 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. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman here with John Troyer where we have three days wall-to-wall coverage here at VMworld 2019. We're in the lobby of Moscone North and happy to welcome to the program, to my right is Tom Burns, who is the Senior Vice President and General Manager of Networking and Solutions at Dell EMC, and sitting to his right, another Tom. We have Tom Gillis, who's the SVP and General Manager of Networking and Security inside VMware, so I'm super excited to go back to my roots of networking. Tom and Tom, thanks so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having us. All right, so Tom, you and I have talked for years now about, it was not just SDN, but the changes in the environment, of course, networking and compute, smashing together, and where the role of software in this whole environment has changed. So, let's start, there's some news, let's cover the hard news first. VMware has some networking pieces, Dell has some software networking pieces also, and there's some more commingling of those, so maybe walk us through that. Absolutely, I think the story this week is about the collaboration that's happening between Tom's team and my team in kind of innovating and disrupting in the traditional networking world. Tom's had NSX around micro-segmentation, network virtualization, a lot going on with analytics and capability to really see what's going on in the network from core to edge to cloud. The acquisition of AVI, which is outstanding, other things that are going on in VMware, Dell EMC disrupting around desegregation of hardware and software, giving customers that capability to run the last thing you need for the connectivity they need, depending upon where the network is sitting. So, this week we've got two announcements. One is, we've got worldwide shipment of the Dell EMC SD-WAN solutions powered by VMware. Great, better than none software, combined with better than none hardware coming from Dell EMC on a global basis. Worldwide, secure supply chain, plus professional services. Worldwide is a key parameter there, right? Tom, maybe bring us in. We'd watch VeloCloud before the acquisition, SD-WAN. There's a lot of solutions that fit in a couple of different markets. It's not a homogeneous market there. Maybe give us just kind of the key point from a VeloCloud standpoint. SD-WAN is a white-hot market, because it has the classic combination of better, faster, cheaper. It delivers a better end user experience. It is so easy to deploy this, and it saves money. MPLS circuits and backhauling traffic, that was a 1990s idea, and it was a good idea back then, but it's time for a different approach. And just when I've talked to some customers and talked to them about their multi-cloud environment, SD-WAN's one of those enabling technologies that they will bring up to allow them to actually do that. Yeah, it was the movement really to Office 365 and SaaS applications that drove the SD-WAN revolution and that backhauling all this traffic to headquarters and then going out to Office 365 when a user might be in Des Moines, that doesn't make any sense. And so with SD-WAN, we intelligently route the traffic where it needs to go, delivers a better end user experience, and it saves a bunch of money. I mean, it's not hard to imagine that. Cheap broadband links are an order of magnitude lower than these dedicated MPLS circuits. And the interesting math is that you can take two or three low-cost links and deliver a better experience than with a single dedicated circuit. I'm kind of interested in the balance between hardware and software, right? The family trees of networking and compute kind of were different because of they had specialized needs in the Silicon. So where are we now? It's 2019, where are we now with line speeds and x86 and the hardware story? I think, and I'll let Tom join, the discussion around speeds and feeds is not dead, but it should be dying very, very, very quickly, right? You know, it's around virtual network functions and everything really moving to the software layer, sitting on top of commoditized x86 based hardware. And the combination of these two factors help our customers a lot more with flexibility, agility, time to deploy, return on investment, all these types of things. But I mean, that's my view. Well, there's a recurring theme you're going to hear is that in networking, and I think you were alluding to this, you needed these dedicated kind of magical black boxes that had custom hardware in order to do some pretty basic processing, whether it be switching, routing, advanced security, you had to run things like, you know, hardware regular expression matching, et cetera. It was about three years ago that Intel introduced a technology called DPDK, which is an acceleration that allowed VMware to deliver in software on a single CPU, you know, we could push traffic at line rates. And so, or, you know, faster than line rates. And so that was sort of like, there wasn't the champagne didn't go off and the, you know, the ball didn't drop in time square, but it's a really important milestone because all of a sudden it doesn't make any sense to build these dedicated black boxes with custom hardware. Now, general purpose hardware, when you have a global supply chain and logistics partner like Dell, coupled with distributed software can not only replace these network functions, but we can do things completely differently. And that's really, you know, we're just beginning this journey because it's only recently that we've been able to do that, but I think you're going to see a lot more of that in the future. So we talked about SD-WAN, there was a second announcement. That goes back into the core. You know, the creation of a fabric inside of the data center is still a bit difficult. I mean, I've heard quotes of saying it's something like 120 lines of CLI, you know, per switch. So let's say four to six leaf switches and two spine switches could take days to set up a fabric. What we've announced is the smart fabric director, which is a joint collaboration and development between VMware and Dell EMC that creates this capability to tightly integrate NSX and vCenter into the Dell EMC power switch family of data center switches, really eliminating several cases and in fact, setting up that same fabric in less than two minutes. And we're really happy about not just the initial release, but Tom and I have a lot of plans for this particular product in the roadmap for, you know, quarters and years to come about really simplifying again, the network, automating it. And then really our version of intent-based networking is the networking operating the way you configured it, you know, when you set it up. And I think the two of us combined. Not just on day one, but day two, day, you know, in day N. And I think, you know, you hit the nail on the head, networking has changed, it's no longer about speeds and feeds, it's about availability and simplicity. And so, you know, Dell and VMware I think are uniquely positioned to deliver a level of automation where this stuff just works, right? I don't need to go and configure these magic boxes individually. I want to just write, you know, a line of code where my infrastructure is built into the CI-CD pipeline and then when I deploy a workload, it just works. I don't need an army of people to go figure that out, right? And I think that's the power of what we're working together to unleash. When something, a technology comes up like SD-WAN, sometimes there's a lot of confusion in the marketplace. Vendor's going out, one size fits all, this will do everything. Of course. Where are we in the development of SD-WAN and what is the solution? Who should be looking at, taking a look at the solution now? Yeah, the SD-WAN market, as I said, is growing depending on whose estimate you look at between 50 and 100% a year. And the reason is better, faster, cheaper, right? So everyone has figured out, you know, like maybe it's time to think differently about network architecture and save some money. So we just announced today on the VMware side an important milestone. We have more than 13,000 network virtualization customers. That includes our data center as well as the SD-WAN. We don't report them separately. But 13,000 is, you know, that's almost double where it was a year ago. So significant customer growth. We also announced we're deployed together with our partner from Dell in 150,000 branches around the world. So by many metrics, I think VMware is the number one vendor in this space. To your point, it is a crowded, noisy space. Everybody's throwing their hat in the ring. Oh, we do it too. But I think the thing that is driving the adoption and the sales of our product is that when you put this thing in, it fundamentally changes the experience for the end user. There's not a lot of networking products that do that. Like, I've meet customers that are like, this thing is magic. You know, you plug it in and all of a sudden streaming just works. You know, like Google Hangouts or WebExes, like they just work and they work seamlessly all the time. And that, there's something there that I think is still unique to the VMware product. And I think it's going to continue to drive sales in the future. I think the other strong differentiation when it comes to Dell technologies, VMware and Dell EMC combined is we have this vision around the cloud, you know, edge core cloud and, you know, this hybrid multi-cloud approach. And obviously SD-WAN plays a critical part as one of the stepping stones as it relates to, you know, creating the environment for this multi-cloud environment. So, you know, fantastic market opportunity, huge growth. As Tom said, markets probably doubling in size each year. I don't know what the TAM numbers are, I hate to quote. But, you know, we really feel as though now having this product and this capability inside of Dell EMC, again, combining our two assets, it could be the next VX rail. It really could. Yeah, yeah, we believe that the SD-WAN is going to be a gigantic market. And I think that what's interesting about our partnership is that we can reach different segments of the market. You know, VMware, we tend to focus on the very high-end, large enterprise customers, technically very sophisticated, Dell can reach customers we don't even know, we don't even talk to. And a product is simple enough that it works in all segments. We win the very, very biggest and we win these, you know, smaller accounts where the simplicity of a one-click deployment really, really matters. Yeah, Tom, one of the things that excited me a year ago at this show was the networking vision for a multi-cloud world reminded me of NYSERA pre-acquisition. Yes, yes. You know, when we look at networking today, it's, you know, most network admins, a lot of the network they need to manage, they don't touch the gear, they don't know where it lives, but they are still responsible as to keep it up and running and if something goes wrong, it's there. Give us the update as to where we stand with that, where your customers are, and how that all goes together. You're asking the right question, right? So our mantra is infrastructure is code. And so no one should ever have to log in or switch. No one should have to look into a queue and no one should have to be like trying to move packets from here to there. That's just, it's very, very difficult and not really feasible. And so as networking becomes software and those general purpose processors I talk about are giving us the ability to think about not just the configuration of the network but the operation of the network in ways that were never before possible. So for example, we announced at the show today with our monitoring product, VRealize Network Insight. It's, we call it Vernee, not always such clever with the names but we're really good at writing code. Vernee gives us the ability to measure application response time from the data center all the way out to the edge. So a single pane of glass, we can show you, oh, here's where it's broken. Whether it's in the network, whether it's in the server, whether it's the database that's not responding. And that, we do this all without agents, right? So it's like when the infrastructure gets smart enough to be able to provide that insight, it changes the way the customer operates. And that translates into real savings and real adoption. And that's what's driving all of this momentum, right? That 700 to more than 13,000 customers, something has to be behind that. And I think it's the simplicity of automation. CLI has come up a couple of times here. And so that's kind of a dirty word, maybe even these days, it kind of depends on who you're talking with. I think VMware and Dell both spent a lot of time and effort educating the networking engineering market and also educating the kind of data center, the rest of the data center crew about each other's worlds. Again, where are we at now? It sounds like with director and with the whole, NSX, whole stack, the role is changing of a network engineer. But again, where are we in that evolution? I think we're early on, but it's moving quite rapidly. I think the traditional networking engineer or networking admin is going to need to evolve. More to this DevOps, how do I bring applications? How do I manage the infrastructure more like a platform? I mean, Tom and I truly believe that the difference between a compute and network infrastructure is really going to start to dissolve over time and why shouldn't it? I mean, based upon what's happening with the commoditization and the speeds of the CPU versus the MPU is coming from Merchant Silicon, it's really beginning to blur. So I think we're in the early stages. I mean, certainly from a Dell EMC perspective, we still at times have those discussions and challenges with traditional networking people, but let's face it, they have a tough job. When something's not working, the network administrator usually gets blamed. And so I think it's a journey and things such as the Dell technology cloud, open networking, NSX and now SD-WAN, it will continue to drive that. And I think we're going to see a rapid change in networking over the next 12, 18 to 24 months. I've talked to a number of customers that have said, you know, this journey that Tom was talking about is a challenge because the skill set is different. My developers need to learn software. And so what we've been working with VMware is trying to make that software easier and easier to use and to actually approach like English language. So the latest versions of NSX have these very simple, declarative APIs that you can say, oh, server A can talk to server B but not server C, click done deploy. And now in our partnership with Dell, we can take that policy and push it right down into the metal, right down into the silicon. And so simplification and automation are the name of the game, but it is definitely a fundamental change in the skill set necessary to do networking. Networking is becoming more like software as opposed to speeds and feeds and packet sniffers and more of the old traditional approaches. All right, Tom, I want to give you the final word as to what people should be taking away from Dell and VMware in the networking space. Well, I think across Dell EMC and in VMware, there's a great amount of collaboration, whether it's the Dell technology cloud with VMware really taking the leadership from that perspective with this multi-hybrid cloud. But in the area of networking, two to five years ago when we announced the disaggregation of hardware and software, I am in this to disrupt the networking business and to make networking very different tomorrow and in the future than it has been in the past for our customers around ease deployment, automation and management. And I think that's a shared vision with Tom and his team and the rest of VMware. Tom Gillis, Tom Burns. Thank you so much for having us. Thanks for having us. We'll be back with more coverage here from VMworld 2019 for John Troyer. I'm Stu Miniman. As always, thanks for watching theCUBE.