 Welcome back to theCUBE's ongoing coverage of VMworld 2021, the second year in a row we've done this virtually. My name is Dave Vellante and longtime VMware technologist and new CTO, Kit Colbert is here. Kit, welcome, good to see you again. Thanks Dave, super excited to be here. So let's talk about your new role. You've been at VMware, you've touched all the bases so to speak and you know, love the career evolution, you're ready for this job. So tell us about that role. Well, I hope so, I don't know. It's definitely a big step up. Been here at VMware for 18 years now, which if you know Silicon Valley, you know, that's a long time. It's probably like four or five normal Silicon Valley lifetime in terms of stints at a company. But I love it. I love the company. I love the culture. I love the technology. And I'm super passionate, super excited about it. And so, you know, the new role, previously I was CTO for one of our business groups and focused on a specific set of our products and services. But now as the corporate CTO, I really am overseeing, you know, all of VMware R and D in the sense of really trying to drive a whole bunch of core engineering transformations, right? Where we've talked a lot about our shift toward becoming a SaaS company, a cloud services company. And so there's a lot of changes we got to make internally, technologies, platform services we need to build out, you know, the sort of culture aspects of it again. And so, you know, I'm kind of sitting at the center of that. And it's, I'll be honest, it's big. There's a lot of stuff to go and do. But I am just, you know, super excited about it. Wake up every day, really excited to meet a whole bunch of new people across the organization and to learn all the cool things we're doing. It's just, well, you know, I'll say it again, like the level of innovation happening inside VMware is just insane. And it's really cool now that I get kind of more of a front and center row to see everything that's happening. Well, and when I was preparing for the interview with Raghu, I was thinking about, you know, I've been following VMware for a long time. And I sort of noted that it's like the fourth, you know, wave of executive management. And I sort of went back, it's okay, yes, we know it started with, you know, workstation, okay, fine. But then really quickly went into really changing the way in which we think about servers, server utilization and driving. I remember the first time I ever saw a demo, I said, wow, this is going to be completely game-changing. And really, and then thought about the era of the software-defined data center, fine-tuning the cloud strategy, and then this explosion of innovation, whether it was the sort of NSX piece, the acquisitions you've made around security, again, more cloud expansion. And now you're laying out sort of this Switzerland from multi-cloud combined with this, as you're pointing out, this as-a-service model. So when you think about the technical vision of the company transforming into a cloud and subscription model, what does that mean from a sort of architectural standpoint or a mindset perspective? Oh yeah, both great questions and both sort of key focus areas for me. And by the way, it's something I've been thinking about for quite a while, right? Yeah, so you're right. Like we are on our third or fourth lap of the track depending on how you count. But I also think that this one, that this notion of getting into multi-cloud of becoming a real cloud services company is going to be probably the biggest one for us and the biggest transformation that we're going to have to make. We did extend from core compute virtualization to network and storage with the software-defined data center, but now these things I think are a bit more fundamental. So how are we thinking about it? Well, we're thinking about it in a few different ways. I do think as you mentioned, the mindset is definitely the most important thing. This notion that we no longer really have product teams purely, they should be thinking of themselves as service teams. And the idea being that they are operating and accountable for the availability of their cloud service. And so this means we really need to step up our game we have in terms of the types of tooling that we built, but really it's about getting these developers engaged with that to know that, Hey, like what matters most of all right now is that service availability in addition to things like security compliance, et cetera. But we have monitoring systems to tell you, Hey, like there's a problem and that you need to go jump on those things immediately. This is not like, you know, normal bug that comes in or we'll get to it tomorrow or whatever. It's like, no, no, you got to step up and really get there immediately. And so there is that big mindset shift and that's something we've been driving for the past few years, but we need to continue to push there. And as part of that, you know, the other thing we're doing is that what we've seen is that a lot of our individual teams have gone out and build like really great cloud services. But what we really want to build to enable us to accelerate that is a platform, a true, you know, SaaS platform and leveraging all these great capabilities that we have to help all of our teams go faster. And so it gets to things like standardization and really raising the bar across the board to allow all these teams to focus on what makes their products or services unique and differentiated rather than just doing the basic blocking and tackling. So those are a couple of things I'm really focused on, both drive the mindset shift. You know, I think when I, you know, as I was taking on this role, I did a lot of reading on other CTOs and how do they view their roles within their companies? And one of the things I did hear there was that the CTO is kind of the, I don't know if the keeper is the right word, the keeper of the engineering culture, right? That you want to really be a steward for that and to help take it forward in the right sort of directions that align with the strategic direction of the business. And so that's a big aspect for what I'm thinking about. And the second one, the SaaS platform, one of the really interesting things about this reorg that we've done internally is that traditionally CTO is kind of focused, you know, outbound, maybe a little bit inbound, but typically don't have large engineering organizations. But here, what we want to do because the SaaS platform is so important to us, we did centralize it within the office of the CTO. And so now, you know, my customers from an engineering standpoint are all of the internal business units. So a lot of really big changes inside VMware, but I think this is the sort of stuff we need to do to help us really accelerate toward the multi-cloud vision that we're painting. Well, VMware has always had a super strong engineering culture. And I like the way you phrase that, the steward of the engineering culture. When you think about a product mindset, and of course correct me if I'm off here, but when you're building a product and you're making that thing rock solid, you know, Marit's used to talk about the hard and top. And so it seems to me that the services mindset expands the mind a little bit in terms of what other services can I integrate to make my service better? Whether that's a machine intelligence service or a security service or, you know, the dozens of other services that you guys are now building, the combination of that innovation is like a step function and a lever on top of the sort of traditional product mindset. Yeah, there's, I think you're absolutely right. There's a ton of like really fundamental mental mindset shifts, right? That are a part of that. And the integration piece you mentioned is super critical, but I also think it's actually taking a step back and looking at the lifecycle more holistically. When you're thinking about a product, you're thinking about, okay, I'm going to get the bits together, I'm going to ship it out. But then it's really up to the customer to go deploy that, to operate it, to deal with problems and bugs that come up. And when you're delivering a cloud service, those are all problems that you, as the application creator have to deal with. And so you got to be on top of all those things. And, you know, if you design something in such a way that it becomes kind of hard to debug at runtime, well, that's going to directly impact your availability. That might have, you know, contractual obligations with an SLA impact to a customer. So there's some really big implications there that I think traditionally product teams didn't always fully think through, but now that they sort of have to with a cloud service. The other point I think that's really important there is the notion of simplicity and ease of use. Experience is always important, right? Customer experience, user experience, but it gets even more magnified in a SaaS type of environment because the idea is that you shouldn't have to talk to anybody. You as a user should be able to go and call an API and start using this thing, right? And swipe a credit card and you're good to go. And so, you know, that sort of maniacal focus on how you just remove roadblocks, remove any unnecessary things between that customer and getting the value that they're looking for. So in general, the thing that I really love about SaaS and cloud services is that they really align incentives very well. What you want to do as an application builder, as a solution builder, really aligns well with what customers are looking for and you can get that feedback very, very rapidly which allows for much quicker evolution of the underlying product and application. So one of the other things I learned from my interview with Raghu and I couldn't go deep into it. I did a little bit with submit, but I wonder if I get your perspectives as well as I always talk about the subtraction layer across clouds, hybrid, multi-clouds, edge, abstracting the complexity of the underlying complexity. And Raghu was sort of, it's nuanced, but he said, okay, but the thing is we're not trying to limit access to the primitives. We want to allow developers to go there to the extent they want to. And my takeaway was, okay, but the abstraction is you want to be that single management layer with access to the deep primitives and APIs of the respective clouds, but simplify to your point across those estates at the management layer. Maybe you could add some color to that. Yeah, it's a really interesting question. And, but let me tell you about how we think about it because you're right. And that the abstractions can sometimes hide the underlying primitives and capabilities. And so Raghu was getting at, hey, like we don't necessarily force you one way or the other. And here's the way to think about it. Is that it's really about delivering optionality. And we do that through offering these abstractions of different layers. So to your point, Dave, like, we have management capabilities that can enable you to manage consistently across all types of clouds, public, private, edge, et cetera, irrespective of what that underlying infrastructure is. And so you look at things there like our re-realized suite of products or cloud health or Tanzu, Tanzu Mission Control is really focused on that one as well. But then we also have our infrastructure layer. That's what we're doing with VMware cloud and this notion of delivering consistent infrastructure. Now, even though the core sort of IaaS layer is more consistent, you still get great flexibility in terms of the higher level services. If you want to use a database from one of the public clouds or messaging system or streaming service, or AI, whatever it is, you still get that sort of optionality as well. And so the reason that we offer these different things is because customers are just in different places. And as a matter of fact, a single customer may have all of those different use cases, right? They may have some apps where they're moving from on-prem into the cloud. They want to do that very quickly. So boom, we can just do it really fast with VMware cloud, consistent infrastructure. We can vMotion that thing up in the cloud, great. But for other ones, there may be a modern app they're building and maybe a team has chosen to use native AWS for that but they want to leverage Kubernetes. So there you could put in a Tanzu Mission Control to give them that, you know, consistent management across sites or leverage cloud health to understand costs and to really enable the application teams to manage costs on their own. So I think, you know, I always go back to that concept of optionality, like we offer these different levels of abstraction and it really depends on what the use case is because the reality is, especially for a complex enterprise, they're likely going to have all those use cases. You know, I want to stay on optionality from them because you're essentially becoming a cloud company. I'm expanding the definition of cloud and that's which I think is appropriate because the cloud is expanding. It's going on-prem, it's going out to the edge, hybrid connections across clouds, et cetera. And but when you look at the public cloud players, they all are deep into what I'll call data management. I'm not even sure what that term means anymore sometimes but certainly they all own databases but they also offer databases from folks. You, I go back to something Marit said with the software mainframe, that we want to be able to run any workload, you know, anywhere and have high reliability recovery, you know, lowest costs, et cetera. It doesn't seem as though, so you're going to run those workloads. Project Monterey is about supporting new workloads but it doesn't seem like you have aspirations to own sort of the database layer, for example. What's your philosophy around that? Yeah, not generally. I mean, we do have some solutions like Green Plum, for instance, that play in that space, more of a data warehouse solution, but generally speaking, you're absolutely right. You know, VMware success was built through tight partnerships. We have a very, very broad partner network and of course we see hyperscalers as great partners as well. And so, you know, I think if we get back to like, what's the core of VMware, it really is providing those powerful abstractions in the right places at the infrastructure level, at the management level and so forth. Yeah, we're not trying to necessarily compete with everyone, reinvent the world. What we're trying to do is, and by the way, if I just take a step back, when we talk to customers, what really drives them toward multi-clouds, toward using multiple clouds is the fact that they want to get after these, what we call best-of-breed cloud services that many of the different public clouds offer databases and AI and ML systems. And for each app team, the exact one that perfectly meets their needs may be different, right? Maybe on one cloud versus another cloud. And so that is really the optionality that we want to optimize for when we talk to those customers, that they want the easiest way of getting that app onto that cloud so we can take advantage of that cloud service. But what they worry about is the lack of consistency there. And that goes across the board. You know, if something fails at 2 a.m, you have to wake up and go fix it, do you have like the right sort of tooling in place? If it's fails on one cloud versus another, do you have to like, you know, scramble to figure out which tools to go use, how to go, you know, which dashboard to look at? It's like, no, you want kind of a consistent one. When you think about from a security perspective, how do you drive a secure software supply chain? How do you prevent the types of attacks that we've seen in the past few years where people insert malicious code into your supply chain? And now you're running with hack code out there. And if you have different teams doing different things across different clouds, well, that's going to just open up sort of a can of worm of different possibilities there for hackers to get in. So that's why this consistency is so important. And so, you know, if I guess, if we were to find the optionality a little bit at that point, it's about getting optionality around cloud services. And then those like, those are the things that really differentiate. And so that, you know, we're not trying to compete with that. We're saying, hey, like, we want to bring customers to those and give them the best experience that they can, irrespective of whether that's in the public cloud or on-prem or even at the edge. And that's a huge technical challenge and amazing value for customers. I want to ask you, there's a lot of talk about ESG today. How does that fit into the CTO mindset? Is it a bolt-on? Is it as fundamental component? The idea there is that if we look at the core values for VMware, this is something that's hugely important. And it's something that we've actually been focused on for quite a while. We now have a whole team focused on this, really being a force multiplier to help keep us honest across VMware, to help ensure equity in many different ways that we have and are continuing to increase, for instance, the amount of female representation within our organization or underrepresented minorities or communities, ensuring that pay is equal across the company, these different sorts of things, but also around sustainability. They actually have a number of folks working very closely with our teams to drive sustainability into our products. vSphere is great because it reduces the amount of physical service you need. So by definition reduces the carbon footprint there. But now we're taking a step further. We have cloud partners that we're working with to ensure that they have net zero carbon emissions, using 100% renewables by 2030. And in fact, that's something that we ourselves have signed up for is, today we are carbon neutral, but what we wanna get to is to be net carbon zero by 2030, which is an absolutely huge lift. And that's by the way, not just for VMware, our operations, our offices, but also for our supply chain as well. And so when you look across this, as well as efforts around diversity and inclusion, this is something that is very core to what we do as a company, but it's also a personal passion of mine. The ESG office actually lives within my organization. And it does that because, what I view the office of the CTO as being is really a force multiplier, as I said before. Like, yes, the team is located here, but their purview is across all of engineering and in fact, all of VMware. So I think, when we look at this, it's about getting the best talent we have, very diverse talent, increasing our ability to deliver innovative products, but also doing so in a way that's good for the planet that is sustainable, and that is giving back to the community. But I think, I'm looking at measuring success in a few different ways. First of all, as I said before, the ESG component and diversity, equity, inclusion in particular, in terms of our workforce, extraordinarily important to me is something we're gonna be really pushing hard on. As we all know, women underrepresented minorities, not very well represented in general in Silicon Valley. So it's something that we all need to step up on. And so we're gonna be putting a lot of effort in there. And that will actually help drive, as I said before, all these innovations, this fundamental shift in mindset. I mean, that requires diverse perspectives. It requires pushing us out of our comfort zone. But then that result of that is what you're gonna see is a much faster cadence of releases of innovation coming from VMware. So there's some just insanely exciting things that are happening in the labs right now that we're cooking up. But as we start making this shift, we're gonna be delivering those faster and faster to our customers and our partners. You know, I'm interested to hear that it's a passion of yours. There was an article of, I think it was last week in the Wall Street Journal, it was an insert section on women in the workforce. And there was a stat in there, which I thought was pretty interesting. I'll run it by you, see what you think. It said that, you know, it's talking about COVID and post COVID and the stresses. And it's interesting to me because a lot of executives are, and you know, I'm with them as, hey, work from home. This is a beautiful thing. It's good for business too, because you know, everybody's more productive, but you have this perpetual work day now. It's like we never sleep. It goes, bleeds in the weekends. And the stat from Qualtrics, which was published in the journal, I think it said 30% of working women said that their mental health has declined since COVID. And that number was only 15% for working men. It's still notable, but half. And so, you know, one has to question maybe that perpetual work week. And you know, maybe there's a benefit from business productivity, but then there's the other side of that as well. And a lot of women have left the workforce, a lot of working, previously working moms. And so there's an untapped labor pool there, and there's this huge labor shortage. And so these are important issues, but they're not easy ones to solve, are they? No, no, no. It's something we've been putting a lot of thought into at VMware. So we do have a flexible program that we're rolling out in terms of work. People can come into the office if they want to. Of course, you know, where we have offices where it's safe to do so, where the government has allowed that. Or people can have an actual desk there, or sometimes they can say, hey, I only want to come in once or twice a week. And then we say, okay, we'll have some floating desks that you can take. And others are saying, I want to be fully remote. So we give people a pretty broad range in terms of how they want to address that. But I do think to your point though, and this is something I've been really trying to do already, is to create a more inclusive environment by doing a number of different things. And so it's being thoughtful around when you're sending emails. Because like I do, like my sort of schedule is I do tend to like fire off a lot of emails late at night after the kids are in bed, I get a little quiet time, some thinking time. But I make it very clear that I'm not expecting an immediate response. Don't worry about it. I'm just, this is my work time. It doesn't have to be your work time. And so really setting those, I guess boundaries, if we will, explicitly and kind of the expectations, maybe it's a better term, setting that explicitly, trying to schedule meetings, not at times where you're gonna have to drop the kids off at school or pick them up, because you're trying to take over your life. And so we really try to emphasize boundaries and really setting those things appropriately. But honestly, it's something that we're still working on and I'm still learning. And so I'd love to get feedback from folks, but those are some of the early thinking. But I would say that we at VM, we're taking it very, very seriously and really supporting our employees in terms of navigating that work-life balance. Well, congratulations on the new role. And it's great to see you again. I hope next year we can be face-to-face. Always a pleasure to have you on theCUBE. Thanks Dave, appreciate it being here. All right, and thank you for watching theCUBE's continuous coverage of VMworld 2021, the virtual edition. Keep it right there for more, right after this.