 from our studios in the heart of Silicon Valley, Palo Alto, California. This is a CUBE Conversation. Hello, welcome to the special CUBE Conversation here in our CUBE studios in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, the host of the CUBE. We're here with a special guest talking about our 10 years at VMworld. The CUBE is 10 years old. This is our 10th year of operation. We're here with a special guest, Sanjay Poonan, COO of VMware. Distinguished guest, CUBE alumni. He's on the leaderboard with us since 2010 or 11. Which date it was? Great to see you. Congratulations, John, on 10 years with us. And I think I was on your show before that at SAP. So it's a pleasure to know you for these many years. We've been following your career, obviously, as COO of VMware. So much is going on. If you look at the changes over the past 10 years, certainly the CUBE has been documenting it, talking to the top tech athletes like yourself. The cloud has changed the game. And you look at the time where the stock price saved VMware, which has used numbers, you know, 44 in 2016. And then your original deal with Amazon set the real tone for what has turned out to be great value creation in terms of stockholder value. But overall as a company, just really moving in the right direction. Cloud has changed the industry, but it's also changed VMware certainly has changed the CUBE. So I want to get your take on that. But first I want to show you a clip and get your reaction to. Roll the clip. We've seen so many partners working with us to bring our solutions to customers together. One of these partners is VMware. And it's my great privilege to welcome Sanjay Poonen. Thomas and I grew up in the same town in Bangalore. We went to rival schools. I spent eight years competing against him when I was at SAP in Oracle. I'm just happy to be on the stage partnering with you finally. So that's great. He's going to do great things for Google Cloud. Quietly, many of you may not think of VMware and networking space, but the last five or six years since we acquired NYSERA, we've become the leader and softer to find networking. And our vision has been to take NSX, the product, from the data center to the cloud and to the branch. So a lot of things that we are looking for to collaborating with you already done and more to come. Thank you so much, Sanjay. Thank you, Thomas. Lovely to have you. Congratulations. Sanjay, so that was a great moment from this year on stage. I liked the personal connection with Thomas Curry and formerly of Oracle. Now see a yo at Google Cloud. But that's just one of the many clouds you do business with. As I mentioned prior to the clip, October, 2016, Pat Gelsinger, Andy Jassy, Raghu was there, Terry Weiss of Amazon, you were there. That was a seminal moment, a change VMware. If you look back at the 10 years, it's been interesting. You've got Paul Moritz laying out the vision in 2010. We call the software mainframe is called the cloud, laid out the stack. That's all kind of happened. Now cloud is a tailwind for VMware. Software is the heart of it. That was Moritz's original idea. It's happened. Your thoughts? Yeah, John, you know, I think back to, it's kind of when you reminisce about VMware, when I was actually prior to even SAP, I was at Veritas. And Veritas had a chance to buy VMware and lost out in that deal to EMC. I think this is one of the seminal acquisitions that Joe Tucci made, which may go down the best in history. But I remember talking to a general manager who ran the hardware business of Xseries at IBM, a lady named Susan Whitney, a wonderful lady at the time. I asked her, why did you partner with VMware? And this was for the virtualization stack on top of Xseries. That's now part of Lenovo, but at that time IBM owned it. And she said this was the most phenomenal technology you'd ever seen that was going to change the landscape of server computing, now server virtualization. And steadily, one by one, IBM was one of the first. Dell, I think Michael actually invested in the company, but IBM Xseries, now Lenovo, Dell, HP all embraced VMware one at a time. And my view is the cloud computing world is just the new hardware economy. So we had a, the first announcement made was Amazon. Why? Because they're number one. Andy, Pat, myself, Raghu, Matt Garmin, some of the key people there, Mike Claiborle, got together and said, we're going to make this our first and preferred. And it is a very special relationship and it's our first engineered solution. And we are very, very excited about that. This next generation of industry in the next 10 years is really going to be about cloud 2.0. It's going to be about networking. It's going to be about security. It's going to be about software. And this is again, an extension of kind of where you're at now. Although Amazon is a deeper relationship, you have cloud foundation, which allows you to do business as Gartner has recently put out in their famous Magic Quadrant. Of all the cloud players, except for Oracle, you are working with all of them. Do you have too many irons in the fire? Is that the strategy? But what we seek to do is to build a cloud foundation, compute storage, networking, and management. And that cloud foundation needs to first off, sit on premise and make an on premise cloud look like Amazon. And that's the bulk of our market today, where we're serving hundreds of thousands of customers with SDDC. We've been talking about that for the first time, my good friend Raghu announced that on stage. So that's the core mission. Now, when people move that stack to the cloud, our vision is it's sort of like a mobile home. We want you to take your apps and move it on a freeway called VMware, okay? And the first place we engineer that solution with the solution that's managed and sold by us is on Amazon. It's called VMware Cloud on AWS. It's basically the cloud foundation stack running there. But customers came to us, a customer like Walmart, who runs Azure and say, we're not running AWS. Can you provide us the ability for VCF to run on Azure? And we said three years ago, not now. But as time matured and we had the bandwidth to do more than one thing and one thing well, we're now doing that through our VCPP program and virtual streamers enabling us to do that. Google came to think they have customers like Colgate or Target, their customers, many of them in that same conference were up on stage. So this is all customer driven. We are customer obsessed. And when customers ask us a question, if we can't do it, we tell them we can't do it, which was the answer three years ago. But when customers say, and we rarely, John, almost never are making a decision for a customer on their public cloud. They've usually made that decision just like they made a decision on the hardware before we got there. They've picked Amazon or Azure or Google. And we want to be the indispensable choice, irrespective of whether you're running on premise as the freeway on or maybe off that cloud, if you choose to. So I got to ask you a question. On your VMware has always been ecosystem friendly. You have a great community of tech people and customers. The art of partnering in this new era is a challenge. Because we just talked about Amazon's your primary on the engineering side of the partnership and you have other deals with multi-cloud and they'll get better based on customer attraction. I get that, but partnering is an art. What do you say to that when you say, hey, how do you partner in this new world? I think you have to have some sort of fundamental philosophies. A little bit of what we've described is that Swidsland philosophy where you have a big tent to as many friends and you have as few enemies. So listen, you know me. I was competitive, very competitive when I started my job six years ago against Citrix and Mobile Iron and Good. Probably a little bit competitive these days against Nutanix, but it's not personal. It's just strictly business in the words of the Godfather. But for the big guys, every one of them, whether it's Amazon, Microsoft, Google, even Cisco, where there's a little bit of overlap, we want to be partners with them because customers want that. And now these major titans in the tech industry, you know who they are. There's certain players in the hardware economy, Dell, HPE, Cisco, you know, on-premise. There's certain players in the cloud economy, Amazon, Azure, Google, and in China, Alibaba. There's got to be a competition. Now you got Cisco out there, you got Red Hat, you got open source. You have a lot more new dynamics happening, not just infrastructure, win the market share. There's collaboration involved in a lot of these open source. You acquire Heptio as a company, certainly Kubernetes as Pat Gelsinger says, dial tone for the next generation cloud. I truly believe that. There's also that open source angle, totally right. Let's just take the one you mentioned, Red Hat. So Red Hat gets acquired by IBM. IBM is a great partner with us. I've been public in saying, service is part of IBM, one of our key partners. IBM Cloud, like 2,000-odd customers. Even Red Hat, 80% of Red Hat is Linux. 15% of that, if I remember right, is OpenStack and JBoss, which's not doing so well. And maybe two or 3% is OpenShift. That's the part we compete with. And we'll compete hard there with the combination of the VMware and the Pivotal portfolio in containers. And you've seen these big ads we're doing, Containerware, which is a player in VMware. And we want to be just as strong in the container platform, but are we going to basically create a big riff between us and IBM because of that 2% of revenue? No. So we can walk- I believe it's one of the partners on the cloud game. Yeah, absolutely. We can walk and chew gum, which means we will compete with that small part, but that's not the big picture. The bigger picture is we partner. Looking back 10 years, what were the seminal moments in the industry that you could point to in saying these were key inflection points. Could it be a trend? Could it be an announcement? Could it be an acquisition? I think the advent of cloud computing, you've got to give leaders like Andy Jassy and Mark Benioff tremendous amount of credit for doing something in IaaS that's been never done. And he did that on his own. It wasn't acquisitions. Mark Benioff were kind of creating something new or a juggernaut in the SaaS space. He did that on his own. But 2010, let's talk about VMworld's time, that was private cloud, was just kind of hitting the scene. EMC had that messaging. Paul Moritz laid out his initial manifesto, the architecture that would become essentially the cloud architecture DevOps as we know it today, from that moment of Paul Moritz to today. A lot's happened and a lot has happened. I'll tell you a few things that didn't happen. One of it, I'll just be reflective a little bit of a mistake we made and we're glad it didn't happen. We try to be a public cloud ourselves, be cloud air. People may not know much about that now, but we divested that business in 2015 and we embraced the players like Amazon and others. Do we continue that or have been a disaster? Fortunately, we do. But we look back and say, we shouldn't have done that, yes. But sometimes you learn from your mistakes. Docker hasn't happened. People thought Docker was going to kill VMware. What happened to Docker? Kubernetes came along and takes the head of Docker. So people have used Docker as a container. And all this talk in 2012, when I joined the company, 20 to 30 years ago, Docker's going to kill VMware. We've been able to embrace the container, but it's not Docker, it's Kubernetes. So these are things that you look at in the scheme of time and you ask yourself, where is the industry trying to go? And when you see a wave happening, the key is to embrace that wave. We embrace the mobile wave. We've embraced with AirWatch. We've embraced the cloud wave with our partnerships with AirWatch, with Amazon and others. We're embracing the container wave now with what we're doing with Kubernetes. And the key is to get those waves right at the right time. It's just like surfing. If you catch it at the right time, and if you're on a wrong wave, get off it quickly. Which is kind of what we did with vCloud Air. You won't get everything right. I mean, look at, you know, Microsoft's not one of the greatest companies. They've made a lot of mistakes and they've corrected them. They tried to be a mobile phone and that didn't work out, but Microsoft's the most valuable company today. And so there's a lot of work. Well, they had, there's some moment with the cloud. Obviously the cloud is a key, a lever for value creation. So when you look out now, the waves and the bets you're making, because these are ultimately bets. The wave you're betting on has to be, you got to be aware of it. You got to know it, got to capitalize on it and ultimately get the job done. What's the big best now? Yeah, I think there's two or three things that, you know, nothing, none of this is going to feel new, but sometimes you just have to go to one is we've really got to make this hybrid cloud and multi-cloud vision happen. We are very excited of VMware Cloud and AWS. I would love to have 10% of our vSphere customers pick it. Okay. We have 100,000, 500,000, maybe roughly customers in that space. 10% of that's a big number. We'd love to see them pick VMware Cloud and AWS or if they're picking another cloud, VMware VCF landing in that cloud infrastructure. That's great. I think in networking, there'll be two companies that matter long-term, Cisco and VMware. Cisco will do hardware networking really well and VMware will do software networking really well. And it won't be like one has to win for the other one to lose or the losing to lose for the other one win. It'll be two. VMware over the course of 21 years, spawned 50 million plus VMs. It won't take that long for an enterprise container platform to become a standard. Let's say 10, 20, 30 million containers. Why not containerware? I'm not changing the name of the company. But VMware become that enterprise standard. So between us and Pivotal, we have to make that happen. We're very early on in this journey. As you look out over the next 10 years, with any big wave, we are on a wave. I'm calling it cloud 2.0 because it's cloud 1.0 is about storage and compute. Now cloud 2.0 is about networking, security and all these other new app experiences. In every new wave, there's always new brands that emerge. I don't know where an entrepreneur starts a company. In your kind of experience, you kind of had to just, you know, take your VM where I had put your Sonjam and investor. I knew you do some personal investing as well. There's always new brands that pop up and these white space that turn out to be big, part of the big, big wave. I'll name two brands that everyone started to talk about this year, because they've been two of the hottest IPOs, Zoom and Slack. Who would have thought in the world of Skype and WebEx that you could come up with a new video conferencing company that would be worth, what is it, 25, 30, 35 billion market cap? And it's founded by my good friend, Eric, who is an immigrant like myself from China. Really proud of him. And he's a, you know, he's a paper billionaire, but that's not the way he acts. Similarly with Slack. What Butterfield has done there is become a, you know, and these are two brands that people weren't talking about 10 years, but have. How about on the AI side? Obviously AI, a lot of automation happening. RPA is a hot sector. I mean, there's a lot of companies that are focused on AI and so on, but it's becoming an inherent part of how companies are building it into an intrinsic part of it. You take security, for example, a significant part of what any company, whether VM or anybody else needs to do in security is make a data lake with AI so that you're able to detect these threats more and more and faster, faster. That's an area where AI is inherently becoming in all of what we've just seen in the consumer world that's already been designed in, whether it's Amazon recommendation engine, Netflix recommendation engine, a lot of the Google advertising capabilities, the shopping experience, that's becoming part of the consumer world. I think it's going to increasingly become an inherent engine in almost enterprise capabilities. A lot of what Zoom's doing, Slack's doing, there's AI capabilities in all these products. And we at VMware have to do the same, make it intrinsically part of our platform. Sajji, I forgot one brand, the Cube. That is a great brand. I mean, billion dollar valuation on the horizon for us. We've got 10 more years. Whatever you want, man. You and Dave and Stu and the rest of the crew, you're here, all of you folks in the production studio here have done has been phenomenal because you know what? You get deep and you're authentic. And we love partnering with you. I wasn't at VMware 10 years ago, but I was with you at SAP around that same time. I remember coming to your show and my first impressions of John was this, that's what I tell people about you, John. You're authentic, you're down to earth and you get deep into a story. We like that. And that's kind of been true to your character 10 years later and we love that. Well, being authentic, informational and entertaining, which you are and certainly authoritative and VMware has that community and that empathy has always been a great form for us. We're going to continue. Innovation and customer empathy. That's the two engines that keep us going, John. We want to watch your best moments on the Cube. We teed up a little special for you here, Sanjay. Let's watch Sanjay's best moments on the Cube. Quick highlight reel produced by our great producers here at SiliconANGLE Cube Team. Our premise is if there's more computing that's moving to the edge, more software defined happening at the edge, we should benefit from that. The hardware vendors will have to adapt and that's good, but software becomes quintessential. Our principles at VMware have not changed. We're really focused on software defining the data center. Why? Because it makes you more agile, removes costs, reduces complexity, makes the plan more green. We think we've got a long way to go and just building a private cloud, making the data center be like a cloud. Part number one. Part number two, extending to the hybrid cloud. You know, for us, it's a further, it's sort of like the chess pieces lining up of VMware's vision that we laid out many years for our hybrid cloud world, where it's not all public cloud, it isn't all on-premise, it's a mixture. We coined that term hybrid cloud and we're beginning to see that realized. I think it's going to, the world is going to go from mobile cloud to cloud edge and the whole world of cloud and edge computing is the future. The more important thing is not necessarily how much money you make, but what a force you can be for changing people's lives. That lasts forever. If you look at what's transformed every aspect, whether it's the mobile device, which is really a computer in your pocket, or cloud computing, which is kind of bringing the supercomputer into the cloud. It's tremendous what we could do and we have to constantly find ways by which artificial intelligence and these forces of, you know, the next parts of general mobile cloud computing can be used for greater good. Who was your favorite cricketer? Was it, was it such a Nintendo car? Clearly you're reading off your notes, Dave. Sanjay, it's been great to have you as supporting theCUBE and being on theCUBE and sharing your insight and knowledge with the industry, our audience, and your peers. It's been great. Final thoughts, 2019, VMworld's coming up. You're in the center of all the action. You're in the middle of it. You're working hard. You've got a great relationship with Amazon. You've got all the top clouds under your belt. You're on that wave. What are we expecting to see? What's the most important stories happening at VMworld this year? What should people expect? Well, first off, for every one of you who hasn't registered, be there, okay? You've still got a few days, a few weeks. You've got to be there. We're back in San Francisco, the greatest city of all. You've got to be there. So if you haven't registered to be there, we have, we just announced a couple of guest speakers there. Last year we had Malala. This year the team is Make Your Mark and we're going to talk to two athletes who made their mark, not just in their professional life. Steve Young for the 49ers, one of the greatest football players of all time. Lindsey Vaughn, one of the greatest ski years, world champion, Olympic athlete. And then in the spirit of technology, we have some exciting news. Unfortunately, John, I can't tell you what it is. Otherwise people won't come, but I guarantee you, it's going to be really exciting. Maybe the best ever, okay? So be there or be square. Our 10 years on theCUBE, Sanjay, thanks for coming in. We'll be right back with more coverage on this VMware special celebrating 10 years of theCUBE at VMworld with Robin Matlux, CMO of VMware. Stay with us after this short break. This pendulum of centralization and decentralization has been swinging through the industry for 40 years. Pat Gelsinger. Hey, you know, if I need 500 millisecond round trip to the cloud and the robotic arm needs a decision in 200 milliseconds, ah. CEO of VMware. Yo, I'm not going to send every surveillance picture of the cat to the cloud. 40 years of technology leadership. I want to just point out you're wearing a VMware tattoo. Yeah, we have the tattoo machine. There we go. I love it. Pat Gelsinger is CUBE alumni. We believe in a multi-cloud world. We think our customers are going to consume cloud services from a variety of cloud providers. And what we're all about is creating a common operating environment that lets you run, manage, connect, and secure workloads on any cloud, right? Consumed by any device. And that means we've got to be present. The line between public and private. The line between on-premise and off-premise. It's fading. It's blurring. We're going to get to a point where we're just going to talk about what's the workload and what's the service I need to deliver the workload. In this industry, you have to be constantly innovating. And if you get too protective of the market that you're in, you start to get into a cocoon and then people are innovating around you and they're making you obsolete and you're not even seeing it happen. I think VMware has a vision and it's consistent. It really hasn't changed for many, many years. We were advocating hybrid cloud long, long ago. And so now what you're seeing is the delivery against that vision. Now the industry is starting to talk about tech as a force for good. So now we're starting to move out of the conversation of just the technologies and the products and the impact. But what are we collectively doing to make this world a better place? That's a new dialogue. Joining me here in our Palo Alto studios is Robin Matlock, CMO of VMware. Robin, thanks for coming in, celebrating our 10 years of VMworld here for VMworld preview 2019. John, happy to be here. Always happy to see you, bud. So we're celebrating our 10th year of theCUBE at VMworld. It's been there since the beginning. You've been with us since the beginning. It's VMware's 16th VMworld, our 10th. So much has changed. We just heard from Sanjay. We're going to have Carl Eschenbach come on. You're a former mentor and boss. We have Jerry Chen coming in. We have Steve Herrod, former CTO of both VCs. The VMware community and VMworld has barely been such a steady player in the industry through the ups and downs over the past 10 years. It's been interesting. I guess the game's still the same in the sense that we're all trying to help our customers transform and be competitive and differentiate themselves in the world. And that doesn't change. But man, how we do it and what the technologies are and what is the real story and value proposition? It's just a whole new world nowadays, right? It's been interesting to watch the ups and downs, the resiliency. That's a word that gets kicked around a lot when I talk to VMware execs, employees, former alum from VMware. Great technology company, great engineering, great leadership, great community. The event's gotten bigger. There's more activations. theCUBE's got two sets now. It's a big part of it. Well, as the CMO of VMware, having you reflect on VMworld is something with resiliency. I love that. Thank you. I agree. And I think in this industry, innovation is at the heart of what keeps everybody going. And I think VMware has proven time and time again that we always are leaning into the edge of innovation. And VMworld is this massive platform. We're not just VMware, but the whole ecosystem can come together and really set the foundation of what's important as our industry shift and change in the future. And why does that matter to customers? And I think we've done a really masterful job, frankly, of keeping that technical innovation spirit in the purpose of VMworld. So you have some activations. You guys have a philosophy. And this is an email I just got from you guys. Work hard, play hard, inclusion in action, hands on labs, lounges and activation and special offers from attendees. What are we expecting this year at VMworld 2019? So first of all, I think there's some things you can always count on, right? You can count on the fact that it's a technical conference that you're going to get technical education and access to the subject matter experts, the engineers who know products across the entire infrastructure and industry, best in class. But it's more than that. I think you've brought up a few other things. You know, we as an industry have a responsibility. We have a responsibility to give back more than we take. And this notion of tech for good and what can we collectively do to help society improve? And you know, there's a lot of pressure on tech right now. And so we think that's a dimension that is evolving and continuing to strengthen in this program. The diversity inclusion is a whole nother layer. And we have so much work to do in that part of our industry. And VMworld is trying to create opportunity where one, we can create inclusive environments where different gender ethnicity can come and really learn and engage on equal footing. And I think we're trying to get these other dimensions so it's not just a kind of a limited tech conference in the old definition of that. Looking back over the 10 years, one of the things I observe, and Dave Vellante and I talk about this with Stu Miniman all the time is, you know, VMworld started with the Paul Moritz's keynote that 2010, our first year. That was kind of like the, okay, this is the cloud platform. He basically presented what's happening now in cloud. Maybe the top of the stack didn't work out as well. It's fast, but it's kind of still happening now. But certainly the infrastructure and what became the core infrastructure as a service and platform as a service that enabled the SaaS market has been absolutely validated and that is creating massive amounts of value creation. You guys had a cloud, VCloud Air didn't work out, but 2016 when you guys decided to partner with Amazon, that flipped a bit a little bit right there. You had a couple of things going on. A little bit? I think, yeah. You had EMC owner now as Dell Technologies. You got the Amazon relationship. It just changed the trajectory of the company. Talk about that dynamic. Yeah, I think actually, and I look back on my 10 years at VMware, that moment in our history is probably some of the time I am most proud of. I think what you see, you see when there's trouble and difficulties when you're either going to be at your best or your worst. And I think VMware really proved to be at our best in those challenging moments. We really came up with a winning cloud strategy and the Amazon partnership is really just one of many by the way. We have Microsoft, Google, IBM, a whole 4,000 servers per provider. So there's a rich plethora of partnership in that cloud space, but I think what we really did is we transformed the nature of the conversation on hybrid. We transformed the definition of multi-cloud and we have been acting on those strategies now for multiple years delivering that value to customers. We have some fabulous case studies we'll showcase at VMworld, but I think that we really recognize that we had to shift our strategy, have to adapt and we did and we focus on what customers want and need. We listened to them and they told us go embrace the big public cloud providers, which is what we did and it's been great success for really all parties involved. One of my favorite moments at VMworld, and I kind of ate a lot of crow for this, but I went to Pat Kjell, so it was 2013, I think it was, I said, he was pumping up hybrid cloud. I said, Pat, is hybrid cloud a halfway house or a way station between just the final destination of public cloud? And he blew again, hybrid cloud, what are you kidding me? And turns out he was right. Hybrid cloud became super important, you guys transformed that, but you were on that from the beginning. Yeah, I think we saw early on that one, customers want freedom of choice and there were gonna be many examples where it was more cost effective or efficient or just more pragmatic to run a workload in a public cloud environment. There are gonna be situations where it was simply not feasible, it was better to run in a data center. There were gonna be applications that had requirements to cross the line on either or. So we always saw that that was going to be a need. Now we also envisioned that customers were gonna probably not marry a single cloud provider, that they were gonna end up doing business with multiple cloud providers and that was going to get complex. Anytime there's complexity, there's opportunity to help customers simplify. And VMware really saw a place where we could help drive consistent, whether it was infrastructure, that's the ultimate or just consistent operations. We can now allow you to manage these kind of complex environments with a seamless operating model. And I think, yeah, we had early vision on that and it has proven to be very much the way the market has played out. I wanna ask you a personal question because I really have gotten to know you since 2010. I really admire you as a person and as executive, but there's a moment in time where you weren't always the CMO, Carl Eschenbach was your manager and you were named the interim CMO. And that's always hard, I always find the interim, whether it's interim manager for a sports team, no one wants to be considered interim anything. You fought through that. You kept your nose to the grindstone, you kept grinding then Carl Eschenbach promoted you to CMO. Well, it's actually a wonderful long story. We won't have time to go into it. One day I'll teach you to the whole background on that. But I think at the end of the day, I saw that as nothing but one thing, a golden opportunity. I mean, for me, it wasn't a stick, it was a carrot. It was the greatest opportunity to go prove that I could be the chief marketing officer of VMware. I saw nothing but upside, I had very little to lose and all I had to go do was just stay consistent with who I am, think about what's important to the business and really lead. And I really looked at it as nothing more than a gift from Carl and from VMware. I think they made it interim frankly just to create a soft landing. If it didn't work out, then it was a graceful way maybe to fit back into the marketing organization that I only had one option for me and that was gonna be the real CMO. Got a great attitude, love that. What's some of your favorite highlight moments? Oh my gosh, I think my favorite ones are the ones I can laugh about which are kind of the bloopers that either almost happened or didn't happen but they were so close to happening and we pulled it out at the end. The time we built the data center down at the base of the stairs, I don't know if you remember that, we built this entire live data center and we were using cutting edge hardware. And there were literally piece parts coming in hours before the doors were opening and the engineers were back there trying to get it all together and we never built a data center in a matter of days. So that was kind of a funny one. Some of the keynote experiences and just 3 a.m. in the morning trying to get the last slides put together and making sure those landed. Malala was very special. Pat's introduction, we did the Paul to Pat transition on the CEO transition, that's a highlight. One of the funny moments that I think that you were involved with theCUBE was, I think I went to VMware, maybe in 2015 or 2014, you were in Vegas, I think you just went to move to Vegas. In the hang space, it was the green theme or garden theme, the village. Oh yeah, the picnics and yeah, the picnics. And the CUBE desk was a great creative idea would be green and it looked like. A massive green room. It looked like a bunch of buds, purple, you know. You looked at it and said, that desk has got to go. And overnight, they built a new desk. I'm taking pictures with Tony Dunn, he's like, Tony's like, Pat, this is never gonna happen. Robert's like, get a new desk. It looked like marijuana buds. Oh my gosh, okay. Robin, great, great memories. Looking forward to this year. What's some of the highlights this year? Just as quick as the band's been announced, you guys got music again. What's some of the entertainment, fun activities? Well, you know what I think at the heart of the Umworld is really about news and innovation. And so of course I can't do the spoiler alert to give you all that, but just trust me in that we will have big, exciting industry changing news to announce and you gotta come and be a part of it and experience that. I think having Steve Young and Lindsey Vaughn on stage, very different twists to guest speakers. So they're gonna be a lot of fun. They're champions, they're experts. Everybody loves to hear a journey of like what did it really take to become best in class in something? So I think Sanjay will do a great job having that conversation with them. We've got all kinds of great technical content. The party is fun. The band is going to be fantastic. One of my personal favorites, One Republic. So it's going to be really a great week. It'll be exhausting. I guarantee you'll come out of there tired, but pretty confident we're all going to have a great time. Well, you're a great CMO. You standardized theCUBE. You're the first one as the CMO to set two CUBE stages at an event and theater presence adopted by AWS and a lot of the other industry leaders. So congratulations on that standardization and innovation keep innovating. Yeah, we all have to keep innovating. You too, right? That's part of our jobs. Robin Matlock, CMO of VMware here talking about the VMworld preview 2019 and 10 years of theCUBE at VMworld. I'm John Furrier. We'll be right back with another segment with myself, Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman breaking down all the action from the guests talking about VMworld preview as well as the 10 years of theCUBE at VMworld. People want to work for a mission-driven company. People want to buy, we hope so, from mission-driven companies. That state is clear and the leadership you guys are providing is known. The CUBE is awesome. John Furrier, Dave Vellante, they're both journalists, friends, they're something I've learned over the last few years about focus of a company. They've always got a very good perspective of mixing up thoughtful questions. VMworld, I hope, is known by our customers as having these two engines. Engine of innovation, innovating product and a variety of other things and focused on customer obsession. When we do those, the plane will go a long way. Right now, of course, we've got a lot of folks from India in our world, but who's your favorite cricketer? Was it Sachin Tendulkar? Clearly, you're reading off their notes, Dave. It feels like always a little homecoming. I love it just because it just feels like a fine party. This is Sanjay Poonan, COO of VMware, and you're watching theCUBE. Okay, we're back. We're here for theCUBE's special presentation of VMworld 2019 preview as part of theCUBE's 10 years at VMworld celebration. Of course, we're celebrating the 10th year of theCUBE and covering events and extracting the silver of the noise. We're going to break down the preview of VMworld this year, 2019 with Dave Vellante and Stu Miniman. We're going to riff on what are the most important stories? What's going to happen? What do they expect to happen at VMworld? We heard from the VMware executives, Sanjay Poonan and the CMO, Robin Matlock. Guys, what do you expect to see this year at VMworld 2019? Hey, John, how are you doing? Thank you. Excited to be here with you. Looking forward to VMworld this year. Stu and I, we've been riffing on this all week. I mean, Stu, big news, of course, is that VMware is going to fold Pivotal in. Pivotal will stock up 77% on 800 Dow drop day. So I'm sure there's going to be some buzz around that in the ecosystem. They're probably not going to make it a centerpiece, but we're certainly going to be talking about it. Yeah, I mean, Dave, always acquisition to always are hot buzz. I saw in the news, there was some network monitoring. I can't even remember the name of the company that VMware just acquired. So those things always hit the news, but you listen to the VMware people and they said, biggest announcement we've ever had for vSphere, all the cloud stuff, of course, I think there's like 140 Kubernetes sessions and the Kubernetes tie in, of course, is where Pivotal fits in. We've heard Pivotal's going all in on Kubernetes and VMware are charging hard there. They want to make sure that they are not left behind in the multi-cloud, cloud native world that everybody's driving towards. And so obviously cloud, multi-cloud, you're going to hear a lot about containers and Kubernetes, you're going to hear a ton on NSX and VSAN. And underneath all this, Stu, is going to be the de-lification of VMware. They're not going to push that out forward, but it's going to be an undertone. And you're certainly going to hear that from the ecosystem in the hallway talks. It's been happening since Pat joined VMware and certainly since Dell bought EMC, they've been much, much more aggressive about rationalizing the portfolio, picking the swim lanes and really building platform hooks from the hardware into the VMware software platform. Yeah, like, are we going to see any big execs on stage? When Andy Jassy of AWS gets on stage with, Pat Gelsinger, there's a little bit of a, ooh, in the room, we'll talk to Nadella show up. We saw him at Dell World this year. We know Steve Young and Lindsay Vaughn are there. So you've got some leaders that understand change and what's happening in the environment from the sports world. But this is one of the big marquee tech events. We've been covered for 10 years. We've had lots of phenomenal guests over the years. So VMware always throws some exciting things out. Well, what about Thomas Curiant? That wouldn't surprise me. If you see a bigger Google presence, and you think about it, Stu, Google desperate to have cloud relevance. What's the best way for them to get cloud relevance is to buddy up with VMware. They're both in the valley. Google is one of Pivotal's key partnerships. Companies like Home Depot, Run, Pivotal Cloud Foundry on Google Cloud Platform. And yeah, Thomas Curiant, it's no longer Diane Greene. There's no longer a little bit of, how do we treat our former CEO now over there? TK was up on stage with Sanjay Poonan at the Google Cloud Show in San Francisco. So it's a short drive for Google to go participate. Definitely wouldn't be out of the realm of possibilities. I really don't expect this week, but I don't think the moves in the chessboard are over. We're seeing Pivotal. Frankly, I'd like to see, and I said this in SiliconANGLE yesterday, VMware is the software mothership. Put in Pivotal, put in RSA, put in SecureWorks, put in Del Boomi, drive the software business. That to me, starts to make some sense. And then as I say, hooks from the hardware and pushing into the software. So I don't know, anything else you would expect this week? Just how much will that developer angle be at the show? We've seen VMware try to get part of it. Last year, actually the code group, which was right behind where we were at theCUBE, it was buzzing and a lot of activity. Not just, hey, here's a hoodie and let's go do some hackathon. There was some real activity going on. And as we watched that changing of the workforce, I'm actually participating in two events at the show, talking about future of careers and what you should be focusing on and how do you work on those. So it's a hot topic because we know that the sands are shifting and therefore all the people that have their career working on VMware and love to dig in on the stuff are trying to figure out where they live in the future. Yeah, like I say, I don't think the big moves are all where Michael thinks big, go big or go home, as he said. So John, that's what we're thinking. Can't wait to hear what you think. Thanks, Dave. Yeah, what I think is that VMware's real move since the AWS relationship announcement in October of 2016, you've seen VMware stock price increase up and to the right to an all-time high from a very low point before then. That shows that the cloud and cloud success is going to be a big part of their customers. Can VMware keep the business momentum to keep their customers, grow their customer base and attract new customers? So that's kind of the philosophy which begs the next question. As the market involves, we talked to a lot of CISOs and CIOs. We were just recently at AWS Cloud Security Conference and really the decision makers are the ones who have the spend, they're the ones making the investments in Cloud 2.0. What are decision makers thinking around IT spend right now? What are they looking at? Can you guys share your analysis? Well, you know, John, here's the thing is that IT people are always trying to place bets, right, Stu? I mean, where do we put the chips on the table? We got limited budget even though we might have big budgets but you got to pick your spots. And I think right now they're trying to figure out their cloud strategy. You know, some organizations saying we're going all in on cloud. Others are saying, well, you know, we're going to hedge our bets. Others are saying, hey, we still really need to keep an on-prem presence. What's our exit strategy? You know, what's the right cloud for the right, you know, horses for courses? So I think that's going to be top of mind for IT people. The other thing that's on top of mind for IT people is security. I mean, more than ever, you know, we were just at, as John was saying, just at reinforce the big, you know, cloud security show. It's fundamental. If you're going to have a hybrid cloud, if you're going to have multi-cloud, you've got to have consistent security policies, governance, security, compliance, edicts across those clouds that really reflect the tenets of my organization. Yeah, Dave, absolutely. What VMware's done the last two years is they help give customers that bridge from where they are today to where they need to be in that multi-cloud world as they build that out. So the VMware cloud on AWS with the other public cloud frauders on infrastructure, such as what they announced with Dell Technologies World this year, is something that's front of mind for users today and they can take their VMware software stack and put it in other environments going forward. You know, so cloud and security. Dave, you know, you can't talk about the key things they're thinking out with that AI. It's a little bit earlier in that wave but started to see all the infrastructure players are lining up to how they have the best solutions for AI, how AI is impacting everything that's happening in software. So, you know, that's the other key theme that I would mention in the pieces and definitely we hear from decision makers trying to figure out where they go. And I think as it relates to VMware specifically in infrastructure, generally you're talking about automation. You're talking about, you know, predicting and solving bottlenecks and things of that nature using machine intelligence to do that. And I think that leads to a discussion that's on IT professionals' minds, which is skill sets. You certainly see, you know, Cisco with DevNet and, you know, pushing infrastructures code, CCIEs lining up to learn Python. If you're a VM admin, you know, what's your future? You want to reskill? You want to make sure you're contributing to that digital transformation of the organization, moving up the stack, it's DevOps. It's maybe supporting application development. It's agile. That's what's on the mind, John, of IT pros. Thanks guys, customer success is key to their revenue growth. I appreciate that, that's great insight. Final question, this is theCUBE's 10th year. We've seen a lot at VMworld since the beginning, 2010 for us, Paul Moritz was the CEO. A lot's happened in 10 years. A lot's going to happen in the next 10 years. I mean, Pat Gelsinger talks about multiple generations of cycles coming in this one wave that's upon us with cloud and multi-cloud and hybrid cloud. All this is happening. What's you guys take on what's happened the past 10 years? And what's the next 10 going to look like? So a really interesting question, John. I mean, I think that when we go back to 2010, it was the three-par acquisition and the bidding war with Dell and HP, now HPE, and Dell buying compelling, it was the storage consolidation but the big move, several. NYSERA, VMware beating Cisco to that punch. And of course, the big mega moves to Dell acquiring VMware and through EMC. I mean, that has completely changed the landscape. What are some of the things that you look back on? Yeah, so you talked about some of the company moves there. We talked about the waves of technology, the difference between 10 years ago and today and how we talk about cloud. Hybrid cloud was something we talked about but really didn't have a good feel of what it actually meant. We've been looking from a research standpoint to try to lay that out. Originally with hyper-converged infrastructure and server-san was how do I make my data centers look more like the private cloud? For years, Dave, I heard you say that the public cloud is the bar that we measure everything against. Today, that's kind of table stakes out there. We understand how that is. Now we're looking at things like the hybrid cloud taxonomies and VMware went from really fighting against the public cloud so now partnering heavily with the public clouds. We don't talk as much about servers anymore. We talk more about serverless than we talk about that environment. So those waves of technology as we go and the landscapes change a lot. It's always interesting, Dave. You've got over 20,000 people at the show. There's good new people always showing up. Some people leaving and the moves on the chessboard. I'd love to look back at some of our leaderboards as to who we've had on the program and say, wow, we just had Carl Eschenbach and he used to be one of the senior execs at VMware now he's a VC. The VMware mafia has had a huge impact on the overall IT world and Silicon Valley specifically. So many changes. It's been amazing to be able to document that and you're definitely gonna have that for the next 10 years going forward, right? Yeah, so STDC, the NYSERA acquisition, the AirWatch acquisition, bringing in Sanjay Poonan, Pat replacing, you know, Paul Moritz. Those are some of the big highlights. You know, looking forward, everything's all kind of cozy between Amazon and VMware now. Look down the road. You know, why is it that early on VMware tried to get into the cloud business? Because they know what the trend is. So they have to hedge their bets. Yes, we hear that AWS is the premier, the preferred partner, but we just did a deal with Google. I could see VMware and Google getting tighter. You've got the Microsoft relationship with, personally with Michael Dell and Jeff Clark, obviously Pat, all very, you know, strong relationships with Microsoft. VMware in my opinion, too, has to hedge its bets. It has to have designs on that cloud market. Maybe for the next one, two, three cycles, they're okay, but they have to figure out, okay, how do we get a bigger piece of the cloud pie? And so I would expect continued partnerships, I mentioned Google, I mentioned Microsoft, you know, maybe even putting their toe somehow into that cloud mix again, to kind of hedge what I think is the impending collision course with AWS. Yeah, Dave, absolutely right, is how do they go from just being a partner to staying strategic so that it is not a stepping stone to take my VMware estate, move it a little bit into supporting with the public cloud and then realizing like, oh hey, the water's good here, maybe I should just migrate off because all of the public cloud providers have those services. So it's absolutely critical, how does VMware get closer to the application, closer to the business and more strategic there? And that's where some of the acquisitions they've made, if they do actually pull pivotal inside, they are getting everything together so that Dell becomes underlying infrastructure, the infrastructure leader that Michael Dell wants to be and they are the leader in many of the spaces that they play and VMware, the software property to help them live and thrive in this multi-cloud world. All right, good, thank you Stu. John, what do you think? We onto something here? We sure are, we onto something big, Dave, it's called theCUBE 10 years and 10 more years. This has been a great special presentation of theCUBE, 10 years at VMworld and a VMworld preview here in theCUBE Studios. I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman, and thanks to our great guests at VMware and throughout the industry and thank you for watching and being part of theCUBE journey of the past 10 years. But Jeff Frick and the team here in theCUBE, thanks for watching.