 Live from the Mendeley Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2016. This is SiliconANGLE Media, this is theCUBE. Our flagship program, we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier with our guest host inside the community, Keith Townsend who's with CTO Advisors and our next guest is Beth Zaire who's the SVP and CIO of VMware. Both of you, welcome to theCUBE. Your first host as an analyst here on theCUBE. Keith, thanks for coming on. Beth, it's great to see you again. Thank you, good to see you. So you're not like just any old CIO. You're at VMware, it's a big company. It's a vendor in the landscape, but you've also been on the other side. You've been a practitioner. You've run for over decades real infrastructure, really going back through the cycles of innovation. Now you're on this side serving customers on the other in this transformation stage. What a couple of years it's been. So since last year when you were on theCUBE, we talked about, oh, digital transformation, eating your own dog food. First question is what's changed this year with VMware? Obviously a lot going on with the Dell Technologies, Post-Federation World, but what's going on technically and in the landscape for VMware? I know you guys do a lot of early stuff inside VMware. Yeah, so I think we are eating even more dog food. In fact, we're calling it drinking our own champagne because I don't like dog food. Even if you make them, I'm not going to eat dog food. I've been drinking a lot of champagne. So what that puts you as an IT practitioner is, I mean, you're showcasing private cloud, you're showcasing hybrid, and most of the things that we are talking about, we have influence from inside. So you can go to the executive staff and say, I need to go to Amazon. I need to go to Google. I need to connect. I cannot be logged into a single cloud strategy or a device strategy and so on. So I feel like our team is very much part of it. Our team is also getting more into new product development types. We've developed a whole line of mobile technologies right now that makes it easier to sell something like AirWatch. It's easier to always talk about applications. So here's what you can do with applications on the mobile side. Well, a lot of, certainly, VMware is a company that's changed with some big executives that have departed. Carl, Bill Fawkes, among others. Sanjay's still there, but he had the AirWatch. But now, does any cloud, any application, any device, this is not a new messaging, but there's been some product turnover. V-Sphere's been changing. V-Cloud Air, we're not hearing much about that. More management layer. How has that impacted some of the champagne or your own internal incubation of the technologies? What's new there? What's shifted? Yeah, so what you are seeing is if the change in technology is even faster. And I keep telling my team is, yesterday's news wraps fish. So unless it changes, you know, why are we here? I love the fact that we are pushing technology. So the thing I see in my experiences, technology always changes, but the last few years it's faster and faster. And I don't think it's going to slow down. So what has changed from last year to this year is we were the leaders in private cloud last time. I came and talked about how VMware has one of the biggest private clouds. All the hands-on lab has run on our private clouds. But we want to go beyond that. We want to go from private cloud, hook it to the public cloud, or any cloud, right? I want to come back. And if you think about when I talk to the CIO friends, while they like every cloud provider, they don't want to necessarily be locked into anybody. It's a big, big fear everybody has. And for people who don't believe it can happen, I've been here long enough. In the 2000, we had this guy's called ASPs, if you remember. A lot of us migrated to the ASP providers, and a lot of them went out of business because they were all competing for the bottom line. Not that that's going to happen in the public cloud story, but different workloads have different needs. And you want to provide the maximum flexibility as possible. If you run a private cloud effectively, even as of today, it's definitely more cost-effective than any public cloud. But you may not want to do that. So what do you go and tell my colleagues to say, you want a public cloud? You got it. You want Amazon? You got it. You want IBM? You got a choice. And I think VMware, if you remember, made our mark by giving that choice for you. So you can run on HP, you can run on Dell, you can run on NetApp, you can run on EMC. Even when EMC was the owner, still the owner, we still did not exclude you from running it on a competitive story. And that built the ecosystem, basically. That built the ecosystem, the things that you see here. And Michael reiterated it today, right? So we are going to be available on every cloud, every platform. That helps. It creates a lot of money for people. And for CIOs, just go back into the practitioner. That's what I want. I may stick to a vendor, but don't lock me in. That should be my choice. So talking about fast change, VMware infrastructure focus company from the outside, internally you have to deal with both developers and infrastructure guys. Martin Casado was famously said that developers are much more involved with that purchasing cycle. How's the relationship with your internal developers in your infrastructure folks? Yeah, it's very good. I mean, but I can see Martin's point. I've worked on other companies where the developers actually worked around infrastructure folks because you won't get the things provisioned on time, right? So if you run an effective infrastructure, which we do, and I actually challenge my developers, developers reporting to me as well, and say, do whatever you want. I mean, because I want to know what you like doing. And a lot of them work on our infrastructure because it is effective. So if you do a good job, people will want to use somebody who manages them and runs them for it. But it's not true in most of the cases. Most of our infrastructure is still run the old IT way. But people just say, you know, it's going to take me years. I have to build up the paperwork for me to get a virtual machine. I'm out of here. So what I internally see is my developers actually do a lot of development, continuous development. We rolled out SAP. Not that it's a big news. Everybody seems to do it. But we have zero issues on infrastructure. I mean, we never talked about infrastructure. We never talked about, is this going to be available? Not available? How does disaster recovery work? That's what developers want. They want to just worry about continuous improvement, continuous development. Doesn't work on mobile. Infrastructure should just handle it, right? So we're able to do that internally. But I'm also telling people, use Docker. I mean, it's a good one. Use containers. Use Amazon Web Services. Use IBM. Because you don't want to restrict. The freedom of choice is really. The freedom of choice is very important. The developers are in charge. Yeah, exactly. That's like. Invisible infrastructure is there to support what developers do. Invisible infrastructure is invisible only until it's broken, right? But your point is well taken, yeah. Well, you dev ops is great, but you still need five nines ops. So operational focus. We've seen this year, I'm kind of smelling the theme this year is all about dev, not the operational side of cloud. Right. So I got to ask you, we were in our last, we get a meeting at SiliconANGLE offices. We're talking about, oh, VMware. And I'm like, guys, it's all about the SDDC experience. So like what the hell is SDDC? Okay, it's a software to find data center. Okay, but that was the theme a couple of years ago. And then someone else raised their hand. Well, what the hell does SDDC mean? Anyway, so I want to ask you, what does SDDC experience, we've heard on the keynote, actually mean? So I think, you know, Raghu defined it well as in order to react to the needs of today, you cannot hope to put in a hardware and hope that box runs. You need to free the intelligence away from the box. So let me give a practical example. You get attacks from security. Typically the response is, you know, buy my box, put it in and it'll take care of it. Humans cannot respond to the speed in which these attacks are happening. So you have to write algorithms. So that's software. So the attacks have to be done in software. The configuration has to be done in software. So the whole idea is free the intelligence from all the boxes you have and define a software layer on top of it because software will trump hardware. I mean, you need good hardware. Let's not, let's not, I mean, things have to run somewhere. The one experience is the guy gets to go to the beach because everything's automated. Well, so we all, That's one experience. That's one experience. Yeah, I just think you get more work. I mean, I always say you should hire smart but lazy people because they will automate what they're doing. But what ends up happening is no good deed goes unpunished. So you just get a more to do. But look, I, you know, in my own case, I did every job in IT. I started in a hardware, automated it. People say, can you do software? Yeah, I can do it. Well, you automated this. Can you do BSEIO? Can you do end user computing? Can you run real estate? Can you run shared services? Can you do this? So your job becomes bigger. I don't think I'm going to sit on the beach, but you're doing that. Yeah, but you freed up essentially. I use that as metaphor. But the idea is the beach is being excited about not being in the weeds, fix and stop being like tired all the time. Right, I see I get to do this, right? I talk to customers. The only reason I get to do this is because my infrastructure is working. If it's not working, I'm not mistaken. I have to go back and fix it. So if you free up your time, then you go talk to your customers, your advisory panel. They're giving me internet of things as another business unit to run. It's exciting. You're getting to the front office, but I never forget it's because your back office is working. So you stole a little bit about Thunder by mentioning internet of things. You're talking to customers. And one of the things when I talk to customers is internet of things. What's some of the challenges you've had internally around internet of things and how has VMware solved some of those challenges? Yeah, so a lot of internet of things, it's coming out of hype cycle now into reality. So a lot of talks where on how do you control the home thermostat, your Amazon Nest, I mean Amazon Echo device and so on and so on. But what is happening now is buildings have to be automated and they have to get another 30% more efficiency. In order to get 30% more efficiency, it's not just turning the light bulbs off and on when you want. You want to know what's your occupancy and do I really need this bigger building all the time? That requires intelligence, right? So if you have the intelligence, you can really figure out do I need 400 buildings or do you need only 100 buildings, right? And the reason I picked something mundane as buildings is that's where a lot of people spend a lot of their money in actual buildings. For example. So the thing I tell from the IT standpoint is I think we've gone from kind of pilot stages to now you're going to go to scale. When you get to scale, it's not fun anymore. It has to work all the time, it has to be secure. So I was talking to a bunch of CIOs a week ago and I told them how many of you have multi printers, multi scanners, the multi devices? Everybody says that. So how many of you know that they send information on whether the toner is out to the manufacturer? Everybody puts their hands up. How many of you know that it's not sending the whole thing that you're scanning over to the manufacturer? And people said, does it happen? I don't know. I don't know if it doesn't happen or it doesn't happen. It's a question. This is the way you need to pay attention because your coffee machine is going to say they're out of coffee beans. Are they just sending that information or not? If you take it seriously, manufacturing, the folks actually work around IT sometimes because they don't want IT to slow it down. So if IT doesn't get involved in Internet of Things right now and define the architecture and so on, you're opening a door for shadow IT. I want to just drill down on that. You mentioned IT going slow, but that's exactly the point. Machine learning, AI and software, there's been a huge acceleration of things like asking those kinds of questions and the infrastructure has been slow and certainly the network has, right? So for all the CXOs out there, whether it's CIO, Chief Data Officer, Chief Compliant, there's a lot of CXOs out there, they're trying to figure it out. So what's your advice to them? And looking at the message of multi-clouding, inter-clouding, all that stuff, they got a job to do. End of the day, they don't really care what VMware's doing in the business. They want to know what their business is doing. How do they apply the stuff going on here at VMworld? If you had to look at this VMworld this year and talk to the CXOs, what's in it for them? What's your thoughts? The first thing I say is have the curiosity. What happens in my job is I hear so much vaporware that you become skeptical. The problem with skeptical and being too pragmatic is your mind becomes closed. So when you look at internet of things, you say, oh, is that really going to happen? I got things to do. I can't worry about it. You can have that. That's how you let the SaaS get out of your hand. That's how you have to come back later on the cloud. That's why BYOD happened because we said, hey, Blackberry's good enough. You don't need any other phones. So you need to have this open mindset, right? So internet of things, I tell people, there's a tornado coming here and you better be involved. Now to be involved, you have to take a solution for them. You can go and say, stop all projects. Let me look at architecture. Let me review them. So I tell them, go with an architecture. So a couple of things I tell them is there are so many gateways, so many sensors. You need to go with some way to manage these gateways because like it or not, they're coming to you and they're going to expect you to manage it. After the initial setup is done, they're going to say, hey, IT guy, you run it for me. So better be there. Go with an architecture. So it's a private cloud, public cloud, or it's a combination. How do you manage edge? So I tell people to get involved and here's a couple of things that we're doing is manage your gateways with software. Go with a cloud in the box for IoT so people can give it to a manufacturing guy or your operations guy. You need to take something there. You need to be involved. So balancing the hopeful and the optimistic. I'm hopeful that this may happen with the pragmatic. I got to make it run at scale, which is again, this is all about scale now with cloud. It kind of brings back the kind of looking back to the history of IT, which you've certainly been involved in and lived personally is you see a sprawl of something. PCs, lands, whatever, and then consolidation, single throat to choke, single pane of glass, these are the buzzwords. We're seeing that now where we're seeing there's been a sprawl of APIs, a sprawl of microservices, a sprawl of mobile. Now, are we getting to that phase where we got to manage it? So you're hearing things like single choke to throat, single pane of glass for management. What's your thoughts on that? And this is really mind boggling to the customer because the CXOs are out there going, hell, I still got to get top line revenue with these new apps for my banking app or my oil and gas application. So right now we're in a tough, really interesting position. How do you describe that environment and what do you prescribe specifically to the CXO? It's a challenge or an opportunity depending on how you look at it. It's very exciting to me that you have all these things exploding and there's so much more you can do in the business. So if you're an IT practitioner, CTO, this is a good time to be excited and add value to it. If you get too pragmatic, you're going to lose it. Or if you're a blocker saying please hang on, let me define the architecture for you, let me do this for you, you're going to lose it because people are going to work around it. And my belief is the CXOs I meet right now are a lot more progressive. They realize the mistakes they made by being a little too pragmatic sometimes on technology, not getting on it. And they are jumping on board. So the hope is I'm at a stage in my career where I want to make sure my community of CIOs do the right thing and I'm telling them this is coming. So you're seeing progressive mindset right now? I see very, very progressive mindset there. I see a ton more CIOs who are acting like the digital guys pushing it and so on. The other thing to remember is it's not always about technology. You can do the pilots, but to make a change, you need people, process and technology. The CIOs are best equipped to do that. So the best for the company is to make sure you get the right CIOs, the people are involved in the technology change, not going around it. So from a technology perspective, a lot of great news from, at least exciting news coming from Pat this morning. Cloud services, Cloud Foundation, with your team internally, which product or what direction are you most excited to enable your team with? So anything that makes my development go faster, I'm excited. So that's why I'm interested in Cloud Foundation and Cloud services very much because if I don't have to think about where to go and I can do it faster, good, right? The things I'm very excited about is, you haven't seen the end user computing announcement which comes tomorrow and day after. It's fantastic. I believe that enterprise mobility has not really happened. I mean, you've got what, two to three million applications on your Android store and your Apple store, two to three millions on your Apple store, but you go to most enterprises, they just give email and calendar. Email and calendar, we gave access in 1999 with BlackBerrys. For 17 years, you're still giving email and calendar on your iPhone now instead of the BlackBerry. That's not a good progress. People haven't been creative to look at mobile as an enterprise platform to develop. That's going to change. I think people are going to wake up and see how do you make productivity on the phone. I challenge my team and we have come up with a 50 yard productivity applications. It doesn't take a long time to develop and I can show you some time. When I showed every CIO, they all said they want it. They want to go to one place to approve all the purchase orders. They don't want to go to SAP and Oracle and Salesforce and 40 different places to approve. So the mobile revolution, I think is starting to happen in the enterprise. It's very, very late. You will see that. I mean, you don't want to be carrying necessarily these when you're traveling, right? Exactly. I want to ask you about a minute left and it's more of a personnel kind of conversation we see in the industry. And one of the things that we're very passionate about at Silicon Angle is our new fellowship with the ground truth, our partner. We have this new fellowship called the tech truth where we are funding fellowships and journalism and we're also going to be at the Anita Borg conference in November for the third year where we're funding a special assignment on women in tech. IT has been one of those areas where it's been mostly male dominated like developers but yet IT isn't the old stack and rack and it used to be it's changing, shifting. How has the role of STEM and women in tech and science changed IT? Do you, can you share some color? I know you're involved with Anita Borg as well. Thoughts on that because this is, again, it's not just the IT anymore. IT is now got a little global stance. Your thoughts on women in tech. Yeah, very passionate. In a sense, we haven't done enough. I mean, we are, most companies are talking and I guess compared to everywhere we made progress, it's not good enough. Having 20% in tech when you can go up to 50% is not good. The thing with STEM, I say, is sometimes we say we support science and sometimes we mislead women. I know a lot of people with science degrees, women with science degrees in biology or something else who are not getting employment like the coders. So we got to get through with their language. Are you looking for coders or are you looking for STEM? Coders. Right. Now you have different analytics and you, so there's a new stuff going on that's interesting, right? I mean, coders, not necessarily biology doctors. I think it's very unfair if you tell people we lick any science possible and women actually go to classes when they come out. The first question we ask is, do you know Python? Do you know this? I'm not saying it's right or wrong. That's what the industry is doing. And you need to actually respect every science. But if not, don't mislead people. So that's one. Silicon Valley has a problem with older gentlemen, older people. Ageism. Ageism. So that's an issue. There are not too many African Americans in Silicon Valley. See, these are elephants. I think the first step is we have to talk about these things. People are afraid to talk about it. That's not a good sign. I mean, we got to come back and put it. I mean, Anita Borger liked them because they put the issue on the table, which is the first step. I mean, it's like an alcoholic. You have to say, I'm Basque. I'm an alcoholic. If you don't even say that, we're not solving it. Well, I gotta tell you, I was there last year. This will be our third year. It is 12,000 women, and it's a great time. It's a great time. It's a really great event. Yeah, my daughter is going. I wanted to go learn, but we have to do more. So I don't want to sound down on the last minute. We've made definite progress, but if you go to more Silicon Valley companies, we can't say we've done it. Well, my wife and I just talked about men from Mars, that kind of, that whole, that stick, but the role of IT, there's a lot. I mean, first of all, there's a lot of women in that are involved in tech, but not necessarily coding. As you said, but there's a lot of roles in IT that are changing. For instance, the data science roles move to data analysts, which by the way, is dashboard based. So that's kind of becoming an IT role. Very interesting, some of these job personas, per se, are evolving. Yeah, so the last one I'll leave it with you is look at a lot of the help desk. We used to outsource the help desk. We used to treat it as not important, whatever. And then we find out a lot of knowledge workers are struggling for simple stuff. I've configured my PC so I can do my job. So we bought it back, like how the Apple has genius bars. We have our own things inside. But we recruited it from an organization called Year Up. And what they do is there are a lot of kids who are underprivileged from underprivileged families who don't get to finish high school. So why can't they work on help desk? Why do you need a degree? Why can't you go to a finishing school? We put a lot of them, they're very passionate about what they do, very satisfying. So we can talk for hours, I'm very passionate about this. We should do more with underprivileged folks. We should do more with diversity in the true sense of the word, right? Well, we'd love to have you, we're going to recruit you as a volunteer for our Cube team in Silicon Valley. We're doing a lot of coverage there. Certainly the fellowship's been great. And we're going to be at Anita Borg, Grace Hopper celebration in Houston. The Cube will be there. I'm John Furrier here with Keith Townsend. Here live at VMworld, breaking it down, sharing all the data. CIOs are really interested in the cloud and certainly they got to get the playbook. Bass, thanks so much for sharing your insight again. Great, great insight. Thanks for sharing the data. Thank you, John, appreciate it. We'll be right back with more live coverage from Las Vegas from VMworld 2012. This is Silicon Angles of the Cube. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.