 From Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to VMworld day three, continuing coverage with theCUBE. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante sporting this fantastic salmon tie. And what you can't see is the matching salmon pants, Dave. There you go. I feel like- I still have my voice. No. The alpha game is on point, Dave. Hey, thank you. So we've been here since our third day. This is a huge event. 25,000 or so people here. Lots of great announcements. We're excited to welcome theCUBE for the first time. Mimi Speer, the vice president of the Internet of Things business at VMware. Thank you. It's great to have you. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for coming on. Yeah, it's great. So three action packed days. Yes. Lots of announcements, lots of momentum. You lead a team at VMware that launched the VMware IoT business about a year and a half ago, including launching the product, the GTM strategy, the partner in marketing strategy. That's correct. In the last year and a half, talk to us about the evolution of VMware IoT, the business challenges that you're helping customers to solve. Absolutely. So, you know, this has been a journey for almost, you know, a couple of years now and VMware saw a need to really start to look at what we'll call the edge or IoT use cases. Our customers started coming to us saying, wait a minute, this is coming. I know my business units are starting to invest in IoT. I have no control over it. I have no exposure to it. What should I do? And we are, you know, really committed to being an infrastructure company. We knew that when we started this journey and we said, we really want to focus on infrastructure, but we want to help our customers go to the edge, really start to embrace this new opportunity in the industry to be able to take advantage of this data. We call it, you know, the data is the gold. How do you actually be able to take advantage of it? So we're really excited. We just started the journey and now we've really this VM world is where the momentum is starting to take off. How do you look at that opportunity? Because it's complicated, especially for a bunch of IT people, right? Exactly. And now you're entering this world of operations technology, but how do you sort of look at the landscape of the market? I'm really glad you asked that because that's one of my favorite topics. So, you know, I want our customers to think about, first of all, what are the mission critical objectives of their business? They shouldn't do IOT just to do IOT. They need to do what's right for their business. But I also think it's important that they look beyond that. So if you look at some of the macro trends happening in the world today, there will need to be 70% more food that's created and there's only 5% more land that it can be built on. There's going to be 300 million connected cars out on the roads. There was a statistic that there will be two thirds of energy is consumed by cities, yet we still have very old ways of doing it, but it's in this very consolidated area. Why would we not take advantage of that? So I think industries, whether you're in energy or you're in smart cities or you're in automotive, you have to really think about where is your industry going and how can, and even IT people need to think about this. I think, and I'll explain why in a minute, but how can I actually create an industry and a company that can sustain in this future world and also contribute to the future of what our world's going to be like? So I think, and the technology and the way we set this up in the architecture is really the foundation to do that. So that's where VMware comes in. Okay, and talk a little bit more about VMware's specific strategy as it relates to IoT. I mean, I was at the big Dell announcement last fall. Okay, so you've got Dell sort of with existing relationships actually with a lot of the industrial giants. But now enter VMware, what's your strategy? Yeah, so first I want to say that Dell and VMware have come together into one big business unit to solve IoT and Edge. And the beauty of that is we believe that our customers can really have a more simplistic way of achieving this infrastructure foundation if we can offer these end-to-end solutions together. So I'll talk about how the Dell piece fits into the VMware strategy. But what VMware is trying to do is drastically simplify the complexity of the infrastructure and the foundation you'll need for IoT. So we want to extend what we're doing in the cloud and the multi-cloud, because we fundamentally believe most of our customers are actually in multiple clouds, private, public, multiple public and actually be able to extend that down to whatever edge they need as well. Because of the amount of data that will be generated at the edge there's going to be, I don't know, analysts say 50 to 75% of data will be generated at the edges of our business by 2020 and think about it, all of our applications today are in the cloud. So there must be edge computing that is local to be able to process that data. And there also needs to be, there's this heterogeneous set of devices that will need to be managed, monitored, secure and collect that data. So this requires, it's complex. So we want to drastically simplify that and that's the overarching part of our strategy. But we also want to allow our customers to do it in a way that's secure, that's scalable and that's manageable over time. So does that mean, first of all, the Dell partnership is interesting and Alan Cohen, one of our guest analysts this week said partnerships used to be like tennis, you know, you've one-on-one and now partnerships like soccer. There's so many parts of the ecosystem. So that's sort of one observation, but are you sort of bringing VMware to the edge? Is that, you know? We are, so we're bringing VMware to the edge. We announced a new portfolio of solutions called VMware Edge. It will take advantage of the ability to do the compute edge, which is the processing at the edge and really extending our hyperconverge technology as a service, like we're doing for VMC on AWS to the edge and it includes our device edge. And there's a lot of things that is happening on the device edge, which is like gateways and things that we want to help provide a more software a defined approach, as well as ensure that those can be managed, monitored, secure across all the diverse set of devices. Now, you can't do that alone. The ecosystem you mentioned, I've never seen any, you know, in my history of my career, the amount of collaboration that's going on across the ecosystem, because IoT is so hard. So you really do need to collaborate. And we are collaborating with the IoT platform providers, the gateway and the thing providers, you know, the hardware providers, the system integrators. It requires that to be successful. But what we want to do with Dell is do it in a way that we offer these end-to-end solutions so that it's just more simple. You can go to one place to consume it, to ensure that it gets deployed and to actually support that solution, but offering it from a multitude of our partners. So let's dig into simplicity, because we hear that Mimi all the time, as you do to customers, want choice, they want simplicity, right Dave? They want flexibility. They want it all. They want it all. We all want it all. But how are, is the VMware Edge computing strategy from a technology level actually facilitating simplicity in what is inherently a complex world of multiple devices, multiple clouds, et cetera. Talk to us about the technology and the actual enablers of that simple first thing. I'm so glad you asked me that. So we've been saying very consistently that we want to offer consistent infrastructure, consistent operations, but we want to give you the choice of your application platform or development platform. We're going to do the exact same thing at the Edge. So everything that VMware customers experience in their private cloud, their SDDC solution, private cloud, public cloud, we are now going to offer as a service at the Edge. Same infrastructure, same operational model as the hybrid cloud model, but at the Edge with the choice of the application development tools that they would like, because they might want green grass from Amazon. They might want, you know, the Azure. They might want IoT Watson, whatever they want at the Edge, we want to be able to support that on our infrastructure, but still maintaining that simplicity of a consistent infrastructure, no matter where you choose to run your applications. We want to just eliminate the even thought process, run your applications anywhere on a consistent infrastructure with the same management, the same operations, and move them around as much as you'd like. So is there an abstraction layer almost that this can enable so that that management of all of these different applications and development platforms can be really done seamlessly? Yeah, so Project Dimension, we announced a tech preview and we'll be launching it later this year and it will have a management layer that allows you to move your infrastructure and be able to actually, it's a VMware managed solution, so we will do it for you, it's even more simple, but be able to choose where you want to run that appliance as a service or infrastructure, whether it be the public cloud, the private cloud, or the data center and the Edge. So that is the new, what you call extraction, it's almost a new dimension, no pun intended. Hence the name. Hence the name of across all of your different clouds or Edge. So the notes I had on Dimension, a hybrid cloud control plane, the end-to-end VMware stack on-prem cloud at the Edge. That's right. And I think I heard Lenovo, VMware, and Dell are the initial platform providers. That's right, Lenovo, Dell is the hardware. And that, what's the consumption model? Is that an as-a-service consumption model? So we'll start with as-a-service, and what that means is VMware will actually manage your hardware, your infrastructure, and your software. We will do it for you, obviously with the collaboration of when to do it, and if everything, because this could be at the Edge running mission critical applications. We want to make sure the OT, it's really an opportunity for OT and IT to collaborate and ensure that it's meeting the OT needs as well. So it's bringing a cloud-like consumption model to the Edge, which of course is huge for VMware. I think probably 10% of your business today is SaaS-based. And the trend is clear, and the trend is your friend, as they say, but it's not easy to necessarily get there. So that's exciting, I think, that you're delivering that as a service. I think we got really lucky. We ended up with this hybrid cloud strategy. It was the right thing to do. It's absolutely where the market's gone. And we're now almost at a multi-cloud strategy. And that puts us at the perfect position because we have set up our customers to be flexible and be able to choose whatever cloud or private they want in the cloud, we are very easily able to extend that to the Edge. So it puts us in a very good position. You know, talking about the ecosystem again, I mean, the IoT, I mean, it's every industry, every sector, every size of company, and I want you to discuss the ISV piece of this. It's a very complex situation. I would love to talk with ISV. But there's so many ISVs, it makes your eyes bleed when you look at the list of ISVs. It's hard to figure out, okay, who's real, who's not, and who to partner with. How are you guys sorting all that out? Okay, so we are the infrastructure. What is beautiful about that is, we are not competing with the ISVs at all. So they all want to work with us. And the ISVs in the IoT world consist of not only specific application providers, but also IoT platform providers. So it's the SAPs of the world. It's Microsoft. It's also the Bosch, the GE. It's everybody that wants to do something with that data and build applications on it. Most of those are doing industry-specific things. So what we're going to do is take project dimension and we're going to offer appliances as a service for industry-specific use cases and sometimes they're horizontal, like building management. But we're going to pick the best ones that we think have the right solution that can scale to the level our customers need in a secure way and doing the most rich experience with our data. We have 15 different partners in our zone right now really showing what they can do across six different industries. And that's what we're going to do with them. We're also with Pulse. So I need to talk a little bit about Pulse because it's my baby. We announced Pulse IoT Center 2.0. And what that is, it's the ability to manage, monitor and secure things or IoT gateways. So one example of that is surveillance. We are partnering with camera companies that also offer analytic applications for visualization and surveillance. And we're offering an end-to-end solution. In fact, we announced the Dell Technologies surveillance solution, partnering with companies like Access Communications owned by Canon. Pulse runs on the camera to ensure that that camera is working properly, hasn't been hacked into, can get patched, can get isolated, God forbid something happens. And we're doing the same thing across many of the device and think providers as well. So let's talk about an actual customer. Where do they start in this conversation? Because as you were sitting in the beginning, the world is going IoT. This is proliferation of devices. Companies are moving in this direction because they have no choice. We were talking with the school district yesterday and the proliferation of BYOD and all of the things. So where does the conversation start with a customer about VMware Edge? Is it start with the business-level leadership who need to be able to get a handle on this and identify new revenue streams, new business models? Does it start with the technology folks who have to have the infrastructure to support it? What is that sort of customer, maybe a hospital or what not? Where do I start? Great question. So it starts, it depends is the answer. It can start either way. Even if it starts on the infrastructure side, what we always tell IT is that you really need to have a reason to do this. You need to work with your business. You need to prioritize. You need to understand the mission-critical objectives of your business, the outcome you're trying to achieve. And then let's work together on a use case and we can help solve it with your business. So whether we go through IT and we really educate them on the importance of this digital foundation at the Edge and then we work one of their businesses, maybe it's security and surveillance or maybe it's with a bank, the ATM group. Actually there is a group that runs the ATMs and we're working with that group. It might be the Bank of the Future Retail Bank and they're all different organizations with many different use cases. We'll work with all of them. The nice thing about starting with IT is IT understands the challenge that they're faced with and they really want to have the impact that they've had on the IT organization now on the OT. OT is very siloed. So anyway, it starts there but with our partners and the beauty about working with partners like ISVs, it will start on the OT side and it will start with the use case and then they'll go to the IT side and say, hey, what about VMware to solve this and IT will say, are you serious? That's a dream. So it absolutely is both but it has to have a business outcome. How about the data model? I mean, we know from talking to IT people they understand data, they've lived data their whole lives. A lot of the operations side of the business is analog today and it's becoming digital. What's the conversation like around data? So, okay, so my whole background is data. I started in business intelligence and then analytics and then big data and now IOT. The purpose of the data, so first of all, it depends on the use case. So the one thing that we like to educate are anyone we're talking to is that you are going to need deep learning and you're going to need real time analytics and each use case will be unique and depending on the use case, you will need a slightly different architecture. So we'll help support this foundation based on the data. It's always about the data or actually even more importantly, the insights you're trying to get from the data. Once you know your use case, then you can determine where am I getting this data? Although sometimes you already know and what's the right analytic process? Am I doing machine learning? Am I doing AI? Am I doing just predictive analytics? Do I want to do something quickly at the edge to determine something in real time and then send it back to make that process smarter? That's actually what I think will ultimately happen. It will be a decision making loop that goes from the edge to the cloud and back. But that's the data conversation we have and I could talk all day just on that topic. I mean, I know we're tied on time, but how prominent is the discussion around data ownership? I mean, does the factory own the data? Does the device manufacturer own the data? I mean, yes and yes. I mean, there is controversy there, but typically, I know the device manufacturer does want to own the data, and oftentimes they have access to that data. Every industry is slightly different, but at the end of the day, the customer should own the data. I mean, they should at least have access to that data. And we will always say in our situation, the customer, the data is yours. And we will work with both of those organizations because those will be our constituents to a use case and we will do what's right for that use case and hopefully everybody wins. It really does depend. If it's a car manufacturer, they have to own the data because they have to make sure that car is safe and secure, but there might need to be a level of access that the consumers get as well. Mimi, thanks so much for stopping by. I could tell by your energy and your genuine passion for this. We're going to hear a lot more, Dave, about what VMware Edge is doing and helping customers embrace the superpowers that Pat Gelsinger was talking about on Monday. Great to have you on the show, Mimi. Thank you for having me. Have a great day. Thank you. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE, continuing coverage of VMworld 2018. This is our third day stick round. We'll be right back with our next guest.