 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, my co-host for this segment is Justin Warren. This is the 10th year of theCUBE here at VMworld 2019. We're in the lobby of Moscone North and happy welcome to the program. First time guest on the program, Jun Yang, who is the Vice President of Product Management and Engineering at VMware. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. And welcoming back to the program is Varun Chabra, who's the Vice President of Product Marketing of Cloud at Dell EMC. Varun, great to see you. Thanks Stu. All right, Jun, so many different pieces talking about cloud, we think back 10 years ago, Paul Meritz was talking about it, it's the software mainframe is what we're talking. Because even back then, cloud isn't really, it's not a destination or a place, there is no cloud, it's just somebody else's computer. It's more of an operating model. So of course the VMware cloud on various solutions, of course sitting here with Dell, well I'm sure we'll be talking about the VMware cloud on Dell EMC, but just give us overall a little bit about you're in a lot of customer meetings, what's resonating with your customers? What are they coming to you to discuss when it comes to their overall cloud strategy? I think for a lot of customers, they're really looking for both the hybrid cloud story as well as the multicloud story. I mean this is something that Pat spent quite a bit of time talking to you on the Monday's keynote. When we see customers, clearly many of them have very large existing footprints on-premises and Edge is again, as a growing segment of their infrastructure, it's also getting very significant, making very significant investment over there and of course the public cloud itself. So we see many customers really trying to straddle the combination of the private cloud, the public cloud and the Edge side and our strategy is really, we want to have a consistent infrastructure that's running everywhere. So therefore, we have a consistent operational model that enables the customer and their admins to be able to do that. You know in some ways it reminds me back, you know in the early days when I worked with VMware, every group had some application they built and you know which server they bought, you know they would run VMware underneath that because it would help with the efficiency in there. So in some ways, is multi-clouds similar to what we had in multi-vendor back in the day? I mean we think about, you know, if you think about the first iteration of VMware, right? We're really thinking about, we're taking the hypervisor and making all the hardware underneath that to be really invisible, right? You're dealing with the hypervisor and really hiding the heterogeneity of what's underneath that. And then we talk about, you know, our SDDC era which is really focusing on software defined data center where virtualized not only compute but also storage and network as well and really hiding the heterogeneity for that. And so the third iteration for us really looking at the cloud as the next level of, you know, different infrastructure customer money. Again, we want to be able to hide that and offer a consistent operational model there. Yeah, so from the customer perspective, back in the day when VMware was new, it was new and scary for a lot of customers. And we saw that with cloud as well. So 10 years ago cloud was evil and wrong and we should never use it. Customers have moved on in both of those cases. Have we reached the point now where cloud is just, yes, it's accepted and we're going to be doing it. Are we going to have another battle about whether hybrid or multi-cloud or are customers just moved past that and are now looking at? We know what we want to use this for. So we know that we need to choose it. We're not going to be moving everything to the cloud but we're not going to be putting everything in VMs either. We're going to choose what is the right solution for the different use case. I think over the last couple of years that has become sort of the de facto standard. People are comfortable with the cloud, people comfortable with on-premises. They know that it's going to be a hybrid cloud world. It's going to be a multi-cloud world. All right, so Varun, we talked about the VMware cloud on Dell EMC. We had a number of conversations back at Dell Technologies World earlier this year. When you look out in the general marketplace, they're like, oh, I look at the family. Well, Dell is the hardware and VMware is the software. There were a lot of announcements this week that were the cross-pollination of pieces and a lot of those are software pieces from the Dell family that tie into what's happening on VCF and the like, so bring us the update. Just to as June said, both Dell EMC and VMware are incredibly customer-driven companies, right? So what we've been hearing from customers is one, they're really excited about being able to try out VMware cloud on Dell EMC. So we're very, very happy to be working with VMware to bring this to market first. So that's something that our customers have been asking us for. But then along with that, as customers start understanding the model of the fully managed data, the fully managed infrastructure, you can, the next question that customers have is, okay, I can now focus on higher value added services. And one of the things that immediately comes up next is, okay, what about my data? How do I protect it? I'm going to be running applications on this and we've already spoken on this show many times before. Data is increasingly one of our organization's most valuable assets, right? It's a competitive differentiator. We see news every day if it falls in the wrong hands what happens, right? So what we've been doing now, in addition to the amazing amount of work that we've been doing with June's team, just to bring this to market, we've also been working on the data protection side. So now with Dell EMC, data protection is now validated to be working on VMware cloud and Dell EMC as a data protection solution. So this means that customers can not only take advantage of the integration that we have on the infrastructure layer, they can also take advantage of just have the peace of mind that our industry leading data protection solutions will be there to help them manage the data and protect their data. So it sounds like it's something that you don't have to think about it as an afterthought, which is often the challenge with data protection. If you wait to think about it, it never happens. So this pretty much just comes, we know it's going to work, turn it on day one, just have it start with your data being protected and just have that baked into the way that you run your operations so that it no longer becomes spinning up a specific backup project because those things are, they're always expensive. There's no perceived value to the business of doing this whereas if it's just now part of, this is how you run your infrastructure. So this is how you stand up a VMware cloud on Dell EMC and this is just how you should do business. You know, it's absolutely like that way. What we find that's really exciting about VMware cloud on Dell EMC is customers are asking us to deliver the cloud model, right? To their data centers, to their edge locations. So that's how they want to consume software solutions as well. So what's amazing about the solution is you're doing everything to the browser. So that's how you're going to consume, data protection becomes an add-on service that you want to add on, right? And I'm sure over time we're going to add other capabilities as well. But it's really, that's the key part here. The ease of consumption, sorry, the ease of use and basically being able to consume things through the browser is a game changer for infrastructure in the data center on the edge. So, June, one of the things that definitely has caught our attention and one of the bigger announcements this week is Tanzu Mission Control is what they call it because if I'm going to have multiple locations, we've been looking for my entire career in IT. Oh, we're going to have some tool that's going to manage across these environments and maybe a VMware cloud on Dell EMC but I probably have VMware cloud on some of the public clouds and I might also be doing some Kubernetes that's not even with the VMware pieces. So I'll paint a picture as to where we are today and where we're going when it comes to that management consumption maybe even some of the finances in getting to that cloud operating model across all my environments. Yeah, I mean Tanzu is a kind of portfolio name for a number of products within that. Tanzu Mission Control, of course, is one part of that. The way we view Tanzu is that this is really a multi-cloud platform. We understand that customers, developers in particular, wanted to be able to consume Kubernetes cluster and often they want to choose Kubernetes cluster based on different cloud for variety reasons. Sometimes cost, sometimes resiliency, sometimes just geographical availability and then there needs a way to be able to see this in a consolidated fashion and that's what Tanzu Mission Control does and that's what I showcased yesterday at the keynote to really show that you can now have a single pane of glass to be able to see all of these clusters across multiple cloud and then be able to do some troubleshooting and so forth making things much easier. Then of course be able to apply policies on top of these clusters and then we'll can propagate the changes and making sure those are enforced. So those are some really, really, I think really good operational capabilities that really simplifies the day-to-day operational kind of the task that an operator has to do. It's part of the driver for this that enterprises who've got this investment in vSphere. So they've spent 10 more years investing in vSphere and then all of a sudden you've got these cloud people who want to come and do things in a completely different way. So now as a business I have to make a choice of well do I invest a lot of money in both of these things? Do I move everything to one model? It sounds like you're actually trying to provide customers with a way that say, look you've already made these investments. You don't have to throw them all away. You can still operate things here but you can also have these cloud things without having to move everything off into a completely different operating model. Is that fairly accurate? So I think we're very customer driven, right? We want to deliver what customer wants to be able to consume. So that's why part of the reason we're so excited about Project Pacific on top of the vSphere side is really the customer has made huge investment on the vSphere platform and we've got 500,000 customers out there and tons of customers that becomes their standard in the data center. And then you now have Kubernetes coming in and containers coming in and we don't want a customer have to do a siloed platform for it and by embedding Kubernetes directly into vSphere itself we have now made vSphere the platform for containers and for VMs as well. So that investment the customer has made on the vSphere side now kind of moves on to be able to cover the Kubernetes and containers as well. And because our SDDC and our hybrid cloud story we're taking the same vSphere across to VMware Cloud and the Dell EMC, VMware Cloud on AWS, and VMware Cloud on Edge and so forth. That means all those benefits that Project Pacific brings is now going everywhere. Having spoken to some clients about the experience of even managed Kubernetes services, it's really, really painful for them. So having the ease of use of vSphere, if you could bring that to Kubernetes and have that as a managed service, I'm sure you'll make a lot of people very happy. That's why we're so excited about it. June, I want to click one level further on the Project Pacific stuff because the thing that struck me at first is like, wait, containers and Kubernetes, that's going to be the cloud and vSphere, we want to modernize it, but that's not what I want to put in the public cloud but Project Pacific is this primarily a data center offering, if I'm doing VMware Cloud in a public cloud, do I expect to be leveraging the native public cloud and then Tantu helps me manage across them? Is that how I think of them or am I not getting the full story? Yeah, so think a little bit about, think about there's one track as you can do is all vSphere based clouds, right? vSphere based on premise, vSphere based on Dell EMC, vSphere based on top of public cloud, right? That's one track. If you follow that track, then Project Pacific essentially allows you to be able to run both Kubernetes and virtual machines on a single platform. Now if customers also wanted to be able to run a native cloud, then this is where we're kind of bringing tons of mission control in because that's a multi-cloud story. So that was kind of what Pat was trying to explain at the keynote in terms of hyper cloud versus the multi-cloud. Okay, so you don't actually have to make a choice of one way of saying things, if the tyranny of the single glass of pain is that you have to make choices and you can't have a lot of things and if there's one thing enterprises hate is that's dedicating themselves to just one way of doing things. They like to have choice. We want to give them choice as well. Yeah, so having that ability to be able to make those choices and have it be an and decision instead of or, I think that's really valuable. So Varun, one of the questions we've gotten from customers this week is your partners here at VMware have just made a lot of acquisitions. It's a lot of integration work that needs to get done there. Dell's got strong experience and the things that sit on top of the stack gives a little bit as to what we should see going forward on your platforms. I mean, I think if there's anything that's apparent this week is that VMware and Dell Technologies are just getting started. I mean, even as having known a little bit about some of these announcements, it was just so exciting to see all of that stuff come real. And we are very, very excited to continue to work with VMware to bring Tanzu, the various components of Tanzu, more Kubernetes stuff as well, as well as other capabilities that we saw in we realized orchestrator and automation. We want to bring that to our customers in an integrated fashion so that it's easy for them to deploy and just easy for them to use. And so I think what you're seeing here is just the start. That sounds fantastic. Yeah. So all of this investment that we're seeing from VMware and from Dell EMC is like, are customers going to see the payoff immediately, like tomorrow, or are we going to have to wait for some of these investments and integrations to pay off? How long are we going to wait? I mean, I think a lot of this is coming to fruition already. We announced the availability of VMware Cloud on Dell EMC at the VMworld. So it's ready for customer to purchase today, right? If a customer wanted to, much like what I demoed at the keynote, if a customer has a data center they want to stood up wherever they need to be, they can literally place the order and be able to get that, right? So that's a benefit they can have immediately. And of course, a lot of the longer-term things we've been talking about by layering additional capabilities when project Pacific comes into fruition, this becomes available, you know, across the VMware Cloud and Dell EMC products as well. I mean, these things will all kind of continue as snowballing as we go forward, but there's immediate benefit today and there'll be ongoing benefit as we go forward in making additional investment. Excellent, I don't have to wait forever. Yes. Yes. It's about instant gratification. So I'm going to check now, yes. Varun, I wonder if you can speak to kind of the changing application portfolio as customers are modernizing, going cloud native on that. What's the impact on your platforms and what are you seeing and hearing from customers? You know, there is obviously a lot of interest in containers and customers are either already trying it out or having some sort of applications that are packaged there or they're looking at it and saying this seems really interesting. In some ways, it seems very, very similar to what I saw from customers five years ago when people were saying, oh, I'm going to move everything to the public cloud. And you know, sometimes you hear a little bit of, oh, I'm going to move everything to containers. I think what we will likely see over the next few years is a little bit of rationalization just like we saw with public and private is that it's both. I think we will continue to see certain traditional applications and new applications live in more of a VM-centric model. And I think there will be, as there are new applications being built or as ISVs package up their applications to be more container friendly, we'll see some go that way. If anything, I've learned, if there's one thing I've learned in the IT industry in all of these years is there really isn't a one size fits all solution. We get very excited about things and we're like, oh, everybody's going to do this. But the reality is things balance themselves out. And to June's point, as a vendor, what we want to do is we want to give our customers choice. We know that there's no one size fits all and we want them to choose what's right for their business and help them achieve their goals. So June, last question I have for you. First of all, congratulations on the keynote yesterday. Thank you, I appreciate it. We heard, we know a lot of the inside work and heard like the guy that swam across the English channel, like that got added to the agenda, like days beforehand and flew him across and we understand what happened with demos in last minute. Gives a little bit as to kind of the making of the team that helped put that together. Anything that you were super excited that actually made the final stage that you might not have thought would have gotten there. You know, we started out with, we were very ambitious, right? And we put in 15 or 16 demos into it. And as we started putting things together, time was our biggest enemy. You know, our friend Joe, who was running the day two show, he was telling me, you are 30 seconds over on this particular demo. You were 45 seconds on the other demo. I said, Joe, give me some credit here. I'm trying to tell the story here. So unfortunately we actually had to cut some demos out just because it couldn't fit into the scope of time. We want to make sure the story really comes out and the customer really understood what we're trying to show. I mean, I'm just so excited as part of the, you know, me doing the key day two keynote, I actually learned about a bunch of products I wasn't that familiar with. And so I was like, wow, I didn't even know we're doing that. And so just to see the amount of capabilities we're bringing to bear, it's pretty astonishing and it's exciting. Well, June, I'll say it reminds me of other cloud shows where there's so much going on, so much new products getting launched that no single person can keep up with that. But thank you, June, and Varun, for helping our audience learn a little bit more about the areas that you're doing with. It's my pleasure. Thank you for having us. For Justin Warren, I'm Stu Miniman. Back with more coverage at VMworld 2019. Thank you for watching theCUBE.