 From Gillette Stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE, covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is the CUBE Worldwide Leader in Live Tech coverage. We're on the ground here at the VTUG Winter Warmer and it is 2019. It's actually the 13th year of this event. One of the original, if not the original, VMware user groups covers virtualization, cloud computing and even more, always great to be able to give back to the community, get some good interviews and no better person helped me start with my first interview at a show of the year, but good friend of the program, Keith Townsend, he is the CTO advisor and he is also now a Solutions Architect with VMware. Keith, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me on theCUBE. Yeah, so Keith, I mean, you were host of our program for a number of years. You're now back working on the vendor side, but this community, what I always say in my career, there are certain communities in the ecosystem where there's just, you love to be a part of it and the virtualization group, I've been part of it for a long time, VMware and beyond though, it's people that, they get excited and they geek out on the technology and they love to share and that's why we come to events like this. Yeah, it is amazing, just, every show is getting smaller, maybe with the exception of AWS re-event, but I don't think the intensity has shrunk at all. You get around friends, we were just at a desk and one of the attendees asked, how do I get a job doing X? And the community was like, oh, you just talked to the people at this table. So it is a great, great community. Yeah, it's an interesting dynamic. You talk about, we've seen the huge growth in meetups in user groups and regional shows. VMware does VMworld, but the VMworld, VMware forums around the globe, I'm sure you probably have to go a few of those, they've been doing well. I remember back in my EMC days, EMC did a number of those. So we see, yeah, Amazon re-event is growing, but oh my God, their regional shows are ridiculous. I've said some of those regional shows, either different communities or different localities can actually be even better than some of the big shows. And we love Keith, we're happy to welcome you here to the home of the AFC championship, New England Patriots. You all, first off, congratulations. The, you know, we went a little back and forth, huge Bears fan, and I say, you know what? Tom Brady won't play forever, so enjoy it. This is an amazing backdrop. Stu, I'm a little offended that you've not invited me to a VTUG before now. Oh, well, I'm sorry Keith, it's a community thing. I absolutely should have come. Absolutely, I've had friends. Most of them, it is local. I'm talking to users from Maine and Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut and the like. So you gave a keynote this morning, and you did it in true fashion. You did a blog post about IT reality check leading in, and I thought it was a great way for us to start, is, you know, there's so much change in the industry. Those of us that are technologists, you know, we're super excited because there's so much new stuff. It's not like, oh geez, you know, 2019 is probably going to be just like 2018. It's like, oh my gosh, what did I do in 2018? What do I have to change? How do I keep up? How do I manage it? I'd love to get your viewpoint. You know, what's going on with Keith? And you're talking to a lot of users. So, you know, help share. You know, what is the reality check that everybody's going through? You know, we're talking about a pre-recording and a banter, just, you know, whether it's, you know, VMware with Hipdale and all the stuff that Casey, Kelsey Hightower is doing out with Kubernetes. Then as you spin out to serverless, infrastructure's cold, scripting, et cetera. There's so much to learn that you're a bit overwhelmed. And we're seeing this out, you know, as I'm talking to executives, CTOs, CIOs, VP of infrastructure, they're feeling the same kind of excitement at the same time overwhelm us. Like, what's real? You know, we had the big cloud movement some of a few years ago where I think we're at the high tackle where organizations are starting to understand that, you know, cloud isn't the destination. It's part of a strategy. And everyone seems to be in a throes of figuring out what that means for us. We're just on the crowd chat, talking about multi-cloud and the drivers around multi-cloud. You guys did a great job of hosting that cloud chat. And I think we saw the gambit of where people are, you know, there's not really a business rationale to people who are really in a throes of trying to figure it out. Yeah, actually, I'd love to comment. Friend of ours that we've had on the program before, Bobby Allen from Cloud General, said when he's working with companies, if they ask for a three-year strategy plan, he said, I will not do it unless we guarantee that we will go revisit it every six months. Because I look back, you know, Clay Christensen, when he talks about strategy, strategy is a point-in-time thing. Not something that you write it in stone. I've been saying for a couple of years, cloud strategies at companies today is they wrote it in ink and the ink's still drying and you're probably going to need to go through it and change it because it is changing fast and therefore, huge challenge. I started to deploy something. Oh, wait, what about the next thing or there's some new practice or something to do it? So it is challenging because I need to run my business today. I got to set my budget for the year usually and I need to be agile, but I can't constantly be tearing everything up and you're not going to be throwing it out or retraining and skills. I mean, there's so many challenges there. So still you might remember when I was on the other side of the table, it was meant at somewhat of a dig that VMware moves at the speed of the CIO and it was picked up as more of a compliment, but it was a dig. I'll be honest that it was a dig and what I've learned the past few months is that VMware has to move at the speed of the CIO. It's no longer, and it's not just VMware. The community has, and the CIO is faced with that. We could do a few years ago a cloud strategy and that thing could sit on the desk for a year and it would still be valid, but to Bobby's point, if you're going to do a strategy, a three-year strategy, you got to revisit that every six months and this agility that we're not accustomed to previously in the industry, we have to now become super agile and figure out how do we keep the lights on and innovate at the pace that the business needs, which is a pretty good challenge. Yeah, it's a true, we're beginning of the year. I made a comment personally and said, I'm not a big believer in setting resolutions. More, let's set goals. You're a runner, I do some biking and it's like, okay, I've got a big race. I want to do this year. I'm going to work myself towards that goal and raise some money. You've got a certain target and something that you can do over the year and there's the way that you do that. Companies, they've got goals that they need to accomplish out of business and it's great to say, oh, well, we need to be more efficient. We need to do something different, but reality is it's not just digital transformation or modernizing, it was, oh, okay, do I need to transform my backup? Data protection, huge activity going on in the marketplace right now. It was 760 million in an investment in one week? Yeah, exactly. The wave of hyperconvergence is one that really changed a lot of architectures and had people change. We've talked cloud computing there. What are some of the big movements that you see? We used to track in the industry, it was kind of the Intel refusional cycle and oh, well, it's the next version of Microsoft or VMware operating system would be one of those big kind of TikToks of IT. What are some of the big commonalities that you're seeing out there that are actually moving people to new things? Without a doubt, there is one conversation that customers cannot get enough of and I had on my little vlog, I had a game being from VMware, SVP of the storage and business availability unit and I challenged her on the VMware vision around this but customers cannot get enough of having a conversation around data. And what do they do with data and how do they move data? How do they get compute closest to data? How do they get data the closest to the resources? We talked about it on the multi-cloud conversation but by far conversations are around how do they extract value from data? How do they protect data? And how do they make sure they're compliant with the data is something that's driving a lot of innovation, a lot of conversation, a lot of interest. Yeah, Keith, it's a great one. When I look at our research team at Wikibon, data is at the center of everything. In many ways, the failings of big data was talking about the challenges I have with infrastructure and oh, the growth and the variety and blah, blah, blah and everything. That's not what important to the business. They don't care about, you know, it's like, oh, well there's a storage problem and a network problem. It's the business says, there's data. You know, do I protect my business to make sure that I'm not at risk? You know, all the things like GDPR are coming and can I leverage value? Can I get new lines of business? Can I generate revenue out of that? And I've seen early signs that we've learned this whole AI, ML movement, you know, data really at the center. We've seen storage. We went from talking about storing data to about, you know, that data ecosystem and even edge computing and IoT. Data, where data needs to be, how I work it, absolutely a center. So yeah, it's great to hear that customers are identifying that. We've been doing like chief data officer events for many years. You know, where does data live? If is that a CIO thing? Is that a different part of the business? I don't know if you've got anything you're seeing from, you know, your customers as to who owns the data initiatives. So it's really interesting. I had a conversation with a major bank and it was a one-on-one with the CDO and what I thought was the most interesting part of the conversation is that he, not only does he report directly into the CIO, which, you know, is to be expected, but he meets regularly with the board of directors. So data, we're seeing, I'm seeing these CDO roles being popped up and it's not just about the technology, as you mentioned, it's about a whole approach about this asset that we have is so critical that we're creating a C-level position that today might report into the CIO but it is most definitely accountable to the board of directors. Well, yeah, Keith, the trend we've been watching for a while is it used to be IT was a cost center and that's what it was considered. Today, if IT isn't in direct relationship working with the business, the business will go find somebody else to do it. The whole stealth IT movement, I can go find an answer for what I'm doing. I think about projects I've worked on in my career and been like, oh, I wish it was as easy 15 years ago as it was today to do those, but we see security as a board-level discussion. Data as a board-level discussion is excellent and all of those things that traditionally we think that IT owned them, having awareness and visibility and information communication flow between the board and the C-suite is great progress. You know, it's interesting. I was a big proponent of this prior to coming on the vendor side is that vendors have to start having conversations outside of IT. So traditional infrastructure of vendors, Cisco, I'm sorry, Microsoft, VMware, the whole, the Dell EMC, Dell Technologies, they have to skill up and have conversations with CMOs, CDOs, COOs, HR directors because these buying centers now have power to go out and buy solutions. You know, I talked about in my keynote this morning, you know, how many people have Workday, how many people have Salesforce applications that had nothing to do when IT had nothing to do with the procurement of these solutions. The ball is moving outside of just traditional IT court, technology is starting to get to the point where regular users can consume, business users can consume these massive, massive solutions based on technology and just happens to be a label of a technology whether it's Salesforce or Workday. All right, yeah, so Keith, on this whole point there, I want to ask you, in my career, there's often been groups inside of business that didn't get along and we built silos, the storage and the network team don't get along, cloud and traditional IT, we're fighting, who owns it, turf wars, managing that, have we built silos in multi-cloud today? Is everybody holding hands and pointing the business in the same direction? Yeah, kind of give us the good and the bad and what we need to work on going forward. I think the good is that the umbrella of infrastructure is starting to work as a single unit, so you have storage, compute, networking, even configuration management, groups that were kind of confrontational before and territorial, those groups are starting to come under one senior manager or one senior executive looking at how do you provide services as a group and providing those services? I think where we're starting to see silos is actually the developer versus the infrastructure group, is developers just want an API to a set of services, they want infrastructure to get out of the way, developers themselves haven't kind of gotten enough of the scars from having to have to do operations, and so there's a different view of the world and today I think developers haven't gotten the budget power of operations, but the business wants solutions and they're going out and they're competing with traditional IT to get the dollars to run these services in the cloud or wherever, however they consume them, whether it's, you know, I just saw Chick-fil-A deploying 2,000 endpoints to run 6,000 containers at the edge, is that something that's run by IT or is that something run by developers? I don't know Chick-fil-A well enough to know, but this is what we're seeing in the industry. Yeah, all right, well, Keith Townsend, always a pleasure to catch up with you, thanks so much for joining us. Be sure to check him out, CTO Advisor on Twitter, check out his blog and of course, thank you so much for watching, we'll be back, lots more coverage here at VTUG Winter Warmer 2019, thanks for watching theCUBE.