 VMware was definitely announcing and talking about GenAI. There was a considerable push to get Generative AI, both sort of directional content and pragmatic content, even things like training people to do Generative AI in their daily business and just use ChatGPT better, right? And it's funny, because we're doing the rack ends sponsoring VMware user groups or Vmugs and our presentations are gonna be very similar using Generative AI to improve your DevOps practices. Welcome to tier for newsroom. And today we have with us once again, Rob Hershfield, CUN Co-Found at Rackend right back from VMware Explorer. Unfortunately, I could not attend even this year due to another conflict, but you were there. And we used to sit down at the events to the whole wrap up and talk about the whole event. So this time I'm going to like, you are going to become my eyes and tell me what the event was like. So before we get into some major announcements, some major kind of discussions, let's just talk about how was the event because you have been attending it for a very long time also and you are very core part of the VMware ecosystem as well. So for you, how was the event like? It was a solid event. I think VMware does a good job putting on the show and there's a lot of information. There's a lot of sessions and things like that where they're really providing very solid education for people. One of the things I felt about this show is it just felt like it was more VMware practitioners. It wasn't as big, definitely it was not as big as past shows. And it had a good energy, but it didn't have sort of overwhelming enthusiasm. It definitely didn't have a, everybody looking downcast and sad either. So it was a good solid show for VMware. Maybe not, but if you're used to VMworlds in the past, before they changed the name, there was a lot of activities in and around the show and this didn't have quite that same level of energy. When you're talking to people, what kind of discussions you are hearing? It could be the post-unit, whatever it was, but what was the, I don't want to talk about the official VMware, but I want to hear more about what you're hearing. You want the hallway track pieces. The hallway track on this is that the broad come, the lack of resolution on the broad come acquisition is definitely causing a lot of uncertainty. And that's one of the challenges with any of these shows is every presentation starts with a warning about uncertainty and things like that. And it's very hard for VMware to have a really concrete direction when broad come is standing in the future. And it's a two-sided problem here and it does show up in the show a bit, right? Everything that VMware's positioning is forward messaging is filtered through the, maybe or we think so, there's a lot of concerns in the hallway tracks around what broad come cuts, right? And people don't know how deep it's going to go. It could be, and I've heard rumors all the way down from the whole Tanzu, Kubernetes application stuff gets pushed out in favor of virtualization. I don't have any concrete information on that, but that's a popular assessment. To VMware, broad come raises the prices a whole bunch and people go fleeing for alternatives. And so I think what you see in a show like this with that type of uncertainty is people wanna know about the basics about what they're using and they're more skeptical about whether or not VMware can deliver on the innovation side of these curves. And that's sort of what I saw walking around the show floor is the show floor was dominated by the basics that you need to run VMware and VMware infrastructure which is still the market leader hands down. And so there's a lot of hardware vendors, there's a lot of consulting people, there's backup, there's recovery, there's printing, right? There's those types of things, but you didn't see a lot of the DevOps innovation pieces around it, you didn't see a Kubernetes community pieces around what's going on. And so that's sort of an interesting challenge from VMware and the fact that it's taken so long for the Broadcom pieces to come about. And that's the hallway track, it's like when's it gonna close, what's gonna get dropped, how much is the price gonna increase? There unfortunately isn't an expectation that Broadcom's gonna drop a lot of investment in innovation around VMware. I haven't seen anybody turn around and expect Broadcom to be investing on new technologies out of VMware. Sadly, because it's actually a very, very good team. And it's worth noting there are some really interesting things or we should get to that some interesting things that VMware is doing that I think have real enterprise value. A few days ago, the UK already cleared the acquisition so it may close in October or whenever the expected date is and Broadcom also announced investment of $2 billion in innovation at VMware. If you look at the Broadcom's investment and some of these core technologies, open source technologies that VMware is working on, did you hear anything about that? And this is a place where I think the hallway and the punditry is very different than what VMware is messaging because I have a lot of friends at VMware and the people in the Tanzu group are very bullish about Tanzu's opportunity in the market. And as somebody who works in enterprise, I also see a high desire for enterprise-grade Kubernetes that companies run themselves, that runs on-premises in a self-managed way. And this is the thing I found very interesting, right? VMware's done a lot of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud discussion and they keep talking about that. One of the things they've done very effectively here is they've made it possible for people to consume Kubernetes in their own cloud infrastructure and that's really or in their own private cloud infrastructure. And then they're working towards Edge, they're working towards other places and that work is very important to enterprises. And one of the things I think that Broadcom could be doing and VMware is definitely moving towards is this idea of we're making stuff that you can run yourself. And that was fascinating. I say that with the Tanzu filter, the thing I found fascinating was some of the AI work that they're doing, where they are investing in using the open models like Huggingface to then do training on internal data. And there is without a doubt, VMware's aware of this and they're moving towards this. I think it's a great opportunity from a Broadcom perspective of saying, I need to do training on my own data behind my own firewall in my own protected ways. And that is actually a significant opportunity and was definitely part of VMware's messaging here. And this is the place where I think things get a little funny. There's a lot of people who are very much like the cloud is gonna win and all that, but enterprises that we talked to actually are very concerned about privacy and costs and maintaining control of their infrastructure. And we definitely see VMware's talking the right language for those customers, undoubtedly. But if they can clear the air by getting the Broadcom done, right? And then messaging very clear on where Broadcom's making investments, there's a lot of great tech. And VMware stuck to their knitting and talked about this great tech that they're doing and how to use it and deliver it. And that's exactly what they should be doing, frankly. And since you mentioned, Gen AI, of course, Broadcom, they're doing a lot of work there. And of course, we are very, how could, how much discussion you saw there were any booth with any Gen AI technologies or any discussions or any announcements that you saw from VMware? VMware was definitely announcing and talking about Gen AI. There was a considerable push to get generative AI, both sort of directional content and pragmatic content, even things like training people to do generative AI in their daily business and just use chat GPT better, right? And it's funny, because we're doing, Reck Ends sponsoring VMware user groups or V-Mugs and our presentations are gonna be very similar using generative AI to improve your DevOps practices. And that was, VMware was doing the same thing and working towards that process. But there was, as much as in the past, we've seen shows pivot, there was a significant amount of content around the generative AI pieces. There wasn't as much in the booths. And I think that some of that is that it's been, it's harder for companies marketing to position into what generative AI is using. And it's also harder for companies to actually have material products. It's still relatively new. Hats off to VMware, they showed some very, I don't know how soon this gets into product, but they showed some very good integrated assistant. So you could have a VMware chat bot that would actually help you do things in VMware. And I saw a couple of demos where they're using AI to re-identify problems or reinforce issues. So that type of integrated work with AI is very powerful for the VMware user base, right? It means that they can do more effectively on their own premises work. And you definitely feel people get more excited when they're like, oh, wait a second, you're gonna help me diagnose problems faster, you're gonna help me identify problems before I do upgrades. Those are very, very potent uses of AI. And it's exactly what VMware was showing. So hats off to them for focusing on very pragmatic use cases for this technology. When you were at the event and you saw the attendance, you saw announcement, you saw some uncertainty on Broadcom, what does it mean for Racken? And I'll go back to the point that you and I always discuss is the folks that we are serving the customer, what does it mean for customer solace? And what does it mean for Racken to continue to serve its VMware customers? And it's worth noting that Racken were a software product that companies, our enterprise customers and hosting companies, customers used to deploy VMware and other things. And our customers deploy VMware hundreds of thousands of times a year in a fully automated way. So we're very invested in the tools and the components that go into building infrastructure from the bare metal up around VMware. And so the thing that's interesting to me is there's a lot of value in helping companies do that, especially in Edge. And I keep waiting and watching for the Edge infrastructure side of these conversations to really come about. Edge was not as dominant in this year's show as it has been in the past. But when Racken looks at it, we get very excited when customers start moving towards more infrastructure as code and DevOps processes, which VMware is pushing very aggressively, and then look for ways in which they can do that at the cluster build or the Edge build site. And those conversations are still not really part of the VMware Explorer conversation. VMware Explorer is much more about how do I use VMware? And most people aren't talking in the show about how they install, condition, build an environment around and things like that. There isn't actually a show for that. And so we do definitely go and talk to customers at that show and prospects at that show and partners at that show who are very invested in improving that out-of-box experience because the ROI for VMware actually can be really extended the more dynamic you make the whole infrastructure. So it's been exciting for that. We keep looking for the place where we can talk about how fun and fast we've made VMware installs. And we're happy to do that one-on-one with customers, but the show is not the place for that. Rob, thank you so much for taking me to the conference. Thank you for sharing all those, of course, great insight, the discussions that you heard there. And most importantly, I mean, as you also said, and we'll see how things will look like after October. There is no need to get either super excited or panic. We have had a lot of experience with getting excited or getting worried, but we'll see how things shape up. But thanks for all those, sharing your experience there. And I'll look forward to our next discussion. Thank you. Thank you.