Covering Dell Technologies World 2019.

Brought to you by Dell Technologies

and its ecosystem partners.

>> Hello everyone.

Welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage

here in Las Vegas for Dell Technologies World.

I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante.

Dave, we've got Pat Gelsinger back on theCUBE.

He stopped by yesterday, did a flyby after his keynote

to kick off our intro section.

He's back for the sit-down. >> (laughs)

Welcome back.

>> I can't get enough of you, Pat.

>> CEO of VMware, Pat Gelsinger.

>> Yeah, I love to photobomb you guys, so it was great.

>> Anytime.

I know you're super busy, business is going great.

And you know, what a three years its been.

I remember the keynote you gave at VMworld a few years ago.

This was really on a time where,

I would call it the seminal moment for you

because you saw a vision,

and we've talked privately and on theCUBE about,

and you gave this speech of

this is going to be the preferred future,

and it was very visionary-oriented,

but it ended up happening.

That became the beginning of a run for VMware.

And since then, you've been kind of chipping away

and filling in all the tech pieces,

the business model, and deals,

with Amazon and now Azure and others.

How are you feeling about it?

What's the highlights?

What's your perspective of where we are now?

What's the notable accomplishments?

>> Well you know, it's been just great.

And you think about the run that we've been on where we,

five years ago, we described a hybrid future.

And you know, most people said, what are you, stupid?

And you know, student body right to the public cloud.

And now everybody is starting to understand

the difficulty of replatforming, right?

And says wow, this is really hard.

I can spend millions and millions of dollars,

in fact, one customer's estimate

was that they were going to spend almost $1 billion

replatforming all their applications to the cloud.

And when they got them cloud-native, what do they have?

The same apps.

So imagine going to your board and saying

I'm going to spend $1 billion just so I can be on the cloud,

but give you no new business value.

You've got to be kidding!

And that's why this hybrid future,

and as I like to joke, Andy, five years ago,

Andy Jassy said if you're running your own data center,

you're stupid.

And Pat said if you're using Amazon, you're stupid.

And now we're doing bro hugs on stage with each other.

(laughter)

>> And by the way, hybrid,

you picked that trend that was right.

Multi-cloud, though, came out of more a reality,

less of an operating vision,

'cause hybrid cloud, you know, you saw the dots,

connected those dots,

but I think multi-cloud was much more of just a reality.

When people started to realize

that as I started doing stuff on premises,

wow, I got native workloads on the cloud,

and there are benefits for being in the cloud first

for certain workloads.

But then the multi-cloud thing comes up.

>> And I think everybody has started to realize,

and I really, as I would say,

I think every CIO needs a three-cloud strategy.

Making their private data centers

into a proper operating private cloud.

And some of this week's announcements,

I'm sure we'll get back to those a little bit,

to me are just a huge dimension.

You know, VMware Cloud on Dell EMC,

you know, a huge accelerant

of making your private data center

op like a private cloud, right, at scale.

Second, you need a primary public cloud partner.

And I think most people should pick a primary.

Not one, a primary,

and then a secondary cloud, right,

you know, as their partners.

And then you have your range of SAS offerings.

And I think that needs to be the core, right,

of every IT, CIO's strategy for the future.

And our objective is to create an environment

between what we're doing with VMware Cloud Foundation,

and now VMware Cloud on Dimension.

What we're doing with Amazon,

our preferred partner for the public cloud offering.

What we announced this week with Azure, right?

Our 4000 other cloud partners, including, you know,

very successful relationship with IBM.

And saying, okay, that's your infrastructure.

And the bulk of your workloads

should run on a VMware environment

that we can operate across that,

with the same tools, the same interfaces,

the same security, the same management tools,

and then use the other cloud services

as they bring you business value.

You're a fan of Tensorflow?

Go for it, baby.

Right?

You know, and use it in your app.

You love function as a service with Lambda, go for it.

But the bulk of your workload should lay in here

and use these where they have business value.

>> And to follow up on the three legs of the cloud stool,

the CIO's legs, number three is for what?

Is it for risk mitigation, exit strategies,

or more specific best-of-breed, horses-for-courses

type of workloads.

>> Yes, yes, and yes.

To some degree, really it's saying,

nobody wants to say, I'm only in one.

Right?

Nobody wants to lock in for it.

Also you know, clearly, hey, you know,

these are technologies that break.

You get more resilience that way, right?

You want to be able to manage your cost environments.

There's clearly this view of

okay, you know, if I can do one, two, and three,

I can do N.

'Cause most people are also going to end up picking,

oh, I'm in Hong Kong.

Okay, I need a Hong Kong cloud,

because my data can only go there.

You know, I'm in Malaysia,

oh, they require all data to be there.

'Cause a practicality, if you're a big enterprise company,

it's not just going to be three.

You're going to need to be four, five, and six as well,

for regional.

And then you're going to acquire somebody,

they're using a different partner.

It really says, build an operational environment

that works that way.

Give myself business flexibility.

I have application flexibility, and if I've done that,

I really can move to the other environments

that my business requires.

>> I think one of the reasons

why you guys have been so successful,

if I go back five or six years,

I remember you laying out the market,

the market segmentation,

you're obviously close to customers.

You're a very clear thinker.

You've obviously looked at the market for multi-cloud.

How do you describe that,

how do you look at the TAM, how big is it?

>> Well you know, if you think about cloud today, right,

we're closing in on $100 billion of the public cloud.

You add SAS to it, you know,

you got almost another $100 billion at that level.

And you know, the overall data center market

is probably on the order of, you know, $1 trillion-ish.

>> Give or take. (laughs)

>> Yeah, on that order.

And then you know, you throw the operations costs

inside of it,

you're probably looking at something

that's, you know, on the order of $2 trillion as well.

So this is a big market, right?

You know, part of the excitement that people are seeing

in this cloud environment,

is that they can just go faster.

And as I described in the keynote today,

we want to enable every one of our customers

to stop looking down and look up, right?

Spend less time looking down at the infrastructure.

We're going to operationalize it,

we're going to automate it for you,

we're going to take care of it

so that every one of your engineers

can become software engineers

building app and business value.

>> I want to ask you on that point,

because one of the things, I was talkin' last night,

the analyst said at the briefing or the reception was,

having a debate with one of the strategists in Dell,

and I'm like, look it,

outcomes are great at the top of the stack.

Looking up, you want outcomes.

But during the OSI stack days, no one cared about outcomes.

It was either token ring or Ethernet.

Speed won, so certain things have to be speed-driven,

world-class, and keep getting better.

And so that's what we're seeing

as an infrastructure requirement.

Horizontal scalability, operational scale.

So that's a speeds and feeds game.

So the outcome there is faster (laughs), and simpler.

Up the stack, data becomes a big part of that.

That, more, is where we see outcome.

Do you see it that way, Pat?

Because you know, again, infrastructure is often,

that's how they said it on stage.

We want to have whole new-paved,

new infrastructure for this generation,

essentially a refresh of infrastructure.

Okay.

Well, what does it look like?

It's got to be fast, got to be flexible, software-defined.

Your thoughts?

>> So you know, clearly, I mean,

what we're trying to do

is we build this common infrastructure layer.

And build an environment that allows you to be fast,

but also allows you to be in control and cost-effective.

Because if you would say, oh, I just want to be fast,

ah, that doesn't work, right?

We still have limited budgets, and you know,

people, someday there's a CFO day of reckoning.

But you also have to realize,

part of the hybrid cloud laws that I described this morning,

you know, one of those is the laws of physics, right?

Hey, my factory automation for robotics

needs to be 40 milliseconds, period.

And if I round-trip to the cloud at 150 milliseconds,

guess what?

(laughs)

>> Latency.

>> Right.

You know, my image recognition for being able to detect

my autonomous vehicle is less than 50 milliseconds.

I can't round-trip to the cloud.

It has to be fast, right,

but we also need to be able to push more of this data,

more of the inference of my machine learning and AI

closer to the edge.

That's why, you know, you heard Michael talk about,

and Jeff talk about this explosion of data.

Most of that data will be at the edge.

Why?

Because every camera, you know, every sensor

will be developing it,

and I'm not going to round-trip it to the cloud

because of economics.

I can't afford to take all that data to the cloud.

It's not just the latency.