 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We are on the ground at the VMware headquarters in Palo Alto, California. Beautiful day, beautiful setting, a lot of green. It's green on the outside. It's actually a lot of green buildings as you heard in some of the other segments. And we're joining this next segment by Milan Desai and he's the VP Products Networking and Security Business Unit from VMware. Welcome. Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Absolutely. So networking was kind of the last child to this virtualization. Storage was early, servers were early. And then a lot of movement has happened over the last several years about networking and virtualization networking software to find networking. Why don't you give us kind of a quick update where we are as we kind of come to the close of 2016? Absolutely. So you're right. I think when you think about networking, it's been a journey. And before we talk about where we are with networking, it's important to understand what's happening in the industry as a whole. If you look at organizations, whether it's a retail organization, a healthcare organization, a manufacturing organization, everyone is looking to leverage technology as a way to differentiate themselves. And the term being coined around is this idea of digital transformation. And when you think about digital transformation, each of these organizations are trying to deliver a unique set of interactions and experiences for their customers. And these are happening at a much more rapid pace. It's a much more iterative process. And that's in turn is driving how applications are designed. And so applications are being designed now in a much more modular fashion with microservices, which means applications are getting disaggregated. They're running in the public cloud, in the private cloud, maybe in hybrid mode. And so the network and security model needs to align to this disaggregated application. And so fundamentally now looking at 2017, at the end of 2016 and beyond, I think the approach of network disaggregation or delivering networking and security aligned to the application model, wherever it may run, independent of the infrastructure is going to become the leading cause. And NSX and its ecosystem and its approach is going to lead the way in this disruption, right? It is a long ways coming. It's been six years to this point, but now with all of these things coming together, I think that's where you will see networking and security evolve with what I call as network disaggregation as applications disaggregate. It's just this continualization of the consumerization of IT, where the expected behavior of what I can do, when I can do it, where I can do it, driven by my interaction with Google to find a restaurant or Amazon to buy something really now drives the perception of why doesn't this work at work? Where before you started with the infrastructure, then what can you build on top of it? Now, as you said, it's really an absentric world with APIs that should connect to everything and now that infrastructure has to support the app as opposed to the other way around. Absolutely, and think of this world where we used to build infrastructure and applications on-prem and we used to deliver a set of services that application is now running on a cloud where you don't own the infrastructure. So how do you deliver a same set of policies for connectivity and security in that model? It's fundamentally delivered in a different manner. It's delivered in software because you don't own that physical infrastructure. And that conversation is essentially driving how people are thinking about networking and security, but in general infrastructure going forward. And I think going beyond 2017, it's going to be a fun ride. Right, and security just has to be baked into everything. It shouldn't, it doesn't exist on its own. There are no walled gardens anymore. There are no moats that you can build big enough. It really has to be baked in to every piece of the infrastructure and the application. Absolutely, from end users to applications, security needs to be baked in, whether it's a end user device, are we, do we know what's going on? Is a jail broken? What type of services are running on it? All the way to the application. What are the different communication paths that should be allowed? Are we monitoring those communication paths, removing all the other unnecessary connections? That's the end to end security model. It's baked into the infrastructure. It's no longer, let me build a perimeter which will protect all the things on the interior. It's in every aspect of what we do. And a lot of conversation for years. Pat Gelsinger was on theCUBE at VMworld a couple years ago talking about hybrid cloud and private cloud, public cloud, true hybrid cloud, whatever. Now that's completely getting mixed mashed together, probably no better symbolized than having Andy, Chassis and Pat Gelsinger stand up on stage together a month or so ago and talk about VMworld infrastructure is now available on AWS cloud. So even the lines between what's on-prem, what's not on-prem, private versus public is starting to come together because at the end of the day, I just want the application to work, right? I couldn't agree more. And I think the partnership with Amazon signifies what VMware brings to the table. We fundamentally, when you look at virtualization back in 2007, we talked about bring your server vendor of choice. Then there was storage virtualization with vSphere where you brought your storage vendor of choice. And then with NSX, you were able to bring your network vendor of choice on-prem. And now we are going to do something similar where we are saying, hey, you can run our software and Amazon is going to bring the infrastructure in this case or its IBM who will deliver the infrastructure where cloud is the new hardware. Right, right. And then the role of IT is shifting, right? It's not going away. It's not going to go away, but it's shifting significantly from racking and stacking and configuring now to managing and managing across all these multiple environments. And the other piece that's so important is the community, right? Everybody wants developers, they're a really important part of the puzzle. How do you see community working in what you do and how is the role of those individuals changing as there's more automation? I think if there's one thing we've learned in our journey over the past couple of years, going through NSX deployments and talking to our customers is the shift in people and process that needs to take place. Typically organizations were built around areas of excellence. My operating system and server infrastructure team, my storage team, my network team, my security team. And as you mentioned, it's about the app. And the application wants it instantaneously. It cannot wait for tickets and teams to coordinate and interact in that order. So what we've learned over the past couple of years is people and processes have to be looked at. And it's not like things, roles are going away, roles are transforming. The networking team has to lean in and understand what the application wants to do. They have to understand the system level architecture of the application. And as a result, you're delivering now as a team to the business application. It's no longer the different teams or silos in there. And so bringing the people and process together is very important. Part of this is training. Part of this is enabling these teams to be successful. So it is incumbent, not just on us, to provide training and certifications, but leaders in IT to provide the right forums for these teams to work, train themselves and enable the next set of delivery items for IT. It's just wild. This digital transformation theme, we've talked to Clorox a while ago. And even Clorox, you think, is kind of a very data-centric CPG company that they're full in on transformation. We were at the GEMinds Machine show earlier month ago and Jeff Malt is basically all in on transformation for G&G software, what Bill Ruz built over in the East Bay. But one thing that stuck with me with what Beth Comstock said at that event is organize around the flow, the process flow. That's the key to transformation. As you talked about all those silos, I couldn't help but think, the silos are no longer relevant. The silos are support of organizing around that information flow. If you organize that way, you're going to deliver better to your customer. I think it's about, to your point, what is our goal as a business? What are we trying to do? It's not a technology goal, it's a business goal. We are going to deliver a better experience for our end customers. And how do we go about achieving it, bringing the teams together, allowing them to fail? Because there will be when you embark on a new project, how do you handle failure? How do you provide training? How do you provide, in terms of when there's a failure, you just can't say, this person did it or that team did it. How do you handle these situations? It's a cultural shift and it takes time. And to your point, creating small milestones and goals of achievement, celebrating those achievements, learning from failures, and building on each of those steps so that that end goal is achieved of giving better interactions and customer experiences. I think it's not just about technology, it's about bringing people together and driving that. Right, and I think everyone knows that the technology is easy compared to the people and the process and the transformation in game. Much, much more difficult to get people to start to change their behaviors, think differently about the way they work. So as you look forward to 2017 and don't give away any secrets, we didn't do the non-disclosure, whatever the SEC statement at the beginning of the interview, I wonder if you can share some of your goals, what are some of your priorities in your team as you look forward now to this next calendar year? Yeah, so we've had a really good success with NSX in terms of with our customers around automation, security, and application continuity. And multiple customers upwards of now, starting with 150 at the beginning of the year, we are well over 700 plus now and growing. So the number of deployed customers is growing. And I would say what we're hearing from them is, how do we scale this environment more? How do we add it to more use cases? So give me a service-like experience, make the people process piece easier and help us integrate our teams better. And so it's no longer a discussion around, hey, what can NSX do? It's about how can I use NSX to grow my environment or deliver a better business use case? So I think it is incumbent on us when I look at our goals that we deliver a better service-like experience, better training, better people and process tools for our customers. But of course, we are a technology company and we do need to evolve. And you've heard these announcements, one being CrossCloud, where NSX can now provide network and security for applications that are built natively in public clouds. So the VMware on AWS, of course, will have NSX. But even in environments where applications are built natively, can we deliver a consistent network and security model so that you get on-prem, off-prem, you get the same visibility and security that you are used to. And then of course, the last piece of the puzzle is new apps. We talked about the applications. How do we work with the community of these new application frameworks that are out there and build and integrate into them so that we are the de facto networking and security model in these new microservices-based application architectures? And the community is such an important piece, right? Everybody's competing for their mind share, their attention, but they're out there and they're working on, they have so many exciting opportunities in front of them. So being part of that is super, super important. Open source community. So I think a lot of folks talk about open source. I think open source is very important, but I think it's the community that makes the whole process very interesting, which is open source plus a community that supports it, that's there for each other, that works on the integrations together, can make for a solid delivery vehicle. And I think that's where you will see in our 2017, as you look at new app frameworks, people talk about Kubernetes and Docker and these communities are developing. How do we work with these communities? How do we integrate together as a ecosystem of providers is going to dictate the success of IT going forward? All right. Well, then, well, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day. It's going to be an exciting year for sure. I'm looking forward to it. All right. Melinda Sy, I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. We are on the ground at the VM World, excuse me, VMware headquarters in Palo Alto. Thanks for watching.