 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware Radio 2019, brought to you by VMware. Hi, welcome to theCUBE. Lisa Martin with John Furrier at the 15th annual VMware Radio, which is our R&D Innovation Summit. Pleased to welcome back one of the CUBE alumni extraordinaire CEO, VMware Pat Gelsinger. Hey Pat, good morning. Good morning, great to be with you guys today. Thanks so much. Great to be here. This is the 15th radio, your internal innovation summit that really has been very influential in VMware's development over the last 15 or so years, about 1,800 engineers here. So each year, growing more and more interest, excitement, cross-collaboration with VMware. Talk to us about how this is really worthy of the CEO's time to come here and with this Geek Fest. Well, it is in many ways just one of these pieces of the VMware R&D culture. It's a research and development innovation off-site and it's something long preceded me, but when I got here, it's like I'm going to keep doing it. Of course we are. This is sort of like the party for the top engineers, right? They get to come, geek out, share their best ideas, interact with each other. And so it's become one of those unique pieces of our development culture. And ultimately, as I say, VMware, we only do two things, right? Develop great breakthrough, innovative disruptive products, and make our customers successful with those products. So everything that we do sort of centers around those two things. And obviously if the products aren't great, we don't know what to do. So to us keeping that culture of innovation and giving our engineers time to really just geek out, see what each other's are doing, challenge each other, it's really pretty special. And yeah, it deserves the CEO's time. And you just had your sales president's club with our top performers on the sales side. This is the technical version. This isn't been that organic piece of the VMware culture engineering leadership. But you also have acquisitions just acquired in Bitnami. So you've had a few other, you know, Cloud Health, big time moves, relationship with AWS, Azure, the Cloud Foundation stuff. How is blending it together? Because you have all this organic innovation. I see cloud management, network and security, obviously the software defined data center is playing out as you guys had predicted. How does the acquisitions fit in to the culture and radio? Well, you know, part of it is when we talk to many of the engineers about the acquisitions, we say, hey, we do radio. And they're like, huh? All right, well it's this opportunity for us to see what everybody is doing interact at that level. And good engineers are almost always part of the decision with respect to acquisitions. So they just take to it like, you know, fish and water, right? They just jump in, right? Start interacting with their peers. And it is such a, you know, open, diverse pool that all of a sudden ideas are being bounced off each other, homogenized, challenged and you know, people seeing how they can connect with people. So to us, many of the acquisitions just find this to be so beneficial to how they come into the company. And they quite appreciate it. You know, just getting back from sales club, hey, the sales leaders, hey, this is pretty good. I like this, you know, for many of those acquisitions but the engineers, this is even better for them. You guys aren't just buying stuff up. You guys are very specific in your acquisitions. Cloud Health again is a great example. You've seen, you know, AirWatch going with further back. Why Bitnami? What was so big and important about Bitnami to acquire them? Well, you know, we saw a couple of things. One is, is that, you know, as a company, they definitely had this ability, this respect rapport with the open source community. You know, and being able to cross between open source and enterprise credibility, that's exactly where VMware sees and wants to be able to position ourselves. So they fit exactly into that space. This idea of being able to bring enterprise packages for the cool open source application space. And we already had a multiple set of marketplace efforts internally where we saw that we needed that ecosystem play for activities. So they just snapped so perfectly into the middle of that and very much hybrid multi-cloud aspects to it. And as we do for every one of our acquisitions and I personally meet with every CEO before we do the deal, are they going to fit our culture? And, you know, there aren't that many of our acquisitions where I have people saying, no, no, I'll be the executive sponsor for this one. No, no, no, I will be, no, no, no, please, I'll do this one. And, you know, of course, the fact that it's in Seville, Spain, right? You know, I think a few of it was just driven by vacation plans, but it's all good. Well, of course, Erica, CUBE alumni. We have a whole CUBE alumni thing going on here. There's no M&A work we're doing here. Just good CUBE alumni. So you're planning the CUBE visit to Seville, Spain as well, I think. We'd love to, of course, we have international presence. One of the things I always quote from you is, besides that hybrid cloud reference years ago, was a quote you said, I think in 2012 or 2013, I forget which year it was, seems like yesterday, you said if you're not out on that next wave, you're driftwood. So I got to ask you here at radio, you got all this organic stuff, it's kind of kind of, the wave's coming. Is this, what wave is, are you seeing VMware riding right now? Because business is great. You're pumping on all cylinders. You've kind of gone through your 10 years through the early days of as you got CEO and everything's normalized now and you're on a good run. What wave are you going to be surfing in the business side with all this stuff behind you? What does this all fit in? Well, one of the things that I think is so critical for us now, and particularly with the VMware cloud and the AWS, now with the relationships with Azure and IBM, Alibaba, our 4,000 VCPP partners. So that's really starting to take off our VMware cloud foundation on premise. We have big customers saying, okay, I get it, right? Don't look down the stack. Look up, rely on you guys to be the infrastructure. Bring that together for the hybrid infrastructure as a service. And to me, part of what I'm looking for from the conference is putting all those pieces together. Because our customers don't want to be doing it. They want us to do it. But we have to make it so consumable, so compelling that just sort of like vSphere was at our beginning, they just sort of say VMware, you're a hybrid cloud. That's what I want, right? And be able to operationalize that at scale. And if we get that really working well for customers, the management, the automation, the security, operations of that. Boy, now we do have the opportunity to ride the Kubernetes wave, right? And to me, it really is, we have to straddle those two over the next several years. So making the structure super easy. So moving up, making the highest part of the stack. And then embracing that next major trend. Which is what, on top of the stack, programability? Yeah, as I've described, Kubernetes and containers, it's like Java was 20 years ago. What was the last major software abstraction that the industry agreed upon? Java, it's almost exactly 20 years ago and it defined middleware abstraction for the last 20 years. Containers, Kubernetes, the next middleware abstraction. And we see Kubernetes becoming the next native API that the VM where infrastructure, SDDC will support and will deliver. And we're going to make containers and Kubernetes so seamless with regard to the core VM infrastructure that a customer never needs to decide. What impact will this have? I mean, obviously you've been involved in many ways to talk about the Pentium and the Intel side of your career, obviously. And what that enabled in terms of inflection point and growth and creation of value. Where do you see this Kubernetes abstraction? If this is going to be one of those inflection points as you point out, how do you envision the impact to the industry? What's going to happen? We see that Kubernetes layer impacting down as well as impacting up. And that's why we see it as so critical to get it right. It becomes the consumption API of infrastructure. And we've talked about infrastructure as code or API, it'll displace open stack as an API becomes the middleware API of choice. But it also then defines the middleware abstraction of choice. So all of your web spheres, web logics, Java communities are going to get displaced as well as they are refactored into this automated containerized scale out world. And that's exactly where we're sitting. And that's another piece of the Bitnami acquisition that we just announced. Because being able to package containerized open source applications packages exactly fits into that strategy as well. And if we do those two things, I think VMware is going to be extraordinarily well positioned for decades to come, way past me. So let's talk about customers. Here we are at Radio 2019, 15th year as I mentioned. This is a really competitive event. Engineers want to be here. You probably had well over a thousand project submissions. How do customers want benefit from the innovations that are discussed here at Radio? But also how do customers influence some of the projects and the exciting things that engineers want to put together? Well, one of the things that we really enjoy about the whole VMware R&D community is, engineers are meeting with customers all the time. We push them out into those places. We selectively bring customers in and have them interact here at Radio. We have other mechanisms like Flings, right? These open source lightweight things that customers can be giving us code. We can be giving them code. We regularly bring them into our campus for their participation in different advanced programs. So it really is a very constant ongoing and somewhat end-to-end dialogue that we're having. Whether that's from an early product concept that we might be seeing for the first time here at Radio to active participation in beta activities before we roll them out broadly. So it really is having them participate in the end-to-end role of innovation. And sometimes, hey, it sounds like a good idea and it sort of sucked when we tried to do it. Other times it's like, oh, wow, some of these things really have taken off and gained legs well beyond what we would have dreamed of. What have you seen that this year's event, project-wise, featured project-wise, that really kind of caught your attention like, oh, that's a really good idea. Well, I must admit, I just landed last night. So today is my first day at Radio. So just got back from our sales club, as John mentioned earlier. So I think I'm going to have to take a bye on that question here, because I got to go do my homework here in a few minutes. Well, I'll ask you a question. You guys have attracted talent, engineering talent. This is obviously the best of the best elite forces. This is a challenge in the industry, is to retain talent. And engineers love to work on hard problems. So I got to ask you, what's some of the hard problems that VMware's trying to tackle that would attract the elite engineering forces to the company? Because, again, you're talking about something really big that's going on with software. What are some of the big problems that are? Yeah, well, a couple of them that, you know, I'm pretty focused on for our team. And one is we said, you know, we said it's the software-defined data center. Right, going forward, it's the self-driving data center. How do we bring so much telemetry and automation that we truly are running the data center on a customer's behalf? And if I, you know, build on the Dell Technologies world announcement of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC, you know, we're now managing their on-premise data center from our cloud. Hmm, you know, and if we can put more machine learning AI into the middle of that, it's not just that I want to do it instead of them, I want to do it dramatically better than they ever could, right? Using the greatest algorithms, telemetry, learning, et cetera, that the infrastructure becomes more reliable, right? It becomes higher performance. It becomes increasingly predictive, right, of its behavior and adjusting to those things. So the self-driving data center is pretty high on the list for us. You know, this idea then of a true multi-cloud operational plane where customers just say, here's my workload, you figure out where to run it, here are my policies, here's the workload, take care of it for me. Oh, today I was running it on this cloud. In the afternoon, I brought it back on-premise because you had spare capacity, right? And wow, if you could do that at scale, but then you say, boy, you know, if I move it around, where does the data reside? Right, you know, have I met my policies and compliance requirements? So this multi-cloud operational plane is a huge- So the big problem that you're attracting talent is abstract complexity away and making it easy. Yeah, right, you know, fundamentally, that's what we do. It's hard to tell. You know, some of the cool things, you know, the, our blockchain, right, you know, also breaking through, as I've described, blockchain is like the public-private key encryption breakthroughs of 40 years ago. But they're still very raw, right? Their performance is crappy, you know, they don't scale very well, you know, of all sorts of issues associated with auditability and reputability of those mechanisms. So those are some of the new problems. And then also attacking entirely new segments like NFV, right? Hey, we're going to build a 5G network that's not reliant on hardware, right? Well, when you're out of the quiet period, we're going to come to your office, we'll go a deeper dive on the business and some of the cool tech stuff. I look forward to that. I look forward to that. And we're just coming up on VMworld in a couple of months. I think this will be the Cube's 10th time there. Any, any little teasers that you can give us about VMworld 2019? Well, we certainly hope that, you know, we're able to bring a lot of these cloud messages together, right, and have sort of, you know, connected all the dots at VMworld this year. Stay tuned. You heard it here on theCUBE first. Some exciting announcements coming from VMware in just a few months at VMworld 2019. Pat Gelsinger, CEO, thank you so much for joining John and me at Radio 2019. As a pleasure always. Thank you so much. Thank you, Pat. Likewise. We want to thank you for watching. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from VMware Radio 2019 in San Francisco. Thanks for watching.