 Welcome back everyone, live coverage for theCUBE here in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. We're in the broadcast booth, VMware Explorer 2023. It's our 13th consecutive year covering VMware's conference, formerly VMworld. Last year's converted over to VMware Explorer. This could be the last VMware Explorer as they close the chapter of the original VMware historic run as they go to the next chapter, which is the Broadcom takeover. I'm with Dave Vellante and Keith Townsend, Influencer, CTO advisor, principal of CTO advisor, his firm, research analyst and influencer. Keith, great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for having me, guys. Your analysis lately has been phenomenal around data center, cloud, hybrid cloud, obviously VMware, you're well known in this community as, you know, speaking and saying how it is and getting on the light board and doing a lot of architectural. We've been saying all CUBE about this AI GIF that fell in their lap, using a little bit of buzz, shines the light, NVIDIA is on stage, earnings are blowing it out. And they got the multi-cloud super cloud thing going on. But you know, if you think about the cloud admin or VMware admin, that's kind of evolving to cloud admin, but also cloud architect because AI could automate away the admin. So a lot of things going on that look compelling from an operation standpoint. And the emphasis is like on the Vexpert and the cloud architect because if you're a Vexpert, you have to be a cloud expert. So you're starting to see this transition in the VMware world fast, where it's like, if you know virtualization, that's pretty much like the high IQ, you know your stuff. And then cloud is natural extension. How do you see that in your world? What do you see in that? VMware crosses over multiple environments, data center, cloud, what's your view here? What's going on with the people and the practitioners as the skills start to evolve to be multi-cloud and now will AI sprinkled in there? So you guys know last year or earlier this year, I took a victory lap. Hybrid has won. The future isn't all AWS, it's not all Google Cloud or Azure, it's not all VMware. Enterprise IT is cumulative. You hit that point, AI, VI admin, we talked to Josh Augers who I think you guys talked to earlier this week, starting into an alliance of VCDXs. VCDXs are the CCIEs of the VMware environment. These folks are multi-talented. They can talk public cloud, they can talk private data center, they can talk pass, SAS, and that's the future path of all VI admins. This ability to not just talk, I need eight VCPUs and whatever the technical jargon you want to throw at it, it's the ability to take these very diverse business requirements and then translate them to the infrastructure layer. So you remember, well, the death of the LUN, a logical unit number, right? It's a very small, narrow sort of example. That's a throwback. Yeah, it is. But it's a narrow example of what's happening here. So my question to you is, and we've talked about the skill sets before, it's something that you understand deeply as you live in that world, but so what is the analogy for the VMware admin in terms of what's going to go away and what their path is, sounds like the path is multi-cloud, we sometimes call it super cloud, but what is that? No, not sometimes, always. How does that skill set evolve? We do, we do. But how does that skill set evolve? What is needed if you're advising an individual that is today knee-deep in VMware? So Kelsey Hightower is here last year of Google Cloud and Kubernetes fame, and he talked about his career path. He talked about how he cut his teeth on VMware and VMs and that, it was actually that path. His keynote was talking about, you know what, even today, and I was left that when I saw containers come on the scene, I said, you know what? You know where containers were won best in? VMs. VM is the best abstraction for the infrastructure layer. So take your basic building block of understanding how VMs, networking storage, if you're a long guy and you know what a long is, that knowledge helps you translate. Matter of fact, storage guys or in gals make some of the best cloud engineers in my experience because they understand your, you agree with this, John? Data. If you understand data and the need and how you service the application with data, your career will be protected for the next 10, 15 years. And the IO piece of it, which used to be a really big challenge inside of VMware, and then they solved that problem with partnerships. Well, this IO piece, first of all, yes, I want to come back to the skills thing, but the IO piece is interesting. If you look at the data center technologies before cloud came on the scene, all the optimization was IO. Yep. Okay. If you look at the challenge with AI and large language models that are on-premises, it's IO, because you got to move the data into the GPUs. IO will be huge in the AI workloads. I'm going to predict that here in the cube. We're going to watch that close in it. And VMware is well peaked for that. The thing about, you said about knowing VMs is a skill set. I saw this play out when I was in college, I was a CS major and we had to learn everything. We were hexadecimaled core dumps, assembly language, machine code, and then you had to have an operating system knowledge of how computers worked. If you had that system skill, you could do anything, because everything was built on top of it. So I think VMware community has a huge opportunity as cloud becomes more abstracted away, knowing the underpinnings and how it works is a huge advantage. And if AI comes on the scene, you can have code assistance. This is a huge architectural opportunity. So I think you're going to see the rise of the folks in the VMware community with the experts and the practitioners rise up to powerful positions in platform engineering roles. Because this is clear to me, like DevOps needs the VMware merging, the mind meld and the expertise because everything's built fundamentally on top of it. Conceptually, if you think about the components. I was just talking to an engineer yesterday, he was saying, Tanzu, I'm a cloud native person and I can't stand Tanzu, I don't see the point of it. And I said, well, zoom out. What is it that you're trying to accomplish? You may be focused on Kubernetes, but there's Kubernetes, there's VM, there's past, there's super cloud. I like, I like the concept. I'm on record of saying I like the concept of super cloud. Name, concept, absolutely. But the- It's memorable. Yes, very memorable and it's very controversial and it gets the conversation started. And we've talked about the super cloud conversation. We're talking about managing the first cloud services across multiple environments. And you're talking about this one function, the vAdmin that has to do it, not the Kubernetes admin, but the vAdmin that has to manage Kubernetes. They have to manage EC2, EKS, AKS, all the essence, all the Kubernetes, the Tanzu message starts to make sense. It starts to make sense to that practitioner and to that executive that they have to do more with less and you tie in AI ops into that. There has to be a central control plane, why not Tanzu? So you are known as a CTO advisor, but you're also a VMware practitioner advocate. Right. And you've been, just based on your commentary in social media, you're skeptical, or at least you've got some concerns about the Broadcom acquisition, as many customers do. Based on what you're hearing here, have you, what is your view? Have you altered your view at all? Can we talk about that? I talked to Brad Tompkin, the VMA president, and we had a robust conversation about, let's not talk about the negative, let's talk about the opportunities. Broadcom is going to take a, well, this is negative. Broadcom is going to take an X to VMware. Yeah, $5 billion X. Yeah, I'm certain that they'll cut the commercial sales unit, which is a huge part of VMware, the smaller organizations. I think the stat that Brad gave me, that 34% of his membership is the enterprise. He believes only 17% of that, or half of that, will fall into that category of Broadcom's attention directly. That's a huge gap of support and capability that customers won't get directly, at least not initially, at least in the vision. So there's a lot of opportunity for the VAT men the VMware expert to rise in a prominent position, whether they're starting VARs, partners, support organizations, new user groups, et cetera. That's the explosion. I see the community completely changing. The next conference focused on IT infrastructure is not going to be VMware explorers, going to be VM explorer or cloud explorer, or some variation that focuses on this super cloud product. The rise of that consultant brain to help fill that gap. We call it the last mile. I love last mile businesses, businesses that can't be AI the way when the data center is not something that I can click and point and build. I need boost on the ground to understand, oh, we do, Appasino replied to one of my blog posts the other day and said, yes, Keith, power is the problem. A rack of NVIDIA latest generation graphics card, not a rack, but one server can eat up the entire rack power, one server of their entire rack in the traditional equinix or QTS data center. You need boost on the ground, shoes on the ground, sandals on the ground to help figure out that problem as it relates to your organization. When you talk to your customers that are all in on VMware, there are a lot of them here. A lot of them. They're like, what if somebody came to you, your boss, and said, you got to get rid of this VMware stuff, the prices are going up, what would you do? And they're like, ah, that would be a nightmare. We don't really have a lot of alternatives. So my premise has been that Broadcom, they're going to put forward a roadmap. They said they're going to invest in R&D. They're going to narrow that to the core and then show customers, hey, this is where we're going to take you. And I think it's like Jensen, spend more and you'll save more. Don't spend more. Well, we might have to dial up the cost per unit. And so, but customers, they are locked in, okay? And the challenge that Broadcom has, pretty straightforward, I think, is to give enough value to incent those people to stay. And I don't think that's that hard from a business case standpoint, because the business case to leave is horrendous. So I picked on Nutanix when they first shifted their model from a HCI company to a software-defined data center company. This is what, eight, seven, eight years ago. I said to them, it's a solved problem. Seven or eight years ago, the software-defined data center is a solved problem. If you're going to compete with VMware, it's going to be a race to the bottom because you can only compete on price. I'm not, as a IT leader, I'm not trying to refigure out how to virtualize a data center. VMware has done that. I need my smart people to understand how am I going to create a platform, not just a software-defined data center, but a platform that my developers can trust and program against. And then I can begin my super cloud journey and hedge the different cloud providers in my private infrastructure before them because now they have this single interface into my infrastructure. That's the opportunity for this $2.1 billion investment. How do I provide a trusted platform for the super cloud? And to your earlier point, Tanzu fits into that vision, but what if to the gentleman that you talked to, it doesn't get adopted, it doesn't take off? Does it matter? Because can't VMware just turn to the open source community and still provide its core value or is Tanzu success critical to that vision? I think Tanzu is partially critical to it. I think we're in a new world that open source is established, it has a foothold in the enterprise and it's not going away. It is a tremendously effective way to run proofs of concepts, to fail fast. We've talked about that a lot on theCUBE, the ability to get something in the door, try it, does it work? No, let's try something else. I can't necessarily do that with Tanzu. So there are still customers who very much just want to be told what to do. If you're a customer who there's not value in taking a Kubernetes distribution, an open source networking product, an open source storage product, there's not enough value in that engineering effort for you and you just want a path, Tanzu is a path. Well, I'd love to get your thoughts on what you see VMware doing in the next chapter. I mentioned some of the cuts with Broadcom, but what do you think product-wise is going to rise up? I mean, I've got the core business, vSphere, vSAN, infrastructure, that's the cloud group, they call it the cloud group. Modern apps is out there and you've got end-user computing. But the Aria-Tanzu connection, I thought was smart. Pranina is a smart executive, putting that together was smart. I think that now you've got the Aria hub and now you've got Tanzu kind of bolting on to something that's workable, of console. Well, it simplifies things. It simplifies things. That's sort of almost necessary. What do you think arises up? Because I don't think Broadcom, I think Broadcom's going to cut. We've got some reports from some insiders. We've been reporting some data around the cuts, but Broadcom's not going to just kill people out of the gate. I mean, they're going to cut the fat, so to speak. But they're going to let the BUs run. They've got to let them run, because they've got forecasts. They've got business. Right. So we'll see how they do. Seen in game of thrones, run! You know? Yeah. So they're... Who wins? I mean, what do you think will rise up? And the core business is going to continue to pass. So what was the recent consolidation in the observability market? ARIA falls dead into that. That is in the space. Observability is extremely difficult, you know, from a services perspective. If I have Lambda services that don't run on traditional networking stacks, I have my Oracle database sitting in my private data center, then I have my AI substrate across multiple cloud providers. How do I know what I have? That is a real problem. I can no longer just run a copy of VRealize, the predecessor to ARIA, in my data center and get all of that insight. I need help. ARIA, obviously, winner in that battle. We talked about the glue that connects all of this. I think A16Z put out a stat, something about a trillion connected devices. When you think about IoT is still very much a thing, the edge is still very much a thing. The data center, the public cloud, planes in the sky, all of that is going to be connected by a network control plane, and I need smart people to manage that control plane. There's not enough of it. NSX Plus, super smart. NSX is horribly complex to run. I love that VMware adopted NSX-T, but NSX-T is much more complicated than NSX-V. I need experts, and I need experts across my entire enterprise infrastructure, and when a company like VMware takes that burden away from me and I can just consume the control plane, VMC on AWS, OCI, all these other VMware cloud solutions. So VMware cloud foundation, another winner. So for me, the three winners, ARIA, NSX, the security BU. Because they simplify the NXX. Because they simplify the network management. So ARIA for observability, NSX for network management, and then VMware cloud foundation. It is, I laughed at it when it came out. I'm like, oh, I saw you just had Chris Wolf on, and I asked Chris three or four years ago. I said, Chris, what am I going to do? Take my Kubernetes and run it on VMC on AWS? How deep do the turtles go? And recently, I'm looking, hmm, that may not, that may be the place. And it's getting uptake, and then I throw in, you know, vSAN, the vSAN Max, they finally, about time. That's a subset of vFile foundation. That's right. So NSX is going to be a carry on. Your infrastructure stuff's getting better. It's not going to go away, get vSphere, vSAN. You know, it's funny, we were talking yesterday about vSAN Max, the hyper-unconverged, you know. Yeah, that's a whole nother trend, that we're moving away from hyper-converged. But the whole point why hyper-converged became popular is the same reason why these other products have the potential to take off. Single panes of glass. The ability to manage my super cloud in a single pane of glass. And this becomes the foundation. Isn't it ironic, because you used to have a server group, the networking group, the storage group, totally, you know, stovepipe, hyper-converged, we converged then hyper-converged, brought that together so you could actually get a single pane of glass. And everybody said, okay, what we had before was right, we just want that single pane of glass. Yeah, we don't want the, the ACI is a poor design for the entire data center. But the single pane of glass, absolutely what we want. Absolutely, yeah. Full circle. Keith Townsend, as always, laying down some epic truth bombs and knowledge here on theCUBE. Keith Townsend, industry analyst and influencer and principal at CTO advisor, friend of theCUBE collective and a great contributor to theCUBE. We really appreciate you coming on theCUBE every year at VMware and always chipping in. We'll see you at KubeCon coming up soon. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. Look forward to having you in Chicago, my home city. All right, can't wait for Chi Town. We'll be right back. This is day three. We're going to go right to the end when they send the speakers. The hall is now closed. We're going to keep going. We're going to keep going. Stay with us, we'll be right back.