 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin. Pleased to welcome back to the program, the CTO of VMware Kit Colbert. Welcome back to the program and congrats on your new role. Thank you. Yeah, I'm really excited to be here. So you've been at VMware for a long time. You started as an intern, I read. Yeah, it's been 18 years as a full-timer, but I guess 19 if you count my internship. So quite a while, it's many lifetimes in Silicon Valley. Right, many lifetimes in Silicon Valley. Well, we've seen a lot of innovation from VMware in its 23 years. You've been there the vast majority of that. We've seen a lot of successful big tech waves written by VMware. In April, VMware pulled Tanzu and VMware Cloud Foundation together, VMware Cloud. You've got some exciting news with respect to that. What are you announcing today? Well, we got a lot of exciting announcements happening at VMworld this week, but one of the ones I'm really excited about is VMware Cloud with Tanzu services. So let me talk about what these things are. So we have VMware Cloud, which is really us taking our VMware Cloud Foundation technology and delivering that as a service in partnership with our public cloud providers, but in particular, this one with AWS, VMware Cloud on AWS. We're combining that with our Tanzu portfolio of technologies. And these are really technologies focused at developers, at folks driving DevOps, building and operating modern applications. And what we're doing is really bringing them together to simplify customers moving from their data centers into the cloud and then modernizing their applications. It's a pattern that we see very, very often this notion of migrate and then modernize, right? Once you're on a modern cloud infrastructure makes it much easier to modernize your applications. Talk to me about some of the catalysts for this change and this offering of services. Was it catalyzed by some of the events we've seen in the world in the last 18 months and this acceleration of digital adoption? Yeah, absolutely. And we saw this across our customer base, across many, many different industries, although as you can imagine, those industries that were really considered essential were the ones where we saw the biggest sorts of accelerations. We saw a tremendous amount of people needing to support remote workers overnight, right? And cloud is a perfect use case for that. But the challenge that a lot of customers had was that they couldn't take the time to retool that they had to use what they already had. And so something like VMware cloud was perfect for that because it allowed them to take what they were doing on-prem and seamlessly extend it into the cloud without any changes able to do that almost overnight, right? But at the same time, what we also saw was the acceleration of their digital transformation. People are now online. They're needing to interact with an app over their phone to get something remotely delivered or to schedule maybe an appointment for their pet because a lot of people got pets during the pandemic. And so you just saw this rush toward digitization and these new applications need to be created. And so as customers move their application estate into the cloud with VMware cloud and AWS, they then had this need to modernize those applications to be able to deliver them faster, to respond faster to the very dynamic nature of what was happening during the pandemic. So let's talk about some of the opportunities and the advantages that VMware cloud with Tanzu service is going to deliver to this IT admins who have to deliver things even faster. Yep. So let me talk a bit about the tech and then talk about how that fits into what the users will experience. So VMware cloud with Tanzu services is really two key components. The first of which is the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid service the TKG services we call it. So what this is is actually a deep integration of Tanzu Kubernetes Grid with VMware cloud and the Kubernetes we've actually integrated into VMware cloud foundation. Folks who are familiar with VMware may remember that a couple of years ago we announced Project Pacific which was a deep integration of Kubernetes into vSphere essentially enabling vSphere to have a Kubernetes interface to be natively Kubernetes. And what that did was it enabled the IT admins to have direct insight inside of Kubernetes clusters to understand what was happening in terms of the containers and pods that their developers were running. It also allowed them to leverage their existing vSphere and VMware cloud foundation tooling on those workloads. So fast forward today, we have this built in now and what we're doing is actually offering that as a service so that the customer doesn't need to deal with managing it, installing it, updating any of that stuff. Instead, they can just leverage it. They can start creating Kubernetes clusters and upstream conformant Kubernetes clusters to allow their developers to take advantage of those capabilities but also be able to use their native tooling on it. So I think that's really, really important is that the IT admin really can enable their developers to seamlessly start to build and operate modern applications on top of VMware cloud. Got it. And talk to me about how this is going to empower those IT admins to become Kubernetes operators. Yeah. Well, I think that's exactly it. We talked to a lot of these admins and they're seeing the desire for Kubernetes from their lines of business, from the app teams. And the idea is that when you start looking at the Kubernetes ecosystem, there's a whole bunch of new tooling and technology out there. We find that people have to spend a lot of time figuring out what the right thing to use is. And for a lot of these folks, they say, hey, I've already figured out how to operate applications in production. I've got the tooling, I've got the standardization, I've got things like security figured out, right? Super important. And so the real benefit of this approach and this deep integration is it allows them to take those tools, those operational best practices that they already have and now apply them to these new workloads fairly seamlessly. And so this is really about the power of leveraging all the investments they've made to take those forward with modern applications. And the total adjustable market here is pretty big. I heard your CTO referring to that in an interview in September. And I was looking at some recent VMware survey numbers where 80% of customers say they're deploying applications in highly distributed environments that include their own data center, multiple clouds, Edge, and also customers said 90% of our application initiatives are focused on modernization. So VMware clearly sees the big TAM here. Yeah, it's absolutely massive. We see many customers, the vast majority, something like 75%, are using multiple clouds or on-prem in the cloud. We have some customers using even more than that. And you see this very large application estate that's spread out across this. And so I think what we're really looking at is how do we enable the right sorts of consistency both from an infrastructure perspective, enabling things like security, but also management across all these environments. And by the way, that's another exciting thing that I neglected to mention about this announcement. VMware Cloud with Tanzu Services not only includes the Tanzu Kubernetes Grid service, giving you that sort of Kubernetes cluster as a service, if you will, but it also includes Tanzu Mission Control Essentials. And this is really the next generation of management when you start looking at modern applications. And what Tanzu Mission Control focuses on is enabling, managing Kubernetes consistently across clouds. And so this is the other really important point is that, yes, we want to make VMware Cloud, VMware Cloud infrastructure the best place to build and operate applications, especially modern ones. But we also realize that customers are doing all sorts of things, right? They're in the native cloud, whether that's AWS or Azure or Google. And they want ways of managing more consistently across all these environments, in addition to their VMware environments, both in the cloud and on-prem. And so Tanzu Mission Control really enables that as well. And that's another really powerful aspect of this is that it's built in to enable that next level of administration and management. That consistency is critical, right? I mean, that's probably one of the biggest benefits that customers are getting is that familiarity with the console, the consistency of being able to manage so that they can deploy apps faster that as businesses are still pivoting and changing direction in light of the pandemic. So I imagine that that is a huge, from a business outcomes perspective, the workforce productivity there is probably pretty big. Yeah, and I think it's also about managing risk as well. You know, one of the biggest worries that we hear from many of the CIOs, CTOs, executives that we talk to at our customers is this software supply chain risk. Like what is it exactly? Like what are the exact bits that they're running out there, right? In their applications? Because the reality is that those apps are composed of many open source technologies. And as we saw with SolarWinds, it's very possible for someone to get in and plant malicious code into their source repository such that as it gets built and flows out, it'll just go out and customers will start using it. And it's a huge, huge security vulnerability. And one thing on that note that customers are particularly worried about is the lack of consistency across their cloud environments. That because things are done different ways and the different teams have different processes across different clouds, it's easy for small mistakes to creep in there for little openings, right? That a hacker might be able to go and exploit. And so I think this gets back to that notion of consistency and that you're right, it's great for productivity. But the one I think it's almost in some ways, you might say for many of these folks, more important for is from a security standpoint that they can validate and ensure they're in compliance with their security standards. And by the way, you know, this is for most companies a board level discussion, right? The board is saying, hey, like do we have the right controls in place? Because it is such an important thing and such a critical risk factor. It is a critical risk factor. We saw, you mentioned SolarWinds, but just in the last 18 months, the massive changes to the threat landscape, the huge rise in ransomware and DDoS attacks. You know, we had this scatterer, everyone went home and you've got, you know, the edge is booming and you've got folks using, you know, not using their VPNs and things when they should be. So that the fact that that's a board level discussion and that this is gonna help from a risk mitigation perspective, that consistency that you talked about is huge. I think for a customer in any industry. Yep, yeah, that's pretty interesting as well. Like you mentioned ransomware. So we're doing some work on that one as well, actually, not specifically with this announcement, but it's another VMware cloud service that plugs into this seamlessly, VMware cloud disaster recovery. And one of the really cool features that we're announcing at VMworld this week is the ability to actually support and maybe handle ransomware attacks. And so the idea there is that if you do get compromised and what typically happens is that the hackers come in and they encrypt some of your data and they say, hey, if you wanna get access to it, you gotta pay us and we'll decrypt it for you. But if you have the right DR solution that's backing up on a fairly continuous basis, it means that whatever data might be encrypted, you know, it would only be a small delta like the last, let's say hour or two of data, right? And so what we're looking at is leveraging that DR solution to be able to very rapidly restore specific individual files that may have been compromised. And so this is like one way that we're helping customers deal with that. Like obviously we wanna put a whole bunch of other security protections in place and we do and we enable them to do that. But one thing when you think about security is that it's very much defense in depth that you have multiple layers of the fail safes there. And so this one being kind of like the end result that hackers do get in, they do manage to compromise it, they do manage to get a hold of it and encrypt it. Well, you still got unencrypted backups that you control and that you have a very clean delineation and separation from just like kind of an architectural standpoint that the hackers won't be able to get at, right? So that you can control that and restore it. So again, you know, this is something very top of mind for us. And it's funny because we don't always lead with the security angle, maybe we should as I'm saying it here, but it's something that's very, very top of mind for a lot of our customers and something that's also top of mind for us and that we're focused on. It is because it's no longer if we get attacked, it's when and they've got to be able to have the right recovery strategy so that they don't have to pay those ransom. And of course we only hear about the big ones like the SolarWinds and the Colonial Pipelines and there's many more going on. Want to get back to VMware Cloud with Tanzu Services, talk to me about how this fits into VMware's bigger picture. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Great question. Thanks for bringing me back. I love to geek out on some of these things. So, but when you take a step back, so what we're really doing with VMware Cloud is trying to provide this really powerful infrastructure layer that is available anywhere customers want to run applications. And that could be in the public cloud, could be in the data center, could be at the edge, could be at all those locations. And you mentioned edge earlier and I think we're seeing explosive growth there as well. And so what we're really doing is driving broad optionality in terms of how customers want to adopt these technologies. And then as I said, we're sort of, we're kind of going broad many locations. We're also building up in each of those locations. This notion of Tanzu Services being seamlessly integrated and doing that, starting now with VMware Cloud native US but expanding that to every location that we have. In addition, we're also really excited. Another thing we're announcing this week called Project Arctic. Now the idea with Arctic is really to start driving more choice and flexibility into how customers consume VMware Cloud. Do they consume it as software or as a service and where do they do that? So traditionally, the only way to get it delivered as a service would be in the public cloud, right? VMware Cloud native US, you can click a few buttons and you get a software defined data center set up for you automatically. Now traditionally on prem, we haven't had that. We did do something pretty powerful a year or two back with the release of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. We did deliver a service there but that often required new hardware, new setup for customers. And customers are coming back to us and saying, hey, like we've got these really large vSphere deployments. How do we enable them to take advantage of all this great VMware Cloud functionality from where they are today, right? They say, hey, we can't rebuild all these overnight but we want to take advantage of VMware Cloud today. So that's what really what Project Arctic is focused on. It's focused on connecting into these brownfield existing vSphere environments and delivering some of the VMware Cloud benefits there. Things like being able to easily, well, first of all, be able to manage those environments through the VMware Cloud console. So now you have one place where you can see your on-prem deployments, your cloud deployments, everything, be able to really easily move applications between on-prem and the cloud, leveraging some of the VMware Cloud disaster recovery capabilities I just mentioned, like the ransomware example, you cannot do that even on-prem as well because keep in mind it's people aren't attacking, you know, the hackers aren't attacking just the public cloud, they're attacking data centers or anywhere else where these applications might be running. And so Arctic's a great example of where we're saying, hey, there's a bunch of cool stuff happening here but let's really meet customers where they're at. And many of our customers still have very large data center footprint, still want to maintain that, that's really strategic for them. Or as I said, may even want to be extending to the edge. So it's really about giving them more of that flexibility. So in terms of meeting customers where they are, I know VMware has been focused on that for probably its entire history. We talk about that on the queue with every VM world. Where can customers go? Like, what's the right starting point? Is this targeted for VMware cloud on AWS? Current customers, what's kind of the next steps for customers to learn more about this? Yeah, absolutely. So there's a bunch of different ways. So first of all, there's a tremendous amount of activity happening here at VM world. Just all sorts of breakout sessions, like, you know, detailed demos, like all sorts of really cool stuff, just a ton of content. I'm actually kind of, I'm in this new role, I'm super excited about it, but one thing I'm kind of bummed out about is I don't have as much time to go look at all these cool sessions. So I highly recommend going and checking those out. You know, we have hands-on labs as well, which is another great way to test out and try VMware products. So hl.vmware.com, you can go and spin those things up and just kind of take them for a test drive, see what they're all about. And then if you go to vmc.vmware.com, that is VMware cloud. We want to make it very easy to get started. Whether you're in just a vSphere on-prem customer, or whether you already have VMware cloud and AWS, what you can see is that it's really easy to get started and that there's a ton of value-add services on top of our core infrastructure. So it's all about making it accessible, making it easy and simple to consume and get started with. So there's a ton of options out there. And I highly recommend folks go and check out all the things I just mentioned. Excellent. Thank you for joining me today, talking about VMware cloud with tons of services, what's new, what's exciting, the opportunities in it for customers from the IT admin folks to be empowered to be Kubernetes operators, to those businesses being able to do essential services in a changing environment. And again, congratulations on your promotion. That's very exciting. Awesome, thank you, Lisa. Thank you for having me. Our pleasure. For Kit Colbert, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021.