VMware Explore: Broadcom and VMware in Limbo
Transcript
[Music] hey how's it going it's Keith towns I'm principal of the C advisor I'm here with my partner Dan Newman CEO of the futurum group in case you missed it CTO advisor now part now part of the fut group yeah I got I got to figure out how we do this though it's easier for you because you're like I'm Keith Townsen adviser but like I want you to put the little underscore maybe you can do one of those little video popups that when you say it
it goes part of the future group that you know what is is you said it and it's done and by the way I couldn't be happier to have you you know I couldn't be happier to hear we uh the reaction from the market has been exceptional all our combined customers are excited they're eager to do more business with us e eager to get more advice it's been exciting right it has been really exciting I mean it's taken us on this journey all the way to beautiful
uh sun setting in Barcelona so you see us squinting a little bit we uh we're chasing daylight but uh it has been great it's been good to be here you you know uh I honestly was heading over to Barcelona to spend some time with you but also uh expecting to be here on the other end of a closed transaction where uh VMware was going to have been acquired by broadcom and I was going to see the new VMware by broadcom and uh I got to be
candid I came and um ended up being a little different than I expected because now we have VMware in limbo of being acqu and it's been a super interesting uh set of conversations I've had with friends uh some the people you've introduced me to some of the people I've worked with and and partners uh but I'd say it's a worthwhile trip you know it has been a worthwhile trip you know you you usually speak at the CEO level uh no lower than the CIO I would
say and I operate you know C down and I've gotten a chance to introduce you to some of my folks in the community the reactions been pretty good people are like hey this guy actually does know a little bit something about technology other than talking to all of the big fancy CEOs I got to uh meet HW for the first time which was really cool I was surprised at how well he understands the problem space uh and how VMware by broadcom will address the problem space
he he seems to have a Clear Vision which is always a good thing sometimes simple is powerful and if you kind of look at the ethos of the way Hawks run the software companies he's acquired postacquisition he simp ifies them he likes flat organizations he likes not having a lot of managers with very small teams he he looks for efficiency he looks at numbers and metrics but he also you know if you heard the way he explained it here both on the main stage and and
if I you know from what you've told me a little bit um he's kind of come up with the kind of pillars of messaging he's not going to kind of buy into some of the quote like kind of press headline stuff and he's saying look we're going to put our heads down we're going to get to work we're going to um go out and we're going to win our customer customers by focusing on the best products in the portfolio we're going to try to find a
way to keep the best people here that fit within the plan and you know whenever you make these kinds of you're never going to get it all right right but the early indications and I've said this from the beginning you and I had talks about it for now a year um I've said from the beginning this will be more successful than people probably a lot than a lot of the naysayers thought it would be you know the doing some of the analyst sessions some of the
push back was you well what about VMware customers leaving VMware and H you know he he he had a pretty viscal reaction to the question but overall he reacted to what I've been hearing from customers customers have fast forwarded their uh uh trups with VMware and they're trying to lock in uh permanent Ironclad contracts over the next three four years to be locked into VM the VMware relationship and if you anything it validates Hawk's approach to acquiring VMware the strength of the brand vmware's position in
the industry so you know we've talked about some of this forward what's your you know it may not be VMware by broadcom but do you have any changed outlooks after this short couple of days at VM first of all what what if they lower the price all these people you know no one's ever even considered the fact that you know there could be enough efficiencies that they could actually create a more price effective vsphere maybe pouring resources into uh tanzu I mean I'm being a little
provocative I don't see that as the outcome but it would be interesting all these people that ran to lock in these bigger contracts and then it's like oh I could have gotten cheaper yeah you know this isn't uh singular where you get to roll your minutes over I'm sure the contracts are pretty like you said Ironclad um you know I think uh there's a couple things that are going to happen now either way I mean one is There's No undo button on a lot of the
actions that have taken place yes so the personnel and the leadership in the future look of this company is going to be different and I do still have a strong belief that the deal will get done um I have no specific insight to that and if I did I wouldn't talk about it but um the deal is also going to be able to take advantage I think this whole private AI is a really smart strategy I think public Cloud companies are going to dominate the the
workloads and in the long run they're going to be more and more focused on kubernetes on portability of workloads and they're going to try to centralize now not great at multicloud it's actually really interesting I talked to Matt Hicks yesterday at Red Hat um the CEO of Red Hat right and you know he was actually kind of saying that like the one thing about the the public Cloud companies they're all good at kind of workloads on their Cloud so there is still a real need for
this I'd also say though is that VMware um you know there is a longer term the choice between you know virtualization and and and and kubernetes is going to be substantial in the sense of you know can VMware establish the same kind of trusted leadership ship in multicloud for the kubernetes side the tanzo side that it's been able to create with these that would make it a very powerful company um having said that that's the thing is the current Administration has not been successful the current
leadership has not really been successful um but Hawk seems committed to it um and people wondered about that but you know you saw today uh you had a chance to hear from the new GM of tanzo you know there are some people that even said maybe he's going to get rid of it all together and that doesn't seem to be no he's actually built the four different buus there's uh Edge there's core compute VC VCF or Cloud that as they call it there's the network Buu
and then there's the app Buu and when I challenged them on why are they building these silos they pointed back to Hawk's comment of it being all about VCF having a cloud platform that you can then have these three other add-ons so it doesn't matter where a customer comes into the conversation ation It All Leads back to VCF and vmware's ability to replicate what the cloud providers do anywhere so I think they've like you said they there's there's the Bell can't be unrung the changes in
the organization are going to be permanent and they're going to resonate throughout the rest of the industry and uh vmw is kind of uh laid down a gauntlet ironically they bought up open shift they bought up IBM AI on open shift on VCF so uh VMware is leaning into the uh application space into the AI space into the edge and using their assets at least their core assets to the best of their ability I'm glad you called that out because I think the IBM partnership's really
great there's a nice hedge there with open shift right um you know I I I don't fully understand I guess other than the kind of like Merchant silicon you know AWS says well we build a chip for AI but we also sell nvidias I guess maybe to some extent we MW says look you know we have a huge customer base and some of them are going to want to use red hat and you know by the way they all want to do AI they there's a
huge like I would absolutely say there's I can say this with some confidence that there's more open shift on VCF then there is 10 zoo on VCF so uh customers want what they want and haw and team are delivering what customers what they believe customers want and there's no no uh nothing bad in that 69 billion in spend there's no way they can walk away from it so a prediction you know besides the fact that I still believe the deal is going to get done is
uh the value return to Wall Street to investors and actually to customers is going to outperform by a pretty large mag uh large amount what the expectations were 18 months ago when this deal came out someone asked me if VMware steel matters and I said uh they matter about $69 billion worth matters to matters to me I'll take I'll take just a little bit of it I'll take just a little bit of it as well if you want to learn more about the CTO visor now
I'm part of the futurum group you can visit either website we're continuing the integration you'll see more collaborations like this the C visor.com futurum group.com you want to follow me I'm at cisor on Twitter Dan Daniel Newman UV don't ask why there's a UV at the end but it's there talk to you next CT advisor Studio
