 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering Radio 2018, brought to you by VMware. Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE. Special coverage here in San Francisco. I'm John Furrier, we're here at VMware's Radio 2018. It's 14th year, it's annual. I won't call it a spring fling, I won't call it the Burning Man. It's like a sales kickoff for engineers as Steve Herrod, former CTO said on stage. Rajiv Ramaswamy's chief operating officer at VMware products, one of the groups here. Great to see you, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Great to be here, John. So Steve Herrod kind of coined it. It's like a sales kickoff for engineers which is like motivating, intoxicating, a lot of energy, a lot of good technical buzz going on. People are flexing their muscles, stretching their minds, creating their sparks of innovation. Totally. How do you guys do it? What's the secret sauce? Yeah, let me take a step back here. Innovation overall at VMware, it's part of the culture. It's not something that is just purely top-down but in fact, I don't believe we can simply drive down innovation from the top. It has to come from within. But what we do at VMware is culturally we have several set of activities that we foster that create this culture of innovation. Let me lay out a few examples of which of course we'll get to radio and why we are here. But everything from, you start with just tech talks. Anybody can bring a group of people together. We have weekly tech talks to talk about anything. They may be stuff that they're working on, that they want to get a broader audience for or they may be stuff that is far out that they just want to get an audience and communicate. So we have tech talks. We have our own version of hackathons, we call them borathons. We run globally at all our sites, 7,000 plus R&D engineers globally. We run these everywhere. And out of those, by the way, come great ideas. And these are typically one to two day kind of events that groups of people get together. They actually build prototypes. They code prototypes. The expectation is they have to show us something working at the end of those two days. And all kinds of cool things have come out of those. The next step there is flinks. If you have a prototype and you actually want to get customer feedback and you want to get ecosystem feedback in there, it's not a sanctioned product. But you can go out there and release it and have customers support that and test it for you. And finally, then we have sort of a more incubation type, what we call X-Labs, but it's actually now more of a centrally funded project that moves on and works on a particular topic. And last but not the least, this event radio. So the radio encapsulates the big tent event but you're talking about a specific process for innovation. Yeah, exactly. So it's organic. So I got to ask you one of the things I've observed over my 19 years living in Palo Alto and nine years covering VMware and seeing from founding as principles to now is there's two things that jump out at me. Engineering culture. Absolutely. And community. Yeah. These have always been kind of like the nine lies for VMware, you guys always been leveraging those two things. How do you guys do that going forward? Because as it becomes more competitive, you're bigger now, you got a process. So that's cool, I get that. How do you guys drive the process without sacrificing the engineering and the community? So let me tell you one thing that you should keep in mind. All of this is done on people's spare time, right? This is not their day job. Every one of these people engineers over here are doing this separate from their day jobs. And so they are motivated that what prompts people to come to VMware in the first place is the ability to work on interesting, difficult problems, particularly when it comes to infrastructure related. Our motto around our vision is around how software can really change the world. So there's a fundamental driven culture that. The passion engineers want to work on hard problems, change the world. They want to work on hard problems, right? And we foster that and we encourage them to do that. And they like it, right? And it's also the fact that in most cases these are not individuals, most of these, in fact almost every paper that you see here is actually a small group of people. And what I'm amazed at is as I look through the work that people do, a lot of the stuff, some of it may be related to what they're actually doing in their day jobs and that there's some subset. But a lot of it is actually stuff that is actually done completely different from what they do in their day jobs. And the X Labs is interesting because you have two tracks as we heard earlier. There's kind of like continue to incubate it further with some funding while you do your day job. Then it's like, oh my God, functions as a service. Let's fast track that, take a break, find someone else, you fill your job, or we'll do it and you work at full time. That is a full time job. Once we get to an X Lab, that is a funded incubation project that you are dedicated to. And we allow people to go out, go off and do that. And sometimes it'll be successful, sometimes it won't, and then they can come back. But you've got to ask the engineering question because all my engineering friends, we always talk about this. You hit the first one, which is, we're a company that solves hard problems. You guys check. And you've been voted a great place to work across the board. So great culture, I can test the culture is great. The second problem is all the engineers, oh, I didn't get picked, or who made the selection? There's also self-governance going on. So you have to manage the typical engineering reaction because everyone loves their baby. Yes. So it might not get picked for radio. But you know what? How do you manage that dynamic? So yeah, it's a competitive process, by the way. And we run radio, let me talk a little bit about radio right here. We run radio much like any world-class technical conference that ACM would run or IEEE would run. We encourage an open process where people can submit papers. We encourage, we have a committee that's actually sitting and reviewing these papers. Just like any other technical conference, some of them are going to make it. Some of them aren't going to make it. It's not a black box, though. It's transparent. It's a pretty open, transparent feedback, okay? It's not like, hey, you submit something, we throw it over the fence. We actually give feedback. In fact, there's a whole process here. So first of all, this year, for example, we had over 1200 submissions and we picked 200. That's all we can afford. Think about the acceptance rate right there. That is on par, if not better than most top-notch technical conferences. So that's a very high bar. Okay, and by the way, the stuff that doesn't get picked can still continue. It's not maybe they'll refine it and do better next year. Maybe they'll continue some of it. Or join someone else in the team. Exactly, yeah. You allow for people to come together. People can come together and it is completely informal. We don't mandate who comes together. They can come together. And once they get selected, by the way, the other part of this is actually helping the engineers develop as public speakers and presenters also. A lot of us engineers particularly like to sit in their black box, they're sitting out there coding on a daily basis. Here's an opportunity for them to actually go out and present their ideas to a broad forum. And we actually help, part of it is we help coach them and build them into good presenters as well as part of this process. So for them, it's a personal development experience. This competitive dynamic, by the way, is what actually holds up the bar and quality for radio. It actually has no negative value. It's not like if you don't get selected this year, there's a bad feeling or anything. You try again next year. It's a pride just to be part of it. And succeeding the bar is a big accomplishment internally. And frankly, by the way, out of these two or 1200 submissions or so, in addition to the papers that get accepted here, about 200 of these actually are invention disclosures that eventually find their ways into patents over time too. So there's other ways these things get moved forward. This is a social benefit, also a personal benefit to grow. Absolutely. And you get the patent option. And the networking that comes here, right? The most important part, I don't know if you saw the poster session yesterday. I mean, the energy in the room is just phenomenal. The people out there who are really passionate about talking about their work and there's people out there wondering and you meet new people. In fact, for me, in my role, what I enjoy the most is, of course, getting to hear what these guys are doing, but also helping them make connections. Because I sort of look at all of R&D and then, okay, somebody here is doing something. In fact, I'll give you an example. There's somebody who's figuring out how to do, the topic was called teleportation. But it really was about fast data movement, right? And so this was a team in our core virtualization platform. And then I said, okay, hey, there's another team there that's focused on hybrid connectivity. You guys should connect because they're actually building a product that could leverage what you do. So you make those informal connections here and then off they run. You know, it's interesting. Ray Alferro and I were talking about the confluence of these markets coming together. You guys started out and in data center, you get cloud, AI now, which is big data, and now blockchain. Really interesting stuff. You guys are doing a blockchain. We're talking off camera and I have talked with some of your folks. You guys are already kind of eyeing that way pretty heavily and I know there's work going on there. But in the intersection of infrastructure, AI, cloud and blockchain and decentralized applications is a lot of really important stuff. This is the confluence. This is the where it all has to mash together, the mash up and security, IoT and data. Not big data or AI. Data hits everything. Security hits everything. IoT's hitting everything. So do you have to tweak your R and T focus? How do you guys manage these changing confluences? Yeah, so look, we are constantly adapting and evolving what we do. It's never static. I'll give you an example from recent times. So when we got into networking, we pioneered the concept of software defined networking and we came out and initially it was all about the data center, right? It was about how do we do and connect and secure applications inside data centers? And then we saw the world changing, right? Applications are moving out to the public cloud and then more recently applications are moving to the edge to your earlier point. And so what did we do? We took that networking mission, we expanded it to now include public clouds, include the edge and that's what we just launched recently. So that's an area where things are dynamic. Our innovation moves on as I do believe the edge is going to be one of the next big areas of investment and opportunity and security is pervasive across the board. So our vision now and compasses security everywhere, right? All the way from your mobile device to the edge to and branch off with us to the public cloud and to your data centers. Anywhere where you have applications running, data setting and users, you've got to secure that. What's the big ways Pat Gels is going to come on soon. He always talks about the ways of innovation. If you're not out in front of the next wave, your driftwood is famous quote on the cube years ago. You've got to pick the big ways out. So you see blockchain as a great call, cloud, no brain, you're there, data center, you've been there, entrenched, you got AI. I know you guys are working on stuff. Are those the waves you're on? Is there a new wave that no one's seeing and how do you guys look at that? I think in general, I mean, of course it's all adjacent, right? Edge computing is adjacent to what we do in IoT. So that's obviously a big area for us. Telcos, for us, you may not necessarily think of it as innovation, but they are actually rejiggering how they do their entire infrastructure. And that's a great opportunity for us, right? So at the end of the day, there's two things, right? We have innovation and then innovation correlated also to what markets we can go after that are new and can drive incremental business for us. And so the edge and telco in our view are two big, big opportunities for us. You guys are doing a great job. World-class organizations, fun to watch. It's a pleasure to interview such great smart people here. Rajiv, you're leading the team. My final question I want to ask you for the folks watching who don't work at VMware. Describe what it's like to work here. What's the DNA of the culture? Explain the dynamic, because you have, it's like a kid in a candy store if you're an engineer. Explain what's going on. So I mean, the thing that I'm, I continue to be impressed by here and I've been here for two and a half years, right? Is the quality and depth of the engineering talent that we have and the willingness to work on difficult and interesting problems. And also share that across the board, right? There is no sort of, it's very rare that we have people sitting isolated that go off and do something. People are willing to share. We work as a community together. So that really, really stands out. I've worked at many companies and I have to say, no other company really creates this kind of culture of innovation where we bring all these people together. This event radio is absolutely unique. I have not really seen it at this scale anywhere else. It's a great use case of world class in a modern era. I think you guys have the secret engineering and community focus has been a key backbone. The other thing, by the way, I would say is engineers feel that their ideas are valued and they're actually used. Something that starts out in a very small way actually could end up becoming pretty, getting a lot of visibility. I'll give you an example. For Borothon last year or so, somebody came up with the idea of using a virtual reality headset to figure out how you can actually manage your entire data center using virtual reality and pick in place. That's great for working at home. It's cool, right? It was cool. It just came out of a two-day hackathon session and what did we do with that? Well, we did that. I took that and made it a demo center stage at VMworld, at all our V forums that we run across the world. And all of us, by the way, Pat and I said, we were all sitting out there doing virtual reality demos, built on that what a couple of engineers have done in two days. Great visibility now. That's not going to go into a product any time soon, I think. But, yeah. It's a cultural example of grassroots innovation. Sparks of innovation can come from anywhere. That's right. And some of this stuff, yeah. Thanks for coming on, appreciate it. This is theCUBE's coverage here in San Francisco for Radio 2018. It's 14th year annual events turning into quite the showcase for flexing and also stretching the minds of the smartest people in VMware. Of course, theCUBE's here on the ground. I'm John Furrier, back with more coverage after this break, stay with us. Thanks.