 Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high-tech coverage, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2019, brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage here at VMworld 2019, San Francisco, California. We're in Moscone, North Lobby. I'm John Furrier with my co-host Dave Vellante. Dave, 10 years of covering VMworld. This is our 10th year. Pat, you've been on every year since 2010. We have photos of you that go to you back then. And we've heard your rap going way back. Welcome back. You guys probably got some dirt on me, boy. Be careful. Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of VMware on theCUBE. Thanks for coming on to the scene. Always a pleasure to be on with you guys. We're going to end up with Driftwood. You're already as a do-over. We're going to talk about all that. We're going to spend the entire segment just talking about Pat Gelsinger's predictions. We'll recycle some of them. But let's get into the core news here. VMworld, you've done such an amazing job. We've given you a lot of props on theCUBE over the years, but still continuing, even in the market climate, that's swinging up and down right now. VMware's still producing great results. The team is executing their transition. Since October, 2016, when you kind of made that move, cloud is it, clear vision, a lot's been falling into place. Pivotal has dropped on your lap and you got the engineering stuff coming out on top of vSphere and a bunch of other things. Great stuff. I mean, you must be geeking out. Well, thank you. As I, at the U.S. gymnastics finals, Simone Biles did a triple double, right? First time ever in competition. And I think of our last week as a triple double, right? Two major acquisitions and earnings call and now VMworld and all the announcements as part of it is like, wow. You stick the landing. You stick the landing. That's right. We did yesterday morning. We stuck the landing and Ray did that today as well. So super proud of the team in bringing these across the line. You know, and I think, you know, certainly meeting with many of the customers or the partners here, everybody's sort of going, wow. And I was excited about VMware before I got here. Now I'm just U4. And it's really- I thought Ray did an exceptional job. I'm going to talk to him later today on theCUBE today in his keynote. He was great and he repeated the messages over and over but he nailed the tech piece. I got to ask you, as the engine of VMware is continuing to be put together and expanded, it's like a new turbo engine gets pulled in here. There's a lot of really good engineering going on. What are you most excited about? How would you describe all the action going on if someone says, Pat, what's the underlying engineer? What's being built? What's going to be the outcome of all this? Well, you know, I think it really, you know, it sort of boils down to, right, you know, these two phrases that you heard from me yesterday. We're going to engineer for good, the tech for good stuff, and we're going to do good engineering. And, you know, doing both of those is just okay. And you sort of say, hmm, you know, we got, you know, vSAN, right? You know, we're not being able to optimize the performance because, you know, big blocks, the little blocks, latency, buffer size, all this other kind of stuff. So now we're doing Magna, right? And when you see that demonstration there, it's like, we're going to do it automatically for you to be fine grain optimizing your storage. Wow, that's pretty cool. And it's X intelligence, right? You sort of say, wow, this is like really cool. So let's go automatically produce an understanding of the underlying network, understand what's going on, give you the rules that we recommend, and allow you to simulate them, which is like super cool, right? You know, we will, within minutes, we will give the network engineer more understanding of what's really going on in their applications and then allow them to see it in real time and then apply it, right? Just, you know, every one of these, and yeah, it's just 10 or 15 tremendous engineers who are doing these little innovations that are fundamentally changing the industries that they're in, in addition to the big stuff. Yeah, Dave did a survey before coming into VMworld with customers, with a panel. 41% said they're not going to change their spending habits with VMware. Increase. Increase. The second half, only 7% said they're going to decrease. So great customer loyalty. And remember, VMware is moving so fast and transient. Customers aren't moving as fast as you guys are. So you've talked about that before. What are you hearing from customers as they look at it and say, wow, is it too much new stuff? Because they want to continue to operate, but they also want to enable the developer piece. Because remember, dev ops means dev and ops. You guys got the ops piece down, you're adding stuff to it. There's always concerns there and making sure it's smooth and you guys work on that. The dev piece becomes super critical. That's where Amazon really shine with public cloud. So hybrid clouds here. What is the dev ops equation for hybrid? I mean, Kubernetes is a good start. Where do you see it going? Yeah, and that's really the center, you know, to me, that is the most important news of VMworld this year is the entire Tanzu message, the coming together of Pivotal, the coming together of Pacific, coming together with Mission Control. So really leveraging VMware in the run layer, leveraging Pivotal in the build and Heptio in the manage, right? And those coming together under Tanzu. I think that's the most important thing that we're doing. And I think, you know, for operators, which is really the center of our audience here at VMworld, you know, they've always struggled with those crazy developers. You know, they do this cool new stuff. It's not operational, it's not secure. Boy, and bringing those together, the magic formula for that is Kubernetes. And that's why we're making these big bets. The, you know, move with Pivotal. Obviously the Heptio guys, I mean Joe Beta and, you know, Craig, you know, they're just, you know, the rock stars of that community because they really are solving in an industry consensual, standard way. You know, that's really the magic of Kubernetes. You know, this ain't a VMware thing. This is an industry thing. Is Kubernetes the technology enabler? I mean, TCPIP was that in the old networking days. It enabled a lot of shifts in the industry. You were part of that wave. Is Kubernetes that disruptive enabler? Yeah, I really see it as one of those key transition points in the industry. And as I sort of joked, if my name was Scott and we were 20 years ago, I'd be banging the table calling it Java. And Java defined enterprise software development for two decades. And by the way, Scott's my neighbor. He's down the hill. So I look down on Mr. McNeely. I always don't like that. It looks up to you. But you know, the, you know, it changed how people did enterprise software development for the last two decades. And Kubernetes has that same kind of transformative effect, but maybe even more important, it's not just development, but also operations. And I think that's what we're uniquely bringing together with Project Pacific, really being able to bridge those two worlds together. So, you know, and if we deliver on this, you know, I think it is, you know, the next decade or two will be the center of innovation for us, how we bridge those two worlds together and really give developers what they need and make it operator friendly out of the box across the history to the future. This is pretty powerful. So that does lead to the big question is you just mentioned developers. And when you look out the VMworld audience, it's not comprised of huge developers. I know you're thinking about this. So what's your plan to attract those developers and you're giving them platform now in the technologies, but those builders, what are you going to do for them? Is it build community, more events, more training? What's the plan there? Yeah. And I'd say, you know, I think about it in a couple of different contexts. You know, one is if we were here six years ago and you would have asked me about open source, right? You know, I mean, you know, VMware's reputation in the open source community wasn't good, right? We hired Dirk, we started to build momentum, make contributions. You know, one of the litmus tests for Joe and Craig on Heptio, because remember, you know, a lot of people could have bought Heptio, right? You know, because, you know, someone was who's going to be the buyer, but also will they be a willing seller? And their litmus test was, are you really serious about open source, right? Are you really committed to the open source Kubernetes tree and development and cloud native computing foundation? Are you really there? Because they were also looking, do I want to be bought by you? Do I want to be part of the VMware family? And we passed the test. You know, that's why Heptio's part of the team. Clearly this has been central to Pivotal and their view. So we have to be open source credible. We also have to be developer credible. And, you know, and those two are tightly linked. And that's why, you know, we know that on stage, Pivotal is particularly the Java community is three plus million developers. Bitnami is two millionish developers. You know, we now have high volume connections to the developer community. And you're going to see a show up in dramatically more profound ways at places like Kubicon and Spring One is coming up to start to be in the developer spaces. And ultimately you got to do stuff that they care about. You know, at the end of the day, you know, winning developers has nothing to do with great marketing, even though that's important. You have to do great code, right? You know, and bring them value to their development assignments. And you know, we think, you know, with the assets that we're lining up, that's why we did Pivotal, Bitnami, Heptio, some of our organic things, Dirk's leadership here. You know, I believe that a year or two from now, VMware could be seen as the most developer and open source enterprise company in the industry. And that's the goal that I'm on. I have an idea for you. Allocate 1,000 engineers to open source and start having them build new applications, new workloads, give it away to the open source community and then sell your products and services to them. I mean, that would get you in fast. Well, by the way, you know, we now have hundreds of engineers who are committed to open source, right? Who are making, you know, who either full-time job is open source contributions. So I'm not to 1,000 yet, but I'm now several hundred that their day job, night job, weekend job is open source contributions. So we're becoming very credible. And as you heard me say in the keynote, we're now top three contributor to Kubernetes. You know, this is big. And some areas like the networking area, we're clearly the leader in a number of the key networking open source technologies. And you'll see us do more of those kind of projects. One of the things you mentioned, I mean, you mentioned about the open source six years ago, you might have rolled your eyes or might not have had an opinion on it. I mean, because of the timing of where VMware was. But one thing you've been banging the drum on since 2012 was hybrid cloud. And so you see certain things early on. You know, you see those waves. That's what you're known for, in my opinion. You're really good at it. You see blockchain as a great wave. But as a headline, I'm reading that you use unfortunate, it says VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger, Bitcoin is bad for humanity. Sold all my Bitcoin. Okay, so now are you implying, and blockchain is a lot of open source components there. It's evolving, you've got a lot of blockchain projects. So is that an indictment on the unregulated currency market or is it the underlying infrastructure? And are you excited about blockchain, is it underlying? Is it one of those hybrid cloud moments for you or is it more of, we'll see how it develops? What's your thoughts? And explain the Bitcoin comment too. You know, the idea of distributed ledger technology, immutable distributed trust. You know, I've said, I think of that and blockchain is the underlying technology as almost like public private key encryption. Right, you know, if we go back 40 years before RSA, you know, Ravechumi and Ari, you know, I mean, it's that important. You know, this is breakthrough innovative technology in how you do distributed secure trust. That's powerful. So we are huge believers, you know, strongly committed to blockchain and distributed leverage or technology. Now, why do I make my comments like I do on Bitcoin? So Bitcoin, as it's implemented and implementation of blockchain and distributed ledger, I assert it's bad. It's bad for two reasons. One is it's an environmental crisis. Right, a single ledger. You know, if you and I transacted a penny, right, you know, I would consume enough energy to power your house for half a day. I mean, you know, it's incredible, right? You know, I mean, and that's why you had these crazy bit farms being built and people, you know, finding GPs. So you think of a sustainability standpoint. Absolutely, climate sustainability, right, you know, this is a terrible implementation of blockchain. Secondly, the way it's also done as well in this totally unregulated environment, almost all of its uses are for illicit and criminal purposes. You know, that's who's trading in Bitcoin, right? You know, as well. So its purpose is almost all illicit, right? And it's environmental crisis. I say bad. Now, I'm not saying that blockchain is bad. I think this is revolutionizing. I want to make sure we clarify that because obviously unregulated outside the United States has been a big problem. We've seen the SEC crack down. But you know, studies have shown over 95% of the use of Bitcoin is criminal, right? So back to the past moments. Yeah, let's go make it good. And that's what I mean. These two phrases do good engineering and engineer for good. How do we make blockchain? And this is part of the reason, you know, we had just announced on a Sunday a partnership with Australian Stock Exchange and Data Asset, you know, that they're leveraging the VMware distributed ledger technology, right? You know, as part of their go forward strategy for the stock exchange of Australia. Well, that's good, right? You know, we're making it suitable for enterprises. You know, meeting the regulatory requirements. I'm happy with the progress of the blockchain for you guys. Absolutely, you know, and we're order plus magnitude better in terms of performance and energy consumption. So yeah, and we're just getting started. And it's consensus space, which is great. A quick question for you on multi-cloud. So hybrid cloud, you said in 2012, I challenge you on it. And you've been banging the drums since 2012, this couple of years into it. And hybrid cloud is pretty much standard. People see it, recognize it as the cloud 2.0. Multi-cloud is all the buzz and all the rage here at everywhere. What does that actually mean? It's different debate. So I want to get your thoughts on defining what multi-cloud is. And is it going to have that same gestation period of the same kind of years? Because if it's seven years to get, or six years to get hybrid cloud mainstream, is multi-cloud going to have a similar trajectory? Yeah. So, you know, let's try to be very crisp with the definition, right? Multi-cloud is simply that, you know, customers using multiple clouds for different business purposes. And what we said is, is that we're going to help them manage, that's the center point of cloud health. Right, help customers manage, cost optimize, secure in a multi-cloud environment where the underlying infrastructure is dissimilar, not compatible. Right, and in that sense you sort of say you can have consistent operations if we do our job well with cloud health, but you're not going to have consistent infrastructure. Meaning I can't be motion between these things. I can't, you know, have higher, you know, these, you know, things. So that's the multi-cloud. Now a proper subset of multi-cloud is hybrid cloud. And hybrid cloud is where you have both consistent operations and consistent infrastructure. And that's when we can do things like you saw in the demo today. Right, you know, we're running a VMware stack on Azure. We're removing Azure running workloads in real time, right? You know, without, you know, stunning them, pausing them to an Amazon VMC instance and I'm moving workloads from Amazon VMC onto an Azure instance. That's the hybrid cloud, you know, and that's the power at work from private data centers to multiple, you know, different targets in the public cloud where you can be optimizing the location of work nodes based on the proper business requirements. And that might be, you know, governance, that might be performance, it might be latency, you know, it might be the time of the day of the week when you have capacity available, right? And that's really what we're saying, consistent operations and consistent infrastructure, proper subset of multi-cloud. I have a question on something you said yesterday. You said strength lies in differences, not similarities. True, I buy that. There's a number of differences between you and your preferred public cloud partner. AWS doesn't use the term multi-cloud, they say you shouldn't say security is not broken and there are a number, you want to be the best infrastructure and developer software company, they want to be that platform, they want to be the security cloud on and on and on. So, I see this impending collision course, maybe not tomorrow, but what are your thoughts on the differences and the good or bad that does for the industry? Yeah, well, you know, we do, we appreciate Amazon, the investments that we're making, you know, we've both bet big with each other and they're been a great partner. In fact, I'm going to talk to Andy before the end of the week, updated some of the announcements and some of the things. You know, a great partner, we have regular cadence of our activities with each other and you know, as we said, they're our preferred public cloud partner and with it, you know, it's preferred in two senses. It's a go-to market and how we position that, but it's also an R&D statement, right? You know, this is where we're doing a lot of core engineering and that will flow into, you know, private cloud, embodiments flow into our other public cloud and our cloud verified partners, but that's the point of the arrow in terms of the innovations, the go-to market and the R&D aspects of the partnership. And I expect we're going to be here, you know, five years from now and we're going to have this conversation and I'm going to answer it exactly the same way. That'll be our CUBE's 15th anniversary and so we'll be excited for that. It's our 10 years, so I want to, last question, put you in the spot, looking back over 10 years, pick the moments that you think were key inflection points, what were key notable good things that happened, bad things that happened, or things that didn't happen right and then going forward 10 years, you laid out a few of them with Kubernetes. Just past 10 years, it could be CUBE memories, but in VMware's world, you were at EMC first and became CEO, a lot's changed. Paul Morris laid out the original vision and where we are today, what's your key moments? Well, you know, I think if you go all the way back, obviously, hey, when the first WSX, right, and people could run Linux and Windows on there, wow, all right, you know, the first VMotion, right? Oh my gosh, and that sort of ushered in ESX. Obviously, the transition from Diane to Paul, the public offering, you know, boy, that was a pretty tumultuous time. And, you know, from Paul to Pat was very much, you know, we laid out pretty much this any cloud vision, any, you know, and that, you know, while it was formative and we're sort of bringing it together, it was get rid of some assets, bring together. So it was sort of that transition was challenging for the company, but then we started to sort of systematically say, you know, build from the core. What do we have, what do we need as we started to build these layers and the concentric circles? You know, the NYSERA acquisition, boom, that was the shot that changed the world of networking. And obviously that doesn't change quickly, but we have a multi-billion dollar networking business, Avi Networks, Velo, Cloud, you know, we're building that set of assets. Software-defined data centers, the core engine. Absolutely, you cannot build a software-defined data center if you don't address the networking. It's just that simple. And that's why I was so passionate about that. Obviously the HCI moved with VSAN. You can remember, Joe Tucci was so pissed off at me, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yo, what are you doing in software? It's part of the ingredients of the data center, Joe. I got to do it. Just being a software company. Yeah, yeah, right, you know, so that was a pretty intense moment. You know, the period of the Dell EMC merger, you know, a tough period, right? You know, as well and just how, where the company's going to go. And, you know, within a week, right? You know, I'm going to be fired. I'm going to be a, you know, spun out, right? You know, I'm going to be the new CEO of Dell, right? I mean, it was like, you know, it's going to be HP, you know, it's all like, man, you know, stock is 40. You know, obviously the Amazon moment, right? When we did that partnership, you know, vCloud Air, hey, we had the right idea. We didn't implement it properly. And then we did it right with the Amazon partnership. And that just changed the cloud industry. And, you know, I think we're going to look at today this week and the moves with Heptio, Kubernetes, Pivotal, those pieces coming together, you know, and to this audience, Project Pacific, right? You know, it's just like, okay, wow, every one of them will become Kubernetes enabled. You know, 20,000 selfies with Joe Beta, right? Have now been ushered. You know, because it is that game changing, we believe. This is the biggest re-architecture of the core platform in a decade. So. My favorite quote from you was, if you're not out on that next wave, you're driftwood. You said that like, you know, I think it was 23rd, which year it was. And my security is to do over. You're doing it over. You're doing it, Mr. Gelsinger. 10 years, what's the big wave everyone should be on? What's the wave that you identify? You've seen many waves. You've created waves. You've been part of waves. What's the wave for the next 10 years that people should pay attention to that? They need to be on. Well, you know, if they're not on the networking wave, get on it, right? You know, they got to be on this multi-cloud hybrid wave, you know, couldn't be louder. You know, the Kubernetes one is the one, right? That's the one I'm going to put at the front of the list. And, you know, this move in security, you know, I am just passionate about this. And as, you know, as I've said to my team, you know, if this is the last thing I do in my career is I want to change, you know, security. We just not are satisfying our customers. They shouldn't put more stuff on our platforms. National defense issues, huge problems. You know, it's just terrible. So, and I said, you know, if it kills me, right? I'm going to get this done. And they says, it might kill you, Pat. That's a mouth kill, Majaro, right there. Pat, thank you for all your commentary. Great look back 10 years. You've been one of our favorite guests coming on theCUBE. Bringing the A game, you're bringing the tech chops. You see the history, story and aspect. Also, you're running one of the most valuable companies, open source companies in the world. Thank you. I love you, I love you guys. Thank you so much. Thanks, Pat. Pat Kelsinger here inside theCUBE, our 10th year. VM is looking good off the tee right now, middle of the fairway as they say for the next 10 years. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Thanks for watching.