 Okay, we're back, we're live here at theCUBE at VMworld, VMware Explorer, not formally VMworld. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Three days of wall-to-wall coverage, we've got Vittorio Vierringos, the Vice President of Cross Cloud Services at VMware. Vittorio, great to see you, and thanks for coming on theCUBE right after your keynote. I can't get that off my tongue, VMworlds. 12 years of theCUBE coverage. This is the first year with VMware Explorer, formally VMworld community. Ragu said in his keynote, he explained the VMworld community now with multi-clouds that you're in charge of at VMworld. VMware is now, the Explorer brand's going to explore the multi-cloud. That's a big part of Ragu's vision, and VMware, you're driving it and you're on the stage just now. What's going on? Yeah, but I said at my keynote is that the, our customers have been the explorer of IT, new IT frontier, always challenging the status quo, and we've been, you know, a legendary engineering team being behind the scenes, providing them with the tools and the technology to be successful in that journey to the private cloud. And Kelsey said it, what would we build was the foundation for the cloud. And now it's time to start a new journey in the multi-cloud. Now, one of the things that we heard today clearly was multi-clouds are reality. Cloud chaos, Kit Colbert was meant to talk about that. We've been saying, you know, people are chaotic. We believe that. Andy Grove once said, rain in the chaos. Let chaos rain, then rain in the chaos. That's the opportunity, the complexity of cross-cloud is being solved. You guys have a vision. Take us through how you see that happening. A lot of people want to see this cross-cloud abstraction happen. What's the story from your standpoint, how you see that evolving? I think that our IT history repeats itself, right? Every start's nice and neat. Oh, I'm going to buy a bunch of HP servers and my life is going to be good. I know this story. It's been up in EC2. Yeah. Eventually everything goes like this in IT because every vendor do what they do. They innovate and so that could create complexity. And in the cloud is the complexity on steroids because you have six major cloud, all the local clouds, the local cloud providers. And each of these cloud brings their own way of doing management and security. And I think now it's time, every customers that I talk to, they want more simplicity. You know, how do I go fast but be able to manage the complexity? So that's where across cloud services last year we launched a vision with a sprinkle of software behind it of building a set of cloud native services that allow our customers to build, run, manage, secure and access any application consistently across any cloud. Yeah. So you're a year in now. It's not like, I mean, you know, when you come together in a physical event like this, it's just, it resonates more. You got the attention. You're watching the virtual events. You get doing a lot of different things. So it's not like you just, you know, stumbled upon this last week. Okay. So what have you learned in the last year in terms of post that, that long? What we learned is what we have been building for the last five years, right? Because we started, we saw multi-cloud happening before anybody else. I would argue, right? With our announcement with AWS five, six years ago, right? And then our first journey to multi-cloud was let's bring vSphere on all the clouds. And that's a great purpose to help our customers accelerate their journey of their legacy application, their application to actually deliver business to the cloud. But then around two, three years ago, I think Raghu realized that to add value, we needed customers who were already in the cloud and we needed to embrace the native cloud. And that's where Tanzu came in as a way to build application, Tanzu mesh way to secure manage application. And now with Aria, we now have more differentiated software to actually manage this application across. And Aria is the management plane, that's the rebrand. It's not a new product per se. It's a collection of the VMware stuff, right? Isn't it like? No, it's a new product. There is a new innovation there because basically the engineering team built this graph. And Raghu compared it to the graph that Google builds around the web. So we go out and crawl all your assets across any cloud and we'll build you this model and now allows you to see what are your assets, how you can manage them, what are the performance and all that. So no, it's more than a rebrand. It's a new innovation and the integration of technologies that we have. And that's a critical component of the cross-cloud. So I want to get back to what you said about Raghu and what he's been focused on. You know, I remember interviewing him in 2016 with Andy Jassy at AWS and that helped clear up the cloud game. But even before that, Raghu and I had talked to him on theCUBE. I think it was like 2014. Pat Gelsing was just getting on board as the CEO of VMware. Hybrid was very much in the conversation then. Even then it was early. Hybrid was early. You guys are seeing multi-cloud early. It was private cloud. Totally give you props on that. So VMware gets total props on that being right on that. Where are we in that journey? Because SuperCloud, as we were talking about, you were contributing to that initiative in the open with our open source project. What is multi-cloud? Where is it in the status of the customer? I think everyone will agree, multi-cloud is an outcome that's going to happen. It's happening. Everyone has multiple clouds and they configure things differently. Where are we on the progress bar in your mind? I think I want to answer that question and go back to your question, which I didn't address, what we are learning from customers. I think that most customers are at the very, very beginning. They're either in the denial stage. I guess they talk to a customer and said, are you in your multi-cloud journey? And he said, oh, we are on-prem and a little bit of Azure. I said, oh, really? Oh, no, the business unit is using AWS, right? And we require a company that is using just, okay. So you are, that customer is in cloud first. Like you said, we've seen this movie before. It comes around, right? Somebody's going to have to clean that up. Yeah, and so I think a lot of, the majority of customers are either in denial or in the cloud chaos. And some customers are pushing the envelope like SMB, SMB Global, we heard this morning. Somebody has done all the journey in the private cloud with us and now has said, and I talked to him a few months ago, he told me, I had to get in front of my developers. And half of this, you know, Wild West, I had to lay down the tracks and galleries for them to build multi-cloud in a way that was, give them choice, but for me as an operator and a security person, being able to manage it and secure it. And so I think most customers are in that chaos phase right now, very early. So at our SuperCloud 22 event, we were riffing and I was asking you about, are you going to hide the complexity, yes, but you're also going to give access to the developers if they want access to the primitives. And I said, it sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too. And you said, and you want to lose weight. And I never followed up with you, so I want to follow up now. By lose weight, I presume you mean, be essentially that platform of choice, right? So you're going to simplify, but you're going to give access to the developers for those primitives if in fact they want one in, and you're going to be the SuperCloud, my word of choice. So my question to you is why, first of all, is that correct, your lose weight? And why VMware? When I say you want a cake, eat it and lose weight, and I'm going to sound a little arrogant, it's hard to be humble when you're good. But no, I work for a company, I work for a company that does that, has done it over and over and over again. We have done stuff. I, sometimes when I go before customers, I say, and our technology does this, then the customer gets on stage and I go, oh my God, oh my God. And then the customer says, yeah, plus I realized that I could also do distance. So that's the kind of company that we are. And I think that we were so busy being successful with on-prem, and that we kind of, the cloud happened under our eyes. But now with the multi-cloud, I think there is an opportunity for VMware to do it all over again. And we are the right company to do it for two reasons. One, we have the right DNA. We have those engineers that know how to make stuff that was not designed to work together, work together, and the right partnership because everybody partners with us. But you know, a lot of companies are like, oh, they miss cloud, they miss mobile, they miss whatever it was. VMware was very much aware of this. You made an effort to do kind of your own cloud initiative, backed off, and everybody was like, this is a disaster waiting to happen. And of course it was. And so then you realize that, you learn from your mistakes and then you embraced the AWS deal. And that changed everything. It changed, it cleared it up for your customers. I'm not hearing anybody saying that the cross-cloud services strategy, what we call multi-, super cloud is wrong. And nobody's saying that's like a failed strategy. Now, the execution obviously is very important. But so that's what I'm saying. It's different this time around. It's not like you don't have your pulse on it. I mean, you tried before, okay, the strategy wasn't right, it backfired, okay, and then you embraced it. But now people are generally in agreement that there's either a problem or there's going to be a problem. And so you kind of just addressed why VMware, because you've always been in the cat bird seat to solve those problems. But it's a testament to the pragmatism of the company, right? You try, technology cannot always get it right, right? When you don't get it right, say, okay, that didn't work, what is the next? And I think now we're onto something, it's a very ambitious vision for sure. But I think if you look at the companies out there that have the muscles and the DNA and the resources to do it, I think VMware is one. So one of the risks to the success that what's been, you hear the watch the Twitter chat is, oh, can VMware actually attract the developers? John chimed in and said, it's not just the devs. I mean, the devs devs. But also when you think of DevOps, the ops, right? When you think about securing and having that consistent platform. So when you think about the critical factors for you to execute, you have to have that, that pass platform, no question. Well, how do you think about, okay, where are the gaps that we really have to get right? I think that for us to go and get the developers on board, it's too late. And it's too late for most companies. Developers that go with the open source, they go with the path of least resistance. So our way into that, as Kelsey Eithauer said, building new application, modern application is a team sport. And part of that team is the ops team. And there we have an entry, I think, because that's what our... I think it's Baltimore. I think you're hitting it. And my dev comment, by the way, I've been kind of snarky on Twitter about this. I say, oh, devs got it easy. They're sitting in the beach with sunglasses on, you know, having focaccia. Doing whatever they want. Having whatever they want. No, but it's better life for the developer now. Open source is the software industry. That's going great. Shift left in the CI CD pipeline. Developers are faster than ever. They're innovating. It's all self-service. It's all DevOps. It's looking good for the developers right now. And that's why everyone's focused on that. They're driving the change. The ops team, that was traditional, IT ops, is now DevOps with developers. So the seed change of data and security, which is core, we're hearing a lot of those. And if you look at all the big successes, Snowflake, Databricks, Minayo, who was on earlier with the S3 cloud storage anywhere, this is the new connective tissue that VMware can connect to and extend the operational platform of IT and connect developers. You don't need to win them all over. You just connect to them. You just have to embrace the tools that they're using. You just got to connect to them. It's different than, you know, you bring up an interesting point. Snowflake has to win the developers because they're basically saying, hey, we're building an application development platform on top of our proprietary system. You're not saying that. You're saying we're embracing the open source tools that developers are using to use them. Well, we give it a single pane of glass to manage your application everywhere. And going back to your point about not hiding the underlying primitives, we manage that application, right? That application can be moving around, but nobody prevents that application to use an API underneath. I mean, that can always do that. And one of the reasons why we had Kelsey Itower and my keynote and the main keynote was that I think he shows the template, the blueprint for our customers, our operators. If you want to have, even propel your career forward, look at what he did, right? You know, VI admin, going up the stack storage and everything else, and then eventually embrace Kubernetes, became an expert, really took the time to understand how modern applications are built, and now it's a luminary in the industry. So we don't have all that to become luminary, but you can, our customers are right here doing the labs upstairs. They can propel their career forward in this demo. So summarize what you guys are announcing around cross-cloud services. Obviously Aria, another version, 1.3 of Tanzu. Lay out the sort of news. Yeah, so with Tanzu, we have one step forward with our developer experience. So that, you know, speaking of meeting where they are with application templates, with ability to plug into their idea of choice. So a lot of innovation there. Then on the Aria side, I think that's the game in multi-cloud, is having that object model allows you to manage anything across anything. And then, you know, we talk about cross-cloud services being a vision last year, I launched it, I put security and networking up there as a cloud, but it was still down here as the deployed technology. And now with NSX, the latest version, we brought that control plane in the cloud as a cloud native cross-cloud service. So a lot of meat around the three pillars. Development, management and security. And then the complimentary component of vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 and the whole DPU thing, because that's cloud, right? I mean, we saw what AWS did with Nitro five, seven years ago. That's the future of computing architecture. And the licensing model underneath. Oh yeah, explain that, right? The universal licensing model. Yeah, so basically what we did when we launched Cloud Universal was, okay, you can buy our software using credit that you have on AWS. And I said, okay, that's kind of hybrid cloud, it's not multi-cloud, right? But then we brought in Google and now the latest was Microsoft. Now you can buy our software from credits and investment that our customers already have with these great partners of ours and use it to consume as a subscription. So that kind of changes you go to market and you're not just chasing an ELA renewal now, you're sort of thinking, you're probably talking to different people within organizations as well, right? So if I can use credits for whatever, Google, for Azure, for on-prem, for AWS, right? Those are different factions necessarily in the organization. So not just the technology is multi-cloud but also the consumption model is truly multi-cloud. Okay, Victoria, what's next? What's the game plan? What do you have going on? It's getting good traction here. Again, like Dave said, no one's poo-pooing across cloud services. It is kind of a timing market forces. We were just talking before you came on. Customers may not think they have a problem whether they're the frog in boiling water or not. They will have the problem coming up or they don't think they have a problem but they have chaos, rainy. So what's next? What are you doing? Is it going to be new tech, new market? What is the plan? I think if I take my bombastic kind of marketing side of me hat off and I look at the technology, I think that customers in this chaos wants to be told what to do. And so I think what we need to do going forward is articulate these cross-cloud services use cases. Like, okay, what does it mean to have an application that uses a service over here or service over there and then show the value of getting these components from one company? Because cross-cloud services, at your event, how many vendors were there, 20, 30? So the market is there. I mean, these are all revenue-generating companies, right? But they provide a piece of the puzzle. Our ambition is to provide a platform approach. And so we need to articulate better what are the advantages of getting these components, management, security, problem. And Kit was saying it's a hybrid kind of scenario. I was kind of saying, oh, you know, putting like a little business school scenario hat on. Oh yeah, you go hardcore competitive, best product wins, killer be killed, compete and win. Or you go open and you create a Karitsu, you create a consortium and get support, standardize or de facto standardize a bunch of it and then let everyone monetize or participate. Yeah, we cannot do it alone. What's the approach? What's the approach you guys want to take? So I think whatever possible, first of all, we're not going to do it alone, right? So the ecosystem is going to play a part. And for the ecosystem can come together around a consortium or a standard that makes sense for customers, absolutely. You say, nobody's poo pooing and I stand by that. But they are saying, and I think it is true, it's hard. It's a very challenging, ambitious goal that you have. But yeah, you've got a track record. I mean, the old playbook, the old playbooks are out. I mean, I always say, you know, the old kill and be highly competitive strategy, proprietary is dead. And then if you look at like the old way of winning was okay, you know, we're going to lock customers in. What do you mean proprietary is dead? So proprietary is not dead. No, I mean like, I'm talking, okay, I'm talking about like how people sell. Enterprise companies love to simplify, create value with chaos. Like, okay, complexity with more complexity. So that's over. You think that's how people market it? No, no, it's true. But I mean, we see a lot of proprietary out there. Like what? That's still happening. There's no flake. Right? Okay. Tell that to the entire open source software industry. Right. Well, but that's not your play. I mean, you can't, I mean, you have to have some kind of proprietary advantage. The enterprise playbook used to be solve complexity with complexity, lock the customers in, cloud changed all that with open. You're a seasoned marketer. You're also an executive. You had an interesting new wave. How do you market to the enterprise in this new open way? How do you win? For us, I think we have the relationship with the C level and we have deliver for them over and over again. Right? So our challenge from a marketing perspective is to educate this executive about all that. And the fact that we didn't have this user conference in person didn't help, right? And then show that value to the operator so that they can help us just like we did in the past. I mean, our sales motion in the past was, we made these people, I told them today, you were the heroes when you virtualized, when you brought down a thousand server to 80, you were the hero, right? So we need to empower them with the technology to know how to be heroes again in multi-cloud. And I think the business will take care of itself. Okay, final question from me. David might have another one is, everybody wanted to know this year at VMworld, VMware Explorer, which is the new name, what would it look like? What would the vibe be? Would people show up? Would it be vibrant? Would cross-cloud hunt? Would super-cloud be relevant? I got to say, looking at the floor last night, looking at the keynote, looking at the perspective, it seems to look like all people are on board. What is your take on this? You've been talking to customers, you're talking to people in the hallways, you've been briefed, talked to all the analysts. What is the vibe about this year's Explorer? I think you've been covering us for a long time. This is a religious following we have. And we don't take it for granted. I told the audience today, this to us is a family reunion, and we couldn't be, so we get a sense of like, that's what I, it feels like the family is back together. And there's a wave coming too. It's not like business is dying, like it's like a whole number. It's funny. Another wave is coming in. I mentioned about the heroes, because I go back, I don't really have my last question, but it's just the last thought is, I remember the first time I saw a demo of VMware, and I went, crap, wow, this is like totally game changing. I was blown away, right? Like you said, 80 servers down to just a couple, a handful, this is going to change everything. And that's where it all started. You know, I mean, I know it started in workstations, but that's when it really became transformational. Yeah, so I think we have an opportunity to do it all over again with the family that is here today, of which you guys consider families. All right, favorite part of the keynote, then we'll wrap up. What was your favorite part of the keynote today? I think the excitement from the developer, people that were up there, Kelsey. I came after Kelsey. What was his name? I didn't catch it, but he was really good. Yeah, I mean, it's what it's all about, right? People that are passionate about solving hard problems and then cannot wait to share it with the community, with the family. I love the one line. You kids have it easy today. We walk to school barefoot in the snow back in the day. I'll peel. Both ways. Broke the ice to wash our face. Victoria Vera, great to see you. Great friend of the Cube, Cube alumni, Vice President of CrossCloud serves at VMware, a critical new area that's harvesting the fruits coming off the tree. As VMware invested in cloud native many years ago, it's all coming to the market. Let's see how it develops. Congratulations. Good luck, and we'll be back with more coverage here at VMware Explorer. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us after this short break.