VMware - Operationalizing Innovation

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Hey, welcome to yet another episode of the CTO Advisor. Last week we talked to Mark Thiele in his new endeavor in helping you figure out how to get your COLO situation closer to a cloud, COLO provisioning contract, et cetera. We're talking to another really important player in this space, VMware. We have on the other side of the country. And it's really funny because I'm in the Midwest, so it's hard to say which other side of the country. Coming from New Jersey, Chris Wolf, global field CTO of VMware.

Chris, welcome back to the program. Well, thanks, Keith. Since we last spoke, I've got a different job at VMware. So I'm no longer the global field CTO. Oh, wow. What are you now? Yeah, I run a team in the CTO office called the Advanced Technology Group. So our focus is off-road map innovation on a sub-three-year horizon. We reorg the CTO office back in December, and innovation was split in two different pillars. So David Tenenhaus runs really the research and emerging tech team.

They're focused on three-plus years out. My team is focused on less than three years, which in many cases is really less than 18 months because the industry is moving so quickly. So right now we're incubating about 15 different innovation projects. And we've already graduated four for this year. Another one is looking to graduate tomorrow, actually. And, yeah, a lot of good things happening in that regard. It's really difficult for me to get my arms around everything that VMware does today.

You know, people like to think of VMware and equate that to vSphere. But you guys are helping folks with challenges that will surpass that. So give me a sampling. What are some of the some of these, you know, incubator projects that you guys have graduated? Yeah, there's there's quite a few things. I mean, one of the more recent higher profile graduations was the 5G network service orchestration and network slicing technology. That was about an 18-month incubation. And what you can think about that is we're effectively providing capabilities such as end-to-end network quality of service from through the radio access network all the way down to a mobile endpoint, all the way back to, say, a server application.

So for more emergent use cases such as, say, telemedicine today, so you get a video appointment or you're on a video call with your doctor, we can guarantee the quality of service of that call and that it just stays up the entire time that you're having that appointment. And that's really dovetailed into the announcement we had last week with Intel with regards to virtualizing RAM, as well as the recently announced deal that we had with DISH Networks, which is which is quite large. Combining the EUC stuff with 5G and 5G slicing and getting services closer to the end user is going to be really interesting innovations that come out of the telcos.

So as telcos kind of get their wits about them and their capabilities and being able to become service providers, servicing the edge, taking those learnings from the fail start and stops of their cloud efforts and applying this, I think there's real opportunity. Yeah, yeah, we do, too. And I think, you know, when you get back down to your first question around, you know, what does VMware do? I mean, the history of VMware has been about making lots of disparate technologies work together, whether it was running multiple applications on the same server at the same time to solving a lot of the challenges folks have in terms of operating from multi clouds to edge environments back into their data centers.

There's lots of lots of innovation to be had in all of those scenes. And that's where we're continuing to do, I think, some pretty interesting things. So that's an example of one great product as you I'm assuming you're still talking to an awful lot of customers, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Just just as a benchmark, we just recently looked at the first half of the year. And even with covid, my organization, the office, we've done about 500 different customer meetings in the first six months of the year.

Talk to me about how VMware, how your team is delivering on 500 meetings since the beginning of the US. That number is kind of insane. Like I couldn't do that on it. You guys couldn't do that on the airplane. Yeah, you know what? It's actually been interesting, like even talking with my boss, Greg Lavender. He's had more meetings, actually, his meetings in the first half of the year are equal to the number of meetings he's had in all of 2019.

Just to provide some perspective. And the reason for that is it's I guess two things have happened with us. A, as you know, right. VMware employees, the first day on the job, they learn to work and live around using Workspace one. Workspace one connects us to all of our apps, both internally, SAS, et cetera. So that was one. The second thing in my organization, we've been for a while now, for years. We've been just hiring talent based on best person for the job, not caring where they happen to live or work.

A good data point for that is my organization. One of the one of the teams we have is VMware's machine learning program office. And we needed a really strong, capable engineer and architect to sit on that team. And we hired Enrique, who happens to live in Mexico City. But he was the best person for the job. We didn't care. And he's been fantastic. So my point there is like I give you another example. The folks that are running the day zero support for any new hardware feature from Intel or AMD.

So working across Intel, AMD, all of our OEM partners and the VMware business unit. So really the compute platform business unit that builds vSphere, the networking and security business unit, as well as the vSAN team. We need to make sure that when a new feature drops from Intel and is deployed by Dell, HP and others, that our software works on it from day one or day zero. The folks that do all of that work for the company, they live in rural Washington state.

So we were pretty lucky. We've been operating as this virtual organization for a while. And it's something that I've just installed in the team. And as the global events happened, it really wasn't that much different in terms of business as usual for the team. Some of our engineers, of course, you know, they're not going into the office anymore. We needed to get equipment to different people. I'd say most of most of my work, the following really the the work from home policies that started to hit in March was making sure folks in the organization had equipment to work comfortably at home.

You know, working off a laptop all day is rough. Right. So you need better monitors and better desks and all sorts of different things. So there is a lot that we had to do there just to get folks comfortable right now talking to you on a big 27 inch 4K display, which absolutely changes my ability to work. I'm also having a standing desk. So for those of you can't see us, you'll see me raising up and down as the conversation continues.

And as you're engaging customers, you guys are having. So I would say just heard accelerated number of meetings. What are the themes like? What are customers coming to VMware to talk about, especially as they talk about this 18 to 36 month roadmap? Good things, you know, a it's something that we try to really impart on the team is that. Business continuity is great, but folks have been really focused on that since January, probably for a lot of enterprises, you know, into March through June.

And they've kind of figured out at least what they're doing and their go forward plans in that regard. So we wanted to spend a lot of time talking about business innovation and, you know, what is what is what does that look like? So some of the themes that we've really been focused on has been complementary to our Kubernetes strategy. And the Tanzu portfolio is centralization around a multi cloud marketplace. You know, it's great to build a platform for applications to accelerate innovation.

But if you if you don't have the marketplace to make it really turnkey and accessible for software engineers, then, you know, what what have you actually solved? Right. You you need that same type of velocity, as you see with an Azure or AWS marketplace today. So the marketplace work that's been happening in the modern application platforms business unit is really important. And then, you know, to that end, we've been building some capabilities into the platform that are helping to accelerate how applications can land on our stack or land on a VMware footprint anywhere.

So that's been an area that's been really important. So this is getting into some of the more important critical core technologies, like consumption based billing for any type of Paz layer that might run on vSphere. It's like it's great if the provider can land a platform on vSphere. Right. But if I can't actually properly build my customers, then I haven't actually solved the problem. So plugging gaps has been important. We've looked at areas around edge computing and specifically more around the thin edge and even single node type of deployments.

You know, what does it look like to stand up the right level of infrastructure for edge environments? And that may not even include a vSphere footprint at all. So we're really being open minded in terms of what is the best way to solve the problem for the customer and then work backwards from that question. Not as not answering the question is if this was perfect for a VMware product to kind of shove into a use case, how do I make that work?

That doesn't usually solve the problem the way you want it to. So working backwards through some of those exercises is important, too. I go on and on. We've got a lot of projects that we're incubating. But I guess the point, too, around this is we we get we source ideas from our customers. We take ideas to our customers. We have this great secret weapon called our CTO ambassador program, which is 200 of the smartest VMware people in the field around the world that can take our early incubation ideas, get very early feedback from customers.

And we're doing more to even get our customers involved in the engineering process so they can contribute to some of the new capabilities that we're that we're building and doing these things hand in hand based on their needs. And this is even things that are related, such as mobile health clinics that are important to some of our customers. And just having a more agile infrastructure around medicine is something that's really important. So let's talk a little bit about the CTO ambassador ambassador program.

I kind of get in Twitter fights with these guys because they take my Twitter handle CTO a. So, you know, there's that. But they are some of the smartest folks inside of VMware. They're typically in the field and they are more or less the tip of the spear. But one of the things that I would really be interested in is how do you take the culture of a CTO, a program and apply that across the huge machine? That's VMware, because one of the biggest challenges with any organization is taking these early technologies, taking these teams that are really passionate about adopting and implementing these programs and getting value out of it and then spreading it to the masses.

Talk. Talk to me a little bit about that transition of how you guys are using that program, the transition, the knowledge to the larger field force. Yeah, there's a few things that are that are happening there. And, you know, part of the just if I step back for a second, part of the innovation process that we've looked to instill in our team is around absolute transparency. So we have documentation for every project we're running. Any VMware employee can go and look at our confluence site and see exactly what we're doing.

We have no private code repos so engineers can go and scrutinize our code. The projects that we're even thinking of funding, so projects that we haven't even incubated yet but are on our idea board. We're also fully transparent about those. A couple of weeks ago, I had a conversation with Colbert talking to him about this, where it was like, look, man, if you see anything on our board that you just want to run yourself and your own business unit, go ahead and take it because we have plenty of things to work on.

So having a culture of, you know, what's best for VMware first and not worried about like who gets credit for what technologies makes a big difference. And really living that culture in a very public and transparent way inside the company really helps from an innovation process. And that's our mantra is, look, there's plenty of new things to do. There's a lot that we can work on. So the sooner that we get a R&D team that says, yep, we want to champion this and run with it and continue to build it, we just say, great, and we move on to the next thing.

Now, if we connect that to the CTO ambassadors, the CTO ambassadors, as you said, you know, being the tip of the sphere, they're able to take feedback directly from customers. They've over, you know, we're close to a decade into this CTO ambassador program now. They've built this reputation inside VMware that if one of our field principals or CTO ambassadors is talking, you really want to listen. You really want to hear what they have to say because their perspective is not just from one customer, but it's from multiple customers.

It's incredibly detailed. Now, there's very specific reasons why they say what they say. So we collect information. We roll it up to our core executives. So Raghu, Rajiv, and others in the company, Greg Lavender, of course, and their feedback directly contributes to the decision-making that happens even with our product management teams. And what we've seen is now we get a lot of proactive outreach where the product teams, as soon as they're working on something, they want to float the idea by the CTO ambassadors because, A, they get very early feedback.

And then, second, CTOAs can often say, hey, I already have a customer that's looking to solve this problem. And I can give you a specific example of how this has worked recently in the last couple of years. When Pere Monclos was working on the idea of how does VMware get involved in service mesh, what we wanted to understand from customers was, well, you know, there's projects out there already, you know, such as Istio. So what are the customers doing with Istio today, and where do they see the perceived gaps, and where do they see an opportunity where VMware might be able to solve some of those gaps?

So we found a few. There weren't many a couple years ago, early adopters of Istio that were really doing much. And through our CTO ambassadors, we were able to get very detailed, A, identify these customers, and then get very detailed feedback on some of the gaps they saw in the Istio project. And that drove the strategy and direction for NSX service mesh, which is now Tanzu service mesh. But that happened, or a lot of that early scoping happened in partnership with the CTO ambassadors.

And it's just a it's a good proof point in terms of how the model can be very effective. So, Chris, I want to respect your time. You have time for one last question. Yeah, sure. So you brought up Tanzu mission. Well, actually, Tanzu service mesh and the idea of all these things that are not vSphere and they're closer to application development. VMware is pretty much put on the Tanzu umbrella of products. Again, it's a really interesting debate on Slack channels for tech field day last week during storage field day.

And it was kind of a question. Hey, Keith, do you think VMware has missed the boat on Kubernetes? And I think the industry knows, generally speaking, I don't think there's a boat yet for Kubernetes. I think the boat hasn't quite arrived. As you guys have made this push, the amazing stuff and we should probably talk about it at some point. 0 is namespaces. Regardless of what you feel about Kubernetes namespaces and vSphere 7 leads to doing better things like service matches and stuff that's independent of Kubernetes.

What has been the overall customer reaction as you guys have started to go to basically new customers within your existing organizations? So new sponsors and the traditional sponsors, as you merge what has traditionally been two different worlds. You know, you talk about technology that's in the emerging technologies over the next 18 to 36 months. This is kind of it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, for us, it's it's I think it's pretty exciting. And you're right. It's the early days.

But what I think sometimes doesn't get mentioned enough is that when you look at vSphere 7 with Kubernetes, Kubernetes is really just the first use case. The broader, I think, and more strategic use case is through vSphere 7 with Kubernetes. We're giving all of our ISV cloud has partners a standard set of APIs by which they can integrate with the VMware stack, but by which they can also take that same engineering they've done to integrate with us, to integrate with even our competitors such as Red Hat.

So we're dictating a standard way that a software package can be deployed using Kubernetes, which is which is exciting. You know, you think about the Kubernetes operator model. It really affords this type of extensibility to the Kubernetes platform. And what we've in the past, we had a partner, a cloud partner that wanted to run some of their services on vSphere, and they wanted to use the traditional vCenter APIs and SDK to do the integration. And we said, no, time out. Don't do it that way.

And they're like, why not? And we said, well, if you if you integrate with us using Kubernetes, you're going to be able to repurpose that integration for other potential partners that would compete with VMware. It's the best thing for the customer at the end of the day. And for our customers, if that's a Kubernetes based integration, if they want to swap out VMware underneath, then they can do it. Right. So that's it's a good investment all around for the entire ecosystem.

And that's where I think is the bigger opportunity. So even an enterprise that doesn't necessarily have to care about building their own applications using Kubernetes in their environment, they might have ISVs where the products are getting deployed using that model. And that's giving them a lot of multi cloud flexibility, which I think is just good for the customer and good for the industry. And I think that's the that's that other side of the tale that hasn't been told yet. That's that's really important.

And I think because we're we're operating ethically and how we're going about contributing upstream to Kubernetes, how we're our vision for being true, a true multi cloud Kubernetes service puts it. And the fact that we just have some real luminaries in the industry as a part of the VMware team puts us in a really good position to do some really good things. And if you if you're solving customer problems in the right way, they're going to come. And how do you build credibility and open source is through your contributions.

And that's what we've been doing. So we think we're doing things the right way with the customer's interest at heart. And that's going to that's going to create a lot of opportunity for us and our customers going forward. So quick follow up question to the Kubernetes API story, because I love like I'm not a big fan of managing Kubernetes. It's it's cumbersome. It's it's just a big, heavy solution for most enterprises. But I absolutely love the concept of having a standard set of APIs across my infrastructure.

So that part of Kubernetes, I absolutely love and appreciate. So for this service provider use case that you gave, do they actually have to run Kubernetes or is this something that's more invisible? They, you know, install Tanzu Mission Control and they have all that keep the API capability without the overhead of needing to run Kubernetes. Yeah, really. When they're the way you want to think about it, when they're thinking about doing all of the deployment, lifecycle management, metering, et cetera, of their software on our stack, instead of writing those integrations, say to spin up a VM or pot or container, they're simply using Kubernetes APIs or commands to do that.

We're saying this is our preferred integration layer from here going forward. So. So it really it just makes it easier for the things they need to do. And there is a lot of hard stuff in there because you're you're talking about not just getting the app instantiated, but you have storage, you need to provision, you have networking, you need to provision. Right. There's there's a lot of telemetry that you're going to want in terms of being able to manage the application.

And we've been telling our partners, both in the cloud space and in the space to go on this journey with us, because we knew that forcing partners to go down this path was also going to be a forcing function to to give you full feature parity in terms of our Kubernetes implementation versus what you can do natively with vSphere and vCenter. So it was an important forcing function for us and VMware engineering. And our partners have been really receptive to this approach because, again, it really lessens the amount of work that they need to do to certify a application on on vSphere going forward.

So, Chris, VMware's massive organization, as I said before, much bigger than even when I was there a year ago. If people want to know what your team is working on, how do they find out? I mean, Amanda Bevins is just what she's she's superwoman, but she's still just one woman. How do people, you know, figure find out about some of the projects you're working on? Yeah. Well, I mean, we'll be sharing some of them at VMworld coming up. So I hope a lot of folks can can join VMworld online.

That's that's one way we're right now. We're roughly I think about we have about 40 team members and we're looking to continue to grow globally over the next three to six months. So I think that's pretty exciting. Engaging with some of the folks on social media, such as myself or Daniel Beverage or Mark Peek is also pretty active, in addition to Amanda or Joe Bagley, to name some others. That's that's a good way to go. And also we're going to continue to be reaching out.

You know, so another new addition, there's a team that's also pretty active on social media is Tom Heights organization was an internal acquisition. So we've moved Tom Heights and Tom Scanlon and other folks in his team into the VMware CTO office, and they're going to be driving some new co-innovation initiatives with customers. So actually, if you're looking for products or capabilities that are even not on the VMware roadmap right now, or a VMware product roadmap or it's too far out and you need it sooner, we have a team that will work directly with you and accelerate feature development on our platform.

We think this is the first in the industry or we don't know of any other vendors our size doing something like this with customers. So we're pretty excited about it. Tom Heights team is going to be leading that exercise and reach out LinkedIn, Twitter, whatever. You know, get a hold of us. We want to work with you. We want to build new things together and we were ready to do it. So, Chris, I really appreciate you taking your time out of your busy schedule.

I have a really funny Zoom experience to share with everyone with me and Chris just trying to get Zoom. How long does it take a CTO and a CTO advisor to figure out how to click the same link? Obviously, the CTO figured it out. The CTO advisor took a little bit longer. We'll talk to you next. CTO advisor podcast. Until then, you can follow us on the Web. The CTO advisor dot com. Come check out the report that we're doing where we're testing out each one of the VMware cloud solutions.

Really fun project. We'll have a study at the end of this, probably sometime in mid-September. Until then, you can follow me on Twitter at CTO advisor. Talk to you next. CTO advisor podcast.