 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada. It's theCUBE, covering EMC World 2015. Brought to you by EMC, Brocade, and VCE. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live. This is SiliconANGLE's theCUBE, our flagship program. We go out to the events. Nice practice to hear from the noise. We are live in Las Vegas for EMC World 2015. Our sixth year at EMC World and it will be our sixth year at VMworld this year. Super exciting, I can't believe it. I'm John Furrier, my host, Dave Vellante. Our next guest is Robert Matlock, the CMO of VMware. Welcome back to theCUBE, great to see you. Thanks, glad to be here, guys. So we'll be doing six years at VMworld. We started theCUBE in 2010. Wow. I'll never forget when you were saying, get that signage right behind theCUBE. I always said, I like her. Who is she? Oh, she's the one in charge. I'm like, oh, okay, good. Help you with your branding job, that's right. A lot of stuff going on. So what's going on in your world? Obviously we were at the AnyCloud event and the native app things hot. Horizon is hot. Oh, yeah. Botan, torpedoes are hot. I mean, give us the update. Give us what's going on at VMworld. You know, in our world, it never stops. You know, and the day it does is probably when we should all turn in our badges. I mean, it is just non-stop. We've had some great new innovations announced. You were with us in February when we announced the OneCloud, any application, any device kind of vision and strategy, which is all about how we're unifying a hybrid cloud platform and taking the VMware stack that's been known in the Software Defined Data Center but extending that seamlessly to the hybrid cloud. Well, that's continuing to get traction. Just a couple of weeks ago, we rolled out two new open source projects which were really new for us and all about how we enable our customers to leverage their skills in really the vSphere stack but deliver cloud-native apps. So those open source projects were Project Photon and Project Lightwave. So Photon is the Linux distribution. It's the new... Lightweight Linux operating system distribution that's really optimized for a VMware vSphere environment. So the cloud, obviously, open source is a big part of it. And back in February, you had the 28 days of a lot of launches. You must have had a bunch of stuff, vSphere. Oh yeah, all of the whole Software Defined Data Center basically got a refresh in that launch. So you had a tsunami of stuff happening this window in the spring or a winter. What was it all about? Was it a retooling? I mean, vVols was highly expected to come out. What was the big push? Why? Was it timing? Just the confluence of roadmaps coming together? Well, I mean, certainly there were just a lot of product things that were updating and that's one dimension of it. But I think from a customer perspective, what is important is how all these things are coming together. And instead of a bunch of piece parts, how does the collective whole have more impact and more value for our customers? And the real essence of that is how we are uniting behind a hybrid cloud platform. One cloud, it's not literally one cloud, it's essentially an architecture that enables you to treat all your cloud environments as one and bring that all together so you can more holistically expand into the public cloud as needed, manage the SLAs as appropriate in your business whether you want to run that on a private cloud, a managed cloud, or a public cloud. So explain that a little bit because a lot of people are confused about this. Oh, one cloud, what's that? The VMware cloud? I can only use a VMware cloud? No, you're not predicting a world of just a VMware cloud. You understand there's tons of different clouds. So how do you connect to those clouds? Help people understand that. Well, and you know, that's a little bit of probably some play on words there. I mean, the notion of one cloud is the spirit of what you want your cloud to be. That's what you'd like. I want your clouds to behave like one cloud. But I got so many clouds. The reality is that we're going to use lots of different clouds to run our businesses and we have completely embraced that and we want to empower our customers to embrace that. That said, we want them to have the power and the tools to manage it as one, secure it as one, and be able to leverage their expertise in their behind the firewall private cloud just like they can in their public cloud implementation. So this notion of one cloud is really not a literal singular cloud, but rather the opportunity to leverage and manage all your clouds as one. And you mentioned LightWave before. LightWave's security, open source security initiative, isn't it? Yeah, so LightWave Project LightWave is an open source project that we have released about two, three weeks ago that is really about identity and access management and it's enabling containers and the scalability of containers in a very secure manner. Okay, so guys, you mentioned before you dabbling in open source, that's sort of new for you guys. Well, I guess NSX kind of open source parts of that to open stack, right? So we're seeing a little shift in- Yeah, there's more open source involved in VMware than you might realize. We also introduced at VMworld last year the VMware integrated open stack distribution which was our own open stack distribution. Again, optimized to run in a VMware environment with all the support that you need. It's free to all of our vSphere customers, but it comes with a lot of support. Interesting, right? Because when these things come out with open stack, oh, big threat to VMware. Docker, oh, big threat to VMware. Yeah, and then we see, you guys are on stage with Docker, right? You're doing stuff with open stack. What's it like? What's the discussion like? You guys talk to customers, you talk about it internally and say, okay, this is a trend. Trend is your friend, why fight it? What's your philosophy? When did you share that with us? I don't think I could just give a blanket statement of our philosophies in general about all new trends. I mean, some that come up add tremendous value to customers. Others are just kind of moments in time and they won't be around a year from now. I think what our job is, is to really assess from our customer's perspective what adds value to their environment. How do we make their life easier, more productive, more effective? Containers is a good example. Containers have been around for a long, long time. What we want to do is help enable containers in a secure manner. Enable you to leverage all that you've already invested in, get the benefit of the container, but also not throw away this investment you've made to run a better infrastructure to tie to your storage, your networking, and your compute. So what's Sanjay Poonan's doing with end user computing? Because we talked about Horizon briefly. You've got an end user piece at the top of the stack and then you've got vCloud, vSAN, vSphere, and then a lot of stuff going on at the network and Pat Gelsinger said to me at the announcement. Because Google was kind of mentioned and the press kind of gloved onto the Google partnership, although it wasn't as big as the other partnership, but Pat kind of gave me a little wink and he said, you know, watch out for the network implying, and we've talked publicly about NSX and Miserra, a lot of innovation going on, the network layer, the cloud, and then end user computing. What's going on at the top of the stack in terms of VMware? What's the met, what's the positioning, and how's that evolving? Oh my gosh, that whole part of the business is really just like a rocket. As you know, we acquired AirWatch about two years ago I would say and it's been a very, very successful acquisition for VMware and it has taken our end user computing platform and what we're so strong in desktop virtualization but such a nice augmentation with mobility, device management, security, mobile app management, and the fusion of the two is really driving tremendous value to our customers and it is leveraging the infrastructure and yet it also has its own trajectory and its own customer base. Customers are deploying virtualization at the desktop and mobile are the outcome endpoints. So like. That's right. I mean it boils down to how people want to consume their applications and at the end of the day they want to consume them in a variety of these form factors in a variety of ways and IT is still burdened with the job of securing those, managing those, controlling those. I got to ask you, pretend I'm like, I don't know anything or that could be true but I'm a customer. Robin, so like this federation thing, can you explain to me what this is all about and how does VMware fit in the federation? Sure. So you know, we are a member of the federation and there are five of us that are members and we're a very proud membership and our membership is really about how we run our business independently but yet leverage each other's strengths to have more impact in the market and add more value to our customers and one of the best synergies is where we have joint customers where many of those federated companies are into the same customer. The customer's kind of asking, hey guys, can you work together? Can you help me integrate these solutions? Can you deliver more value instead of me dealing with five companies? Can you really come together and give me a more holistic approach to my business which is a great opportunity. Do you have access to tapping to some pivotal stuff? Absolutely, the members of the federation are VMware, EMC, II, Pivotal, VCE, and RSA, so we have access to all of that. Can you talk about the brand a little bit and how it's transforming, how it's changing? Like, who are your peeps? I mean, you were at the core of IT, right, and it's evolving. Who are your homies to use this next loop in life? And how is that changing? Wow, maybe you should tell me about them. Hold on, I pull up to the end. Yeah, okay. We're all at Microsoft Ignite right now. They're all my peeps, they're all my peeps. Our roots are definitely in the practitioner audience. You go to VMworld and you know that is the core of the VMworld attendee for sure a technical audience. And yet, so many of our businesses are evolving and touching different parts of businesses today that we're getting involved with architects, we're getting involved with DevOps, we're getting involved with core developers, and of course, they all are managed ultimately by the CIO of the organization, so we do a lot with CIOs. VMware is competing with Microsoft. Azure Cloud, we just saw it in John Thompson's chairman of Microsoft, Satya Nutella, is going up, taking over, pushing a big cloud mojo. But they have a lot of install base like VMware does. I mean, if I'm VMware, I can see the little teedlies being read by, yeah, Azure's a competitor to VMware. How are you guys, how are you positioning yourself against the other players in the market? I mean, it's really hard to do what you do as CMO of VMware, there's so many moving parts. How do you position that asset against the competition and for customers to understand the value? Yeah, well, I think that is ultimately your last statement is what it's all about. It's about customer value. And you know, our strategy of VMware is stick to customer value, that's what we care about, that's what we want to deliver. And in the end, competitive landscapes will sort themselves out. And we are sitting on a rich install base of customers who are devoted and very committed to our technologies. And our job is to help them leverage that investment and add more value on top of that. Help them go from what they've done in their private clouds and get them to the public cloud in an efficient, streamlined, cost-effective manner. All that leverages their skills, their experiences, their tools, their technology. I think we're as well positioned to do that as anybody in the industry. What's the most exciting thing about VMware? I mean, I get jazzed about VMware one, we love Pat Gelsinger, we love having you on theCUBE. But it's technology innovation that's exciting. But it's also a chess game at the same time. You have a lead that you have to continue to win and the challenge around, we just talked about that. So you got the chessboard and you got technology innovation having at the same time. So, you know, there's a flavor of what gets you excited. What's the exciting things that you guys are working on right now so VMware world's coming up? You know, I think VMware has a roadmap before us and has really a strategy and a vision that's going to take us into the next decade. And I'm very enthused. I'm six years with the company and ready, I'm signing up for another six. I think we have that much potential ahead of us. We are disrupting on so many fronts, but all those fronts are working together. We're disrupting at the network layer. We're disrupting at the storage layer. We're disrupting at the management and operations layer. We're disrupting at the mobile layer, the device layer. And we're disrupting in the cloud. But all these things can work very seamlessly together. And I think the value that we needed to keep striving for our customers is to help ensure that it all works together so that when it comes together, it delivers that much more value. It's just all about raising the bar. There's a lot of leverage points in there. I mean, when I say chess game, I mean like there's a lot of innovation levers that you can move the ball down the field for customer value. You got cloud, you got virtualization, network virtualization, so super exciting. With all that, do you have a theme yet for VMworld? John. Yeah. Do you want to announce it on the queue? But I announce it right now, I announce it. But the good news for me is we don't yet. We have two, we're playing with them, we're not finalized. And given the fact that neither of my bosses, Carl Eschenbach or Pat Gelsinger have heard them yet, I'm not going to get to share them today. Not yet, but coming soon. Okay, so I saw some stuff going on Twitter about throwback Thursday. I saw a nice thing going back. This is the first VMworld. I think it was 2004, was it? Maybe, what was the first VMworld? The very first one? Well, this is our 12th year, right? Yes, the 20th. Yeah, do the math for me, okay? So, do the badges, right? You guys get bigger and bigger every year. I mean, what's your philosophy? I mean, you're managing this growing tsunami of change in audience. Yeah. How do you think about VMworld every year? Well, you know, obviously I want VMworld to continue to grow with the industry. So, that's my first objective. You know, the core VMworld is a technical conference and I hope it always stays true to its technical roots, but the technical audience is diversifying and it's no longer just about virtual admins, it's now starting to become the desktop guys, the networking guys, the storage guys, the DevOps guys, the developer community. So, it's definitely broadening, but it's staying a technical conference and I think we'll stick to our roots in that regard, but we definitely look to cover more aspects of IT. VM's consolidated all their shows into two big monster shows. You see Dream 4, Special Sales, Oracle, Open World. These are, there are mega show themes going on. Is that something that you see in the future? Well, I certainly see growth in our future, but I also think that, you know, one of the things I want to protect is the experience. And when you come to VMworld, there's a certain vibe, you know, it's geeky, it's techy, it's fun, it's spontaneous, and it's big, it's educational, it's about the ecosystem too. It's not just about one company. Right, so for me, it's probably, I want to measure our success less on whether we're the biggest show in the world, I want to measure our success. We have great customers coming who really engage and get out of that conference. You know, something really meaningful and come back year after year. What's your plans at EMC World this year? What's your, what do you got on the agenda? Customer talks, talks? You know, the good news is, Pat's on stage tomorrow for the keynote, so I hope you go watch the keynote and we'll do a great presentation. Lay out our strategy and vision. Focus on the things that are really relevant to this audience. You know, what we're doing in the hyperconverged space. What we're doing in VCloud Air and public cloud. I think it'll be really interesting. What we're doing with virtual sand and storage. All right, Robin Maddlach, CMO of VMworld. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great to see you. Always a pleasure, guys. VMworld, exciting technology change, business opportunities, business outcomes, all part of the EMC theme here, of the information generation. Virtualization is a big part of it. It's theCUBE. We'll be right back with more after this short break.