Thank you very much. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. 10 years. Congratulations to you. Any CUBE moments you can point to? All of them. I mean, I think when I first came to, I was, who are these guys at SAP? Like, who are these guys, right? John and Dave. And I was like, man, they're authentic people. What I like about you is you're authentic. Real good questions. When I came first year, you grilled me a lot on airwatch. Like, hey, this could be big hat, no cattle. What are you going to do? And you made me accountable. You grilled me on AWS. You're grilling me right now on cloud native and modern apps and security, which is good. You keep us accountable. And hopefully every year that we come to you, we want to show as a team that we're making progress. And then we're credible back with you. That's the way we roll. Sanjay, thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Okay, we're live here. Stay with us for more of this short break for San Francisco VMworld 2019.