(funky music) Announcer: Live from San Francisco celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage it's "theCUBE" covering Vmworld 2019 brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners John: Hey welcome back everyone its "theCUBE" live coverage here of VMworld 2019. We're in Moscone North in San Francisco, California. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante. Our tenth year covering VMworlds. The last show that's still around since "theCUBE" started. EMC World's now a part of Dell Technology World so VMworld was our first show of "theCUBE" in 2010 and we're here with then the Senior Director now the CMO of VMware Robin Matlock. Great to have you. Thanks for coming. 10 years ago we were across the street at the South. The first ever "CUBE", now 10 years later, what a run. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Robin: Well how 'about the fact that this is number 11 VMworld for me so I think we're on, like, number 16 or so for VMworld so, yeah, we've driving been this ship for a while and it's still going strong. John: And, you know, when you came in the studio we did a little preview video and one of the things we talked about and you jumped on was this notion of resiliency around VMware. I want to get into that because the keynote this year I thought really used some of his primetime real estate to highlight Tech for Good and really some of the efforts around that so 1. Shareholder value, you guys have been doing great. Stock prices up. But in this era of, you know, corporate responsibility and accountability, this Tech for Good message is real. You guys have been doing it for a while. It's not new, it's not like you're doing it for fashion, it's the real deal and it was a big part of the keynote. Robin: It was. In fact, it was really a highlight for part of the keynote for me personally. I mean, I think when it's in our DNA, and that is consistent with our values, and we've been at that for some time. We have values that are all about, you know, customer and community and that's who we are. We also have very high aspirations that of course we have to be performant. We have to perform well as a business and deliver shareholder value but that isn't enough. You know, I do think that Pat leads this narrative that we as a company have to think about giving back more than we take. And it's not just PowerPoint slides, it's real. We empower our employees. I hope you enjoyed the story about Callum Eade swimming the English Channel all for a cause that he chose. He raised the money, he drove that and VMware just opens up those opportunities to allow our employees to do that so I think, we think it's a really important topic, we tried to give it a lot of air time, and give a way for the attendees to connect with it and see what they could take action against. John: And also, you guys are also voted one of the best places to work. Your campus in Palo Alto, beautiful and it is a great place to work. But this is the ethos, but it's still competitive and had Carl Eschenbach recently in our studios in Palo Alto and he made a comment he's like, "You know, I've been at VMware "for many, many years", now he's a VC at Sequoia Capital, and Carl said, "You know, everyone's been "trying to kill VMware. This is going to VMware, "that's going to kill virtuals." The resiliency just around the staying power of the product and technology leadership happens. This year it's containers, the attendees are excited by it, the numbers are up, 20,000 people here. Still evolution on the technology side, still great community. Robin: Yeah, I mean I think, you know resiliency is in the fabric of VMware but I think innovation is what is the secret sauce and we know in Silicon Valley you better innovate and keep moving forward or you're going to find yourself kind of, left out and, you know, Pat's been an incredible visionary. He's got a team of leaders that are very confident, strong technological disrupters. I mean some of the big acquisitions that we announced just last Thursday at earnings that we are educating folks here about, the intent to acquire Pivotal, the intent to acquire Carbon Black, you know, further that we'll either do it organically or we will acquire interesting combinations of companies to drive unique value to our customers. So I think there was a whole bunch of that today. Dave: We were talking in "theCUBE" earlier, Robin, about how now it's a post-virtual machine world and if we go back to 2009, which was my first VMworld as well, Paul Maritz at the time said we're building this software mainframe. Now, of course, you got promoted and I'm sure killed that mainframe from all marketing but (laughs) so well done but you kind of evolved the software-defined data center vision. But one of the takeaways for me from the keynote was this notion of any workload, any app , which was kind of the vision back then and now in a cloud which the cloud wasn't as prominent then. And so from a marketing standpoint you've really, the vision has been consistent but now with all these acquisitions you're making you're really embracing a much broader vision and your marketing message has to evolve as well. Robin: To support that, I think the fact that our vision has been incredibly consistent for many years now, I mean, that's Pat's leadership kind of setting that foundation for the company. My job as a marketer is to help find the way to articulate that in a way that's consumable and people understand. But what's happened over the years is we deliver on that vision 'cause, you know, a vision it's not all perfect, we don't have every piece of it or it's not all optimized. All of these moves year after year are just validating and supporting the delivery of that vision to our customers and I think the big moves this year are no different, whether it's Tanzu for Kubernetes, whether it's the Carbon Black acquisition idea, whether it's Pivotal, these are just steps along a journey that's going to deliver on our vision which is delivering any application on any cloud consumed by any device, all with security intrinsically built in the fabric. Dave: Well and the gauntlet that you lay down this year in talking to your practitioner audience was that technologists who master multi-cloud will own the next decade. Okay. That kind of says it all, right? And that is a strong message that you're sending to your buyers, to your practitioners so. Robin: Yeah, and I think the people that are right here at VMworld, these are the kinds of technologists that have that opportunity in front of them. That's why this whole notion of make your mark it's like, lean into this opportunity. Betting on VMware, building your career on virtualization has opened up many opportunities. It went from compute to storage to networking. It's now into multi-cloud. These are incredible opportunities and these technologists are the ones that can deliver this value for their enterprises. Dave: And there's diversity in the messages, you know, all the major cloud players say, "Well no. Just our cloud." You guys are pushing in a new direction. I mean that's what leaders are supposed to do, right? Robin: Our strategy has always been about choice, you know, we've really been advocates of letting customers choose the path that's right for them and we know in this cloud war that we're all a part of that customers they are choosing. Some are leaning into AWS, some are leaning into Azure, some are biased towards IBM. Our job is really to enable them to have a rich, powerful experience without friction, efficiently, and operate those workloads in any of those environments. John: Have you seen any demographic shift in your primary audience because obviously the operating side, even with Kubernetes, they love it, containers, a messaging channel that's in and of itself but still containers seems to be that next step function with Kubernetes that VM's brought to computing. But when you bring in the dev and the ops that's where it starts to get magical when the operating's got to meet up with the developers. That's been the theme. cloud-Native. All this enablement's coming in. Has there been a shift in demographics to your audience? Robin: Well it is an evolving journey, if you will, and yes but it's still, I think we have a long ways to go. We are largely still have an infrastructure audience here, there's a mobility crowd here, there's a cloud architect crowd here. The new audiences are going to be the platform architects that dev/ops community and we do have shifts in that but I would say that's part of the value as we bring Pivotal into the family, we can now merge these audiences and, I think, do a much formidable job at that. John: It's interesting, Telco will have them on later. 5G was a big part of the keynote as well >> Robin: Yeah. John: A new opportunity, a new affinity group there. Robin: Without a doubt, I mean, the whole Edge and Telco clouds are really opening up new entirely new markets. The Telco, the 5G, we do think that's going to be a very significant wave and is going to create new opportunity for new application types, new fundamental architectures that we can now merge between Telco and Enterprise so we think it's really a rich ground for innovation. John: You mentioned Pivotal, I think that's more of they were already in the fold, now they're officially in the fold with Dell Technologies but your other acquisitions, there's a lot of them. You got to kind of bring them into the fold so is there the marketing playbook do you have an off-site meeting and you just give them the playbook? How do you handle all the integrations? 'Cause that's always a big challenge. IT integration, messaging integration, again it helps if they're on the fault line of the value proposition but >> Yeah. John: What's your strategy to integrate all these companies? Robin: Well, you know, any time you're doing a lot of mergers and acquisitions you definitely have to think very strategically about integration and then sometimes you want to integrate fully, right away and sometimes you want to let an acquired company be stand-alone for a little while. Got to get used to the culture a bit-- John: Like Velocloud? Robin: Velocloud is kind of independent-- John: They've got their own building. Robin: within the networking team. AirWatch was held very independent for a couple of years. Some other ones are just tuck-ins. You just bring 'em right into the family, you just merge 'em in, it just depends on the size, the scope, the culture and the strategy. I think we take a very purposeful approach to M&A integration and we don't really have a one-size-fits-all strategy. Depends on the circumstances. Dave: So follow up on that because clearly there's an engineering culture here at VMware and take the Carbon Black example for instance you talked about how you guys have sort of pretested it with AppDefense but from your standpoint, how do you think about the architecture of the marketing and the messaging? I think you answered it in part. It was sometimes it makes sense to keep it separate sometimes but when you think about the vision do you look at it and say, "Okay this plugs nicely into the vision "and so here's what I'm going to do?" How integrated is it with the rest of the sort of decision-making process? Robin: Well, you know, I would take the position that all these acquisitions are plugging into the vision. They are that's why we're buying them because they are very aligned to our strategy and vision. Now I have the challenge as a marketer to deal with a lot of different brands that are coming into the family. I mean, how and when do I consolidate and kind of unite the brands and that is a journey that we're going to be on. We'll take some time to do that. You don't want to rush things in that regard. I think it's very important that the market sees one VMware, one vision and strategy, you know, if it's delivered in a product and it's through an acquisition as a different brand that's okay, we can work on that over time but as long as we're laying out one strategy and vision to the marketplace and just showing these are evidence of proof points of that journey. John: Yeah. I mean, you guys, you're pretty clear. Your strategy is to evaluate, understand where they are in the value chain of what you're trying to do. Unlike others like IBM which brings companies in quickly, makes them IBM, you guys are a little bit different, You'll play with whatever the market will give you. That's pretty much what I hear you're saying. Robin: Well for example, Carbon Black, experts in security, you know. I think we want to capitalize on that expertise. We want to protect that expertise. They've already been partnering with AppDefense now for some period of time rather than, you know, it's like which one is >> Right. Robin: consuming the other (laughing) so our strategy is let's combine AppDefense with Carbon Black and then start working with Patrick and Carbon Black to merge that into the-- >> Yeah. Dave: Organizationally, I think that's, at least what I read >> Yeah. Dave: was you can set up essentially a cloud security division, right, that Patrick is going to That Patrick is going to run. Dave: run, so >> That's right. John: Okay so VMworld 2019, what's the update here? Give us some factoids, some of the exciting things happening here. We're in the meadow, there's birds chirping here. This is Moscone North, nice build-out, always good build-outs here. Moscone, we're back in from Vegas but what's going on? Labs, activities-- Robin: We've got it >> Give the-- Robin: all, John >> Give us the highlights. Dave: Klingons >> That's right. Robin: First of all you've got two great days of keynotes, right, those are really important highlights. Tomorrow we're going to do some really interesting things, demo, technical, deep dive. Great guest celebrity speakers, right, We're going with the sports theme this year and elite athletes and what they're giving back to the world with Lindsey Vonn and Steve Young. But here for the program we have the Hands-On Labs are on fire. They broke records on Sunday so I know they've been really well-attended and consumed. We have over 600 break-outs, so many it's mind-boggling. We have 230 sponsors in the Solutions Exchange and that's probably a place where you can go not just to get the VMware stuff but get that good exposure and lay of the land of the entire ecosystem. And they're all showcasing their innovation. What's new, what's the latest. So I think those give people a really good quick snapshot in one week, you can pretty much get an overview of the entire industry. John: Are there any must-sees in your opinion? Robin: (breathing in) Oh-- John: Or that people are talking about? Robin: I think for sure you got to get into this Kubernetes stuff. If you don't come out of this week of VMworld with a good handle on what is Tanzu, what's Tanzu Mission Control, what are we doing with the Heptio acquisition, what is PKS evolution happening, I think you would be missing something if you don't really grok that. Project Pacific work, Kubernetes in vSphere, tightly integrated, so that's a must-do. I think there's a lot happening in the networking space, right. Pat was pretty bold up there about, you know, what is the opportunity relative to network virtualization and the time is now so I think you've really got to get into that from the data center to the Edge to the cloud. Network transformation's hot. And then of course I think the cloud and I think we're really clear on hybrid-cloud and multi-cloud and how to really think about those environments and how, if you're architecting cloud for your company, what you want to be thinking about, what are we doing across multi-cloud, and, you know, I think all that hybrid-cloud stuff, it's all there. Dave: As we move to this, you know, this post-VMworld, VMware world how do you-- Robin: Is there a post-VMware world? Dave: What role, post-virtual-- John: Oh look at that, there we go. (laughing) Robin: I don't think there's a post-VMware world. Dave: Post-VM. I mean virtual machines. Robin: Virtualization. John: Are you changing the name to container world? Robin: No. (laughing) Dave: Right, exactly. So what (laughing) yeah what specifically are you guys doing to sort of educate folks, I mean, obviously you've got a lot of Kubernetes sessions, et cetera but just in terms of helping people sort of transform their skill sets into infrastructures of code, being able to take advantage of Kubernetes, you know, we've seen some things in the industry at events like this where you know, guys learn how to program in Python or, you know, whatever it is >> Right. Dave: Are there specific plans to do that? Is that actually happening at the event or? Robin: Well that's part of what all this content is about, I mean, you know, 600 break-out sessions aren't about, you know, compute virtualization. You can find those but this is about all these different dimensions, right? Whether it's what is Kubernetes, fundamentals, how you think about that in what kind of environment you're running. And I think that's the spirit of what VMworld is about. It's about hands-on, it's about meet the experts, it's about sessions, it's about the ecosystem, it's about having that all at your disposal in one week. You forgot something. Oh did I? The parties. The party? >> Everyone Well that's not helping your technical-- Everyone >> Aptitude Everyone knows VMworld has great parties at night and that's where all the action, you guys work hard/play hard one of the ethos of VMware culture. Robin: That's right, that's right. Well, we do work hard/play hard because this is intense, right? These guys are trying to jam as much as they can into four days and so we got to let off a little steam and OneRepublic is on stage on Wednesday night. We're going to have a great time. But I do think it's on the back drop of them here they are just like sponges trying to absorb this information. John: My final question is, and you guys brought it up in the keynote, around the tech industry good, bad, and Pat says neutral, it's how you shape the technology. Really a call to action and a strategic imperative to be more proactive in accountability and driving change for good. So I got to ask you about the word trust. I've seen a lot of marketing around companies always try to market around trust. Now more than ever the trust, whether it's fake news, company responsibility to security, which is a big part of what you guys do. How do you see that a marketer and what's the conscience of VMware because trust is certainly a big part of what you guys do. Is that a marketing, going to be a marketing ethos? Is it built into everything? Just curious how you personally feel about the word trust. Robin: Yeah, well first of all, I think it's foundational to doing good, healthy business. I think you got to be very careful as a marketer to market trust. I think you need to demonstrate your trustworthiness. You need to be consistent. You need to be credible. You need to be there when the times are tough. You need to be, you know, not always asking for something in return and if you earn trust you don't really have to say it. I believe we can position our validity and our credibility proven, you know, having customers say that we're trustworthy, having customers articulate >> Yeah Robin: why they depend on us, I believe that's more effective for our customers and, at the end of the day, probably more authentic. John: Yeah, and I think people, yeah that tends to be the track record of people who say it maybe haven't earned it, right, earning it's the better marketing strategy-- Yeah, I think these 20,000 (laughing) people are saying it as they show up here with their time and energy and investment. And I think our customers, you heard from a lot of customers on stage today. Gap, Freddie Mac, Verizon, there'll be more tomorrow. You know, I think there's over 100 customers in these sessions here and they're here advocating because they trust VMware. John: Well they run their business on you guys. Dave had a survey hey did, just published it yesterday, the spend is not going down. I mean the cloud impacts your business, you're getting into the cloud so that's pretty obvious but just overall the business is healthy >> Oh very John: for VMware (laughing) Robin: Very healthy. And you know we do that by really trying to have a balanced approach. It is about shareholder value but it's about tech as a force for good, we're passionate about that and ultimately we put customers at the center of our thinking, of our decisions, of our behaviors, and I think that ultimately keeps rewarding us. John: Well, Robin, it's been great to work with you over the past 10 years. Continue on. I think you guys have earned the trust, certainly the proof is in the results, and, you know, it is what it is, and the community votes with their wallet on the product and their participation so congratulations. Robin: Well if that's an indicator, I think we're getting a pretty good report card. John: Thanks, yeah. (laughing) Thanks for inviting me. Love being here, guys. Take care. John: Alright, Robin Matlock, CMO of VMware here inside "theCUBE" for our 10th year but also as VMware goes to the next level step function with virtualization to containers, Kubernetes, big theme here, I'm John with Dave Vallente, stay with us for more coverage after this short break. (funky music)