 Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage here, live in San Francisco for VMware Explore, formerly VMworld. We've been to every VMworld since 2010. Now it's VMware Explore. I'm John Furrier, your host with Dave Vellante, with Dave Lenthilm here. He's the chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate your time. Thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Epic Kino today on stage. All seven minutes of your great performance. Yes, very quick through the water. I brought everybody up to speed and left. Well, Dave, it's great to have you on theCUBE. One, we follow your work, we've been following for a long time. A lot of web services. A lot of SOA kind of in your background, kind of the old web services, you know, SAML, RSS, web services, all that good stuff. Now we're in kind of web services on steroids. Cloud came, it's here, next gen. You wrote a great story on MetaCloud. You've been following the SuperCloud with Dave. Does VMware have it right? Yeah, they do, because I'll tell you what, the market is turning toward anything that sits above and between the clouds. So things that don't exist in the hyperscaler, things that provide common services above the cloud providers are where the growth's going to happen. We haven't really solved that problem yet. And so there's lots of operational aspects, security aspects, and the ability to have some sort of a brokering service that'll scale. So multi-cloud, which is their strategy here, is not about cloud. It's about things that exist in and between cloud and making those things work. So getting to another layer of abstraction and automation to finally allow us to make use out of all these hyperscaler services that we're signing onto. Dave, remember the old days back in the 80s when we were young bucks coming into the business? The interoperability wave was coming. Remember that? Oh yeah, I got a deck, mini computer, I got an IBM S&A. Unix, I got Unix, and then this other thing over here, and LANs, and everything started getting into this whole, okay, networking wasn't just co-acts, you started to see segments. Interoperability was a huge, what, 10-year run. It feels like that's kind of like the vibe going on here. Yeah, we're not focused on having these things interoperate onto themselves. So what we're doing is putting a layer of things which allows them to interoperate. That's a different problem to solve, and it's also solvable. We were talking about getting all these very distinct proprietary systems to communicate one to another and interrelate one to another, and that never really happened, because we got to get them to agree on interfaces and protocols, but if you put a layer above it, they can talk down to whatever native interfaces that are there and deal with the differences between the heterogeneity and abstract yourself in the complexity, and that's kind of the different. That works, the ability to kind of get everybody clunk their heads together and make them work together, that doesn't seem to scale. And people got to be motivated for that, and not many people might not be. It has to be money. In other words, it has to be a business for them in doing so. A couple things I want to follow up on from VMware, keynote this morning, they use the term cloud chaos. When you talk to customers, when they have multiple clouds, are they saying to you, hey, we have cloud chaos, do they have cloud chaos and they don't know it, or do they not have cloud chaos? What's the mix? Yeah, I don't think the word chaos has used that much. They do tell me they're hitting a complexity wall, which you do hear out there as a term. So in other words, they're getting to a point where they can't scale operations to deal with the complexity and heterogeneity that they're bringing into the organization because of using multiple clouds. So that is chaotic. So I guess that is another way to name complexity. So there's so many services are moving from 1,000 cloud services under management, to 3,000 cloud services under management. They don't have the operational team, the skill levels to do it, they don't have the tooling to do it, that's a wall. And you have to be able to figure out how to get beyond that wall to make those things work. So when we had our conversation about MetaCloud and SuperCloud, we, I think, very much aligned in our thinking. And so now you've got this situation where you've got these abstraction layers. But my question is, are we going to have multiple abstraction layers? And will they talk to each other? Or are standards emerging? Will they be able to... No, we can't have multiple abstraction layers, else we just, we don't solve the problem. We go from complexity that exists at the native cloud levels to complexity that exists that this thing we're dealing with to deal with complexity. So if you do that, we're screwing up. We have to go back and fix it. So ultimately this is about having common services, common security layers, common operational layers and things like that, that are really reduced redundancy within the system. So instead of having a, you know, five different security layers and five different cloud providers, we're layering one and providing management and orchestration capabilities to make that happen. If we don't do that, we're not succeeding. What do you think about the marketplace? I know there's a lot of things going on that are happening around this. I want to get your thoughts on obviously the industry dynamics, vendors preserving their future. And then you got customers who have been leveraging the capex goodness of, say, Amazon and then have to solve their whole distributed environment problem. So when you look at this, is it really solving, is the order of operations first common layer abstraction? Because, you know, it seems like the vendor, I won't say desperation move, but like their first move is, we're going to be the control plane. Or, you know, Cisco has an vision in their mind that no, no, we're going to have that management plane. I've heard a lot of people talking about, we're going to be the management interface into something. How do you see that playing out? Because the order of operations to do the abstraction is to get consensus, right? Right. First, not competition. Right. So how do you see that? What's your reaction to that? And what's your observation? I think it's going to be tough for the people who are supplying the underlying services to also be the orchestration and abstraction layers because they're kind of conflicted in making that happen. In other words, it's not in their best interest to make all these things work and interoperate one to another, but it's their best interest to provide a service that everybody's going to leverage. So I see the layers here. I'm certainly the hyperscalers are going to play in those layers and they're welcome to play in those layers and they may come up with a solution that everybody picks. But ultimately, it's about independence and your ability to have an objective way of allowing all these things to communicate together and driving this stuff together to reduce the complexity again. So a network box, for instance, maybe have hooks into it, but not try to dominate it. That's right. Yeah, that's right. I think if you're trying to own everything, and I get that a lot when I write about SuperCloud and MetaCloud, they go, well, we're the MetaCloud, we're the SuperCloud. You can't be. In other words, that's a huge problem to solve. I know you don't have a solution for that. Okay, it's going to be many different products that make that happen. And the reality is people who actually make that work are going to have to be interdependent, independent of the various underlying services. They can support them, but they really can't be them. They have to be an interoperate. They have to interoperate with those services. Do you see like a W3C model at the World Wide Web Consortium? I remember that came out around 96, came to the US at MIT, and that helped forward some of those early standards in the internet, not DNS, but like the web. DNS was already there, and internet was already there, but like the web standards, HTML, kind of had, I think it wasn't really hardcore at getting people in the headlock, but at least it was some sort of group that said, hey, intellectually be honest. Do you see that happening in this area? I hope not. Why not? Yeah, here's why. The reality is that when these consortiums come into play, it freezes the market. Everybody waits for the consortium to come up with some sort of a solution that's going to save the world, and that solution never comes. Because you can't get these organizations through committee to figure out some sort of a technology stack that's going to be working. So I'd rather see the market figure that out, not a consortium. You mean the ecosystem, not some burning bush group? Yeah, not some burning bush. It just hasn't worked. I mean, if it worked, it would be great. We had an event on August 9th, SuperCloud 22, and we had a security securing the SuperCloud panel, and one of my, it was a great conversation, as you remember, but it was kind of depressing in that I was like, we're never going to solve this problem. So what are you seeing in the security front? It seems like that's a main blocker to the MetaCloud, the SuperCloud. Yeah, the reality is you can't build all the security services in the MetaCloud. You have to basically leverage the security services on the native cloud and leverage them as they exist. So this idea that we're going to replace all of these security services with one layer of abstraction that's going to provide the services so you don't need these underlying security systems, that won't work. You have to leverage the native security systems, native governance, native operating interfaces, native APIs of all the various native clouds using the terms that they're looking to leverage. And that's the mistake I think people are going to make. You don't need to replace something that's working, you just need to make it easier to use. Let's ask Dave about the sort of discussion that was on Twitter this morning. So when VMware announced their cross-cloud services and the whole new Tanzu 1.3 and Aria, there was a little chatter on Twitter basically saying, yeah, but VMware, they'll never win the developers. And John came and said, well, hang on. You know, if you've got open tools and you're embracing those, it's really about the ops and having standards on the ops side. And so my question to you was, does VMware happen? It's not exactly what I said, but close enough. Sorry, I'm paraphrasing. You can fine-tune it. But does VMware have to win the developers or are they focused on kind of the right areas, that whole ops side of DevOps? Focus on the ops side because that's the harder problem to solve. Developers are going to use whatever tools they need to use to build these applications and roll them out. And they're going to change all the time. In other words, they're going to change the tools and technologies to do it in the supply chain. The ops problem is the harder problem to solve. The ability to get these things working together and running at a certain point of reliability where the failure is not going to be there. And I think that's going to be the harder issue and doing that without complexity. Yeah, that's the multi-cloud challenge right there. I agree. The question I want to also pivot on that is that as we look at some of the reporting we've done and interviews, data and security really are hard areas. People are tuning up. DevOps and the developer market's booming. Everyone's going fast, fast and loose, shifting left, all that stuff's happening. Open source is booming. Toga party, everyone's partying. Ops is struggling to level up. So I guess the question is, what's the order of operations from a customer? So a lot of customers have lifted in shift. Some are going all in on, say, AWS. Yeah, I got a little hedge with Azure, but I'm not going to do a full development team. As you talk to customers, because they're the ones deploying the clouds that want to get there. What's the order of operations to do it properly in your mind? And what's your advice as you look at a strategy to do it right? I mean, is there a playbook or some sort of situational, you know, sequence? Yes, one that works consistently. As number one, you think about operations up front. And if you can't solve operations, you have no business enrolling out other applications and other databases. That quite frankly can't be operated. That's how people are getting into trouble. So in other words, if you get into these very complex architectures, which is what multi-clad is, complex distributed system, and you don't have an understanding how you're going to operationalize that system at scale, then you have no business in building the system. You have no business of going in a multi-cloud because you're going to run into that wall and it's going to lead to an outage. It's going to lead to a breach or something that's going to be company killing. So a lot of that's cultural, right? Having the cultural fortitude to say, we're going to start there. We're going to enforce these standards. That's what John Cleese said. Yeah. Cleese's famous line. Yeah, you're right. You're right. So what happens if that as a consultant, you probably have to insist on that first, right? I mean, I don't know. You probably still do the engagement, but you're going to be careful about promising an outcome, aren't you? You're going to have to insist on the fact they're going to have to do some advanced planning and come up with a very rigorous way in which they're going to roll it out. And the reality is if they're not doing that, then the advice would be, you're going to fail. So this is not a matter of when it's going to happen, but at some point you're going to fail. Either number one, you're going to actually fail in some sort of a big disastrous event or more likely or not, you're going to end up building something that's going to cost you $10 million more a month to run. And it's going to be under-optimized. And is that effective when you say that to a client or they say, okay, but or do they say, yes, you're right? I view my role as someone like a doctor and a lawyer. You may not want to hear what I'm telling you, but the thing is if I don't tell you the truth and I'm not doing my job as a trusted advisor and so they'll never get anything but that from us as a firm. And the reality is they can make their own decisions and we'll have to help them whatever path they want to go, but we're making the warnings in place to make them. And also, also situationally, it's IQ driven. Are they ready? What's their makeup? Are they have the kind of talent to execute? And there's a lot of, believe me, I totally agree with on the ops side. I think that's right on the money. The question I want to ask you is, okay, soon that someone has the right makeup of team. They got some badass people in there, coding away, dev ops, SREs, you name it, everyone lined up, platform teams, as they said today on stage, all that stuff. What's the CXO conversation at the board room that you have around business strategy? Because if you assume that cloud is here and you do things right and you get the right advisors in, the next step is what does it transform my business into? Because you're talking about a fully digitalized business that converges. It's not just IT helps you run an app back office with some terminal, it's full blown business edge app, business model and innovation. Is it that the company becomes a cloud on their own and they have scale and they're the super cloud of their category servicing a power law of second place, third place, SMB market. So I mean, Goldman Sachs could be the service provider cloud for financial services, maybe. Or is that the dream? What's the dream for the CXO staff? Take us through your- What they're trying to do is get a level of automation where they're able to leverage best of breed technology to be as innovative as they possibly can using an architecture that's near 100% optimized. So it'll never be 100% optimized. Therefore it's able to run, bring the best value to the business for the least amount of money. That's the big thing. If they want to become a cloud, that's not necessarily a good idea. If they're a finance company, be a finance company. Just build these innovations around how to make a finance company be innovative and different for them so they can be a disruptor without being disrupted. I see a lot of companies right now, they're going to be exposed in the next 10 years because a lot of these smaller companies are able to weaponize technology to bring them to the next level, digital transformations, whatever, to create a business value that's going to be more compelling than the existing player. Because they're on the capex back of Amazon or some technical innovations that would do smaller guys. What's the lever that beats the- It's the ability to use whatever technology you need to solve your issues. So in other words, I can use anything that exists on the cloud because as part of the multi-cloud I'm able to find the services that I need, the best AI system, the best database systems, the passive transaction processing system, and assemble these things together to solve more innovative problems than my competitor. If I'm able to do that, I'm going to win the game. So it's a buffet of technology. Pick your meal. Oh, come on. Thanks, Branson. This operation's first thing is sitting in my head. Remember Alan Nance when he came in the Cube and he said, listen, if you're going to do cloud, you better change the operating model or you're going to make, you know, you'll drop millions to the bottom line. He was at CIO of Phillips at the time. They're not going to drop billions and it's all about, you know, the zeros. So, do you find yourself, in a lot of cases, sort of helping people re-architect their operating model as a function of what cloud can enable? Yeah, every engagement that we go into has operating model changes and typically it's going to be major surgery. And so it's reevaluating the skill sets, reevaluating the operating model, reevaluating the culture. In fact, we have a team of people who come in and that's all they focus on. And so it used to be just kind of an afterthought. It would put this together, oh, by the way, I think you need to do this and this and this and here's where we recommend that you do. But people who can go in and get cultural changes going, get the operating models systems going to get to the folks where they're going to be successful with it. Reality, if you don't do that, you're going to fail because you're not going to have the ability to adapt to a cloud-based infrastructure that you can leverage at scale. Dave, we have a masterclass here on theCUBE at VMware. Explore. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for spending the valuable time. Just, what's going on in your world right now? Take a quick minute to plug what's going on with you. What are you working on? What are you excited about? What's happening? Love and life. I'm just running around doing things like this, doing a lot of speaking, still have the blog on InfoWorld and have that for the last 12 years. And just loving the fact that we're innovating and changing the world and I'm trying to help as many people as I can, as quickly as I can. What's the coolest thing you've seen this year in terms of cloud kind of either weirdness, coolness or something that made you fall out of your chair? Wow, that was cool. I think the AI capabilities and application of AI. I'm just seeing use cases in there that we never would have thought about. The ability to identify patterns that we couldn't identify in the past and do so for the good. I've been an AI analyst. It was my first job out of college and I'm 60 years old. So it's matured enough where it actually impresses me and so we're seeing applications right now. That's just NLP anymore, is it? No, no, not this. That's what I was doing. We're able to take this technology to the next level and do a lot of good with it and I think that's what just kind of blows me on the wall. Oh, I wish we had 20 more minutes. One more master class sound bite. So we all kind of have kids in college. Dave and I both do young ones in college. If you're coming out of college CS degree or any kind of smart degree and you have the plethora of now what's coming tools and unlimited ways to kind of clean canvas up by application, start something. What would you do if you were like 22 right now? I would focus on being a multi-cloud architect and I would learn a little about everything, learn a little about the various cloud providers and I would focus on building complex distributed systems and architecting those systems. I would learn about how all these things kind of run together. Don't learn a particular technology because that technology will ultimately go away. It'll be displaced by something else. Learn holistically what the technology is able to do and become the orchestrator of that technology. It's a harder problem to solve but you'll get paid more for it and it'll be a more fun job. Sister's thinking, big picture. Big picture, how everything comes together to architecture problems. All right, Dave is on theCUBE. Masterclass here on theCUBE. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, explore 2022 live back with our next segment after this short break.