 Hello, and welcome back to VMworld Explore and theCUBE's wall-to-wall coverage. I'm joined today by Dave Nicholson, who's really the principal of CXO Insights. Glad to have you on here. I think we can jump in. This is a little back and forth because I think we've been seeing some similar trends in what some of the announcements have been here around VMware Explore and what's going on. And why don't we jump right into it? I think, again, both of us have been other places and seen things around in our analysis of this. And I think, you know, I always thought it was pretty funny when people thought it was going to be anti-competitive with Broadcom buying VMware. Because I look at it, and VMware has such a huge CSP cloud service provider type market that they've been selling into with the cloud director and a number of other different product sets that aren't really totally highlighted this week, but there is a strong presence. I know they're here. We're going to have some of them on later in the week. What have you been seeing and what have you been hearing? Because I think that to me is an underlying theme that really isn't getting talked about here. Yeah, yeah. So I would say that starting out this morning, I thought the keynote was brilliantly executed. And I was looking for sort of the behind the scenes announcements and what came across loudly and clearly to me was sort of the one-two punch of we are going to increase competition via our cloud strategy. And then they also addressed something that maybe kind of flew past people, but having NVIDIA, the leader of NVIDIA up on stage was huge because one of the concerns that was raised in the EU and the UK was this idea that there would be an anti-competitive dynamic introduced in the guys of Broadcom making it really hard for other hardware providers to integrate with VMware. And boom, NVIDIA front and center, who happens to be a customer of Broadcom, put just wood behind the arrow of no, no, no, no. This is an ecosystem that's going to thrive. Customers will benefit from this ecosystem moving forward. So yeah, we can go into more detail on stuff like the cloud strategy, but no, I think it was, it should have been a message well received by the VMware community customers at large. Of course, folks who are part of VMware, the company, are going to experience change in the future as we all do in tech constantly. But no, I think it was largely positive and very well done from a keynote perspective. Yeah, and off the record type little conversations I've been hearing is that actually emails have even already gone out to certain parts of the community where internal employees and stuff about some of the changes that are coming. And I think that what's interesting to see is that, and I think this is a good place that you went there. I think there's a community here that wants to embrace AI, the cloud service providers that are out there want to embrace AI and they want to see NVIDIA up there right, you know, Jensen in front of Hoctan, right in the front row there. I thought that was very, very symbolic of the relationship and the openness that they're going for. And I think a big push is, you know, and Hoctan even said it in his little part of the taped interview, the taped part of the opening was, we're going to invest in R&D and in the ecosystem. And I think that's a change from what had been happening under EMC and Dell where the ecosystem became way more closed. I was saying on our opening this morning that there's over 80 hands-on labs right behind us next door here and out of that, only five of them are from partners. Those five partners are all hyperscalers right now. So it'll be nice to see that ecosystem and be embraced and see how that changes over the next coming years. Where do you see some of the other things that you heard this morning that may have really piqued your interest about how this, you know, this could be really successful? Well, you mentioned that we've each been at other places at various times in our history. One of the things that I did was work on the team that produced the Azure VMware solution that was acquired by Microsoft. So I spent a couple of years crawling around in the belly of the beast that is the software defined data center stack. In other words, everything from VCF through, everything having to do with this idea that you can put a VMware layer on top of hyperscale, cloud provider, infrastructure as a service, and really subjugate those hyperscalers to that model. That's not something that would have happened readily under EMC's leadership. In another life, I was at EMC when we acquired VMware. So when I see mentions of latest iterations and development that's being worked through on things like VSAN, but in particular NSX, what I see signaled to the world is that they're serious about continuing to pursue the cloud strategy. Now, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, as they say. You and I were talking about this off air. Networking is absolutely at the center of this. So an organization's propensity to either adopt or reject NSX will determine just how much this promise is fulfilled when it comes to that part of the strategy. So it's all about networking. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think networking is the linchpin that connects all of these around. It originally made cloud a reality, is that fast network, big bandwidth, and being able to have those pipes where you could move your data and your workloads up there so that people could use things like VDI or different types of access methodologies to get at their data. And then with clouds and being able to have that, I mean, of course it started with three-tier apps and web logics and all that up there and all that old school stuff. But I think what is really interesting is networking has just become so much more complex. And I think part of it is the security aspect of it. Part of it is just the complications and APIs between the different clouds and the service providers in between them. What are you seeing when you're looking at that complexity as well? So I would say that my advice to private clients and others is that the complexity is worth it. That once you actually get these environments instantiated, the benefits that you'll derive are worth it. One of my roles is to be a program leader in the Wharton CTO Academy. And so my CIO, CTO students are often asking, how do I generate consensus or consent to make investments in things like a new networking topology that's going to deliver all of these benefits? And so I would say that strategically it's gonna be just as important, more important moving forward to realize this vision of VMware cloud everywhere. To help those customers, those CIOs, CTOs, senior decision makers, help them articulate internally the value of this investment. Don't undersell the complexity involved. Be upfront, admit, hey, it can be complicated. But once we get past it, once it's put in place, boy is your life gonna be a lot easier. So just because it's complicated doesn't mean that it's, I don't think that's a negative. And I don't know if we're gonna have to go to San Francisco Giants versus Red Sox discussion in order for us to disagree on something, but I mean, let's try to find something where we have contrasting views. I was gonna say, I think that interestingly enough, I think it's not just one topology. And I think to your point, to a certain extent, I think it's people, because these different networks have, some companies have become multi-cloud by accident. And I think when you start to look at how do they re-architect everything, I'm not sure that everybody's gonna go to just NSX Plus. I think going to a PaaS service and making NSX PaaS service, which seems to be the direction they're taking NSX with NSX Plus and it being SaaS offering and having some data lake behind it for understanding configurations makes a lot of sense. I just wonder how that jives with all of the different complexities of load balancers and all of the different partnerships that you have there. Are you gonna put a load balancer behind a load balancer inside a cloud network? And I think that those complexities, because hey, maybe Azure does it a certain way and Amazon definitely does it a different way with ALB and ELBs, how do you bring this all together? I think that to me is really the challenge that VMware has is that these networking is complex. NSX does a certain job of abstracting it, but it can't be the full boat on that. And I don't know if that's how you see it or... No, I completely see it that way. I totally agree. I'm sitting here trying to think, let's pick apart what he said. The only thing I would say is I like to clarify that whenever we talk about multi-cloud, it's like, yeah, it's kind of silly. IT has been multi-vendor. It has been multi-tool forever and it always will be. And even when we talk about cloud, I think at some point we'll sort of back off on using the term cloud because cloud is just another tool in the IT toolkit. The one thing that what you just described, my heart is warmed by what you said because it's true because what it equals is job security for human beings for at least a few more years and hopefully beyond that because good luck AI trying to sort through all of this stuff. It's complicated. It needs smart people to put together still and for the foreseeable future. Yeah, I think the cloud architects are safe. I think it will be and I liked some of the messaging. I think we'll start to hear tomorrow around that VMware is going to talk about upskilling and helping the VM admins who've been very loyal. I mean, they've talked about 150,000 Vmug members as part of that. And it's a huge community that they have here and that's always something VMware has done better than anybody. I mean, for years and years and I think part of that is how do you bring them along on this journey? And it's not just about the products. It's about the solution in the ecosystem. I think the Vmugs are gonna have to get more open again. I think that again, when they start to go down this path it will help them but to your point I think AI can't solve everything initially. I think they'll be AI tooling and even they talked about it. Hey, here I can help you with configurations. And I think that's key, especially when they started talking about another persona that they're selling to now in platform engineering. Which John Furrier and I started this kick back in February when we were talking at KubeCon around platform engineering as, hey, IT became SRE and DevOps and all started to come together into platform engineering and I had this experience when I was at AWS where the engineers are like, don't SRE me. And so you start to go and look at how you have this division of labor. And it can't be automated away. And I think that there is so much complexity to this, all of this, not just the networking aspects to it. I definitely think that there will be moments of automation but I think that will be to enable people to move forward in their careers versus, hey, this is going to replace you. I mean, obviously there will be replacement and shifting of people. Well, there's going to be change. That's why, frankly, that's why positions in this industry that we are blessed to be a part of pay pretty well. And so my advice to folks in this industry, rule number one, don't name your farm animals because when it comes time to eat them, it makes it a lot harder if you've named it and you treat it like a pet. So if you think of, yes, we're here at VMware Explorer, but when you think of the V as really meaning virtualization, there are all sorts of virtualization abstraction technologies, they're not going to go away. Virtualizing an entire operating system as a virtual machine is not going to go away in the near future. It will be augmented and it will need to interoperate with other technologies. Figure it out, learn it. Just don't be tied to some very, very specific thing because if you're tying yourself only to say, VMware, VMware is going to shift to the left and come up with something new. I mean, just look at the introduction of VSAN and NSX over the years, new disciplines that come in. So that doesn't change. I think the one thing to watch and the one thing that Broadcom will have to navigate carefully is the, they say that our reality exists between our ears, but that's not the reality. It's our reality. The reality for someone who works at VMware is going to be very, very different possibly than the reality that exists in the rest of the world. And there's going to be a lot of noise as those changes move different people's cheese along the way. So number one, don't name your farm animals. Plenty of opportunity moving forward. More opportunity than ever before in this space. So I think I'm bullish on this. No worries. No, I agree. And I think that that's a good place for us, I think to leave it, I think on a positive note with everybody, because I agree with you, having gone through that with HPE when they split from HP to HPE, and I was over there and I told people, I said it's always worse on the outside what you're hearing than what's happening on the inside. Not if you're impacted, but when you're going through that, you got to stay the course and you got to look at where is it getting us to? Because I think that's the positive way. And I think there's so many good things that can come out of this acquisition, but so we'll grab- Next time, big argument smack down. We're going to have to figure it out. We got to figure it out. I'll have to plan this better. Contrarian, yeah. And we'll have to figure it out. But hey, thanks for joining us for Dave and myself. We're here with theCUBE live from VMware Explore and we're continuing our wall-to-wall coverage. Thanks and we'll be right back.