 Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explorer 2022, formerly VMworld, theCUBE's 12th year covering the annual conference. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, we've got Jason Bloomberg here, who's a SiliconANGLE contributor, guest author, president of Intelix, analyst firm, great to see you, Jason. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Yeah, it's great to be here, thanks a lot. And thanks for contributing to SiliconANGLE. We really appreciate your articles and so does the audience, so thanks for that. Very good, well, happy to help. All right, so I got to ask you, okay, we've been here on the desk, we haven't had a chance to really scour the landscape here at Moscone, what's going, what's your take on what's going on with VMware Explorer, not VMworld, obviously the name change, you got the overhang of the cloud, a Broadcom, which from us, it seems like it's energized people, like shock to the system, something's going to happen. What's your take? Yeah, something's definitely going to happen. Well, I've been struggling with VMware's messaging, you know, how they're messaging to the market. They seem to be downplaying cloud-native computing in favor of multi-cloud, which is really quite different from the Tanzu-centric messaging from a year or two ago. So, Tanzu is still obviously part of the story, but it's really, they're relegating the cloud-native story to an architectural pattern, which it is, but I believe it's much more than that. It's really more of a paradigm shift in how organizations implement IT, broadly speaking, where virtualization is part of the cloud-native story, but VMware is making cloud-native part of the virtualization story. Do you think that's the mischaracterization of cloud-native or a bad strategy or both? Well, I think they're missing an opportunity, right? I think they're missing an opportunity to be a cloud-native leader. They were well-positioned to do that with Tanzu and where the technology was going, and the technology is still there, right? It's not that that- They're just downplaying it. They're just downplaying it, right, so- As they were security, too, they didn't really pump up security at all. Yeah, well, and, you know, vSphere is still going to be based on Kubernetes, so they're going to be cloud-native in terms of Kubernetes support across their product line, anyway, but they're really focusing on multi-cloud and betting the farm on multi-cloud, and that ties to the change of the name of the conference, although it's hard to see really how they're connecting the dots, right? Bridge you can't cross, you can't see that bridge crossing what you're saying. Yeah, I mean, I thought that was a clever way to say, oh, we're exploring new frontiers, which is kind of like we don't really know what it is yet. Yeah, I think the term explorer was probably concocted by a committee, where, you know, they eliminated all the more interesting names, and that was the one that was left, but, you know, Raghu explained that that explorer is supposed to expand the audience for the conference beyond the VMware customer to this broader multi-cloud audience, but it's hard to say whether- Do you think it worked? Was there people you recognized here or identified as a new audience? I don't think so, not at this show, but over time, they're hoping to have this broader audience now, where it's a multi-cloud audience, where it's more than just VMware, it's more than just individual clouds. We'll see if that works. You heard the cloud chaos, right? Do you think their multi-cloud cross-cloud services is a solution looking for a problem, or is the problem real? Is there a market there? Oh, the cloud chaos, that's a real problem, right? Multi-cloud is a reality. Many organizations are leveraging different clouds for different reasons, and as a result, you have management security, other issues, which lead to this chaos challenge. So the problem is real. ARIA, if they can get it up and running and, you know, straightened out, it's going to be a great solution, but there are other products on the market that are more mature and more well-integrated than ARIA, so they're going to, you know, have to compete, but VMware's very good at that, so, you know, I don't count them out, but who do you see as the competition? How do you lay out the horses on the track from your perspective? Well, you know, there's a lot of different companies. I don't want to mention any particular ones, because I don't want to, you know, favor certain ones over others, because then I get into trouble, but there's a lot of companies that... Okay, I will. So you got Red Hat with an open shirt. You got Cisco. It's an obvious one. Cisco? Cisco, I guess. It's an Oshikore plays a role here. Well, Cisco's been talking about this. Anybody we missed? Well, there's a number of smaller players, including some of the exhibitors at the show that are putting together this, you know, yes, cloud native control plane that covers more than just a single cloud or cover on-premises virtualization as well as multiple clouds. And that's sort of the big challenge, right? This control plane, how do we come up with a way of managing all of this heterogeneous IT in a unified way that meets the business need and allows the technology organization, both IT and the application development folks, to move quickly and to do what they need to do to meet business needs, right? So difficult for large organizations to get out of their own way and achieve that level of speed and scalability that technology promises, but they're organizationally challenged to accomplish. I've always looked at multi-cloud as a reality. I do see that as a situational analysis on the landscape. Yeah, I got Azure because I got Microsoft in my enterprise and they converted everything to the cloud and so I didn't really change that. I got Amazon because that's where my action is. And I use Google cloud for some AI stuff, all good, right? I mean, that's not really spanning anything, there's no ring, it's not really, it's like point solutions within the ecosystem. But it's interesting to see how people are globbing onto multi-cloud because to me it feels like a broken strategy trying to get straightened out, right? Multi-cloud roping for multi-cloud, it feels that way and that makes a lot of sense because if you're not on the right side of this historic shift right now, you're going to be dead. So which side of the street do you want to be on? I think it's becoming clear. I think the good news is this year, it's like if you're on this side of the street, you're going to be alive. And this side of the street, not so much. So that's cloud native, obviously hybrid steady-state. How multi-cloud shakes out, I don't think the market's ready personally in terms of true multi-cloud. I think it's an opportunity to have the conversation, that's why we're having the super-cloud narrative because it's a little more attention-getting but it focuses on it has to do something specific and can't be vaporware. The market won't tolerate vaporware in the new cloud architecture. At least that's my opinion. What's your reaction? Well, you're quite right that a lot of the multiple cloud scenarios involve picking and choosing the various capabilities each of the cloud provider offers. So you want TensorFlow, you have a little bit of Google and you want Amazon for something but then Amazon's too expensive for something else so you go with Azure for that or you have Microsoft 365 as well as Amazon. That's sort of a multi-cloud right there. But I think the more strategic question is organizations who are combining clouds for more architectural reasons. For example, backup or failover or data sovereignty issues where you can go into a single cloud and say, well, I want different data in different regions but a particular cloud might not have all the answers for you. So you may say, okay, well I want one of the big clouds or there's specialty cloud providers that focus on data sovereignty solutions for particular markets and that might be part of the mix, right? It isn't necessarily all the big clouds. I think that's an interesting observation because when you look at hybrid, right? When you really dig into a lot of the hybrid it was DR, right? Yeah, well we're going to use the cloud for backup and what you're saying is multi-cloud could be sort of a similar dynamic which is fine, it's just not that interesting. It's the low hanging fruit though, it's the easy, it's the risk-free, I won't say risk-free but it's the easiest way not to get killed. But there's a translate into just sort of more interesting and lucrative and monetizable opportunities. It's kind of a big leap to go from DR to actually building new applications that cross clouds and delivering new monetization value on top of data and, you know, this. Yeah, whether that would be the best way to build such applications, the jury's still out. Why would you actually want to do this? Well, I was going to ask you, is there an advantage? We talked to Marianna Tessel who's CTO of Intuit. Now, of course, Intuit's a different kind of application but she's like, yeah, we kind of looked hard at that multiple-cloud thing. We found it too complex and so we just picked one cloud, you know, in four, kind of the same thing. So, you know, is there an advantage? Now, the one advantage, John, you pointed this out, is if I run on Microsoft, I'll make more money. If I run on Amazon, you know, they'll help me sell. So that's a business justification but is there a technical reason to do it? You know, global presence. There could be a technical reason not to do it either, too. Because of complexity. And or technical debt on some services might not be there at this point. I mean, the puzzle piece has got to be there. Assume that all clouds have the pieces. Then it's a matter of composability. I think AJ, who came on, AJ Patel who runs modern application development would agree with your assessment of cloud native being probably the driving front car on this messaging because that's the issue. Once you have everything there, then you're composing. It's the orchestra model, Dave. It's like, okay, we got everything here. How do I stitch it together? Not so much coding, writing code because you got everything in building blocks and patterns and recipes. Yeah, and that's really what VMware has in mind when they talk about multi-cloud, right? From VMware's perspective, you can put their virtual machine technology in any cloud. So if you do that and you put it in multiple clouds, then you have, you know, this common familiar environment, right? It's VMware everywhere. It doesn't really matter which cloud it's in because you get all the goodness that VMware has and you have the expertise on staff. And so now you have, you know, the workload portability across clouds which can give you added benefits. But one of the straw men of this argument is the price arbitrage, right? I'm going to, you know, put workloads in Amazon if it's cheaper, but if then if Amazon, you know, if Azure has a different pricing structure for something I'm doing, then maybe I'll move a workload over there to get better pricing. That's difficult to implement in practice, right? So that's that. While people like to talk about that, yeah, I'm going to optimize my cost by moving workloads across clouds. The practicalities at this point make it difficult. But with, if you have VMware in each of your clouds, it may be more straightforward, but you still might not do it in order to save money on a particular cloud bill. It's still gonna be on the US. People don't want to move data. They really don't want to move data. This audience does not want to do it. I mean, if you look at the evolution of this customer base, even their affinity towards cloud native, that's years in the making. Just to put it in perspective. So I liked how VMware's reality is on crawl, walk, run. Their clients, no matter what they want them to do, you can't make them run and when they're still in diapers, right? Or in still in the crib, right? So you got to get the customers in a mode of saying, I can see how VMware could operate that I know and know how to run in an environment because the people who come to the show, they're like teams. It's like an offsite meeting meets a conference and it's institutionalized for 15 plus years of main enterprise workload management. So that's just not going away. So okay, given that, how do you connect to the next thing? Well, I think the missing piece of the puzzle is the edge, right? Because it's not just about connecting one hyperscaler to another hyperscaler or even two on-premises or a private cloud. It's also the edge computing and the edge computing data center requirements, right? Because you could have an edge data center in a phone tower or a point of presence, a telco point of presence, which are those nondescript buildings every town has. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That little colo that no one knows about. Right, exactly. It used to be your DSL endpoint and now it's just a mini data center for the cloud. Or it could be the factory computer room or a computer room in a retailer. Every retailer has that computer room in the modern retailers, Target, Home Depot. They will have thousands of these little mini cloud data centers that are handling their point of sale systems, their local Wi-Fi and all these other local systems. That's where the interesting part of this cloud story is going because that is inherently heterogeneous, inherently mixed in terms of the hardware requirements, the software requirements and how you're going to build applications to support that, including AI-based applications, which are sort of one of the areas of major innovation today is how are we going to do AI on the edge and why would we do it and there's huge opportunities. Well, real time inferencing at the edge. Exactly. Absolutely, with all the data. My question is, is the cloud going to be part of that or is the edge going to actually bring new architectures and new economics that completely disrupt the economics that we've known in the cloud and in the data center? Well, this is where hardware matters. The form factor matters. You can put a data center the size of four U-boxes and then you're done. Nice. It's going to be ARM-based. I think it's a semantic question. It's something for the marketers to come up with the right jargon for. Is the edge part of the cloud? Is the cloud part of the edge? Are we going to come up with a new term? Super cloud, hyper cloud. Wonder woman cloud, who knows? But what might not be semantic is I come back to the silicon inside the Apple Max, the M1, M2 Ultras, the what Tesla's doing with NPUs, what you're seeing in ARM-based innovations could completely change the economics. Of computing, the security model. As we say with AJ, cloud's the hardware, middleware, and then you got the application as the business. If everything's completely technology, the business is the app. I mean, we're 15 years into the cloud. It's like every 15 years, something gets blown up. We have two minutes left, Jason, so I want to get into what you're working on with your firm. You had a great, great practice over there. But before that, what's your scorecard on the event? What would be your constructive analysis? Positive, good bet, ugly for VMware's team around this event? What'd they get right? What'd they need to work on? Well, as a smaller event, right? It's about one-third the size of previous VM worlds. I mean, it's been a reasonably well-run event for a smaller event. In terms of the logistics and everything, everything's handled well. I think their market messaging, they need to sort of revisit. But in terms of the ecosystem, I think the ecosystem is doing well. I met with a number of the exhibitors over the last few days, and I think there's a lot of positive things going on there. They see a wave coming, and that's CloudNative in your mind. Well, some of them are talking about CloudNative, some of them aren't. It's a variety of different things, yeah. Depends on your topic. Where they are on the stack or on the hardware. Okay, cool. What's going on with your research? Tell us what you're focused on right now. What are you digging into? What's going on with the firm? Well, CloudNative, obviously, a big part of what we do, but cybersecurity as well. Mainframe modernization, believe it or not. It's a hot topic. DevOps continues to be a hot topic. So a variety of different things. And I'll be writing an article for SiliconANGLE on this conference, so highlights from the show. Focusing on not just the VMware story, but some of the hotspots among the exhibitors. And what's your take on the whole crypto DeFi world that's emerging? It's all a scam, 100%. All right, we're now back to enterprise. Wait a minute. Hold on. We're out of time. Gotta go. We'll make that a virtual event. There are a lot of scams. I'll admit that. There's a lot of cool stuff. You got to get through the underbelly that grows the old. You heard Kit earlier. He's like, yeah, well, forget about crypto. Let's talk blockchain. But I'm like, no, let's talk crypto. Yeah. All good stuff. Jason, thanks for coming on theCUBE. Thanks for spending time. I know you've been busy in meetings, and thanks for coming by. Yeah, happy to help. All right, we're wrapping up day two. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. CUBE coverage, two sets, three days. Live coverage, 12th year covering VMware's user conference called Explore Now. It was formerly a VM world. Onto the next level. That's what it's all about. This is theCUBE signing off for day two. Thanks for watching.