 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. Hey, welcome back everyone. Live, CUBE coverage at VMworld 2019. We're here in San Francisco, California, Moscone, North Lobby, two sets. Our 10th year covering VMworld and our 10th year of our seasons covering B2B enterprise tech. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, Justin Warren, Breaking Down, day two, CUBE Insights segment. Dave, Stu, you're on set, valley set, this is the meadow set because it's got the steaming, but chirping birds behind us. Justin, you've been doing some interviews out on the floor as well. Check out the stories out. All the news is out. Day one was all the big corporate stuff. Today was the product, technology news. Stu, I'll go to you first. What's the assessment on your take on VMware? Obviously, they're reinventing themselves. Jerry Chen, who we interviewed, said, this is Act Three of VMware. They keep on adding more and more products to their core. Your thoughts on what's going on? Yeah, so the biggest story I've seen is the discussion of Tanzu, which really you're talking about those cloud-native applications. And if you break down VMware, it's like many companies have said, there's the core product of the company. It is vSphere, it is the legacy for what we have. And it's not going anywhere and it's changing, but then there's the modernization. Project Pacific, how do I bridge to the multi-cloud world? How do I bridge? Kubernetes is going to come into vSphere and do that. But then there's the application world. And it's the thing I'd been, the existential threat to VMware I've been talking about forever is if we sassify and cloudify and all the apps go away, the data centers disappear, and VMware dominant in the data center is left out in the cold. So Pivotal was driving down that path. They've done a lot of acquisitions. So, love directionally where Tanzu's going. Time will tell whether they can play in that market. This is not a developer conference. We go to plenty of developer events. So, that's some of the places I see. It's an operator conference, too. You're right, exactly right. And Justin, I want to get your thoughts, too, because you've been blogging heavily on this topic, as well as DevOps and generally commenting on theCUBE. You know, the reality and the reality of the situation from the announcements, I'm not going to say vapor because they're doing some demos. And they're real product directions. So product directions is always what VMware does, and it's not something that they're shameful of. It's what they do. They have real engineering. They put out, it's not vapor either. It's a statement of direction. We were talking hybrid cloud in 2012 when I asked Pat Gelser was a halfway house. He blew a gasket, and now five years later, the gestation period for hybrid was that. But VMware's happy to have the data center back in the play here. Your thoughts on? Yeah, so this conference is, I think, a refreshing return to form. So VMware is, as you say, this is an operators conference, and VMware is for operators. It's not for devs. There was a period there where cloud was scary, and it was all this cloud native stuff, and VMware tried to appeal to this new market, and I guess tried to dress up as something that it really wasn't, and it didn't pull it off. And it didn't feel right, and now VMware has decided that, well, no, actually, this is what VMware is about. And no one can be more VMware than VMware. So it's returning to being its best self. And I think we're seeing that this year. Again, software, they know software. They know software. So the addition of putting Project Tanzu in and having Kubernetes in there, and it's to operate the software. So it's going to be in there, and apps will run on it, and they want to have Kubernetes baked into vSphere so that now, yeah, we'll have new apps, and yeah, there might be SaaS apps for the people who are consuming them, but they've got to run somewhere, and now we could run them on VMware. Whether it's onsite at the edge, could be in the cloud, you know, VMware on AWS. You have options. So Dave and Stu, I want to get your thoughts, Justin, I want you to jump in too, because I love Pivotal, what they've done. I've always felt as a standalone company that they probably couldn't compete with Amazon, the scale of what's going on, and the other things, but bringing it back in the fold in VMware, you mentioned this in a couple of our interviews yesterday, Dave, and Stu, you illuminated to the fact of, you know, the cloud native world coming together. It's better inside VMware because they can package Pivotal and not have to bet the ranch on an outcome in the marketplace where there's highly competitive statements out there. So you got the business value of Pivotal, the upside now can be managed. Stu, your thoughts first, and then I'll go to Dave. Is it about Pivotal? Yeah, it- As an integrated, integrated is better for the industry than trying to bet the ranch on a pure play. Right, so John, yesterday we had a little discussion about hybrid and multi-cloud, and still early about there, but the conversation of Paz five years ago was very different from the discussion today. Docker had a ripple effect with containers, and VMware is addressing that, and it made sense for Pivotal Cut to come home, if you will. They still have the Pivotal Labs group that can work with customers going through that transformation, and a number of other pieces to put together, but yeah, VMware is doing a good enough job to give customers the comfort that we can move you forward to the cloud, you don't have to abandon us, and especially all those people that do VMware is they don't have to be frozen where they are. Dave, business value. Well, I think you got to start with the transaction and provide a historical context. So this goes back to what I used to call the misfit toys, the Federation, David Goulden's taking bits and pieces of assets inside of EMC and VMware, and then creating Pivotal out of whole cloth. They need an IPO. Michael Dell maintained a 70% ownership of the company and 96% voting shares, floated the stock. Stock didn't do well, bought it back on 50 cents on the dollar as to what the IPO price was, and then took, brought back a $4 billion asset inside of VMware and paid $900 million for it. So it's just a brilliant financial transaction. Now, having said all that, what is the business value of this? You know, when I come to these shows, I'd like to compare what they say in the messaging and the keynotes to what practitioners are saying. And the practitioners last night were saying a couple of things. First of all, they're concerned about all this M&A. Like one practitioner said to me, look, if it weren't for all these acquisitions that they announced last minute, what would we be hearing about here? It would have been NSX and VSAN again. So there's sort of little concerns there. Some of the practitioners I talked to were really concerned about integration. Now, they've done a good job with Nasira, but some of the other acquisitions that they made have taken longer to integrate and customers are concerned. And we've seen this move before. We saw it at EMC, we certainly saw it at Dell, we're seeing it again now at VMware. VMware, while they're very good at integrating companies, sometimes that catches up to you. The last thing I'll say is we've been pushing, you just mentioned it, Justin, on devs, not a dev show, Pivotal gives VMware the opportunity to whether it's a different show or an event within the event to actually attract the devs. But I would say in the multi-cloud world, VMware's sitting in a good position with the exception of developers, Pivotal I think is designed to solve that problem. Justin, your thoughts. Do you think that VMware is at risk of becoming a portfolio company just like EMC was? Because it certainly looks at the moment to me, like we look at all the different names for things and I just look at the brand architecture and stuff. There are too many brands, there are too many product names, it's too confusing. And there's going to have to be a cull at some point just to make it understandable for customers. Otherwise we're just going to end up with this endless sprawl and we saw what the damage that did at places like EMC. It's a great point and Joe Tucci used to say that overlap is better than gaps and I agree with him to a point, better until it's not. And then Michael Dell came in and Jeff Clark came in and said, look, if we're going to compete with Amazon's cost structure, we have to clean this mess up and that's what they've been doing. They've been doing a lot of hard work on that. So yeah, they do risk that. I think if they don't do that integration, it's hard to do that integration. As you know, it takes time. And so right now, all looks good, right? Right down the middle, as you say, John. All right, multi-cloud, big topic. Gestation period is going to take five years to seven years. When's the reality multi-cloud? I had a debate on Twitter last night, someone saying, well, I'm doing multi-cloud today. I mean, we had Gelsinger lay out the definition of multi-cloud. Well, he laid out his definition. His definition. Everyone likes to define it. It's funny how, and we mentioned this as Stu and I earlier on the other set. Cloud, we're still arguing about what cloud means. So is it multi-cloud? Which kind of multi-cloud is a hybrid, blah, blah, blah? And then you compare that to edge computing. Edge computing was always going on and then someone just came along and gave it a name and everyone just went, huh, okay. And got on with their lives. And it's like, why is cloud so different and difficult for people to agree on what the thing is? There's a lot of money to be made and lost. That's why. Right. The thing I've said is for multi-cloud to be a real thing, it needs to be more valuable to a customer than the sum of its pieces. And we know we're going to be at Amazon re-invent later this year. We will not be talking, well, they will not be talking multi-cloud. We might be talking about it. They'll be hinting to hybrid cloud. They may or may not say that. But hybrid is okay in their world without posts and everything they're doing and they're partnering with VMware. But the point I've been looking at here is management of multi-vendor was atrocious. And why do we think we're going to do any better? Dave, when you hired me nine years ago, it was like I could spend my entire career saying management stinks and security needs to be solid. It's a story. So I want to share Floyer's definition that he published on Wikibon on multi-cloud. Multi-cloud and hybrid cloud, he put them together as true hybrid cloud and multi-cloud. Any application or application service can run on any node of the hybrid cloud without rewriting, re-compiling or retesting. True hybrid cloud architectures have a consistent set of hardware software services, APIs with integrated network security data and control planes that are native to and display the characteristics of public cloud infrastructures of service. These attributes can be identically resident on other hybrid nodes independent of location, for example, including on public clouds, on-prem or at the edge. That ain't happening. It's just not unless you have outposts, cloud of customer, Azure Stack, okay, and you're going to have collections of those. So that vision that he laid out, I just, I think it's going to be. It's interesting because David and I have some good debates on this. I said, tell me a company that has been better than VMware about taking a stack and letting it live on multiple hardwares. I've got some of the scars. I wrote a big piece last weekend talking about, when we had to check the BIOS of everything and when blade service rolled out, getting VMware to work 15 years ago was really tough. Getting VMware to work today, it was pretty easy. But the problem is you're going to have outposts. You're going to have project dimensions installed. You're going to have Azure stacks installed. You're going to have roll your own out there. And so yeah, VMware is going to work on all of those. And it's not going to be a static situation because when I talk to customers and if they're using VMware cloud on AWS, it's not a lift and shift and leave it. They're going to modernize their things. They're going to start using services from the public cloud and they might migrate some of these off of the VMware environment, which I think is the thing that I am talking to customers and hearing about that. It's, you know, none of these situations are, oh, I just put it there and it's going to live there for years. It's constantly moving and changing. And that is a major threat to VMware's multicloud strategy. My question is, is it technically feasible without just insanely high degrees of homogeneity? That's the question I'm asking. No, I don't think it is. And I don't think it's a reasonable thing to expect anyway because any enterprise, you have any M&A activity and all of a sudden you've got more than one. That's always been true and it will always be true. So if someone else makes a different choice and you buy them, then well, now I've got both. So maybe that's not a fair definition, but that's kind of what one could infer. I think the industry is implying that that is hybrid multicloud because that's the nirvana that everybody wants. Yeah, the only situation I can see where that could maybe come true would be in something like Kubernetes where you're running things as an abstraction on top of everything else. And that that is a common abstraction that everyone agrees on and builds upon. But we're already seeing how that works out in real life. But if I'm using Google Anthos, I can't easily move it to PKS or OpenShift. There's things, it's Kubernetes, as Joe Beta says, is not a magic layer and everybody builds on top of that. Because it turns out it's actually not that easy. Well, and plus people are taking open source code and then they're forking it and then building their own proprietary systems and saying, hey, here's our greatest thing. Well, to the credit of CNCF, Kubernetes does have a kind of standardized agree on theme so that to get away from that particular issue. So that's why it stands a better chance than say, unfortunately, OpenStack. So, because we saw a bit of that change of, we want to go this way and we want to go that way. So there's a lot of zing and zagging. At least with Kubernetes, you have a kind of common framework. But even just the implementation of that, and operating it, it's really hard. I love Kubernetes. I think I've been a big fan of Kubernetes from day one. I think it's a great industry initiative. Having it the way it's rolling out is looking very good. I like it a lot. The comments that we heard on theCUBE, which supports some of my things that I'm looking at is for CNCF's KubeCon coming up is, what happens with Knative and Istio? Because that's, you're going to see the battleground form above Kubernetes. You're going to see that's where the differentiates. That's where the vendors are going to start to differentiate who they are. So I think Kubernetes is going to be a great thing. And I think what I learned here was the virtualization underneath Kubernetes doesn't matter. If you want to run a lot of VMs, if you're at scale, no big deal, run Kubernetes on top. If you want to run it on bare metal, God bless you, go for it. So I think this use case is for both. That's why I particularly like Tanzu is because for those customers who want to have a bit of this Kubernetes, I don't want to run it myself, it's too hard. But if I trust VMware to be able to run that and to upgrade it and to give me all of the goodness about operating it in the same way that I do VMware again, we're in an ops show. So now I can have stuff I already know and love, and I can add some Kubernetes on top of it. Well, all right, but who's going to mess up multi-clouds, too? Who's the one vendor that doesn't exist? I'm not even saying it exists, so you can't mess up something that doesn't exist. This vision of multi-cloud that the entire industry is putting forth, who's going to throw a monkey in the rich? Which vendor is going to screw it up? So licensing usually can cause issues. Our friend Corey Quinn wrote a nice article about Microsoft's licensing changes there. What's Amazon's play, is my point. Right, but oh yeah. Amazon is going to make it very difficult. They're not going to screw up multi-clouds, they're not in the multi-clouds. But yet, how can you do multi-cloud without Amazon? Well, they play with that. Amazon is going to control the chessboard on this. My line has been, Amazon is in every multi-cloud because if you've got multiple clouds, there's a much greater than likely chance of error in that environment. My feeling is, in looking at the history of how multi-vendor evolve from the IT industry, from proprietary network operating systems, from mini computers to open systems, TCPIP, web, et cetera, what's going on now is very interesting. And I think the CISOS of the Canary in the coal mine, not CIOs, because they like multi-vendor. They want multiple clouds. They're comfortable with that. They got staff for that. CISOS have pressure, security. They're the Canary in the coal mine. And all the CISOS that I talk to are all saying multi-clouds BS because they're building stacks internally and they want to create their own technology for security reasons. And then build APIs and make APIs the supplier relationship. And saying, hey supplier, if you want to work with me, support my stack. And I think that is an interesting indication. What that means is that the entire multi-cloud thing means we're going to pick one cloud and build on, have a backup, we'll deal with multiple clouds if there's workloads in there, but primary one cloud will be there. And I think that's going to be the model. Yes, there'll be multiple clouds. If you got Azure and you got Office 365, that's technically multi-cloud. But I want to make a point. And when Pat's on, we joke about the cul-de-sac, his hybrid cloud cul-de-sac. And you've been very respectful and basically saying, yeah Pat, okay, you were right. Really? What's hybrid? Well show me a hybrid cloud. It's taking all this time to gestate, you see federated applications. It's not happening. You have on-prem workloads and you have a company that has public cloud workloads, but they're not hybrid as the original. Some will talk about it, but even multi, it is an application per cloud or a couple of clouds that you'll do it. But it's right, did the follow the sun thing that we might have talked about 15 years ago is not something- And now you're going to have consistent- There's data moving around in some clouds. And now you're going to have consistent security and governance and the organizational edicts across all those platforms. The one place I can see it- I'll wait for that. Eventually, and this is a long way off, would be if you go with serverless, where it's all functions. And now it's about service composition and I don't care where it lives. I'm just consuming a service because I have some data that I want to go on process and Google happens to have the best machine learning that I need to do it on that data. Awesome, I'll use that service. And then when I actually want to run the workload and host it somewhere else, I drop it into a CDN with an application that happens to run in AWS. Good guys, wrapping up day two, but I just got to ask, what is that animal? It must be an influencer because it hasn't said a word. This is the famous blue cow. She travels everywhere with me. And has an Instagram account? She used to have an Instagram. She now she doesn't. She just uses my Twitter account from time to time. Justin, I learned a lot about you right now. Thanks for sharing. Great to have you. As always, great commentary. Thanks for coming. We have day three tomorrow. Tomorrow I want to dig into what's in this for Dell technologies. What's the play there? We're going to unpack that. Tomorrow on day three, if there's no multi-cloud and there's a big tam out there, what's in it for Michael Dell and VMware, it's crown jewel as the main ingredient. Guys, thanks for coming. It's Stu Miniman, Justin Warren, Dave Vellante, I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching day two insight coverage here. Our wrap up, thanks for watching.