 Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021. I'm Lisa Martin, another CUBE alum joining me on the program next, Sanjay Upal is here, the SVP and GM service provider and edge business at VMware. Sanjay, it's great to see you. Thanks for coming back on the program. Oh yeah, thank you. Thanks Lisa and thank you to theCUBE. It's great that we're covering VMworld. I can't wait till they're back in person. This is another event that is virtual for obvious reasons, but I wanted to dig into your role and have you really kind of unpacked that for us. Your role as the senior vice president and general manager of the service provider and edge business, talk to me about that. Yeah, it's a bit of a mouthful, but really what we're doing here is recognizing that the world is shifting and a lot of the workloads are moving to the edge. So that's the edge part of my responsibility. And the other part is the service provider. Service provider, of course, is the name for facilities-based telecom operators as they used to be called in the past but simply called service providers today. So putting those two things together because service provider, 5G and the edge all go together. So I'm running that as a business for VMware. Got it. Let's get VMware's definition of the edge. I always like to do that because some companies have slightly different spin on it. What is it to VMware? Yeah, so to VMware, the edge is distributed digital infrastructure. Digital infrastructure, of course, is the software stack that you need to run the applications on top. And it's for running workloads. Now the important part here that we're defining is that the workloads can be in what's known as the underlay, which you can think of as the infrastructure that is needed to run 5G and fiber. But the workloads can also be in the overlay, which is where you find software-defined WAN, secure access service edge. And the workloads can be at the edge application layer. These are the new class of applications that we'll talk about. So it's for running workloads. And the other important part of it is it's across a number of locations. This is not just about being in a few handful of data centers. This is about being in hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of locations, which has its own quirks in terms of how that infrastructure should work. And the important point is that the edge is placed close to where the end points are either producing or consuming data. So that's what the edge is as we define it at VMware. Got it. Talk to me about the strategy and the vision that VMware has for edge. Now, we're at a very important inflection point in the industry as far as the edge is concerned. And I just always link it back into what's happening as an example in music. So one of my favorite songs from Aerosmith is living on the edge. And that's literally where we are right now. We're living on the edge. And what Aerosmith says is, we're looking at the world in a different way because things are changing all the way around. Of course, I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but our strategy at VMware is to take this living at the edge, which is happening across the board and to capture it into infrastructure that we're building, come up with a common software stack that will support workloads that are running in the underlay, in the overlay, or at the application layer and support this entirely new class of applications that are coming in. And these applications to contrast it with what has been happening before, these applications are being built for experiences. And I'll dig into this in a little bit, but really essentially VMware strategy is to come up with that common software stack that is going to be placed at all of these edge locations, sometimes millions of them for different types of workloads, but the commonality of the stack is important because that is what the service providers and the enterprises use to derive the benefits. Being designed for experiences is so interesting because that's what we expect in our personal lives, in our business lives. We want to have good experiences whether we're ordering something on Amazon or we're trying to collaborate via Slack or something like that. That is experience matters, it sounds silly to say, but it's absolutely true. Talk to me about some of the things, the edge being core to customer's future in any industry. Yeah, so from an industry standpoint, we always used to talk about what are the features of your product and what are the benefits for customers. And then we started seeing an evolution from benefits into what are the outcomes that the customers want. But now we're getting from outcomes to experiences. And you take just an example of a retail chain that we're working with. What they want to do is not just simply sell a product to a customer walks into the store. They want that person to have an excellent experience. And in order to get to that experience as an example, what would happen is this person walks into a store, they recognize who that person is, what they had purchased before, they look at what are the likelihood that they want to buy something today. Do I have that thing in my inventory? If I don't, can I manufacture it with my third generation printer that I have over here, the 3D printer that is sitting in the back room. And then once that is produced in the next few minutes, can they have an experience in playing a game with the sportsman of their choice on this massive screen that's in there? That's experience. That's not just walking into a store, buying a product and walking out. Another experience would be when you look at healthcare, what's going on right now, that when you have a symptom, you go to your doctor, you get checked out. But what if your body tells you that there's something that you need to get done? So this entire new class of applications are coming in with sensors that have artificial intelligence in them that are metricating what is happening. And these sensors with that intelligence then get fed into the edge infrastructure because this is voluminous amount of information. As you can imagine, the amount of metrics that your body needs to track, all this voluminous information needs to get correlated and then you need to make an inference about it. Again, that's an experience because you're completely changing the nature of health as this is going about. So in every vertical industry, we have these examples of experiences and what this requires is computation, networking and storage to be pushed all the way into the edge. It requires a network to get this done. It requires connectivity and it requires, as I've spoken about before, this common software stack that VMware is bringing. So talk to me about what's being announced and unveiled at VMworld. So what we are announcing very simply is the VMware edge. And what that VMware edge is, it comprises three common software stacks at different layers of the stack. So the first thing that we're saying is that we are announcing the VMware edge compute stack. So this is software that companies can use, ISVs can use to develop edge-native applications. These are applications that are born at the edge. They're not applications that are necessarily being refactored from somewhere else. And this is stack that is available in very small form factors all the way to large form factors and it's stack that's connected together. As I mentioned before, the numbers of locations are very important. So we are packaging this, we are making it available across the board next week. This is the first part of the announcement. The second part of the announcement is the expansion of our secure access service edge offering. And that expansion includes going from software-defined WAN, which was the first and highly successful service to include secure access, cloud web security, and then to follow that on in a multi-services approach and add more services as we go along. And the third piece is to take our telco cloud platform, we are announcing that that platform is being co-opted to now run at the edge. Now, one very important development in that part is that we've had our ESXi product which is very successful in running in the data center. We have an edge-ready version for this product. We've made a 10x improvement in the overhead and latency of ESXi. So now it can be deployed in edge locations in very small form factors and it is absolutely equivalent to bare metal overhead. So now when companies are looking at, is there overhead associated with the ESXi hypervisor? We're saying no. It's equivalent to bare metal and all the benefits that you get with deploying ESXi will now accrue to benefits that you would have at the edge. Talk to me about some, how the events of the past 18 months, we've seen massive acceleration and digital transformation. We've seen, you know, you mentioned the retailer, the retailer's having to be able to massively shift, curbside delivery, e-commerce. How have the events of the last 18 months influenced or catalyzed VMware Edge? Absolutely. So if you take a step back and think what has happened due to the pandemic, all of us are working from locations we're not going to some centralized location to our offices, we're actually working from our home edges. We were literally living at the edge when we were working from home. And also when you go to do curbside pickup, you're making a decision right there. You know, you're going to where that edge location is for that retail store. So really to me, what has happened with the pandemic is emphasize the need for moving computation all the way to the edge. Now you take one use case, work from home itself, work from home has gone up by in some cases and five X to eight X compared to what it was before. And we've seen the network come under tremendous strain because of work from home. We've seen that the user experience, if it's not good, then of course your productivity gets hampered. So work from home is one of those use cases that has been focused on because of the pandemic. And we've come up with the solution that will help people when they're sitting in their home environment, the kids can do homework, someone can be watching streaming movie, but the business user still continues to function with full productivity. So it's really emphasizing the need for moving computation all the way out to the edge. Yeah, the edge exploded in the last year and a half. I'm going to now rethink instead of working from home or living at work, living on the edge. So thank you for giving me that idea. That definitely changes how I feel about this room right here. Talk to me about some of the customers, customer examples, customers in terms of their feedback as VMware has been developing this. I know you're very much a customer centric organization. What were some of the directions and the influences from the field? I think, you know, as far as customers go, they're an integral part of our development process. It's not that we develop a product and then we go sell it to the customer. What we do is we get the customer to be a part of that process. We figure out what are the issues that the customers are facing in their own business. As an example, when the pandemic hit, we had, you know, in the healthcare space, we had one acute care hospital that came to us and said, well, you know, we can't get enough of the telemedicine done because the radiologists and all are not able to come into the office. Well, we came up with a solution so that radiologists sitting at home can still look at very high definition images as they're talking to their patients. Now, once we develop the first part of the solution, we actually brought the customer in, you know, gave them a prototype. And then I tell my team that when the customer gives feedback, it's like they're handing us a flashlight and that flashlight illuminates the path ahead for us. And so we follow that path that the customer has set based on the technology that we've produced. Our responsibility is to iterate on that technology in a very fast cycle so that as we get the flashlights, we illuminate the path and that gets to building the product. And then we get the product built and then we have a happy, successful customer with good outcomes and experiences. And in the end, VMware has done something positive, not just in terms of our business, but for the world at large. Right, I love that, handing the customer a flashlight. Another one I'm going to steal from you, Sanjay. Thank you, giving me two good ones today and also a different look at Aerosmith, which I probably now won't be able to get that song out of my head. Some of the trends that we've seen, trends over the last 18 months, what are some of the things that you think we've had a lot of acceleration, but there's a lot of positivity that's come from that, but I don't think it gets enough coverage. All of the capabilities that we now have, if you take even just the work from home use case that you mentioned, that's going to be persisting for quite some time, some amount of it's going to be permanent. But what are some of the trends that you're seeing now that you think are really going to help facilitate the edge and the compute and the network and customers being able to take advantage of that even faster? Yeah, I think that one of the really important changes that has come apart from, because of the pandemic is giving customers choice. And as a part of it, VMware is really focused on multi-cloud. So the cloud has come in, we had a movement of workloads from the private data center into the public cloud, but now what customers are saying is, we want choice, we want to make sure that this infrastructure is always available to us. So we are focusing from a VMware standpoint on multi-cloud. Now, what does that mean? It means that it gives customers choice. They can go to different cloud providers, including the private data center and run their applications on top. And this we think is here to stay. This is a trend that we think is as important as what's happening in the future of work. Because previously we used to think of work as a destination, it's not. It's a workspace right now. People could essentially be working from anywhere. And one of the things that we've learned in the pandemic is that that actually does happen. Human beings, we are flexible enough that we can accommodate to these changes that are coming in. So the future of work is going to be distributed. It's going to be work spaces and not workplaces. And then multi-cloud and marrying those two things together is what we are focusing on at VMware. What are some of the tracks or sessions at VMware where folks can go to learn more about that use case in particular, as well as VMware Edge and what you're announcing. Yeah, so we have some excellent tracks. I mean, we have a track about, of course, the distributed edge. We have a track about what's going on with cross-cloud services that we have come up with. We have tracks in terms of what's happening with networking and security, because security obviously goes hand in hand with everything. Zero trust is becoming fundamental in everything that we do. I was talking to one of my customers who owns gas stations and he was saying, Sanjay, you have gas stations in places that I would never visit. But there are people who would sit at these gas stations. I still need for them to come into the network, but I can't trust the devices that they're coming in on. So these would be a few of the tracks that I would recommend that people would go and watch. Excellent, yeah, speaking of zero trust and just the massive changes in the threat landscape in the last year and a half, the things that we've seen with massive rise and ransomware indeed also attacks and attacks like this becoming a when, not if kind of a scenario. So everybody needing to ensure that they have, they can trust the people and the devices on the network. Sanjay, thank you so much for joining me, talking to us about VMware Edge. You gave us some great analogies there that I'm going to take forward with me. And I look forward to seeing you hopefully next year at VMworld in person, fingers crossed. In person would be awesome. Thank you so much, Lisa, and thank you to theCUBE. Our pleasure. For Sanjay Upal, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2021.