 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. Okay, welcome back everyone. It's theCUBE live coverage here for VMworld 2019. We're in Moscone North in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Our 10th year covering VMworld is the last show that's still around since theCUBE started. EMC world is now part of Dell Technologies world, so VMworld was our first show of theCUBE in 2010 and we're here with then the senior director, now the CMO of VMware, Robin Matlock. Great to have you. Thanks for having me. 10 years ago we were across the street in the south, the first ever CUBE, now 10 years later. What a run. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. Well how about the fact that this is number 11 VMworld for me? So I think we're on like a number 16 or so for VMworld, so yeah, we've been driving this ship for a while and it's still going strong. And you came in the studio, we did a little preview video. One of the things that we talked about and jumped on was this notion of resiliency around VMware. I want to get into that because the keynote this year, I thought really use some of its primetime real estate to highlight tech for good and really some of the efforts around that. So one, shareholder value, you guys have been doing great, stock price is up. But in this era of corporate responsibility and accountability, this tech for good message is real. You guys have been doing it for a while. It's not new, it's not like you're doing it for fashion, it's a real deal. And it was a big part of the keynote. It was, in fact it was really a highlight for part of the keynote for me personally. I mean I think when it's in our DNA and that is consistent with our values and we've been at that for some time, we have that values that are all about customer and community and that's who we are. We also have very high aspirations that of course we have to be performant. We have to perform well as a business and deliver shareholder value. But that isn't enough. I do think that Pat leads this narrative that we as a company have to think about giving back more than we take and it's not just PowerPoint slides, it's real. We empower our employees. I hope you enjoyed the story about Calamede swimming the English Channel all for a cause that he chose, he raised the money, he drove that and VMware just opens up those opportunities to allow our employees to do that. So I think we think it's a really important topic. We tried to give it a lot of air time and give away for him the attendees to connect with it and see what they could take action against. And also you guys are also voted one of the best places to work, so your campus in Palo Alto, beautiful. It is a great place to work. But this is the ethos, but it's still competitive. And I had a Carl Eschenbach recently in our studios in Palo Alto and he made a comment. He's like, you know, I've been at VMware for many, many years. Now he's a VC at Sequoia Capital and Carl said, you know, everyone's been trying to kill VMware. This is going to kill VMware. That's going to kill virtuals. The resiliency just around the staying power of the product and technology leadership happens. This year it's containers. The attendees are excited by it. The numbers are up, 20,000 people here. Still evolution on the technology side, still great community. Yeah, I mean, I think resiliency is in the fabric of VMware, but I think innovation is what is the secret sauce. And we know in Silicon Valley, you better innovate and keep moving forward or you're going to find yourself kind of left out. And, you know, Pat's been an incredible visionary. He's got a team of leaders that are very confident, strong technological disruptors. I mean, some of the big acquisitions that we announced, you know, just last Thursday at earnings that we're educating folks here about the intent to acquire Pivotal, the intent to acquire Carbon Black, you know, further that we'll either do it organically or we'll acquire interesting combinations of companies to drive unique value to our customers. So I think there was a whole bunch of that today. We were talking in theCUBE earlier, Robin, about how that now it's a post virtual machine world. If we go back to 2009, which was my first VM world as well, Paul Moritz at the time said, we're building the software mainframe. Now, of course, you got promoted and I'm sure killed that mainframe from all marketing, but so well done, but it kind of evolved the software defined data center vision, but one of the takeaways for me from the keynote was this notion of any workload, any app, which was kind of the vision back then and now any cloud, which wasn't, the cloud wasn't as prominent then. And so from a marketing standpoint, you've really, the vision has been consistent, but now with all these acquisitions you're making, you're really embracing a much broader vision and your marketing message has to evolve as well. To support that, I think the fact that our vision has been incredibly consistent for many years now. I mean, that's Pat's leadership kind of setting that foundation for the company. My job as a marketer is to help find the way to articulate that in a way that's consumable and people understand. But what's happened over the years is is we deliver on that vision. Because, you know, you lead a vision and it's not all perfect. We don't have every piece of it or it's not all optimized. All of these moves year after year are just validating and supporting the delivery of that vision to our customers. And I think the big moves this year are no different, whether it's Tanzu for Kubernetes, whether it's a carbon black acquisition idea, whether it's Pivotal, these are just steps along a journey that's going to deliver on our vision, which is delivering any application on any cloud consumed by any device, all with security intrinsically built in the fabric. Well, on the gauntlet that you laid down this year in talking to your practitioner audience was that technologists who master multi-cloud will own the next decade. Okay, that kind of says it all, right? And that is a strong message that you're sending to your buyers, to your practitioners. Yeah, and I think the people that are right here at VMworld, these are the kinds of technologists that have that opportunity in front of them. That's why this whole notion of make your mark, it's like lean into this opportunity. Bedding on VMware, building your career on virtualization has opened up many opportunities. It went from compute to storage to networking. It's now into multi-cloud. These are incredible opportunities and these technologists are the ones that can deliver this value for their enterprises. There's diversity in the messages. You know, a lot of the major cloud players say, well, no, just our cloud, you guys are pushing in a new direction. I mean, that's what leaders are supposed to do, right? Our strategy has always been about choice. You know, we've really been advocates of letting customers choose the path that's right for them. And we know in this cloud war that we're all a part of that customers are, they are choosing. Some are leaning into AWS. Some are leaning into Azure. Some are biased towards IBM. Our job is really to enable them to have a rich, powerful experience without friction efficiently and operate those workloads in any of those environments. Have you seen any demographic shift in your primary audience? Because obviously the operating side, even with Kubernetes, they love it, containers, a messaging challenge in and of itself, but still containers seem to be that next step function with Kubernetes that BMs brought to computing. But when you bring in the dev and the ops, that's where it starts to get magical when you start, the operating's got to meet up with the developers. That's been the theme, cloud native, all those enablements coming in. Has there been a shift in demographics to your audience? Well, it is an evolving journey, if you will. And yes, but in still, I think we have a long ways to go. We are largely still have an infrastructure audience here. There's a mobility crowd here. There's a cloud architect crowd here. The new audiences are going to be the platform architects that DevOps community. And we do have shifts in that, but I would say that's part of the value as we bring pivotal into the family. We can now merge these audiences and I think do a much more formidable job of that. It's interesting, Telco will have them on later. 5G was a big part of the keynote as well. A new opportunity, a new affinity group there. Without a doubt, I mean, the whole edge in Telco clouds are really opening up new and entirely new markets. The Telco, the 5G, we do think that's going to be a very significant wave and is going to create new opportunity for new application types, new fundamental architectures that we can now merge between Telco and enterprise. So we think it's really a rich ground for innovation. You mentioned Tivital, I think that's more of they were already in the fold. Now they're officially in the fold with Dell technologies, but your other acquisitions is a lot of them. You got to kind of bring them in the fold. So is there the marketing playbook that they all, you get an offsite meeting, you just give them the playbook. What's the, how do you handle all the integrations? Cause that's always a big challenge. IT integration, messaging integration. Again, it helps if they're on the fault line of the value proposition, but what's your strategy to integrate all these companies? You know, anytime you're doing a lot of mergers and acquisitions, you definitely have to think very strategically about integration. And then sometimes you want to integrate fully right away and sometimes you want to let an acquired company be standalone for a little while. You got to get used to the culture a bit. Like VeloCloud. VeloCloud is kind of independently within the networking team. AirWatch was held very independent for a couple of years. Some other ones are just tuck-ins. You just bring them right into the family. You just merge them in. It just depends on the size of scope, the culture and the strategy. I think we take a very purposeful approach to M&A integration and we don't really have a one-size-fits-all strategy. It depends on the circumstances. So follow up on that because clearly there's an engineering culture here at VMware. And take the carbon black example, for instance. You talked about how you guys have sort of pretested it with app defense. But from your standpoint, how do you think about the architecture of the marketing and the messaging? I think you answered it in part was sometimes it makes sense to keep it separate sometimes. But when you think about the vision, do you look at it and say, okay, this plugs nicely into the vision? And so here's what I'm going to do. How integrated is it with the rest of the sort of decision-making process? I would take the position that all these acquisitions are plugging into the vision. They are, that's why we're buying them because they are very aligned to our strategy and vision. Now, I have the challenge as a marketer to deal with a lot of different brands that are coming into the family and then how and when do I consolidate and kind of unite the brands? And that is a journey that we're going to be on and we'll take some time to do that. You don't want to rush things in that regard. I think it's very important the market sees one VMware, one vision and strategy. If it's delivered in a product and it's through an acquisition as a different brand, that's okay, we can work on that over time. But as long as we're laying out one strategy and vision to the marketplace and just showing these are evidence of proof points of that term. Yeah, I mean, you guys, you're pretty clear. Your strategy is to evaluate, understand where they are in the value chain of what you're trying to do, unlike others like IBM, which brings companies in quickly, makes them IBM. You guys are a little bit different. You'll play with whatever the market will give you just pretty much what I gave you. For example, carbon black experts in security. You know, I think we want to capitalize on that expertise and want to protect that expertise. They've already been partnering with app defense now for some period of time rather than, you know, it's like which one is consuming the other. So our strategy is let's combine app defense with carbon black and then start working with Patrick and carbon black to merge that into the building. Organizationally, I think that's at least what I read was you can set up essentially a cloud security division. Right, that Patrick is going to run. That's right. Okay, so VMworld 2019, what's the update here? Give us some factoids, some of the exciting things happening here. We're in the meadow, there's birds chirping here. Mrs. Musconi, more nice build-out. Always good build-outs here. Musconi, we're back in from Vegas, but what's going on? Labs? We got it all, John. We've got it all. Give us the highlight. Hang on. First of all, you got two great days of keynotes, right? Those are really important highlights. Tomorrow we're going to do some really interesting things. Demo, technical, deep dive, great guest celebrity speakers, right? We're going with the sports theme this year and elite athletes and what they're giving back to the world with Lindsey Vaughn and Steve Young. But here for the program, we have the hands-on labs are on fire. They broke records on Sunday. So I know they've been really well attended and consumed. We have over 600 breakouts. So many, it's mind-boggling. We have 230 sponsors in the solutions exchange. And that's probably a place where you can go, not just get the VMware stuff, but get that good exposure and lay of the land to the entire ecosystem. And they're all showcasing their innovation. What's new? What's the latest? So I think those give people a really good, quick snapshot in one week. You can pretty much get an overview of the entire industry. Are there any must-sees in your opinion or are the people talking about? I think for sure you got to get into this Kubernetes stuff. If you don't come out of this week of VMworld with a good handle on what is Tanzu? What's Tanzu mission control? What are we doing with the Heptio acquisition? What is PKS evolution happening? I think you would be missing something if you don't really grok that. Project Pacific where Kubernetes and vSphere tightly integrated, so that's a must-do. I think there's a lot of happening in the networking space, right? That was pretty bold up there about, what is the opportunity relative to network virtualization and the time is now? So I think you really got to get into that from the data center to the edge, to the cloud, network transformations hot. And then of course, I think the cloud. And I think we're really clear on hybrid cloud and multi-cloud and how to really think about those environments and how of your architecting cloud for your company, what you want to be thinking about? What are we doing across multi-cloud? And I think all that hybrid cloud stuff, it's all there. As we move to this post-VMware world, how do you, what role? Is there a post-VMware world? Oh, look at that. There we go. I don't think there's a post-VMware world. I mean virtual machines. Virtualization. You're changing the name to containerware? No. Right, exactly. So what specifically are you guys doing to sort of educate folks? I mean, obviously you've got a lot of Kubernetes sessions, et cetera, but just in terms of helping people sort of transform their skill sets into infrastructure as a code, being able to take advantage of Kubernetes. You know, we've seen some things in the industry at events like this where guys learn how to program in Python or whatever it is. Are there specific plans to do that? Is that actually happening at the event? Well, that's part of what all this content is about. I mean, 600 breakout sessions aren't about compute virtualization. You can find those, but this is about all these different dimensions, right? Whether it's what is Kubernetes, fundamentals, how you think about that in what kind of environment you're running. And I think that's the spirit of what VMworld is about. It's about hands-on. It's about meet the experts. It's about sessions. It's about the ecosystem. It's about having that all at your disposal in one week. You forgot something. Oh, did I? The parties. The party? Well, that's not helping your technical attitude. Everyone knows VMworld has great parties that night, and that's for all the action. You guys work hard, play hard. What are the ethos of VMworld culture? That's right. That's right. Well, we do work hard, play hard, because this is intense, right? These guys are trying to jam as much as they can into four days, and so we got to let off a little steam, and one republic is on stage on Wednesday night. We're going to have a great time, but I do think it's on the backdrop of them here. They are just like sponges trying to absorb this information. My final question is, and you guys brought it up in the keynote around the tech industry, good, bad, and Pat says neutral. It's how you shape the technology. Really a call to action and strategic imperative to be more proactive in accountability and driving change from good. So I got to ask about the word trust. I've seen a lot of marketing around, companies always try to market around trust, now more than ever the trust, whether it's fake news, company responsibility to security, which is a big part of what you guys do. How do you see that as a marketer, and what's the conversation with VMworld? Because trust is certainly a big part of what you guys do. Is that a marketing, going to be a marketing ethos? Is it built into everything? Just curious how you personally feel about the word trust. Well, first of all, I think it's foundational to doing good, healthy business. I think you got to be very careful as a marketer to market trust. I think you need to demonstrate your trustworthiness. You need to be consistent. You need to be credible. You need to be there when the times are tough. You need to be, you know, not always asking for something in return. And if you earn trust, you don't really have to say it. I believe we can position our validity and our credibility proven. You know, having customers say that we're trustworthy, having customers articulate why they depend on us, I believe that's more effective for our customers. And at the end of the day, probably more authentic. Yeah, and I think people, yeah, that tends to be the trajectory of people who say it. Maybe Devin earned it, right? That's earning is a better market. Yeah, I think these 20,000 people are saying it as they show up here with their time and energy and investment. And I think our customers, you heard from a lot of customers on stage today, Gap, Freddie Mac, Verizon, they'll be more tomorrow. You know, I think there's over a hundred customers in these sessions here, and they're here advocating because they trust VMware. Well, they run their business on you guys. Dave had a survey he did, just published it yesterday. The spend is not going down. I mean, the cloud impacts your business. You're getting into the cloud. So that's pretty obvious, but just overall the business is healthy for VMware. Oh, look, very healthy. And you know, we do that by really trying to have a balanced approach. It is about shareholder value, but it's about tech as a force for good. We're passionate about that. And ultimately we put customers at the center of our thinking, of our decisions, of our behaviors. And I think that ultimately keeps rewarding us. Well, Rob, it's been great to work with you over the past 10 years, continue on. I think you guys have earned the trust. Certainly the proof is in the results. And you know, that's what it is. And the community votes with their wallet on the product and their participation. So congratulations. Well, if that's an indicator, I think we're getting a pretty good report card. Thanks for inviting me. Love being here, guys. Take care. Thank you. Rob and Malak, CMO of VMware here inside theCUBE for our 10th year, but also as VMware goes to the next level, step function with virtualization to containers. Kubernetes, big theme here. I'm Jarvis Dave Vellante. Stay with us for more coverage after this short break.