 Okay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explorer 22, formerly VMworld. We've been here since 2010 and VMworld 2010 to now it's 2022 and it's VMware Explorer. We're here with the CEO, Raga Raga. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you in person. You're welcome. Great to be here in person. Dave and I are proud to say that we've been to 12 straight years of covering VMware's annual conference. And we've seen the change and the growth over time. And it's kind of, I won't say pinch me moment, but it's more of a moment of, there's the VMware that's grown into the cloud after your famous deal with Andy Jassy in 2016. We've been watching what has been a real sea change in VMware since taking that legacy core business and straightening out the cloud strategy in 2016. And then since then an acceleration of cloud native like direction under your leadership at VMware. Now you're the CEO. Take us through that because this is where we are right now. We are here at the pinnacle of VMware 2.0 or cloud native VMware as you point out on your keynote. Take us through that history real quick because I think it's important to know that you've been the architect of a lot of this change and it's working. Yeah, definitely. We're super excited because like you said, it's working. The history is pretty simple. I mean, we tried running our own cloud cloud air, we cloud air, didn't work so well, right? And then at the time customers really gave us strong feedback that the hybrid they wanted was us and Amazon together, right? And so that's what we went back and did and the Andy Jassy announcement, et cetera. And then subsequently as we were continuing to build it out, I mean, once that happened, we were able to go work with Satya and Microsoft and others to get the thing built out all over. Then the next question was, okay, that's great for the workloads that are running on vSphere. What's the story for workloads that are going to be cloud native and benefit a lot from being cloud native? So that's when we went the Tanzu route and the Kubernetes route, we did a couple of acquisitions and then we started, that has started paying off now with the Tanzu portfolio. And last but not the least is once customers have this distributed portfolio now, right? Increasingly everything is becoming multi-cloud. How do you manage it and not connect and secure? So that's what you start seeing that. You saw the management announcement, networking and security and everything else is cooking and you'll see more stuff there. You know, we've been talking about super cloud, it's kind of like a multi-cloud on steroids, kind of a little bit different, we pivot of it and we're seeing some use cases. No, no, it's a very great, it's pretty close to what we talk about. Awesome, I mean, and we're seeing this kind of alignment in the industry, it's kind of open. But I have to ask you, when did you have the moment where you said multi-clouds is the game changer moment? When did you have, because you guys had hybrid was really early as well. When was the ragu, when did you have the moment where you said, hey, multi-cloud is what's happening? That's, we're doubling down on that, go. I mean, if you think about the evolution of the cloud players, right? Microsoft really started picking up around the 2018 timeframe. I mean, I'm talking about Azure, right? In a big way, yeah. In a big way, right? When that happened, and then Google got really serious, it became pretty clear that this was going to be looking more like the old database market than it looked like a single player cloud market, right? Equally sticky, but very strong players all with lots of IP creation capability. So that's when we said, okay, from a supplier side, this is going to become multi. And from a customer side, that has always been their desire, right? Which is, hey, I don't want to get locked into anybody. I want to do multiple things. And the cloud vendors also started leveraging that on-prem. Microsoft said, hey, if you're a Windows customer, your licensing is going to be better off if you go to Azure, right? Oracle did the same thing. So it has become very clear. I have, John, make it laugh. I always go back to the software mainframe because you were here, right? I mean, you're almost 20 years in. And the reason I appreciate that is because that's technically very challenging. How do you make virtualization overhead virtually non-existent? How do you run any workload? How do you recover from failure? I mean, that was not trivial. Okay, so what's the technical, you know, analog today, the real technical challenge when you think about cross-cloud services? Yeah, I mean, I think it's different for each of these layers, right? So as I was alluding to for management, I mean, you can go each one of them by themselves. There is one way of doing multi-cloud, which is multiple clouds, right? You could say, look, I'm going to build a great product for AWS, and then I'm going to build a great product for Azure, I'm going to build a great product for Google. That's not what ARIA is. ARIA is through multi-cloud, which means it pulls data in from multiple places, right? So there are two or three, there are three things that ARIA has done that I think is super interesting. One is they're not trying to take all the data and bring it in. They're trying to federate the data sources. And secondly, they're doing it in real time. And they're able to construct this graph of a customer's cloud resources, right? So to keep the graph constructed and pulling data, federating data, I think that's a very interesting concept. The second thing that, like I said, is it's a real time because in the cloud, a container might come and go like that. That is a second technical challenge. The third, it's not as much a technical challenge, but I really like what they have done for the interface. They've used GraphQL. So it's not about, if you remember, in the old world, people talk about single pane of glass, et cetera. No, this has nothing to do with pane of glass. This is a data model that's a graph and a query language that's suited for that. So you can literally think of whatever you want to write. You can write and express it in GraphQL and pull all sorts of management applications. You can say, hey, I can look at cars, I can look at metrics, I can look at whatever it is. It's not five different types of applications. It's one. That's what I think. Come to do it at scale is another problem. And the technical enable there is just good software. It's a protocol. No, no, it's software. It's a data model. And it's the federation architecture that they've got, which is open, right? You can pull in data from Datadog just as well as taking all the data from VR off. We don't care, right? Yeah, yeah. So, Rego, I have to ask you, I'm glad you like the super cloud because we think multi-cloud is still early, but coming fast. I mean, everyone has multiple clouds, but spanning, this idea of spanning across has interesting sequences. Do you data, do you do computer both? And a lot of good things happening. Kubernetes has been containers, all that good stuff. Okay. How do you see the first rev of multi-cloud evolving? Like, is it, what happens, what's the sequence, what's the order of operations for a client standpoint, customer standpoint of multi-cloud or super cloud? Because we think, we're seeing it as a refactoring of something, like Snowflake, they're a database. They're a data warehouse in the cloud. They say data cloud. They're like, no, we're not a data warehouse, we're a data cloud. Okay, you're a data warehouse refactored for the CapEx from Amazon and cooler, newer things. That's a behavior change. But it's still a data warehouse. How do you see this multi-cloud environment refactoring? Is there something that you see that might be different? That's the same, if you know what I'm saying. Like, what's the new thing that's happening with multi-cloud that's different than just saying, I'm doing SaaS on the cloud? Yeah, so I would point to a couple of things that are different. Firstly, the answer depends on which category you're in. Like the category that Snowflake is in is very different than Kubernetes or something. Or MongoDB, right? Yeah, or MongoDB. So it is not appropriate to talk about one multi-cloud approach across data and compute and so on and so forth. So I'll talk about the spaces that we play in, right? So step one for most customers is two application architectures, right? The cloud-native architecture and an enterprise-native architecture. I'm tying that together, either through data or through networks or through, et cetera. So that's where most of the customers are, right? And then I would say step two is to bring these things together in a more closer fashion and that's where we are going. And that is why you saw the Cloud Universal Announcement and that's why you've seen the Tanzu Announcement, et cetera. So it's really the, step one was two distinct clouds that is just two separate islands. So the other thing that I'd like to get your reaction on, because this is great, you're like a master class in the cube here, is we see customers becoming super clouds because they're getting the benefit of VMware, AWS. And so if I'm like a media company or insurance company, if I have scale, if I continue to invest in cloud-native development, I do all these things, I'm going to have a data scale advantage, possibly. Agile, which means I can build apps and functionality very quick for customers. I might become my own cloud within the vertical. Exactly. And so I could then service other people in the insurance vertical, if I'm the insurance company, with my technology and create a separate power curve that never existed before. Because the capex is off the table, it's operating expense that runs into the income statement. This is a fundamental business model shift and an advantage of this kind of scenario. And that's why I don't think Snowflake's, what's your reaction to that? Because that's something that is not really talk, it's highly nuanced and situational, but if Goldman Sachs builds the biggest cloud on the planet for financial service for their own benefit, why wouldn't they? Exactly. So they sort of hinted at it that when they were up on stage on AWS, right, that it's just their first big step. I'm pretty sure over time, they would be using other clouds. Think about it. Well, they already are, on-prem. Yeah, on-prem too, exactly. They're using VM-based R&D there, right? I mean, think about it. AWS, I don't know how many billions of dollars they're spending on AWS R&D. Microsoft's doing the same thing. Google's doing the same thing. We are doing not as much as them, but we're doing our own share. If you're a CIO, you would be insane not to take advantage of all of those IP that's getting created and say, look, I'm just going to bet on one, doesn't make any sense, right? So that's what you're seeing. And then the really smart companies like you talked about would say, look, I will do something for my industry that uses these underlying clouds as the substrate but encapsulates my IP and my operating model that I then offer to other partners. And their incentive for differentiation is scale and capability and that's a super cloud. That's a, or would we say, IT environment. This is why I'm saying. I mean, it seems like the same game. But this is why I'm saying. Well, I mean, I think IT environment is different than... Well, I mean, IT advantage to help the business. The old day was the Eastern service, you know. You said snowflakes in the day to work. You guys are the marketing guys, so you put up whatever. But you said snowflakes in the day to work. See, I don't think it's a day to warehouse. It's not a day to warehouse. That's like saying, you know, VMware is a virtualization company or service now is a help desk tool. This is the change that's occurring and that you're enabling. So take the Goldman Sachs example. They're going to run on-prem. They're going to use your infrastructure to do self-serve. They're going to build on AWS CapEx. They're going to go across clouds and they're going to need some multi-cloud services and that's your opportunity. Exactly. That's really when you... In the keynote, I talked about Cloud Universal, right? So think of a future where we can go to a customer and say, Mr. Customer, buy 1000 cores, 100,000 cores, whatever capacity. You can use it any which way you want on any application platform, right? And it could be on-prem. It could be in the cloud, in the cloud of their choice and multiple clouds. And this thing can be fungible and they can pipe to the right services. If they like SageMaker, they could pipe to Sage Aurora, they could pipe to Aurora, et cetera, et cetera. So I think that's really the foundation that we are setting. I mean, you're building a cloud across clouds. I mean, that's the way I look at it. And that's why to me, the DPU announcement, the Project Monterey coming to fruition is so important because if you don't have that, if you're not on that new silicon curve, you're going to be left behind. No, absolutely. It allows us to do things that you would not otherwise be able to do. Not to pat ourselves on the back, Raghu, but in what, 2013 day, we said- Feel free, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We said with Lou Tucker when OpenStack was crashing and then Kubernetes was just a paper, we said, this could be the interoperability layer. Yeah, you got it. And you could have inter-clouding because there was no inter-clouding. I was going to riff on internetworking. But if you remember, internetworking during the OSI model, TCP and IP were hardened after the physical data link layer was taken care of. So that enabled an entire new industry that was open, open interconnect, right? So we were saying inter-clouding. So what you're kind of getting at with cross-cloud is you're kind of creating this routing model, if you will, not necessarily routing, but like connection, inter-clouding, we called it. I think it's going to be a terrible name, but- What you said about Kubernetes is super critical. It is turning out to be the infrastructure API. So long it has been an infrastructure API for a certain cluster, right? But if you think about what we said about vSphere 8, with vSphere 8 Kubernetes becomes the data center API now. We sort of glossed over the point of the keynote, but you can do VM operations, storage, anything that you can do on vSphere, you can do it using a Kubernetes API. And of course, you can do all the containers in the Kubernetes clusters and et cetera, what you could always do. Now you could do that on a VMware environment on-prem. You could do that on EKS. Now Kubernetes has become the standard programming model for infrastructure across. It's a great equalizer. We used to say Amazon turned the data center API. It turns it, it turns it like a lot of APIs and a lot of complexity, right? Kubernetes changed it. Well, the role of de facto standards played a lot into the TCPIP revolution before it became a standard standard. What the question, Ragu, as you look at, we had submit on earlier, we had the tutorial on as well. What's the disruptive enabler from a de facto? In your mind, what should, because Kubernetes became kind of de facto, even though it was in the CNCF and in an open source, open, it wasn't really standard standards, no, like standards body, but what de facto thing has to happen in your mind's eye around making inter-clouding or connecting clouds in a way that's going to create extensibility and growth. What do you see as a de facto thing that the industry should rally around? I'll see Kubernetes as one. Is there something else that you see that's important for in an open way that the industry can discuss and get behind? Yeah, I mean, there are things like identity, right? Which are pretty critical. There is connectivity and networking. So these are all things that the industry can rally around, right? And that goes along with any modern application infrastructure. So I'd say those are the building blocks that need to happen. On the data side, of course, there are so many choices as well, so. How about, you know, Sikiri, I think about, you know, after Stuxnet, the whole industry said, hey, we have to do a better job of collaborating and then when you said identity, it just sort of struck me. But then a lot of people tried to sort of monetize private reporting and things like that. Do you see a movement within the technology industry to do a better job of collaborating to solve the acute security problems? Yeah, I think the customer pressure and government pressure causes that. Even now, even in our current universe, you see there is a lot of behind the scenes collaboration amongst the security teams of all of the tech companies that is not widely seen or known, right? For example, my CISO knows the AWS CISO or the Microsoft CISO and they all talk and they share the right information about vulnerability attacks and so on and so forth. So there is already a certain amount of collaboration that's happening and that'll only increase. Do you, you know, I was somewhat surprised I didn't hear more in your face about security. Is that because you had such a strong multi-cloud message that you wanted to get across? Because your security story is very strong and deep. When you get into the DPU side of things, the separation of resources and the encryption and all end to end. No, we have a phenomenal security story. We have a phenomenal security story. And yes, I mean, I'll plead guilty to the fact that in the keynote you have some resources at the time. But what we are doing with NSX and you will hear about some NSX projects as you, if you have time to go to some of the sessions, there's one called Project Not Star and the other is called Project Watchman or Watch, I think it's called. They're all dealing with this. That is going to strengthen the security story even more. We think security and data is going to be a big part of it. Right, as CEO I have to ask you now that you're the CEO. First of all, I'd love to talk about product with you because you're just great conversation. We want to kind of read the tea leaves and ask pointed questions because we're putting the puzzle together in real time here with the audience. But as CEO now you have a lot of discussions around the business. You've got the Broadcom thing happening, you've got the Rename here, you've got Multicloud, all good stuff happening. Dave and I were chatting before we came on this morning around the marketplace around financial valuations and EBITDA numbers. When you have so much strategic goodwill and investment in the oven right now with the investments in cloud native, multi-year investments on a trajectory, you've got economies of scale there. It's just now coming out to be harvest. And more behind it. As you come into the Broadcom and or the new world, wave that's coming, how do you talk about that value? Because you can't really put a number on it yet because there's no customers on it. I mean, some customers, but you can't, probably some four or four. It's not like sales numbers. How do you make the argument to the PE type folks out there like EBITDA and then all the strategic value? What's the conversation? Like if you can share any, I know it's obviously public company, all the things going down, how do you talk about strategic value to numbers folks? Yeah, I mean, we are not talking to PE guys at all, right? I mean, the only conversation we have is helping in Broadcom. Yeah, but people who are looking at the number EBITDA, kind of. Yeah, I mean, you'd be surprised if, for example, even with Broadcom, they look at the business holistically as what are the prospects of this business becoming a franchise that is durable and could drive a lot of value, right? So that's how they look at it holistically. It's not a number driven conversation. They do, they look at that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think it's a misperception to say, hey, it's a numbers driven conversation. It's a business driven conversation where, I mean, and Hock's been public about it. He says, look, I look at businesses, can they be leaders in their market? Because leaders get to, as we all know, a disproportionate share of the economic value. Is it a durable franchise that's going to last 10 years or more, right? Obviously with technology changes in between, but 10 years or more. You got your internal VMware talent, customers, partners. Yeah, significant comparative advantage. So that's really where the conversation starts and the numbers fall out of it. Got it, okay. I think there's a track record too that VMware has. You've always had an engineering culture that's turned ideas and problems into products that have been very successful. Well, they had different engineering cultures. They're chips, you guys are software, right? You guys know software. Yeah, I mean, they've been very successful with Broadcom, the standalone networking company since they took it over, right? I mean, there's a lot of amazing innovation going on there. Yeah, not that I'm smiling. I want to kind of poke at this question and see if I get an answer out of you. When you talk to Hop Tan, does he feel like he bought a lot more than he thought? Or does he know it's all here? So the last two months, I mean, they've been going through a very deliberate process of digging into each business and certainly he feels like he got a phenomenal asset base. He said that to me even today after the keynote, right? It's the amazing amount of product capability that he's seeing in every one of our businesses. And that's been the constant refrain. Congratulations on that, how are you? I've heard Hop talk about the shift to merchant silicon from custom silicon. But I wanted to ask you, when you look at things like AWS Nitro and Graviton and Tranium and the advantage that AWS has with custom silicon, you see Google and Microsoft sort of Alibaba following suit, would it benefit you to have custom silicon for DPU? I mean, I guess you, you know, to have a tighter integration or do you feel like with the relationships that you have, that doesn't buy you anything? Yeah, I mean, we have pretty strong relationships with, in fact, fantastic relationships with NVIDIA and Intel and AMD. And then, Anzando and AMD and however. Yeah, I mean, we've been working with the Anzando team in their previous incarnations for years, right? When they were at Cisco. And then, same thing with the, we know the Mellanox team, as well as the NVIDIA original teams and Intel is a collaboration right from the get go of the company. So we don't feel a need for any of that. We think, I mean, it's clear for those cloud folks, right, they are going towards a vertical integration model in select portions of their stack, like you talked about. But there's always a room for a horizontal integration model, right? And that's what we are a part of, right? So there'll be a number of DPU vendors. There'll be a number of CPU vendors. There'll be a number of other storage, et cetera, et cetera. And we think that is goodness in an alternative model compared to a vertical integration model. And yeah, this trade-offs, right? It's not one or the other. I used to talk to Al Shugart about this all the time, right? I mean, if you vertically integrated, there may be some cost advantages, but then you've got flexibility advantages if you're using what the industry is building, right? And those are the trade-offs. Yeah. Rekha, what are you excited about right now? You got a lot going on. Obviously, great event. The branding's good. I love the graphics. I was kind of nervous about the name change. I like the VM world, but you know, that's something I'm kind of like. It doesn't readily roll out your thoughts. Yeah, I know. I had everyone miscue this morning already. And it's a VMware Explorer. So you had to pay Laura a fine. Yeah, no. I mean, I got a quarter of a dollar, and a cursed star or whatever I did wrong. No, believe me, I went small mistake. That's because the thing wasn't on. Okay, anyway. What's on your plate? What's your, what's some of the milestones? Can you share for your employees, your customers and your partners out there that are watching that might want to know what's next in the whole Broadcom VMware situation? Is there a timeline? Can you talk publicly about what people can expect? Yeah, no. We talk all the time in the company about that, right? Because even if there is no news, you need to talk about what is where we are, right? Because this is such a big transaction, and employees need to know where we are at every minute of the day, right? Yeah. So, we definitely talk about that. We definitely talk about that with customers too. And where we are is that all the processes are on track. There is a regulatory track going on. And like I alluded to a few minutes ago, Broadcom is doing what they call the discovery phase of the integration planning, where they learn about the business. And then once that is done, they will figure out what the operating model is. What Broadcom has said publicly is that the acquisition will close in their fiscal 23, which starts in November of this year, runs through October of next year. So, it's your guess as to where it is in that window. All right, Raghu, thank you so much for taking valuable time out of your conference time here for theCUBE. I really appreciate Dave and I both appreciate your friendship. Congratulations on the success as CEO because we've been following your trials and tribulations and endeavors for many years and it's been great to chat with you. Yeah, yeah, it's been great to chat with you, not just today, but over a period of time and you guys do great work with this. So, thank you so much. And you guys making all the right calls with VMware. All right, more coverage. I'm Sean Furrier, Dave Vellante, theCUBE coverage, day one of three days of World War Coach here in Moscone West, the CUBE coverage of VMware Explorer 22. We'll be right back.