 It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in San Francisco at Moscone North Lobby here for VMworld 2015. This is Silicon Angles theCUBE. This is our flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of Silicon Angles. I'm a coach Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.com Research. Our next guest is Robin Matlock, the CMO of VMware. We are in the Cube set and the two sets here this year. We have the director set, new innovation here at VMworld. Again, setting the stage, the leadership of VMware and the person behind all of this is Robin Matlock CMO. Thanks so much, first of all, for letting us come and do your lobby here. It's been great so far. I just want to say thank you. You guys, you know we love having you. You're a big part of this program for us. Six years now, we've been watching the transformation. It's been interesting. This year has been fun to watch because of all the outside noise and certainly the products are doing great. Pat Gelsinger's keynote this morning was really a home run. He never really knocked it out of the park. So the messaging is tight this year. Really good. Thank you, John. It's looking forward. It's got a longer perspective. It's not a short-term driven messaging. Is that by design? I mean, this is kind of showing the future. Yeah, absolutely. We really tried to change things up this year and that's important is that we have to reinvent. We have to make ourselves relevant and part of it is taking something like the program at VMworld and making sure that every year it delivers fresh new, a different perspective for these attendees. So we changed things. We started with Carl, talking about OneCloud, any application, any device. Very much framed the conversation for VMworld and the keynotes, but also more of a 12, 18, 24 month kind of view. And today we closed with Pat Gelsinger on the stage and you're right. It's all about forward-looking. What lies in the next two, three, five years and what is our point of view on it? And I agree with you. I think Pat really did an amazing job this morning. So the ecosystem's changing. We've been monitoring the ecosystem on our CrowdChat platform. We had some great conversations with the thought leaders. It's changing. The demographics seem to be changing. You own IT. They got great market share and traditional IT. That's VMware's legacy wheelhouse. So the ops guys are all here. But the DevOps focus is really scratching the services at a whole new developer community. Do you guys, were you guys aware of that? Is that kind of like the big aha this year? Was it, is that a big part of the ecosystem? Can you share some color in how this DevOps theme is now resonating through the ecosystem? Sure. And without a doubt, I wouldn't call it an aha. I think it was a very strategic intentional move, frankly. The reality is the world is changing and it's impacting IT as part of the core of that transformation. So IT needs to change to be relevant for business. And DevOps is a part of that. How are we going to build applications in this cloud native world? How are we going to do it faster, more agile, and serve our businesses quicker? Well, DevOps plays a key role there and what we can do is help IT serve that development community. I mean, obviously we had a lot of big announcements that are coming out this week. And we wanted to make sure we had a way to deliver that content to this new audience. So the ecosystem is evolving and it needs to because part of it is how we all transform. So I'm glad you're noticing some of those changes. They're very strategic. I mean, the other thing about VMworld that has been since day one is the core of the practitioner community and the peers. And people are excited to be here. They look forward to it. They come early. They hang out with their friends. But the content is very much around the customer. And so you've been able to preserve that but at the same time provide an interesting layer of senior management perspectives, high level customers. What if we could talk about that core? Sure, the core, we really do see VMworld as a technical conference. That would be the one thing that's anchored in the ground. Now as the people that need to engage with technology and as technology itself shifts and changes and VMware's offerings shift and change the ecosystem, we have to be able to address a broader set of different types of audience. So the practitioners are core but now you get the DevOps audience. You get mobility professionals. You get networking ops people. You get storage folks. So although the content will always stay very educational and technical in nature, I do think we've done a really good job starting to broaden to appeal to these different audience types. Yeah, and so that's the other piece that I wanted to address is that I think the roles are shifting within IT. And so to me what this conference does is allows people who want a different career path to find one here. They don't have to go to 10 different conferences and that's unique I think in the industry. There was a wonderful tweet. You'll have to pull it up for your audience and I'm sorry I can't reference the gentleman that did it but it was at the end of yesterday while Kit Colbert and Ray O'Farrell were presenting, we ran over a little bit. So some people were moving on to their sessions and he tweeted that those that are leaving the hall right now, I predict they may not have jobs five years from now because of the shifts and changes and how relevant it is to be in this cloud need of world. Initially the knee jerk reaction to that change is somewhat negative and disconcerting but I think when people come to this event and they get back in the plan and they start thinking about the opportunities they see this affords a lot of different avenues and it's really grown tremendously over the years. I think VMware is doing a lot to help people bridge the two worlds. And that's a big part of our philosophy. It's a big part of how we're helping customers kind of get from point A to point B and helping the practitioners leverage the skills they've built over the last decade and really apply those to what's going to be required of them in the next decade. I'm glad you mentioned that. That was a big theme of Pat's talk, the bridge and you hear a lot of talk from the analyst community. Gartner in particular talks about bimodal IT. My friends at IDC talk about the third platform but the problem I've always had with that is it's more silos. Like you don't want to be part of the old and I don't want to be part of it. Well, what you guys are saying, your messaging is no we're going to bring the existing that asset base that you have along. We recognize you want to go from point A to point B without just ripping everything out. And so that's fundamental to the strategy and it's coming through in the messaging. That's great to hear. That is fundamental. It's Massimino Ray Ferry is the guy who said the cube. We just pulled it up on our real-time analytics system. But he said, I feel I was leaving Erkino during kit cobra session maybe without a job in five years. Fact, hashtag fact. But that is a vibe of the show. What are some of the stats on the numbers? Share some of the inside the numbers, attendees, sessions. What can you share? Yes, I mean, I'm really proud of the stats actually. So we exceeded our goal. We have 23,000 and 500 plus attendees and they're still coming in the door as you can see out at the registration desk. So biggest VMworld ever, really solid growth and the demographics is shifting. We're starting to see more of these new audience types. So really excited about that. We have over 400 breakout sessions, very well subscribed. I mean, the demand for the breakouts is quite incredible. We have almost 300, about 289 or so exhibitors in the Solutions Exchange. There is simply no more floor space. If I could add another building, I'd be able to scale out and get another 100 in the door. But I'm just simply have a finite resource of space and we're tapped out. You should take over Howard Street. Let's go. That's next. That's a great vision. We're there. We're there. We're there. So I gotta ask about, there's never anyone's, it's always hard to please everybody at these events and you always feel, oh, nothing new at VMworld. And then you have people coming, oh, it's so fresh and relevant. So you have a lot of people from the old guard and the new guard kind of coming together. As Pat said, cowboys and farmers kind of working together is his quote on the cube. What is that vibe right now? How would you describe that? Because a lot of people are scratching their heads and saying, what's new this year VMworld? I'm not seeing anything new. So for the record, share folks, what's new this year? Share the new stuff. Yeah, I think there's a lot of new stuff. But we are getting into a more iterative development world where we're doing kind of lots of littler releases instead of five years ago where you just, you held out for two years and then it was just one huge release. You've got the Evo SDDC that was new, right? And within that, SDD Evo SDDC manager, brand new, quickest way to really implement and get to a software defined data center, a tightly integrated software stack with new management capabilities to manage the underlying hardware and infrastructure. You have the whole Photon platform, right? Which Kit Colbert and Ray O'Farrell launched. So the Photon platform, which is largely open sourced with the exception of the very small and just enough virtual machine, all brand new. Photon OS, Photon controller, the Photon machine, part of the Photon platform. Then today we talked about business mobility. So you have the workspace suite. Sanjay talked about that. What we're doing with AirWatch. We also then of course rolled out security in NSX 6.2. We have all kinds of new cloud services that came out. VCloud Air, the disaster recovery on demand. Some new SQL database as a service technology. So they're really, I can just go on on. Microsoft on stage. Microsoft on stage. Virtual Sand 6.1, Microsoft. We're shaking it up here, guys. So I gotta ask you, so as a CMO, your job is to kind of watch the trends, watch the fashion, if you will, in the industry. And you know, the trend is don't fight fashion. You got to be fashionable and be relevant. I get that, but it's a hard thing to market. VMware is its unique company. You have a core, a lot of things going on around the company, obviously the Federation, EMC conversations, you have customers that are changing, hat laid out essentially a whole new future vision of what's going to happen to VMware and basically devices world global company. How do you market that? What's your approach and what's your philosophy? How do you do that? I think one of the most important things, and I hope you got this from the keynotes this week, is we are unifying behind a common narrative that is really relevant to our business and the value we deliver to our customers. And everything we do somehow connects to that storyline. And that's really this concept of one cloud, any application, any device. And by one cloud I mean really the simplicity of managing something as one, but it's really about a multiple cloud, unified hybrid cloud strategy, all delivering any application, any device. I think the other common theme that we anchored around is what is our relevance to applications? Because at the end of the day, that's what the business cares about. So we've worked really hard to make sure that our customers understand how is it what we're doing is enabling them to deliver modern and traditional applications to their business really in any way they want to consume it. Well my observation there Robin is that so that's great to have the high level messaging but when you test beneath it, we ask Pat, okay so how do you live in that heterogeneous world? And he basically explained, okay, took each of the levels of the stacks that is what we're doing there, we can't do it at this level, we will do it at this level, with a very precise answer as to how that strategy turns, aligns with that messaging. And so that to me is the ultimate test. It's not just marketing, a little marketing tagline. And the reason why that's so important is because when you test it with the customers, they're actually going to be doing it down the road. It's going to tie back. And that's where you succeed. Thank you, I would agree with you. The customers, it has to be relevant to the customers at the end of the day, they need trust in the vendor. Okay, I got to ask the question that everyone wants to know, what's the party? The big party, everyone, I mean VMware always has parties, there's so many parties going on in the event. I mean I think there's like 10 different parties happening tonight, so we can't go to all of them but we'll try our best. The big party at AT&T for share. The big party, yes it is always one of the highlights of the week. I must say for all this technology, it boils down to how great is the party. Well I have good news, the San Francisco Giants cooperated and they went ahead and left town for a Wednesday night so we're able to get the park, which is fabulous, love being at the park. So we're back at the park, we're featuring two great bands and we very intentionally picked bands that are the up-and-comers, you know? Not the kind of tried and true rock and roll, we're going for some eggs here. Same band that everyone sees every year, they're all the different conferences. Yeah, we're pushing the envelope, John. So you better get comfortable and come out and hang out with us. Neon Trees opens up the act and then we're closing with Alabama Shakes and the rumor on the street is, if you want to go to a good concert, you go see Alabama Shakes perform. So come join us, it's going to be our rock and time. We'll do our best to sneak into the VIP booth like we did for Imagine Dragons. Yeah. I hope to see you there, okay. Robin, thanks so much for coming on the show. I know you're super busy, thanks for sharing the insights and time and updating all the stats. I love what you guys are doing, it's a great audience, love to have you. Thank you. Okay, we'll be back more live at the service of Moscow, Moscone North. The Emerald 2015, things are shaking up, up and coming, new things, a lot of stuff happening. We'll be back after this short break.