 Live from the Mandalay Bay Convention Center in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2016. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now, here's your host, Stu Miniman. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2016. I'm Stu Miniman and when we have people on the program they become CUBE alumni. And there's certain guests that have been on a number of times. Pat Gelsinger said on theCUBE yesterday, he couldn't imagine VMworld without theCUBE. He's one of our most frequent guests on the program and happy to have a friend of mine who I've known for many years, worked with in the past and multi-time CUBE alum. He's in the top 10 list of most times on the program. Lawrence Schwartz, who is now the CMO of Software One. Lawrence, welcome back to the program. Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here and good to have an interview with you. All right, so Lawrence, you lived in kind of the infrastructure world for many years, but since we worked together, you've worked for a bunch of interesting software companies. So very innovative moves there. I believe it's the first time we've had you on since you moved to Software One. So tell us what moved you there and for our audience that's not familiar, who is Software One? Yeah, yeah, sure, absolutely. So as you can see with the dynamics going on in the industry right now, cloud's a big topic, right? First day discussion here and people are trying to figure out how to do a hybrid cloud, how to kind of incorporate that into their environments. And you've got that on top of a legacy world, right? Sure, cloud adoption's going to continue, but managing both is a critical area. So last place I was at, from an infrastructure side, that was a lot of the question of how do you take that existing, what you have in premise and then manage it with the cloud? And then as I look at Software One where I joined just a few months ago, we're looking at that from a software portfolio management perspective of, look, you have a lot of different systems that you're trying to manage, you're trying to incorporate the cloud and how do you do that successfully? So Software One is one of the fastest growing technology solution providers. I've been a strong partner of VMware for a while. Last year we won our first award with VMware for our work as a solution provider, so excited about that. And when I talk about Software Portfolio Management, which is Software One space, it's when you think about if a lot of customers, from small customers, you'll have say, dozens of different software vendors that they work with, to large customers who have hundreds of different vendors, how do you manage that portfolio? So that's everything from the asset itself, are you actually using it or not, to the procurement of it, how do you buy it effectively, wherever you are in the globe. And then the last part is how do you knit that together into interesting technology solutions? So that's what Software Portfolio Management is, that's what Software One focuses on, and that's what brings us to a great show like VMware. Wow, that's great. We said people talk about hybrid cloud, but really what customers need to do is, they look at their application portfolio, and what am I keeping on site, what am I using with SaaS, what am I doing in the public cloud, and boy, those things will change, and managing all of those pieces is a big challenge for companies. So, Software One, they've been doing acquisitions themselves, they're growing, give us some speeds and feeds that's kind of the size of the company. Yeah, yeah, the company that's been around for around 30 years, and it's a great story that the CEO of it, Patrick Winner was also the founder. Company has grown to 3,000 plus people so far, and we have a very global presence, so we're in today, we've got feet on the ground over 80 countries, we can actually deploy software or sell software in over 140 countries, so pretty much anywhere in the world you can think of, say maybe North Korea, right? We've got it covered, and recently we had an investment last year from KKR, a significant investment, to help grow the business, particularly as we look at the digital transformation and to make sure the company's a leading player in that space. So, exciting times for where the companies come from and where it's going to tomorrow. Okay, yeah, you mentioned in the opening keynote there were discussions about, you know, multi-cloud, inter-clouding, a lot of that's very much at the infrastructure layer, so it sounds like it's complementary to what you're doing at Software One. Exactly, so Software One actually has experience, you know, licensing and working with literally thousands of different vendors, right? So we can handle any type of environment, and it was nice to see, you know, at the keynotes on the first day, obviously VMware is kind of a different approach this year, they're kind of embracing, you know, the opportunity with Azure, they're embracing the opportunity they have with AWS as well as Google, and that's the reality, right? People are going to manage things on different clouds, and that's what we're here to help with. And when you look at some of the other peers that we have in this space, who are either solution providers or resellers, when you look at where they focus, some of them have come from doing hardware and software, and we tend to focus more on the software piece, so that advantage, we're not trying to hawk hardware at the same time. And some other vendors are very focused on the cloud space, right? But in the reality is, as I mentioned earlier, most environments are hybrid, right? So we're trying to help customers manage that on both sides. So we've developed platforms, a platform we have called PureCloud, which is an engagement platform for people to manage both their on-premise and their cloud to look at consumption, to picture as well, and really make that a much more simplified way of managing their portfolio of software. All right, so Lawrence, bring us inside of what a typical customer looks like. So what are the challenges they're facing? Are they really moving workloads between clouds, do they care about that, or how are they managed in their software assets? Yeah, yeah, I'll give you one example of kind of a digital transformation that we're working with. And this one's, as I was understanding the business, I've been here for a couple of months. This one kind of really hit home, which I thought was interesting. One is, if you look at Panera, if you go to Panera, it's plenty around Boston, plenty all over the US. I've got the app on my phone, there's one across the street from my office. Exactly, right? So Panera is a great example of a restaurant that's doing a digital transformation themselves, right? You've got the app, you go in store, they have the tablets that they're working from, right? You can order from there, it's a seamless experience. There are other people in the restaurant industry like Chili's, right? Similar thing, you sit down at a table, there's kind of a little pad for you to order stuff on. They try to add on a sale at the end with dessert, right? Even as you do your receipt, they do a survey so they get much better engagement feedback. So we're working not with Chili's and Panera, but we're working with another major restaurateur. They've got hundreds of different outlets around the world. And they're looking at this and say, how do I get there, right? How do I go from what I have today? How do I leverage VMware? How can software one help me do that? So we kind of start at the beginning and we help them build the business case for the executive management, for the CXO level of, here's what's happening in the industry, here's how you get there and here's how we can help. And then we look at their environment. Their environment, their digital environment consists of a computer in the back room that's about 10 years old running some Citrix email on it and an old inventory system, right? There's a huge gap from that to something like the industry leaders, right? So we can go in there and then we advise them on how they can use some VMware software on top of that, how they could leverage AirWatch on top of that as well to really have a seamless way to integrate, get in, no matter where you're coming in from if you're an employee even as well. So we're looking at those models and how do you leverage and pull that in. And for other customers and other spaces, they're also looking at how they take that environment and then shift some of that workload to the cloud as well. All right, so you've talked about some of the other public clouds, we're here at VMworld. How does software look at that? What do you hear from customers? Do they think like in a mega public cloud service provider or some of these other things, SaaS? How do you see the reality of the kind of the cloud ecosystem today? Yeah, I think it's, we see it and I've seen it a lot where if you're in with VMware and working with them you're very familiar with the story and there's kind of a lot of interesting attraction around that. I think the announcement around NSX and more security there that's very attractive too because the security side is a whole other ball of wax that they're trying to figure out and pulling together. So that's attractive from one angle. And what I see oftentimes, particularly like with Amazon is that comes in around the edges, right? You've got your central IT, somebody's running off and doing some workloads on AWS. Next thing you know, it's turning into a project and then they're looking ways to integrate that with some of the core vendors they might have. And including VMware. So I think it's a mix and it depends, you know, what part of the IT group you're in or kind of periphery as well, so. Okay, so do you guys have any play with kind of the security aspects or governance aspects of managing my applications, wherever they are? For us, we're looking at as a solution provider. Certainly we get a lot of questions around that, right? So, you know, we can work with the best of breed vendors to pull those in, right? So it's had a lot of interest on the NSX side and security around that, they kind of like that, kind of integrated and kind of modular level. But there's certainly other places that we can work with, you know, Checkpoint and others as people think about their overall application, you know, all the way up the stack as well, so. All right, so Lawrence, you're not a VMworld veteran, but I know you go to a lot of conferences. We've seen you at a lot of big data analytics shows, Amazon re-invent, can you kind of give us a compare and contrast as to what you're seeing at this show and the customer base here versus some of the others? Yeah, yeah, no, this show has been a, you know, there's some, what we like about it is there's some real, you know, buyers here, right? Who are looking at and very excited about what's going on. Somebody was going through the stats the other day, we had a little customer event and talking about the hands-on lab here, right? And, you know, they said, I think they have a thousand machines running or 900 machines running. So it's an audience that's very hands-on, they want to try things. You know, I heard one year there was almost a riot when the machines went down, when they were trying things, right? It's a very technical audience, but that's good. I mean, mixed within those, you also have some of the, you know, right CXO level people here. And that's good for us as we talk about the overall solution and where we fit in. So when we do events, we're seeing, at the show, we're seeing kind of both customers come in and that's important or both levels of the buying because, you know, we want to, you know, understand the technology concerns and we have a technology solutions group that can help get into that level. But at the same time, we also want to have those higher level software portfolio discussions with the CXOs. So this has been a really good conference from that angle. Other conferences I've been to in Vegas, you know, that are in the cloud, you know, it's still a lot more on the technology side. You get a mix, right? But this one's, I think, got more of that and a nice level in combination, so. Great. So Lawrence, what kind of takeaways do you have from the show, things you're going to be bringing back to your team from VMworld 20? Sure, sure. I mean, again, the excitement and enthusiasm around the cloud, right? That's a verification of what we're doing. You know, we've done a lot of work with Azure. You know, we've developed packages that are very attractive with Microsoft to help people get started and get moving with it and we've seen a lot of adoption there and to see these announcements from VMware shows that obviously VMware's seeing, you know, that interaction, that pull from places like, from places like Microsoft as well. So that's, you know, it's kind of a confirmation of what we're looking at and it helps us as we continue to evolve our technology services and our technology platform, it helps us shape, you know, the right packages. I think some of the things, you know, simplifying the access, you know, to NSX, you know, including that, you know, more in a lot more places, especially as you think about the cloud, that makes it much easier and kind of removes a barrier as well. So I think this is a net positive, certainly for software one where we look at, you know, this is really helping, you know, the onboarding to the cloud, you know, more so than I even knew about or thought coming into the show. Yeah, so you've mentioned NSX a bunch of times. I think you guys probably have a really interesting viewpoint as to how companies are doing with kind of their deployments of software and where they're getting traction. How is VMware doing, getting kind of beyond the base hypervisor, you mentioned AirWatch, NSX. I don't know, VSAN probably doesn't hit your radar, but, you know, you're seeing success and they're coming up a lot in conversation. It is, it is, because, you know, if you start with, it's interesting, when you start a conversation and we try with our technology services and our solutions to start the conversation, what are the big issues that you have, right? And when you talk about, you know, security, right, as well as, you know, virtualization, you know, vSphere, people of God that's fairly well-adopted, say no about that and they're looking at what's next. And when you can talk about the power of the security built into NSX, what that can do at the modular level, that becomes interesting and I think we're seeing a lot more interest on that area. You know, AirWatch, as I mentioned, you know, to kind of help with the portability for the digital workplaces. I mean, when I talk about the restaurant industry, right, you know, you're dealing with people who don't have a strong IT background, you want something very easily accessible and usable from anywhere, right? So, you know, definitely the core is still a big part of the business, but we're starting to see more of that growth in some of the different areas. All right, so Lawrence, I'm going to give you one final question. Sure, yeah. There's nothing personal. Yeah, yeah. So you've got a strong technical background. Yeah. That kind of merged the technical and the marketing and you've, you know, really interesting to see where you've gone with your career. Share some of the moves and changes. What advice would you give to people, especially starting out and they say, okay, well, maybe I understand a little technology. Yeah, yeah. Marketing, you know, what advice do you give to those moving up in the range? Yeah, well, you know, I think I'll, you know, the advice I have and not me thinking about the bigger business picture is earlier in my career, you know, I had started in telecom actually and I started out in engineering and this was in the era of the bubble, right? And you can kind of see all this investment going in at the same time, you didn't see a lot of people necessarily buying it, right? So you can see trouble coming. And when I was an engineer at the time, I looked at this and said, okay, you know, what's going on with the market, right? We've got this really great technology. It's the hottest thing out there. We're doing all this stuff around core switching and ATM space way back when. So it's not really cool, really cutting edge, but was there a buyer for it and there a market for it? And I saw, you know, a lot of people saw it, you know, there wasn't, right? And we had to figure out after that where to move the business and what to go after and where to spend the time on. So people coming in with a technical background, I think it's important to embrace and get excited about technology. I mean, that's what gets people into the business. I would certainly not be doing marketing at Procter & Gamble, you know, I'd want to be in the tech space, but having that wider view of what's happening in the business, that's important. So you don't get too caught up in that. So you've got something that's attractive to buyers at the same time, you know, and that's what led me to kind of pivot from being straight on the technology side to getting that broader business sense and then eventually focusing on telling the stories and marketing. So that's great. And we even see many of the companies that you didn't think of as technology companies are becoming software companies, tech companies, every from, you know, GE and Nike, who we see as some of the big trust. All right, Lawrence, always great to catch up with you. Thanks so much for joining us here at VMworld 2016. We'll be back with getting towards the end of our coverage. Thanks for watching theCUBE.