 Hey everyone, welcome back to theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We are live day one of VMware Explorer 23, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. Dave, theCUBE has been covering VMware for 13 years, 13 events. This is a big event. We are so pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to theCUBE. We're going to be talking about the event and a lot of the details around it. Laura Heismann is here, the chief marketing officer at VMware. Laura, it's great to have you back. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much. It's great to be here with you. This is awesome. You guys, this is called day one. It's our day one of our three days of coverage. But yesterday was day zero. Give the audience a little bit of the gooseies around what you guys felt and saw at day zero with the audience. Yeah, it was amazing. The halls were already packed. For most conferences, you would have thought that was full attendance on our day zero. We had everything going on from tutorials and workshops and we had different types of meetings happening. We had the hands on labs happening. It was going, sessions were starting and that was day zero. We had spring one as well, which was oversubscribed standing room only. We had an executive summit. There was a ton of programming happening on day zero and it was the warm up act for today. I love that. Well, the keynote kicked off with a bang this morning with Ragu and a cast of celebrities that made appearances in person and on video standing room only. How many people are here and what are some of the key announcements that broke this morning? Yeah, so we have over 10,000 people here with us and we are so excited that everyone's joined us in Las Vegas and we recognize that some people had to take planes, trains, automobiles and get very creative to get here due to some of the weather. And we're thankful that they're here with us. And our key announcements have been a continuation of our CloudSmart approach to multi-cloud complexities. You heard a lot about our Gen AI announcements helping enterprises and then a ton of innovation happening throughout all of our product lines spanning from modern apps, NSX, to end user computing and their announcements continue today because it is our continuation of Keynote Solution Keynotes and each of those keynotes are also making announcements throughout the day. It was kind of cool what you did in the keynotes because you had the compendium of thought leaders and CEOs and Silicon Valley extended, talking about the future and you're like, okay, here comes the AI, great. And then you went right into the core, right? When you went sort of, when Raghu came out on the stage and you guys started talking about things like VC and when we were here last night at the exhibit hall, the customers were, it was packed with customers. But it wasn't just ecosystem partners, it was 90% customers. So you went right to your peeps and then came back to the lead, which was the whole, it's been a lot of time on AI. So it kind of went full circle. Very nicely done. We're super fortunate. I mean, the VMware community is so loyal to VMware and just loves it. And Raghu has such a special approach to how he talks about everything because he's a product guy, right? And so he talks to our people. He talks with our people. He understands what everybody wants to know about right off the bat. And then, of course, we all need to talk about generative AI and what's happening. And that's super important. In fact, as we were planning for this, someone said, don't you think people will be bored of hearing about generative AI a few months ago? Won't we be late to the game? And it was absolutely not. Everyone's there, everyone's talking about it. This was really important for us to come out strong. Yeah, they want to hear, how are you relevant to Gen A? How are you going to help me? I mean, they've made big investments. And then getting Jensen actually up on stage, because we always wonder, we hear Jensen's going to be there and you're like, is he going to be on video remotely to have him here? That's a big deal. And I think it speaks to the respect that he has for Raghu and obviously the broader community. Yeah, and Jensen and Raghu just have such a special relationship, a longstanding one. I really look at it as two icons up on the stage together, really helping to talk about what's happening with AI and everything that's there. And it's a pleasure for our audience to be able to see them together. As Gen AI has become one of the hottest topics in the globe in every industry, and you're tenure at VMware, how has its mission and vision evolved to really help organizations understand how VMware is using AI and Gen AI and how it can help its customers do that so they can extract the most value from their data to drive competitive advantage. Yeah, so today really is the first of our customers hearing about what we've been planning to come out today. So it has been very important. We came out early with our own responsibilities internally about how to utilize Gen AI because we didn't want to make any mistakes. We didn't want to put anything out there that we shouldn't. So we have our own responsibility around what we're allowed to do within our own company and we've shared that because that's an important part right there. And then everything that we've come out with today is that first step to be able to talk about how we're helping with privacy, with security, with enterprises, really things that VMware can do that a lot of other companies can't do. We can be part of the core of what they're doing to invest in both AI and their generative AI plan. So some policy-based guidelines. Correct. And then did you have access to AI as a marketer before chat GPT, like broad access? So we in marketing utilize AI as part of some of our foundational tools for website and other things like that. And then what really happened is, I have a great story, I have a team of marketers that chose on their own to come together and build a marketing AI council. And this is different than specifically what we announced today. This is us as marketers. And I had a group of about eight marketers that came together, built their own. I didn't know it. They were just very assening about what was going on quickly. This was about January. And they came to me a bit after, probably about six weeks later, and said, we have this plan, we have this mission. We thought you'd want to hear about it and we'd want to know if you'll be our executive sponsor. And I said, absolutely, absolutely. And every one of us in the marketing organization should understand what's happening with generative AI. And that was a really important investment that we've done. And we have definitely built out what we're doing in our marketing organization to give everyone access to become modern marketers. Yeah. Talk about the use of AI within marketing and how does it benefit the customer? Because customers in our consumer lives, we have this expectation that we're going to not only be connected, but we're going to be able to access whatever we want 24 by seven. But it's going to be an experience that's relevant. It's contextually relevant. It's personalized. You're going to get me what I'm looking for. I'm a VMware customer on vSAN. What's next? How is AI helping the marketing organization really tailor to your personas and deliver what they want? It is relevancy. I mean, you said the word. That's what it's all about. I say it's a couple of things. You're not starting with a blank piece of paper anymore. You actually can start with something. And that's way easier for people to be able to do that. You can then customize it with the help of the tools that we use. We use proprietary tools that we've bought into so that it's not just open for everyone to be able to use. And it is about, you can do everything from, I need this for the infrastructure buyer, to I need this for the CIO, for 10 like I'm a CTO. So you can do a lot of that. It's time savings. It's better messaging to our audiences. There's so many great opportunities. And it's not that it's a change in a job or it's a loss of a job. It's about being able to not start from that blank page. I have stories of people on my team where something that used to take six weeks they can now do in a day. And so we're seeing the benefits of ourself in our marketing organization. And this marketing AI council we have, they are talking to everybody on the team. And like I said, we're giving access to the team so that they can all learn how to use it themselves and invest in up skill just like we all should be doing. And these are domain specific tools that you guys have customized or so it's not the generic chat GPT tool. No, no. Are you going to please elaborate? So for example, we're using Jasper and it's great for not just our content writing team in marketing so that we can do a better job here at VMware Explorer of what should we be sharing with everybody? How do we get information that's customized to them? But it's also we're using it to help with video scripts. Something that you could be thinking about of how to do, right? And it's customer case studies and having a conversation with someone here putting in the notes and then asking it, but it's ours. It is not chat GPT, it is ours. It is closed for only RU. And was the motivation for that, Laura, the quality, the specificity, was it the risk of IP leakage of all the above? Risk is actually my biggest concern because we've all heard some of the stories and I don't want to go there. I mean, what we do at VMware is very special. We want to keep it to ourselves and help each other out internally. But absolutely, you have to think about risk and security. But then it's a, how do we get better at our jobs? And this is a way to be able to get better in our jobs. And so I do the equation of that's what we're doing within the marketing organization. Our customer success team is also looking at investments in generative AI to better be able to work with our customers and do more customizable and personal interactions. And then of course it leads to what we're doing at VMware as far as our own products. Was there any resistance that you had to overcome culturally or fear of losing jobs or even like the movie Moneyball where the old timers are like, we don't need the geeks. We don't need the math whizzes. We know from gut feel. Did you have any of those sort of issues that you had to overcome? I think I got really lucky. And maybe there's still some. But because of the marketing AI council and we've learned that we're really one of the first to do this, they were out talking about what they were doing early on. And January doesn't seem that long ago, right? But yet in this era that we're in of generative AI, it was a long time ago. And people were almost jealous. How do I learn more about it? How do I become part of it? How can I get my hands on it? And so the resistance wasn't there. There were questions about jobs, but it was quickly a, and it was from me and across my leadership team. Your job just became better because you're not having to think from the very start of where am I going to start? You have a tool to help you. And so you just became your experience. You know your information. Bring that personalization and value to everything that we're doing. As a marketer, speaking as a marketer, that would make a phenomenal case study because to your point, Dave, there's a lot of trepidation where AI and gen AI is concerned. But VMware being able to show this is what we're doing. This is the massive impact it's had making people more productive, being able to do more things faster with less resources. That's a golden nugget story. And we are working on that because we want to be able to show the positive side of things. There is so much fear out there. And I listened to the stats around, we're going to lose 80 some million jobs, but we're going to add 95 or 97 million jobs according to Mackenzie. Some jobs are just going to go away. There's going to be a whole new set of jobs. I have a son going into college. I think, what is he going to do, right? And so it is about what is actually the future. And that's, again, where I stress that upskill, learn it, be part of what the future is, because this isn't going away. And so it's not a case of fear. It's a case of helping my team understand this is about upskilling and helping you with your future as a marketer. More awareness needed. You can't protect the past from the future as I often like to say. Well, and that kind of underscores marketing's role in really helping drive awareness for all of the positives that it can have across every industry, I think. Do you kind of feel a sense of responsibility to help kind of spread that word to help dial down some of the fear? Absolutely. And Linda, I remember a few months ago there was a CMO call multiple in the industry. We were all comparing notes, what's everyone doing with generative AI. And no one wanted to speak up. And I don't know if it was out of fear of I want to be the first, so I'm not going to tell you. Or if there was just still too much of the unknown. And I'm hoping that if we got back together today, we haven't, that it would be a much different kind of conversation and that people have gotten past the fear. But there are definitely, I hear stories daily of the fear and it's going to cause me my job or we're going to move too fast and then I have to move on to the next thing and this is my thing that I want to work on. There's a lot of those stories, but there's a lot of opportunity too. So yes, I definitely want to be on that side of let me share the benefits and we have great examples that we're doing at VMware. Well, we've each had experience. I've been pretty deep experience, I think in terms of how to interact with the systems and I'm sure you could would agree it's just made our lives much more productive. Yes, yes. Interesting, like you said, you don't start with just a blank piece of paper. You get ideas that perhaps you would have gotten there but it would have taken longer. And for me anyway, there's always like one or two things like, ah, I don't think I would have thought of that. That just gave me another idea. And you'll see advancements of us coming out of VMware Explorer and as we go through explore season because this is just the start. We have many other events coming up throughout the world, right? And we're looking at how do we invest more in our own generative AI tools to keep improving with each event to be able to customize, personalize after the event. How do we get, we know that someone went to a session, let's direct them in a certain way and how can generative AI help us with that? So there's a lot that can be done there. What's the next big event? Is there anything in between now and Barcelona? Yes, we go from, we're here in Las Vegas this week, thrilled to be back here in Las Vegas. And then we have Sao Paulo, we have Tokyo, we have Barcelona, we have Singapore. Amazing. Being able to extend the reach beyond just three days in Las Vegas to the customers and prospects and partners globally. Yes, and our flagship programs are here and Barcelona. And then we have the regional programs in the three other locations because we want to be able to bring everything VMware Explorer to them. We really do call it momentum season for a reason. It's the entire company, it's not just marketing. We're kind of the muscle behind the making of this, the brand, the colors, the event, getting everyone here. But it is a company-wide effort. Everyone, Ragu, to our engineering organization, you saw our legal team on stage today. It is the making of everybody at VMware. Well, I'm glad you mentioned the colors. We were talking about it off camera. The colors are just popping. You can see the colors behind us. But where you can't see, there's the birds flying, there's geckos, there are jellyfish, there are fish swimming, there are butterflies, all in motion and the colors are just brilliant. It's amazing. Thank you. And it is all about exploring, right? So you see that through, coming out through the graphics. So it is about exploring in a creative way. The colors are beautiful. When you're on social media, they pop like, so it's such an amazing thing to see the gen session this morning. We're very proud of the brand of VMware Explorer. Speaking of exploration, if we were to explore a case study of a customer that you think really defines VMware's value problem, what would your story be? As far as customer story, that you think really shines light on the value problem. There are, oh, there's so many great customer stories. We, I don't know if I could just pick one and I don't know if I want to get in trouble with anyone for just 15-one. It was your favorite case. Right, exactly. Maybe by industry. But we have fantastic stories. I was talking with some folks in the telco industry yesterday about what they're doing and talking with some other customers yesterday about what they're doing with edge computing and just how, I was talking with someone about what they're doing with flights and how edge computing has gone all the way to an airplane. I was, everything that we're doing with our cloud infrastructure customers and how they're modernizing and thinking about private and multi-cloud, how we're helping all of our customers, all of our customers. It's hard to pick one. Yes. With their multi-cloud complexities. Digital transformation's gone through an interesting, I don't even know, journey at this point and it doesn't go away, it doesn't stop. The complexities that cloud bring and now generative AI, the complexities aren't going to stop. Not going to stop, but there's also partners like VMware that customers can work with and your ecosystem to help start really understanding getting to the bottom of those complexities that we go from multi-cloud by accident to cloud smart. And our partners are a very important part of this. We have a fantastic partner ecosystem. They're here. Like I said, we had our partner summit yesterday. We have more programming for them. We've made announcements with our partners this week. Dell, NVIDIA, Oracle, there's a long list of them and they're very supportive of our event as well and being here present with us. And so there is a ton that happens with our entire ecosystem. And all the different types of partners that we are with. Yeah, that's a very strong ecosystem. Last question, we've got about 30 seconds left. So we get to day three. You've gone through all these meetings, announcements, keynotes, sessions. What do you want folks to take away from the three days plus day zero of VMware Explore? It's keeping in mind that VMware is here to help them innovate faster. And we want to help with multi-cloud complexities and now also be able to help with generative AI. And if you will, the complexities that come with that as well. So we are continuing down this road of helping everyone with multi-cloud. Helping everyone with multi-cloud. Laura, thank you so much for joining Dave and me back on theCUBE. It's been a pleasure talking to you about VMware Explore, what it means, what it's delivering and how you're extending this reach beyond just Las Vegas. Thank you for having me. Have a great week here. Thank you. We're excited. All right. For Laura Heisman, CMO of VMware and Dave Vellante, co-host, co-CEO, co-founder of theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin. Stick right around. Our next guest is coming up.