 Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here on the ground at VMware's corporate headquarters in beautiful Palo Alto for a special presentation. I'm joined with Robin Madlock, who's the chief marketing officer of VMware. Good to see you. Hi, John, it's nice to see you. Welcome to our special CUBE on the ground. I love it. Getting all the data. It was a lot closer to get to you, just a little walk. Yeah, I love this campus. You guys have the most amazing facility. One of the voted one of the best places to work. It's always good. The parking is always a hassle. We gotta go to that garage. Anyway, how are you doing? Great. So, 2016's coming to a close. Had a great vacation. I heard New Zealand, Amazon reinvented you guys. Had a big presence. Pat Gelsinger was up on stage with Andy Jassy on a fireside chat keynote. Interesting world that we live in, as they say, interesting times. VMware and Amazon with a strategic relationship certainly has impacted the market attention on VMware's cloud strategy now comes into picture. How's that affecting how you guys are talking to customers? I think it's just been a tremendous last several weeks. And frankly, of course, we've been preparing for this for months and months. But the market has been very responsive to the news of these two great companies coming together and the announced intent of how our technologies are gonna work better. And the feedback's been so positive. I think at the end of the day, this just opens up many avenues for customers. They love VMware. They love Amazon helping make their experience as they integrate those worlds together is just a win-win for them. So I personally am very excited about it and we're getting great feedback. You know, you've always lived in this world with VMware and I always compare VMware like Facebook where whenever there's a change, there's a revolt. Right, there's always naysayers and also people complaining. Now, when you guys do the deal with Amazon, people are speculating, but in reality, it's the culture, there's no clash there. There's really a geek culture on both sides. What's your thoughts on that? Do you see it the same way? And what's your observation of the VMware culture? Because you do a lot of digging into the data. You run VMworld, it's reinvented as being called a cloud version of VMworld. Kind of coming together, those two cultures, your thoughts on the two demographics. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of different dimensions to that question. From a cultural standpoint, the two companies actually have very similar cultures in the sense that they really value engineering innovation. These are disruptive companies and they also both, I think we can say, focus on the customer. It's all about customer value, customer impact. And when you keep your customer at the forefront of all the decision making that you do, it's really easy to make the right choices because you're doing on the benefit of that customer. And hey, change is a constant and that's the one thing we can count on. And those of us in the industry that don't change, usually don't have a great outcome in the end. Change is part of delivering more value to our customers. Dave Vellante in Stu, I wasn't there at the Dell World this year. I was at the Grace Hopper event. It was an awesome event. But the Dell event, they asked Michael about VMware. We always ask Michael Dell about VMware. And also Jeremy Burton talked about the messaging around Dell technologies, which is simply just a holding company, I guess, on structure. But the people that are trying to get the message on what Dell technology is in, you guys obviously are, as Michael said, the crown jewel of Dell technologies. How about the strategic alignment with Dell technologies? How does that affect your job? And how does that affect the positioning of how VMware is vis-a-vis Dell technologies, Dell EMC, but also your growing ecosystem? Sure. So first of all, we had a great relationship with Dell prior to this acquisition for well over a decade. So the two companies knew each other very well. Of course, we have a rich history with EMC. For us, strategically, VMware is being run much like it was before. It's an independent company. Michael's been very consistent about that. His behavior is consistent. His message to the market is consistent. His message to customers and partners is consistent. VMware remains an independent company. Our ecosystem is one of our crown jewels. And Michael's been very consistent in making sure that that ecosystem is protected and knows that VMware is gonna operate in the best interest of their customers and that ecosystem. So for us, in a lot of ways, it feels really comfortable. Of course, we're looking for opportunity. We're looking for the upside. And we are seeing tremendous opportunity with Dell technologies to make sure that our joint customers have a better together experience than ever before. And we look at those as incremental opportunities and we're very committed to that. But at the end of the day, that's a really important part of our ecosystem is Dell technologies, but it's not a replacement. You always had a good eye for marketing. Obviously, the way you guys do your events and VMware's ecosystem, you're always tested. People are always gonna hold your feet to the fire. You had a very active community. When you look at the changes that are going on with the Amazon, we heard Pat Gelsinger on stage again, Andy, Jesse, both reiterating the same ethos that you listen to customers. And the customers are saying that they wanna have some cloud. They wanna put VMware in the cloud. How is that gonna change how you market and position and talk to customers? Yeah, well, we've been talking about hybrid cloud computing for a long time. So for us, this is really about how it's evolving and becoming more tangible and more real. You're probably very familiar with the fact that we positioned our cross-cloud architecture at VMworld. And our story with Amazon is very supportive of what that whole architecture was about. It's about, hey, I'm standing up a stack in my private data center and this is my private cloud and I wanna run that stack as is in other cloud environments. I want compatibility between the different cloud providers that I leverage and what I'm doing here within my firewall. And that's all very consistent under our vision and strategy about this cross-cloud architecture. I mean, for customers, it shouldn't feel like very siloed, separate experiences environments, different tools, different experiences, different skill sets. They should be able to leverage their resources to be able to deliver these workloads in whatever cloud environment they choose. And that's really cornerstone to our cloud strategy and Amazon's a major option for customers to extend into the Amazon cloud, but we also have the IBM cloud that's available to them. We have over 4,000 service providers that provide specialty cloud services that are available to our customers. The whole idea is that we unify this and make this a seamless experience and that's what that cross-cloud architecture is all about. That's a great point. Sanjay Poonan brought that up on theCUBE at re-invent around connecting the digital islands. So how is that changing, if anything, or is the game still the same on the digital transformation and those solutions? Is the unification cross-cloud the fundamental piece of it? Is there more to the story? What's the essence of the digital transformation? Yeah, I mean, I think first of all, at the heart of digital transformation is software, right? That is enabling this kind of unified approach. And so that's kind of one point. The second point is really the value for customers in the end user is about applications. And then the question is how do you deliver those apps in all types of apps, right? We need the new modern apps, the stuff that works on our cell phones and our iPads. We also need the ERP systems and the mission-critical systems. And all that needs to be delivered in a seamless experience. What IT and enterprise need is more options about where to put those workloads. What's the right place for those workloads based on whatever their requirements are? Geography, service levels, backup, discovery, disaster recovery, whatever their requirements are, they need flexibility, but they also need control and governance and management in a really efficient way. And so I think at the heart of it is how you deliver apps to users in a much more expedient fashion. As we come down to the end of 2016, we're looking at 2017, what's the vibe internally at VMware? And what's your outlook for 2017? Obviously, VMworld will be, again, the big tent event. Not sure what your thoughts are of anything that was probably working on it right now, but is there any thoughts? Can you share any color around how you guys see 2017? Or what's the conversations between you, Jeremy Burton, the folks within the core teams around the outlook for 2017? You know, I think people are feeling really bullish on VMware. We're exiting the year in a position of great strength. It's been a great year from a revenue standpoint. It's been a great year from a emerging technology standpoint. We're getting critical mass in some of the smaller businesses, like network virtualization and software-defined storage with virtual SAN and hyper-converged infrastructure. You're seeing a lot of great traction. Our customers are speaking. They're out on stage with us. They're really advocating and evangelized and the value that they're getting from their VMware investments. And you know, the bottom line is, we're executing across the world. We have really strong footprint across all the regions and everybody's performing. So I feel like the momentum is really positive right now. Is there a team emerging for 2017 that's sauteing around in your marketing brain in terms of what you might feel happening? Yeah, you know, John, I'm not gonna debut that right here. We've got a few things up our sleeves. But you know, at the heart of it, this notion of unifying clouds is gonna be centerpiece to our strategy in 2017. And we are working on some new interesting ways of packaging at that. But the whole cross-cloud architecture truly is a driving force for us in 2017 and how we keep delivering that to customers in new and fresh ways. And our ecosystem as well, making sure they can deliver that. Has anything about the Amazon announcement, Amazon Web Search announcement, because you had Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy. And that was really kind of a big shocker for everyone. I think, I mean, you can get it now that you look back, but they're both on stage and Andy Jassy never comes down to San Francisco to do a press event. Pretty big announcement for Amazon to stand on the same stage as VMware. And same for you guys, this opens up a whole nother dimension. Any surprises, anything that's changed in your world that you can share that's been positive or concerns or comments from customers that this relationship has changed with you? Well, I think what our Amazon relationship does is kind of solidify that our position in the cloud is very viable. Because at the end of the day, these are the leader in private cloud and the leader in public cloud coming together to deliver more hybrid cloud value to our customers. Now remember, we also had an announcement with IBM earlier in the year. And I think this is just kind of reiterating this notion that what we've done in the private cloud is very special, adds a lot of value to customers, but they want this in public cloud environments. And the more that we can make that seamless and easy and consumable for our customers, the more we can take the complexity out of it, the easier it is for them to govern it, you know, the more value this is for customers. Obviously Amazon's the brand in public cloud and I think that relationship has just made everybody more relevant, both VMware and Amazon. And very customer centric too, in terms of how you guys operate. It's not like a magical deal. I know Radu worked on it with Sanjay and the team. Exactly. Well, Robin, thanks so much for coming on, our special on the ground here. We are on the ground here at the VMware, head coach Robin Matlock, the CMO of VMware here, telling us her thoughts on 2017 and looking back at the momentum of 2016. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.