 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 to Moscone here where at San Francisco, VMworld 2019, I'm John Walls along with Stu Miniman here on theCUBE. Thanks for joining us here for our first of three days of coverage here at a very exciting program. I was just blown away by the keynotes this morning. We'll talk about that with Beth Phalen and Rajiv Ramaswamy here. Beth is President and GM of Data Protection at Dell EMC and Rajiv, of course, Chief Operating Officer at VMware. So thanks to you both for joining us. Good to see you both. Glad to be here. So let's, first off, let's just talk about the, if you will, the vibe of the keynotes. Pat, great command at the stage obviously. A lot of big announcements, but I was just, I thought the whole presentation and the size of the crowd and the reactions were fairly impressive. What was your take on it? I totally agree, being in the audience, it was comprehensive, it was holistic, it told a story that people could connect with, and it recognized just how much the world of IT is changing and what VMware is doing and influencing that, I was impressed. Yeah, no, no, from my vantage point of being on the inside here, it's, you know, our portfolio continues to get broader and broader, our relevance to customers keeps getting bigger, and this year in particular, we had a whole series of announcements, you know. There are two major acquisitions, our largest two acquisitions over the last week, so there was a lot to digest, and in fact, we were actually working on putting that story together at the very last minute, as you can imagine, because these acquisitions were literally announced on Thursday. So a lot came together, it came together beautifully, I thought Pat did a great job putting it all together and giving the story. Yeah, I know, the people are obviously, everybody's saying what, 10 days ago, two weeks ago, say, can't happen that fast, can it? Well, the answer is yes, it can happen that fast. I'm going to give you one more story there. You might remember Calum Eid was on stage, he was a guy who swam across the English Channel at the very beginning, so just to tell you how last minute that was, he finished his swim, I talked to him on Friday morning, and then I went to Pat and said, Pat, you know, one of our guys actually swam across the English Channel, and he said, yeah, we should have him on stage at VMworld, so we flew him over over the weekend. Wow, wow. He comes to VMworld and there he was on stage. Oh, that's impressive. It was a great story, it was a good call to bring him in. Yes, yeah. All right, so obviously you have this, you have a strong partnership that got a little stronger with some announcements today, so let's get into that a little bit, Beth, if you would talk a little bit about what you announced on stage or what was announced on stage today. Yeah, I mean, there are three things that we're talking about this week with our good partners at VMware, how we make sure that we have data protection for the Dell EMC Cloud, for the VMware Cloud, excuse me, on Dell EMC, previewing what we're doing to protect Kubernetes environments, which is super exciting, and then the project we talked about just quickly on stage this morning around how we're doing work together to bring PowerProtect into as tight as possible to have the best integration for vSphere and our VMworld customers. So, Majeev, anything that I missed? Yeah, no, no, at the big picture level, look, I mean, you had a long history in data protection solutions. You modernized your portfolio quite a bit over the last year with the introduction of the new X400 appliances in the IDPA PowerProtect software. And we've been talking together for a while now about what can we be doing together better. And this just came across, we've been working on this together and now we have specific things to talk about. So on the first one, which is really data protection for VMware Cloud. Now, VMware Cloud on AWS, one of the first use cases, important use cases is actually around disaster recovery. So customers want to use the cloud as a backup or a DR site. And very cost-effective to do that, it makes a lot of sense. Now we've been working to continue to improve that solution and making it much more broadly applicable, making use of native cloud storage capabilities. For example, Amazon S3. And so that's really the collaboration that we're doing with Beth's team here, where we're using their underlying technology to build a VMware disaster recovery as a service that will work on all VMware cloud environments and make use of native cloud storage capabilities. So very powerful, brings a lot of value for our customers together. Yeah, and I think that everybody watching probably understands just how important it is to have a DR site. But for many companies, it's cost prohibitive and really old schools to think about having a dedicated DR site. So using the cloud as your destination, if something were to happen, you had to recover is an excellent fit. And I expected to be one of the fastest growing use cases. We're already seeing it, it's going to continue to grow dramatically. I'm going forward, having DR as a service as a core to people's recovery strategy. Rajiv, one of the things we've been watching is VMware's always had a robust ecosystem, but it's been going through a major shift. You know, VMware kind of at the center and the server storage and network around it to where everything fits into the multi-cloud environment. When we see data protection with VMware cloud on Dell EMC, it's obviously a natural fit because it's under there. What do you talk to your partners about when you say, okay, the Dell side of things is getting further embedded into VMware? How do you make sure that you have an open and robust ecosystem without, you know, balancing that? That's a great question. You know, VMware has always pided itself on being a platform company. And you're only a platform company if you actually have a broad ecosystem of people who are building and developing on your platform. So we are not walking away from that one little bit. We continue to support a very broad-based set of providers across many different functions, whether it be data protection, whether it be security, whether it be compliance, you know, a whole bunch of things around the platform. What we will do, though, is we will pick a set of partners and we will do deeper integrations with them. And we're always going to have broad APIs available for everybody. Just as another example, you know, with Carbon Black that you saw today, you know, we had actually partnered with Carbon Black on a deep integration between Carbon Black and AppDefense. Okay, but at the same time, we have open APIs, you know, with every guest introspection provided that there is, and we will continue to maintain that with every endpoint provided that there is. It's much the same way here. We're going to do deep integration with Beth's team. We are actually using some of their technologies to enhance our services, but also enabling them to do better integration with vSphere and the whole VMware environment, while at the same time allowing a rich ecosystem of third-party providers to work with us on top of our platforms. Yeah. Beth, I was wondering if you can help us dig in a little bit to that, you know, Kubernetes space. So, you know, obviously a big present here at the show, you know, prevalent talk in the keynote. You know, when I walk the show floor, everybody's talking about Kubernetes. So, from the data protection standpoint, you know, what's been done to, you know, move into that environment? What's different that people might not have known from your group from just a couple of years ago? Yeah, a couple of things. One, we've been working on this jointly with John Rose's organization and doing an incubation on this for a well over a year. And working with Valera, making sure that everything we're doing is tied very closely with what's going on in VMware. And as you start talking about the container of space, what you're saying about data protection, it's a different set of assets that you need to protect. You have to make sure that you're protecting the metadata. You have to bring up the whole environment. And so it's sort of a variation on a theme. And what we're particularly proud of is that we're approaching it in a way that's really grounds up in designing data protection, not retrofitting the past, but what are the needs for Kubernetes environment and make sure that they can restore that as, you know, come back to whatever data they need to do and whatever application state they need to get back to. You talked about Valero too, I mean, so how does this, what you're talking about, how does that enhance or how does that adding to the data protection capabilities of that then? I mean, what are you building on in terms of enhanced services there? Well, I think the, I mean, what I didn't say about the project, I'd like to hear your point of view too, is as the Valero builds out and working on the Kubernetes environment, it becomes the center for people's production environment, and as you move into production environment, data protection becomes an essential part of that. So as a couple of years ago, Kubernetes might've been something that people were dabbling with or maybe had not their most important applications running on. It's now becoming center and core, and so what we're doing working with VMware is making sure that directly integrated into that, the use cases they need around backup, disaster recovery and all types of RTO and RPOs are all met, even though now there are applications being run in a Kubernetes environment. So look, our vision around this, we talked about Tanzu, VMware Tanzu, which is a whole portfolio. It's a great name by the way. Yeah, thank you. So the portfolio, the idea here is you're going to have build, run and manage, and when you look at the managed component of this, it's not just that every service is going to be delivered by VMware, there's going to be a set of third-party services that run on top of this platform that will do functions like backup, disaster recovery, for Kubernetes clusters. And my anticipation is that Dell would be a second-party, third-party on that, on that environment, right, as part of the overall Tanzu portfolio as a marketplace-type service. And so they're working towards, yeah. Yeah, just following up on that, Tanzu, VMware has mostly been a platform and infrastructure layer for applications. That's correct. Pivotal was the group that really dealt with the model, but you've made some acquisitions, data protections always had that integration with the application. What's changing now that requires Dell and VMware to kind of delve up-stack a little bit more than it might have in the past? Well, for us, it's very simple, as Pat already articulated. The world is moving toward, it's all about how to build and manage your application's portfolio. That's become a CIO's top job. And so for us to be relevant to that space, infrastructure companies naturally need to move up, address the needs of application developers. And while at the same time, the application developers need the infrastructure teams to deliver the infrastructure that they can easily build around and manage these apps without having to do it all themselves. So that's really, that together, they're bringing together the developers and the IT operators is what we are doing. And that's the rationale for why we brought Pivotal in-house and why we're building this overall Tanzu portfolio. It's got what goes around, comes around, right? Absolutely. Well, as Pat explained, right? Right. Six, seven years ago, we weren't really in a position to focus on it. Right. And it made sense to have Pivotal stand on and they invested, they built up their franchise over time. And here we are, this time is right. Right. Rajeev and Beth, thank you. I appreciate the time. Good to see you. Great discussion. Congratulations on day one, off to a great start and... Not over yet. Yeah. Oh, I know, I know. Nor for us. But a great start. Thank you so much. Thank you, sir. Good to see you both. Always a pleasure. Thanks for being with us once again. I'm sorry, sorry. Back before, live here on theCUBE, you're watching the news coverage of VMworld 2019.