 Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explorer 22, formerly VMworld. It's our 12th year covering it. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We've got two sets, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. We're starting to get the execs rolling in from VMware. Sumit Duane, president of VMware is here. Great to see you, great keynote. Day one. Great to be here, John. Great to see you, Dave. Day one, super exciting. We're pumped. You had no problem with the keynote. We're back in person, smooth as silk up there. We were talking about it. We had to dust off our cobwebs to make some of these in person. It's not like riding a bike. No, it's not. We had about 40% of our agencies that we had to change out because they're no longer in business. So I have to give kudos to the team who pulled it together. They did a fabulous job. You do a great presentation. I know you had a lot to crack in there, Raghu. Set the table. I know this was, for him, this was a big moment to lay out the narrative, and dress the broad company right out of the gate, wave from Haktan and the audience, and then got into the top big news. Still a lot of meat on the bone. You get up there. You got to talk about the use cases, vSphere 8, big release, a lot of stuff. Take us through the keynote. What was important highlights for you to share the folks watching that didn't see the keynote or wanted to get your perspective? Well, first of all, did any of you notice that Raghu was running on the stage? He did not do that in rehearsal. I was a little bit worried, but it really did. I bet you that was real. Anyways, jokes aside, fabulous lays out the strategy. You know, my thinking, as you said, was to, first of all, speak with our customers and explain how every enterprise is facing with this concept of cloud chaos that Raghu laid out. And CVS Health's story sort of exemplifies the situation that every customer is facing. They go in, they start with cloud-first, which is needed. I think that's the absolutely right approach. Very quickly build out a model of getting a cloud ops team and a platform engineering team, which oftentimes be a parallel workstream to a private cloud infrastructure. Great start. But as Roshan, the CIO at CVS Health laid out, there's an inflection point. And that's when you have to converge these because the use cases are where stakeholders, this is the lines of businesses, app developers, finance teams, and security teams, they don't need this dope-piped information coming at them. And the converged model is how he opted to organize his team, so we called it a multi-cloud team, just like a workspace team. And listen, our commitment and innovations are to solve the problems of those teams so that the stakeholders get what they need. That's the rest of the keynote. Yeah, first of all, that great point, I want to call out that inflection point comment because we've been reporting, coming into VMworld with SuperCloud and other things across open source and down into the weeds of the hood, the chaos is real. So good call, I love how you guys brought that up there. But all industry inflection points, if you go back in history of the tech industry, at every single major inflection point, there was chaos, complexity or an enemy, proprietary, however you want to look at it, there was a situation where you needed to kind of reign in the chaos, as Andy Grove would say. So we're at that inflection point, I think that's consistent and also the ecosystem floor yesterday, the expo floor here in San Francisco with your partners. It was vibrant, they're all on this wave, there is a wave in an inflection point. So, okay, I buy that. So if you buy the inflection point, what has to happen next? Because this is where we're at, people are feeling it, some say I don't have a problem but they've got chaos, that's just the problem. So where do you see that? How does VMware's team organizing in the industry and for customers, specifically to solve the chaos, to reign it in and cross over? Yeah, you're 100% right. Every inflection point is associated with some kind of a chaos that had to be reined in. So we are focused on two major things right now, which we have made progress in and maybe third we are still work in progress. Number one is technology. Today's technology announcements are directly to address how that streamlining of chaos can be done through a cloud smart approach that we laid out. You know, ARIA, a brand new solution for management, significant enhancements to Tanzu, all of these for public cloud based workloads that also extend to private cloud and then our cloud infrastructure with newer capabilities, with AWS, Azure, as well as with new innovations on vSphere 8 and vSan8. And then last but not the least, our continuous automation to enable anywhere workspace. All these are simple innovation that have to address because without those innovations, the problem is that the chaos oftentimes is created because lack of technology and as a result, structure has to be put in place because tooling and technology is not there. So number one goal we see is providing that. Second is we have to be independent, provide support for every possible cloud, but not without being a partner of theirs. That's not an easy thing to do, but we have the DNA as a company. We have done that with data centers in the past, even though, you know, being part of Dell, we did that in the data center in the past. We have done that in mobility. And so we have taken the challenge of doing that with the cloud. So we are continually building newer innovation and stronger and stronger partnership with cloud provider, which is the basis of our commercial relationships with Microsoft Azure too, where we have brought Azure VMware solution into VMware Cloud Universal. Again, that strengthens the value of us being neutral because it's very important to have a Switzerland party that can provide these multi-cloud solutions that doesn't have an agenda of a specific cloud, yet an ecosystem or at least an influence with the ecosystem that can bring that forward. Okay, so technology, I get that. Open, not provide, not going to be too competitive, get more open. So the question I got to ask you is, what is the disruptive enabler to make that happen? Because you got customers, partners, and team of VMware. What's the disruptive enabler that's going to get you to that level? I mean, listen, our value is this community. Okay, all this community has one of two paths to go. Either they become stove piped into just the public-private cloud infrastructure, or they step up as this convergence that's happening around them to say, you know what, I have the solution to tame this multi-cloud complexity, to rein the chaos, as you mentioned, because tooling and technologies are available, and I know they work with the ecosystem. And our objective is to bring this community to that point. And to me, that is the best path to overcome it. You're the connective tissue. I mean, I was able to sit into the analyst meeting today. You were sort of the proxy for CVS Health when you talked about the private, that's where you started, the public cloud ops team bringing that together. The platform is the glue, right? That is the connective tissue. That's where Tanzu comes in, that's where Aria comes in. And that is the disruptive technology, which it's hard to build that. From a technology perspective, it's an enabler of something that has never been done before. In that level of comprehensiveness from more of an infrastructure side thinking perspective. Yes, infrastructure teams have enabled self-service portals. Yes, infrastructure teams have given APIs to developers. But what we are enabling through Tanzu is completely next level, where you have a lot richer experience for developers so that they never ever have to think about the infrastructure at all. Because even when you enable infrastructure as API, that's still an API of the infrastructure. We go straight to the application tier where they're just thinking about authorized set of microservices. Containers can be orchestrated and built automatically, shifting security left where we are truly checking them or enabling them to check the security vulnerabilities as they're developing the application, not going into the production when they have to touch the infrastructure. To me, that's an enabler of a special power that this new multi-cloud team can have across cloud which they haven't had in the past. Yeah, it's funny, John. It's very challenging, technically. The challenge in 2010 was the software mainframe. Remember, the marketing people killed that term. But you think about that. We're going to make virtualization and the overhead associated with that irrelevant. We're going to be able to run any workload and VMware achieved that. Now you're saying we run anything, anywhere, any Kubernetes, any container. That's the reality, that's the chaos. An anti-cloud, and that's a new real problem, real challenging problem that requires serious engineering. Well, I mean, it's aspirational, right? And let's get the reality right. So true spanning cloud, not yet there. You guys, I think your vision is definitely right on in the sense that we'd like the chaos and multi-clouds of reality. The question is, AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, other clouds, they're not going to sit still. No one's going to let VMware just come up and take everything. You've got to enable the market. True, I don't think this is the case of us versus them because there is so much that they have to express in terms of the value of every cloud. And this happened in the case of, by the way, whether you go into infrastructure or even workspace solutions, as long as the richest of the experience and richest of the controls are provided for that cloud to the developers that makes the adoption of that cloud simpler. It's a win-win for every party. That's the key. I think the simplest. So I want to ask you, this comes up a lot. And I love that you brought that up. Simple and self-service is proven developers who were driving the change cloud DevOps developers. They're driving the change. They're in charge more than ever. They want self-service, easy to deploy. I want to test if I don't like it. I want to throw it away. But if I like something, I want to stick with it. So it's got to be self-service. Now that's antithetical to the old enterprise model of solve complexity with more complexity. So the question for you is, as the president of VMware, do you feel good that you guys are looking out over the landscape where you're riding into the valley of the future with the demand being automation, completely invisible, abstraction layer, new use case scenarios for IT and whatever IT becomes. Take us through your mindset there because I think that's what I'm hearing here this year at VMware Explorer is that you guys have recognized the shift in demographics on the developer side, but Ops isn't going away either. They're connecting. They're connected. I think, yeah, so our vision is if you think about the role of developers, they have a huge influence. And most importantly, they're the ones who are driving innovation. Just an amount of application development, the number of developers that have emerged yet remain the scarcest resource for the enterprise are critical. So developers oftentimes have taken control over decision on infrastructure and Ops. Why? Because infrastructure and Ops haven't shown up. Not because they like it. In fact, they hate it. Developers like being developers. They like writing code. They don't really want to get into the day-to-day operations. In fact, here's what we see with almost all our customers. They start taking control of the Ops until they go into production. And at that point in time, they start requesting one-by-one functions of Ops, move to Ops, because they don't like it. So with our approach, and this sort of, as we are driving into the beautiful valley of multi-cloud like you laid out, in our approach with the cross-cloud services, what we are saying is that why don't we enable this new team, which is a reformatted version of the traditional Ops. It has the platform engineering in it, the key skill that enables the developer in it, through a platform that becomes an interface to the developers. It creates that secure workflows that developers need, so that developers think and do what they really love, and the infrastructure is seamless and invisible. It's bound to happen, John. Think about it this way. That infrastructure is code, also. It's infrastructure. Let's go to the next year, it's invisible because they're just dealing with the services that they need. The self-service infrastructure, and then you've got to have that capability to simplify. I'll even say automated or computational governance and security. So Chris Wolfe is coming on Thursday. Unfortunately, I won't be here. And he's going to talk about all the future projects, because you're not done yet. Project Narrows, it's kind of one of these boring, but important. There's a lot of stuff in the oven coming out. There's like six or seven critical projects coming down the pipeline that support this multi-cloud vision, because it's early days. Well, this is the thing that we were talking about. I want to get your thoughts on, and we were commenting on the keynote review. Haktan bought VMware. He's a lot more there than he thought. I mean, I got to imagine him sitting in the front row going, hmm, there's some stuff coming out of the oven. I didn't even, might not have known. And I'm like, hmm, this is extra value. I mean, he's got to be pretty stoked. Don't you think? No, he is. He can be speaking on headroom, on the margin. You know, I mean, independent of that, I think the strategy that he sees is something that's compelling to customers, which is what in my assessment, speaking with him, he bought VMware because it's strategic to customers and the strategic value of VMware becomes even higher as we take our multi-cloud portfolio. So it's all good. Well, plus the ecosystem is now re-energized. It's always been energized, but it's not energized because it sort of had to be because it's such a strong company. And it was the Dell history there, too. But yeah, but it was all the EMC and the Dell. Now it's like, wow, the ecosystem's real. It's released almost, I guess, I like this new team. We've been calling this new ops kind of vibe, going to refactored ops, as you said. That's where the action's happening because the developers want to go faster. They want to go faster. They want to go fast, because the velocity is paying off of them. They don't want to have to wait. They don't. They don't want security reviews. They want policy. They want some guardrails. Show me the track. That's it. And let me drive this car. That's it, because, I mean, think about it. If you were a developer, listen, I've been a developer. I never really wanted to see how, to operate the code in production, because it took time away for developing. I like developing and I like to sort of spend my time building the applications. And that's the goal of Aria and Tanzu. And then, you know, I got to mention the props of seeing Project Monterey actually come out to fruition is huge because that's the future of computing architecture. I mean, at this stage, if a customer from here on is modernizing their infrastructure and they're not investing in holistic new infrastructure from a hardware and software perspective, they're missing out an opportunity on leveraging the numbers that we were showing. 20% increase in cores. Why would you not just make that investment on both the hardware and the software layer now to get the benefits for the next six years? You would, and if I don't have to make any changes and it's just, I get 20% automatically. And the other thing, I don't know if people really appreciate the new curve that the silicon industry is on. It blows away the history of Moore's Law, which was whatever, 35, 40% a year. We're talking about 100% a year price performance or performance improvement. I mean, I think when you have an inflection point, as we said earlier, there's going to be some things that you know is going to happen, but I think there's going to be a lot that's going to surprise people. New brands will emerge, new startups, new talents, new functionality, new use cases. So we're going to watch that carefully. And for the folks watching that know that theCUBE's been 12 years with covering VMware, VMworld, now VMware Explorer. We've kind of met everybody over the years, but I want to point out a little nuance, Ragu thing in the keynote. During the end before the collective responsibility, sustainment commitment he had, he made a comment. As proud as we are, which is the word he used, there's a lot of pride here at VMware. Ragu kind of weaved that in there. I noticed that. I want to call that out there because Ragu's proud. He's a proud product guy. He said, I'm a product guy. You know, he's delivering keynote. Almost 20 years. As proud as we are, there's a lot of pride at VMware Summit. Talk about that dynamic because there's, you mentioned customers. Your customer is not a lot of churn. They've been there for a long time. They're embedded in every single company out there, pretty much VMware is in every enterprise, if not all, 99%, whatever percentage it is. It's huge penetration. You know, we are proud of three things. It comes down to number one, we are proud of our innovations. You can see it, you can see the tone from Ragu or myself or other executive changes with excitement when we're talking about our technologies. We're just proud of it. We are a technology and product-centric company. The second thing that sort of gets us excited and be proud of is exactly what you mentioned, which is the customers. The customers like us, it's a pleasure when I bring Roshan on stage and he talks about how he's expecting certain relationship and what he's viewing VMware in this new world of multi-cloud that makes us proud. And then third, we're proud of our talent. I mean, I was jokingly talking to the, just the events team alone. Of course, our engineers do amazing job, our sellers do amazing job, our support teams do amazing job. But, you know, we brought this team and we said, you know, we are going to get you to run an event after three years from not doing one. We're going to change the name on you. We're going to change the attendees you're going to invite. We're going to change the fact that it's going to be a new speaker who have never been on the stage and done that kind of presentation. You're also going to serve a virtual audience. And we're going to be a virtual audience. And you know what, they embraced it and they surprised us. And it looks beautiful. So I'm proud of the talent. The VMware team always steps up. There's never, you never slide, it got great talent over there. The big thing I want to highlight as we end this day, this segment, I want to get your thoughts and reactions submitted. Again, you guys were early on hybrid. We have the cube tape and go back into the video data lake and find the word hybrid mentioned 2013, 2014, 2015. Even when nobody was talking about hybrid. Multi-Cloud, Ragu saw it earlier. I talked to Ragu in 2016 when he did the old Pat Kelsinger, I mean Ragu, Pat and Andy Jassy. When that cloud thing got cleared up, he cleared that up. He mentioned multi-cloud even then 2016. So this is not new. You had the vision. There's a lot of stuff in the oven. I mean, as make announcements directionally and then start chipping away at it, now you got Broadcom, Buys VMware. What's in the oven? How much goodness is coming out that's like just hitting the fruits and starting to bear on the tree? There's a lot of good stuff. And how much, just put that contextualize and scale that for us. What's in the oven? First of all, I think the vision, you have to be early to be first and we believe in it, okay? So that's number one. Now, having said that, what's in the oven, you would see us actually do more controls across cloud. We're not done on networking side, okay? We announced something as Project North Star with networking portfolio. That's not generally available. That's in the oven. We are going to come up with more capability on supporting any Kubernetes on any cloud. We did some previews of supporting, for example, EKS. You're going to see more of those cluster controls across any Kubernetes. We have more work happening on our telco partners for enablement of Oran as well as our edge solutions along with the ecosystem. So more to come on those fronts. But they're all aligned with enabling customers multi-cloud through these five cross-cloud services. They're all really, some of them, where we have put a big sort of a version one of solution out there, such as ARIA continuation. Some of them, where even the version one's not out and you're going to see that very soon. All right, so what's next for you as the president? You're proud of your team. We got that great oven description of what's coming out for the next meal. What's next for you guys? You know, I think for us two things. First of all, this is our momentum season, as we call it. So for the first time after three years, we are now being in, I think we've expanded, explored five cities. So getting this orchestrated properly, getting, we're expecting nearly 50,000 customers to be engaging in person and maybe a same number virtually. So a significant touch point, because we have been missing. Our customers have departed their strategy formulation and we have departed our strategy formulation. Getting them connected together is our number one priority. And number two, we are focused on getting better and better at making customers successful. There is work needed for us. We learn, then we code it and then we repeat it. And to me, those are the two key things here in the next six months. Smith, thank you for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for your valuable time, sharing. What's going on? Appreciate it. Always great to be here. Here at the president, the CEO's coming up next to theCUBE. Of course, we're John and Dave. More coverage after this short break. Stay with us.