 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back, everyone. LiveCube coverage here at VMworld 2019. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE here. Two sets are on the main set with a set of their Dave Vellante's hosting this morning. We have two great guests here, Bob Gendley, who's the cloud marketing at Dell EMC. John Allwright, director of product marketing at Pivotal. We got operators, we got development experts here. Guys, thanks for joining us. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, excited to be here. Thanks for coming on. It's great to be here. So the show VMworld, obviously an operator show. One of the things that's really interesting is the Dell EMC equation, the VMware on Dell EMC. You're seeing the piece parts come together. The Pivotal acquisition, you're in product marketing over there, so I'm sure you got a perspective on kind of the dots to connect there, even though the acquisition is a couple of days old. Let's start with Dell EMC. Michael was on yesterday, I said, you guys were number one in all the magic quadrants. You know, this, that, and the servers. As you got to pull that together on premises where the data center isn't really going away and the edge is emerged, you got to have an operating model that's got to be cloud. And that's really kind of seems to be the focus clearly. Yeah, absolutely. You know, what we see is that customers today are trying to deliver value through applications. And it's all about apps because apps is where that value gets delivered to the customer. And so, as organizations are trying to deliver those applications, the question becomes, what's the best place to put the app? And so, right workload, right cloud is a big thing for us. And clearly, organizations have been adopting public cloud in droves. And what we see is that they're trying to figure out how do they get that public cloud infrastructure to work with what they're doing on-prem. And so, what we're bringing to the table is this solution called Dell Technologies Cloud. And so, we're super excited about bringing together private and public in a hybrid cloud solution in a way that provides consistent infrastructure and consistent operations. And, you know, as you guys have seen, everybody's excited about next generation apps, right? So now, where are we going with next generation apps? And, you know, that's really what this show is all about. Bob, I'm so glad you brought up the app because, you know, we often, you know, my background is infrastructure and we get down in the weeds as to what's doing and like, oh, we architected this better and chipsets and all these things there. But it's that modernization that customers are going through. Can you bring us through some of that? What are the patterns you're seeing? You know, what one word I term I'd use for a while is, you know, modernize the platform and then modernize the apps? Is that it, you know, containerization? Where do all these pieces fit again when they're talking about their application development? So, you know, it's interesting because every customer is on an application journey. And so, you know, we all started in physical, right? I was a software developer right out of college and, you know, working with physical infrastructures where it's at. Organizations have clearly adopted virtualization and most organizations are now trying to pivot toward how do I get more efficiency for, you know, more agility for my virtualized applications and that's really where infrastructure is a service and IT is a service is adding a lot of value today. So, the question becomes as I'm working with my existing virtualized applications and now looking at next generation apps and developing those, how am I going to bring that along? And so, we see this sort of physical to virtual to infrastructure as a service to container as a service as being a very logical progression for customers. Well, certainly it's absolutely standardized now. Containers, since Docker was kind of hit the scene, the containers had been around for a while and talked to anyone with developers about containers. They put a wrapper around things. It's kind of a known concept. John, I want to get your thoughts because one of the things about DevOps and the cloud 1.0 was clearly the cloud native world was obvious. If you were a startup, you were born in the cloud, it was all goodness, you didn't have on premise to deal with, you just did everything. The operator was a developer, right? So, cloud 2.0 is a little bit more complicated and we're seeing the trend where the infrastructure has to be enabling for the developer and that has been a key thing. But what's interesting is in cloud 2.0 as we're calling it, the world's flipped upside down. It used to be the infrastructure would dictate what the application developers could do based upon what the capabilities were to now the application developers dictating resources below them to be on demand or elastic or one cloud, two clouds. So, the application's dictating configuration and architecture either dynamically or specifically. Not like limited to what is rolled out. So, this relationship between infrastructure and developers is evolving very quickly. I would love to get your thoughts on how you see it. You've been around the block on this point. Pat had a great slide in the keynote which kind of put Kubernetes as in between developers and operators. And I think the way that has evidenced itself is that Kubernetes has been something that's been driven down from developers. They're saying, this is the infrastructure that we want to run our applications. Working at the levels that typically infrastructure is provided at, there's too much work for them to do. So, in some cases, they were packaging up Kubernetes with their applications and saying to the infrastructure folks, hey, deploy this. And I think we've now gone across the point where infrastructure go, well, this is a thing and I need to provide that. So, things like Project Pacific are a recognition that, yeah, why not bake that into the infrastructure? So, Kubernetes is kind of DevOps materialized in a product. Yeah, it was interesting. I had an interview yesterday which maybe even, we've been watching Kubernetes since the beginning, but the way they described it is like, Kubernetes is really the new server. It's like, I can spin up that environment in a much shorter period of time, which of course was part of the value proposition of going to containerization. And, right, Project Pacific is, you're going to take your install base of VMs and make, give them that bridge to the future. Pivotal also, if I wanted to just do it in the public cloud, you've got the options there. Correct, maybe what I'd love, John, is you can help tease us out the Kubernetes message if I take VMware plus Pivotal and Heptio and all the pieces. Help us sort through the fog a little bit. So, the thing that's become very clear to us, Pivotal and I think in the industry, is that Kubernetes is now becoming an expected default. Whereas maybe before it was VMs, and that's the basic foundation that I'm going to build my workloads, my applications on. Now it's Kubernetes, and whether I'm building custom applications or a vendor is supplying me with something as a container images in a pod, that's kind of the default. So, the big thing about the announcements, I think, from the keynote, whether that's really what we're working to. And something like Townsend Mission Control now takes kind of abstracts you away from necessarily where those Kubernetes are appearing, whether that is on-prem or in the public cloud, unless you work kind of across a foundation that actually appears in a lot of different places. So, you know. Well, the impact of Mission Control, just drill down on that for a second, because that demo was pretty sweet. That would just take a minute to explain the relevance of having a view of all those Kubernetes clusters across the cloud and what it means to the operator, because that was an interesting demo. Yeah, so the analogy I use, and it doesn't fit exactly, but it's kind of like power stations in a grid, like with a lot of products, vendors like ourselves with PKS have been creating the power stations that let you run Kubernetes, but the power is really in having the grid, and so Mission Control gives you the grid. It lets you do operations across Kubernetes wherever they are, but also do things like migration. So, we talk about Enterprise PKS being a really good start point for getting into this new world of Pacific and everything, and it's actually Tanzu Mission Control that enables that. It's like VMotion for containers, almost. Yeah, it is such an important piece because every platform is going to have Kubernetes and while VMware is going to have some Kubernetes, it's not going to have all Kubernetes, so if I've got some in Amazon and I'm using Anthos over here, we'd love to have that management platform that gives me visibility, but I just want to bring it back to you here. In the industry, we've had time and time again where we want to manage a heterogeneous environment, and it's been Don Quixote chasing after that dream. Tell us, how do we pull that together and where do we live? Well, I think you guys were talking about the fact that developers expect this Kubernetes dial tone today, and that's sort of driving infrastructure choices. One of the things that we need to do as infrastructure people is make that real. In other words, it's all well and good to develop an application on a Kubernetes infrastructure, but now how do I turn that into a production service that is helping me drive revenue, for example, right? So what we need to do is operationalize that in a way that can bring that to life and bring that to life in a production way, and that's really where we're going with PKS on VCF, on VxRail. So PKS on VCF allows organizations to actually automate it fashion to play a Kubernetes cluster, right? So what that does is allow organizations to now suddenly bring their investment in what they've been doing in virtualization today and bring that toward this next generation containerized based applications. And this is key because in order to, for example, stand up a Kubernetes cluster and then make that in a production service, there's just tons of moving parts. So why not automate that in a fashion that essentially takes all of the stress out of that day zero and then furthermore, when it comes to day two and making sure that's up to date, making sure that you can patch that, you know, for example, if there's a critical bug, you want to be able to do that in automated fashion as well because there's just so many moving parts that it's impossible to keep track of all this stuff manually. Bob, I think there's so many changes that go through when we're moving to that environment where it's going to change a lot more. You know, we think about management, it used to be, oh, okay, I know where the server lives. Oh, wait, VMs fly all over the place with view motion. Containers, by the time you go looking for it, it feels like it's trying to, you know, measure the speed and direction of an atom. It's, you know, you can't pin it down, but the one I want to get you from a customer along that journey, the consumption model has to be something that is, you know, changing along the lines. How does, you know, the infrastructure, how do we make sure it can scale like the cloud and how can I pay for it like that flexible model? Well, that's pretty interesting because we see a couple of things, organizations come to us and say, you know, I'm all in on cloud. And we're like, okay, what do you mean you're all in on cloud? Well, there's two things that come out, right? One is elastic capacity, the ability to expand as needed. The other one is metered use. In other words, I only want to pay for this stuff when I'm actually using it. So, you know, we're providing a couple of ways to get there today with Dell Technologies Cloud. One is this data center as a service offering that we've been discussing, which is VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. And the other one is flex on demand. And flex on demand is an offer that we're bringing to the table for traditional customer managed infrastructure that allows organizations to essentially only pay for the nodes that they're using in their on-premises cluster. So, you know, we believe that being able to deliver that, whether it's on-prem with traditional infrastructure or in a public cloud environment, which organizations clearly have voted with their dollars on is key. And so, you know, that's what we're bringing to the table. It's clear you guys are building that out and running as fast as you can to get it done. Final thought, I want to get you guys to weigh in on the show this week. What's the big takeaway from your perspective? Obviously, Pivotal's big news with and into the fold with VMware is going to be a really strategic opportunity for VMware to go that next level with developers and then kind of figuring out and kind of connecting the dots there. What's the top stories that you're seeing that people that you're walking away with from the show this week? For me, it's really, you don't have to choose. In other words, organizations are looking at containerization and saying, wow, you know, next generation applications are going there. Maybe I should be shifting everything over there. And yet they're saying, gosh, I've got all this existing infrastructure, what I'm going to do. So really, you know, PKS on BCF is allowing organizations to say, I can have existing virtualized apps living right next to my emerging containerized applications and use existing infrastructure, existing skills in order to get there. And I think really, you know, you don't have to choose. You've got to path forward from where you are today into this next generation of cloud native applications. This is really exciting. And that's what we're bringing to the table. I think organizations, customer organizations need to reevaluate who VMware is and what they can do for them. You know, Pivotal's always been about business outcomes for our customers and those outcomes come through developing software, you know, to drive the business. And VMware has reached out to developers in the past, but that's really on steroids now. They really haven't had success there because they're operators. But they've always been a software company. VMware is at heart a software company. Right, but I always think of marketing as save money, make money, go faster. And you know, VMware has been amazing at helping folks to save money, go faster. I think that the Pivotal relationship is going to be really important for VMware. I think it's going to completely change the game. We'll be tracking the progress. Thanks for sharing, thanks for coming on. Thanks for the insight here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Stu Miniman. More live coverage from VMworld 2019 after this short break.