 Hi there. Welcome back to theCUBE's day one coverage of VMware Explorer 2022 from San Francisco. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson. Dave, we've been here all day having some great conversations with the VMware partner ecosystem. With real live people. Within 3D. Yeah. People actually sitting down next to us. Still appreciate it even though, you know, we've done a few of these events, but yeah, it feels like things are getting back to normal. It does. You and I were both in the keynote starting this morning, standing room only. We're hearing somewhere between 7,000 and 10,000 attendees. We're in Moscone, West, so we're kind of away from a little bit of the main action. But talk to me about some of the things that you heard this morning in the keynote. Some of the announcements from VMware. Did it meet your expectations? Yes. And because I didn't expect, you know, this is very, very different than going to say an AWS event where they're going to launch 300 new shiny objects. This was very much in my mind so far about VMware focusing on its core value proposition and an aspect of its core value proposition. That is the cloud stack and how they are shoring up places in that strategy that needed shoring up like addressing issues with licensing. So you don't have to have separate licensing for on-premises VMware things you're doing. Separate licenses in hyperscale cloud providers for doing those very same things. That looks like something that's going to roll out over time. That's very, very interesting. Something that wasn't really, wasn't mentioned directly but actually one of our guests mentioned it. It's this idea that if you take the VMware cloud provider partner community, VCPP is the inside term for it. There are thousands of VMware partners that deliver VMware cloud software on top of infrastructure all around the globe. If you take that VCPP community as an entity, you can argue that it is the third or fourth largest cloud on earth. If you look at that as a core value proposition and you look at Broadcom acquiring VMware, assuming everything goes through, it isn't just vSphere that is exciting to Broadcom or it shouldn't be at least because you have the entire cloud stack when you look at it from that perspective. I think they were trying to get some of that across today. So they addressed the Broadcom acquisition, obviously. It was the elephant in the room. It was impossible. Well, they had Hocktan stand up at the way. Hocktan stood up, did a wave to the crowd. Because he can't say anything and I've got European approval still, pending, all sorts of stuff. But what we heard today from, I'll say the partner ecosystem, we talked with NetApp, we talked with Pure Storage, we talked with PhoenixNap, others I'd have to look through my notes. Everyone's actually quite positive on the acquisition and what it can mean for the future of VMware. Did you hear the same? Yes, absolutely. And I think partially that's because the partners that we talked to are really close to the core of VMware's value proposition that's never going to go away. So if you're talking about NetApp and AWS partnering with VMware to deliver NetApp storage services into that environment, that's core VMware proposition. It's nowhere near the bleeding edge of what VMware has been doing. So they're going to be bullish. The other thing that's interesting from some of the partners that we've talked to, if you would ask us five or 10 years ago, would those partners be successful today? We might have predicted that they'd all be gone. Right? NetApp, what's going to happen? Well, all storage is going to cloud. Guess what? NetApp's doing pretty darn well with its cloud partnerships and cloud strategy. VMware, old school virtualization on premises. What are they going to do? I'll tell you, I was skeptical when Pat Gelsinger first pursued the VMC strategy with AWS. Hey, it's worked out pretty well and now they have the same capabilities everywhere. So I think that it's interesting to see how solidly positioned some traditional good old fashioned blue gene technologies are, how well positioned they are in this era of cloud and how VMware is such a core part of that. So of course they're happy, yeah. Yeah, we talked, we had AWS, NetApp and VMware on set for a segment and talked about, and you and I were talking about that segment before it went live, just the power of, look what AWS is doing. How many years ago, 10 years ago, would they have been, I'm not going to partner with them in VMware. And now look, it's a core to their business unit. Yeah, no, they wouldn't have acknowledged it. In fact, there was a time when AWS thought that they could maintain their stratospheric rise at the level they needed to while just letting all legacy existing stuff just sort of fade away. They'll just do it on the backs of everything new. They ran headlong into something we call stickiness specifically around the area of VMware. They found that application environments for a variety of really good reasons belong in this context and it's hard to rip them out by the roots. It's, you know, AWS might have told you five or 10 years ago, well, if people don't move to cloud immediately, it's because of one reason, they're stupid. The reality is there are a lot of really good reasons to maintain that VMware context. They embrace that with VMC. And now I think that it's really interesting, the NetApp announcement is another indication that the world of hyperscale cloud sees VMware as something that is part of the future. That is a very, very long tail. That very, very long tail is clearly what Broadcom is interested in. They don't see this as a flash in the pan. Let's make revenue really quickly. This is about a long time of future, long future. Long future. Well, VMware's coming off solid quarter earnings that just announced beating estimates growing the top line by up to 6%. So there's momentum that they're bringing with them into this acquisition. Yeah, definitely momentum. Big argument over what the strategy might be moving forward in terms of growth versus efficiency. I think that virtualization that includes the traditional VM with a resident full-blown OS is definitely something that is behind us but that we're carrying forward for good reason. The transition from a VMware perspective into the world of Tanzu, critically important. It's critically important that they get that right as they move forward so that net new cloud native applications could be created in the VMware context that way. So it's really going to be interesting to watch over the next couple of years, the direction that this goes, but it's easy to get immersed in the Kool-Aid when you're at an event like this. I try to be as skeptical as possible and I'm actually feeling better about VMware's future than I did before I arrived today. That's interesting. Yeah, no question about it. I think, I mean, there is such a large core that I think it's going to take it into the future a long way. Well, they definitely have a lot of tailwind behind them. The one thing that we didn't get to do today was talk to any customers. We will get to do that tomorrow when I always love hearing from the voice of the customer. We heard voice of the customer stories from the vendors, from VMware, from NANA, from AWS. Right, a little skewed, a little skewed. Exactly. They're all happy, all the customers are happy. And very successful. And very successful. But tomorrow we get to actually crack open and talk with some VMware customers. Obviously, customers in the ecosystem as well. And I want to hear from them what their thoughts are on the acquisition. Yeah, we know. They're not bringing their disgruntled customers. Right. This is my ex-wife's, my ex-mother-in-law and she's here to tell you that she didn't have a good experience. Yeah, that's not going to happen. We're going to hear good stories tomorrow, but it's always nice to hear the stories from the customers themselves. Yeah. I always like doing that. No, it's always, it is informative. It's interesting from the perspective that you hone in on what they care about. Because even if they have sort of an idea of the message that they want to get across in terms of what they're doing, still they'll default to that core of what they really care about. And that's interesting because what the customers really care about is part of that core. And as VMware becomes part of Broadcom potentially, it's going to be all about those things that are important that, you know, that customers find important. And that's exactly what it should be about. You know, every conversation that we had today, probably every conversation, was inclusive of customer outcomes. What outcomes are you helping businesses achieve regardless of industry, especially as we're hopefully coming out of the pandemic, still in a dynamic remote hybrid work environment, but it's all about enabling businesses to achieve their goals. So I always want to understand from VMware's perspective or AWS or NetAppure, what are the goals that your customers are coming to you with and who are you having those conversations with? We also heard today a number of, probably almost everyone that during the pandemic, the conversations are going up the stack. And maybe they've been talking with the director of IT, now it's the VP of engineering, maybe it's the CFO. We're seeing much more strategic initiatives and focus here as customers in every industry have to pivot and have got to get to the cloud. Yeah, I think that's why we work together well, Lisa, because you have the virtual leash and you can yank me back from diving into the technical stuff because I get a pit in my stomach when someone says, oh, technology doesn't matter. It's all about outcomes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Try doing this on technology that doesn't work. Your outcomes are going to suck. Both are equally important. No, no, no, they are, I know. And it's important that we focus on those things because that's what customers really care about. They do. They really care about the business outcomes. They do. And on theCUBE, we care about those as well. We want to get that message across. I wish they would care more about speeds and feeds, though. It's super interesting. It's like horsepower and torque, and it's all kind of. He does, he gets really excited about that. But the good news is tomorrow we have more opportunities. We've got a great guest lineup tomorrow. Dave and I are going to be talking to them from right here on this set. So we encourage you to come check in for day two of our coverage of VMware Explorer Live from San Francisco. We hope you have a great rest of your day and we'll see you tomorrow.