 Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, cover, EMC World 2016. Brought to you by EMC. Now, here are your hosts, Stu Miniman and Brian Graceley. Welcome back to Las Vegas, SiliconANGLE Media's exclusive coverage of EMC World 2016. The 16th year of the conference, but the last one under this name before the Assumptive Close of the Dell acquisition. And the seventh year that we've had, theCUBE at the show, so lots of familiar faces, as well as some new ones to the program. And there's people that we've talked to for a number of years, but surprised it's the first time on. Happy to have on the program, Kit Colbert, who is the Vice President and General Manager of Cloud Native Apps Business Unit with VMware. Kit, thanks for joining us. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. All right, so Cloud Native Apps Business Unit. Let's talk a little bit about your background and what's your role at VMware. Yeah, absolutely. So I've been at VMware now a bit over 12 years, maybe 12 and a half years. And really, as the company's grown, started off in the low levels of the VM kernel and ESX, worked on VMotion for a while, started the VRealize operations team, worked in the end-use computing business, and now doing this Cloud Native thing. So what exactly is this Cloud Native thing, right? Well, we started to notice this trend a few years ago, this interest in container technologies, Linux containers, and Docker in particular. What we saw was a whole ecosystem flourish around that, as well as just the fact that businesses needed to move faster, that software's becoming a bigger and bigger differentiator for them, and that as they embrace these next-generation technologies in order to deliver software faster, they had to rethink basically everything they did, right? And so we saw that trend, and we said, we really helped customers through that whole virtualization journey, and how can we do that again for this next-generation Cloud Native journey? So that's what my BU is really focused on, how do we help customers make that transition? Yeah, I mean, one of the conversations we'd be having is for years we were trying to say, what's the differentiators between virtualization and Cloud? And when you talk about Cloud Native, how much of that is infrastructure, and how much is that really on the application side looking up the stack? Yeah, that's a great question. So it's a bit of both, honestly. You know, this is really kind of a full-stack change, and it changes in the application architecture, how this thing's built, building applications to be more distributed and tolerant or resilient to infrastructure failure, but it's also rethinking the infrastructure. Once the applications change, the requirements on the infrastructure can change, and so how you build that infrastructure, how you run it, it looks very different. You know, and on that whole notion of how you run and how you operate infrastructure, also fundamentally different. This whole sort of DevOps model that we hear, you know, a lot of noise about, but there are great benefits there if you can really embrace that. So, you know, this is, I think the big transition is that with virtualization, it was kind of this transparent abstraction layer that we were able to add into the data center. What we see with Cloud Native is a full end-to-end change, both in terms of technology, app infrastructure, as well as the operations. So last year, a couple of years ago, there was all this discussion of like, is it containers or VMs? You know, kind of like either or. Last year at VMworld, you guys hugely embraced it. You laid out the Photon platform, VMWare integrated containers, really essentially saying to the operations team, look, it's not an either or discussion. There's benefits of going native containers, of going, you know, what's been the uptake or what's been the feedback you've gotten from people in the field in terms of, you know, VMWare's approach to containers? Oh, it's been great. I mean, a lot of positive feedback, a lot of engagement and excitement. You know, I think a lot of customers are scratching their heads, frankly, because they have, you know, some folks within these businesses, some developers, some of the app teams are starting to embrace these next generation technologies, and many of the operations teams, folks who need to run these things in production and started scratching their heads saying, how do I go and do that? And so I think, you know, people really obsessed around the VM versus container debate. And I think what we're seeing is we're kind of moving past that to some degree. Containers are excellent in terms of packaging, managing, you know, Docker has shown that, right? But from an operations standpoint and an infrastructure runtime standpoint, I think we're showing that VMs are really, really powerful. They bring a lot of benefits like security, other operational benefits that, you know, like network virtualization or storage abstractions, right? These things are proven. They're out there. And so now we're really looking at how do you combine the best of both worlds? How do we allow you to embrace containers, embrace these new models of operating while at the same time leveraging a lot of the existing technologies that you have just to help accelerate that journey? And VMware is kind of uniquely positioned. You're really the only one of all the container, you know, companies that are dealing with it that can do both of those. Everyone else sort of forces customers into a choice. You and I were talking beforehand about this is open source or at least to a certain extent it's open source. You know, what's the customer feedback on VMware and open source or how it's changing their mindset? Oh, it's changing it very drastically in some cases. So I think what we're seeing is that there's a lot of organic uptake of these technologies. Again, by developers, by application teams, by operators, you know, even at conferences like DockerCon or KubeCon, you know, the things that are, I think, perceived to be more developer oriented, you still have, I mean, 40% of those guys are operators, yeah. So, you know, a lot of people are taking these newer technologies and the way they're getting access to them is via open source. They're just there, you can go download them, you can try them out, it's very easy, right? And so there's this new sort of engagement model that's developing that it's not a sales guy showing up at your door to go pitch you a product, it's, you're hearing about this cool new technology from the community at a meetup, at a conference. And then you go and play with it and you find that it's valuable and then you give that vendor a call to say, hey, you know, I want to run this thing in production, help me do that, you know, help me, give me support, give me some extra functionality. So we're seeing that the whole engagement model with customers start to evolve. And obviously, you know, we're very committed to that, very committed to open source and engaging customers in that way. Yeah, so this week there was some, this week last week there were some announcements around the Photon platform and Pivotal Cloud Foundry. You know, for folks that don't follow that, what does it mean that the two of those groups are working together and what's the value to a customer? Sure, yeah, I mean, let me just give you just for those who may not be aware, may not be aware, it's a little bit of the background of what we are specifically doing in the container and cloud native space. So last year at VMworld we announced two main products, the first of which is called vSphere Integrated Containers. The second of which is called Photon Platform. Now vSphere Integrated Containers is focused on existing vSphere customers who really, again, scratching their heads, how do I support Docker in production? This is the dead simple way of enabling you to do that. You can extend your operational model with vSphere, all the tools, technologies, everything you do, everything you use in and around vSphere to containers. It just works right out of the box. So that's vSphere Integrated Containers, very simple, very easy. Now, again, we talked to some customers and said, you know what, we love vSphere. We absolutely need it for many, many, if not most of our applications. But at the same time, you know, we're looking at these fundamentally different operational models with much higher degrees of scale. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, these guys are also thinking about different sorts of infrastructure paradigms in order to support that operational model in those applications. And so, you know, they're looking for a different solution than vSphere. So that's where what we have called Photon Platform came from. It's really an infrastructure that's designed for cloud native applications from the top to the bottom. And so, you know, that by itself important, right? But really, I think as we talk to more and more customers what they're starting to say is, look, it's not just the basic technologies that we want. We really do want as integrated a solution as possible. Make it super easy for us, right? I'd rather spend less time getting these technologies to work and more time building up my apps and differentiating myself as a business. So this is where we went and teamed up with Pivotal who makes, of course, Cloud Foundry. You know, originally started at VMware. Now Pivotal's taking and just running with it and having great success with it and a lot of customer interest around Cloud Foundry. So what we said, let's do this together, right? Let's combine Cloud Foundry on top of Photon Platform to offer an end-to-end integrated solution. And that's what we announced last week. Okay, so Cloud Foundry can basically run on any cloud, Photon Platform can now be another cloud that if customers want that to be essentially their cloud, that's an available option. Yeah, and I think really what we're looking at is simplicity, you know, just tight integration and simplicity. So out of the box, things just work. Yeah, that's great. So talk a little bit about just, you know, the shift from, you know, infrastructure-centric conversations to cloud-native. You know, David Gould in yesterday in the keynote said, customers got to start to embrace this. I don't understand it. What are you seeing in terms of customers going, I know how to do that? Or, you know, what's an early project they might work on that kind of fits in that cloud-native paradigm? Yeah, so that's a great question. So customers are getting it, you know, at different speeds. I think it kind of depends on the industry, depends on that customer's perspective. We're seeing more and more customers who are really starting to think of themselves first and foremost as technology companies irrespective of what their industry is, right? We've seen this, you know. Well, the financial customers say that, you know, just reading an article even on pizza delivery companies or delivery company food delivery in general. You could send a tweet and get a pizza sent. Yeah, like now they have like a, now I think Domino's it is on like on the Apple Watch, single button press, do order a pizza. I mean, talk about. That's what we needed. Yeah, I know. It's gotten a little too easy maybe, but that's really the idea. And you know, and these guys, and they see it from a business perspective, Domino's was saying that all orders via mobile are actually 10, 15, 20% higher. Like people buy more stuff, bigger pizza, more toppings, whatever it is. So for them, there's a real business imperative to do it and do this. So we're seeing that. And usually oftentimes starts with mobile or some consumer facing app that is a big, you know, breadwinner for the company. They say, you know what? This thing makes a lot of our money. We need to figure out how we can more deeply engage customers. So let's go do that. So then they start, you know, experimenting with container technologies, experimenting with newer, more modern programming languages, experimenting with continuous integration, continuous delivery. And as they do that, you know, they at first, again, they're going to start it within their existing environment. You know, oftentimes vSphere. But over time as they get, over time as they get more and more mature, then they start looking potentially for other alternatives in this, you know, like we talked about with Photon platform. Kit, last week, Brian and I were actually at the OpenStack Summit. And in one of the keynotes, they talked about it was the DevOps Ninja and the virtualization admin and kind of looked at it as a spectrum there. When you kind of look at kind of the skill set, both of the customer base and inside, you know, are these totally different worlds? You know, how do they relate to each other? That's a great question. And I would say, look, I mean, I think there's, you can always define different personas in different roles, right? And the real question is how translatable are the skill sets, right? And so I think, you know, with DevOps, it's definitely a different role, you know, a different persona, a different role than the virtualization admin. The VI admin is, you know, more traditional IT operations sort of model and a lot of point and click where the DevOps person is much more command line driven, API driven, scripting, automating, doing a lot of that sort of work, right? And also, I think just thinking a bit more outside the box. DevOps mindset, while you may have a specific role like an operator or a developer, you know, you're expected to do whatever it takes to get something done, right? Developers wake up at 2 a.m. when their app breaks, you know, they go and fix it, right? Operators are expected to write a little bit of code. So we're seeing a bunch of our customers who are able to make that transition, you know, folks that get it and see it and are sort of the pioneers for it. I think what you're going to see, like any sort of change that happens, there's always a leading edge of folks. And then, you know, as the technologies mature, as they get easier to use, you'll see a lot more folks coming over. So I think like with anything, we're seeing some of our VI admins, totally excited, totally get it. They're willing to jump in, get their hands dirty, experiment a bit, you know, with these kind of very nascent technologies that don't always work right. And as they sort of, you know, settle this kind of new ground and get things set up, then we'll see a lot of the other folks transition over. So I do see it as a journey. We talked to a lot of customers about that. Something that doesn't happen overnight. Something that doesn't happen for all your apps. You do it selectively and, you know, over time get to this cloud native nirvana that people talk about. Yeah, I mean actually, it reminds me some of the early days of VMware. I mean, you've been there 12 years, I think back to those early days. People that help build the VMware community. Many of those that were breaking glass in the initial days, looking for that next new challenge and that this is where they're going after. Yeah, and this is exactly what we want to help customers with, right? It's, you know, we were there for that first revolution and, you know, it was exactly the same thing that we're seeing today, organic uptake. Individual server admins got the idea, the light bulb went off, they got the concept of virtualization. They started implementing it and it was great, right? A lot of benefits. And now we're seeing the same thing with the DevOps cloud native space where people get it, they kind of get the benefits, they try it out, the company, the business sees it and they start expanding it. But as they expand it, obviously those skill sets are hard to replicate. So they look for more proven solutions that are just simpler to embrace and that's really where, you know, our focus is helping those customers on that journey. So Kit, want to give you the last word? Just we look forward, we're going to be back here in Vegas down at the other end of the strip, you know, come the end of August for VMworld. What should we be looking for? Give us a little bit, looking forward as what we expect from your team. Well, yeah, a ton of stuff happening for VMware in general, obviously. Within my team, you know, what we announced, a number of product, or a couple of products back at VMworld last year. You know, really it's about execution on those products. So you'll see possibly some more announcements there, possibly some more announcements of new things to come. You know, I think there's just a tremendous amount of activity happening in this space in the cloud native space right now. A lot of innovation, a lot of new startups, a lot of new ideas. And so we're as much as possible trying to stay on the forefront of that, really helping to drive that and helping to shape that. So we're really excited to see what comes and really excited to help customers on this journey. Great. All right, well, Kit Colbert from VMware's cloud native apps business unit. Thanks so much for coming on. I'm happy to have you part of the CUBE alumni group now. We'll be back here with lots more coverage of EMCworld 2016. You're watching theCUBE.