 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Radio 2018, brought to you by VMware. Hello everyone, welcome to the special CUBE coverage here in San Francisco, California for VMware's Radio 2018 event. This is their R&D big event kickoff. It's like a sales kickoff for engineers, as Steve Herrod said on stage. Our next guest is Mourney Vendor Balt, VP of the Explorer Group, Office of the CTO, also program chair for the event today conference. Working for the collective of people within VMware on a rigorous selection committee for a high bar here at your event. Welcome to theCUBE, thanks for joining me. Thank you. Talk about the event, because I know a lot of work went into it, congratulations. The talks are amazing, I see the schedule. We have Pat Gelsinger coming on later today. We just had Ray O'Farrell on. This is like the, I won't say Burning Man of VMware, but this is like, this is really a recognition, but also really important innovation. Take a minute to talk about the process that you go through to put this together. It's a fantastic event, smartest minds, the cream rises to the top. It's hard, it's challenging, it's a team effort, but yet you got to ride the right waves. Right, so radio, R&D innovation off-site, right? And as you said, it is tough because we've got this huge R&D community and they've all got amazing ideas, so they get the opportunity to submit ideas. I think this year we had over 1700 ideas submitted and at the end of the day, we're only going to showcase 226 of those ideas across research programs, posters, breakout sessions, just in time, buffs, birds of a feather, you know, so the bar is high, we've got a finite amount of time, but what's amazing is we take these ideas and we don't just showcase them at radio, we have four other programs that give us the ability to take those ideas to the next level. So when we think about the innovation programs that come out of OCTO, this is really to drive what we call off-road map innovation. So Ragu and Rajiv, with the Product Cloud Services Division, are driving road map, you know, zero to three years out, the stuff that you can buy from custom sales, customer centric. OCTO is providing an innovation program structure, these five programs, tech talks, flings, borathons, radio and X-Labs, and as a collective, they are focused on off-road map innovation. Give an example of what that means off-road. Sure, so last year at radio, we did a paper that was showcased on functions as a service. So you think of AWS Lambda, right? So VMware is uniquely positioned with the substrate to manage and orchestrate VMs containers and why not functions. So this radio paper was submitted, I then, as the X-Labs group, said we're going to fund this, but given where we are in this market, we said, all right, we'll fund this for 12 months. So we're incubating functions as a service. In July, August timeframe, that'll actually exit X-Labs into the cloud native business unit. It's a real rapid innovation. Very rapid, within a 12 month period, we're going to get something into a BU that they can take it to market. Yeah, and also, I would say that there's also, I've seen from the talks here, there's also off-road map hard problems that need to kind of get the concepts, building blocks or architecture. Probably the confluence is hitting whatever it's IoT or whatever. Blockchain, seeing things like that. Is that also accurate too? Very true, and Ray had a great slide in his keynote this morning. You know, we spoke about how we started in 2003 when he joined the company. It was all about compute virtualization. Fast forward 15 years and you look at our strategy today. It's any cloud, any device, any app, right? Then you got to look to the future beyond that. What are we doing today? What are the next 20 years going to look like? Obviously, there's things like, you know, blockchain, VR, edge computing, you know, ML. Service measures. Service measures, adaptive security. And you know, people say, oh, AI, ML, that's a hot topic right now. But if you look back at VMware, we've been doing that since 2006. Distributed resource scheduler. A great example of something that, you know, at the core of the product was already using ML techniques, you know, to load balance a data center. And now you can load balance across clouds. It's interesting how buzzwords can become industry verticals. We saw that with Hadoop. It really didn't happen. Although it became important in big data, but as it integrates in. I mean, I find that you guys really, from the ecosystem that we look at, you guys have a really interesting challenge because you started out as inside the box, if you will, so that there's a T-shirt there from the 14 year history. You guys have been doing this event. Great collection of T-shirts behind us. You can't see it. It's really cool, but infrastructure's on-premise. You buy it's data center growth. All that stuff happened. Cloud comes in, big data comes in. Now you got blockchain. These are big markets now, but the intersection of all these are all kind of touching each other. IOT, so it's really that integration. I also find that you guys do a great job of fostering innovation and always amaze at VMworld with some great either benchmarks or labs and show the good stuff. How do you do it? Walk me through the steps because you have this Explorer program, which is working. It's almost a ladder, a reverse ladder. Start with Tech Talks. Get it out to the marketplace. Your Hackathon. Take us through the process of those four things. Tech Talks, Borathons, which is a meaning behind the name, Flings and X Labs. Take us through that progression. And radio, of course. And radio, of course, the big 10 event bringing it all together. I'm an engineer. I have a great idea. I want to socialize it. I want to get some feedback. So at VMware, we offer a Tech Talk platform. You come, you present your idea. It's live. There'll be engineers in the audience. We also record those. And then those get replayed. And engineers will say, you know, have you thought about this? Or have you met up with Johnny and Mary? They're actually working on something very similar. Why don't you go and compare ideas? I can actually make that very real. I was in India in November and we were doing a shark tank for our X Labs incubator. And this one team presented an idea on a augmented reality desktop. We went over to another office, actually the air watch office. And we did another shark tank there. Another team pitched the exact same idea. So I looked at my host and I said, do these two teams know each other? And the guy goes, absolutely not. So what did we do? We made the connection point. Their ideas were virtually identical. They were 25 kilometers apart. Never met. So that's one of the challenges. When your company becomes so big, you've got this vast R&D organization that's truly global. In one country, 25 kilometers apart, you had two teams with the same idea they'd never met. So part of the challenge is also bringing these ideas together because the sum of the parts makes for a greater whole. And they could then collectively come together, then present to radio one single paper or idea. Absolutely, all go and say, you know what? Let's take this in the next step, which would be a Borothon. So Borothons are hackathons. Explain the name, because Borothon sounds like hackathons, so it is. But there's a meaning behind the name Borothon. What is the name? So our very first build repository was named after Bora Bora. And so we paid homage to that. And so instead of saying a hackathon, we called it a Borothon. And one of our senior engineers apparently came up with that name. So and it's stuck and it's great. So it's got history. Okay, so Borothons is like, okay, so you do tech talk, you collaborate, you socialize the idea via verbal or presentation that gets the seeds of innovation kind of planted. Borothon is like, okay, let's attack it. Turn it into a prototype. Prototype. And it gets judged. So then you're getting even more feedback from your most senior engineers. In fact- And there's a process for all this that you guys run. Yeah, so the Explorer groups run these five innovation programs. We just recently in Palo Alto did a themed Borothon. Our fellows and PEs came together, decided the theme should be sustainability. And we mixed it up a little bit. So normally at a Borothon, teams come with ideas that they've already been developing. For this one, the teams had no idea what the theme was going to be. So we announced the theme. Then they showed up on the day to learn what the five challenges were going to be. And some of those challenges, one of them was quite interesting. It was using distributed ledger to manage micro grids. And that's a- Great blockchain implementation. Well, it's a project that is near and dear to us at VMware. We're actually going to be setting up a micro grid on campus. And if you think about micro grids and Nicolera Cut can talk more to this, we're going to be looking at, how can we give power back to the city of Palo Alto? Well, imagine that becoming a mesh network. With token economics. How do you start tracking this, right? A blockchain would be a perfect way to do this, right? So then you take your ideas at a Borothon, get them into a prototype, get some more feedback. And now you might have enough critical mass to say, right, you know what? I'm going to present a radio paper next year. So then you work as a team, get that into the system. And certainly in India, these third world countries now becoming large growing middle class. These are important technologies to build on top of, say, mobile. Absolutely. And with solar and power coming in, it's a natural evolution. So that's good use case. Okay, so now I do the Borothon. Now I've got a product, Flings. It's a prototype, right? So now- Socialize it, you have a fling, you throw it out there, you fling it out there, what happens? Yeah, so I've done something at a Borothon. It's like, I want to get some actual feedback from the ecosystem, our customers and partners. That example I used with VSAN. You know, VSAN launched, we wanted to get some health analytics. The release managers were doing their job. The products got a ship on the stage. Senior engineers on the team got a health analytics tool out as a fling. It got incredible feedback from the community, made it into the next release. We did the same with the HTML client, right? And that's been in the press lately because, you know, we've got Rotoflex. Now there's HTML. But that actually started, two teams started working on that. One team just did HTML, a very small portion of the HTML client, presented a radio paper, two years later, another team started the work. And now we have a full-fledged HTML client that's embedded into the vSphere product. So the fling brings in a community dynamic, it brings in new ideas, or diversity, if you will, all kinds of diverse ideas, melting together. Now, X-Labs, I'm assuming that's an incubator, that brings it together. What is X-Labs? Is that an incubator? You fund it, what happens there? So within X-Labs, the real way to think about it, it's truly an incubator. I don't want to use the word startup there because you've clearly got the protection of the larger VMware organization. So you're not being a scrappy startup, but you've got a great idea. We see there's merit, we see it more being on the disruptive side. And so we offer two tracks in the X-Labs. There's a light track, which typically runs three to six months, and you're still doing your day job. You're still, so you're basically doing two jobs. You know, we fund you with the level of funding that allows you to bring on extra contracting, resources, developers, et cetera. And you're typically delivering one objective. The larger X-Labs is the full track. So functions as a service. Full track, we showcased it as a radio paper last year. We said, all right, we're going to fund this. We're going to give it 12 months worth of funding, and then it needs to exit into a business unit. And we got lucky with that one because we were already doing a lot of work with containers, the PKS, the pivotal. So people have to quit their day job, not quit their JEDA, but move their resource over. So the full track is go for it, green light, run as fast as you can, take it to this business unit. Is the business unit known as the endpoint in time? Is it kind of tracked there? Is it more flexible still? Not all the time. You know, so sometimes with functions, it was easy, right? So we know we've got Paul Fezone heading up cloud native apps, the cloud native business unit. He's doing all the partnerships with PKS. That one makes sense. We're actually doing one right now. Another XLAB's full called network slicing. And it's going to play into the telco space. We've obviously got NFV being, you know, led by Shea Karan team, but we don't know if network slicing, when it exits. And this one is probably going to have a longer time horizon, probably 20, 40, 36 months. Does it go into the NFV business unit or does it become its own business unit? That's awesome. So you got great tracks end to end. So you have a good process. I got to ask you the question that's on my mind. I think everyone would look at this. And some people might look at VMware as a, as most people do, at least I do, as a kind of a cutting edge tier one company. You guys are always a great place to work, voted as get awards for that. But you take seriously innovation and organic growth and community and engineering. Engineering and community are two really important things. How do you bring the foster culture? Because remember, engineers can be really pissed off. Oh my God, they're idiots that will make the selection. Because you don't want engineers to be pissed, right? Because they're proud and they're inventing. So how do you manage that? The team approach, what's the cultural secret in the DNA that makes this so successful over 14 years? So before I answer that question, I think it's important to take a step back. So when we think about innovation, we call this thing the VMware innovation engine. There's really three parts to it, right? If you think about innovation at its core, sustaining disruptive, internal, external. And so we've got product cloud services group, Regu and Rajiv. We've got Octo, hit it up by Ray. We've got Corp Dev, hit it up by Shaker. Think of it as, it's a three-legged stool. You take one of those legs away, the stool falls over. So it's a balancing act, right? And we need to be collaborating. And they're talking to each other all the time. We're talking to each other all the time, right? Build or buy. Are we going to do something internal or are we going to go external, right? You think of some of our acquisitions like NICERA, right? We didn't build that, we bought it. You think about AirWatch, right? AirWatch put us into the top right quadrant from Gartner, right? So these are very strategic decisions that get made. Pat just presented at Dell EMC World, Dell Technologies World. He had a slide on there that showed, there was the NICERA acquisition and then it sort of was this arc leading all the way up to VeloCloud. And when you saw it on one slide, it made perfect sense. As an outsider looking in, you might have thought, why were they doing all these things? Why was that acquisition made? But there's always a plan and that plan involves us all talking across. It's a strategic plan around what to move faster on because always the challenge on M&A, if they're not talking to each other, is the buy-build is, you kind of may miss a core competency. You always, what's the core competency of the company? And should you outsource a core competency or should you build it internally? Sometimes you might have to accelerate that. So I think AirWatch and NICERA, I would say it was kind of on the edges of core competency but together with the synergies. Help us accelerate. And I think that's your message. So that's the culture. How do you make all this a secret sauce of making all this work? Because you have to kind of create an open, collaborative, it's competitive. So how do you balance that? You know, so clearly there's a ton of innovation going on within the product cloud services division. The stuff that's on the truck that our customers can buy today. We also know we've got to look ahead. And we've got to start looking at solving problems that aren't on the truck today, right? And so having these five programs and the collective is really what allows us to do that. But at the same time, we need to have open channels of communication back into Corp Dev as well. I can give you examples of, you know, Shae Crony's team might be looking at Company X. We're doing some exploratory work. IoT, I did an audit for Ray. We said IoT is going to be massive. Everybody knows that. But you know what's going to be even more massive? Is all the data at the edge? And what do you do with that data? How do you turn that data into something actionable? All right, so if you think about a jet engine on a big plane, right? When it's operating correctly, you know what all the good levels are, the metrics, the telemetry coming off that. Why do I need to collect that? Throw it away. You're interested in the anomalies, right? As we start thinking about IoT and we start thinking about all this data at the edge, we're going to need a different type of analytics engine that can do real time analytics, but not looking at the norm, looking at the deviations and report back on that so you can take action on that. You know, so we started identifying some companies like PubNug, MuleSoft, who just got acquired, right? Shae Kerr and his team were looking at the same companies and was like, yeah, these companies are interesting because they're starting to attack the problem in a different way. We do that at VMware all the time. You think about app defense. We've taken a completely different approach to security. You know what the good state is? Well, if you have a deviation, attack that, you know? And then you can use things like micro-segmentation. It's reimagining and almost flipping everything upside down. Yeah, challenging the status quo. Great stuff, great program. I got to ask you a final question. Since it's your show here, great content program, by the way. Got the competition, you got the papers, which is deep technical guleness of the show. It's great content, great event. Thanks for inviting us. What's trending? What's rising up? What if you had to kind of point at something that you see getting some buzz that you thought might get buzz or didn't get buzz? What's rising of the topics of interest here? What's kind of popping out for you? What's trending if I had to do a Twitter feed of like, not Twitter feed, but like stop three trending items here? Well, I'll take it back to that last borough that we did on sustainability. We set out the five challenges. The challenge that got the most attention was the blockchain microgrid. So blockchain is definitely trending. And you know, the challenge we have with blockchain today is it's not ready for the enterprise. So David Tenenhausen, his research group is actually looking at how do you make blockchain enterprise ready? And that is a difficult problem to solve. So there's a ton of interest in blockchain. Well, we have an opinion, don't use the public blockchain. So, you know, that's one that's definitely trending. We have a great program called Propel where we basically attract the brightest of the brightest, you know, new college grads coming into the company. And they actually come through Octo first and do a sort of an onboarding process. What are they interested in? They're not really interested in working for a particular BU. But you know, when we share with them, you're going to have the ability to work on blockchain, AI, you know, VR, augmented reality, distributed, you know, systems, new ways of doing analytics. That's what attracts them. And they have the options to go test and put the toe in the water or jump in deep with X-Labs. Absolutely. This is like, you know, catnip for engineers. Draws a lot of people in. Absolutely. And you know, we need to do that to be competitive in the valley. I mean, it's a very hard mark. Great place to work. You guys have a great engineering team. Congratulations for a great event. Morni, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. We're here in San Francisco for the CUBE coverage of Radio 2018. I'm John Furrier. We'll be back with more coverage after this break. Thanks for watching.