 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware Radio 2019, brought to you by VMware. Hey, welcome back to theCUBE's exclusive coverage of VMware's Radio 2019, Lisa Martin with John Furrier-John. We started really right in early this morning with a very excited Pat Gelsinger. VMware, this is the 15th radio. Radio is R&D, innovation, offsite. There's about 1,800 VMware engineers from lots of B.U.'s, very competitive event, very passion-driven event, and really just, is what a great manifestation of the VMware culture and the spirit of innovation. This is the best of the best event, and this is the story around Radio 2019. It's really a accumulation of multiple years, as you pointed out, of cultural innovation, engineering. VMware has always been an engineering culture, coming out of Stanford, and from day one, they've had that guiding principle. They've also been open and transparent, as we heard on theCUBE interviews today. That has created the culture of community. Open source dives beautifully into it, and so Radio is about that accumulation of the talent. It's the best of the best internally. They submit papers, it's a bottoms up process, so it's truly a meritocracy from an engineering standpoint, but it's a culture of engineering, and their job is to come up with the future, and what's notable about this event is it's the second year now theCUBE's been here. Last year was the first year they've invited press, so three outlets from the media were allowed, we're one of them, and we get exposed, you get to look under the hood, and look at the engine of innovation coming down the road for VMware and their partners. So it's a super exciting event. Radio is a community within VMware that's now global, 50% outside of North America and the United States, all bottoms up, a hive mind, we heard that here, really successful for VMware to continue this, bringing the press in, get the stories out there, take that transparency and open message from the content, we can share it, we get access to the data, it's a beautiful co-creation formula with theCUBE and VMware, it's a success, and their challenges, can they take it global and extend it? And this is day four of Radio 19, and you can hear the amount of people that are still here, still passionate, these are projects that they're doing outside of their day job, so the transparency that you talked about, I loved when we were talking with David Tenenhaus about the bottoms up approach, that this is not a set agenda, we're going to talk about blockchain and IoT and security, this is driven, as you said, from 1,000 plus submissions of people who want to have papers presented here. People don't want to leave, because this is like a kid in the candy store, it's like being intoxicated with technology and there's so much content here. Now, that's also a bell, whether, and a barometer of the company. If R&D is weak, you don't have the innovation, these companies that don't really invest in R&D, they wouldn't have this kind of mojo or this kind of excitement, but VMware prides themselves on doing 15% R&D that's way outside the box, the rest is all done within the constraints of what they're doing in the market, so relevance is high, but still room to play and dream the future. And again, I've always believed, if you can't dream it up, you can't build it. Now, of course, VMware, all about as every business should be, we need you to be developing products and solutions and services that the market needs to solve real world problems. One of the cool things we learned about today, from the Amita CTO, John Bagley, is the CTO ambassador program, the CTOA program, where there are folks, and this is also a competitive program, it's a couple, I think you said a four year tenure to get folks through the program, but being out in the field, in customer sites, learning about all these enterprise organizations and what they actually need, so in that spirit of openness that you talked about, they're bringing in customer information, building and fostering relationships so that what they're investing in from an R&D standpoint is going to be able to solve customer problems that they don't even know they have today. You know, that champion program, the ambassador CTO program, it's that Joe mentioned, what's interesting about VMware, and this is what I admire about the company, as well as companies like AWS and Amazon Web Services, the people are smart and they think about scaling. So, you know, that's kind of a cliche these days, how does it scale? Makes you look smart if you ask that question, but VMware actually thinks about how to scale and so the problem that they had was, they had these field CTOs that were out evangelizing with customers half the time and doing internal real CTO work around architecture with the teams to build great stuff and move that to market, they couldn't scale. So, they used their community of their own ecosystem just to find people to come in and replicate. You heard Joe, I had to be Steve Herrod because he can't be everywhere. That's the mindset of this culture and I think they have a real opportunity to crush it in open source, they have a real opportunity to take the radio culture and superimpose that in as a new way to do work, new way to create distributed decentralized teams and ultimately better software and at the end of the day, they have to attract great engineers and keep them, work on hard problems because look at, Pat's ambitious and we know Pat. What he says and what's real, you know, they're all catching up to Pat. Pat has great vision and he's nailing it but the engineers got to build what Pat says they got to do. When he says I'm extracting away Kubernetes as an abstraction layer, yeah, that sounds simple but it's really hard to do. Absolutely, I want to get your perspective too on this, not just the culture of innovation that you talked about that VMware has had for a very long time but also in the spirit of VMware leveraging their innovation programs like radio to attract and retain this high quality talent. From your perspective, how does a conference like this which is kind of academic in nature, it's kind of like a science fair for engineers, how does it differ from some of the other companies like a Google that say we have innovation programs? In your perspective, how is this different? Well, Google actually is fairly similar in the sense that they came out of Stanford, they have that kind of ethos of academic. Facebook is exactly the opposite. He wants to be Bill Gates and be like Microsoft as I was saying the other day. Google's internal stuff is pretty strong. They don't externalize it and that's why Google Cloud is having such a hard time gaining market shares that they're not good on the external game. There are things the SaaS offering, it's all programmable. They're awesome at technology but they're not good at externalizing it. So I think Google's struggle is not a lot of internal to external translation. What radio has done successfully and we heard a little bit here was they took it from the Palo Alto bubble which Google lives in and they've extended it beyond to the rest of the world so 50% of the radio attendees here are from outside the United States. So what they got right is they've actually externalized it better. They're allowing press to come in. The storytelling that we're doing that's going on, the collaboration here is about people collaborating. That's why this is successful and in a world where everything's open and information's freely available there's an audience for high-end tech nerd activity. This meets the high bar of the geeks of the best of the best and so why isn't it being covered? Well, it is, we are here. You're right, we are here. And also if you look at, it's one thing for companies to have innovative cultures but it's another thing, some of the key elements that really can catalyze innovation are partnerships, diversity that come to mind, both of which VMware does very, very well. Big foci on partnerships which we've seen and heard about here as well as well as not just diversity and gender and things but also thought diversity and how groups from completely disparate business units can come together either organically before radio or even maybe even probably and can you imagine the hallway conversations that are going on here where suddenly these different ideas are coming together. Partnerships and diversity are really catalysts for VMware's innovation. Well that's a great point. I mean the first on the partnership side clearly a catalyst because of multi-cloud and cloud native seeing that. Diversity is a home run for them because they are a diverse culture but look at how many women are here? Not many, I mean still more than some still a lot more work to do. But diversity of opinion and the inclusion that VMware has, they're very inclusive companies so it's not like, I just don't think there's enough population of women in my opinion that can earn their community but they're inclusive. There's different people, different backgrounds, different technical backgrounds so from a quote diversity skill set, it's a melting pot. You got people talking about carbon fiber, sustainability to Kubernetes. All kind of companies. So I think diversity is a real strength for them. So we heard, I know you had a really, really intriguing blockchain conversation today. We talked a lot about some of those emerging technologies. VMworld 2019 which theCUBE will be out for that I believe the 10th year is just around the corner. What excites you about some of the things that you've heard today that you think we might hear more about? What excites me about VMworld is what Pat Gelsinger said off camera that it's going to be ton of news, ton of activity. And I think if you look at what VMware is doing, again like I said, Pat Gelsinger's got an amazing vision and I think he's cleared the runway or sailed away from the icebergs. VMware is in a really good market position right now. They have great growth going on and look at the organic innovation here at radio. Amazing, content's solid. People are still buzzing fourth day. They could probably stay here for a week, two weeks. Acquisitions, cloud health, bitnami. Again, two smart acquisitions. There's making smart deals, the ecosystems evolving. It's a new VMware. So I think VMworld is going to have a spring to a step this year. I think you see a lot of action. We have two CubeSets again this year. It's going to be a different company next 10 years, VMware than it was the past 10 years. Well, I'm excited to be there with the CubeSets, as you mentioned. My interest is certainly heightened after some of the things we heard today. John has always had a blast co-hosting with you. You got some awesome swag to go home with. Till next time, right? All right, for John Ferrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You've been watching our exclusive coverage of VMware Radio 2019 from San Francisco. Thanks for watching.