 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage in San Francisco for VMware Explorer 2022, formerly VMworld. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellada, Dave. 12 years we've been covering this event, formerly VMworld now. First time in west. Now it's explore. We've been in north, we've been in south, we've been in Vegas. Multicloud is now the exploration, VMware community's coming in. John Siegel, SVP at Dell, CUBE alumni, Dave Mcraw, VP at VMware. Guys, thanks for coming back, both CUBE alumni, it's great to see you. Very senior organizations, senior roles in the organizations of VMware and Dell. One year since the split, great partnership continuing. I mean, some of the conversations that we've been having over the past few years is that control plane, the management layer, making everything work together. It's essentially been the multicloud hybrid cloud story. What's the update? How's the partnership look? Yeah, just to start off, I would say, I don't think our partnership has ever been any better. If you look at, you mentioned our vision, very much a shared vision in terms of the multicloud world. And I don't think we've ever had more joint innovation projects at one time. I think we have over 40 now, Dave, that are going on across multicloud, AI, cybersecurity, modern applications. And here, just that, at VMware Explorer, we have over 30 VMware sessions that are featuring Dell. And this is, I think, more than we've ever had. So look, I think there's a lot of momentum there and we're really looking forward to what's to come. So you guys obviously spent a lot of time together when VMware was part of Dell and then it's been a year since the spin. And then you codified, I think it was a five-year agreement. So you had some time to figure that out and then put it into paper. So you just kind of quantified some of the stuff that's going on, but now we're entering yet another phase. So that agreement's probably more important than ever now. I mean, at least in terms of getting it documented and understanding, right? What are you talking about? Yeah, that agreement really defines a framework for solution development and for go-to-market. So we've been doing it and refining it for the last five years. So now, you know, putting and codifying it into a written signed agreement, it basically is instantiating what we've been doing that we know works, where we can drive solution development, we can drive deep architectural co-innovation together as well. And as John said, across multiple, you know, project and solution areas. So we've been talking to years to, you know, a lot of these track guys, guys like Matt Baker, about things like, you know, you see AWS do Nitro and then of course, Project Monterey. And I know that you guys have had a, you know, a big sort of input into that. And so now to see it come to fruition is huge because, you know, from our view, what's the future of computing architectures? How do you handle, you know, data-rich applications, AI applications? That's, what are your thoughts on it? I couldn't agree more. Project Monterey is a great example of how we're innovating together. We just talked about, I mean, first of all, it's all, so we have the X-Rail, which let's start there, right? We have over 19,000 joint customers right now. We continue to innovate more and more on the VX-Rail architecture. Great example of that as our partnership with Project Monterey and taking essentially vSphere 8 and running it for the first time on an HCI system, directly on the DPUs itself, right, on the DPUs. Ability now to offload NSXT from the CPUs to the DPUs. You know, and the short-term, first of all, great benefits for customers in terms of better performance. But as you just mentioned, it's game-changing in terms of laying the foundation for the future architectures that we plan on together, helping our customers back. It was one of the dynamic for you on, is, and it's not unique to Dell, but Dell's the biggest supplier partner, et cetera. But you're able to take VMware software and drive it through your business, and that enables you to get more subscription revenue and makes it stickier, and that's a really important change from 10 years ago. Yeah, and it's a combination of Dell software and VMware software. Yeah, they're absolutely. And I think this is a game-changing innovation that you can run on top of our joint system, VxRail, if you will. And now what our customers can expect is lifecycle automation of now the DPUs as well as Tanzu, as well as everything else we layer on top of that core foundation that we have over 19,000 customers running today. So, I mean, like that 19,000 number, I want to get back up to the VxRail, you mentioned vSphere. That's big news here this year. VSphere 8, big release, a lot of going on. What's the HCI angle? You mentioned that. What's in it for the customer? What does that mean for the folks here? Because let's face it, the vSphere 8's got everyone in it. All the vSphere comes going crazy, right? Another vSphere release. Training there of the labs here. What's it mean for the customers? What's the value there with that HCI solution with the DPUs? Well, first of all, vSphere 8, as we know, it has a lot of goodies in it. But what I think, to me, what's been the most powerful about this is the ability to run vSphere 8 specifically on the DPUs. Now you can run, it's opened up all new possibilities now. And so, that NSXT that I mentioned, running that on DPUs opens up a whole new architecture now for our customers going forward, and now really sets us up for modern distributed architecture for the future. So, like Edge? Like Edge? Yeah, and vSphere 8 brings in cloud connectivity as well. So, customers can run in a cloud disconnected mode. They can run in a cloud connected mode. So, that's going to bring in the ability to do specialized things on security, lifecycle management. There's a whole series of services that can now be added, as well as leveraging vCenter management capabilities. So what's happening at the Edge? We had, I think it was Lowe's on at Dell Tech World. Okay, good. Not the other one. But so, that's got to be exploding now with that, because it just changes the game for these stores. There's, I mean, retail, manufacturing. Maybe you can give us an update on... There's so much happening on the Edge side, as you know. I mean, that's where most of the, a lot of the innovations happening right now is in the Edge and a lot of the companies we talked to. 8X, right? 8X expectation of increase in Edge workloads over the next couple of years. And the data challenge too is huge. So, you heard about the innovations with vSphere 8. In addition to that, we just introduced today as well, the smallest vX rail for the Edge ever. This thing is, it's like, picture a couple of eight and a half by 11 notebooks. Not much, you know, maybe a little wider than that, but not much more. You know, these are stacked on top of each other. You can rack and stack and mount these things anywhere. And it also is the first HCI system that has a built-in hardware witness. So, this helps set it up for environments that are network bandwidth constrained or have high latency. No longer an issue. Those next gen apps are going to want to have a local data server at the Edge and with compute there. High performance. Right, right. So now you get across the wire. Yes, you get rack and stack, a couple of these small things. I mean, they can fit into like a, Clark Kent's briefcase, right? These things are so small. You want to do the analytics on site and return responses back. You don't want to be moving massive data payloads off the Edge. So, you got to have the right level of compute to run machine learning algorithms and do the analytics type work that you want to do to make local decisions. Yeah, I mean, we just had David Lithcoman, who was one of the keynote speakers here at the event. And we've been talking about SuperCloud and MultiCloud, MetaCloud, all the different versions of what we see as this next gen. And this brings up a point of, like he's advised the young kids, learn how MultiCloud, learn about system architecture because if you can figure out how to put it together, you're going to have to make more money. Anyway, this whole Edge piece opens up huge challenges and opportunities around how do you configure these next gen apps? What does the AI look like? What's the data architecture? It's not like get some training curriculum online and get 101 and you get a job. No, this is more complicated. But with the hardware, you guys make it easier. So where's the complexity shift between having a powerful Edge device, like the VxRail with the vSphere? What's the EC button on that? Like, how do you guys, what's the vision? Because this is going to be a major battleground, this whole Edge piece. It's going to be huge. I think when you look at the innovation that Dell is bringing to market with technologies like Outlander and then designing that into VxRail, and then you combine that with our Tanzu capabilities to manage development and deployment of applications. This is about heterogeneous deployment and management at scale of applications with technologies like Tanzu Mission Control, then deploying service mesh for security, being able to use SASE to be able to secure cloud security over the wire. So it's bringing together multiple technologies to deliver simplicity to the customer, the ability to go one to many in terms of being able to deploy and manage an update, whether that's a security patch or an application update, and do that very rapidly at a low cost. So the benefit with this solution now, just putting this together, I can ship a box, small, and or stack them, and essentially it's done remotely. That's provisioning, the provisioning issues, not a truck roll as they say, or professional services enabled. You can just drop that out there. And this is where customers need to be. Yeah, absolutely. Exactly, you don't need the skills, you don't need the specialized skills, you don't need a lot of space, you don't need high network bandwidth. All these things, right, all these innovations that we're talking about here, really combined into really enabling a whole new future here for Edge. Is Apex, are you doing Apex now? Is that, I think it's part of your daily work? Okay, so is Apex fitting into the edge? How does it fit? Yeah, I mean, well first of all, a lot of what we talk about with Apex is really about a consumption, a way to ensure there's a common cloud experience wherever the data is and where the applications are. And so absolutely, Edge fits into this as well. And so we have common ways to consume our infrastructure today, our joint infrastructure, whether it's in the data center, at the Edge, or in the cloud. Usain Haragu, when he was on, I said it was a great keynote, loved it. One of the things that I didn't think there was enough of was security. And he's like, yeah, we only have so much time, but VMware is a very strong security story. We heard a really strong security story at Dell Tech World. I mean, half the innovations in the new storage products were security and the new OSs and it was impressive. What's, how are you guys working together on security? Is that one of those? Well, let me give you a few key things here. Our teams are working together at the engineer to engineer level reference architectures for zero trust is an example. Being able to look, hardware root of trust up into the application layer. So we're looking at really defense in depth here. I mentioned what we're doing with SASE, with cloud security capabilities. So you really have to look at this from the Edge to the core, from a networking perspective, getting the insights on things that may, anomalies that may be happening on the network. So using our network insight technology, NSX, and then being able to ultimately have a secure development pipeline as well. I mean, we all know about the supply chain attacks that happened, right? And so being able to have a, you know, secure pipeline for development is critical for both of our companies working together. I think the Tanzu, and you mentioned the developer self-service, that experience, combined with the power of the Dell, you know, let's face it, the boxes are awesome, hardware matters and software matters. So bringing that expertise together, Michael Dell always used to say on the Cube, better together in respect of VMware and Dell, a lot of fruit has been born from that labor, right? Specifically around, and now when you add the Tanzu and you get the vSphere, you got the operational excellence, you got the performance and scale with the Dell boxes and hardware and software, and now you got the Tanzu. What's missing, or is it all there now? I mean, how would you guys peg the progress bars? Is it like, it's all rocking right now, or? I'd say you're never done, first of all, but I look at some of the innovations that we've brought to market recently, where we are combining and stacking these technologies into a more defense and depth-like solution, you know, bringing NSX on to VxRail so that you can flip a switch easily and light up firewall. The new plug-in, yeah, that's a great example of that. Simple, simple. Carbon black workload, another example, where we're taking carbon black technology that was typically on endpoints, you know, on PCs, bringing that into the data center, right, and leveraging all the analytics and insights around, you know, being able to identify anomalies and then remediate those anomalies. So we're seeing very good traction with those solutions. And the cloud-native developers, containers are all native container. We're going to compute and container storage, object store in the cloud, Kubernetes. That's what we've embraced it, yeah. I mean, containers, running containers in VMs on the same infrastructure, common way to manage it all. I mean, that's been a big part of it as well. You guys done that earlier. Obviously, a lot of the focus that Dell's bringing here as well is an ability to run that stack easily. You heard the announcement on Tanzu for Kubernetes operators, right? Earlier today, TKO, we call it. You know, that running on VxRail now is really targeted at the IT operator and allowing them to easily stand up a self-service developer DevOps environment on VxRail going forward. And then a piece that might be invisible to them is back to Monterey. Isolation, encryption and data moving, the storage, the security, the compute, the management, that's a complete change. And it's about reducing attack services as well. The security perspective as well. If when you're moving NSXT onto a DPU, you're doing that as well. So there's, it takes the little things, right? At the end of the day, security is a mindset up across both companies in terms of how we approach our architectures. And a lot of times it's the little things as well that we make sure are right. So shared vision, working at the engineering levels together for many, many years, know that. You guys are validating more of that coming. What's next? Take us through, okay, we're here, 2022. We got super cloud, multi-cloud, hybrid full throttle right now. It's hybrid to steady state. That's cloud operations, infrastructure as code. It's happened, it's happening. What's next for you guys in the relationship? Can you share a little bit that you can, if you can, what we can expect? What you see with Monterey is the start of a re-architecting of IT infrastructure. Not just in the data center, but also with the edge. These technologies will move out and be pervasive across edge to colo to core data center to cloud. And so that's a starting point. Now we're looking at memory tiering. I think we talked last time about Capitola and memory tiering and being able to bring that forward, being able to do more with confidential computing as an example, right? Secure enclaves and confidential computing. So, a lot of this is focused around simplicity and security going forward and ease of management around. Take the heavy lifting away from the customer, abstract that in, offer the power and performance. That's right, and it's going to come down to delivering time to value for our customers. Can we cut that time to value by 25, 50% so they can be in production faster? Yeah, I think Project Monterey is something we're going to be building on for a long time. Right, I mean this is the start of a major new future architecture of these companies. So if you had to pick one, we have 40 initiatives that are joined together literally. Project Monterey is one of my favorites for sure in terms of what it's going to do not just for that common cloud experience, but for the edge. And we talked a lot about the edge today and where that's headed. You think it's going to explode up new apps? I really do think so. Well it's going to put you on a new curve. It's going to put a new curve, yeah, absolutely right. And operationally, security-wise, from a modern apps perspective, I mean it checks all the boxes and it's going to allow us to help and take our existing customers on that journey as well. What's great about this conversation is one we've been following both of you guys for a long time and your companies and technology upgrades and the business impact and the open source and all doing all this for customers. But the wave that's coming was seeing the Expo Hall here. I mean, people are really excited. They're enthused, they're committed. Highly confident that this wave is coming. They kind of see it, people kind of seeing the fog lift, they're seeing money making, value creation, people kind of feeling more comfortable. But still a little nervous around what's coming next because it's still uncertainty. But pretty good ecosystem, I'd have to say. It's pretty interesting. Yeah, a lot of them are excited about what they can do at the edge and how they can differentiate their businesses. I mean, that's easy. Well, congratulations guys. Thanks for coming on theCUBE and sharing the update. Thank you, Sean. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. More of you guys are not stopping here at VMware Explorer. Dell and VMware are continuing to have that kind of relationship. Join engineering. It's all coming together and you can mix and match the stack but it's ultimately going to be cloud operations. Edge is the action. Of course, hybrid cloud as well. It's theCUBE. Thanks for watching.