 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of VMware Explorer 2022. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Host of theCUBE, we're here on the ground floor, Moscone West, two sets, wall-to-wall coverage, three days, we're here with Laura Heismann. It's the Senior Vice President and CMO of VMware. Put it all together, great to see you. Thanks for spending time out of your very busy week. It is a busy week, it is a great week. So a lot of people were anticipating what VMworld was going to look like and then the name changed to VMware Explorer. This is our 12th year covering VMware's annual conference, formerly known as VMworld. Now VMware Explorer, bold move, but Ragu teased it out on his keynote, some reasoning behind it. Expand on the thought process, the name change, obviously multi-cloud, big headline here, vSphere 8, partnerships with cloud, hyperscalers, a completely clear direction for VMware. Take us through why the name change and why it's all coming together. I think he kind of hinted at it. He kind of said, exploring the new things, blah, blah, blah. But take us through that. You've architected it. Yeah, it is a change of, we have a great past at VMware and we're looking to our future at the same time. And so when you come back from a pandemic and things changing and you're really looking at the expansion of the business, now's the time. Because it wasn't just to come back to what we were doing before and every company should be thinking about that, but it's what are we going to do to actually go forward? And VMware itself is on our own journey as expanding more into the cloud, our multi-cloud leadership and everything that we're doing there. And we wanted to make sure that our audience was able to explore that with us. And so it was the perfect opportunity. We're back live. And VMware Explorer is for everyone that's been coming to VMworld for so many years. We love our community and expanding it to our new communities, but maybe you don't have that legacy and that history and have them here with us at VMworld. You guys did a great job. I love the event here. Love how it turned out. And a lot of interesting things happened along the way prior to this event. You had, we're coming out of the pandemic. So it's the first face-to-face of the VMware community coming together, which this is an annual ride of passage for everyone in the customer base. Broadcom buys VMware. You know, if you name change it to VMworld Explorer and then Broadcom buys VMware. So it was a lot. Announces. Announces the buyout. So it's all the uncertainty, uncertainty kind of hanging around it. You had to navigate those waters. Take us through, what was that like? How did you pull it off? It was a huge success because everyone showed up. Yeah. Well. It's the same event, different name. It's the only thing constant is change, right? And so it's the, we've got to focus on the business and our VMware customers and our partners and our community at large. And so it's really keeping the eye on what we're trying to communicate to our community. And this is for our VMware community. The VMod community is here in spades. It is wonderful to have the VMod community here. We have tons of different customers, new customers, old customers. And it's just being able to share everything VMware. And I think people are just excited about that. It's great energy on the show floor and all around. And it's not like you had years to plan it. I mean, you basically six months in, you said you went on a six month listening tour the other day. What was the number one question you got on that listening tour? Well, definitely about the name change was one. But I would say also, it's not just the question it was the ask of, we have, we're in what we call our chapter three here. And it's really our move into multi-cloud and helping all of our customers with their complexity. So virtualization, private cloud, and now multi-cloud. Correct, correct. And the question in the ask is, how do we let our customers and partners know what this is? Help us, Laura. Like that was the number one ask to me. Of help us explain it. And that was my challenge and opportunity coming in to explore. And really to explain everything about our, if you watched the Jen session yesterday, these was going through our multiple different chapters where we are helping our customers with their multi-cloud strategies. And so it has been that evolution gets us to today and it doesn't end today. It starts today and we keep going. Like a lot of companies obviously in this new role, you inherited a hybrid world and you had two years of virtual under your belt. And now you're running a completely different event from that standpoint. How does the sort of the COVID online translate into new relationships and how are you cultivating those? What's that dynamic like? Well, let's start with how happy everyone is to see each other in person. It is amazing just to see people, the high fives and the hallways, the hugs. Some people just the fist pump. Whatever people, masks are there, masks aren't there, right? It is something for everyone's comfort level. But it is really just about getting everyone together and thinking about how was it before the pandemic? You don't necessarily just want to repeat coming back. And so how do you think about this from an in-person event? People have been sitting behind their screens. How do we engage and how are we interactive? Knowing that attention spans are probably a little bit shorter. People are used to getting up and going to get their coffee. We have coffee in the conference rooms, right? Things like that, making the experience just a really great one for everyone. So they're comfortable back in person. But I mean, honestly, the energy and seeing people's smiles on their faces, it's wonderful to be back in person. It's interesting, you know, the queue, we've had some transformations ourselves with the pandemic and living through and getting back to events. But hybrid cloud and hybrid events is now the steady state. So in a way, it's kind of interesting how hybrid cloud and now multi-cloud, the digital aspect of integrating into the physical events is now key first-class citizen thinking for CMOs. You guys did a great job of preserving the best part of it, which is face-to-face, people seeing each other and now bringing in the digital and then extending this so that it's an always-on kind of explorers. That's the thinking behind it. What's your vision on where you go next? Because it's not one and done and see you next year. No. Anymore, because the pandemic showed us that hybrid and digital and physical together, if designed as first-class citizens with each other, you know, one sub-optimized, I mean, obviously, face-to-face is better than digital. But if you can't make it, it shouldn't be a bad experience. No, not at all. It's your vision. And we're in a point where not everyone's going to come back. Everyone has what's going on with their life. And so you have to think about it as in-person and online. It's not necessarily even hybrid. And so it's what's the experience for people that are here. Now, over 10,000 people here, you want to be sure that that is a great experience for them. And then our viewers online, we want to be sure that they're able to know what's going on, stay in touch with everything VMware and enjoy that. So the gen session, that was live. We have a ton of on-demand content. And this is just the start. So now we go on to essentially multiple other VMware explorers around the world. It's interesting, the business model of events is so ticket-driven or sponsorship on-site on the location that you can get almost addicted to the, no, we don't want to do digital and kind of foreclose that. You guys embraced the combo. So what's the attendance? I mean, it probably wasn't as big as when everyone was physical. What are some of the numbers? Can you give us some data on attendance, some of the stats around the show? Because obviously people showed up in droves. It wasn't a no show, that's for sure. A lot of great stuff here. We have, so it's over 10,000 people that have registered and we see them here. The gen session was packed. They're walking the show floor and then I don't have the numbers yet for our online viewership, but everything that we're doing to promote it online, if anyone missed it online, the gen session is already up and they'll see more sessions going live as well as all the on-demand content so that everyone can stay in the loop of what's happening and all of our announcements. You're obviously not disappointed. Were you surprised? Were you a little nervous? So I will say one thing that we learned from others, thank goodness others have gone before us as far as coming back in person is the big change is actually registration happens closer to the event. It's a very big change from pre-pandemic. So a surge at the end? Yes, the last three weeks and we had been told that from peers at RSA and other conferences that that's what happens. So we were prepared for that but people want to know what's going on in the world. You want to have that faith before you buy that ticket and book your travel. And so that has definitely been one of the biggest changes and one that I think that we'll maybe continue to see here. So that was probably the biggest thing that changed as far as what to expect as registration. But we planned for this. We knew it was not going to be as big in the past and that's going to be I think the new norm. You're right, I think a lot of last minute decisions. You know, sometimes... People want to know, I mean, what's going to happen is another going to be outbreak or I mean, I think people have gotten trained to be disappointed with COVID and weirded out by things. So people get anxiety on the COVID, you've seen that. Yeah, yeah. I want to ask you about the developer messaging because that's one of the real huge takeaways. It was so strong and you said the other day in the analyst session, the developers of the Kings and the Queens. Now, you know, when we hear developers, we think it will be pictured. Steve Ballmer running around on stage. Developers develop, but it's different. It's a different vibe here. It's like you're serving the Kings and the Queens with through partnerships and embracing open source. Can you talk a little bit about how you approached or in you are approaching the developer message? Yeah, so you know I came from GitHub and so developers have been on my mind for many years now and so joining VMware, I got to join this great world of enterprise software background and my developer background. And we have such an opportunity to really help our developer community understand the benefits of VMware to make them heroes just like we made server virtualization professionals, heroes in the past. We can do the same thing with developers. We want to be sure that we're speaking with our developer community. That was very much on stage as well as many of the sessions. And so we think about that with our products and what we're doing as far as product development helping developers be able to test and learn with our products. And it's really thinking about the enterprise developer and how can we help them be successful. And I think the beautiful thing about that message is that the enterprises that you guys have that great base with, they're all pretty much leaned into cloud native and they see it. And it's starting to see the hybrid private cloud, public cloud and now with Edge coming, it's pretty much a mandate that cloud native drive, the architecture. And that came clear in the messaging. So I have to ask you on the activations you guys have done. How much developer ops customer base mix are you seeing transfer over? Because the trend that we're seeing is is that IT operations and that's generic. I'll say that word generically, but your base is IT. Almost every company has VMware. So they're also enabling inside their company developers. So how much is developer percentage to ops or is they blending in? It's almost a hundred percent. How would you see that? It's growing. So it's definitely growing. I wouldn't say it's a hundred percent, but it is growing and it is one where every company is thinking about their developer. There's not enough developers in the world for the number of job openings out there. Everyone wants to innovate fast and they need to be able to invest in their developers and we want to be able to give them the tools to be able to do that. Because you want your developers to be happy and make it easier to do their jobs. And so that's what we're committed to really being able to help them do. And so we're seeing an uptick there and we're seeing, you'll see that with our product announcements and what we're doing. And so it's growing. The other thing I want to ask you that we saw again, we saw a lot of energy on the customer vibe. We're getting catching out here because the sessions are right behind us and upstairs. The floor, we've heard comments like the ecosystem's back. I mean, not to that point anywhere, but there was definitely an ecosystem spring to the step if you will amongst the partners. Can you share what's happening here, observations, things that you've noticed that have been cool, that can highlight some trends in the partner side of it. What's going on with partners? Yeah, I mean, our partners are so important to us. We're thrilled that they're here with us here, the expo floor. It is busy and people are visiting and reuniting and learning from each other and everything that you want to happen on the expo floor. And we've done special things throughout the week. For example, we have a whole hyperscalar day essentially happening where we want to highlight some of the hyperscalars and let them be able to share with all of our attendees what they're doing. So we've given them more time within the sessions as well. And so you'll see our partner ecosystem all over the place, not just on the expo floor. A lot of range of partners, Dave. You've got the hyperscalars. You have the big whales and cloud whales. And then you have now the second table we call them super cloud type customer and partners. And then you've got the multi-clouded architecture developing a lot of moving parts that are changing and growing and evolving. How do you view that? Are you just going to ride the wave? Are you watching it? Are you going to explore it through more kind of joint marketing? I mean, how do you take this momentum that you have? And by the way, a lot of stuff's coming out of the oven. I was talking with Joan last night at the press analyst event. And there's a lot of stuff coming out of the VMware oven product wise that hasn't hit the market yet. That's, I mean, you can't really put a number on that sales yet, but it's got value. So you got that happening. You got this momentum behind you. Do you just ride the wave? What's the strategy? Well, it is all about how do we pass to the partner, right? So it is about the partner relationship and we think about that. Our partner community is huge to us at VMware. I'm sure you've been hearing that from everyone you've been speaking to. So it's not even, it's ride the wave, but it's embrace. It's embrace our partners. We need their help. Our customer base, we do touch everybody and we need them to be able to support us and share what it is that we're doing from our product evolution, our product announcements. So it's continuous education. It's there in educating us. It's definitely a two way relationship and really what we're even to get done here at Explore together. It's progress that you can't always do on a Zoom or a Teams call or a Webex call. You can't do that in two weeks, two years sometimes and we're able to even have really great conversations here. And your go to market is transforming as well. You guys have talked about how you're reaching many different touch points. We've talked about developers. I mean, the other thing we've seen at events, we talked about the last minute's registrations. The other thing we've seen is a lot more senior members of audiences. And now part of that is maybe, okay, maybe some of the junior folks can't travel. They can't, but why is it that the senior people come? They, maybe they wouldn't have come before. Maybe because they're going through digital transformations, they want to lean in and understand it better. But it seems, I know you had an executive summit on day zero and Hock Tan was here and so forth. So, okay, I get that. But it seems in talking to the partners, they're like, wow, the quality of the conversations that we're having has really been up-leveled compared to previous years and other conferences. Yeah, I think it's that they're all thinking about their transformation as well. We had the executive summit on day zero for us Monday. And it was 100 plus executives invited in for a day who have stayed because they want to hear what's going on. When I joined VMware, I said VMware has a gift that so many companies are jealous of because we have relationships with the executives. And that's what every company's startup to large company wants. And they're really trusted customers of ours. And so we haven't been together and they want to be here to be able to know what's going on and join us in the meetings. And we have tons of meetings happening throughout the entire event. And they're loyal, they're active in a good way. They'll give you great feedback, candid feedback. Sometimes, you might not want to hear, but it's truthful, they're very engaging. Feedback's a gift. And they stay with you and they're loyal and they show up and they learn, they're in sessions. So all good stuff. I know we only have about a minute left, Laura. I want to get your thoughts and end the segment with your explanation to the world around Explore. What's next? What does it mean? What's going to happen next? What does this brand turn into? How do you see this unfolding and how should people view the VMware Explore event, brand, and future activities? Yeah, VMware Explore, this is just the start. So we're after this, we're going to Brazil, Barcelona, Singapore, China, and Japan. And so it is definitely a momentum that we're going on. The brand is unbelievable. It is so beautiful, we're exploring with it. We can have so much fun with this brand and we plan to continue to have fun with this brand. And it is all about the momentum with our sales team and our customers and our partners and just continuing what we're doing. This is just the beginning. It's not the end. It's a global brand. Explore global. It absolutely, absolutely. All right, Dave, that's going to be great for the CUBE Global activities. Yeah, there you go. Laura, great to see you. Thank you for coming on. You're super busy. Final question, and it's kind of the trick question. What's your favorite aspect of the event? Pick a favorite child. What's going on here in your mind? What's the most exciting thing about this event that's near and dear to your heart? So first is hearing the feedback from the customers. But I do have to say my team as well. I mean, huge shout out to my team. They are the hub and spoke of all parts of Explore. VMware Explore wouldn't be here without them. And so it's great to see it all coming together. As they say in the scoring the Olympics, the degree of difficulty for this event, given all the things going on. You guys did an amazing job. We've written this to it. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you for a great booth here. It looks beautiful. Thanks for coming. Wonderful, thank you for having me. Okay, the CUBE's live coverage here on the floor of Moscone West. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Two sets, three days. Stay with us for more live coverage. We'll be right back.