 theCUBE presents HPE Discover 2022, brought to you by HPE. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage. We're wrapping up day two, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. We've got some friends and colleagues, long time friends. Crawford Del Pratt is the president of IDC, Matt Eastwood is the senior vice president of infrastructure and cloud. Guys, thanks for coming on, spending some time. Great to see you guys, got fun to do it. Awesome. Crawford, I want to ask you, I think this, track me if I'm wrong, but this was your first physical directions as president. Is that true or did you do one in 2019? No, we did one in 2020, we did one in 2019. And you were president at the time. I was president at the time, and then everything started. Well, how was directions this year? You must have been stoked to get back together. Yeah, it was great. I mean, it was actually pretty emotional. You know, I mean, it's a community, right? I mean, we have a lot of customers that have been coming to that event for a long, long time. I mean, to stand up on the stage and look out and see people, you know, getting a little bit emotional and a lot of hugs and a lot of bringing people together. This year in Boston, we were the first event really of any size that kind of came back. And when I kind of didn't see that coming in terms of how people, how ready people were to be together. Because when did you do, did it April in Boston? Yeah, we did it March. In March. Yeah, it was a game day decision. I mean, we were, we had negotiated it. We were going back and forth. And then I kind of made the call at the last minute, say let's go and do it. And in Santa Clara, I felt like we were kind of opening up the crypt at the convention center. I mean, all the production people said, you know what, you guys were really the first event to be back. And attendance was really strong. You know, we got over a thousand. It was really good. Good. It's always a fun, when I was there, it was, it's a big deal. You guys prepare for it. Some new faces up on the stage. So Matt, you've been doing the circuit. I take it like all top analysts, super busy, right? This is kind of end of the spring. I mean, I know it's summer. Right, that's right. But how do you look at, at discover relative to some of the other events you've been at? I think if you go back to what Crawford was just talking about, our event in March. I mean, March was sort of the reopening. And there was, I think people just felt so happy to be back out there. You still get a little bit at these events. I mean, because for each company, it's their first time back at it. But I think we're starting to get down what these events are going to feel like going forward. And I mean, there's good energy here. There's been a good attendance. I think the interest in getting back live and having face-to-face meetings is clearly strong. Yeah, I mean, this definitely shows that hybrid's the steady state, both events, cloud, virtualization, remote. So what are you guys seeing with that hybrid mode just from a workforce? Certainly people are excited to get back together, but it's going to continue. You're starting to see that digital piece. How is that impacting some of the, some of the customers you're tracking? Who's winning and who's losing coming out of the pandemic? What's the big picture look like? Yeah, I mean, if you take a look at hybrid work, people are testing many, many, many different models. And I think as we move from a pandemic to an endemic, we're going to have just ways and ways and ways of people needing that flexibility for a lot of different reasons, whether they have preexisting conditions, whether they're just not comfortable, whether they have people who can't be vaccinated at home. So I think we're going to be in this hybrid work for a long, long time. I do think though that we are going to transition back into some kind of a normal. And I think the big difference is that I think leaders back in the day a long time ago, when people weren't coming into work, it was kind of like, oh, I know nothing's going on there. People aren't getting worked out. I think we're over that stage. I think we're now into a stage where we know people can be productive. We know people can effectively work from home. And now we're into the reason to be in the office. And the reason to be in the office is that collaboration. It's that mentoring. It's that, you know, think about your 25 year old self. Do you want to be staring at a windshield all day long and not kind of building those relationships? People want face to face. It's difficult. They want face to face. I wouldn't. And you guys got a great culture How are you handling it as an executive in terms of is there a policy for hybrid? Yeah, so at IDC what we did is we're in a pilot period. And we've kind of said that the summertime is going to be a pilot period. And we've asked people, we're actually serving. It's shocking. We're serving. But we're actually asking people to work with their manager on what works for them. And then we'll come up with, you know, whether you're an out of the office worker, which will be less than two days, a hybrid worker, which will be three days, or in in the office, which is more than three days a week. And, you know, we all know there's limitation. There's variability in that. But that's kind of what we're shooting for. And we'd like to be able to have that in place in the fall. Are you pretty much there? Yeah, I am there three days a week. Mondays and Fridays. Because you got the CEO radius, right? Yeah. The same way, I'm in the office every day. Smaller office. But so let's talk a little bit about the numbers. We were chatting earlier, trying to squint through. Obviously the gold standard for what the market does. What happened during the pandemic? What happened in 2021? And what do you expect to happen in 2022 in terms of IT spending growth? Yeah, so this is a crazy time, right? We've never seen this. You and I have a long history of tracking this. So we saw in 2020, the market decelerated dramatically. The GDP went down to a negative like it always does in these cases. It was probably negative six in that kind of range. For the first time since I've been tracking IT, which goes back over 30 years, tech didn't go negative. Tech went to about just under 3%. And then as we went to 2021, we saw everything kind of snap back. We saw tech go up to about 11% growth. And then of course we saw GDP come back to about a 4% kind of range growth. Now what's, I think the story there is that companies, and you saw this anecdotally everywhere, companies leaned into tech. I think, Matt, you have a great statistic that 80% of companies used COVID as their point to pivot into digital transformation and to invest in a different way. And so what we saw now is that tech is now where I think companies need to focus. They need to invest in tech. They need to make people more productive with tech. And it played out in the numbers. Now so this year, what's fascinating is we're looking at two vastly different markets. We got gasoline at $7 a gallon. We've got that affecting food prices. Interesting fun fact recently. It now costs over $1,000 to fill an 18-wheeler, all right, based on, this just kind of can't continue. Do you think about it? Don't put the boat in the water. Yeah, yeah, yeah, good luck if you, yeah, exactly. So a family has kind of this bag of money, right? And that bag of money goes up by maybe 3%, 4% every year depending upon earnings. So that is sort of sloshing around. So if food and fuel and rent is taking up more, gadgets and consumer tech are not, you're going to use that iPhone a little longer. You're going to use that Android phone a little longer. You're going to use that TV a little longer. So consumer tech is getting crushed. You know, really it's very, very, and you saw it immediately in ad spending. You've seen it in Metta, you've seen it in Facebook. Consumer tech is doing very, very, it's tough. Enterprise tech, we haven't been in the office for two and a half years. We haven't upgraded whether that be campus Wi-Fi, whether that be servers, whether that be commercial PCs, as much as we would have. So enterprise tech, we're seeing double-digit order rates. We're seeing strong, strong demand. We have combined that with a component shortage. And you're seeing some enterprise companies with a quarter of backlog. I mean, that's really unheard of. And higher prices, which also- And therefore that drives higher prices. It shouldn't be that way if there's a shortage of chips. It shouldn't be that way, but it is. But it is, but it is. And then you look at software, and we saw this, you know, we've seen this in previous cycles, we really saw it in the COVID downturn, where in software, the stickiness of SaaS means that you're not going to take that stuff out. So the second half of last year, we saw double-digit order rates in software. Surprise, we're seeing high single-digit revenue growth in software now. So that we think is going to sustain, which means that overall IT demand, we expect to be between five and 6% this year. Okay, fine. We have a war going on. We have, you know, potentially a recession. We think if we do, it'll be with a lower case R. Maybe you see a banded down to maybe 4% growth, but IT's going to grow. Is it both the structural change of the disruption of COVID plus the digital transformation together, or is it? I think you make a great point. I think that we are entering a new era for tech. I think that, you know, Andreessen's famous Wall Street Journal op-ed 10 years ago, software is eating the world, was absolutely correct. And now we're finding that software is eking into every nook and cranny. People have to invest. They know disruptors are coming around every single corner. And if I'm not leaning into digital transformation, I'm dead. So the number of players in tech is growing. Well, the number of players in tech, the number of industries coming in. The industry is coming in. So I think the interesting dynamic you're going to see there is, now we have high interest rates, which means that the price of funding these companies and buying them and putting debt on them is going to get higher and higher, which means that I think you could, you could see another wave of consolidation, because tech, large install based tech companies are saying, well, you know, I'd like that. The 409s are being reset too. That's another point. Yeah, I mean, so if you think about this transformation, right? So it's all about apps and data and differentiating in apps and data. What the big winner the last couple of years was cloud. And I would just say that if this is the first potential recession that we're talking about, we're the cloud service provider. So I think a cloud as an operating model, not necessarily a destination, but for these cloud service providers, they've actually never experienced a slowdown. So how, and if you think about the numbers, 30% of the typical IT budget is now quote unquote cloud and 30% of all expenditures are IT related. So there's a lot of exposure there. And I think you're going to see a lot of focus on how we can rationalize some of those investments. Well, that's a great point. I want to just double click on that. So yeah, the cloud did well during the pandemic. We saw that with SaaS. Have you guys tracked like the tams of what got pulled forward? So that a big discussion about something that pulled forward because of the pandemic, like zoom, for instance, in the house everyone's using zoom. Was there fake tams? There was one couple of analysts who were pointing out that some companies were hot during the pandemic will go away, that that TAM doesn't really exist. But there's some that got pulled forward early. That's where the growth is. So is there a line between the, I call fake TAM or pulled forward TAM that was only for the pandemic situationally? Devices might be a sample, I mean. Virtual event software was one. I know Hoppin's got laid a lot of layoffs and so that was kind of gone. Coming and going. And you got SaaS, which got pulled forward and it's not going away. But it's sustaining. Yeah, but it's sustaining. I definitely think there was a lot of spending that absolutely got pulled forward. And I think it's really about CEO's ability to control expectations and to kind of message what it looks like. I think, look, I think virtual event platforms probably have a role. I think you can definitely raise your margins in the event business significantly using those platforms. There's a role for them. But if you were out there thinking that this thing was going to continue, then that was unrealistic. You know, to your point on devices, I'm not necessarily sure. I think we definitely got ahead of our expectations and things like consumer PCs. Those things will go back to historical growth rates. Yeah, I mean, you got the install base is pretty young right now. But I think the one way to look at it too is there was some technical debt brought in because people didn't necessarily expect that we'd be moving to a permanent hybrid state two years ago. And now we have to actually invest on both. We have to create a little bit more permanency around the hybrid world. And then also like Crawford's talking about the permanency of having an office and having people work in multiple modes. Yeah, it actually requires investment in both the office and also the company. So you're saying operationally you got to run the company and do the digital transformation to level up to hybrid? Yeah, yeah, just the way people work, right? So you basically have to, even for like us internally, Crawford was saying, we're experimenting with what works for us. My team before the pandemic was like one third virtual. Now it's two third virtual, which means that all of our internal meetings are going to be on teams or Zoom, right? They're not going to necessarily be, hey, just coming to the office, because two thirds of people aren't in the Boston area. Matt, you said you see cloud as an operating model, not necessarily a place. I remember when you were out, I was on the Zoom when we first met Adam Solipski. He said, you were asking him about the on-prem guys and he's like, that's not cloud. And he kind of was very dismissive of it. I want to get your take on what we're seeing with As-of-Service, GreenLake, Apex, Cisco's got their version, IBM, Pure is doing it. Is that cloud? I think if it's, I don't think all of it is by default. I think it is. I actually think what HP is doing is cloud, because it's really about how you present the services and how you allow customers to engage with the platform. So they're actually creating a cloud model. I think a lot of people get lost in the transition from capex to op-ex and the financing element of this, but the reality is what HP is doing and they're sort of setting the standard, I think for the industry here is actually setting up of what I would consider a cloud model for. Well, in the early days of GreenLake, for sure, it was more of a financial, you know, a macro mechanism. It was kind of a spoke, right? But now you've got 70 services and so you can build that out. But, you know, we were talking to Keith Townsend right after the keynote and we were sort of unpacking it a little bit. And I asked the question, you know, if you had to pin this in terms of AWS's maturity, where are we? And the consensus was 2014. Console billing, is that fair or unfair? Oh, that's a good question. I mean, I think it's, well, cloud's come a long way, right? So I think 2014 is probably a little bit too far back. Because you have more modern tools today. Kubernetes is... Yeah, and then just, I would say the market's still getting to a point of readiness and in terms of buying this way. So if you think about HP's kind of strategy around edge-to-core platform as a service, you know, we're all big believers in edge and the app's following the data and Dave's being created in new locations and you got to put the infrastructure there. And for an end user, there's a lot of risk there because they don't know how to actually plan for capacity at the edge. So they're going to look to offload that, but this is a long-term play to actually build out and deploy at the edge. It's not going to happen tomorrow. Five, 10-year play. Yeah, I mean, I like the operating model. I agree with you, Matt, that if it's cloud operations, DevSecOps and all that jazz, it's cloud. It's cloud operating and public cloud is a public cloud hyperscaler on-premise and the storage folks were presented. That's a single pane of glass. That's old school concepts, but cloud-based. Shipping hardware, it's auto-configures. That's the kind of consumption they're going for. Now I like it, then they've got the partner-led thing. Is the partner piece, how do you guys see that? Because if I'm a partner, there's two things. Wait a minute, am I at bottleneck? To the direct self-service? Or is that an enabler to get more cash to make more money if I'm a partner? You see what Ascension's doing with what they do with Amazon and Deloitte and et cetera. It's interesting, right? I'm a channel partner, I'm making more cash. Yeah, I mean, well, and those channel partners are all in transition, too. They're trying to figure out, are they, what are their managed services going to look like? What kind of applications are they going to stand up? They're not going to just be reselling. They bought a big house and a boat. They bought a big house and a cell. I want to ask you guys about growth. Because the big three cloud, a big four growing, pick a number, I don't know, 30, 35% revenue. Big, and like you said, it's 30% of the business now. I think, you know, Dell's growing double digits. I don't know how much of that is sustainable. A lot of that is PCs, but still, strong growth. I think Cisco has promised 9% in that right about that, something like that. I think IBM, Arvind's at 6%. And I think HPE has said, hey, we're going to do three to 4%, which is so really sort of lagging, in which I think a lot of people in Wall Street are like, okay, well, that's not necessarily so compelling, what does HPE have to do to double that growth or even triple that growth? Yeah, so they're going to, so obviously you're right. I mean, being able to show growth is tantamount to this company getting more attention, more heat from investors. I think that they're rightly pointing to the triple digit growth that they've seen on Green Lake. I think if you look at the trailing 12 month bookings, you got over $7 billion, which means that in a year, you're going to have a significant portion of the company is as a service, and you're going to see that revenue that's ratable being recognized over a series of months. So I think that this is sort of the classic sass trough that we've seen applied to an infrastructure company where you basically have to kind of be in the desert for a long time. But I think the most important number for HPE right now is that Green Lake bookings number. And if you look at that number and you see that number rapidly come down, which it hasn't, off a very large number, you're still in triple digits, they will ultimately start to show revenue growth in the business. So one thing people are missing about HPE is there aren't, there are a lot of companies that want to build a platform, but they're small and nobody cares. And nobody, they throw a party and nobody comes. HPE has such a significant install base that if they do build a platform, they can attract partners to that platform. What I mean by that is partners that deliver services on Green Lake that they're not delivering, they have the girth to really start to change an industry and change the way stuff is being built. That's the bet they're making. And frankly, they are showing progress in that direction. So I buy that, but the one thing that concerns me is they kind of hide the ball on services, right? And I worry about that. It's like, is this as services kind of just, you know, same wine, new bottle, or? Yeah. So I would argue that it's not about hiding the ball, it's about eliminating confusion in the marketplace. This is the company that bought EDS only to spin it off. And so you don't want to have a situation where you're getting back into services. They're probably not the only ones who does. I mean, look at the way IBM used to count and they'd still count. I get it. I get it. But I think it's really about clarity of mission. What I know you- Point next, they are in the T.S. business. That's absolutely a point of it. And it's an important proctor for them. At the top, right? The global 50s say there's still a lot of uniqueness in what they want to buy. So there's definitely a lot of bespoke kind of delivery that's still happening there. The real promise here is when you get into the global 2000 and can start them, getting them to consume very standardized offers. And then the margins are healthy. And they got, well, they're what? Low 33%, I think 34% last quarter gross margin. That's solid to compare that with Dell is, I don't know, they're happy with 20, 21% if I can even get that. Which is, you know, I'll come back. Go ahead. I want to ask the guys- No, I want to, he said one thing I like, which was I think he nailed it. They have such big install base. They have a great channel. They know how to use it. That's a real asset. And Microsoft, I remember when their stock was trading at 26 when Balmour was CEO, what they did with, no, they had Office and Windows. So a little bit different, but similar strategy, leverage our install base, bring something up to them. That's what you're kind of connecting the house in. Absolutely, you have this velocity machine with a significant girth that you can now move to a new model. They move that to a new model to Matt's point. They lead the industry. They change the way a large swath of customers buy and you will see it in steady revenue growth over time. Okay, so I have- Just in that- Well, so your point is the focus- Yeah. It's the right focus. And I would agree. What's the other move? What's the other move? The progress, triple digit booking growth of a number that gets bigger and bigger. And what's the scoreboard? Okay, now, the growth, that's the scoreboard. What are the signals that you're looking at on the scoreboard, Crawford and Matt, in terms of success? What are the benchmarks? Is it ecosystem growth, number of services, triple growth? Yeah. What are some of the metrics that you guys are going to be watching? We should be watching. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if you want to jump in. I mean, I think ecosystem is really critical. You want to have, and you need to sell both ways. Like HPE needs to be selling their technology on other cloud providers and vice versa. You need to have the beams of the world on offering services on your platform and kind of capturing some motion off that. I think that's pretty critical. The channel, definitely. I mean, you have to help. And what you're going to see happen there is there will be channel partners that succeed in transforming and succeeding. And there'll be a lot that go away. And some of that's generational. There'll be people that just kind of age out of the system and just go home. Yeah, so I would argue it's going to be bookings growth rate. It's going to be retention rate of the customers that they have. And then it's going to be that, ultimately, you're going to see revenue growth and that revenue growth is going to have to be correlated to the bookings growth for Green Lake. What's the Achilles' heel on HP? If you had to do the SWAT, what's the W for HPE that they really need to pay attention to? I mean, they need to continue their relentless focus on cost, particularly in the core compute segment. They need to be able to be as cost effective as possible while the higher profit dollars associated with Green Lake and other services come in and then increase the overall operating margin and gross margin picture. I mean, I think the biggest thing is they just have, they have to continue the motion that they've been on. And they've been consistent about that. What you see where others have kind of slipped up is when you go to customers and you present the OPEX as a service and the traditional CAPEX side-by-side and the customers put in this position of trying to detangle what's in that OPEX service, you don't want to do that, obviously. And the HPE has not done that, but we've seen others kind of slip up and do that. But a lot of companies still want to buy CAPEX, right? Absolutely. Yeah, they're liquid and I think, but you shouldn't do that bake off by putting those two offers out. You should basically ascertain what they want to do. What's kind of what Dell does, right? Hey, what do you want? Oh, we got this, we got this. On one hand, we got this, the other hand, we got that. Right. The two-hand sales rep. No, this CAPEX thing's interesting. And if you're Amazon and Azure and GCP, what are they thinking right now? Because maybe what, four years ago, Outpost was launched, which is essentially hardware. Yeah. It's just cloud operating law. Yeah. They're essentially bringing Outposts. This is what they got, basically. Is Amazon and Azure, like, is this a blip on the radar for them? How would you, what are they thinking in your mind? If we're in their office, in their brain trust, are they laughing? Are they like saying, oh, they're scared? Is this a real threat? Opportunity? I mean, I wouldn't say they're laughing at all. I would say they're probably discounting a little bit and saying, okay, fine, that's a strategy that a traditional hardware company is moving to. But I think if you look underneath the covers, two years ago, it was pretty basic stuff that they were offering. But now, when you start getting into some, you know, HPC is a service, you start getting into data fabric, you start getting into some of the more sophisticated services that they're offering. And I think what's interesting about HP, what I take is that they're not going to go after the 250 services that Amazon's offering. They're going to basically have a portfolio of services that really focus on the core use cases of their infrastructure set. And I think one of the danger things, one of the red flags would be if they start going way up the stack and wanting to offer the entire application stack, that would be like a big flashing warning sign because it's not their sweet spot, it's not what they had. So machine learning and quantum, okay, one you can argue might be up the stack of machine learning. Quantum should be in their wheelhouse. I would argue machine learning is not up the stack because what they would focus on is inference, they'd focus on learning. If they came out and said machine learning all the way up to what a drug discovery company needs to do. So they're bringing it down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, no, I think they're focusing on that middle layer, right? That data layer. And I think that helping companies manage their data, make more sense of their data, structure their data, that's core to what they want to do. I feel as though what they're doing now is table stakes, honestly, I do feel like, okay, hey, finally. I say the same thing about Apex. Yeah, we finally got it. It's like, okay, guys, you know, great. Welcome to the question. The one thing I would just say about AWS and the other big clouds is whether they might be a little dismissive of what's truly going to happen at the edge. I think the traditional OEMs that are transforming are really betting on that edge being a huge play and a huge differentiator for them, where the public clouds obviously have their own bets there. But I think they were pretty dismissive initially about how big that might be. And I don't think anybody's really figured out the edge yet. Yeah, well, it's a battleground. That's what he's saying. But on the ecosystem, I want to say, up the stack, I think it's the ecosystem that's got to fill that out. You got to see more governance tools and catalogs and AI tools and... It immediately goes more vertical when you go edge. You're going to have different conversations. Interlacking. Yeah, but they're in there though. They're in the verticals, HP's in the verticals. Yeah, for sure. But they got to build out an ecosystem. Like you walk around here, the data, the number of data companies here, I mean, Starburst is here. I'm actually impressed that Starburst is here because I think they're a forward-thinking company. I want to see that times a hundred, right? I mean, that's the... HP's in all the verticals. That's at the point. So they should be able to attract that ecosystem and build that flywheel. That's the hallmark of a cloud, that marketplace. Yeah, it is, but I think there's a... Again, I go back to they really got to stay focused on that infrastructure and data management. Yeah, but they'll be focused on that, but their ecosystem... Their ecosystem will then take it up from there. And I think that's the next stage. And that ecosystem's got to include OT players and communications technologies players as well, right? Because that stuff gets kind of sucked up in that edge. Do you feel like HPE has a leg up on that, or like a little bit of a lead, or is it pretty much even race right now? I think the big infrastructure companies have all had OEM businesses and they've all played there. It's also helping those OT players actually convert their own needs into more of a software play and not so much of a physical role. You've been following it. You guys both have been following HPE and HPE for years. They've been on the edge for a long time. I've been focused on the edge. Now they might not have the product traction, or they might not develop as fast, but industrial IoT and IoT, they've been talking about it, focused on it. I think Amazon was mostly like, okay, we got to get to the edge. And I like the enterprise. And I think HPE's got a leg up in my opinion on that. Can they execute? Yeah, I mean, PTC was here years ago on stage talking about it. But I mean, if you think about the edge, right? I mean, I would argue one of the best acquisitions this company ever did was Aruba, right? I mean, it basically changed the whole conversation of the edge, changed the whole conversation. It became Green Lake. It was Green Lake. Well, it became a big part of it. But I mean, they went after selling edge line servers and frankly, it's very difficult to gain traction there. Aruba is a huge area of differentiation and I think the March announcement was when they brought Aruba management into BNF. Totally right. I love that. What are you guys saying about the Broadcom VMware acquisition? What are the implications for the ecosystem, for companies like HPE, and just generally for the IT business? Yeah, so. You want to start? Yeah, sure, I'll start there. So look, we've spent some time going through it, spent some time speaking to the folks involved. And I got to tell you, I think this is a really interesting moment for Broadcom. This is Broadcom's opportunity to basically build a different kind of a conversation with developers to try to invest in, I mean, just for perspective, right? These numbers may not be exact and I know a dollar is not a dollar, but in 2001, anybody remember what HPE paid for Compact? $25 billion. $25 billion. VMware just got sold for $61 billion. That gives you a perspective. No, again, I know a dollar is not a dollar. Yeah, yeah, still big numbers. Versus 2022. So having said that, if you just did it to basically build your DCF model and say, okay, over this amount of time, I'll pay you this and I'll take the money out over this period of time, which was what people have criticized them for, I think that's a little short-sighted. I think this is Broadcom's opportunity to invest in that product and really try to figure out how to get a seat at the table in software and pivot their company to enterprise software in a different way. They have to prove that they're willing to do that and then, frankly, that they can develop the skills to do that over time. But I do believe this is a different, this is a pivot point for Broadcom. This is not CAA, this is not CAA. In my mind, it can't be CAA, they would destroy too much money. Now, you and I, Dave, had some conversations on Twitter. I don't think it's the step up to them sort of thinking differently about semiconductor dying, doing some custom, I don't think that's the thing. Yeah, I agree with that. I think this is really about them pivoting the company into the, getting a seat at the adults table in software. Well, if Broadcom has been squeezing their supplies, we all hear the scuttlebutt. If they're squeezing, they can use VMware to justify the prices, maybe use that hostage and then install base, that's kind of my conspiracy theory. I think they've told us what they're going to do. I do. Maybe it's not like CAA. I think it's maybe more like Symantec, but what do you think? Well, I mean, that's still, I mean, so VMware, there's really nobody that can do all the things that VMware does say. So it'd be really impossible for an enterprise to just rip them out, but obviously you can sour people's taste and you can very much influence the direction they head in with the collection of providers. One thing interesting thing here is was that 37% of VMware's revenue is sold through Dell. So there's lots of dependencies. It's not as simple as, I think, John, you're right. You can't just pull the CAA playbook out and rerun it here. This is a lot more complex. It's a lot more volume of distribution, but a fair amount of VMware's install base. Dell's influence is still there. It is in the mid-market. It's not something that they're going to touch directly. You think about what VMware did. I mean, they kept adding new businesses, buying new businesses. I mean, is the security business going to stay? Networking security, I think, are interesting. Well, VMware, they can say that it's the same customers over and over again. They haven't done anything. VMware has the same customers. What new customers? So imagine simplifying VMware, right? It becomes a different equation. It's really interesting. And to your point, I mean, I think Broadcom is, I mean, Tom Kraus knows how to run a business. Yeah, he knows how to run a business. I think it's going to be an efficient business. It's going to be a well-run business, but I think it's a pivot point for Broadcom. It's amazing to me. Broadcom sells to HPE. They sell to Dell, and they've got a market cap that's 10x. Yes, yeah. All right, we got to go. Guys, awesome. Great to see you guys. Thanks a lot. Appreciate you talking to you. Okay, listen, day two is a wrap. We'll be here tomorrow. All day, Dave Vellante, John Furrier, Lisa Martin, Lisa, hope you're feeling okay. We'll see you tomorrow. Thanks for watching theCUBE, your leader in enterprise tech, live coverage.