 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. Welcome inside the VM Village at VMworld 2018 where we have a nice big set, double set of theCUBE. I'm Stu Miniman joined with my co-host John Troyer and, wait, Case Townsend. Yeah, I don't know, did you mess up the intro? Oh my gosh. So, luckily, you know, what the great thing about VMworld is it's got a great community. Remember a couple of years ago, had a couple of my staff that weren't going to be here and I'm like, oh my gosh, what do we do? So I reached out to community members. John Troyer, Keith Townsend, I said, hey guys, how'd you like to do some CUBE stuff? Keith did a whole bunch of CUBE with us for a couple of years and something happened. You decided to go and take a real job? You know what, evidently, you can't live off borrowed time for too long. It catches up with you. But VMware, obviously, world-class organization, I've been on the other side, interviewed folks on here. So, you know, I've gotten a good window into the org over the past couple of years thanks to theCUBE. Yeah, well, Keith, look, first of all, thank you for all the time you did and we call you the once-in-future guest host of theCUBE, so we have not seen the end of Keith Townsend, the CTO advisor and you're now with Solutions Architect though at VMware. If people want, you know, go read Keith's blog. Great resource to the community as to look at the jobs. You know, Keith didn't apply to VMware once or twice. It was one of those you keep trying and eventually, you know, you found a pretty sweet job. So, maybe, you know, give us a little insight as to, you know, what brought you, what excited you to come, you know, join VMware. You've known, you know, the community, been a VXpert, you know, been a watcher and a partner and, you know, a customer of VMware. What's it like being inside, you know, wearing that logo? So, I've said on theCUBE a couple of times, VMware moves at the speed of the CIO. You can take that one of two different ways. You can say, you know, VMware is really slow organization or they go right where the CIO needs to go, needs them to go. The thing that intrigued me about VMware all the time is that no company is better positioned to walk through digital transformation than VMware, as seen by the announcements this morning. VMware is struggling through, we're struggling through to find our way through what it is that the right combination of partnerships, technologies, people, process to help companies transition to this new digital age. And that is a deciding thing to be a part of. Yeah, definitely interesting times. I'm sure there's a number of companies that would say, hi, Microsoft, Amazon, you know, and the like that we think we're pretty well positioned to lead companies to where you need to go, but definitely interesting stuff in the keynote, you know, the maturation of cloud and networking, you know, put your CTO advisor hat on there, how they doing? Yeah, this is where I got, you know, I tweeted it out earlier that, man, I got to be careful because some of the stuff that I wanted to tweet, I'm like, oh, you know what, I can't say that as a VMware employee, but I can't say, definitely. I was surprised at the RDS announcement and the people love the VMware ESXi on ARM. It's two amazing announcements, but what really excited me was the RDS announcement. You know, on theCUBE, I've pushed Chris Wolf, I've pushed Lee Caswell, all of these gems, these BU gems, about when is the innovation going to come out of VMware again? You know, let's not just get V1 updates, why should somebody upgrade from Vspear 5.5 to 6.7, give us a compelling reason? And I think this morning we heard some really compelling stuff, like RDS on Vspear is, I can't overstate how disruptive of a innovation that is. That could be really interesting. I liked what you said in the beginning about the digital transformation. I think we also heard this morning the word digital foundation a lot, right? Which is, again, one of my goals here for the show, that Stu and Keith, is to kind of pin down what does VMware do, like what does it do? And it's not quite fair, because it's quite a wide portfolio, but it seems to me, Keith, that like it feels kind of like the early days when I was there, of you had to work with a whole set of OEMs and the hypervisor, and some of the same things that were happening with the whole bunch of clouds. And working as a neutral Switzerland or partners with all of them. So, but I was actually wanting to pivot a little bit over to you as a communicator and as a member of the community, you were a customer, you worked for a large pharmaceutical company and ran a lot of billion dollars worth of stuff. You chose to become a communicator and an explainer and to be part of the learning process and buying process as an independent. Now, back on the vendor side, is there anything in that journey you've learned about 2018 and how people learn and how IT people like figure this stuff? How do I even know where to go or what to buy or even what to consider? Like, any insights into that? So, John, that's a really great question. I was, I went on a run this morning, the V-Fit run, we do it every year at VMworld, and I was with V-Mug CEO, Brad Thompson. And we actually talked about this, you know, vSphere admins want, you know, just all the vSphere content that they can consume. In reality, they need to transition from just being focused on vSphere, vSphere, vSphere and vSan and NSX to this broader picture. Pat on stage this morning talked through PKS, which is Kubernetes, he talked a little bit of serverless. I mean, from a CEO of a software company, that was a lot to consume just on the stage this morning. So you can kind of be a dear in the head, I can think, what should I focus on? And I think the thing to focus on, one of my peers gave a talk, or two of my peers, Craig Fletcher, who bought me into VMware, and Joseph Griffith gave a talk today on culture. And this is about culture, the culture to learn and grow. You don't necessarily have to learn a specific technology, but you should most definitely have the attitude that if the CXO comes to me and asks me about ex-business process, I need to know a high level answer to that. And how do I get there? Simple, simple steps is learn your business processes. I'll throw just one out there, order to cash. Every organization has some process from when they either request money, they place the order and how they eventually get paid. If you learn that process, the technology bits, I think, fall in place. Yeah, it's an interesting point. I've talked to some of the users here and they were a little bit overwhelmed this morning. I don't think there's anybody at this show that if you put them in front of the CEO of their company and said, okay, tell me everything VMware's doing. Nobody can explain that. Nobody inside VMware, nobody out. There's too much. Part of the answer I get all the time is, how do I keep up? It's like, look, you're not going to keep up on everything. You need to have like, I think the role that you're in now, Keith, is part of helping customers understand what are the things they need to understand, what are the steps they can be taking and the areas that they need to learn and things that they can lean on you and your partners to get there. Is that a fair statement? Yeah, you know, I did a podcast with Brian Grace Lee made about a year, a year and a half ago and we talked about this very topic. At the highest level, you just need, from a CIO perspective, CIO, CTO, and if you don't have a CTO, that's probably step one. But from a CIO perspective, you need someone who can just think about big picture, how the moving parts work and then you need people who can go deep in different areas. I talked to Financial Services, Senior VP and he was talking through how he needed today a pivotal guy. But tomorrow, that pivotal guy would not need to be a pivotal guy, but a Kubernetes guy specifically and then how that guy would morph into something else. So he's structuring his organization so that he can, you know, hey, today this guy or gal knows this technology stack, but more important, they know systems and they can adjust and learn the technology that they need to learn to be effective because even as an analyst, near the end of the CTO advisor as a full-time opportunity, I thought about focusing all on VMware because the company is that big now. You know, Pat on stage said that one of the things that they learned from AWS is how to add features every quarter. If I told you five years ago that VMware would add a feature every quarter, the culture just isn't there until now. Yeah, so, you know, Keith said that's a really interesting point, that pace of change because, you know, most people, when you talk about like vSphere upgrades, it was like, oh wow, it's like, it came out every year, year and a half or so like that, but I'm usually a couple of generations behind. Every quarter, there's no way I'm going to do that. We still have a little bit of an impedance mismatch. When I go use the cloud, some of the base things happen underline, but there's other things I still need to choose or there's automation that will help me. How do we help, you know, CIOs, IT businesses to get to this more fluid, dynamic, upgradable environment compared to the, oh wait, I need to consciously think about, you know, when do I upgrade? When do I move? How do I make those changes? So we have to get out of this mindset that IT is in this constant ops mode. Whether it's, you know, vSphere and then announcements that were made today or any other platform, we add no value by engineering upgrades, like putting time into designing and testing the upgrade from vSphere 6.7 to vSphere 6.7 update one, really doesn't add value at the end of the day. VMware made critical announcements about the path to having VMware manage that, you know, VMware cloud on AWS is a great example, but the technologies are out there where we're no longer consuming our OSs. You know, there's plenty of Linux distributions, there's Windows, 10 will be the last version of Windows desktop ever, and we'll get those updates directly from Microsoft. So we need to get out of the mindset that we add value as executives to managing upgrades and move our organizations where we're consuming these things as the black boxes they should be. All right, so Keith, last question, what surprised you so much so far inside of VMware? You know what, I'm going to give an honest, raw answer to that Stu, I'm not used to competing against my friends. So, you know, that is one of those things, you know what, you got to make money, you got to win deals, but both me and you have made a lot of friends and John, we've made a lot of friends in this community and you run into situations where you're pitting your technology against someone you just had dinner with the last night or week before the last conference and you've known for years and they're actually your friends and keeping that, you know, competitive nature but at the same time, you know, maintaining your friendships, that's been surprisingly interesting. All right, well, Keith, hey, pleasure to catch up with you as always. You're always welcome on our program in one of these seats and yeah, absolutely. What I love about this community is I see lots of people that are friends that are fierce competitors but they're grabbing out, hanging out at parties, you know, taking selfies together, doing stuff like that. So, community, definitely a key theme. So, Keith, thank you for being our community guest for today, day one of three days live waterwall coverage here in Las Vegas. VMworld 2018 for John Troyer, the CTO advisor, Keith Townsend. I'm Stu Miniman, thank you for watching theCUBE.