 day two of continuous wall-to-wall coverage is at siliconangle.com.tv operation. We were out to the events and we extract the ceiling from the noise. This is theCUBE, our flagship telecast. I'm John Furrier, the founder of siliconangle.com and I'm joined with my co-host. Hi everybody, I'm Dave Vellante of wikibon.org and we're here with Mark Egan, as the CIO of VMware and a longtime CUBE guest. I think it's the third time you've been on and appreciate it. Good seeing you again. Thank you, appreciate the time. So who'd you think was the best demo this morning? You liked them all, right? We have some really good partners here. I think they all did a fantastic job. Good political answer. Yeah, that was fun this morning and Chad Sackets, who just left the stage, can't believe he didn't win. He thinks it was rigged. So anyway, last year we talked about, we always like to call this the drinking your own champagne. We used to call it the dog-fooding segment and then Oliver Boosman, the CIO of SAP said, no, let's call it the drink your own champagne segment. Let's say you're a pianist Dave. I'd let Google eat their own dog food. Not us, it's all about us. So what's new? What's going on inside of VMware? And how's the journey going? Oh, it's very exciting. One of the things that we've done over the last year is really move all of our applications into the cloud. It's been a great experience for us. So we've been using our products from the beginning to the end, through setting up a catalog through the whole development life cycle, running and managing those. So it's been really great for us. We've been using the products that are shipping now. We've been using them at VMware for some time now. So it's really great to see those ship and my team spent quite a bit of time with the R&D group just in terms of fine-tuning some of these things. So it's great to see them all ship. So I would like to talk to CIOs about the whole IT transformation topic, particularly CIOs at technology vendors seem to be, I mean all CIOs are undergoing a transformation, but CIOs at technology companies seem to be more heightened, have heightened awareness of it. Now maybe that's because you've got marketing people whispering in your ears, IT transformation, but when you think about transformation, IT as a service comes to mind. You mentioned service catalogs and that's the direction that most organizations are headed. Do you feel like you're there? Well I think what you want to do when you go on the journey is really look at it holistically from a people process technology perspective. And I would argue that the people side is the hardest. Do you really have the right staff in place that are ready to embrace some of these new technologies? So one of the things that we did at VMware was really look at our organization and there's some skills that you're gonna need in this new world that you may not have. I mean architects, can someone really architect this where some of your infrastructure will be on premise in a private cloud, some of it will be in a public cloud, but it's much much different as you go forward. So I think that's a key thing and we spend a great deal on training. You're just making sure that our staff are up to speed on the latest skills and we set up two paths at VMware. There's a technical path where you don't really have to get into management. So you can get up to a senior director role by staying in that technical path or the management path. But I think if you really look at that journey, really embracing some of this, I would encourage everybody to look at your organization. Do you have the right people? Do you have to make some adjustments there? Getting the processes in place. Because processes like brakes on a car, you have that to go faster, not slower. And then finally, there's a technology. And I work for a technology company who have lots of brilliant engineers that make these products, but I would argue that that might be some of the easier things of the technology, but you got to get that organization sorted out. Yeah, people tell us that their biggest challenge in terms of moving to IT as a service is the organizational issue. And just even the mindset of moving toward, whatever it is, whatever you want to call it, cloud, IT as a service. So my specific question is how, speaking particularly about the process side, how did you align your technology, your people and your process? What process did you use to do that? Yeah, well what we did is we actually broke off a team and we took the best IT folks in my organization and we formed a project team, we called it VFRED. And we gave them the challenges that we want to run all of our business in a private cloud. And this team was chartered to do this by a relatively short timeframe. So I met with them periodically just checking in with them and so forth. But that was part of it is that I think there's a lot of change going on and the human nature is to resist change. So what we, rather than trying to get the whole organization to move to a new model, we just broke off a group and we formed this team and then what we're doing is that we're proliferating through the rest of the department what we've learned on this journey of moving to the cloud. Mark, I want to ask you about the drink your own champagne. Obviously you guys are virtualizing and sales. So two questions. One is, are you using a lot of cloud foundry like internally the past platform as a service? And two, yesterday they talked about new experiences, old way, new way. So can you share some of the new experiences you've rolled out in your infrastructure that are really cool? Like you're really like this is kick butt. I love this, this is great. We did this as kind of one of the cutting edge disruptive areas. So first cloud foundry, are you playing with or are you working with it internally? Is it part of your deployments or POCs? And then two, new experiences if you rolled out that was just like wow. Or you say, well it didn't work or whatever your choice. Yeah, we actually are using cloud foundry. It's nice to have a platform set up for you. And one of the things that we did with cloud founders we actually developed a mobile app for our customers which is related to a system we call MyVMWare. And one of the really cool things that we did at VMware is that we looked at our customer experience all the way from evaluating our products through purchase our products through support. And what we wanted to do was recreate that experience for VMware and we used our vFabric tools. So through an effort with our business partners we redesigned this and we went live in April with MyVMWare and a couple of things that we did there is that we were able to really shift how we did business with our customers. We wanted to take an approach where we worked from an enterprise, enterprise at VMware because if you know some of our historically we did a lot of work with consumers. So we wanted to operate from an enterprise perspective and then we wanted to make sure that the experience that they have was consistent and some of the statistics there is that we have over 40,000 unique visitors a day to our site and we were able to move much, much faster. So as opposed to using some of the legacy tools in the early release of MyVM where we were making changes every day. So we would add new functionality on a daily basis and then we backed off when we have multiple releases today but if I look at some of the legacy tools that were out there I couldn't have done it in that kind of timeframe. I wouldn't have been able to provide that better experience because I think what we have as IT professionals how do you bring a more consumer experience into the enterprise? You get a lot of these applications they have these Soviet air interfaces so what we need to do is have something like Facebook or Twitter, no training, no manuals and so forth so we have this great experience but then we're able to change it on a rapid fashion. So we don't think about a release that we're going to do in 90 days we're going to think about how many things are we going to do this week? How can we rapidly add new functionality to our application? So rapid release cycle? Absolutely. So the question I want to ask you or I'll share with you some data that we've discovered in our SiliconANGLE Wikibon research and then ask you a question around it. One is we've seen the emergence of two core constituencies under the CIO or IT stewardship and that is obviously the IT professional that's the classic guy we know about but now data scientists and analysts has become much more of a critical role because of big data they're coming in and being much more of an active participant in the planning of rolling out new experiences in IT. So the question is what do you see as the agenda to introduce new what new services kind of CIO roll out with this new environment, this new era of the infrastructure, the data center where there's a need for services. So what I'm trying to get at old way, new way what new way new things kind of CIO roll out today that might not have been on their radar 24 months ago. That is legit, that is locked down solid. Well I think with big data you're able to tap into a lot of information that you might not have had in the past. So think about it, structured data, I think we have warehouses and business intelligence and so forth but there's an enormous amount of data that's out there that's available in more of a less structured format. So I think that my kind of challenge to my peers there are what are all these interactions that you have with your customers on the web on Facebook and Twitter how do you take that information in a more real time fashion and use it to drive your business and that's what really the power of big data and putting these applications in place as opposed to a BI data warehouses which is really looking in the rear view mirror based on all this structured data that we've collected let's do something over the next month or two. So Chad second was referring that as scale out analytics. That's legit, I mean real time dashboards are pretty hot right now. Absolutely. And you feel they're pretty solid from a CIO perspective. That's safe territory to forge into today with technology. Absolutely, I think it's required. I mean I think that we just have to move much, much faster. You know, IT just doesn't have the time. I mean we can't do things in 90 days or 120 days. We need to think in days or weeks. You know, as someone who's been in the tech business since the 80s and watching all the different vendors and technology cycles, it kind of always kind of weaves around and kind of swings back and just kind of new stuff, smaller, faster, less expensive. But now we're swinging back to a real conversation around multi-vendor. Not just multi-vendors, a lot of vendors in an environment, true interoperability. So share with us your vision of what's the current state of that internally? Because what's being enabled is massive amounts of faster deployments but yet still the vendors, still multiple vendors in these environments. How has the multi-vendor equation changed from a CIO's perspective or has it changed? I would look at that in two areas. I mean, we talked about the software-defined data center, you know, at VMworld this week and what it's going to enable IT professionals to do is that if you look at what's happened to compute in the past, if you apply that to storage and you apply that to network, you can operate this all with software and you can move much, much faster. So in those cases, I mean you're going to, you're going to look at pools of resource as opposed to individual technologies or vendors. So I think that's all good because what we, as IT professionals, add to value is in the applications. That's where we can help increase revenue, reduce cost and improve customer set. And I think what you're finding there is that you had the ERP vendors where I'm going to get everything from a single vendor and I don't think that's going to happen as we go forward. I think you're going to have multiple vendors that you work with and then you're going, as an IT professional, you're going to have to decide if I can buy a service, I'll buy a service because it's fast. I can get that up in place. If I have to buy a package, I'll buy a package and not only build when I need to, but we've got to integrate all these. So I think in that multi-vendor world that you're talking about, there will be more as opposed to less application vendors. We have the caveat that, of course I totally agree with that statement, but the caveat that it actually can be deployed fast and do its value long on the days of the eight month release cycle of rolling out the consultants rolling in and deploying proprietary software. Or maybe it's a couple of months versus depending on the scale. Oh, it's speed, you've got to go fast. I mean, to give you an idea of the Mware, I mean, because of the great technology that we had, last year we had a $75 million portfolio, we had 36 programs, we did 81 releases and 89% were on schedule. I couldn't have done that at another company. So by having all this great technology, I can go much, much faster and 80% of our programs are on growing the business. So it's all about programs for our sales organization, our marketing organization and so forth. That's where we're focused as opposed to- So you're talking about the project portfolio, right? The project. Yes. Are you experimenting with DevOps at all? What we've done is we've done more around the scrum and agile developments. So the team is looking at how do we very quickly get prototypes up, so that we learn from them and we adjust. So that's what we've been focused in on. You know, like my VMware had a lot of elements of that. Once we went live, we were constantly adding new functionality there. As far as the DevOps, we haven't implemented that at VMware, but it's certainly something that we'll be looking at. Yeah, okay. So that's not out of the question to bring the operational and the application development rules. Another question we've got the next guest coming up is congratulations, by the way, on all of your success. Last year, it's great to hear the same success the previous year, doing great. Going forward, next 12 months, Mark, what's on your agenda for the internal? What are you going to build on? What are you going to double down on? What are you going to kind of evaluate? Can you share with the audience your agenda for the next 12 months? I mean, give not giving away any proprietary, so you're especially in general your mindset of doubling down. What are you doubling down on? What are you kind of evaluating? What's kind of even keel? Yeah, well, if I kind of separated into different areas, I mean, from a, you know, from the cloud area, you know, what we want to do is really move to that software-defined data center so that I can, you know, move much, much faster and be more agile. So that's my priority there. On the application space, I think the challenge for us is just to bring that experience. How do I improve that experience, you know, to my business partners and get that, you know, that kind of consumer experience, you know, that we offer. And so some of the applications that we have, I'll call them more legacy ones, we're going to be looking at those very closely, mostly in the customer-facing area, you know, because we want to help grow the business. And then finally on the end-user area, you know, we talked about Horizon here, but you know, we're deploying that where you can think of it as an app store. And it's device-independent. You have a portal, you're very familiar with that. And then you can run all your applications. So, you know, those are some of the things that we're focused on in the coming year. Okay, Mark, you get the CIO of VMware, always on the cutting edge. Obviously they are cutting edge, actually virtualization. They own the enterprise with the, with the hypervisor and the VMware product suite expanding, growing, multi-pender. That's the big theme you guys are thinking big and you're actually deploying it internally. I don't want to say the guinea pig for the technology, but you're actually deploying it in a way that's positive and kicking the tires. So congratulations. I will be right back here at the queue with our next guest right after this short break. Great, thank you. Good job. Thank you.