 Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Hey, welcome back, everyone. Live here in Las Vegas for VMworld 2017. I'm John Furrier of theCUBE. Live coverage of VMworld 2017 with my co-host, Dave Vellante, your next guest. I'm Del Fino, Senior Vice President, Sales and Systems Engineer and CUBE alum. Great to see you. Welcome back. Thanks guys. Good to be here again. We're here covering VMworld. The ecosystem has been a little tied, goes out, tied, comes in. Real clarity this year. Cloud, you want it on-prem, private cloud, your private cloud, or Amazon? Right. Any questions? Exactly. I mean, this is clear. This is the vision coming to fruition, right? This is what you're seeing this year at VMworld. I think, in particular, when you talk to the customers, they're now in a state of cloud reality, right? Or, you know, there was sort of this big rush, I'm going to try to move as much to the public cloud as possible. And then, you know, in terms of the scale they got there, they start to run the challenges on that side. And they realize, I need to have a dual strategy. I need to have a private, a public, a hybrid strategy. And I think you see all the announcements that we've made today with VMC on AWS, going live now, with more coming around the world in different zones as we progress throughout the rest of the year and into next year. And as well as, you know, all the service offerings we just announced, Wavefront as a service, VRNI as a service, NSX as a service, AppDefense, which is our latest security strategy as well. Customers really see how it comes together now, and they want to go down that journey with VMworld. It's important to clarify, I call the high-level messaging, so it's got clarity. But also, VMware and ecosystems has a lot under the hood, and it can get very technical. So you got to balance the speeds and feeds to feed the red meat to all the practitioners, and then the high-level. So I got to ask you the question. I mean, because the people that are sitting out there on this cloud reality that you mentioned, they don't have a lot of people sometimes. Someone's got to implement this stuff. Automation's coming. Okay, I get that, but getting to the cloud is not easy. I still got to run my shop. What is that operational reality right now? Because cloud reality, okay, I get it, but now I got to turn my on-premise into a true private cloud with a new operating model, new practices. How are the VMware customers dealing with that? You know, and I think that's part of moving away from the legacy as fast as you can, or at least where you have to keep it. You've got to sort of isolate it and put it in a corner, because it's the legacy that's holding most of us back, right, because I got to understand how to run the legacy, keep the lights on. That takes 20, 30, 40, 50% of my time, depending on the customer, depending on their infrastructure. At the same time, I've got to retool my skills. I've got to retool my toolkits that I use, my runbooks, my operational processes, but now they at least have a direction to build to. So all the customer meetings we're having here today, it's about software defined. How do I build this abstraction layer? Okay, we've been doing this with VMware for years on the compute side. Many of them have ventured down the journey with us on the NSX side. You see 10,000 customers roughly on the vSAN side as well. Now it's about putting it together, putting the automation tool set around it, and really building that same experience that they get in the public cloud, which it's fast and it's easy, on their on-prem data centers as well. And sometimes there's many reasons to retain things on the private side, data sovereignty, intellectual property, all of those things as well. So I think that's where the customers are on the journey right now, and it's now they feel comfortable with the direction and they're going to adopt quickly. I like this idea of cloud realities. We've been talking in theCUBE today about configuring the cloud to the realities of your organization's data. And you're talking about governance, security, data locality, et cetera. So it really comes back to a data challenge. You can't just take all your data and shove it up into the cloud. What are you seeing from customers in that regard? You know, and I think there's a regulatory component to that as well, particularly if you go overseas to Europe and Asia, there's a lot more challenges around that as well. I think what you're seeing is that customers recognize the fact that not everything is going to go into the public cloud at this point. So they're really prioritizing burstable workloads, temporary workloads, definitely a prime opportunity to put into public cloud. New application development, definitely a primary opportunity to put in the cloud, right? If I'm in the healthcare business and I have to retain healthcare records for X number of years, and I'm responsible for HIPAA compliance around them, maybe not something that I'm just going to shove up into the cloud today, right? So it's use case specific depending on, an application specific, depending on the vertical industry the customer resides in, and depending on where they are in their journey to the cloud as well. So the other, so you've got a lot of momentum in your business right now. I mean, basically you're on fire. And so we talked about the cloud realities. That's part of it. The AWS announcement last year, even though it was a year ahead of time, gave a lot of clarity to people. How much of the momentum is due to those factors? Again, the cloud reality, the fact that people are now more comfortable with your cloud strategy and saying, okay, I'm willing to make maybe a multi-year commitment with VMware, is that a factor? It is a factor. It is a factor and I think the two remaining components accelerating and capturing momentum in the market of our SDDC strategy being VMware and being vSAN and NSX is also helped that reality come to fruition for customers as well, right? That this software-defined, we've been talking about software-defined data center for a long time, like everybody else in the industry talk about things sometimes a lot sooner than they come to fruition. But now that they put together vSphere with NSX with vSAN and they say, hey, I can actually build a private cloud that's fast and easy, which is the reason a lot of my IT people or my application developers were going around me because the public cloud was faster and easier. Wasn't necessarily cheaper, but it was definitely faster and easier. Now customers who've been on that journey with us for the last year, realize they can offer the same thing on-prem as well and take advantage of both. Does that make sense? Yeah, yeah. What's the biggest walk-away for you right now, looking at VMware, if you had to talk to customers that are not here and looking at the online coverage, certainly Twitter, you'll be able to do a lot of cube coverage and a lot of pictures, a lot of architectural slides. What's the big walk-away so far, day one? I mean, I think tremendous innovation is the big walk-away. In many different categories coming forward, you'll hear another big announcement tomorrow coming up in terms of what we'll be doing in conjunction with one of our sister companies in the application development world, but also about taking security to the next level with app defense, right? So microsegmentation has become fairly ubiquitously known within the industry now. How do I take that into the guest, into the operating system, into the application layer? How do I secure those things as well? You see a lot of customers getting hit ransomware attacks this year. Those are big reality checkers for you. If you're the one sitting behind the keyboard that's got to defend your environment against that and rebuild it, and I think they really see VMware continue to push the envelope to develop very innovative solutions to these approaches that are very cost-effective and that are also very high performance. Personal question, as you're out in the field talking to customers, you've been in the industry for a while, you've seen the waves. What's the biggest thing that you notice, observe out there right now? What's happening? Share some color with the landscape and the marketplace. I think there is some good recognition from customers around the type of operational transformation that they're going to have to go through in this journey. It's not about the network independent from storage, independent from security, independent from computer anymore. Infrastructure is one entity. That's the way the application owners and the application developers view it and want to consume it. That's the way that infrastructure teams are going to have to deliver it. So I think there's a lot of recognition of that. I think there's recognition that the security problem is bigger and better and worse than ever and it's not going away anytime soon and there's sort of no magic box, right? If there was, you'd pay a lot of money for it to make your problems go away, but it's really something that has to be ubiquitous. And infosec policy has to be aligned with infrastructure security implementation. I could have the greatest policy in the world if I can't actually implement it, I'm not going to get the benefits of that security there. So I think those are some of the things as well. I think sort of the container world is going through a little bit of the post-hype cycle, what's the reality check of that environment as well right now, you know? We saw this with OpenFlow and SDN five and six years ago. It's so expensive to run and why even do it, right? I mean, at some point it can be total cost ownership and ease of use in school topics. I think we're well into production ready phase of software defined networking. We're well into the production ready phase of software defined storage and hyper-converged infrastructure. You know, we need to take containers into that next phase as well. Bottom line, what does cloud ready mean to an enterprise these days? I mean, I think it means that cloud ready means that application, that workload is portable, right? And I can deliver the same level of availability, service and agility, whether it's in the public cloud or whether it's in my private data center, right? Or I move it back and forth between both. So, we're certainly excited about the momentum we see with our customers. I think you can see and hear the buzz around VMware going on this year. And I think it's the best it's been in a few years. You run the SE team as well. Yes, I do. How does that work? I mean, SEs are like the Navy SEALs, John, always talks about on the beach and they- I like to call them the conscience of the Salesforce there. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Yes. They get shit done. Customer trusts them and, you know, and but the same time, they understand the customer requirements at a very, very deep level. How are they organized? How do they fit into the partner ecosystem? Maybe you could explain that a little bit. Yeah, so, you know, I think traditionally we've organized our SEs aligned them with product categories, right? So I've got networking and security SEs. I've got cloud management, automation, orchestration SEs and, you know, silver defined storage SEs. But I think, you know, that sort of is the baseline. And then you start to build their skill sets towards solution, right? Towards a solution. So what, you know, what types of solution is it? Containers on open stack. Is it VMware's SDDC stack? Is it around particular vertical solutions? So if you're an SE on my healthcare team, you're probably very focused on electronic health records and Epic and Metronica and, you know, different applications like that. And how do you solve those customers' problems at the higher level and be able to drill down at the same time with the domain experts from those customers when they want to understand how OSPF works in NSX, all right? Or how they want to understand how LUN creation works in VSAN. So it's sort of an evolution in terms of building skills. You got to start at the deepest levels and then you got to build to how those products and those technologies integrate together to provide the customer with a solution. So as you move toward this sort of multi-cloud word throwing another buzzword, but is this cloud architect like SE role emerging? Yeah, we'll call them a solution architect, right? And that solution may be a cloud solution. It may be a vertical solution targeted at a specific customer base. And make sure that we do what's appropriate to serve our customers in a generally good way. What's the coolest thing you worked on this year? I've got to think that app defense is the coolest thing that we've got out this year. I think that we've solved a lot of problems with micro segmentation from a network security perspective. I think now going up into the guest and into the application layer and providing an analogous functionality there is going to be really a very, very prevalent way of preventing breaches, malware, malware propagation, ransomware in the future as well. So I'm a little bit of a security geek. It's attractive to me. I really see that as just an ongoing, it's not even a battle anymore. It's a war now for our customers, right? And we want to help them win that way. Ransomware has been so brutal. Ransomware has been brutal. And I mean, you know, the customer's almost going out of business, right? Well, it's become a board level topic really overnight. Absolutely. It's a serious board level topic, not just lip service. I mean, you're seeing that, right? You will see in some circumstances, boards actually pulling the chief information security officer out of IT and having to report directly to the board. Well, I mean, it makes a lot of sense that, I mean... It's... The pressure is unbelievable. The pressure is unbelievable, right? In a lot of regards, you would think that the CISO should not, certainly should not report to the CIO. It's kind of like the Fox running the... Fox watching the hen house a little bit, you know? Dynamic, right? Maybe that's not the best analogy, but... Yeah. But there should be an inherent tension there. Number one, but number two is, what's the right regime? I mean, why is it IT's problem? It shouldn't be, right? Yeah, and I think it goes back to, you know, information security policy versus actual implementation. And the gap that's existed between those two for years for many reasons, networking being a flagrant issue in that context, right? Where I could say, oh, this application, this user needs to talk to this application, this application needs to talk to this set of data. How do I implement that? Right? That's not the easiest thing with the tool set that customers who run legacy networks have had historically. So I think now that we have some of those things, you know, you'll see the scenario I just described where some, a few organizations are pulling the CISO out of IT and reporting it to the board. Or some, you know, we've seen board-level mandates for segmentation initiatives within the technology area as well. So I think this is going to be an ongoing battle that we face moving forward. I mean, this is the biggest problem I would stand on the cue all day long because part of the value purposes of cloud and DevOps and apps is having data in real time. So to be liberal with the data, you run the risk of opening it up so you can't do it the old way. You know, part of the cloud adoption and the new way of applications about moving these businesses forward, right? The security is one of those things that will move you backwards from where you are today. Right? So I think that it's important that we be able to tackle all these battles on all different fronts at the same time. If I may, I know we've got to figure out but there's another dynamic as well which is the recognition that we are going to get penetrated. And I think it was the third leg of Pat's slide today was response. And so boards are saying it's not if it's when, how do we respond? That's a critical part of the implementation. And I think it's, you know, and it's particularly, we talk about IoT, right? Think about the number of new entry points you create into your infrastructure, right? Every device you connect to the network itself. So keeping them out is a huge challenge. The question is, what can you do as the owner or operator once they are inside, right? How do you limit, how do you restrict the level of risk that you have and exposure you have to your data, to your applications, to your customer information so on and so forth. And I think that's what we've brought the table in a substantial way with micro segmentation with NSX. And I think you'll see that continue to really, really raise the game when app defense as well. Don Delfino, great to have you, great color, great commentary. Man, you're like a pro. We need like a anchor with us. Sports center here. Can I have a job if Pat fires me, am I in? No, you're in. You're in. Pat fire him so we can hire him. Don't fire me, Pat. I like my job. Don, thanks so much. Great, great to be here. Thank you, Dave. Appreciate it. Appreciate it. Pleasure. Bringing a great attitude on the Cube, great energy. More come, day one as we continue down, wind down day one. Three days of wall-to-wall covers with the Cube, VMworld two sets, double barrel shotgun of content here in the Cube. We'll be back with more after this short break.