 From Palo Alto, California, it's theCUBE covering VMware Women Transforming Technology 2019. Brought to you by VMware. Hi, Lisa Martin on the ground at VMware in Palo Alto, California for the fourth annual Women Transforming Technology Event, WT squared. One of my favorite events and I'm pleased to welcome back to theCUBE one of the female leaders at VMware, Lily Chang, the VP of the Strategic Transformation Office. Lily, it's so great to have you on the program again. Thank you, it's my pleasure and honor to be here. So this event, one of my favorites, as I mentioned, even just walking up to registration this morning, the energy, the excitement, the supports. It's in the air. Yes, and then you walk into the keynote and it was kicked off this morning with such an incredible presentation and VMware was actually mentioning earlier that it's about 1,500 people just in person today, not even mentioning the live stream. So the momentum in just four years that you guys are creating is huge. Yes, VMware is a great place for diversity and inclusion. That is one of our company's strategic motif. We believe that in order to basically create the best technology in the world, today was the evolution and the advancement of all these technology working together. We are servicing all genders, all origin globally. So that means the creation of this, we need to bring all these cultural aspects to bring into our design thinking. So when we solve a problem, we are not solving it in a mono fashion. We actually can look at multiple facets. So having this event is part of our passion. It's really part of our DNA now. I think that's fantastic. That's inspirational for other companies to really look at. It's not just an event that VMware puts on. This is really changing VMware from within as well. Yes, this change process has started quite a while ago. I would say inherently our genetic nature of VMware is that we actually do believe in all genders. Our original founder and the CEO was a woman, right? And so we pioneered virtualization and we believe in woman leadership. We believe in all levels of woman innovation together with man and all the origin globally in the world. That's fantastic. So last year we talked with you, which was fantastic. We're happy to have you back. I want to talk about something that you guys recently launched and about the last year, helping women return to work. Tell us about Tara and what it is helping women how they are able to get back into technology. Yes, so this is one of my favorite topic. Basically, we talked about glass of ceilings for decades about women in terms of how you break the glass of ceiling, how you identify it, how you work around it and all these things. There is a huge transparent glass of ceiling being built worldwide for a long time. And that is basically women care about the society, women care about the family. So is it all the genders as well. However, there's a lot of the woman workforce. They may be technically very achieving in terms of their career or academic side. They have to basically take care of the parenthood, take care of family for various personal reasons. After a couple of years, their passion for the technology still exists. They want to join the workforce to propel the world. And basically, especially now with the technology is put to a lot of technology for good to help sustainability, to help medical feel, to help disabled people, all these things. But they're having a little bit of a difficulty to re-enter the work phase. And that's a glass of ceiling because their technology knowledge may be a little bit dated because just the way how in the past 10 years how we were and all the other giants has propelled the technology world. Right, it changes so quickly. It changes so quickly. Like three months is almost like a decade nowadays, right? It's moving in that quantum speed. So what we have done is basically we decided to create a TARA project. It's a woman return to work initiative. And we're basically launching specifically focused on India region, right? And basically we are funding 15,000 women. And we are training them and brought them up to speed about technology, especially with our software defined data center and virtualization, networking, storage, right? So we are giving them a certification program. And that is something in some part of the world that certificate means a lot. It's like a pedigree that indicate that you not only believe you actually know all this, you got evidence that you really know it and there are people that certifying you. So with that, that enable them to be able to jump back into the workforce with full qualification. And with virtualization being dominant in the world, right? Basically it's like something that is really hot and really relevant. And we are also helping them to basically connect with our customers in India so that they actually could be interviewed for future positions as well. So basically it's an end-to-end strategic transformation to break that huge glass ceiling. A huge thick glass ceiling. So 15,000 women, this was just launched last year. How long is the certification program that they go through? We wanna be able to achieve that goal in the next couple years, starting this year. Starting this year, 15,000 women in the next couple of years? In the next couple years. Wow, that's aggressive. We actually got a few thousands already. So in the beginning, for the first quarter or two, we're making very decent progress. And we have a community partner, happens to be a woman who goes because they have a worldwide organization and they're sending the community message out to promote this. We're also working really closely with the India government to push for this to get their recognition for this as well. Because we believe that will be beneficial for these women we brought back to the workforce. There's multiple aspects. It's not just touching the hearts and the soul of many, many families, but it's also basically injecting highly qualified and competent technical talent back into the India community and industry. So that it actually can proliferate and elevate the entire India technology level. To say it's transformative, I feel like that word isn't even strong enough, Lily. That's remarkable the potential that has on. You mentioned the involvement of women who could, you've been on the board there for quite a while. For more than three years now. And I was looking at some numbers. The growth of that community alone is incredible. Over 180,000 members in 20 countries so far. You've done over 8,000 trainings, workshops, hackathons, conferences. Over $2.5 million has been awarded in developer school and conferences scholarships. Wow, the momentum is very high. It is very high. And you said you're even launching another country this year. So we're not sitting on saying, okay, we're satisfied. We're never satisfied because the world goes on, right? So as the world expand, as the technology excel itself, we want to basically leap ahead with all this. So we're not stopping. So this year, Women Who Code and VMware, we are launching Costa Rica site. So we believe we actually opened a lot of the region of the world and unlock the energy and the innovation and the communities, all gender to work together in India, China and Sofia. And we work really closely with a lot of the industry technical giants and Women Who Code propelling this tech woman community in U.S. and also in Europe. Now, we believe Costa Rica. It's a very strategic site for VMware. Tell us a little bit more about why is it so strategic for VMware? It's a strategic for a couple of reasons. We are doing, as a world, we are working together as a global community and a global clock. So Costa Rica is time zone wise, very nicely, either bridging between the other time zone with U.S. and also it's overlapping very well with U.S. time zone. So they actually could do a lot of the key business execution, including operation and IT and customer support, technical support. So we do have technical people over there, but not enough technical woman momentum. We also believe the country can really use some help from us. So we're working with Women Who Code and this is a decision we've been assessing for a while but we believe that launching Costa Rica will actually make it a blossom in that region of the world, not just Costa Rica. We're kind of looking that we hope it becomes a hub. That's incredible, just the, but also not just what you're doing with Tara and with expanding Women Who Code to Costa Rica. It's also the opportunity for actual economic benefits to these countries. But what I also am hearing is that for example, with Tara, it's not just a VMware myopic, we want more women to come back to the workforce in India. We want them to be introduced to our customer base so that they can network and potentially identify their opportunities for employment. That's right. Even though they do not get a particular position when they are connected to a customer, that is a relationship and that is something that will stay with that woman and that talent for a while. And that is something that we feel is very important to connect all these critical stakeholders together. So Tara has that facet as well. And you mentioned that there's already been about a thousand or a couple of thousand women who've already gone through. A few thousand, more than 2,500 I believe. Any favorite success stories that come to mind? Yes, my favorite success story is the very first Tara certified woman is a woman who can remember. So we're very, very proud of that because that shows the partnership actually works. That means a lot of the technical curriculum and the monthly meetup and all these technical conference that Woman Who Code is trying to do, the scholarship they try to hand off. All those are kind of accumulatively paying off with Tara being the major critical push to push them over that glass ceiling limit, right? I just think that's fantastic. I was looking at the Woman Who Code website just the other day and I saw that your event was sold out Connect 2019. That's right. But just the momentum, the excitement, the support in this community that is growing, as we mentioned earlier, 180,000 plus. Tell us about the Connect event. Connect is a technical conference. We do talk a little bit about the leadership and the software skill, but it has multiple technology track. In fact, this year, what we want to do is we want to start basically elevating into a technology domain track because we now have very successfully created leadership role like a city director, city lead. They incubated from less than 10,000 member in the past three and a half years to 180,000 member. A lot of the kudos and credit go to them. But as a result, we have a wealth body of woman talent that are highly technical and highly versatile in many, many fields, right? Because we believe today for a talent to be successful in technology field, you cannot just specialize in one. If you look at IoT, you look at a blockchain, all these emerging stuff, it's not just about AI or machine learning. It's also about virtualization, about how well you can do the logic and the analytics and the data mining and the algorithms, right? So basically we want to have multiple technology track and that will include things like cloud, like a blockchain. And then that gives also a possibility for women who call to create individual contributor volunteer track. Like we want to basically launch the notion of a cloud architect, right? So that give basically people a way to aspire the growth. And so they can actually measure the growth, which is very good in the sense of that, you know where you stand, you know you can plan for the next step. And so this is something that we want to be able to do. And we're basically launching that as well. Connect also VMware hosted Open the Global Connect in India this year, we had a breakthrough. We actually have more than a thousand attendees. So that's like more than twice the jump from last year. Last year was about maybe 300-ish, right? So this is a tremendous growth and basically it's wonderful to see that there's a lot of technology track and the woman coming in sharing very openly about what they know. And the sharing and the learning and the coaching is part of the whole overall energy as well. So if we look at impact so far, the various impacts that you've talked about with both Tara, which is quite early in its history, women who code, WT squared, and we look at say even in the US alone, 50% of the population is female. It's a tremendous amount of women who are just women in general who are technologically savvy but are passed over through these positions. Then you kind of factor in into that 50%, how many of them are women who've had to leave the workforce for various reasons that we talked about earlier? There's a tremendous amount of women out there with skills who aren't being looked at. Where is women who code and Tara? Where are you on changing those numbers from 50% to 47% to 45%? Do you have any sort of strategic goals in your office numbers-wise? Well, for me personally and for women who code, we want to basically be able to change the world. We want to offer all the technical women in the world a choice for their career ladder. So Tara is a way to do it, to break one particular glass of ceiling, right? And there's also a lot of these scholarships and all this is to help women to be able to do career transformation change. For example, women who code as part of the Connect, we actually hand out five awards to recognize five outstanding women leaders, in our opinion. One of them, she started with a woman who code as an individual member. She was just a junior engineer, but in less than two years period, she is actually now a VP. That's a fast track. It's very fast track. So we believe in human power and potential. We especially believe in a woman that basically is underrepresented in a lot of the technology sectors. Our job is to unlock these potential. And there are barriers and roadblocks in various forms, right, big and small. So the job is really to unlock all of this. And we want to be able to move that needle up towards the right direction with all these things that we're doing. So last thing here, let's finish with how you yourself have broken through many levels of glass ceilings to get where you are today. Share with us a little bit about your career journey. My career journey is recently, about two and a half years ago, I moved from R&D world to strategy transformation office. It's one of these moments I would say is a glass cliff, right? You're standing at the edge of this glass ceiling house and you're just about to plunge in. That was the feeling I got two and a half years ago. But you know what, I am so loving it. It is basically the best career decision I have ever made because there was a dimension that I could never have experienced and seen before because I spent decades in R&D. I viewed out a lot of these know-how and competency and I just work with the business world. But in the transformation office, we do end to end. We actually bridge the two worlds together. So basically for me, it was a fantastic learning journey and it's just the empowerment and the trust I got from VMware's executives and all my coworkers. I feel like that is probably the most transformative decision I ever made. It's not just your shifting technology field within technical world. I literally shift by 180 degree to a different spectrum. But my job is to connect the end-to-end spectrum together which is something that I feel has profound impact with the company and I just love every minute of it. Oh and I love that, that's a great story and it sounds like what you're doing, you're just at the beginning of all of what you're transforming. So I can't wait to interview you next year into here about every great thing that happens the rest of 2019. Lily, thank you so much for coming out with you. Thank you so much for having me. My pleasure. My pleasure. Thanks. I am Lisa Martin, you're watching The Cube, coming to you from Women Transforming Technology for the annual at VMware. Thanks for watching. Thank you.