 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Cover EMC World 2016, brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live at EMC World 2016. It's the SiliconANGLE Media's theCUBE. It's our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante, our next guest is Robin Matlock, the CMO of VMware here on theCUBE, CUBE alumni, great to see you, Robin. Thanks for joining us. Thanks, happy to be here, as always. So, we just talked to Jeremy Bird, who's now the CMO of Dell Technologies, which he was illuminating the challenges of his branding challenges, which can be interesting to watch that happen, but as a CMO, you got to be plugged into all the themes. So, one, I want to get your thoughts on the show here, and then you got the big show come up with VMworld. What's your take on this? Because looking at the landscape, there's a lot of change. It's a challenge for marketers to try to make that message relevant. What's your thoughts of this show? Certainly with the looming acquisition. What's your thoughts on the show and how they're doing? Yeah, so I think you have two big things there. What's my thoughts on this show? I think they've done a fabulous job. Jeremy, you know, I go way back with Jeremy. He's a fabulous marketer, one of the best in the industry. And I mean, this place is alive, you know? I think he has done some amazing, creative things on stage. I don't know if you saw the keynote today, but I thought the James Bond thing was exceptional, very entertaining, keeps people engaged, you know? But also delivering really interesting content. So I thought today's focus on Cloud Native was particularly interesting. So I think he's doing a really good job of focusing on what people need to run their businesses today, but also giving a nod out to the future and where the industry's going. And the other thing, the big discussion here, I want to get your thoughts on this, and is the first time Pat Gelsinger's not here at EMC World. Certainly a lot of hallway conversation. It even surprised Joe Tucci, who was Dave asked in the analyst session, you know, where's Pat Gelsinger? He's been on theCUBE every time. So Pat, we miss you, if you're watching this. Why isn't he here? And just clear the air on the speculation of why he's not here. There's a conspiracy theories everywhere. Just let's clear the air on that. First of all, you guys crack me up. If we run things the same every year, you get bored. When we change it up, you start coming up with all kinds of theories and rationales to what's going on behind the scenes. Let me just put these rumors to rest. Pat Gelsinger is fired up and excited about the VMware and our future and the role we play in the Dell Technologies family as he ever has been. When you do these events, you think first and foremost, what are the big messages or stories that I need to tell the marketplace? It's no different than at VMworld. Then the second thing is who's the most appropriate person to come and tell these stories? Well, the bottom line is the Dell EMC merger is probably one of the biggest, most important messages that had to get covered here at EMC World. Who's better to tell that story than Michael Dell and Joe Tucci, right? Then there was a whole lot of great product information, lots of new products being announced. The best people to tell that are your CTOs, your technical people. We brought some of the top talent from VMware, Ray O'Farrell, a longtime veteran of VMware, was on stage yesterday talking about VRealize and the control plane for a multi-cloud world. Today, Kit Colbert, one of the favorite VMware CTOs, talking about cloud native. So look, there's nothing more to it than that, Pat's alive and well, trust me, he's very engaged. Well, Joe said that to the analysts. He said, look, basically we ought to give Michael some time and we have all this product stuff to pitch. Well, these announcements are huge. I mean, they have a slew of announcements. So it really, to summarize, there's time slot issues. They have limited time on stage. I mean, Chad had the Russia's demo at the end. So that seems to be the issue. Michael needed to be out there upfront, obviously. I don't even see it as an issue, to be honest, John. I don't think it's an issue. I think it's an opportunity. At the end of the day, what were the right things to cover, what were the right speakers to cover those? And you know, I'm the one that called the shot for Pat. I didn't think it was the right place. I think really, Ray O'Farrell and Kit Colbert were optional. And Kit was on theCUBE yesterday, optimal, sorry. Given some great commentary as well. Okay, great, let's get that out of the way. I just wanted to clear the air. Well, I was to say, Pat is our number one guest on theCUBE, you know. I don't know if you knew that. He is number one. Michael Dell, I think has given him a run for his money. He's trying. Don't you worry. We'll see you at VMware, Pat. Don't you worry. Don't you worry. Jay, the sun is around the corner here. Don't worry. Let's talk about what's coming up. Cause obviously that Pat will be on stage at VMworld. So he is going to have to put that together. Last year, he delivered a really epic keynote. I thought it was very well done. Really talked about the future of the industry and VMware's role in it. What's changed since then for you guys? What can you share with us without, you know, tipping the hand on the show theme. Cause now we're going to, we were, it's almost there for VMworld. Last year to this year. What's going on? What's, what's happening? Yeah, I think there's going to be a, first of all, there'll be a lot of exciting things at VMworld and you have to be there to live and experience it firsthand. We've laid out a vision for the industry and a lot of what we're doing is delivering on that vision. I think there's things rapidly changing in our world though. We know that for example, cloud is changing every year. There's kind of a new dimension to what's happening and how people are using clouds. We think there's tremendous opportunities as we think about multiple clouds and how our customers are thinking about their workloads in a multi-cloud world. So I think you'll find a lot of interesting things we're doing in that front. The whole role of business mobility continues to evolve and change. How does that relate to how I'm running my business on premise or in the cloud? I think you'll find a lot of neat things in that area. And then this big wave of modern applications. At the end of the day, we're running our business on these big mission-critical applications, but the rapid iterative development process is really fundamentally changing the kind of value we can deliver back to the business. And what we need to support that and do that is IT organizations to our line of business, to people like me, CMOs who consume applications like nobody else in the business. Excuse me. You'll find a lot of focus on those areas. Well, VMware has become such a strategic part of customers' roadmaps. And it's not just VMware. It's the entire ecosystem. That's what makes VMworld the best show. It is the best enterprise show because everybody's there. It's usually in San Francisco, right? It's just an awesome place to be. I've got some questions on that. We're in Vegas this year, you know? I love it in our home turf in San Francisco. The bottom line is Moscone is going through a lot of construction right now. I don't think it'd be the experience if it was right for our audience. But anyway, it's still the best enterprise show because it is such a community. And so you've got to keep elevating that, right? So you've got the core technical content. Have some fun. We saw some fun today. So can you tell us kind of generally what we can expect this year? Yeah, well, first of all, I think the audiences are evolving. You know, our core traditional VI admin, you know, your virtual infrastructure admin. Of course, that is the essence of the participation of VMworld. But trust me, new audience types are joining and coming to this event. The networking side of the house, you're seeing a lot more engagement, participation there. Storage, frankly, there's overlap. People come here, they also go to VMworld. Your DevOps community is starting to find great value in a program like a VMworld. Some business executives, but I'd say it is foundation. It's a technical conference and it's the architects, the CTOs and the cloud. Let's see the update on the digital transmission because I know that the AirWatch purchase was one that was a really good deal. Sanjay Poonan, lead senior leader over there at the company, has been doing very, very well. I've been seeing some updates on that. What's going on with that? Because that's going to bring in a whole nother IoT slash application mobile piece. Any updates there from Sanjay? I love digital transformation conversations because at the end of the day as a CMO, I feel like I'm at the tip of the spear of digital transformation. You know, I'm pushing the envelope about how we look at analytics and business intelligence and how we change the experience with our engagement with customers and partners. How do I serve content more dynamically, more relevant based on digital profiles of people who come and engage with us? So I love this conversation. And I think at the heart of all that we're doing is to accelerate digital transformation and make sure that IT plays the right critical role in that because at the end of the day, line of business has options and they are driving sometimes around IT but this is a really fantastic moment for IT to be the experts in software, software agility and really building apps for the business that are more relevant and really helpful and that I think is what VMware can really accelerate. You mentioned the analytics. I have a question for you around, can you or how can you operationalize those analytics? So you know, traditionally the analytics have been insights for a few. You know, you got to line up, build a cube, takes forever. How are you able to, or are you able to operationalize those analytics? Put those tools in the hands of the people that can actually affect digital engagement, you know, the front lines. I think there's two dimensions to that. I mean, first of all, you have to build your analytics environment on top of an agile infrastructure because at the end of the day, the foundation has to be agile enough to serve a variety of different requirements, changing requirements. So, you know, obviously we have a big play on infrastructure, infrastructure is a service and the foundations of that. And the kind of root challenges there, networking, big bottleneck, right? So I might have this great infrastructure that compute on demand, but I can't get my networking protocols in place. Security, risk, things like that. But then on the other hand, you have to be able to consume these applications. Analytics is just one of many. How do I ensure that I can get that out to my user community? In the device form factor that they choose, all controlled and governed effectively by me as an IT. I think that really plays to both ends of the VMware strategy. What we're doing in business mobility to allow you to transform experiences and engagement with customers and partners and employees, but then also what we're doing kind of at the foundational level to ensure that the foundation can support these high demand applications that are distributed, that are microservices. They're a very different architecture from, you know, yesterday's apps. Are you doing that with your team? I mean, you kind of dog-fooding that capability with your own app. Yeah, VMware is one of the largest, you know, we are one of the biggest customers. We're the first customer for our technologies. If I had my phone with you, I could show you Workspace One, how I have access to my apps, one button, one push, all completely under governance and control by IT. That's really the future of VMware. It's really the new form of user consumption of technology. You guys are trying to make it easier to stand up apps like Workspace and whatnot. Workspace One is breakthrough. It's really breakthrough. And you're right, we're usually not engaging at the consumer level of enterprise, right? We're usually the back office. We're in that data center. We're kind of in the bowels of IT. But Workspace One puts us forefront. We're on the device. Now the user knows who VMware is. Now they're engaging with our applications. And I think it's really streamlined their experience to give them access to any app with one thumbprint. And you know, really now. Well, it's interesting. You've always been in enabling technology for innovation. Now it's moving up the stack. So it's very interesting to see that progress. Final question is that on that front, I get that, that's great news. On the ecosystem, what's changed with the ecosystem? Because as you said, VMware's a very, I mean, technical community, very engaging. You don't have your share of fair of people who like to raise their hand and tell me what you think. So a great act of community. So what are they saying? What's the feedback from the community? What are people raising their hands and saying to you guys? And what's the conversation like right now? Oh, I mean, first of all, feedback from our ecosystem is fabulous. I mean, VMworld is a really great case study. Go look at the solutions exchange at VMworld. It's just buzzing. I can tell you, we've pretty much are almost, not quite, but almost sold out of all the real estate that we have to offer in Vegas when we come here in late August. I think the ecosystem though is changing and evolving, but you have really great evidence of new things happening. I mean, look at VxRail that got announced here between VMware and EMC. Look at the new Pivotal Cloud Foundry photon platform bundle that we just announced last week. You know, so some real solutions orientation coming together in these partnerships. And of course, the broad ecosystem relative to cloud. I think SIs and SOs are getting very engaged with VMware in new ways. We have a rich channel program. So I definitely think cloud providers, service providers, that's kind of evolving and definitely growing part of our ecosystem. And then I think even some of the traditional partners that we've had in the past, you're seeing more solution oriented focus from those types of partnerships. Robin, thanks so much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to come share your insights on theCUBE. Any time. Been great. Robin Matlock, the CMO of VMware here, sharing her thoughts about the industry and the show and also the upcoming VMworld 2016, which will be in Mandalay Bay this year, not San Francisco because Moscone is going to be half under construction. So you got to do a little interim step here. Should be a great show. It'll be our seventh VMworld this year. Like EMC, we all started there. So I want to thank you for all the support. And appreciate enabling us to be successful. Thank you so much. Always a pleasure guys, thank you very much. Robin Matlock on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante, you're watching theCUBE. Looking back at the history of Dell.