 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of VMware Explore 2022, formally VMworld, I've been saying that. I got to get that out, Dave. I've been saying VMworld. It just kind of comes off the tongue when I'm tired, but you know, wall-to-wall coverage, again, back-to-back interviews all day, two sets. This is a wrap up here with the analyst discussion. I've got one more interview after this. Really getting the analyst perspective around what we've been hearing and seeing, observing and reporting on theCUBE. Again, two sets, blue and green, we call them. Here on the show floor on Moscone West, the sessions upstairs, two floors of amazing content sessions. Keynote across at Moscone North and South. Sarbitra Wells here, cloud strategists with theCUBE, and of course what event would be complete without Sarbit weighing in on the analysis. And I'm all kidding aside, I mean that because we've had great interactions around digging in, you're like a roving analyst out there, and it was great about what you do is you're social, you're communicating, you're touching everybody out there, but you're also picking up the puzzle pieces. And we, you know, of course we recognize that because that's what we do. But you're out, we're on the set, you're out on the floor. And you know your stuff. And you know cloud, so this is your wheelhouse. Great to see you. Good to see you. I'm good guys, thank you, thank you for having me. So I mean Dave and I were riffing going back earlier in this event, and even before during our super cloud event, we were reminded of the old OpenStack days. If you remember Dave, OpenStack was supposed to be the open source version of cloud, and that was a great ambition. And the cloud of Roddy at that time was very into it because it made a lot of sense. And the vision of all the infrastructure is code. Everything was lined up. Everything religiously was on the table. Beautiful cloud future. Okay, 2009, 2010, where was Amazon then? They just went up like a rocket ship. So cloud ended up becoming AWS in my opinion. OpenStack then settled in, did some great things, but also spawned Kubernetes. Okay, so we've lived through this. We've seen this movie. We were actually in the trenches on the front lines, present at creation for cloud computing. Yeah, I was at Rackspace when OpenStack was open sourced. I was there in the rooms and discussions and all that. I think OpenStack was given to the open source like prematurely. I usually call it like we left a toddler on the freeway, no, the toddler got kicked. Behind the wheel. And they can't see it over the dashboard. So we have learned over the years in the last two decades, like we have seen the open source, the rise of open source. And we have learned quite a few lessons. The one lesson we learned from there was like don't let a project go out in the open till it's mature enough with one vendor. So we did that prematurely with NASA. NASA and Rackspace gave the code from two companies to the open source community. And then the likes of IBM and HPE, no, now HPE, they kind of hijacked the whole thing and then put a lot of dwellers on that. And then a lot of us sort of second tier startups started playing. But remember not to interject, but at that time there wasn't a lot of pushback for letting them in. It wasn't like they infiltrated it, like the vendors always try to worry about vendors coming in open source. But at that time it was pretty, people accepted them and then it got off the rails. Then remember the great API debate? They called it a Hail Mary against AWS, which is what it was. But it was, it was true. And it ended up being right. But the battle started happening when you started seeing the network primitives being discussed. You started to see some of the, in the trenches, really important conversations around how to make essentially cross cloud or super cloud work. And again, totally premature, it goes to the continuum. And what does that mean today? So okay, is VMware too early on their cross cloud? Are they, is multi-cloud ready? No. And is it just vaporware? No, they're not too early actually. On that side they were premature to put that out there, but this is like very mature company. Like in the ops area, we have been using VMware stuff since 2000, early 2000. I was a commerce one when we started using it. And yeah, it was for lab manager. You know, like, you know, put the labs out there. Tap addition. Yeah, yeah. Kind of stuff. So it matured pretty fast, but now it's like for all these years, they focused on the ops side more, right? And then the challenge now, in the DevOps sort of driven culture, which is very hyped to be honest with you. They are trying to find a place for developers to plug in on the left side of the sort of whole systems, life cycle, management sort of line, if you will. So I think that's a struggle for VMware. They have to figure that out. And they are like a tapped Hensu application platform, services, they have released a new version of that now. So they're trying to do that, but still they are from the sort of get ops to the right, from that point to the right. On the left side, there are a lot more tooling developers use as we know, but they are very scattered kind of spend and scattered technology on the left side. VMware doesn't know how to tackle that. But I think VMware should focus on the right side from the get ops to the right, and then focus there, and then out in the multi-cloud, cross-cloud. My sense is they're saying, hey look, we're not going to own the developers. I think they know that. And they think they're saying, do develop in whatever world you want to develop in, we'll embrace it, and then ops guys, we got you covered, we got the standards, we have the consistency, and you're our peeps, you can then take it to the market. Is that not, I mean, it seems like a viable strategy. I mean look, if you're VMware Dave, and start, you know this, where they are right now, the way they missed the cloud, and they had to reboot that with Jassy and Raghu to do the AWS deal, it's essentially VMware hosted on AWS. And clients love it, because it's clarity. Okay, it's not vCloud air. So if you're them right now, you're saying to yourself, we could be the connective tissue between all clouds. We said this from day one, when Kubernetes was hit in the scene, whoever can make this the interoperability concept of inter-clouding and connect cloud so that there could be spanning of applications and data. We didn't say data, but we said, creating that nice environment of multiple clouds. Okay, and again, in concept, that sounds simple. But if you're VMware, you could own that abstraction later. So do you own it, or do you seed the base and let it become a de facto organization, like a super layer, super past layer, and then participate in it? Or are you the middleware yourself? We heard AJ Patel say that. So they could be the middleware for it all. Aren't they the infrastructure super cloud? I mean, that's what they're trying to be. I think they're trying to do that. It's, I have said that many times, VMware is bridge to the cloud, right? They're sorry, is that again? It's to the cloud, right? For enterprises, they have virtualized environments mostly on VMware stacks. And another thing is, I want to mention, touch on that is that number of certified professionals on VMware stack, it's a huge number. It's in tens of thousands, right? So people who have got these certifications, they want to continue that sort of journey. They want to leverage that. It's like, it's a sunk cost if they don't use that going forward. And that was my question to, during the press release yesterday, that are there new certifications coming into the limelight? I think VMware, if they're listening to me here somewhere, they will listen, I guess. They should introduce a cross-cloud certification for their stack. Because they want to be cross-cloud or multi-cloud sort of vendor with one single pane. So does actually Cisco and so do many others. But I think VMware is in a good spot. It's their market to lose, I call it, when it comes to the multi-cloud for enterprise, especially for the legacy applications. Well, they have the enterprise. They're super cloud enabler, Dave, for the enterprise. Because they're not hyperscaler, okay? They have all the enterprise customers who come here. We see them, we speak to them, we know them. We'll mingle with them. But they have really good relationships with all the hyperscalers. These guys need a way to the cloud in a way that's cloud operational. So if you say enterprises need their own super cloud, I would say VMware might want to raise their hands saying we're the vendor to provide them. And then that's the middleware role. So middleware isn't your classic stack, middleware. It's middle tissue. So you've got, it's not a stack model anymore. It's completely different. Maybe my industry super cloud is too aspirational. So let's assume for a second, you're not going to have everybody doing their own clouds like Goldman Sachs and Capital One, even though we've seen some evidence of that. Even in that case, connecting my on-prem to the cloud and modernizing my application stack and having some kind of consistency between your on-prem, and it's just to call it hybrid, like real hybrid, true hybrid, they should dominate that. I mean, who is, if it's not, it's VMware and it's what, Red Hat? Who else? I think Red Hat wants it too. Yeah, well, Red Hat's doing it with IBM Consulting and they got to be, they have great advantage there for all the banks, awesome. But what about the other 500,000 customers that are out there? If VMware can do what they do with the hypervisor with virtualization and create the new thing for super cloud, AKA connecting clouds together, that's a holy grail move right there. But what about this pass layer, this Tanzu and Aria, which somebody on Twitter, there was a little snark, come at us, re-realized, just renamed, which is not. I mean, it's from talking to Ragu, unless he's just totally PSing us, which I don't think he is, that's not who he is. It's this new federated architecture and it's their super pass layer and it's purpose-built for what they're trying to do across clouds. This is your wheelhouse. What do you make of that? I think Tanzu is a great effort. They have put in a lot of other older products under that one umbrella. Tanzu is not a product, actually confuses the heck out of the market that it's not a product, it's a set of other products put under one umbrella. Now they have created another umbrella term with a newer sort of... So really is some... There are two umbrella terms. So what's what? It's pivotal, it's vrealized, it's... Yeah, vrealized, pivotal and older stack, actually. They have some open source components in there. So they claim, Ragu's claim is this new architecture, this new federated architecture, graph database, low latency, real-time ingestion, observability. AJA, that's AJA's department. Sounded good. I mean, is that... Actually, I think the newer stuff what they announced, that's very promising because it seems like they're building something from scratch. So graph database. It won't be hardened for, but... It won't be hardened for... But they have a track record delivering. I mean, they got to say that about... They're an engineering-focused company. They have engineering culture. Their software engineers are top-notch. Top-notch? Yes, yeah. Yeah, it's all relative. If the VMware stays the way they are. Well, yeah. We'll get to that in a second. What do you mean? What are you talking about, John? They don't get gutted. They're the elephant in the room. They say, don't get gutted. And then we'll see what happens there. But right now, we love VMware. We've been covering them for 12 years and we've seen the trials not without their own issues to work on. Everyone needs to work on stuff, but, you know, world-class. They're very proud of their innovation. But I want to ask you, what was your observations walking around the floor, talking to people? What was the sense of the messaging? Is it real in their minds? Are they leaning in? Are they, like, enthused? Are they nervous, apprehensive? How would you categorize the attitude of the folks here that you've talked to or observed? Yeah, at the individual product level, people are very confident what they're building, what they're delivering. But when it comes to telling a cohesive story, if you go to all the VMware booths there, like, it's hard to find anybody who can tell what are all the services under Tensu and how they are interconnected and what facilities they provide. Or they can't, I mean, most of the people who are there, they cannot walk into the economics side of things, like how it will help you save money or how the TCO or ROI will improve. They are very focused on, because of the nature of the company, right? They're very focused on the technology only. So I think that's what I learned. And another sort of gripe or negative I have about VMware is that they have their product portfolio is so vast and they are even spreading more thinly. And they're forced to go to the left towards developers because of the sheer force of hyperscalers on one side, on the right side, they are forced to work with hyperscalers to do more like ops or later improvements. They didn't mention AI, ops, or data. So management, that was weak during the keynote as well. And they didn't mention security and their security story is strong. Security, I think they mentioned it briefly. Very briefly. Very briefly, but I think their story is good, actually. But they didn't mention it properly, I guess. It wasn't prominent in the keynote, you know? And again, I understand why data wasn't prominent. They wanted to say about data, they got to talk about green plug. They needed to make room for the developer story. I think this was very much a theatrical maneuver for Hock and Tan and the employee morale and the ecosystem morale, Dave, then it had to do with the nothing bolts of security. They can come back to get that security. In my opinion, I don't think that was as bad of a call as barring the vSphere, giving more demos, which they did do later. But the keynote I thought was well done, was targeted for all the negative sentiment around Broadcom. And Broadcom had the acquisition agreement that they are doing. I agree, it was well done. I mean, if I was VMware, I would have done the same thing. Look, this is a bright future. We're giving it, look at what we got. If you got this, it's on you. Okay. And I agree with you, but again, I don't see how you can't make security front and center when it is the number one issue for CIOs, CISOs, boards of directors, they just, it was a miss. They missed it, okay. And they said, oh, well, there's only so much time, but, and they had to put the application development focus on there, I get that, but. Another thing is, I think the, just keynote is just one sort of thing, one moment in this whole so continuous period, right? I think they need to have that narrative, like messaging done periodically, just like Amazon does, you know, like frequent events, tapping into the practitioners on regional basis, they have to do that. Maybe it's a funding issue, maybe there is some weakness on the GT side. I think they're planning, we talked to the CMO and she said, Explorer is going to be a road show, they're going to go international with, it's going to take a global, they're going to have a lot of wood behind the arrow, they're going to spend a lot of money on Explorer, is what we're seeing. And that's a good thing, you got a new brand, you got to build it. You know what I would have done? I would have had a shorter keynote on day one and then I would have done like a security day, day two. I would have dedicated the whole morning day two keynote to security because their story I think is that strong. Yeah. And I don't know, the developers are things, I think it's hard for VMware to go too much to the left. The spend on the left is very scattered, you know, if you notice the tools, developers change their tools on fricking monthly basis, right? It's hard to sustain that there on the very left side. And the... It's hard for companies like VMware to your point. And then this came up in SuperCloud with Instacray mentioned that developers drive everything, the patterns, what they like. And you know, the old cliche, meet them where they are. You know, honestly, this is kind of what AJ says is they're doing and it's the right strategy. Meeting the developers where they are means give them something that they like. They like self-service, they like to try stuff, they like to, they don't like it, they'll throw it away. Look at the success of, it's like data dog. Companies like to have that kind of offering with freemium and self-service to continue to sell, to win versus jamming the tooling down their throat and selling them. Self-serve infrastructure in a way, you know, you said they miss cloud, which they did be cloud air and then they got it right. It kind of did the same thing with Pivotal, right? It was almost like they forced them to take Pivotal, you know, buy Pivotal for $2 billion or whatever it was. All right, do something with it. Okay, we're going to try to do something with it. And they try to go out and compete. Now they're saying, hey, let's just open it up, whatever they want to use, let them use it. So unlike, and I said this yesterday, unlike Snowflake has to attract developers to build on their unique platform, okay? I think VMware's taking a different approach saying use whatever you want to use, we're going to help the ops guys. So now, to me, that's a very sense of it. The new ops guys. The new ops guys, yes. Yes, but. Another challenge on the right is on the upside, is like if you are cloud native, you are a new company, you just, when you start up, you are cloud native, right? Then it's hard for VMware to convince them to, hey, you know, come to us and use this. It's very hard. It is, they're a good play for a while at least. They can prolong their life by innovating along the way because of the skills, gravity, I call it, of the developers and operators. Actually, that's their, they have a loyal community, they have VMAG and all that stuff. And by the way, the name change for the show, I think they're trying to get out of that sort of culty kind of nature of their communities that they force, the communities actually can force the companies not to do certain things in a certain way. And I've seen that happening. Well, I think they're going to learn, and they already walked back to our messaging, not that they said anything overtly, but you know, Laurie, the CMO clarified this significantly, which was they never said that they wanted to replace VMworld, although the name change implies that. And what they've re-amplified after the fact is that this is going to be a continuation of the community. And so, you know, it's nuance, they're splitting hairs, but that's to me walking back the loyalty and look at it, let's face it. Anytime you have a loyal community, you do anything to change. People are going to be bitching at a moment. Yeah, but I mean, it worked. Explore worked. Yeah, it wasn't bad at all. It was not a bad, look, it wasn't disastrous call. Okay, I don't know. I'm critical of the name change at first, but the graphics are amazing. They did an exceptional job on the branding. They did an exceptional job on how they handled the new logo, the new name, the positioning. A lot of people showed up. Yeah, it worked. I'm busier than I thought. It worked, and I think they threaded the needle. Given everything they had going on, I thought the event team did an exceptional job here. I mean, just really impressive. So hats up to the event team at VMware on pulling it off. Now did they make profit? I don't know, it doesn't matter. Again, so much going on with Broadcom, but here being in Moscone West, we see people coming down the stairs here, Dave Sessions. A lot of people, a lot of buzz on the content, sold out sessions. So again, that's the ecosystem, the people giving the talks. The people in the V-Brown bag got the V-Tug. They had their meeting this week here. Actually, the red hat, the integration with the red hat is another highlight. They announced that you can run that stock. Open shift. And red hat's not here. Red hat's not here, but hey, but... It pulls more developers, more practitioners. About time, I would say. Why did it take so long? That should have happened. All right, final question. What's the bottom line? Give us a summary. What's your take? What's your analysis of VMware Explore, the event, what they did, what it means, what it's going to mean when the event's over? What's going to happen? I think VMware Explore have bought the time with the messaging. They have promised certain things with newer announcements and now it is up to them to deliver that in a very sort of fast manner. And build more hooks into other sort of platforms. So that is very important. You cannot just be closed system. People don't like those systems. You have to be part of the ecosystem. And especially when you are sitting on top of three, actually four or more public clouds, Alibaba Cloud was, they were saying that they are the only, VMware is only VMware based offering in mainland China on top of Alibaba and they can go to other ones as well. So I think especially when they are sitting on top of other cloud providers, they have to build hooks into other platforms. And if they can build a marketplace of their own, that would be even better, I think they've. And they've got the ecosystem for it. I mean, you saw it last night. I mean, all the parties were hopping. I mean, it was a lot of buzz. I mean, I pressed, I pressed them Dave hard. I had my little, my zingers. I wanted to push the buttons on one question that was targeted towards the answer of, are they going to try to do much more highly competitive maneuvering, you know, get that position in the middle? Where are they going to be more aggressive with frontal competitiveness? Or they're going to take the strategy of open, collaborative and every single data point points to collaborative. Kit Colbert I want to do out in the open. We're not one company. So I think that's the right play. If they came out and said, we're going to be this. You know. The one, the last thing actually, the one last idea I'm putting out there since I went to the Dell world was that there's a economics of creation of software. There's a economics of operations of software. And they are very good on the operations side of things. That when I say economics, it doesn't mean money only. It also means the productivity, production, growth, everything is in there. So I think these vendors who are not hyperscalers, they have to distinguish these two things and realize that they're very good on the right side, economics of operations, and that will go a long way. Actually, I think they muddy the waters by when DevOps, DevOps, and then it's just. Well, I think, Dave, we always had moments in time over the past 12 years covering VMware's annual conference, formerly VMworld Now Floor, where there were moments of, that's Pat Gelsinger's final speech. I remember he was under the siege of being fired. There was a point in time where it was touch and go and then everything kind of came together. That was a moment. I think we're at a moment in time here with VMware, Dave, where we're going to see what Broadcom does because I think what Optan and Broadcom saw this week was an EBITDA number on the table that they know they can probably get or squeeze. And then they saw a future value and that present value of future state that you got to roll back and do the analysis saying, okay, how much is it worth? All this new stuff worth. Is that going to contribute to the EBITDA number that they want on the number? So this is going to be a very interesting test because VMware did an exceptional job of laying out that they got some jewels in the oven. You think about how resilient this company has been? I mean, EMC picked them up for a song, it was 640 million or whatever it was, but the public. And then another epic moment, you'll recall this, was when Joe Tucci was like the mafia dawn up on stage and Michael Dell was there, John Chambers with all the ecosystem CEOs and there was Tucci and then of course, Michael Dell ends up owning this whole thing, right? I mean, when John Chambers should have owned the whole thing. I mean, it's just, it's been incredible. And then Dell uses VMware as a piggy bank to restructure its balance sheet, to pay off the EMC debt, and then sells the thing for $60 billion. And now it's like, okay, we're finally free of all this stuff. Okay, now Broadcom's going to buy you. And if Michael Dell keeps on stock, he'll be the largest shareholder of Broadcom and own it all. Well, and that's probably, that's a good question is, it's probably a very tax-efficient transaction if he takes all stock and then he can own against it. I mean, that's- That's- What a history. We're going to leave it there. Sorry, it'd be great to have you Dave, great analysis. Okay, we'll be back with more coverage here, day two, winding down after the short break.