 Covering VMworld 2015. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem sponsors. Now your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Moscone North Lobby at VMworld 2015. San Francisco, this is theCUBE. SiliconANGLE's flagship program. We go out to the events and extract the signal noise. I'm John Furrier, the founder of SiliconANGLE. I'm Joe Mykos, Dave Vellante, co-founder of wikibon.com. Our next guest is Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware. Welcome back to theCUBE. Again, every year, six years now in a row, CUBE alum in all of our CUBEs. Thanks for taking the time. I know you're super busy. Thanks for coming on. Number one for the record. Number one for the record. Number one for the record. Yeah, I was bugging you guys yesterday that you tell that to all your guests. It's definitive. You are number one. Now you're the only one who's outlasted us. 34 minutes is the record and your handle is we're so mad at us. But that's okay. Thanks for coming on. So keynote was great. Just everyone that didn't watch the keynote, go check out the replays on SiliconANGLE.tv and vmware.com under VMworld. Really good speech this year. I like how you laid out the future. Really set the canvas for the next generation. So was that kind of by design? Were you thinking, hey, I want to paint the picture? A lot of talk about VMware and the news that recently, speeds and feeds, VCloud, all this product stuff on day one. What was the purpose of the speech? Yeah, and it really was as Robin, Carl and I were sort of architecting the speeches. And this whole idea of run, build, deploy, secure, and how we were trying to carry that theme through everything that we were doing. Having me kick it off would have been very traditional. And he says, well, what would it mean if I was wrapping it up with a much more visionary and future-looking speech and ask Carl to set context? And the more we tried that idea, it really sort of allowed me to, I'll say, go to a different altitude and rise up from some of the more techy things that I love, but to put it into context, that's much more industry and futuristic. So the more we played with the idea, the more we liked the idea and given the good response from this morning, I think it worked pretty well. And it brings a long-term perspective versus the short-term myopic, what we can do to stock price and all that stuff today. So congratulations. But one of the things I noticed was the asymmetric messaging around the future. And I want to ask you, because I asked you three years ago, Pat, is hybrid cloud the resting full destination or is it just a way station in between public, private cloud, and it's the future? So hybrid cloud, I'm asking all the guests, what is hybrid cloud and what is it today? Because clouds are different, every company will have a different cloud. Is hybrid cloud a product of the outcome of deployment or engineering, like distributed computing? You know, and clearly from our perspective, it is the culmination of bringing together these capabilities and to deliver to our users the ability to treat a range of different clouds, you know, from SaaS providers, right, through what they're doing in their own private data center and be able to treat that in a homogeneous way. Right, that they can look out at a set of resources, they can manage across those, secure across those environments. Right, and in many cases have increasing flexibility of how they run their workloads and scale them across. That is the vision of what we are off to build. That's what unified hybrid cloud is about. Now obviously, underneath that, right, there's a whole lot of work to get done and from us in a product perspective, hey, that means our management products got to be heterogeneous. Right, it means that the networking layer, hmm, there's some things I can do when it's V cloud air and the other end of the wire and, you know, VMware stack within the data center and you know, wasn't that cross cloud V motion, wasn't that cool? You know, to me that was my favorite demo of the show and then in other cases, boy, there's more limited things. And you know, we are starting to demonstrate even connectivity at the core networking layer into Amazon, right, and one of the work ventures show. Let me show you how we can extend the NSX connection all the way into an Amazon node. I mean, so those pieces are part of that broader set of vision but we want our customers to be able to say, VMware, you are my best partner to deliver that complete set of cloud services that I require. I like how you brought in the history lesson there, brought in some early Intel days and I want to ask you this question and a futuristic question around what's possible because really you laid out the future and I want to bring in kind of the Moore's Law analogy. I just interviewed Jerry Chen. I had Greylock and he said, I will talk about cloud and VMware's role potentially in the future, whether it's OpenStack today or containers tomorrow. He said, is this technology the best of the last generation or the first of the next generation? And I want you to take that quote in context and talk about what Moore's Law could look like in the cloud in the future. If you assume that the market's going to be, you know, 10X improvement, 100X improvements in these areas, how does Moore's Law apply to the cloud? Because cloud is an accelerant. Yeah, and you know, the beauty of Moore's Law has all, you know, I mean, if you go down to its fundamentals, right, it's not a law in the physics sense, right? It's an observation in the economic and technology sense, right, this doubling every two years. And the power of the cloud though, it allows you to benefit from both the scale, right? You know, the performance capabilities as well as the economics, right? Because it's saying, you know, you can scale out as well as scale up in each processor capacity. And that really is the magic of the cloud. And you're able to do that dynamically. And essentially, I can rent the biggest computer in the world now. I mean, you know, for 10 bucks, I can rent the largest supercomputer that's ever been built. It might be only for, you know, a few milliseconds, right? But the ability to aggregate essentially an unlimited scale resource, right? For my application, you know, it's just fabulous. So you really benefit from Moore's Law, both economically as well as the scale. Each node gets bigger and faster as well. And that ability, right, is why every cloud is built on x86 just because you see this engine of innovation that has not stopped. So do you see creativity being unleashed on that? Because I mean, I know there's all the different themes of VMware over the years, unleash your creativity. But unleashing now, think about that concept of unlimited, as you were pointing out. What are some of the things that you see and you guys in the VMware team see around what creatively is going to get done in that new world? Yeah, and you know, clearly some of the things that we described here as well, I mean, some of the things with respect to security, right, you know, these are very much game changing. And you know, people as they build more and more of their mission critical environments, you have to address it. You know, enabling some of these forward-looking analytics environments that we described and very much the proactive future that we described. You know, I mean, it's not like machine learning and some of these AI algorithms. I mean, these are 30 year kind of investigations. And now you just got this enormous compute resource that I can even take some mediocre algorithms with extraordinary amounts of data and start bringing some incredible insights, right, that predict behavior and opportunity. I mean, those are exciting capabilities. And you start going into different domains as well where all of a sudden, you know, I mean, you can ask almost any question and get an answer very quickly to those when you've put your services and capabilities into the cloud. So it is in so many ways, you know, we're just creating, you know, this next phase of innovation that, you know, as we described, you know, the proactive phase of the internet. You said recently, we've committed ourselves to a heterogeneous management strategy which allows us to be managing in a multi-cloud environments, both on and off-premise, including AWS and Microsoft Azure. Two questions. How much of AWS and Microsoft Azure are you managing today and do you expect to be managing in the future? Let me start there. Yeah. And you know, today we have a small amount that is being managed by a lot of customers, right? And you know, and it's interesting because almost every customer is asking, right? But as they're putting those CMP layers and those cloud management platforms layer using us in the day, in many cases it's, you know, I want to do a little bit so I know that it works, right? I want to know that the proof point is there that I can use it in that capacity. But what we're finding for customers is, okay, I need the promise of where I might go, but I got so much work to do just to operationalize my own private cloud environment that the reality of how much they're really doing in that way today is fairly modest, right? Now we're not bothered by that in the sense that, you know, they are going through this fundamental transformative phase and most of the private cloud automation for our management stack today is in this phase where they are going from ITIL, CMDB, trouble ticket dominated environments to self-service, you know, automated provisioning catalog environments and they are so deep into that transition that taking advantage of some of the heterogeneous cloud things is sort of, you know, number four on their list and they haven't clicked off number one, two and three yet. But that promise is definitely there and we're seeing an increasing amount of customers taking advantage of it. So the second part of my question, and I want you to help me square a circle. So we've heard Joe Tucci in the past talk about the advantages that some of the big hyperscale guys have in homogeneity and part of VMware strategy over the years has been to really get VMware out into the cloud service provider space. You know, at the same time, we live in this heterogeneous world. So how can you achieve that vision with all that heterogeneity? What is the underlying strategy and technology that enables you to do that? Yeah, and different layers of the stack you need to do different things. And for instance that, you know, the lowest layer, cross cloud V motion, that's going to be homogeneous for quite a while, right? It just is, right? And there's lots of things in terms of, you know, copying page tables, synchronizing page tables, fail forward, fail back environments. You got your best people working on it. Yeah, it's not trivial. Yeah, right, you know, that kind of stuff. But at higher levels of the stack, depositing workloads, observing workloads, getting telemetry on workloads. Okay, there you can be highly heterogeneous. So what really I'd say is the higher you are in the stack, the more heterogeneous you can be, right? The lower you go in stack, you know, to deliver a value proposition, right? You know, that's exciting to customers. The more homogeneous you tend to be. And obviously technologies tend to sediment down over time. So, but our commitment is, you know, a broader and broader set of cloud capabilities across other party clouds. And of course we want to enable as many of our partner clouds as well in those technologies. I mean, one of my most exciting products NSX, right? You know, one of the fastest growing segments is into service providers who are running that as part of their cloud as well. So that's going to build some of those hybrid networking capabilities into non-VMware hosted cloud environments as well. You talked in your keynote about your Cinderella career. Is VMware your glass slipper? Is it my glass slipper? Well, you know, I'm loving what I'm doing right now. It's a great place to be in the industry. I don't expect to go anywhere else. So, you know, at this point in time, I'd say, yep, sure is. Well, so you were asked yesterday on CNBC, you know, they want to know about how you touch consumers. And you gave some very good examples of ways that you power companies that power consumers. You also gave some Internet of Things, what I would call Internet of Things examples. You said there are 7,200 objects orbiting the earth and IT in your bloodstream, where two or sort of two examples that you gave. So you up-leveled your keynote this morning. I wonder if you could talk about VMware's role in powering things like the Internet of Things and things like consumer technologies. Yeah, you know, one of the, you know, maybe my favorite examples right now on some of the Internet of Things that we're doing, one is, you know, medical devices. You know, heart monitors, you know, right, being able to, you know, pain medication, injection devices, and so on. It ends, you know, next generation of those is going to be managed through a cell phone, right? You know, so you'll be able to go to your cell phone and you click, oh, my pacemaker kicked me three times last night, right, kind of things. But those devices need to be managed and secured. So how's the next generation going to be done? The leveraging, air watch, and our horizon suite. We're going to be doing that kind of capability. Right, and those things are just, you know, I mean, we're talking about people's lives and changing the lives, but it's also then about the telemetry that goes on the other end. And, you know, my wife has a heart monitor in right now. And Justin, you know how painful it is to get access to that data, right? It's my heart. Yeah, you know, why is it so hard? And it's going to be hosting a cloud and we're building those clouds for those environments. And to me, you know, some of those applications, you know, it's not just about going to an IT guy, and let me tell you how you can save a bunch of money. You know, let me go to that IT guy and say, let's go partner into your line of business and say, how can we change your business? Right, and that's really where I tried to end this morning's speech is very much right. That is the role that everybody at VMworld gets to play. You're the smartest tech guys. Go be the evangelists, the entrepreneurs inside of your business, because you are the person who's going to enable them to take advantage of these core trends to change their business. Yeah, one thing on that point is that people are looking at, we talked to a lot of customers in CIOs, and they're looking at the different vendors, Oracle, you know, looking at VMware, IBM, or HP and everyone else. But the trend that we're seeing is kind of pivoting off the appliance and engineered systems concept and end to end, you mentioned homogeneity and then heterogeneous at the top of the stack. They want an end to end solution. They want it to work so that it can get those kind of outcomes you describe. So in order to have that, they need developers, and you guys have an ecosystem, and there's a big focus on DevOps. So very geeky company, a lot of engineering at VM where a lot of people know what DevOps is, is that servicing up to the top of the senior management team where DevOps is top priority, the APIification, these kinds of things. Can you share some of the mindset and some of the conversations you're having at the senior level with DevOps and developers? Yeah, I find the conversation, by the way, I'd be very interested in your guys' perspective on this. One of the recent to DevOps conferences recently that we had a team go and attend and we're presenting some of our products and value propositions there, and a survey was done of how many of those were IT folk versus how many of those were developers? And what was the answer? Ops Dev. It was almost all IT folks, right, operations guys. Right, because do developers really want to carry pagers at midnight? Right, you know, it's like, you know, no. Right, you know, there's this funny, No, they're too busy writing code. Exactly, right, you know, and so there's this, You write code at night. Right, you know, and there's this aspect of, hey, they want programmable infrastructure, because they don't want some long trouble ticket kind of model to go get infrastructure, so they want API access that's automated, self provision and so on, but do they really want to take over infrastructure operations? And the answer to that is no frickin' way. Yeah, no way. Right, at that point of way, because they, you know, so it's very much that they don't want to be bottlenecked, right, they want to be enabled by infrastructure, right, for it. And so a lot of this DevOps is, how do we bring those two worlds together so that developers can go do what they want to do, right, develop, innovate, and at the pace of that, that they are never limited by any of the infrastructure deployment or life cycle management capacities. So as we're having those conversations, it's very much, how can we present more and more API access to a more and more automated set of our products? And that's why we've embraced OpenStack, that's why we've embraced containers, that's why we've done the Cloud Foundry, right, it's why we continue to have our own traditional VSIM interfaces that we've supported forever. We're just going to give them more API surface area than any other guy on the planet. And the next thing that comes up, right, if the Volante development environment diverges, hey, we're going to support that. If we get more than 10 developers on it, we'll be there. Yeah, Crouch Hat, we support Crouch Hat APIs. Yeah, so I got to ask, so the development is a good point, I love that point, because IT is where your wheelhouse is, certainly on the offside VM, where it's install-based. But now you bring up the developer community, those guys have embraced containers. That's changed the game a lot, because now you can abstract away the complexity that you guys can provide, kind of harden that top. So how do you see that market? So two questions, containers, comment on the containers we asked that last year. And where's the line on the hardened top? Where's the line where developers, hey, don't look here, your cool programmable interface, whatever you want to call it, infrastructure as code, where's the line on the stack, and then develop this new developer ecosystem that's developed. And I think as I said last year when I was on theCUBE, that we see the container trend as a more significant and long-term one, even in an open stack, right? And I think it really does become the biggest issue in the future for developers, because it's an application value proposition, right? And at that level, how can I make application development, deployment, life cycle management in a more effective and productive way? And software does eat the world, and everybody needs to become more productive in their application experience. And then the hardened top question, you know, it's a great question, developers, do they want to reach, I mean, do they want to go worry about infrastructure? No, they don't, but they don't want to be hindered by infrastructure, right at that level. So the question is, can we present in a lightweight, open way that they can take care and not worry about, oh, how do I get enough storage for this? How do I secure that network? How do I connect to this other thing? What is my directory service? So we're trying to present an infrastructure that gives them the surface area that they require so that they don't need to go down the stack, because they're not going down the stack because they want to, but because there isn't a flexible, easy way for them to get there another way. To them it's just like smashing rocks, they don't want to do that. I mean, they want to program some code. That's right. You know, they want to, you know, application code, interface code, you know, things that create business value. So our job is to present to them, you know, a capability, right, that makes those things easy. And that's what the Photon platform announcement was all about, making it easy, making it easy for traditional IT. And NSX is playing a role there too. Oh yeah, absolutely. NSX, you know, we're doing the bindings of the storage layers. We're absolutely bundling in the right way so that IT gets visibility into that environment so they can manage and secure it, you know, deploy it. But the developers get the flexible interfaces that they like as well. And really, you know, sort of the, you know, if you remember the old Oklahoma movie, can the, you know, Cowboys and the Farmers be friends? Right, you know, and that's our objective is to bring those two worlds together. So I got to bring up the cloud native question because we're seeing this transition now to, we, Dave and I were talking on the cube on the intro here about the old mini computer trend and how that spawned a whole level. You had Sun, HP, Pat and Intel from the writing chips and this in the X86 servers. The whole SAP workflow, ERP systems, manufacturing, got innovated, all this new automation happened. So we're seeing cloud native take on the similar role there where you're seeing people at the services level, the big consulting firms want to deploy more apps fast. And you mentioned the apps are taking over Hollywood. So where do you see the pressure point for that service? Ben or Angry Bird, I don't know. So that trend's happening right now. So what's the pressure one? What's holding back that explosion of new services that are going to roll out, consulting services, big firms rolling out apps for banks and every vertical, as you said, they're being disrupted. What in the infrastructure is holding back that? Yeah, I think that, and part of the reason we're so excited about some of the photon announcements in that sense is because, you know, it is too hard and too slow today. Right, you know, at the bottom, you know, it's heavy, complicated, right? You know, the IT processes aren't nimble and, you know, self-service environments are minimally deployed, right? You've got the application guys over here, hey, you know, they're innovating at, you know, a pace and these scale outs, container-oriented microservices, architectures that are beginning to differ. They're not scalable, they're not manageable, they're not secure, right? So the problems are so obvious on both sides of it, right, but, you know, as these worlds are coming together, some of the early embodiments, right, you know, of the new applications, etc. are so thrilling that people are really are moving into the space. So the fundamental limiters, right, we think are, you know, an agile, lightweight infrastructure with the right, you know, set of northbound APIs that give programmatic access to the infrastructure. And on the other end is a developer environment that can take advantage of those that's highly productive with the level of software skills. I think ultimately, you know, on that side of things, you're going to be developed, you're going to be limited by software development capacity, right, and that's what we are finding, right, when we meet and particularly when Pivotal meets, right, with the largest companies in the world, right, their biggest issue is, do I have the software development skills to do that? Right, can I be productive at that level? You know, the app is now more important than the color and the warranty on the car, right? You know, that's the shift that's occurring. Pat, I wanted to ask you a couple of public policy questions. I want to get into politics, but as a CEO in Silicon Valley, you know, you hear folks like Donald Trump sort of saying, well, we should, you know, really clamp down. He goes after Zuckerberg, for example. Right, but he goes after Zuckerberg in particular. I'm talking about H-1B visas. So, you know, what's your take? I mean, presumably you want more talent. We educate talent. What do you say as a CEO of a public company regarding, you know, educating and then keeping folks here? I think it's wonderful that the world wants to export their top talent to the United States, right? And Alma, you know, I mean, how many? Yeah, I mean, please, absolutely. And the fact that we want to close our doors to the most talented human beings on the planet that want to come and work, develop, create the next generation of startups in our communities and on our soil, right? To me, that's a stupid policy. Yeah, great. And then the second question that you mentioned, self-driving cars. I wanted to ask you about, you know, for decades, you know, millennia, we've seen machines replace humans. And we're seeing now that GDP grows, you know, income grows, but the average immediate income in the United States has dropped from 55,000 down to, say, 50,000, you know, since from 99 until today. Yet, you guys, and I'll be interested in you too, John, you live out in Silicon Valley. It's like, okay, well, there's always opportunities because you guys live in a virtual reality field and you're positive thinkers, right? So are you concerned, as, again, a CEO of a public company and, you know, somebody who's pretty prominent, about that effect and what's the answer? Is it more education? Is it, and what can companies like VMware do to support that, not that trend, but to reverse that trend? Well, you know, at the heart, you know, and you mentioned education to me, that's so, right, you know, so foundational at that level and increasing, you know, stem education beginning at the earliest ages, you know, we need more software programmers. We need more women in software programming in particular. I mean, you know, we have almost half the population is excluded from that potential, right, that today by the very low entry rates into those areas, we gotta fix those issues. The quality of U.S. education at the, you know, secondary level is, you know, at the collegiate and university levels unmatched on the planet, right? You know, at the high school and junior high level is pretty weak on a world scale, right? Those things are fundamental, gotta be fixed in that respect. I also believe that, you know, many of these technology shifts are actually gonna enable a, let's say a renaissance of some of the communities that, some of the areas that have been not available for American workers. And this whole idea of, I'll say, you know, as I just briefly mentioned in my speech this morning, the idea of customized, automated manufacturing. Well, as that emerges, you know, now, right, if I can, you know, have highly automated, customized manufacturing, you know, 3D printing, et cetera, that occurs, boy, you know, I believe we will see a resurgence of some of the manufacturing sectors, you know, back on to, right, mature market soils and back on to American soil as well, because it isn't just gonna be a cost arbitrage question anymore to find the lowest cost labor on the planet. The transportation costs become, you know, essentially a barrier to export. And you're unlocking, let's say, big data as an example. You're unlocking new jobs around data analysis and development. You know, that's very much, you know, what we see as one of the huge opportunities associated with internet connectivity on a global basis, is, you know, whether it's healthcare, education, or unlocking new jobs. I mean, internet of things, I mean, machines, like airplanes, they're all enough data, they're gonna need people to analyze that. So I got to ask a question online with Dave, is that, you know, I was talking to some young college kids and my wife and I talked to our two youngest who are ones in eighth grade and ones in freshman high school around how to think about technology. It's not just, oh, you need to be computer science and have two daughters. So obviously we're talking to them about, hey, don't be bullied out of computer science. If you love technology, there's plenty of things. So what's your take on that? What's your view on the different opportunities for young people, women, boys, girls, all across the board? It used to be just programming, electrical engineering, computer science, and that was kind of like the two pillars. But now, what new opportunities do you see through a young physics major or someone in high school who just loves technology? Because they're all connected. They're all on Instagram. They aren't doing their thing. They're breathing technology. They're natives. So what academic, what things might inspire young people? Yeah, I think some of it is taking down some of those, I'll say, false barriers or perceptions as well. And John Hennessey, a president of Stanford, and he and I have a great relationship. And Stanford now is almost 50-50 in the incoming class for women into computer science. Right, and obviously they put huge emphasis on that. And as they said, getting away from first-player shooter games as the first touch point of technology and into much more social experiences has changed the perception of females into that sector. Excuse me, I still got two more days of VNB. Oh, I knew that. I had a huge tire, I mean, we might outland you this time. You beat us last time, 34 minutes. I think it was longer than it says. But there's a lot of opportunities to your point and there's not just programming, there's a lot of interdisciplinary stuff. Yeah, that was exactly the next point I was going to make because computer science and programming ends up being cool in every aspect, right? Whether you're in economics, hey, you got to build models. Hey, if you're in the medical field, hey, there's an increasing amount of telemetry, big data, other things coming into it. Every field is touching on and then to me, that cross-disciplinary view of the impact of technology into every segment and every interest becomes more and more powerful going forward. And I think some of those are the ways that we can actually change the perception even, right? That everybody is sort of like, imagine that you would go to school and you say, our school does not teach math. Right, I mean, would you send your kid to that school? No, no. Right, of course not. Only if they had programming on top instead of math. Right, right, and they say, but your daughter, she wants to be a psychologist but you're not going to teach her math. It's a basic life skill, she got to learn math. That is the essential of technology and computer science going forward. It is a basic life skill that we have to teach everybody and they have to participate in it regardless of what field they may pursue. So we're getting crunched on time here. I want to ask you my final question. Dave, Popeye, I have one. Maybe I'll have a final, final question. Seems to be the new thing going on here at theCUBE. This year at VMworld, what do you think will happen this week? When you look back down the road, you got a great career here, looking great with VMware. We love working with you on theCUBE here in the keynotes. What about this year so transitional for VMware? Is it the fact that now we have full dev-outs, now that cloud is mainstream? Is it the fact that the company's transforming itself into a whole other power? Is it because of the ecosystem all the above? What's your take on this year's kind of inflection point for VMware? I think obviously at the front of the list for us is this whole unified hybrid cloud and really getting people to view because three years ago cloud was an enterprise customer. Now it's really how can you take advantage of these resources that will be heterogeneous across multiple environments and the value proposition that we can be in. Everybody needs to be doing that. So that's one of the takeaways. Second is the engagement into the developer community, the photon announcements, I think are probably the second most important shift of thinking that we've delivered here. Maybe the third is the thing that I'm always thrilled about when I show up at VMworld is the ecosystem. Friends and foe alike here show up to talk about how they're collaborating together to bring more from the things that we do. And that's what's just so energizing about it when you go around the show floor. It's just overwhelming. You've got investors too, that's at the VCs, top tier VCs, NEAs here, Graylock, Excel, all over here. Well a lot of startups coming out of the woodworks too. They launch at VMworld. Absolutely, it's just wonderful that way and this ecosystem effect just couldn't be more powerful and alive and well than it is here at the show this year. We're six years here. We love watching the transformation. We've seen it when Paul Morris produced that first slide that was there and now here. So great job. And thank you for expanding our space this year. Hey, you know what, you said you were in a corner of Moscone North. I mean, I said, this is the cube in Moscone. I think you mispositioned that. We're in the lobby of the big lobby of Moscone North. We have the lobby. Thanks for everything. We appreciate it. Six years and great to see you every year and thanks for taking the time out of your busy schedule. You're inside and the data and your vision and product news. Thanks so much. Thank you. Pat Kelsinger here live inside the cube here in San Francisco, Moscone North Lobby. The big lobby here. And of course it's VMworld 2015. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. We'll be right back.