 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Radio 2018, brought to you by VMware. Hey, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's exclusive coverage of Radio 2018. We are in San Francisco for their VMware's Radio 2018. It's their R&D fiesta party. As Steve Herrod said, former CTO, it's like a sales kickoff for engineers. It's a great time, but it's also serious, a lot of real serious discussion. And of course, people are flexing their technical muscles, stretching their minds. And I'm here with one of the chief operator, one of the main principals and legend in VMware, Ragu Ragu Ram, chief operating officer, new title, chief operating officer, products and cloud services. Great to see you. Great to see you, John. What year did you join VMware? 2003. So you've seen many of these radios. Yes, it's one of the highlights of the year for me. Yeah, super important architect of VMware, great part of the community leader, architect of the AWS relationship. Sure. Part of that, moving with Andy Jassy, Sanjay Poonan. This is the 14th year of radio. And VMware has changed a lot since you joined. Now, a world-class organization, getting check marks for one of the best places to work, certainly for engineers. It's like a great party of ours. Take a minute to explain the radio culture. It's 14th year. There's t-shirts behind us that commemorate the key milestones. Where it's come from, where it's gone. Your thoughts on the program and the community. Yeah, I mean, this is in fact, one of the unique characteristics of VMware. I've checked around with my peers in the industry, and I don't think any other tech company of our size does this. Radio stands for R&D Innovation Offsite. And like you said, we started 14 years ago, just to take the bunch of engineers out from their daily grinds, and say, what could we be building? Fundamentally, that's groundbreaking. So I would say it's a cross between us, wild science fair and a research conference. And in fact, both of these go hand in hand at this place. People publish papers, and there is a selection committee just like in serious conferences. And in fact, Ray had some amazing stats for this year's submissions, and the selection is very, very rigorous. At the same time, you'll go upstairs, and you'll see the exhibition hall, where there are all kinds of things that are displayed, things that could be very well incremental, things in the next release, and things that are wild and wacky off the wall that we might never, ever do. So it's really the full gamut. The other interesting thing is if you've gone bigger, we are getting people from pretty much all parts of VMware. And I think there is a representation from 25 to 30 companies. How many engineering centers are there, roughly? I mean, there's core centers, and then you have engineers all over the world. How many engineers? I would say, in terms of medium to big size centers, there are probably over a dozen across the globe, and literally every continent. Clearly in the US, we have four big centers. In Europe, we have three, at least. And in Asia-Pac, we have another three or four. So we definitely have over 10. I mean, everyone who knows VMware and also knows theCUBE for nine years, but this is our ninth year covering VMworld. All you got to do is look at VMworld and you can tell one thing right out of the gate, very community-oriented. All the decisions are made in the community. Also, people who know VMware know you're highly an engineering organization. This is not like a lot of marketing fluff, although you do have some good marketing here and there, but the point is it's an engineering culture with community. This is unique. I've seen companies that don't walk the talk on, quote, community engineering. They have silos, there's a lot of infighting. How has VMware preserved a culture of innovation amongst their peers when it's competitive as hell inside VMware One to be smart, achieve the success, but also VMware's always been in always a moving market. How do you guys do? What's the secret sauce? I mean, there's not a single thing. Like you said, I think culture is something that happens over time and is preserved over time and is preserved through people. It's not like anything you can write down, right? Of course you can write it down, but it won't be worth the paper to turn it down unless it's practiced every day by the people. And so I think that is the key thing here. Right from the get-go, customer-centric innovation has ruled the rules here. So the question to ask always is, okay, great innovation. Look at it from a customer end point of view. I think that matters a lot here. Secondly, there is a lot of emphasis on breaking the rules in terms of doing something disruptive. And the engineers that come here are tend to be the kind that respond to that, right? And then lots of venues, like this is not the only thing that we do, right? We do these things called Boratons, which is our internal versions of hackathons. We do regional versions of these things. Each of the teams, like the business units, have their own little R&D, I mean, innovation activities that go on. It's a lot of things. They can go outside the scope of their job. Exactly. Get an idea of passion, an idea, and go after it and not have to worry about anything. Yep, yep, exactly. And we have a pretty... With a path to commercialization, if the... Yeah, that's what I was going to say. We have a fairly high success rate, I would say, of taking things that we see here and turning them into product and eventually into monetizable businesses, all things that go into the product features, right? Give some examples of historically successes, notables, and then also talk about some ones that aren't notable, that have come out. I mean, I know a lot's come out of this. Numbers are clear. What are some of the highlights that have come out of the radio event that have been blockbuster successes? I mean, a lot of the things that you see in the networking today came out of radio, right? A lot of the things about doing security and networking from the hypervisor up came from here. What you see today as V-SAN, add its roots here, right? What you see today with the app defense and the security stuff, add its roots here. A lot of the features that are in V-Sphere today, right? Especially the storage, V-Motion, and so on and so forth was first showcased here. And this goes on and on and on, right? We also have a lot of things that I've shown up here that we have not pursued. There was, for example, almost like an eBay for V-M capacity, and we didn't pursue it. God knows that could have been a huge idea, right? So- There's some misses, too. Yeah, there's some misses, too. But that's the whole point of this, so. Yeah, that sparks the creativity. How much is creativity goes on at this event? I mean, certainly a lot of barnstorming, brainstorming. I don't want to call it a lot of interaction, physical face-to-face. How much creativity is happening, do you think, here? Yeah, so a few years back, they introduced a couple of things. One is instant birds of a feather, where you can literally go to a whiteboard and say, hey, let's discuss this topic and set up a time and then people show up. And then there's this other one that they call Lightning Rounds, which literally happens over drinks, I think, tomorrow or something, where people come in and it's not of a mini gong show where nothing's scripted, all sorts of crazy ideas keep flowing. I would say those are two examples where there's a lot of on-the-spot creativity, right? And also, as the companies and the R&D teams have gotten more dispersed, this is an opportunity for people to get together, even within the same business unit or across business units, and say, let's go solve this problem. You and I have been talking about this on email, let's talk about it face-to-face, and say, hey, let's bring somebody else in that's relevant to this conversation as well. So those are the kind of things that go on here that spark the creativity. And then, of course, the exhibits, when people start talking, thinking about these exhibits and talking to people that are showing there, other ideas get spawned off as well. Greg, we talk about, just from your experience, so you had a lot of great track record, and certainly within VM, where it goes back to the early 2000s, what is your observation on the innovation formula? What's been the consistent constant of innovation, as the waves have changed, and certainly, I mean, I've been in Palo Alto for 19 years now, in my 20th year, even Palo Alto's changed. So the world's changed, modern, and we'll get to the Amazon deal in a second, certainly clouds here. What have you seen as the constant innovation variable? I mean, what I would say is this, fundamentally the people that we tend to recruit into VM are by and large what we call, what I at least I call, platform thinkers. So they think of building a fundamental piece of technology that can be used, possibly used in 10 different ways, right? And they build it for one particular use case, and then the question goes back to, okay, now we have done this, what else can we do with this foundational technology? And if you look at vSphere with the same thing, if you look at networking the same thing, storage is the same thing. So I would say that is the constant, that's one constant here, right? Which is how do you build fundamentally a platform that can be used in fundamental, very different ways? I mean, some will also say systems thinking. I mean, the cloud is a system. I mean, cloud has been offering me, I think Paul Maritz's 2010 picture, although some of the calls didn't come out, but he kind of generally had the architecture. Yeah, yeah. He nailed it. Yeah, yeah. And there are only a few people like Paul in the world and absolutely he nailed it. Yeah, Dave and I would give him a lot of credit for that. Okay, let's talk about Amazon Web Services. Certainly, radio is now 14th year. At what point did the clouds start clicking in? You said there's some misses to eBay for VMs. Certainly, cloud is on the radar. And vCloud, we know what happened there. Pat talked about how you guys really took that opportunity, which is you made lemonade out of some lemons there with that project. That's my words, not his. When did cloud first appear on the horizon in radio? Yeah. And when, now, how do you see that happening now as we talk multi-cloud? Yeah, so you missed the alumni session today and one of the early engineers said when he was interviewed by Mendel, which was in 1999, right? Mendel is, of course, the founder and chief scientist the first chief scientist here. He said he foresaw Dave and when the engineer asked him how are we going to make money on this, right? He thought there'll be a day when people just rent compute capacity from a data center instead of going out and buying gear, right? And so, in some ways- He predicted cloud operations. But it's back in the company starting days, right? But really, I think we saw this in 2005, 2006, 2007 at the same time actually as Amazon saw this, right? But the big difference was we were growing 100% a year in our core business and we had our hands full that way, right? And we felt like as a software company the way to play it is by delivering technology to other people to build it. So that's when it really made its way here, right? In radio and in the products. And by the way, it wasn't obvious to many people in the industry at that time to Amazon. I have had many conversations with Andy Jatsy and he always, now he uses the term being misunderstood. I mean, they were completely misunderstood unless you were an entrepreneur who was using EC2s to avoid seed money because it was a dream for entrepreneurs at that time. I remember that clearly. That was not obvious. It really wasn't obvious until about 2010, 9, 10 there. So you guys were growing, okay, missed that. But I mean, radio is not about missing, it's about identifying. So how does it translate today for Amazon? So the Amazon relationship, if you think about the technical underpinnings of it, right? Clearly we did a vCloud error. We learned a lot of that. Then within our, some of our engineers, the question that was asked was, what if we could run a cloud on top of other people's clouds, right? And we did experiments with nested virtualization, we did experiments with bare metal and then we chose this sort of a model. So that's, I would say, one of the technical early indicators of what we could do on other people's clouds. So that's, I would say, a big thing. And the rest of the things that we're doing with respect to elastically growing capacity and all those things, came from the experiments that were shown up here. So that was the roots connection back to radio. In terms of the Amazon partnership itself, that was, a lot of it was driven from the customer end. As we were thinking about VCA not working the way we wanted it to work, we went back to the customers and said, look, what is wrong with this picture? And the answer that came back was very clear. They said, we like the hybrid idea, but we want the hybrid to be VMware on-prem and Amazon in the cloud, because 70% of our customers turned out to be AWS customers. And at the same time, AWS is hearing the same thing. Why don't you guys team up instead of being an either or, right? That's what led to the partnership actually. And your team at VMware, can you notice the cloud native piece aspect of it? So obviously Kubernetes is on the horizon, but not on the horizon, in your face, and you've got service mesh over the top. It's up the stack, it's networking. Still needs to do networking. It's like, you guys must be like, hey, we love what's going on up there. Come down to the store. So the boundary between what is the application platform and infrastructure platform is constantly changing, right? And Kubernetes, when it started out, people said, oh, it's an application platform. Now it turns out it's actually infrastructure. And similarly, same thing in networking. So what we see is things that were at the lower level of the infrastructure constructs, the same idea is applying at the next level up. That's why we love Kubernetes. We love service mesh. We love similar concepts that are coming about in storage and security and so on and so forth. A unified stack is coming. Yep, exactly. It's just someone fixed networking and the Holy Grail programmable networks. When are they coming? At the application level. Let's go. Holy Grail is finally here. It's not where you thought it was going to be. It is at both places, right? I mean, it's tying back to the conventional layer, two layer, three stuff because that's also important still. Rego, I love having a chat with you. It's great to chat. Good to see you again, John. Super impressive with the work you've been doing. I love the cloud deal with Amazon. You know that. Love was going on in Kubernetes and containerization. Love was going on service mesh, unified stack. Love cryptocurrency, which I didn't get to ask you. Yep. Thumbs up. You've got crazy things going on there too. Thumbs up, okay. Thumbs up. More blockchain than cryptocurrency, but yeah. Blockchain, token economics coming right behind it. It's theCUBE bringing you all the action here at Radio, we're the signal. 2018, Radio 2018, I'm theCUBE. With Raghu, I'm going to be right back with more coverage after this short break.