 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. I've got a CUBE alum with me next. Ajay Patel is here, the SVP and GM of Modern Apps and Management at VMware. Ajay, welcome back to the program. It's great to see you. Well, thank you for having me. It's always great to be here. Glad that you're doing well. I want to dig into your role as SVP and GM of Modern Apps and Management. Talk to me about some of the dynamics of your role and then we'll get into the vision and the strategy that VMware has. Makes sense. VMware has created a business group called Modern Apps and Management with the single mission of helping our customers accelerate the digital transformation through software. And we're finding them leveraging both the edge and the multiple clouds to deploy on. So our mission here is helping be the cloud agnostic vendor for application development and management through a portfolio of Tanzu and we realize solutions, allowing customers to both build and operate applications at speed across these edge data center cloud deployments. And the big thing we hear is all the day two challenges, right? Of managing costs, risk, security, performance. That's really the essence of what the business group is about. How do we speed idea to production and allow you to operate at scale? When we think of speed, we can't help but think of the acceleration that we've seen in the last 18 months. Businesses transforming digitally to first survive the dynamics of the market. But talk to me about how the pandemic has influenced, catalyzed VMware's vision here. You can see in every industry, this need for speed has really accelerated. What used to be weeks and months of planning and execution has materialized into getting something out in production in days. One a great example I can remember is one of our financial services customer that was responsible for getting all the COVID payments out to the small businesses and being able to get that application from idea to production matter of 10 days. It was just truly impressive to see the teams come together to come up with the idea, put the software together and getting production so that we could start delivering the financial funds the company needed, but to keep them viable. So great social impact are great results in matter of days. And again, that acceleration that we've seen there, there's been a lot of silver linings, I think. But I want to get in next to some of the industry trends that are influencing at modernization. What are you seeing in the customer environment? What are some of those key trends that are driving adoption? I mean, this move to cloud is here to stay. And most of customers have a cloud-first strategy and we rebranded this from a VMware as a cloud smart strategy, but it's not just about one particular flavor of cloud. We're putting the best workload on the best cloud. But the reality is when I speak to many of the customers is they're way behind on the modernization plans. And that's because the simple idea of, you know, lift and shift are completely rewrite. There's no one size fits all. And they're struggling with how to take both their, the development teams, their IT assets, the applications and modernize across these three things. So we see modernization kind of fall in three categories. Infrastructure modernization, the practice of development or DevOps modernization and the application transform itself. And we are starting to find out that customers are struggling with all three while they want to leverage the best of cloud. They just don't have the skills or the expertise to do that effectively. And how does VMware help address that skills gap? Yeah, so the way we looked at it is we put a lot of effort around education. So on the, everyone knows containers and Kubernetes is the future. They're looking to build these modern microservices, architectures and application. A lot of investment and just kind of putting the effort to help customers learn these new tools, techniques and create best practices. So CUBE Academy and the effort and the investment putting in just enabling the ecosystem with the skills and capability, the one big effort that VMware is putting. But more importantly on the product side, we're delivering solutions that help customers both build, design, deliver and operate these applications on Kubernetes across the cloud of choice. I'm most excited about announcements around this product we're just launching called Tanzu Application Platform. It is what we call an application of their platform. It's about making it easy for developers to take the ideas and get into production. It's kind of bridging that gap that exists between development and operations. We hear a lot about DevOps as you know, how do you bring that to life? How do you make that real? That's what Tanzu Application Platform is about. I'm curious if your customer conversations, how they've changed in the last year or so in terms of app modernization, things like security being board-level conversations. Are you noticing that that is rising up the chain that app modernization is now a business critical initiative for our businesses? So what I'm finding is it's the means, it's not the, it's a, when you think about the board-level conversations about digital transformation. I'm a financial services company. I need to provide mobile fintech and competing with this new age application and you deliver the same service that they offered digitally now, right? If I'm a retail bank, I can't go to the store, the retail branch anymore, right? I need to provide the same capability for payments processing all online through my mobile phone. So it's really the digitization of the traditional processes that we're finding most exciting. In order to do that, we're finding that no applications in Ireland, right? They had to take the existing financial applications and put a mobile front end to it or put some new business logic or drive some transformation there. So it's really a transformation around existing application to deliver a business outcome. And we're focusing it through our Tanzu lab services, our capabilities of Tanzu application platform all the way to the operations and management of getting these products in production or these applications in production. So it's the full lifecycle from idea to production is what customers are looking for. And they're looking to compress the cycle time as you and I spoke about to the agility they're looking for. Right, definitely a compressed cycle time. Talk to me about some of the other announcements that are being made at VMworld with respect to Tanzu and helping customers on the app modernization front and that aligned to the vision and mission that you talked about. Yeah, wonderful. I would say they're kind of, I put them in three buckets. One is what are we doing to help developers get access to the new technology, factor that skills learning part of it. Most excited about Tanzu Community Edition and Tanzu Mission Control Starter Pack. This is really about getting Kubernetes stood up in your favorite deployment of choice and get started building your application very quickly. We're also announcing Tanzu application platform that I spoke about. We're going to beta two for that platform which makes really easy for developers to get access to Kubernetes capability. It makes development easy. We're also announcing marketplace enhancements allowing us to take the best of breed ISV solutions and making them available to help you build applications faster. So one set of announcements around building applications delivering value, getting them turned to a market very quickly. On the management side, we're really excited about the broad portfolio management assembled. We're providing the customers a way to build a cloud operating model. And in this cloud operating model, it's about how do I do VMs and containers? How do I provide a consistent management control plan so I can deliver applications on the cloud of my choice? How do I provide intrinsic observability, intrinsic security so I can operate at scale? So this combination of development tooling, platform operations, and day two operations along with enhancements in our cost management solution with cloud health or being able to take our universal capabilities for consumption driving insight and observability that really makes it a powerful story for customers either on the build or develop or deploy side of the equation. You mentioned a couple of things that are interesting consistency being key from a management perspective, especially given this accelerated time in which we're living. But also you mentioned security. We've seen so much movement on the security front in the last year and a half with the massive rise in ransomware attacks, ransomware now becoming a household word. Talk to me about the security factor and how you're helping customers from a risk mitigation perspective because now it's not if we get attacked, it's when. And I think it's really starts with, we have this notion of a secure software supply chain. We think of software as a production factory from idea to production. And if you don't start with known good out of artifacts to start with, trying to wire in security after the fact is just too different though. So we started with secure content, curated images, content catalogs that customers are setting up as best practices. We started with application accelerators. These are best practices that are codified with the right guardrails in place. And then we automate that supply chain so that you have checks in every step of the way, whether it's in the build process and the deploy process or in runtime production. And you have to do this at the application layer because there is no kind of firewall or edge you can protect. The application is highly distributed. So things like application security and API security is another area we announced when you're offering at VMworld around API security. Everything starts with an API endpoint and you have a secure. So security is kind of woven in into the design, build, deploy and then runtime operation. And we're trying to wire this in intrinsically to the platform with best of breed security partners now extending and evolving their solution on top of us. What's been some of the customer feedback from some of the new technologies that you announced? I'm curious. I imagine knowing how VMware is very customer centric. Customers were essential in the development and iteration of the technologies, but just give me some of the idea and customer feedback in this direction that you're going. You know, there's a great exciting example where we're working with the army to create a software factory. You want to never imagine, right? The US Army being a software digital enterprise. We're partnering with what we call the US Army Futures Command in a joint effort to help them build the first ever software development factory where army personnel are actually becoming true cloud native developers. We're equipping these soldiers to do cloud native development. Everything in the terms of practice of building software but also using the Tanzu portfolio in delivering best in class capability. This is going to rival some of the top tech companies in Silicon Valley. This is a five year prototype project in which we're taking cohorts of soldiers making them software developers and helping them build great capability through both combination of classroom based training but also strong technical foundation and expertise provided by our lab. So this is an example where, you know the industry is working with the customer to co-innovate how we build software but also driving the expertise that these personnel have, right? As a soldier, you know what you need. What if you could start delivering solutions for rest of your members and in a productive way? So very exciting. It's an example where we've leapfrogging and delivering the kind of the Silicon Valley type innovation to a standard practice. It's traditionally been a procurement driven model. We're trying to speed that and drive it into a more agile delivery factory concept as well. So one of the most exciting projects that I've run into the last six months. The Army Software Factory. I love that. My dad was an Army medic and combat medic in Vietnam. And I'm sure probably wouldn't have been apt to become a software developer but tell me a little bit about the it's a very cool project and so essential. Talk to me a little bit about the impetus of the Army Software Factory. How did that come about? You know, this came with strong sponsorship from the top. I had a job opportunity to be at the opening of the campus in partnership with the local Austin College. And as General Millian team spoke about it, they just said the next battleground is going to be a digital backup algorithm. It's something we're going to have to put our troops in place and have modernized not just the Army but modernize the way we deliver it through software. It speaks so much to the digital transformation we're talking about, right? At the very heart of it, it is about using software to enable whether it's medics, whether it supplies either in a real-time intelligence on the battlefield to know what's happening. And we're starting to see user technology is going to drive dramatically the next, hopefully the next, what we don't have to fight it's more of a defensive move but that capability along is going to be significant. So it's really exciting to see how technology has become pervasive in all aspects in every form factor including the US Army. And this partnership is a great example of talk leadership from the Army Command to deliver software as an innovation factory for the Army itself. Right, and for the Army to rival Silicon Valley tech companies that's pretty impressive. Pretty ambitious, right? In partnership with one of the local colleges. So that's also showing in terms of how to bring you talent, that shortage of skills we talked about. It's a critical way to kind of invest in the future in our people, as we build up this capability. That's excellent, that investment in the future and helping fill those skills gaps across industries is so needed. Talk to me about some of the things that you're excited about. This year's VMworld is again virtual but what are some of the things that you think are really fantastic for customers and prospects to learn? I think as R.C. Yoragu said, we're in the third act of VMware. But more interestingly with the third act of where the cloud is. The cloud has matured. Cloud 2.0 was really about shifting using a public cloud for the IS capability has. Cloud 3.0 is able to use the cloud of choice for the best application. We're going to increasingly see this distributed nature of application. I asked most customers, where does your application run? It's hard to answer that, right? It's on your mobile device. It's in your storefront. It's in your data center. It's in a particular cloud. And so an application is a collection of services. So what I'm most excited about is all business capabilities being published as an API. I had an opportunity to be part of a company called Sanoha and then Apigee. And we talked about API management years ago. I see increasingly this need for being able to expose a business capability as an API. Being able to compose these new applications rapidly. Being able to secure them. Being able to observe what's going on in production and then adjust and automate. So you can scale up, scale down or deploy the application what's most needed in minutes. That's a dynamic future that we see. And we're excited that VMware is right at the heart of it. We're that cloud agnostic software player that can help you whether it's your development challenges your deployment challenges or your management challenges in this future of multi-cloud. That's what I'm most excited about. We're set up to help our customers on this cloud journey regardless where they're going and what solution they're looking to build. Alji, what are some of the key business outcomes that the cloud is going to deliver across industries as things progress forward? I think we're finding the consistent message I hear from my customers is I want to leverage the power of cloud to transform my business. So it's about business outcomes. It's less about technology. It's what outcomes we're driving. Second, it's about speed and agility. How do I respond, adjust kind of dynamic continuous? How do I innovate continuously? How do I adjust to what the business needs? And third thing we're seeing more and more is I need to be able to manage my costs and I get some predictability. I need to optimize how I run my business. What they're finding is the cloud that costs about auto control. They need a way, better way of knowing the value that they're getting and using the best cloud for the right technology. Whether it may be a private cloud in some cases, a public cloud or an edge cloud. So that ability is going to select and move and have that portability. Being able to make those choices optimization is something they're demanding from us. And so we're most excited about this need to have a flexible infrastructure and a cloud agnostic infrastructure that helps them deliver these kinds of business outcomes. You mentioned a couple of customer examples in financial services. You mentioned the army software factory. In terms of looking at where we are in 2021, are there any industries in particular maybe essential services that you think are really prime targets for the technologies, the new announcements that you're making at VMworld? Which we're saying to see is this is a broad change that's happening. If you're in retail, you're kind of run a hybrid world of a digital and physical. So we're seeing this blending of physical and visual reality coming together. FedEx is a great customer of ours and you see them spoken as example of it. They continue to both drive operational change in terms of being delivering the packages to you on time at a lower cost. But on the other side, they're also competing with the primary partners and retailers in some cases, right? From a distribution perspective, for Amazon with Amazon Prime. So in every industry, you're starting to see the lines of learning between traditional partners and competitors. And in doing so, they're looking for a way to innovate, innovate at speed and leverage technology. So I don't think there is a specific industry that's not being disrupted, whether it's FinTech, whether it's retail, whether it's transportation logistics or healthcare, telemedicine, right? The way you do pharmaceuticals, how you deliver medicine. It's all changing. It's all being driven by data. And so we see a broad application of our technology. But financial services, healthcare, telco, government tend to be a kind of a traditional industries that we really shine on. But I think the reach is pretty broad. Yeah, it is all changing. Everything is becoming more and more data-driven. In fact, many businesses are becoming data companies. If they're not, they need to otherwise. Their competition, as you mentioned, is going to be right in the review mirror ready to take their place. But that's something that is, that we see that isn't being talked about, I don't think enough. It's some of the great innovations coming out as a result of the situation that we're in. We're seeing big transformations in industries where we're all benefiting. I think we need to get that word out there a little bit more so we can start showing more of those silver linings. For sure. And I think what's happening here is it's about connecting the people to the services. At the end of the day, these applications are means for delivering value. And so how do we connect us consumers or us employees or us as partners to the business that we operate with, both digitally and in a physical world? And we bring that in a seamless experience. So we're seeing more and more experience matters, you know, service quality and delivery matter. It's less about the technologies, back again to the outcomes. And so very much focused in building that platform that our customers can use to leverage the best of the cloud, the best of the people, the best of the innovation they have within the organization. You're right. It's all about outcomes. Ajay, thank you for joining me today, talking about some of the new things that the mission of your organization, the vision, some of the new products and technologies that are being announced in VMworld. We appreciate your time and hopefully next year we'll see you in person. Yeah, thank you again and I look forward to the next VMworld in person. Likewise, for Ajay Patel, you're very welcome. For Ajay Patel, I'm Lisa Martin and you're watching the CUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021.