 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of VMworld 2020, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hello and welcome back to theCUBE's virtual coverage of VMworld 2020 virtual. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. Our 11th year covering VMworld is not in-person, it's virtual. I'm with my co-host Dave Vellante, of course. I guess it's been on every year since theCUBE's existed. Sanjay Poonan, who's now the chief operating officer for VMware. Sanjay, great to see you. It's our 11th year. It's virtual. We're not in-person, usually high-fives are going around, but hey, virtual fist bump. Great to see you. Virtual fist bump to you, John. And Dave, always a pleasure to talk to you. I give you more than a virtual fist bump. Here's a virtual hug. Well, Sanjay, great, great to have you on. First of all, a lot more people attending VMworld this year because it's virtual. Again, it doesn't have the face-to-face. It is a community and technical event, so people do value that face-to-face, but it is virtual and it's a ton of content. Great guests. You guys have a great program here. Very customer-centric. Kind of the theme is unpredictable future is really what it's all about. We've talked about COVID you've been in on before. What's going on in your perspective? What's the theme of your main talks? Yeah, thank you, John. It's always a pleasure to talk to you folks. We felt as we thought about how we could make this content dynamic. We always want to make it fresh. A virtual show of this kind and program of this kind, we all are becoming experts at mini TED Talks or ESPN, whatever your favorite program is, 60 minutes, and becoming digital producers of content. So it has to be crisp. And everybody I think was doing this has found ways by which you reduce the content. Pat and I would have normally given 90 minute keynotes on day one and then 90 minutes again on day two. So 180 minutes worth of content. We've reduced that now into something that is that entire 180 minutes into something that is 60 minutes you get a chance to use as you've seen from the keynotes. An incredible, incredible, you know, packed array of both announcements from Pat and myself. So we really thought about how we could organize this in a way where the content was clear, crisp, and compelling. The crisp piece of it needed to also be concise, but then supplemented with hundreds of sessions that were as often as possible. We made it a goal that if you're going to do a breakout session it has to be incorporate or led with a customer. So you'll see not just do we have some incredible C-level speakers from customers that are featured in our Pat and my keynotes, like John Donahoe, CEO of Nike, or Laurie Beer, CIO Global, CIO of JP Morgan Chase, or Aparna Baba, who is CEO of Zoom, or Jensen Wang, who is CEO of Nvidia, incredible people. Then we also have had some luminaries. We're going to be talking in our vision track of people like Indra Nui. I mean, one of the most powerful women in the world many years ranked by Fortune magazine, Chairman C. O'Cupcy, or Brian Stevenson, the person who starred in Just Mercy. If you watch that movie, he's a real key fighter for social justice and criminal reform and the jails and the incarceration systems. Then Milana made an appearance too. I asked her personally, I've gotten to know her and her dad since she spoke two years ago. I asked her to make an appearance with us. So it's a really, really exciting content. We get to do some creative stuff in terms of digital content this year. So on the product side and the momentum side, you have great decisions you guys have made in the past. We covered that with Pat Gelsinger, but the business performance has been very strong with VMware props to you guys. Where does this all tie together in your mind? Because you have the transformation going on at a highly accelerated rate. COVID, we're not in person, but COVID-19 has proven to customers that they have to move faster. It's a highly accelerated world. A lot's changing. Multi-Cloud has been on the radar. You got security, all the things you guys are doing. You got the AI announcements that have been pumping. The Nvidia thing was pretty solid. You had Project Monterey. What does the customer walk away from this year and with VMware? What is the main theme? What's their call to action? What do they need to be doing? I think there's sort of three things we would encourage customers to really think about. Number one is as they think about everything in infrastructure serves apps. As they think about their apps, we want them to really push the frontier of how they modernize their applications. And we think that whole initiative of how you modernize applications driven by containers. You know, 20 years ago when I was a developer coming out of college, C, C++ Java, and then emerged these companies that worked on J2EE frameworks, WebLogic, BEA, WebLogic, and IBM WebSphere. It made the development of whatever's e-commerce applications or portals, whatever was in the late 90s, early 2000s, much, much easier. That entire world has gotten even easier and much more microservice based now with containers. We've been talking about Kubernetes for a while, but now we've become the leading enterprise container platform making some incredible investments, but we've also not just broadened this platform, we've simplified it as you've heard. Everything in VMware works in threes, right? It's sort of like almost t-shirt sizing, small, medium, large. So we now have TenZoo in the standard, the advanced, the enterprise editions, with lots of packaging behind that, that makes it a very broad and deep platform. We also have a basic version of it. So in some sense, it's sort of like an extra small, in addition to the small, medium, large. So TenZoo and everything around app modernization, I think would be message number one. Number two, alongside modernization, you're also thinking about migration of your workloads. And the breadth and depth of VMware Cloud Foundation now of being able to really solve not just use cases you were traditionally done, but also new AI use cases was the reason Jensen and us kind of partnered that. And I mean, what a great company. Nvidia has become the king maker of these AI-driven applications. Why not run those AI applications on the best infrastructure on the planet VMware? That's a coming together of both of our platforms to help customers, automotive, banking, fraud detection. There's a number of AI use cases that now get our best. And we want to see it. And the same thing then applies to Project Monterey, which takes the VCF VMware Cloud Foundation proposition to SmartNICS and Dell, HV Lenovo are embracing the Nvidia, Intel's and Pensando's in that SmartNIC architecture to cover that. So that entire world of multi-cloud being operative for VMware Cloud Foundation on-prem and all of its extended use cases like AI or SmartNICS or Edge, but then also into the AWS Azure Google multi-cloud world. We obviously had a preferred relationship with Amazon. That's going incredibly well, but you also saw some announcements last week from Microsoft and Azure about Azure VMware solutions at their conference ignite. So we feel very good about the migration opportunity alongside the modernization. And the third priority gentlemen would be security. That's obviously a topic that I've most recently taken an interest in my day job as CEO of the company running the front office, customer facing revenue functions. My night job by Joe Crawford has been driving the security strategy for the company. Has been incredibly enlightening to talk to CSOS and drive this intrinsic security or zero trust from the network to endpoint and workload and cloud security. And we made some exciting announcements there around bringing together more capabilities with NSX and Zscaler and a problem black and workload security. And of course, cloud security, we can cover all of those. But I would say if I was a attendee of the conference those are the three things I want them to take away. What VMware is doing in the future of apps, what's VMware doing in the future of a multi-cloud and how are you making security relevant for our distributed workforce? I know Dave. So much to talk about here Sanjay. So talk about modern apps. That's one of the five franchise platforms. VMware is a history of going from challenger to dominant player. You saw that within user computing and there are many, many other examples. So you are clearly one of the top, let's call it five or six platforms out there. We know what those are. And but critical to that modern apps focus is developers. And I think it's fair to say that it's not your wheelhouse today but you're making moves there. You agree that that is a critical part of modern apps and can you update us on what you're doing for that community to really take a leadership position there? Yeah, no, I think it's a very good point Dave. And we seek to constantly say humble and hungry. There's never any assumption from us that VMware has completely earned any place of rightful leadership until we get thousands, tens of thousands. We have a half a million customers running on our virtualization sets of products that have made us successful for 20 years, 70 million virtual machines. But we have to earn that right in containers. And I think there will be probably 10 times as many containers as there virtual machines. So if it took us 20 years to not just become the leader in virtual machines but have 70 million virtual machines, I don't think it'll be 20 years before there's a billion containers and we seek to be the leader in that platform. Now, why VMware and why do you think we can win in their long-term? What are we doing with developers? Number one, we do think there is a container capability independent of the virtual machine. And that's what this entire world of what Heptio and Pivotal brought to us. And many of the hundreds of customers that are using what was formerly Pivotal and Heptio now what's called Tanzu have, I mean, the case studies of what those customers are doing are absolutely incredible when I listen to them. You take Dick's sporting goods. I mean, they are building curbside pickup. I mean, a lot of the world now in the pandemic is doing e-commerce and curbside pickup, people aren't going to the store. That's all based on Tanzu. We've had companies within this sort of world of pandemic working on contact tracing apps, some of the diagnostic tools built with our Pivotal lab services and on the Tanzu platform, banks, large banks are increasingly standardizing on a lot of their consumer facing or wealth management type of applications, anything that they're building rapidly on this container platform. So it's incredible the use cases I'm hearing public sector of the US Air Force was talking about how they've done this. Many of them are now public about how they are modernizing apps. And I tend to learn the best from these vertical use case studies. I mean, I spent a significant part of my life as you know at SAP. And increasingly I want to help the company become a lot more vertical use case in banking, public sector, telco, manufacturing, CPG retail, top four or five where we're seeing a lot of recurrence of these. The Tanzu portfolio actually brings us closest to almost that SAP type of dialogue because we're having an apps dialogue in the speak of an industry as opposed to bits and bytes. Notice I haven't talked at all about Kubernetes or containers. I'm talking about the business problem being solved in a retailer or a bank or a public sector wherever have you. Now, from a developer audience which was a second part of your question, Dave. You know, we talked about this, I think a year or two ago. We have five million developers today that we've been able to, you know as bringing these acquisitions earn some audience with. About two or three million from the spring community and two or three million from the Bitnami community. So think of those as five million people who know us because of two acquisitions we've done. Now, obviously spring was inside VMware, went out of pivotal and then came back. So we really have spent a lot of time with that community. Few weeks ago we had spring one. You guys are aware of that conference. Record number of attendees registered, I think of all 40 or 50,000 which is much bigger than the physical event and then a substantial number of them attended live physical. So we saw a great momentum out of spring one and we're really going to take care of that community base of developers as they care about Java. Bitnami also doing really, really well. But then I think the real audience now has to come from us becoming part of the conversation that PoopCon at AWS reinvent at Ignite. Not just VMware. I mean, VMware is not going to be the only place where infrastructure and developers come to. We're going to have to be at other events which are very prominent and then have a developer marketplace. So it's going to be a multi-year effort. We're okay with that. To grow that group of about five million developers that we today cater to. And then I think there will be three or four other companies that also play very prominently to developers. AWS, Microsoft, and Google. And if we're one among those three or four companies and VMware's included that list, we feel very good about our ability to be in a place where this is a shared community. It takes a village to approach and appeal to those developers. I think VMware will be one of those four companies that's doing this for many years to come. Sanjay, I got to get your take on. I love your reference to the web days and how the development environment changed and how the simplicity came along. Very relevant to how we're seeing this digital transformation. But I want to get your thoughts on how you guys are doing pre and now during and post COVID. You already had a complicated thing coming on. You had multi-cloud. You guys were expanding your end. You had acquisitions. You mentioned a few of them and then COVID hit. So now you have everything's changing. You've got more complexity. You have more solutions. And then the customer psychology's changed. You've got two spectrums of customers. People trying to save their business because it's changed. Their customer behavior has changed. And you have other customers that are doubling down because they have a tailwind from COVID. Whether it's a modern app, companies like Zoom and others are doing well because of the environment. So you got your customers are in this storm. They're trying to save down, modernize or go faster. How are you guys changing? Because it's impacted how you sell. People are selling differently. How you implement and how you support customers. Because you already had kind of the whole multi-cloud going on, you have the modern apps. I get that, but COVID has changed things. How are you guys adopting and changing to meet the customer needs who are just trying to save their business and refactor or double down and continue? John, great question. I think I also talked about some of this in one of your previous digital events that you and I talked about. I mean, you go back to the last week of February, the first week of March, actually back up even in January. My last trip on a plane, a major trip outside this country was to World Economic Forum in Davos. And there were thousands of us packed into the small villages in Switzerland. I was sitting having dinner with Andy Jassy in a restaurant one night that day. And little did we know, a month later, everything would change. And what we began to do in late February, early March was first take care of our employees. You always want to have the pulse check of your employees and be in touch with them because the health and safety of our employees is much more important than the profits of VMware. So we took care of that, made sure that folks who are taking care of older parents were in good place. We fortunately have not lost anyone to death. COVID, we had some COVID cases, but they've recovered. And this is an incredible pandemic that connects all of us in the human fabric. It has no separation of skin color or ethnicity or gender, a little bit of difference in people who are older, who might be more affected or prone to it. But we just have to, it's taught me to be a significantly more empathetic. I've begun to do certain things that I didn't do before, but I felt was the right thing to do. For example, I've begun to do 25, 30 minute calls with every one of my key countries. You know, as I know, I run customer operations, all of the go-to-market field teams reporting to me. And I felt it was important for me to be showing up not just in the big company meetings, we do that. And big town halls where, you know, some fraction of the 30,000 people of VMware, but you know, go and do a town hall for everybody in a virtual Zoom session in Japan, but in their time zone. So 10 o'clock my time in the night, then do one in China and Australia, kind of almost travel around the world virtually. And it's not long calls, 25, 30 minutes, where first 10 or 15 minutes, I'm sharing with them what I'm seeing across other countries in the world, encouraging them to focus on a few priorities which I'll talk about in a second and then listening to them for 10, 15 minutes. And then the call on time or maybe even a little earlier because every one of us is going through Zoom button, going from call to call to call, we're tired, we're fatigued. There's also mental fatigue that we've got to worry about and mental well-being long-term. So that's one that I personally began to change. I began to also get energy because in the past, you know, I would travel to Europe or Asia, you know, 40, 50% of my life was traveled. It takes a day out of your life on either end, you're jet lagged. And then even when you get to a Tokyo or a Beijing or to Bangalore or to London, getting between sites of these customers is like 45 minutes, sometimes an hour commute. Now, I'm able to do many of these 25, 30 minute calls. So I set myself a goal to talk to 1,000 chief security officers. I know a lot of CIOs and CFOs from my times at SAP and VMware, but I didn't know many security officers who often either work for a CIO or report directly to the legal counsel and accountable to the audit committee of the board. And I got a list of these 1,000, 2,000 people. We cold emailed them. And man, I got to tell you, people are willing to talk to me. Just coming into this, I'm about 500 into that. And it was role modeling to my teams that the top of the company is willing to spend as much time as possible. And I've probably gotten a lot more productive in customer conversations now than ever before. And then the final piece of your question was just what do we tell the customer in terms of our portfolio? So these were just more the practices that I was able to adapt during this time that have given me energy. And I'll kind of say the two things. From the portfolio perspective, I think we began to notice two things. One is the entire move of migration and modernization around the cloud. I described that as, for example, moving to Amazon as a migration opportunity to Azure. Modernization is that whole Tanzu. M&M, migration and modernization is highly relevant right now. In fact, taking more speed. Data center spending might be on hold or in freeze as people kind of are holding till the pandemic or the GDP recovers. But migration and modernization is accelerating. So we want to accelerate that part of our portfolio. What are the products? We have our cloud on Amazon or cloud health or Tanzu and maybe the other offerings for the other public cloud. The second part of our portfolio that we're seeing acceleration around is distributed workforce security, work from home, work from anywhere. And that's that combination of Workspace One for both endpoint management, virtual desktops, Common Black and VeloCloud and the announcements we've now made with Zscaler for distributed workforce security or what the analysts call secure access service edge. That's beautiful because everyone working from home even if they come back to the office needs a very different model of security. And we are now becoming a leader in that area of security. So these two parts of the portfolio, you take the five franchise pillars and put them into these two buckets. We began to see momentum. And then the final thing I would say guys just on a soft note, I've had to just think about ways in which I balance work and family. It's just really easy, what six, seven months into this pandemic to burn out. And I've encouraged my team, we've got to think about this as a marathon, not a sprint. Do the personal things that you want to do that will make your life better through this pandemic and practices that you keep after it. I'll give you one example. I've again biking with my kids and during the summer months we're able to bike later. Even now in the fall, we're able to do that often. And I hope that's a practice I'm able to do much more often even after the pandemic. So develop some activities with your family, with the people that you love the most that are seeing you a lot more and hopefully enjoying that time with them that you will keep even after this pandemic ends. So Sanjay, I love that you're spending all this time with the CISOs. I mean, I have as well, maybe not a thousand, but dozens. And there are such smart people, they're really in the thick of things. You mentioned your partnership with Zscaler. I had Scott Strickland on who was the CISO of Wyndham. He was talking about the security cloud. But since the pandemic, there's really three waves. There's the cloud security, the identity access management and endpoint security. And one of the things that CISOs will tell you is the lack of talent is their biggest challenge. And they're drowning in all these products. And so how should we think about your approach to security and potentially simplifying their lives? Yeah, you know, Dave, we talked about this, I think last year or maybe the year before and what we were trying to do in security was really simplify because the security industry is like 5,000 vendors. And it's like, you know, going to a doctor and she tells you to stay healthy, you got to have 5,000 tablets. You just cannot eat that many tablets. You take your days, weeks, maybe a month to eat that many tablets. So a grand simplification has to happen where that health becomes part of your diet. You eat your proteins, your vegetables, you drink your water, do your exercise. And the analogy in security is we cannot deploy dozens of agents and hundreds of alerts and many, many consoles, infrastructure players like us that have control points. We have 70 million virtual machines. We have 75 million virtual switches. We have, you know, tens of millions of Workspace One and Carbon Black endpoints that we manage and secure. It's incumbent on us to take security and make it a lot more part of the infrastructure, reduce the need for dozens and dozens of point tools. And with that comes a grand simplification of both the labor involved in learning all these tools and eventually also the cost of ownership off those particular tools. So that's one. The other thing we're seeking to do is increasingly be a part of that education of security professionals. We're both investing in a lot of, you know, kind of threat protection research or many of our folks, you know, who are in a threat behavioral analytics, you know, kind of threat research where people have come out a deep hacking experience with the government and others, give back to the community and teaching classes in universities. There are a couple of nonprofits that are really investing in security, education of CSOs and their teams. We're contributing to that from the standpoint of ways in which we can give back both in time talent and also in treasure. So I think as we think about this you're going to see us making this a long-term play. We have a billion dollar security business today. There's not many companies that have a billion dollar plus of security. It's probably just two or three. And some of them have hit a wall in terms of their progress forward. We want to be one of the leaders in cybersecurity. And we think we need to do this both in building great product, satisfying customers, but then also investing in the learning, the training enabled. Remember, one of the things of VMworld's pride is these hands-on labs and all the training enabled that happened at this event. So we will use both our platform, VMworld and a variety of other virtual environments to ensure that we get the best education of security to professionals. So that's got to be exciting because if you look at some of the valuations of some of the pure plays, I mean, your cloud security business grown at triple digits. And you see some of these guys with 30 billion dollar valuations, but I wanted to ask you about the market. I mean, VMware used to be so simple, right? And now you guys have expanded your TAM dramatically. How are you thinking about the market opportunity? You've got your five franchise platforms. I know you're very disciplined about identifying markets. And then saying, okay, now we're going to go compete. But how do you look at the market and the market data? Give us the update there. Yeah, I think Dave, listen, I like Da Vinci's statement, simplicity is the greatest form of sophistication. And I think you've touched on something there, which is companies as we get bigger. I've had the great privilege of working for two great companies, SAP and VMware, the bulk of my last 15 plus years. And if something I've learned, it's very easy, both companies was to throw these TLA's, three letter acronyms. Okay, and I use an acronym and describe it with three letter acronyms like ER or ESX. I mean, they're all acronyms and a new employee who comes to this company, you know, Carol Crawford for example, we just hired her from Google as our CMO. Her first comment is like, my goodness, there is a lot of acronyms here. I've got a needed glossary. I had the same reaction when I joined VMware seven years ago and I had the same reaction when I joined SAP 15 years ago. Now, of course, two or three years into it, you learn everything and it becomes part of your speed. We have to constantly, it's like an accordion. Like you expand it by making it more voluminous and deep, but as you do that it gets complex, you then have to simplify it. And that's the job of all of us leaders. And I, this year, just exemplifying that I don't have it perfect. One of the gifts I do have is communication, being able to simplify things. I recorded a five minute video of our five franchise pillars, just so that the casual person didn't know VMware could understand it. And then when I'm on your show or I'm on with Jim Kramer and CNBC, I try to simplify it, simplify, simplify, simplify. Because the more you can talk in analogies and pictures, the more the casual user, I mean, of course, in some of the audiences I'm talking to investors, get it. And then of course, as you go deeper, it should be like progressive layers or peeling of an onion. You can get deeper. It's not like the entire discussion with Sanjay Poonan or my team is like a empty suit. It's a superficial discussion. We can go deeper, but you don't have to begin the discussion in the bowels of that. And that's really what we don't do. And then the other part of your question was, how do we think about new markets? You know, we always start with, listen, you're sort of core in context, I would borrow from sort of Jeffrey Moore. And in the Jeffrey Moore context, you think about things that you do really well and then ask yourself outside of that, what are the adjacencies that are closest to you that your customers are asking you to advance into and that either organically to partnerships or through acquisitions. I think John and I talked about in a previous dialogue about the framework of build, partner, and buy. And we always think about it in that order. Where do we advance? And any of the moves we've made, six years ago, seven years ago when I joined, the, I felt VMware needed to make a move in the mobile to really cement our position in end user computing. And it took me some time to convince my peers and then the board that we should buy AirWatch, which at that time was the biggest acquisition we'd ever done, okay? Similarly, I'm sure prior to me, both Joe Tucci, Pat Gelsing, who were thinking about NYSEERA and I'm moving to networking. Those were two big inorganic moves, seven, eight years ago. Ragu was very involved in that. The decisions we moved to make, to move to the public cloud, myself, Ragu Pat, were very involved in the decision there to partner with Amazon to change and divest VCloud there and then invest in an organic effort around what's become VMware Cloud 8S. That's an organic effort, that was an acquisition. Fast forward to last year, it took me a while to really argue internally, convince people and then make the move off the second biggest acquisition we made in Carbon Black and endpoint security and cement the security story that we're talking about. Ragu did a similar piece of good work around app modernization to justify that Pivotal needed to come back in. So, but you could see all these pieces being adjacent to the core, right? And then you ask yourself, is that context meaning we could leave it to a partner? Like you don't see us getting to the hardware game or partnering with obviously the players like Dell and HP and Lenovo and the SmartNIC players like Intel and Nvidia and Pensando, you see that as part of the Project Monterey announcement. But the adjacencies, for example, last year into app modernization, up the stack and into security, which I'd say more as adjacent horizontal to us, were now made a lot more logical. And as we then convince ourselves that we could do it, convince our board, make the move, we then have to go and tell our customers, right? And this entire effort of talking to CISOs, what am I doing? Is doing the same thing that I did to my board last year, simplify it to 15 minutes and get thousands of them to understand it, receive feedback, improve it, invest further. And actually some of the moves we're now making this year around our partnership in distributed workforce security and cloud security and Zscaler, what we're announcing in XDR and security analytics, all of the big announcements of security at this conference came from what we heard last year between the last 12 months of my last VMworld keynote around security. And now, and I predict next year it'll be even further. That's how you advance the puck every year. Sanjay, I want to get your thoughts. I know we have a couple of minutes left, but we did poll the audience and the community to get some questions for you since it's virtual, we wanted to get some representation there. So I've got three questions for you. First question, what comes after cloud? And number two is VMware security company. And three, what company had you wish you had acquired? Oh my goodness, okay, the third one is going to be the trickiest one. I think listen, because I'm going to give you my personal opinion and some of it was probably predates me so I can probably safely so do that and maybe put the blame on Joe Tucci or somebody else who's no longer here. But let me kind of give you the first two. What comes after cloud? I think cloud's going to be with us for a long time. First off, this multi-cloud world, you just look at the momentum that AWS and Azure and the other clouds all have. It's incredible. And I think this, that multi-cloud phenomenon. But if there's an adaptation of it, it's going to be three forms of cloud. People are really only focused today in private and public cloud. You have to remember the edge in telco cloud. And this pendulum of the right balance of workloads between the data center called a private cloud, the public cloud on one end and the telco edge on the other end, I think we're in a really good position for workloads to really swing between all three of those locations. The other part that I think comes as a sequel to cloud is cloud native. All of the capabilities are serverless functions, but also containers, that obviously one could think of that as sister topics to cloud, but the entire world of containers, the other sea than cloud or cloud native will also be topics, but these are all fairly connected. That's how I'd answer the first question. A security company, absolutely. We aspire to be one of the leading companies in cybersecurity. I don't think they'll be only one. We have to show this by the wealth and breadth of our customers, the revenue momentum we have, Gartner ranking us or the analyst ranking us in top rights of magic quadrants, being viewed as an innovator, simplifying the stack. But listen, we weren't even on the radar. We weren't speaking at the security conferences of years ago, now we are. We have a billion dollar security business, 20,000 plus customers, really strong presences and network endpoint and workload and cloud security, the three co-pillars, a lot more coming in security analytics, cloud security, distributed workforce security. So we're here to stay. And if anything, VMware persists through this. We're planning for multi-year, five or 10 year timeframe. And in that course, I mean, the competition is smaller companies that don't have the breadth and depth of VMware's R&D muscle and our growing market. We just have to keep building great product and serving customers. On the third, man, there's so many, but I mean, I think, listen, when I was looking back, I always wondered, this is before I joined. So I can say this somewhat speculatively and don't make this, this is VMware's, sorry, this is Sanjay Phoon's opinion, not VMware's. I got to make this very, very clear. But listen, if I was at VMware in 2012 or 2013, I would love to have bought service now then. Service now is a great company. I don't even know, maybe the companies talk, but man, talk about a very successful company at that time. Now, maybe their priorities were different. I wasn't at the company at the time, but I can speculate if that had happened, that would have been an interesting. Now, I think that was during the time of Paul Moritz here and so on and so forth, and maybe there were other priorities the company needed to get done. But at that time, of course today, service now is as big or maybe slightly bigger market cap than us, so that's not happening. But that's a great example of a good company that I think would, at that time, fit very well with VMware. And then there's probably others. We don't look back in regret. We move forward. I mean, I think about the acquisitions we have made. The big ones, okay? NYSERA, AirWatch, Pop and Black, Pivotal. The big moves we've made in terms of partnership, Amazon, what we're announcing this week with NVIDIA and Zscaler. So you never look back in regrets. You always look forward. All right, so follow up on that. To follow up on that, from a developer entrepreneurial or partner perspective, can you share where the white space is for people to innovate around VMware? Where can people partner and play, whether I'm an entrepreneur in a garage or venture-back-funded or say a partner pivoting and or resetting with COVID? Where's the white space within VMware? I think that there's going to be a number of places where the Tanzu platform develops as it kind of makes it relevant to developers. I mean, there's, I think the first way we think about this is to make ourselves relevant to all of that ecosystem around the CICV type of platform. They're really good partners of ours. They're like GitLab, all of the ways in which open-source communities will play alongside that. HashiCorp, JFrog, there are a number of these companies that are partnering with us and we're excited about all of their relevancy to Tanzu and it's our job to go and make that marketplace better and better. And you're going to hear more about that coming up from us. And then there's the set of data companies, Confluent, of course you've seen a big IPO of a snowflake. All of those data companies will need a very natural synergy. If you think about the old days of middleware, middleware was always sort of separate from the database. I think that's starting to kind of coalesce and data and analytics placed on top of the modern-day middleware, which is containers. I think there's going to be now, does VMware play physically as a data company? We don't know. Today we're going to partner very heavily but picking the right set of partners, Confluent is a good example of one. And there's many of the next generation database companies that you're going to see as partner with that will become part of that marketplace influence. And I think as you see us certainly produce out the VMware marketplace for developers, I think this is going to be a game changing opportunity for us to really take those 5 million developers and work with the leading companies. I use the example of GitLab as an example, GitHub, there are others that appeal to developers, tie them into our developer framework. The one thing you learn about developers, you can't have a mindset with that you all come to just us. It's a very mingled village of multiple ecosystems and Venn diagrams that are coalescing. If you try to take over the world, the developer community just basically shuns you. You have to have a very vibrant way in which you are mingling, which is why I described this like, listen, we want our developers to come to our conferences and reinvent and ignite and get the best experience from all of those provide tools that coincide with everybody. You have to take a holistic view of this. And if you do that over many years, just like the security topic, this is a multi-year pursuit for us to be relevant developers. We feel good about the future being bright. Dave, we got five minutes, go, yeah. I thought you were going to say Zoom Sanjay. That was my wild card. Well, listen, I think Zoom's more recent. They had a very fast catapult to success. And I don't know that that's clearly in the complete sweet spot of VMware. I mean, unified collaboration would have probably put us in much more competition with teams and WebEx. I mean, you always have to think of what's in the daily work of what's closest to us. But Zoom's a great partner. I mean, obviously you love to acquire anybody that's hot, but Eric's doing really well. I mean, Eric, I'm sure he had many people try to come to buy him. I'm just so proud of him as a friend of all that he was named to Time Magazine, top 100. But what he's done is phenomenal. I think he could build a company that's just as important as Facebook. So, you know, I encourage him, don't sell. Keep building the company and you'll build a company that's going to be, you know, the enterprise version of Facebook. And I think that's a tremendous opportunity to do this better than anybody else is doing. And, you know, I'm as an immigrant, he's a, you know, China-born, now American, I'm Indian-born, now American. As immigrants, we both have a similar story. I learn a lot from him. I learn a lot from him on speed and how to move fast. He tells me he learns a thing or two from me on scale. We teach each other and it's a beautiful friendship. Well, make sure you put in a good word for the key. We want more Zoom integration. Oh, I'm happy to do that. Final word. You can keep it for the Zoom. That is the future Facebook of the enterprise. Whatever, I'm happy to do that for you. Thank you for connecting with us virtually. It is a digital foundation. It is an unpredictable world. It's going to change. It's going to be software-defined. The operating models are changing. You guys are changing how you serve customers, a new chief commercial customer officer you have in place, which is a new hire. Congratulations. And you guys are flexing with the market and you got a tailwind, so congratulations. John and Dave, always a pleasure. We couldn't do this without the partnership also with you. Congratulations on the success of theCUBE and in its new digital format. Thank you for being with us with VMworld here and all that you're doing to get the story out. The guests that you have on the show, they look forward to it, including the non-VMworld people, like, hey, can I get on theCUBE? I'm like, absolutely. Because they look at your platform as a way of telling the story. Thanks for all you're doing. I wish you health and safety. I'm going to bring more community in, Dave, as you know, and Sanjay. It's easier. We don't have to travel. Get more interviews, tell more stories and tell the most important stories. And thank you for telling your story and VMworld's story here at VMworld 2020. Sanjay Poonan, the Chief Operating Officer here on theCUBE, I'm John Furrier. Dave Vellante, thanks for watching theCUBE Virtual. Thanks for watching.