 Selecting the signal from the noise, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. And now your host, Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are live in San Francisco at VMworld 2015. This is Silicon Angles flagship program, theCUBE, where we go out to the events and extract the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of Silicon Angles. I'm my co-host Dave Vellante, co-founder of Wikibon.com research. Our next guest is Bask Iyer, SVP and CIO of VMware. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, John. Great to see you. So a lot of stuff happening. Being the CIO, we interviewed all the CIOs at VMC, VMware, because we love to talk about that, what's going on. So it's not so much pimping up the VMware stuff, but it's really, you guys are really pushing a lot of the stuff into production early. You're always kind of kicking the tires. You're the guinea pig, if you will, for a lot of the new stuff. So I want to get your take on it. It's always exciting. So thanks for joining us. What's going on with VCloud? You know, to go there. But what's going on inside? You're new to the job. When you came in, what attracted you to come in to be the CIO? And what are some of the cool things that you guys had in place and are doing? Yeah. So I've been a VMware customer for such a long time. You know, who was that who said, you know, he loved the Razor so much? Philip Kahn, he said, right, that he bought the company. So it was one of those things. I loved the company. I bought the product for so long. And I said, when an opportunity came up, you know, why not work for them? It is a cool product. You know, it works. There's a lot of snake oil and software sales, as you know, and I bought a lot of them as a CIO. And when you see a product that actually works and delivers value, it feels good to work with a company like that. So I got to ask you, because one of the things that we've been talking about is we've seen the long range of the EMC, VMware, Federation 2.0, or 3.0, however you want to describe it. And then Pat Gelsing has that long vision, not a short-term, myopic view, but the future. And then you're seeing DevOps, a very tactical piece of the program here this year, organically growing out in a serious way. That's an IT ops kind of vibe with VMware. And yet the developer communities are out there. How do you see you guys balancing that now? Because now you have a whole new constituency coming in, pure developers. And you need the IT ops. So is it ops dev or dev ops? Well, I mean, I've been doing this for a while. When I started it, I was the IT guy. You do the development, you do the network, you ran the cables, you did the hardware. There was no really, yeah, there's no dev, there's no operators. Then we became sophisticated and we say, hey, you are a developer, you code, you rack and stack, you're the hardware, the network guy, and so on. What's happening now is a little bit of that is coming together. So you want to develop things faster. Sometimes knowing a little bit of everything is pretty good. So the developers, programmatically, are able to control the infrastructure. I think the thing we have to be careful with, some of these are going to be trends, some of these are fads. And so as a company like EMC, VMware, is we have to be aware of the fads. And you have to play there, but don't just think of it as a real trend, right? So I think this Docker container, the whole thing DevOps, doesn't look like a fad to me. It looks like a real thing, because I as a developer would love to have more control over this. So Jeremy Burton said in the cube last year, never fight fashion. And from him, as a marketing guy, he's at that DA and at the same time, you don't want to bet on a fad or fashion statement that could change. What is the fads and what is the trends in your mind right now? I think I talk about this with other CIOs is every time they, somebody asks me, they said, what is the next big thing coming, right? So, you know, I've lived on the beach and I've always watched the surfers. There are some people who are just waiting for the next wave. There are 300 waves coming in front of you, they don't write it. They say, what is the next wave? So what I'm telling people is, you got two waves to write right now. I know it's not cool to talk about it, but there's cloud. And I know it was so yesterday is what everybody thinks, but not a lot of us are still writing that wave. There's so much mileage to get out of it. Second is mobile. Now, mobile has done so much on the consumer side, but you know, in the enterprise side, mobile is kind of pathetic. You know, most of us use it to get your email and calendar, but we don't have apps like Waze or WhatsApp or things on the enterprise side. So I can't tell people, please write the wave you have right now. The next wave will come. So, John's right. We have to, I go back to when we were here at VMworld in 2010. We had Mark Egan on. It was the CIO at the time. The conversation seems so outdated. It was around, well, what percent of your infrastructure is virtualized? And you know, what's your journey look like? And Joe Tucci said, we will have X percent of our company virtualized. And even if it's SAP and Oracle, and that happened. You know, looking back, you know, at the time I was like, that's pretty ambitious, but looking back, wow, that's the easy stuff. Now you're on a different journey. You mentioned cloud, mobile, you're right. It sounds yesterday to talk about cloud, you talked to IT practitioners. They were still defining it, you know, recently. Now they're trying to get there. So, talk a little bit more about those big transformational challenges that you're going after, particularly around cloud and mobile and modern apps. Right, so I think most people are doing the easy things on the cloud. You know, they take their website and they put it on the public cloud. And then they do some sales applications or HR applications and so on, email, okay. Those don't, not all of them really differentiate a whole lot. These are things that, you know, somebody can do it for you and they can do it reasonably well. You know, why not put it on the public cloud? But there's still a whole ton of stuff running inside the enterprise, right? So can we use the cloud scale, the advantages that public cloud has, and treat your internal data center like a cloud, like a private cloud? Not a lot of us have done that. So you can apply all the techniques in the cloud computing internally. So that way has to still go on. Then, you know, I think the marketing guys call it hybrid cloud. I just call connecting these two. So you can't have stuff running in the cloud and something running in your cloud and not connect them. That's one to watch out. And CIOs always, you talked about fads. What I have to worry about it is, are these, which cloud vendors are going to win and who's going to lose? Because I've been in a situation when there was ASPs, I don't know if you guys remember. Sure, of course. And I put my stuff on the ASPs and they went out of business. And painfully, I have to bring it back. And I had to rewrite a lot of the applications. So the CIOs want to know, if I put it there, can I bring it back? And people would say, well, these guys are too big. They can't go out of business, but I've seen it happen. So one of the things to think about it is, how do you do in a private cloud, put it in a public cloud, can you bring it back? Can you put it in another cloud? Those are the kind of things the CIO should think about. Well, we just did a study on this. We sized the cloud market, public cloud market, and the number one vendor was other. There's so many out there to your point. And your customers got to make bets, and those bets are potentially very risky. But now, so I want to ask you, from the standpoint of that so-called hybrid cloud, being able to move it out and move it back, we know that homogeneity makes that easier. Executives have talked about it for years. Of course, now we live in this heterogeneous world. VMware has to be open to open stack and to talk to Amazon and Azure, et cetera. But from your standpoint, you have the option of building that vision that we saw on Monday. Is that what you're building up? Exactly, so if you, we call it, we are not marketing people, so we call it one cloud internally. We run completely all VMware processes, including R&D and stuff on VMware, inside VMware. And vCloud Air, I think. And vCloud Air, so we used to call it dog-fooding. I call it drinking your own champagne, because I don't like to eat dog food. But it's true, if you go to the hands-on lab, which is just across the street, you will see all the labs, all the training, everything that we are doing for the show is all run on our internal cloud. So, and I can't close the books without VMware. So that is so done, the VMware and VMware is here. First question people will ask is, do you use your products? So you have to say yes to that one. And I can confidently say yes. The next question is, what are you doing clever with your products that we should learn? So that's the practitioner to practitioner. So most of the time I spend with CIOs to say is, here are the things I think my folks are doing, extending vSphere, extending vMotion. Here are the scripts we write. Here's how we play with OpenStack. Here's how we play with Container. I actually use Container for my own app's development. I don't think of it as a threat to VMware. I think of it as a very complimentary thing to do. So, but show it. And so that is the role for the IT professionals is, this is how we use it. Here's the positives. Here are some of the negatives that go. And it's just a follow-up on that. It's a different job you have now than you had with, say, CIO of Farva or Honeywell, right? I mean, because now the sales guys want a lot of your time. Right, right. How's that transition been? It's good and bad. I mean, I could never turn to be a complete salesperson because, you know, I have to be a practitioner. That's where I draw the line. So I actually tell my salespeople, if you want to tell me how brilliant we are and so on, I'm not the guy. I'm going to tell you, and there are a lot of good things to say, but there are warts. I'm going to talk about the warts, if any, and so on. And if you're not comfortable, don't put me in. That's what the honest customers want the honesty. You'd be surprised at how many people just want that. I mean, the reason people come to the show, like our show, is because they are loyal customers. They already are customers. They just want to know, what do you actually do? What works? What doesn't work? And can I trust your pipeline? You know, are you going to put more development to it? So my job is just, you know, I'm a practitioner. And if I go completely into just the sell mode, then people would want to talk to the real CIO of VMware. And they say, who's the guy who actually runs it? You know, I know you're doing the external. So I mean, my job is 100%, used to be 100% internal, although over the last few months I've got a good team and I'm like 95% internal, 5% external. I'm hoping it'll be 70, 20, 30. Talk about the CIO conference you guys had here. And I want to ask you a specific question because you mentioned snake oil, salesmen are out there selling enterprise software. And also you mentioned fads versus real trends. And I don't think cloud and mobile are old ways at all. I think the narrative of cloud, if anything has been up level enough, certainly with Amazon success, and you know, certainly maybe in the Clouderati circles, it's not cool to talk about cloud, but it's definitely kicking ass right now. So, and people are using it. So I think that's a great way, so I agree with you. But I want to ask you about some of the even more boring stuff. There are channel partners out there. There are suppliers that CIOs deal with and also vendors. He's my box guy and I got this and he's my, I'm an ex shop or this shop, that kind of goes away. So we'll talk about that dynamic for the CIO. What kind of gets vaporized with this integrated end-to-end stack with cloud and mobile, business mobility, and how does that affect the supply chain of the suppliers, the VARs, because they have to have that value at proposition. So one thing, surprisingly, IT is all about automating things, right? One thing we never automated is IT. So a lot of the suppliers and partners made a lot of money by this labor arbitrage. You know, I can get 10,000 people in and do a project with you. And I can get it cheaper than the next person, whatever. I can get 10,000 person for the price of 5,000 people. You know, those kind of labor arbitrage. With cloud and with some of the automation, you want to get five people to do the work of this 10,000 people. You don't mind paying a lot of money to these five. It's actually cheaper to pay for these five folks. So now you really, the talent war is getting even higher for the partners. So there's still a need for a lot of automation in IT. And you're talking about really that notion of a full stack developer and or versatile DevOps like person. I think Mark Andreessen coined the term 10X developer concept. That's right, exactly right. Exactly right. And look, Silicon Valley is a great example, right? I mean, there's one person creating Linux. Two people creating MS-DOS and Microsoft. Two people creating Unix perhaps. I'm exaggerating to make a point. But it's not armies of people creating this enormous value. So let's talk about the developer angle. Because if you believe the notion of a 10X developer, that makes the efficiency cloud essentially making efficiency on the developer side really go crazy, really off the charts. How does that change the dynamic inside the organization? Because now you have the rock stars. Used to be, hey, code some stuff and ship it. We'll get on a waterfall and then next week, QA meeting, pass the baton over. Now it's pushing code daily, weekly, monthly. All kinds of different life cycles of software development. But now you have a short number of people. You have the 10X developer. What is CIOs? They're not used to that, are they? The front line guy, he used to be the networking guy. Right now it's like this guy. How is it changing the dynamic? No, so you have to, your management style has to change. You have to be privileged to have good folks working for you. I mean, you can't assume I'm the boss guy. I'm going to tell you what to do. Because you can walk out and get a job elsewhere. You don't have to work for me. So now, I mean it's old fashioned again. People want to work for good people. You know, I used to want to work to make money, right? Or put on the table. These guys are not worried about putting food on the table or even making money. They want challenge. They want challenge. They want to work for a good guy first. They want to change the world. So do you have a mission and purpose that is higher than coming in and coding? Do I like working for you? I mean, this is huge. You used to be hurting the cast, now it's hurting the egos. Yeah, I mean, the ego goes up. I mean, hey, I'm a full stack developer. It's a good way though. It's a good way though, but they are smart. So you have to be humble enough to know, hey, this guy is smarter than me. He works for me, but he's smarter than me. He took me some adjustment to get you some more red meat at him. Yeah, so getting back to the DevOps so that the code base has been pretty crappy. You mentioned that earlier. I didn't say that's my word, but you're used to now with ways in the consumer apps, API application, horizontally scalable. These are new notions. How is that impacting IT guys and CIO? So in the enterprise side, I think it's creativity. So what is happening on the consumer side? You can name 5,000 consumer apps for the mobile form, right? I mean, you probably use 10 of them every day. In enterprise, somehow we are still too pragmatic. We kind of go into let's fix the old legacy first, let it make it work. And then we'll worry about mobile and cool stuff. We still think of mobile as a cool stuff, not as a necessity. So I'm challenging people to say, hey, stop riding that wave, clean up the beach. Clean, yeah, exactly, exactly. Exactly, that's what it is I'm thinking. Stop having fun up there, right in the waves. This is not fun. I mean, you got to clean up the foundational. You do, you do, but don't forget, you know, starting the new stuff. So I keep, somebody for a coin the term, not me, think of mobile moments. You know, you have to think about, the reason Waze is popular, you're stuck in a traffic, you're one-on-one, you're late for a meeting, and you have nothing else. You have to pick up your phone, click it in, it knows your GPS, it tells you there are eight ways to get there. It's like a mobile moment, right? Oh, it's an old mobile moment. Value right there. Value right there. There must be opportunities like that in enterprise, there is, but we haven't bothered to think. So I think it's a laziness on creativity and innovation with an enterprise. So you almost have to demand and force it. So I'm asking my... This is not a technology, this is a people process. It's a mindset. I mean, when people say mobile first, so one way to do it is, you know, you're folks saying, I'm not going to take a PC to my next meeting. Everything has to be on my mobile. So we, so, I mean, VMware, you know, specifically virtualization in general, helped us clean up the infrastructure portfolio. The application portfolio is still a mess. The average age of an enterprise app's got to be two decades old. So are we going to see that sort of the true rationalization? We went through a mini rationalization after, you know, Y2K and the dot com bubble blew, but are we going to see a true application rationalization where we can actually be mobile first? And is that happening? How long it's going to take? What's your generalizing? And of course it's different by industry, but try to generalize at the high level. I think this is where I'm seeing the wave is just here. The cloud wave. What the cloud wave lets the CIOs do is take your mundane stuff. You know, there are a lot of people who still want to run their email internally. Now some companies, there are reasons why you do it, so I don't want to belittle it. But in a lot of companies, you know, put it in a cloud, let somebody else run it for you. You don't get, you know, that frees up 10% of your time to work on creative, innovative things. Don't necessarily want to run your payroll. You really want to run your payables and other, the actual system. So you're going to find that the clever CIOs will slowly take some of the really mundane back office operation and use the cloud to kind of put it away. And then now you have time to actually focus on the front office to see how can I help sell? How can I help the revenue? How can I create some mobile apps that makes a salesperson productive? But we are so consumed by the operational thing of back office reporting and so on. So unfortunately, a lot of enterprises are like that. We read about the consumer stuff, but you go open a data center in an enterprise, there's still a lot of legacy stuff. Yeah, so a lot of upside for the CIO that has that initiative and a lot of risks for those that don't, I would think. So, Pat said something yesterday. What is it? Not taking risk is the biggest risk. I totally believe it. And this thing about, don't break it. I mean, if it ain't broke, don't change it. You got to change it. Yeah, talk about VMworld here. I see a lot of stuff going on. We're burning the midnight oil. So much interaction, great engagement. The data's coming in from all angles. Meeting people, great conversations. What are you hearing? What are the top three conversations out on the streets, in the hallways, and in the sessions that you can stack right? It is so humbling. People come, there's so many people come back and they want us to be successful. They like us and they want us to be successful. So it is a big challenge for us. You know, to put a lot of weight on our shoulders. People are shaking hands like, I'm just joined the company. I didn't create the product, but they are shaking hands and say this is a great company. So one thing I'm feeling is the expectations on our shoulders on how much people expect from this company. It's also good to see so much goodwill. People actually like it. But I keep saying we are always one step ahead of the sheriff, right? That's the feeling I have is we're doing good, but just one more step. And the pace of technology is changing so fast. So I think we have to be, we have to think like a startup, act like a grown up, but we have to think like a startup and then be always paranoid and always running. And unfortunately it's not going to change. And we were talking yesterday on our editorial clothes about the size of Amazon web services. I mean, VMware size, their show is going to be hitting the numbers that you guys are doing. You got to get up there. You got to up your game. Right? I mean, VMware's got to really go to the next level. Exactly. No, I think we all feel it. I mean, I think you need to know your blind spots. You know, you need to feel the pressure. And so it feels a lot of goodwill. I mean, we feel good about what the company has created, the ecosystem we have, but it's not time to rest on the wall. What about some other conversations? Obviously the Federation conversations always out there. We're discussing that till the cows come home. But what else is out there? So the Federation, I mean, just to answer that is, I keep telling the customer, I was a customer before I said, you put yourself, you are in charge. If you want us to come look like one company, tell us we want us to look like one company. If you want us to look like two companies, you write the show. Don't let the Federation or us drive it. It makes sense, doesn't it? I mean, a lot of customers do come back and say, you know, I want to see you have a unified front. It makes a lot of sense. And we have a lot of synergies across the companies. It makes sense. But some companies may come back and say, I want to just talk about software. I want to talk about hardware. So I'm telling the customers is you are in charge. You don't realize how much you are in charge. Don't believe what you're hearing even from us or press. You just tell us what you want us to do. Yeah, we know for a fact, a lot of those press reports are wrong. Confirm that they're wrong. And you know who you are. Rico. And I've been a customer of both the EMC and VMA before. It's good companies to work for. But you have to take fate into your own control, right? And you should drive it. And I think the companies will be responsive, you know, either way. So that's what I mean. I hear some of it, but most of it is out of what they read and press us. It's not affecting the day-to-day is what my feeling is. A lot of the thing is about is, you know, what are we doing new? What are we doing differently? And can I leverage my investment that I have to still get the changes in Docker and other kind of stuff? So I think that's what we're trying to show. I am actually trying to show them, here's some examples of how I'm doing it internally. You know, I do like the container story, but you still need an infrastructure, don't you, to run it? And then how do you manage that infrastructure? The second thing is people say, hey, what about all this free-sustuff I can download from the internet and, you know, why would I pay money for you? And the honest answer is if you can get something free, and if it's really free, you should get it. You should get it. You should get it. That's what I would do. But you've got to think and say, is it really free? And I'm not, obviously I'm biased, so I'm not going to say what the answer is. But if it's free, please buy free. Yeah. But do you value it? Is it free, too? Is it? And support? I'm fully supported. No problem. I think it's very simple. Again, a customer is in charge, and if it's free, go get the free one. By the way, we give you free ones, too. If you want that, you can have it, right? Yeah, pick your site. Well, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thank you. Appreciate the insight as CIO, and also as a practitioner, ultimately, that's really the value you guys bring to the table so much. This is theCUBE live in San Francisco at VMworld 2015. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back after this short break.