 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome to theCUBE special coverage of VMworld 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We have Stu Miniman, Dave Vellante all doing interviews covering the virtual version of VMworld. First time it's ever happened. We've been covering VMworld for over 10 years, our 11th season with theCUBE at VMworld. And of course it's different, it's virtual, but we're doing our part. We're getting in the programs. We need to get the stories out. And we've got a great guest here, Sumit Duvallan, who's the chief customer officer of VMware, back to VMware. He ran the end user computing of which we covered. AirWatch, a lot of great announcements. Sumit, great to see you. Thanks for coming on to theCUBE virtual. John, great to see you again and great to be back on theCUBE. So great to see you. And again, I know you came in, you're back into the wheelhouse of VMware. But as the theme of this show is putting the digital foundation for an unpredictable world also with COVID and going virtual, makes a lot of sense. However, VMware has been doing extremely well on the business performance side and making all the right tech moves. We've been covering them theCUBE, it's well documented. The business model is evolving. The performance is there. You are in a new role for VMware. It's newly created, chief customer officer. Tell us why you're back, why this role, why is it important? Yeah, great question, John. You know, I joined VMware because VMware, I looked at sort of what VMware is trying to do all aligned with what customers want. If you think about customers, they have been up until now dabbling with cloud, building sort of strategies on how to embrace cloud, which applications will go to which parts of the cloud. And it has been something that has been more of a slow roll strategy and with a multi-year cloud transition plan. Now VMware provides to some extent, this started out with operating system for the hardware and it has evolved to provide operating system for the cloud. It truly runs applications across multiple clouds. And with our partnerships with AWS, Azure, Microsoft, Google, we're able to sort of give our customers this multi-cloud platform for them to run any application, whether that's traditional or modern in a sort of unified operational fashion. Now, this is a different subscription world for customers, right? And customers in the world of cloud, especially when they're going into this kind of a transformational journey, you know, it requires VMware to think slightly differently. It's not just the traditional cell implement support kind of a customer model. You have to really help them achieve their outcome over a period of time and then make them successful as they continue to sort of face the uncertainties of the multi-cloud world. So Pat and Sanjay decided to create this new customer experience office and all different functions from success, support, digital engagement, as well as our consulting professional services, TAMS were put together so that we can offer integrated experiences to the customer. And that sounded exciting. And you know, we're making tons of interesting innovations there. Some announced at VMworld and very much aligned with an objective to help our customers move on to cloud. I want to dig into the news and the announcements because I think there's a specific thing I'd like to drill into, but I want to get your thoughts to me because I think VMware, and I've talked to Sanjay about this as well as Pat, clearly Kubernetes is the dial tone of the internet and investment cloud native, Project Monterey speaks to multi-cloud, totally get it. But COVID has accelerated, not only VMware, every company, whether they're on the delivery side of it, selling side or even consuming of the technology cloud, for instance, has forced the digital transformation and it's catching some people off guard, right? So I want to get your thoughts because you know, you have a value project and you sell it to customers, you implement it, you support it. I mean, that was a nice groove swing for enterprise vendors like VMware, but now with COVID and all the digital transformation acceleration, it's causing a lot of people to be ready faster. How do you get that readiness? What are you bringing to the table? What's your view on this? What's your reaction? Because if people try to figure this out, it's confusing. I mean, I, you know what, it's very interesting. For example, I will give you an example. There's like two extremes and both of them are dealing with a very similar situation, all caused because of COVID. Okay, on one end of the spectrum, there are customers who are saying, listen, our business is doing extremely well because of digital and all of a certain business needs this rapid agility which can only be achieved through modern applications and they're able to sort of move these applications because of elasticity of the cloud and leveraging multiple clouds to do so is extremely important. If you're on one side of the spectrum on your business where the business is doing extremely well, you have a percentage of the business that was coming from e-commerce, all of a certain that e-commerce has accelerated. You know, you can think of certain retailers, you know, large scale retailers in that segment. And there, their multi-cloud journeys are accelerated mostly because of just this surge in demand and change in capabilities that are needed to perform digital engagement with customers at a much, much rapid pace, which are very difficult to do without leveraging multiple clouds. That's one extreme. The other extreme is, you know, I'll give you an example from large scale airlines and we all know in the travel hospitality airline business, this is extremely slow business for them, right at this point of time and they're using the opportunity of this sort of time when things are slower to say, okay, why don't we take this opportunity to fundamentally change our digital engagement and truly embrace multi-cloud while doing so because there is an opportunity to do so, the workload on the applications and the infrastructure is not high. Little more technology reasons, little bit more sort of a downtime reason sort of go through the transformation faster. In other words, both ends of the spectrum, I'm seeing customers move towards sort of this destination faster. And guess what? There is really no one at this stage outside of VMware who can help them achieve that because otherwise you've said a single voice. You know, there are players who will guide you to their singular cloud solution and running, you know, what I tell customers is multi-cloud doesn't mean you are running two different architectures on two different clouds, right? That's not multi-cloud. Multi-cloud means running a singular architecture on multiple clouds because that's when you get true governance and true operational scale and true experience and elasticity and control. And that's what VMware is all about. So we are now engaged with those conversations and helping customers at both the front end, right? When they're engaged with us at this stage but we have also now tailored our service delivery and our success offerings and how we engage with customers digitally and sort of technically and through people in once they start their journey with us and they sort of embark on leveraging the technology into multi-cloud. So that's the sort of shift that has occurred. Yeah, I want to unpack the offering in a second but I want to stay in the customer experience for a minute. We've heard that cliche, oh, customer experience, oh, digital transfer. Okay, it's actually happening now and I totally agree with you, by the way. There's the modernization trend. You just basically spoke to the spectrums but it's about modernization. Okay, if you think modernization, you think business model. The business model is, hey, it's pretty light right now. I'm not a lot of people traveling. Let's retool, let's modernize. Let's use our resources and modernize our business which is a lot of applications. It's everything up and down the stack. And then the companies that have a tailwind with COVID who have had the epiphany and saying, if we don't build a modern app or have modern apps in market, we're out of business. So there's a critical urgency to coming out of it with a growth strategy. That's a business model transformation. Totally get that. That's where the customers are. So the question for you is, okay, how do you talk to the customer that is saying, hey, I'm building a modern app. We have to pivot. We're forced to pivot. Whatever word you want to use, forced to survive. They're now, they have to build a modern app. How do you guys support that customer? How does that customer, what does that customer need to be successful? Yeah, I mean, I think it starts with an architectural approach, right? We bring to the customers an architectural approach across multiple clouds that help them when they go for their existing applications or new modern applications, conforming to one operating model and one architecture. Because in this time, you know, customers have many critical line of business applications. This airline customer I was talking about, they have 600 applications that are quite critical. They sort of segment them out on which one they will truly modernize because of the business model modernization, like you mentioned, and which ones they will live with the way they are for multiple reasons. And how it starts with connecting them with a unified architecture and a unified operating model is how we start with customers, okay? And that is where the power of VMware comes in. Because like I said, it becomes this architectural operating system for the customers to run and adopt multiple clouds. You got to be the chief customer officer. You're the quarterback, you're the one in charge of making sure that customers are happy, okay? And they get what they need. And again, there's different aspects of it. What are you guys announcing at VMworld 2020 virtual that people should pay attention to around servicing customers in this new subscription and SaaS world? Yeah, I think besides the technology announcements in terms of modern sort of a multi-cloud platform, the architecture with Project Monterey, from the customer experience side, we did announce make two announcements. One was for customers embarking on a journey. We want to make sure that customers get everything they need to be successful on the journey on an ongoing basis. Some of these journeys for large customers, John, can take not just sort of three months, but three years because they are dealing with the various applications. So for that, we announced two pretty simple and easy to embrace offerings. One is app navigator. App navigator enables customers to quickly assess which applications have to be on one end rewritten, completely rewritten. And on the other end, simply sort of rehosted, okay? And there are multiple options in between and we call them as a five-hour model with customers. And we guide customers through our own assessment and working with customers on how to sort of segment their applications and use a common architecture across all of them that we can then help them with. And secondly, to help them with, we announced something called Success360. Success360 is our mechanism to guide and help customers on an ongoing basis for a success plan with continuous sort of adoption guidance, design workshops, as well as providing the dedicated support that customers need for embracing multiple cloud across all the cloud with this architecture. This way, customers get assured that they're able to get the right upfront sort of assessment on applications and ongoing success, okay? And that's sort of what we announced within customer experience side. And we have enabled all of this available to people, that are critical for large scale engagements, but also digital, just like our customers are innovating with digital, we innovated with our own digital environment and we brought it all together with something called Customer Connect, all available with one single digital experience that's mobile-friendly, alert-driven, search-driven, all the AI that's needed at this point in time in terms of engaging with customers with proactive notifications and guidance in terms of how they're doing with success built into a singular experience so that they can engage with us and we can engage with them to make them successful. And so it's people and technology you guys are bringing to the table. What can customers expect? Because as they've worked with VMware, you've always had great technical support, obviously there's been a technology-driven company, but as you start getting into SaaS, you're starting to get into the business model transformation. How do you guys- That's right. Impacting the customers and how you go to market and how you service your customer base? Yeah, I think there are two elements what customers can expect. One, they don't have to stand up in engagement and experience model completely separate for a small set of applications on a completely different cloud architecture. They can just fit and build a single experience of dealing with VMware as a mechanism to enable all of their applications to be hosted regardless of which cloud they're in. And they do it at their own pace as in when they're ready for applications. Secondly, and more importantly for the business model transformation side, we have a model where we continue to show them the value realization, okay? Because these are true business model transformations. At this stage, there is a lot of investment that's coming into IT, while at the same time, the rest of the business is doing belt tightening. So there is a continuous pressure on our customers, our IT that is the champion for the customers and they're working with developers in line of business teams and they have to continue to show how what they're investing into as a singular platform or an architecture is going to deliver some kind of a value on an ongoing basis. So we have delivered on an ongoing basis, reports and feedback and continuous sort of information back to the customers so that they can take back to their businesses on all the investments they're making now are on an ongoing basis, what value the business is getting. Because at the end of the day, in this, this is probably the first time where IT is probably getting the least belt tightening in the case of sort of an economic downturn and in fact, IT has been looked at as a way to invest out of the downturn, right? So they're going to be in a way where they're sometimes even going into the boardroom and showing not just governance but also sort of the investments they made or what kind of value they got. So those are the two things we're providing. Seamless and at pace move to multicloud with a common experience and second ongoing value realization that they can communicate wherever they need to. Submit, you know, we've been following VMWare for many, me personally first since it was founded but with theCUBE since 2010, it's our 11th year. You know, we've been critical of times and pointing out the obvious and some cases not so obvious successes and challenges. And so we've seen the completeness of vision evolve and Pat certainly, you know, he held the line and he did the right things and then he executed. So, you know, as you look at VMworld, we're now been complimentary on some of the moves certainly on the technology side that you guys have made. And then we've, again, we've talked about this many times on theCUBE. So completeness of vision, check. Okay, there's still some Michael Dell issues but Dave talks about that. So good vision, complete, executed, business performance is there. But as you talk about SaaS and subscription, your ability to execute is going to be a key variable in things like the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the areas you're competing in in multicloud. Talk about how you guys are set up financially to support that personnel. What is your organization going to do? Can you share your vision of how you're going to be able to execute customer success programs as this uncertainty around multicloud continues to become reality and things are changing. Yeah, I think a couple of things. Firstly, you know, to be absolutely candid, you know, the pace at which the customers are going to the new multicloud models is faster now than it was nine months ago. We just discussed that. Okay, so I wouldn't, I would be misrepresenting if I said we always were ready for this kind of a pace. We are also adjusting and innovating at this stage as fast as possible. The good news is that we were headed in the right direction. Okay, if we were headed in the wrong direction, it would have been much, much harder. Okay. Secondly, I think there is a very strong leadership team. The leadership team, I mean, at the end of the day, it's vision, leadership team, investment, the three key components, and then of course, diligence to execute that comes in for the execution. To me, vision and the direction was always very, very strong. It motivated me to join VMware for this important mission and many other executives. Second, the leadership team is as strong as it could get. The core team is extremely strong. We have strong leadership team, leadership from Pat, Michael of course, as well as Sanjay, Raghu, Rajiv. Everyone provides strong leadership. And then third, you asked about sort of the financial element. You know, the company continues to perform quite well, right? We have core businesses that become critical for customers to use as technologies to enable them to come out of this sort of economic issue we are facing and they're facing. So as a result, financially, we're in a good position to be able to invest back into the business. And secondly, we have made now, we've always, always been extremely strong on the technology front, okay? Now with Sanjay and Pat sort of saying that we are going to be extremely strong in terms of customer experience front because the world of subscription, the world of cloud, the world of this SaaS requires not just great technology but also great customer experience. So we're seeing tremendous continued sort of support financially in terms of investing into the customer experience from both getting the right set of people offerings as well as technology. So I believe we have all three things. Having said that, you know, some of these things that we are investing in they need a lot of work. And while I'm proud of what we have accomplished I truly believe, you know, the best is yet to come and the right investments that we are making are going to continue to sort of enhance our offerings both through people as well as technology but there's work to be done. You know, it's all about, you know, having the consumability of the technology to the value proposition of VMware and also as a company being open and easy to work with and consumable that way. So I think this is a great time. Certainly product-wise, business-wise, you guys do extremely well. Congratulations on your new role in the senior leadership as the chief customer officer of VMware. We'll be following the stories of your customers. So I really appreciate you taking the time. Thank you. Thank you so much, John. Excited to be back at VMware. Great to have you back on the queue. VMworld coverage of 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier, this is the host of theCUBE virtual. Check us out at cube.net and also our new CUBE 365 where it's our new modern application for virtual events. Of course, we want to continue to tell the most important stories and cover all the key people making it happen. Submit, thank you for coming on. This is theCUBE. Thanks for watching.