 From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE Conversation. Hello, everybody. Welcome to this special CUBE Conversation. My name is Dave Vellante, and you're watching theCUBE. We're here with Sanjay Poonan, who's the COO of VMware and a good friend of theCUBE. Sanjay, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. Dave, it's a pleasure. In these new circumstances, shelter at home and remote working, I hope you and your family are doing well. Yeah, and back at you, Sanjay. Of course, I saw you on Kramer Mad Money the other night. I was jealous. I said, I need Sanjay on to get an optimism injection. You're a great leader, and I think a role model for all of us. And of course, the Go Niners in the background really incented me to get, I got my Red Sox cap and lack of sports, but then we miss it, but hey, we're making the best. Okay, Red Sox is better than the Patriots, although I love the Patriots if I was on the East Coast, especially now that Brady's gone. I guess you guys are. Brian, ruin a little bit that Jimmy G came to us. I am a huge Tampa Bay fan all of a sudden. I'd be honest with you. Tom Brady could become a Yankee, and I would root for them. I tell you, that's how much I love the guy, but anyway, I'm really excited to have you on. As obviously as you mentioned, these times are tough, but we're making the best do, and it's great to see you. You are a huge optimist, but I want to ask you, I want to start with Narendra Modi, just announced basically a lockdown for 21 days, 1.3 billion people in your native country. I wonder if you could give us some thoughts on that. You know, my parents live half their time in Bangalore and half here. They happen to be right now in the U.S., and they're doing well. My dad's 80 and I go to India a lot. I spent about 18 years of my life there in the last 32 odd years here, and I still go there a lot. I have lots of friends in my family there. And I'm glad that the situation is kind of as best as they can sort of in control. It's weird, I was watching some of the social media photos of Bangalore and I tweeted this out last night. The roads look so clean and beautiful. I mean, it looks like 40 years ago when I was growing up and I would take a bicycle to school. I mean, Bangalore is one of the most beautiful cities in India, very green. And you can kind of see it all again. And I think as I've been watching some of the satellite photos of the various big cities to just watch sort of Mother Nature, obviously we're in a tough time. And I hope in my empathy and thoughts and prayers go to every family it's affected by this. And certainly ones with lost loved ones. But it's sort of, I think it's neat that we're starting to see some of the beautiful aspects of nature, even as we deal with the tough aspects of shelter at home and the incredible tough impacts of this pandemic across the world. Yeah, I think you're right. There is a silver lining, as much as our hearts go out to those that are suffering. You're seeing the canals in Venice run clear, as you mentioned, the nitrous oxide levels over China, what's going on in Bangalore. So there is a little bit of light in the end of the tunnel for the environment, I hope. And at least there's an indication that we maybe need to be more sensitized to this. Okay, let's get into it. I want to ask you, so last week in our breaking analysis, we worked with a data company called ETR down in New York City. They do constant surveys of CIOs. I want to read you something that they came out with just on Monday and get your reaction. Basically their annual growth in IT spend, they're saying is showing a slight decline for 2020. As a significant number of organizations plan to cut and or delay IT expenditures due to the coronavirus. Though the current climate may suggest worse, many organizations are accelerating spending for 2020 as they ramp up their work from home infrastructure. These organizations are offsetting what would otherwise be a notable decline in global IT spend versus last year. Now, we've gone from a 4% consensus at the beginning of the year. ETR brought it down to 0% and then just on Monday they went to slight negative but what's not been reported widely is the somewhat offsetting factor of work from home infrastructure. VMware obviously plays there. So I wonder if you could comment on what you're seeing. Yeah, Dave, I think we'll have to see, I'm not an economic pundit so we're going to have to see what the IT landscape look like overall sense and we'll probably play off GDP. Certain industries travel, hospitality. I mean, it's brutal for them. I mean, and I hope that what I really hope that's going to happen in that industry, especially if there's an infusion through a recovery type of bill is that no real big company goes under and goes bankrupt. I mean, kind of the situation in 2008. I mean, you know, people are wondering what will happen to the airlines, you know, Boeing cost, these are, some of them like Boeing are iconic brands of the United States and of the world. I mean, there's only two real companies that make planes. So we've got to make sure that those industries stay afloat and stay good for the health of the world, health of the economy, jobs and so on. That's always one and listen, the health and safety of our employees always comes first. Before we even think about that, I always tell people the profits of VMware will wait. If you are not well, if your loved ones are not well, if you're going to take care of people, take care of that first, we will be fine, you know, this too shall pass. But if you're healthy, let's turn our attention because we're not going to just sit at home and, you know, play games. We're going to, you know, serve our customers. How do we do that? A lot of our customers are adjusting to this new normal and as a result, they have to, you know, either order devices with a laptop, screens, things of those kinds to allow or work from home environment to be as close to productive as their work environment. So I expect that there will be a surge in these sort of endpoints that people need. I will have to see how Dell and HP and Lenovo, but I expect that they'll probably see some surge in their laptops as people, you know, kind of want those in the home and hopefully their supply chains are able to respond. But then with every one of those endpoints and screens that we need now for these types of conversations, you need to manage them, end point management. Often you need virtual desktops on them. You need to end point security. And then in some cases, you will probably need, if it's a remote office, branch office and into the home office, network security and app acceleration. So those solutions, you know, end point management workspace one, inclusive of a full fledged virtual desktop capability horizon, that's our product workspace one. End point security is carbon black. And the network platform NSX being software defined is really catered for things like, you know, load balancers and SD-WAN capabilities. And it's kind of almost feels like good that we got those solutions the last three, four years through acquisitions in many cases. I mean, of course, AirWatch in Nigeria was six, seven, eight years ago. But even SD-WAN, we acquired fellow VeloCloud three and a half years ago, carbon black just four months ago. And Avi in the last year, those are all parts of that kind of portfolio now. And I feel we were able to, as customers come to us, we're not going in ambulance chasing, but as customers come to us and say, what do you have as a work at home for business continuity? We're able to offer them a solution. So we did a webcast earlier this week, where we talked about, we're calling it work at home with business continuity. It's led with our EUC offerings workspace one, a company by carbon black to secure that. And then underneath it will obviously be the cloud foundation and our network capabilities around the sex. Yeah, so I want to double down on that because it was not, the survey results showed, it was not just collaboration tools, like Zoom and WebEx and GoToMeeting, et cetera. It was, as you're pointing out, it was other infrastructure that was of VPNs. It was network bandwidth. It was virtualization security because they need to secure that work from home infrastructure. So a lot of sort of ancillary activities. You know, it was surprising to me when I saw the data that 21% of the CIOs that we surveyed said that they actually plan on spending more in 2020 because of these factors. And so now we're tracking that daily and the sentiment changes daily. I showed some other data that showed the CIO sentiment through March every day of the survey, a drop. Okay, so it's prudent to be cautious, but nonetheless, people to your point aren't just sitting on their hands. They're not standing still. They're moving to support this new work from home normal. Yeah, I mean, listen, I forgot to say that, yeah, we are using the video collaboration tools. I'm, you know, I'm Zoom a lot. We use Slack, we use Teams. So we are, those are our company. We were actually one of the first customers to use Zoom. I'm a big fan of my friend Eric Yuan and what they're doing there and modernizing, making it available on a mobile device just really fast. They've been very responsive and they reciprocate by using Workspace One. They have, we've been doing ads joined to VMware and Zoom in the market for the last several years. So we're a big fan of their technology. So five years for me to proclaim that the only thing you need here is VMware. There's a lot of other things on the stack. I think the best way, you know, Dave, for us that we've sought to do this is again, I'm very sensitive to not ambulance chase, which is, you know, kind of go after this to do it authentically. And the way it authentically is to be, I think Satya Nadella put this pretty well in an abbreviated yesterday to be a first responder to the first responder, a digital first responder, if I'm not. So when the, our biggest customers are hospital and school and universities and retailers, pharmacies, these are some of our biggest customers. They are looking in some cases actually hire more people to serve their communities and their customers. And every one of them, as they, you know, hire new people and so on and so on, will just naturally come into us. And when they come to us, serve them. And it's been really gratifying, Dave, if I could read you the emails I've been getting the last few days. I got one from a very prominent city in the United States, the mayor and mayor's office, the CTO, just thanking us and our people for being available, who being careful not to, we've been very sensitive to the pricing and making sure customers don't feel like in any way that we're looking, the economics of it will always come. Just serve your customer. I got an email yesterday from a very large pharmacy. Routinely, we're talking to folks in the healthcare, industry, university, a president of a school, in fact, Southern New Hampshire University, who I mentioned on Jim Kramer, sent me a note saying, hey, I'm really grateful you even mentioned our name. And I'm not doing this because, I mean, Southern New Hampshire University is doing an incredible job of moving a lot of their platform to online to help tens of thousands. And we were one of the, they were one of the early customers to adopt virtual desktops and the cloud desktops of the services, so, as we call them. So in any of these use cases, I just tell our employees, be authentic, first off, take care of your families. It's really important to take care of your own health and safety, but once you've done that, be authentic and serving our customers. That's what VMware has always done. From the days of Dying Green, to Pomerance, to Pat, all of us here now, take care of our customers and we'll be fine. Yeah, and I perfectly understand your sensitivity to that notion of ambulance chasing. And by no means trying to bait you into doing that, but I would stress, the industry needs you. And the tech, many in the tech industry like VMware have very strong balance sheets. They are extremely viable companies. And we as a community, as an industry need companies like VMware to step up, you know, be flexible on pricing and terms and payment and things like that nature, which it sounds like you're doing because the heroes that are on the front lines, you know, they're fighting a battle every day, every hour, every minute. And they need infrastructure to be able to work remotely with these stay at home mandates. I think that's right. And listen, let me talk a little bit of one of the things you talked about, which is financing and we moved a lot of our business to, you know, increasingly to the cloud and SaaS and subscription services are a lot more rattable than our front license and maintenance. So we make that choice available to customers in many cases, we lead with cloud-based solutions. And then we also have financing services from our partners like Dell Financial Service that really allow a more gradual, rattable payment if people want financing there. And you know, I think if there are other scenarios, Jim asked me on his show, what will you do if one of your companies go bankrupt? I don't know. That's an unperson until we didn't have, maybe we had obviously the financial crisis. You know, I wasn't here at VMware during the dot com blow up where companies just went bankrupt in 2000. I was at Informatica at the time. So, you know, I'm sure we will see some unperson, but I will tell you, yeah, we're very fortunate to be profitable at a good balance sheet. Whatever scenario, if we take care of our customers, I mean, we have been very fortunate to be one of the highest NPS that promoter score companies in the industry. And, you know, I've been reaching out to many of our top customers, just, you know, courtesy without any agenda other than we're just checking in a friend in need is a friend indeed. It's a line that I've remembered and just reach out to your customers and say, listen, checking in, no other than can we help you if there's anything and thank you, especially for ones who are retailers, pharmacies, hospitals, most responders, thank them for what they're doing to serve many of their people, especially people in retail. Think about the people have to go into warehouses to service us to deliver the stuff that comes to our home. I mean, these people are potentially at risk, but they do it putting on masks, braving health situations. They often need the paycheck. We're very grateful for that. And our hope is that this world situation, listen, I mentioned it on TV as a kind of a little bit of a traffic jam. I love to ski and when I go off into Tahoe, I tell my family, I don't know how long it's gonna take with checkup on ways or Google Maps. And it usually takes four hours, no traffic. Every now and then it'll take five, six, seven. Worst case, eight. I've had some situations never happened to me, but some of my friends just got stuck. They've had to sleep in their car. But it's pretty much the case you will eventually get there. I was talking to my dad who's 80 and he's doing well. And he said this feels a little bit like World War II because you're kind of, you know, in many pieces there, they had a bunker shelter, not just shelter in place, but bunker shelter in that time. But that lasted, you know, whatever, five, six years. I don't think this is gonna last five, six years. It may be five, six months. It might be a whole year. I don't know. I can guarantee it's not gonna be six years. So it won't be as bad at World War II. It certainly won't be as bad as the Spanish flu which took 39 people and 2% of the world, including 5% of my country, India, in the 1918 to 1920 period, 100 years ago. So we will get through this, you know, I like We Shall Overcome. I'm not gonna sing it for you. It's one of my favorite Louis Armstrong songs, but, you know, find ways by which you encourage uplift people, make it through it. It is tough. It is very tough times and, you know, we have to make sure that we get through this, that jobs are preserved as best as we can because that's the part I'm really, really concerned about, the loss of jobs and how we're gonna recover as you as a economy, but we will make it through this. Yeah, and I want to sort of second what you're saying that, look, I know there are a lot of people at home that go on a little bit stir crazy and there's maybe a little bit of depression setting in, but to your point, we have to be empathic for those that are suffering, the elderly, who are in intensive care, and also those frontline workers. And then I love your optimism. You know, we will get through this. This is not, you know, the Spanish flu. We have, it's a different world. It's a different technology world. You know, our focus, like many other small businesses, is, you know, we obviously want to survive. We want to maintain our full employment. We want to serve our customers. And we, as you believe, that that is the recipe for getting through this. And so I love the optimism. And listen, if we can help you part of my, where the moment you texted me and said, hey, can I be in your show? If it helps you drive whatever you need, sponsorship revenue, advertising, I'm here. And the same thing for all of our friends who have to adjust the way in which we want to be there to help them. I've chosen as best as I can in terms of how I can support my family, you know, the sort of five of us at home now, all, you know, fighting over a band with a little bit of three kids and my wife and I, to be positive with them, you know, to be in my social media presence as best as possible every day to be positive in what I tweet out to the world, you know, and point people to a hope of what's going to come. I don't know how long this is going to last. But I can tell you, I mean, just the fact that you and I are talking over video interview, high fidelity, reasonably high fidelity, high bandwidth, the ability to connect. I mean, it is a whole lot better than a lot of what happened in World War II or the Spanish flu. And I hope at the end of the end, some of this will forever change our life. I hope, for example, in a lot of our profession, we have to travel to visit customers. And now that I'm building some of these relationships virtually, I hope that maybe my travel percentage will drop. It's actually good for the environment, good for my family life, but if we can lower that percentage and still get things done through Zoom calls and Workspace One and things of those kinds, that would be awesome. So that's how I think about, you know, the way in which I'm adapting my life. And then I set certain personal goals. This year, for example, we're expanding a lot of our focus and security. We have a billion dollar security business and we're looking to grow that NSX, Common Black, Workspace One, and the company tools. And I've made it a goal to try and meet at all my sales teams, a thousand CISOs. I mean, I know a lot of CIOs in the 25 years I've had, you know, maybe five, six thousand of them in the world and blessed to build that relationship over the years of my SAP and VMware experience. But I don't know, I mean, I knew probably 50 or 100, maybe a few hundred CISOs. And now that we have a portfolio, it's relevant to grant them. And I think very compelling across network security and endpoint security, the only companies with such a strong portfolio in both those areas, I reach it out to them. And I'm happy to tell you why I connected, I mean, I've got the names of a thousand of the top CISOs and the Fortune 1000 Global 2000 and connecting with many of them through LinkedIn and other mixers. I hope to talk to many of them through the course of the year. And many of them will be virtual conversations. Again, just to talk to them about being a trusted advisor to us, seeing if we can help them. And then of course, there will be a proper pitch for NSX and Common Black and how we're different from whoever it is. Palo Alto and F5 and Net Scaler and the SD land players or Symantec, McAfee, Crowdstrike, we're differentiated. So I want to certainly earn some of their business. But these are ways in which you adjust to a virtual, you know, kind of economy where I'm not having to physically go and meet them. Yeah, and we share your optimism and those CISOs are their heroes, superheroes on the front line. I'll tell you a quick aside. So John Furrier and I were in Barcelona when really the coronavirus came to our heightened awareness. And John looked at me and said, Dave, we've been doing digital for 10 years. We have to take all of the software that we've developed all these assets and help our customers pivot. So we share that optimism. And you know, we're actually lucky to be able to have the studios and be able to have these conversations with you guys. So again, we share that optimism. I want to ask you just on guidance, a lot of companies have come out and said we're not giving guidance anymore. I didn't see anything relative to VMware. Have you guys announced anything on guidance in terms of how you're going to communicate? Where are you at with that? No, I think we're just, you know, I mean, listen, we take this very carefully because of Reg FD and the regulations of public companies. So we just allow the normal quarterly and sort of outside of that, you know, if our CFO decides they may, but right now we're just continuing business as usual. We're in the middle of our kind of, you know, whatever middle of our quarter, quarter ends April. So we'll work hard to the best we can in all the regions be available for all of our teams. You know, Pat, myself and others were, you know, to the extent that we're healthy and we're doing well, thank God. Is reach out to CSOs and CIOs and CTOs and CEOs and help them and I believe people will spend money, the questions we have for them. And I think the stronger we'll survive the companies have been a balance sheet. And unfortunately, some of the weaker companies won't. And I think quite frankly, if you do your job well, I don't mean this in any negative sense. The stronger companies will take share in these environments. I was watching a segment from John Chambers. He has been to a number of different, you know, and I know him. So when I've, when I've, and I've talked to him about some of the stuff, he will tell you that he, you know, advises a lot of his companies now from the experiences he saw in 2008, 2001, you know, and many of the crises and supply chain issues. This is a time where leadership counts, the stronger it's stronger, never waste a good crisis as Winston Churchill said. And as you do that, the strong will come strong because you figure out ways by which if you're going to make changes that were planned for one or two years from now, maybe a good time to make them as now. And as you do that, you communicate a vision for where you're going very clearly to your employees, again, incessantly over and over again, they hopefully are able to repeat it in their own words in a simple fashion. And then you get all of your employees, in our case, 30,000 plus employees of VMware lined up. So one of the things that we've been doing a lot of these days is communicate, communicate, communicate internally. I've talked a lot about our communication with customers. But inside and our employees, we do calls with our top leaders over Zoom, calls, intimate calls. And many often we're adjusting to where, I'll say a few words, like I have a mandatory, every week we call with all of my senior most leaders. I'll speak for about five minutes and then for the next 25 minutes, the top 12, 15 of them. I listen to things, I want all of them to speak up. There's nobody who should say some because I want to hear what's going on in that corner of the world. But fantastic Sanjay. Well, I mean, Boeing I heard this morning is going to get some support from the government and strategically that's very important for our country. Congress, you know, finally passed, looks like they're passing that bill and the support, which is awesome, especially for all these small businesses that are struggling and want to maintain full employment. I heard Steve Mnuchin the other day saying, look, we're talking about two months of payroll for people if they agree to keep people employed or hire them back. I mean, the Fed, you know, people say, oh, the Fed is out of arrows, the Fed's not out of arrows. I mean, I'm not an economist either. You know, the Fed has, you know, a lot of bullets in their gun, as they say. So Sanjay, thanks so much. You're an awesome leader and really an inspirational executive and a good friend. So thank you so much for coming on theCUBE. Dave, always a pleasure. Please say hi to all of my friends, your co-anchors and staff at Cuban. Thank them for all their hard work. It's a pleasure to talk to you this morning. I wish you, your family and your friends and all of our community stay safe and be well. Thank you, Sanjay. And thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE and we'll see you next time.