 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019, brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. Okay, welcome back everyone. LiveCube coverage here at VMworld 2019. In San Francisco, we're in Moscone North Lobby. I'm John Furrier, my co-host, Stu Miniman. We are two great guests. David Appel, vice president, C2 Space and Intelligence and defense civil solution at Raytheon and Gil Schneerson, who's the senior vice president, general manager of VxRail for Dell EMC. Great to have Raytheon. Anything with space, Stu and I get jacked up with that. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate it, I think I'm glad to be here. Gil, VxRail, got a customer here. Impressive rollout. Talk about the story. Well, I think it starts with the fact that we have recently announced our support for Pivotal Kubernetes Services over VMware Cloud Foundation, over VxRail, which has actually the only curated, automated stack in the industry that allows people to leverage containers and infrastructure as a service under one stack. And we've been doing this for about three years now in a different way called the Pivotal ready architecture and Raytheon has actually adopted that architecture to help their customer of the Air Force and that's why we're here today together to talk about, you know. Certainly modernization couldn't be more important conversation in government solutions. You guys are a big provider, Raytheon, known for the tech chops, known for having good engineering. Talk about the solution, what you guys did, what's the use case, talk about the deployment. Yeah, with what's going on in the federal government for a while is the acquisition processes and what's taken sometimes years or decades to get software in the field, causing a lot of unmet requirements and needs of the ultimate user, the war fighters out in the field to be met. So we've been down a journey for the last two years with Pivotal and Dell of how to help the Air Force modernize the Air Force has gone under a transformation in a program called Kessel Run, which is where we've deployed the Pivotal ready architecture to allow us to quickly deploy an infrastructure and allow us to focus on the end users and develop capabilities that they need worldwide and what took years and to now months and days. So it's been a fantastic journey. Tell us what that means for the folks that might not know the pace of the procurement process. I mean, some of this stuff is like 1995 procurement rules. I mean, modernization these days is such an important part of it because the impact is significantly relevant. Yeah, I mean, if you think about in the commercial world today where applications, hundreds of applications be deployed overnight and updates what on the hourly basis in the government space, it can literally take years to define a requirement. Then you have to go through a budgeting cycle all the way up through Congress and then you have to go through an acquisition cycle that could take a year to complete. And so by the time you're actually fielding capability, it is literally five years or more by the time the need was actually identified. And in that five years, the technology probably changed which means your solution has probably changed from what's currently available. So shortening the cycles is what it's all about. And that's really about having the right product not the old product five years ago. How fast things change. It's a pretty important to have that nailed down. It's pretty amazing. And you know, I think you look at transformation and there's usually a trade-off. What we have been working on and what we're announcing but really what we believe over the last four years is a way to transform but stay close to your core. In other words, transformation without trade-offs. And so if you can get your VMware stack now running containers in a fully managed automated stack you don't have to change your skill set. And you can do all of that and start innovating while staying very close to your core competency. You know, you transform, but you don't have to go too far. And I think the story what Raytheon did is fairly amazing because they turned, you know, what did you tell me a 50 year old process, you know, in like in less than half a year into an automated systems that, you know, saves the US Air Force a lot of money. And lives too are safe. I mean, you're putting about people in the field. This is about people's lives too. I mean, it's just the money making. And it's been about transforming the culture of the way the DOD does software. And the first example that Gil was mentioning was tanker planning, which was the ability for the Air Force to refuel flight missions in the air would typically take over eight hours to plan. And it was done by a whiteboard. It was done manually. And in order to automate that and shrink the time, again, that would have gone to that a five year procurement cycle. We were able to deploy new applications using the pitiful already architecture within 150 days and get those out worldwide to the field. That's done two things. It's from a financial perspective, it's saving over $200,000 a day in just fuel costs from optimizing the tanker planning. But more importantly, it's actually more efficient and protecting the safety of those flight crews. They're not in the air as long. They might not be in a hostile environment as long. So the security of the Air Force is even more important. As Pivotal always says, they're outcome driven. That's pretty good outcome. I mean, talk about the impact that you've had on everyone else around you because I'm sure there's some blockers in your way, people's feathers got ruffled, but then people see success, they want to copy it. So that's a pattern you see in a lot of government where, hey, there's a new way to do it, modern way. Yeah, so we're, I instead, we're seeing it in two ways. One from a broader DOD perspective. The Air Force was out front here. They established this and from a DOD perspective, what they're calling their Kessel Run Initiative is really taking off. You're seeing other Kessel Run-like programs being stood up like a program called Kobayashi Maru and Rogue Blue and a few others across DOD. So it's proliferating now across the DOD from a customer perspective, DOD customer perspective. From an industry perspective, our competitors are quickly trying to catch up to us and they're trying to copy our playbook, but we're continuing to innovate and continue on this journey, so we're moving ahead with Pivotal and Dell. First of all, David, I think Pat Gelsinger must have been talking to your team because you're mashing up Star Wars and Star Trek with Kessel Run and Kobayashi there, but we talk about mashing up. The stack that you're putting together, VxRail was really built around simplicity and delivers that. That's what Hyperconverge Infrastructure does. We start talking about VCF and containers and PKS on that. Kubernetes, nobody says is simple, but help us walk through. How simple is it for you to leverage and deploy this? You've got organizational challenges and other things, so where's the solution? Sounds like use the ready node and where directionally is it headed? Yeah, let me answer from this perspective. So we started this journey with Pivotal and the Air Force about two years ago, and at that time we started with a group of probably a dozen or less folks that actually even understood the technology or the products and the solutions that Dell and Pivotal bring forward. In those two years, we're now up to over 100 people, fully embracing the technology. It's created an environment where it's easier for us to recruit and retain people because it's modern, it's not the old ways we used to do business. And we're finding that it's been very easy to deploy, very easy to train people up and very easy to operate. So from that perspective, it's just been fantastic. From not just the technology perspective, but also the cultural transformation perspective. Yeah, Gil, I'd love you to comment on that because remember, gosh, when CI and HCI first rolled out, the people that had those jobs were worried we were going to take their jobs away. Now, when I hear your customer talking about, it's easy to train them and even easier for me to recruit and retain, that's a powerful story. Are you hearing that across your customer base? I'll tell you what's a little different. In the past, we have simplified things and we've made work somewhat go away, but there was no alternative work. Today, every developer, every IT person, they can't wait to go and be a DevOps person, right? So for IT, when we come in and we say, we're going to take this off your plate so you can free up your time, it really means something now because they know exactly what they want to do. They want to go and they want to be DevOps, they want to develop new apps, they want to move forward. And so it's very synergistic in a way that we offload some of the burden from them and they actually do free up to do cooler stuff and then they like it. And they get to keep their traditional apps with containers, gives them great capability not to throw away. That's a great point. I think, as I said before, it's really important to convey this. The transformation without trade-offs is a big deal because they can keep the application, they can have run the same environment. Right in our case, they can do it at ease and in remote locations all over the world with less management and at the same time they can innovate and manage those environments. And I think as long as we can keep that up, we'll make a lot of people productive. Well, I got to ask David the security question because one of the things that comes up all the time, obviously Department of Defense, security's top of mind. Industrial IoT are now not just malware getting in for credit card information. You're talking about actual equipment, you're talking about flights in the air, hacking with physical things is a concern and it's a big IoT kind of conversation. You're in the middle of that, this is your world. What's your thoughts on the security question? So we've obviously had to go through that in order to get authority to operate to push things into theater and one of the strongest benefits we've seen is the DevOps process and the platforms has all that security built in, all the testing as we're going through it. So the thousands of tests that are running as new threats are identified, the platform is updating with the latest patches or whatever it may be. So on the automation side of it. So we're actually seeing a lot of the security, I don't want to call risks go away, but our ability to mitigate them is being built into the software itself. So we haven't seen an issue yet where we haven't been able to get things authority to operate and pushed out to the field. So there's a high bar there too. It's a high bar, very high bar, very high bar. And that was part of the, also the challenge of getting systems fielded in months and days versus years because of the ability to get that operation. And this is a really big story I think. First of all, Raytheon is a well-known brand, but the modernization of getting stuff into theater and or into production, your production theater, military operations. That's a big deal. I mean, I think people don't really understand in the government how fast this happens. I think that's a real testament to the solution. So I mean. Well, the powerful thing to it is, the National Defense Strategy is all about capability to speed of relevance. And that's all about technology. Future wars aren't going to be decided by the size of your army or the size of your arsenal. It's going to be about how do you get data to decision makers faster and how do they can act faster? And that's where software and this infrastructure we're putting in place and I'm putting capabilities in the hands of the people that need it faster. That's what it's all about. And you know, General Secretary Mattis who was a former of the Secretary of Defense said, 48% of all the casualties are usually frontline warfighters. And that's where the technology edges, so to speak. So again, this is such a cutting edge topic. Talk about it for days. How do you feel about this? This is pretty exciting. I'm just happy that every time I come into theCUBE, this is the second time I do it with a customer. You give me the opportunity to learn, you know, have a deeper relationship with one of my, well probably now 7,000 customers, which you know, it's really hard to keep up with these days. And so, you know, we make technologies for people to use and when you see it in the field, you know, doing good, it's a great thing. And it's very motivational. It's a transformation story. It's really one of the great transformation stories. They have to. Yeah. Making a difference. Great. David would love to hear, you know, what's on your ask for your partners that are deploying? Kind of give us a look forward roadmap that you can share. No, again, I go back to everything we're about right now is speed and getting capability faster. Clearly in our marketplace right now, we're fully embracing agile DevOps and everything it takes to deploy software from that perspective. Moving into things like artificial intelligence and machine learning, autonomy are the big things that are on our horizon from a technology perspective. And as our partners are in those areas and can help us bring more capability in that, that's going to help our end customer, the DOD as well. What's the big takeaway from VMworld this year for you guys? What's the big observation? Yeah, I'll be honest. This is my first time at VMware. I'm amazed. I was at Dell Technology World a few months ago. I've really enjoyed it. I think it's a great event. And I'm just enjoying learning all the technologies. So I've enjoyed the day. Yeah, what's your big takeaway? Well, I'm part of the family. So I'm a little more familiar and even for me. You're brief. Even for me, the rate of innovation that VMworld puts out there is amazing. And you see how everything plugs to VM. You see how the vision keeps being completed. We're in a good spot in the sense that we actually have what people need right now. And we do it better than everybody else. And you'd think that being number one in almost every category, you'd be sitting there complacent and oh, we keep pushing the envelope, doing more, innovating more, integrating more. So it's very exciting to see that happen. Well, great story here, Raytheon. Congratulations for your success. I think it's super important to have a prepared military, certainly in saving lives and doing it modern way is kind of a miracle these days in governments. Congratulations. And I thank our partners for continuing to innovate because that's helping us. All right, great story. Cube coverage here, VMworld 2019. I'm John Purir with Stu Miniman. We'll be back with more after this short break.