 From San Francisco, it's theCUBE, covering VMware Radio 2019, brought to you by VMware. Welcome to theCUBE, Lisa Martin in San Francisco at VMware Radio 2019. This is a really cool internal R&D innovation offsite with about 1,800 engineers across many business units at VMware, and we're pleased to welcome back to theCUBE the VP of the Sustainability Strategy at VMware, Nicola Acat. Nicola, it's great to have you back on theCUBE. Thank you, Lisa. It's wonderful to be here, and welcome back to radio. This is only the second year that press has been allowed, so this is exclusive for theCUBE. We appreciate being here. So, sustainability. It's a word that is talked about so globally in so many industries, but it has different meanings. When I think of sustainability, kind of the first thing that comes to my mind is energy, but it's more than that. What is sustainability to VMware? Great, thank you, Lisa. And you're right, sustainability means a lot of things to different people. In its holistic sense, we think of sustainability as the capacity to endure. The ability to endure over time, and it has environmental dimensions, it has social dimensions, and of course it has economic dimensions. The way we think about sustainability at VMware is through the lens of innovation, because we really do believe that solving many of the sustainability challenges in the world today is about innovation. And so we're really excited to be able to do that work and to pursue that mission in the Office of the CTO. And to talk a little bit more about that with the sustainability strategy being within the Office of the CTO, what sort of superpowers does that give VMware to amplify what it's doing? And really also, in the eyes of your customers and your partners, leverage sustainability as a differentiator. I love that you use the word superpowers. I think of it exactly that. For me, it's about how do we connect our tech superpowers with this vision and foresight around solving really challenging problems. So for us, how we approach that problem is really in three dimensions. So we think about sustainability innovation around our operations. So that's walking the talk first and foremost, getting things right internally. And from an innovation perspective, that's not just about innovation in terms of energy management, you use the energy example, right? But it's also about processes. How do we think about our engineering processes to make sure that our engineering productivity is as efficient as possible? Yesterday, our chief research officer, David Tenenhouse, made a comment to 18,000 engineers that it's two sides of the same coin. When we're talking about innovation for good, we also have to talk about good engineering, so it's both, right? So that's one, innovation in our operations. The second lens that we think about is innovation in terms of what we do, our products and how our products serve our customers and help them achieve their sustainability goals. So also at Radio, we were really pleased this year to announce a new product initiative called CAM, the Carbon Awareness Meter. And this is a product feature in Skyline, which will be available to our customers later on this year, which will allow them through the Skyline platform to derive almost real-time carbon scores and provide them with more information, more transparency into what's happening in their infrastructure and then serve up information that can make choices around it, whether it's virtual machine density or opportunities to optimize their hardware and then also even provide them information about the grid that their data center is operating on. And that then, we hope, will empower them, our customer, our huge customer base, to think about what they could do possibly as a result. Oh, absolutely, I can't imagine what having that insight into their own grid will allow them to do in terms of resource optimization, to be able to use resources better to identify new products and services. I'm curious about CAM, though, being announced at Radio 2019, was this a product or an idea that spun out of a past radio event since this is the 15th annual? I'm so glad you asked that question, exactly why I think this is such an exciting announcement. Not only is it a really cool product feature, but it tells the story of innovation at VMware and the path that an idea can track through from an idea in someone's head to a product in our customer's system. So that journey at VMware started with this idea, going back, gosh, more than three years, we had a, in fact, it was around about the time that we connect, we introduced sustainability to the Office of the CTO, and this was a challenge we put out to engineers around how could we innovate around sustainability, and it first was discussed as a tech talk, and then the idea came to radio here as one of these poster papers. It was then also a bird's eye feather, a talk, a breakout talk, and later on, the idea then gained more momentum. It was funded as part of X Labs, which is one of our innovation programs. In fact, it was so popular, it got funded a second time and developed, and now it has graduated from the Office of the CTO and the innovation programs into the BU. So that's a great example of this journey that our innovators, our engineers can take with an idea from concept to impact. And was that, one of the things that Ray O'Farrell mentioned to John Furrier and me this morning was that this year's radio, he said it's kind of surprising there's a lot of projects around proposals around collaboration. So talk about how CAM was developed, I mean the spirit of different BU's collaborating, different minds, different engineering minds coming together with ideas that really over time and through not just radio, but the other innovation programs you mentioned, X Labs, that this idea became something that is now enabling your customers to make big decisions and save considerable amount of resources. How does that collaboration between BU's really get VMware's innovation culture dialed way up? That's actually really important, this concept of collaboration and the way I think about it is connecting dots. And a key role that the Office of the CTO plays is to do just that, to create the spaces like this event, which you increase the probability that people are going to have a conversation or people are thinking about something and you give them a platform to share that idea and that's where the spark comes from. You hear it in the conversations, you hear it in the energy, but that is critical, I don't think you can create a culture of innovation without creating a culture of collaboration. Absolutely, they're hand in hand. So you talked about Cam, what are some of the technological changes, improvements that VMware has made to its technologies to really deliver on your sustainability goals? Yeah, well I think it goes back to our roots, the very beginning of VMware and the legacy of our core product and our core innovation has been a massive contribution to the computing field, of course, and to industry and to the world, but it's also been a great, what I call one of the greatest positive externalities in terms of saving energy and resources. So that was a great start to build on and the announcement of a Cam project today was another step in that journey to now be really intentional about connecting sustainability with innovation, just like we do with quality and with security and really thinking about this as part of what we do. So what that journey looks like is continuing to invest in, I talked about operational innovation, I talked about our product. The third area of our strategy is really around future bets. And the products that are currently off-road map but on our radar, you probably heard about a great example of that is our work on blockchain. Yes. And so we're being intentional about developing that software to be energy efficient. Number one, you'll hear more about that, I hope later in the year. We have an intern coming in the summer to help the team work on the sustainability dimensions of our blockchain approach. We just did a demo, actually at radio, this week there was a live demo on stage with our blockchain team testing out a use case in sustainability, in sustainable supply chain or supply chain custody with the example of ocean plastics and making sure that we're able to really track that supply chain and blockchain is a really powerful application for a solution like that. So that's just an example of where we're thinking about applying this lens of sustainability and innovation to our future products as well as to some of the big challenges we face as a global society. Right, globally and environmentally. What is, we look at kind of within the data center, outside the data center to the core to the edge, where does code sustainability fit in and how does that facilitate reducing carbon footprint at VMware, enabling that for your customers? How does that factor into becoming more efficient and more aware globally and societally as well? Right, well it starts with what you do, right? And for us, writing code is the core of all of the applications, everything, all of the powerful things that we can do starts with that integrity of the code. And so at radio, we have one of our sessions with our principal engineers and the sustainability team is working on a project to define what does that mean for us? And so it's about efficiency, it's about really thinking about how do we optimize, how do we design and pay attention to the very core of what we do from the get go as a priority. Last question, from a customer's perspective, what is one of the many VMware customer stories that comes to mind when you think about VMware as an enabler, as a catalyst for helping an organization really dramatically reduce carbon footprint, leverage your technology for their sustainability? Such a great question. And you know something interesting, I'll tell you a story. We recently looked at some of the companies that are making very serious commitments to sustainability, putting their money where their mouth is and for example, organizations that are committing to being carbon neutral, to being RE100, which is renewable energy 100, powering their organizations through clean power, as well as committing to science-based targets around their operations. And when we looked at the data, it was absolutely fascinating to see that many of VMware's best and biggest customers are in that category of leaders. And so for us, that represents over a billion dollars in revenue. So this is important, not just to us, but to our customers. And so, you know, this is a journey we're working within the Office of the CTO with our field teams to really to help connect the dots more intentionally and to drive additional value for our customers through their use of our products and their relationship with VMware as a solution provider. And it just shows and speaks to the great synergies that VMware has developed over its history with its customers. Nicola, thank you so much for joining me at Radio 2019 and sharing with our audience the massive impact, both internally and externally, that VMware's sustainability strategy is having on the world. Thank you. Thank you, Lisa. Absolute pleasure. Likewise. I'm Lisa Martin with John Furrier, joining me at VMware Radio 2019 in San Francisco. Thanks for watching.