 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 San Francisco. We continue our coverage here live on theCUBE, 10th year, John, of Covering VMworld. This is 2019's version. John Furrier, John Wall, is glad to have you inside the Bosconi Center. We are joined now by Varun Shabra, who is the Vice President of Cloud Marketing at Dell EMC. Good to see you today. Thanks for having me. How's your week been so far? It's been amazing. I mean, how can you not get excited at all the innovation we're seeing this week? Well, we're going to hear about some big announcements too, you guys have made. And Munya Mahazadeen, who is the Vice President of Product Marketing for Cloud Security and Workspace Solutions at VMware. Munya, good to see you. Good to see you again. Yeah, you by the way, you might be the busiest guy here. Yesterday, when you came into the set, you were coming in, you just spoke into 1,300 people in a standing room only session. You're coming out 500 folks. How many sessions have you done? The seven. Seven. We usually don't count the one-on-one with the analysts and, you know, with the customers and partners and press. And tomorrow I actually host 140 press media analysts on campus in Palo Alto from Asia Pacific, because they've flown all the way from Asia. So. Just 140? 140, yeah. That's a piece of cake. So, I mean, I... And you're always smiling, too. Knowing that this is a pretty wide audience to whom you've been speaking. But just generally, what are you, if there's a common thread at all about the kinds of questions that people are coming to you with or the concerns or maybe just the things they want to talk about being inspired by what they're hearing here at the show? Okay, now I'll cover two aspects of it. One, obviously from analysts themselves, you know, they actually have been very complimentary about the way we've taken our approach. I'm not sure if you're going to pay attention. In the last couple of years, we've been talking, especially on the cloud side, the narrative to be very much about use cases, you know, solving problems. You know, in the keynote, we talked about, hey, migrate, modernize. It wasn't about, hey, I've got the next big product here with all these features and capabilities. You do this and that. So, we've kind of shifted our narrative and it was very, you know, the analysts, you know, across the board, you know, we've been saying, you know, appreciative of the fact that you're actually changing a narrative to be very compelling and we've kind of reflected in, we have some, you know, things here like Cloud City, where it's not a standard demo boot. It's a customer's walk-in and they touch and feel and see which we did at Dell Technology World too. It's like, what's your business probably going through? Look at these applications. I'm sitting, I don't know if I should be modernizing them or should I be migrating into Amazon or Azure. So, you know, that narrative, the analysts are appreciative of and that reflects into the customer conversations I've been having in our briefings, like one-on-one with customers. They're really kind of lost as to, hey, I'm working in this IT environment. There's a lot of, you know, pressure from me to, you know, modernize my applications or go adopt my cloud-first strategy is, where do I start? Where do I go? It's like, you know, there's big pressure. So, they just want clarity. I think in everything we're going to be doing in our strategy that comes out, obviously the buzzword for this VMworld is Tanzu, right? And, you know, we- This was one of the product announcements. It was actually a branding, you know, yeah. Branding announcement, to be honest, is, yeah, because we're trying to bring together as, you know, and Tanzu has landed in build, run, manage. Build as in, you know, how our intent to acquire Pivotal already acquired Bitnami. How all our different acquisitions with different brand names are coming together to establish our build portfolio. Again, vSphere. Everybody knows vSphere, Project Pacific, PKS, all of those create a good runtime environment and manage to build it like, how do you manage with assets from Wavefront? Again, more Bitnami and, you know, so this multiple brands that are coming into this package of build run. So we had to create Tanzu to, you know, put forward statement together that, yes, there's going to be seven or eight different brands coming into this, but going forward is Tanzu. So that's, of course, a great strategy on Dell EMC side, on Dell technologies. Michael Dell was in here, and I asked him, and I said, he kind of, you've been number one in everything he loves to talk about. I'm number one in servers again, you know, to kind of get on HP, a little bit HP. But those are piece parts now. So we look at the cloud game, it's bringing disparate parts together, kind of, and making it coherent from a positioning standpoint and understandable and deployable. So you guys are going down there, that's your cloud strategy. Take a minute to explain that. Yeah, absolutely, John. So what we've been doing, we announced this at Dell Technologies World this year, but, you know, in the cloud infrastructure space, we're working very closely with VMware to tightly integrate our hardware solutions with their cloud software. And we think that by combining these two in a tightly integrated joint engineer, jointly engineered solutions, coupled with the services that, you know, both VMware and LEMC bring to customers, we think we have, we're giving customers a very consistent experience, both with their on-premises infrastructure, with public cloud, as well as with the Edge cloud. And then that's really what we're trying to do. That's what we've been building upon. And you know, I think the announcements this week, you know, just hopefully show customers that the sky's the limit, whether it's not just your infrastructure management, also your app development, managing your apps, both traditional and cloud native. It's all here. And what's the big takeaway from your standpoint that you'd like people to know about what's going on at Dell EMC for the VMware relation? What's the big top item? Yeah, there's just so much. We could talk about it forever, but if I summarize it. We only have two hours. Okay, got it, all right, I'll set the timer. The most important thing that people should know about it, that's the big... You know, both Dell EMC and VMware I think are very, very customer-driven companies that we respond to customer feedback and we try to respond to them very fast. That's been true throughout our respective lifetimes. And what we've done in the... So I think there's two broad areas of collaboration. One is in the cloud space, which is all about, you know, making sure that the innovation that VMware's bringing to market, we are providing that in a tightly integrated infrastructure solution, right? So we announced, from a Dell EMC side, support for VMware PKS being deployed automatically on VxRail using VCF, right? So now customers can, you know, a lot of IT teams were telling us, hey, we have our developers, internal developers, banging slash knocking on the door, saying we need to build cloud-native applications. You need to give us an environment that we can use. And, you know, if these IT teams don't turn around and give them something relatively quickly, well, guess what, you know, the developers will go somewhere else, right? Yeah, exactly. And then if you look at the Kubernetes environment today, if you really look at what the work that's required to set up Kubernetes-ready infrastructure, so a lot of scripting, a lot of manual work, command line interfaces, testing stuff, and what VMware PKS does, and what Tanzu will do as well, is really makes it easy, right? And we've taken that with the magic of VMware Cloud Foundation sitting on top of VxRail to make it super easy for our customers to be able to deploy Kubernetes-ready infrastructure and then have it be ready for scale, right? And then the important thing here also is, this is the same infrastructure, VxRail and VCF, that our customers are using for traditional applications as well, right? Trying to reduce that complexity, give them one platform. Today's cloud, you know, we had, we were doing the same integration, not just with our HCI platform, but also with our best-to-breed storage, server networking with VCF. And then we're also making investments on data protection. Like, you know, it's so important to be able to manage your data in this multi-cloud world. You have applications sitting everywhere, data, we all know that data's a crown jewel, so. Yeah, it's really, I think, validating from the VMware point of view how that works, right, is about applications, is about the infrastructure, and is about the operations. And it really kind of, together, as we talk about Tanzu, PKS, is giving our customers the choice of, you pick, Kubernetes, you know, environments, application choice. It took us actually, we didn't arrive at it in that order. We did it in the order of infrastructure. So Cloud Foundation is a critical piece of the joint engineering between VMware and Dell Technologies. It's really, from a VMware perspective, it took Cloud Foundation, and that's the stack that runs in every public cloud. So, you know, AWS, Azure, GCP, 4,000 plus, you know, cloud provider partners. But Cloud Foundation is a platform that was validated on Dell Tech hardware. And, you know, that's the package. But now, as you see, we're lighting that same infrastructure up for traditional and Kubernetes applications. I think the app side's important to point out because if you look at the VMware's heritage, and you look at Dell's heritage, you had apps that ran on PCs, apps that ran on servers, client server. And if you look at the virtualization, that was an under the covers app in innovation that didn't require code changes. So that's the DNA that you guys have. Now, when you think about like Cloud 2.0, which we've been riffing on that concept, that's basically enterprise cloud. I mean, talk about hybrid cloud. Applications are going to drive the value. And our premise is that they're going to be customer requirements that traditionally wouldn't have fit on the product marketing management feature list. Customers are going to define what they want, they'll build it, and then they'll dictate to the infrastructure to make it run. None of this, well, we can't do that yet. It'll be, yes we can, it's to be enabled to be dynamic. So this is a new Cloud 2.0 feature. This changes the complete game on suppliers. Oh, completely agree. You know, to your point, because you know, you bring it to, you know, back to virtualization, we've been going higher up the stack on, so day zero virtualization. Infrastructure will virtualize. So the line of abstraction has just been climbing from hardware virtualization next to like, you know, Pat's platform of the service. Yeah, and you kind of, we're working up our way down infrastructure. Now that base infrastructure platform looks like clouds, right? And then they're coming down a little bit over here on the app side, you know, meet in the middle. Meet in the middle, right? That's Kubernetes, hello. Absolutely, so app and app middleware is shrinking down this way. Infrastructure, you know, to cloud and Kubernetes is right in the middle to say, well, there's a bit of infrastructure as a code I can pull. Here's a bit of app APIs I can kind of draw from and that's kind of a nice future middleware for their decade. I mean, I think applications are in charge, right? I mean, that's what's, that's the dynamic and that's the way it should be. But it never was that way before. It was basically the infrastructure was your gating factor, the network. Exactly. So now cloud two point out is about network security data. Yes. DevOps, but true DevOps, Dev and Ops, infrastructure as code. Sorry, go ahead. The only point I wanted to add is the reason the emphasis on apps has changed, apps in the past used to be a business support system. Apps today is business. Yeah. That's the change. I mean, it's really your, you're going to live or die based on the digital services you provide your customers. The other thing I was going to say about cloud 2.0 is that it's also becoming increasingly clear when we talk to customers that customers are realizing cloud is not a place, right? There was this kind of cloud 1.0 was okay, big honking data centers, hyperscalers. What we've found now is that customers have gone through that process of, and there's a lot more maturity in terms of understanding what is the better running on-premises? What's better running in public cloud? And there's a place for both of them and that cloud is actually the automation, the service delivery. It's more an operation and a way of being almost than a place. Well, excuse me, what does it do for you all then in terms of challenge, especially at your teams? Because you're talking about all this customization, you're allowing the application to almost drive, you know, you're changing places in terms of who's the power of the relationship. Can I go for it? Yeah, so I mean, what does that do for you all in terms of how you approach that, how you change your mindset and how you change what you deliver? I think John, it's, the way I think about it is that both Dell EMC and VMware or any technology provider that's worked assault is in the business of building platforms, right? And platforms are essentially extensible, they really provide a foundation that other people can innovate on top of, right? And that's how I think you handle the customization, right? If one thing I think we can all agree on is that IT has always taught us there's no one size fits all, right? So I think providing choice along every single dimension is super important for our customers. Yeah, I think the platform thing is a huge point and I was going to ask that question before John got jumped in because one of the things that you just brought up as a platform is you guys have to build an enabling platform, one, as suppliers, okay? The successful Cloud 2.0 companies are ones that are innovating in weird areas. Monitoring, for instance, like who would have thought that monitoring now observability would be such a massive lucrative sector for IPOs, M&A, why? Because it's data, it's instrumentation. This is operating system kind of thinking here. This is like networks. So it's thinking like a platform on the supplier side's one. A customer's got to start thinking like a platform because their stakeholders are their internal developers or API shipping to suppliers. This is new for enterprises. This requires full hybrid capability. This requires data at the center of the value proposition. That's, you know, again, the biggest value is business and IT are coming together on the area of applications and data. That's a given because the successful businesses are the ones who leverage those. The guys who fail in the future are the ones who don't pay attention to how critical applications are to the business logic and how critical data is to be able to mine and get the behavioral analytics to get ahead of the customer. Now the challenge in all this is what I'm learning in covering some of the public sector activity from the CIA contract and Jedi with Amazon to we had Raytheon here earlier as another customer example with another client. Is that procurement and how they do business is not just a technical thing. There's like all this old legacy things like how do you procure technology? Who you hire? We hire developers, we build our own stacks. So there's a lot of things going on. Yes, and you know, it's really interesting even on the procurement front how our customers experience with cloud has changed expectations, right? And that's really what we're doing with VMware Cloud and Dell EMC is what customers told us is, hey, I love the agility of the cloud, portal based access, easy procurement. I love just being able to click a button and not have to navigate all this complexity. I need that for my on-premises infrastructure and my edge infrastructure. And that's an example of how all of these dynamics are really all converging. Well, if you can create an abstraction layer and remove complexity and make things easy, simple and affordable, that's a good business model. Absolutely, you know, one of our customers without taking the name, right? They're massive retailer, you know, they're spinning up their retail outlets like crazy. They measure success in this, was one truck roll. So they want to have the entire infrastructure come in to stand up one of the retail outlets in one truck roll when everything comes in, one button push that everything gets provision and up to go. So this means they got to have full software instrumentation, automation, intelligence. This is kind of where Cloud 2.0 will lead us all. Exactly, and that's the expectation now that they go so fast in deploying this one truck roll, hardware is there, switch it on from the cloud, it stood up and they're in operation 24 hours. Well, guys, we're going to get you on our power panels and our Palo Alto studio on this topic. Cloud 2.0 is going to be very aggressive and controversial topic because it's going to challenge the status quo. Oh yeah. And that's really what we're talking about here. Yeah, absolutely. That's in our DNA. And the good news is that's more time with John. So as we, before we say so long, we've talked about clients, we've talked about the folks you've met here, we talked about the presentation, all this thing. And what they're all getting out of it, what are you getting out of this? I mean, what are your takeaways as you had back to your respective work orders? You go first, yeah. Okay, yeah. I think for me, the biggest takeaway is just how incredibly vibrant the VMware user community is. I mean, it is unlike anything else I've seen before. And now with the things like Project Pacific, I just feel like it's an opportunity for this community to be able to take the skills they have right now and actually go into this brave new world of containers with so much help versus having to do this all by yourself. Which means it's going to be a, you know, if you think about how large this community is, just think about how much innovation this will spur in the container space and because of that in the application space and then because of that in businesses. I mean, this is a, it just feels like a tipping point to me. To me? Sure. I got high-fives from every tech geek, you know, when we came out, you know, I also run our technical advisory boards for the company, these are the hardcore geeks who have followed and you know, us to the, you know, these are the fans and they were like, you know, they always kind of like, if you walk out of them and you talk to them and they go, eh, and you know, how did it work? Because they're- They're a high bar, yeah. They have a very high bar. They cut through all your marketing messaging. They go right to the, hey, is there meat in this? And the high-fives I got, the hugs I got out of this is like, guys, you're nailing it. That's enough to tell me that, hey, this was like, 10 years ago. You're all smiles. Right, right. It's happy again. Yeah, that motivates me. It's like, oh, you're so busy, I'm still smiling because the energy is, you know, it's positive. I can't give you a hug. I'll give you a high-five though. All right, right, right. All right. Good work. Gentlemen, thanks for the time. Always, he's still smiling too. He's still smiling. He's got to swing to a step. All right, good deal. Thanks for being with us here. All right, thanks guys. Live on theCUBE. You're watching Art Coverage in World 2019 where San Francisco back with more right after this.