Screaming in the Cloud - The Switzerland of the Cloud with Sanjay Poonen

Episode Date: May 18, 2021

About SanjaySanjay Poonen is the former COO of VMware, where he was responsible for worldwide sales, services, support, marketing and alliances. He was also responsible for the Security strategy and business at VMware. Prior to SAP, Poonen held executive roles at SAP, Symantec, VERITAS and Informatica, and he began his career as a software engineer at Microsoft, followed by Apple. Poonen holds two patents as well as an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he graduated a Baker Scholar; a master's degree in management science and engineering from Stanford University; and a bachelor's degree in computer science, math and engineering from Dartmouth College, where he graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa.Links:VMware: https://www.vmware.com/leadership values: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxkysDMBM0QTwitter: https://twitter.com/spoonenLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanjaypoonen/[e-mail]: mailto:[e-mail]

Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud, with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at the Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud. This episode is sponsored in part by Thinkst. This is going to take a minute to explain, so bear with me.

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these things throughout your entire environment. You can get a physical device that hangs out on your network and impersonates whatever you want to. When it gets NMAP scanned or someone attempts to log into it or access files on it, you get instant alerts. It's awesome. If you don't do something like this, you're likely to find out that you've gotten breached the hard way. Take a look at this. It's one of those few things that I look at and say, wow, that is an amazing idea. I love it. That's canarytokens.org and canary.tools. The first one is free. The second one is enterprising. Take a look. I'm a big fan of this. More from them in the coming weeks. This episode is sponsored in part by VMware. Because let's face it, the past year hasn't been kind to our aws bills or honestly

any cloud bills the pandemic had a bunch of impacts it forced us to move workloads to the cloud sooner than we would have otherwise we saw strange patterns such as user traffic drops off but infrastructure spend doesn't what do you do about it well the cloud live 2021 virtual conference is your chance to connect with people wrestling with the same type of thing. Be they practitioners, vendors in the space, leaders of thought, ahem, ahem. And get some behind-the-scenes look into various ways different companies are handling this. Hosted by CloudHealth by VMware on May 20th, the CloudLive 2021 Conference will be 100% virtual and 100% free to attend. So you really have no excuses

for missing out on this opportunity to deal with people who care about cloud bills. Visit cloudlive.com slash Corey to learn more and save your virtual seat today. That's cloudlive.com slash Corey, C-O-R-E-Y. Drop the E. We're all in trouble. My thanks to VMware for sponsoring this ridiculous episode. Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. I talk a lot about cloud in a variety of different contexts. This show is about the business of cloud. But fundamentally, where cloud comes from was this novel concept once upon a

time of virtualization. And that sort of gave rise to a whole bunch of other things that later became then containers now becomes Kubernetes. And if you want to go down the serverless path, you can, but it's hard to think of a company that has had more impact on virtualization and that narrative than VMware. My guest today is Sanjay Poonen, Chief Operating Officer of VMware. Thank you for joining me. Thanks, Corey Quinn. It's great to be with you and with your audience on this show.

So let's start with the fun slash difficult questions. It's easy to look at VMware as a way of virtualizing existing bare metal workloads and moving those VMs around. But in many respects, that is perceived by some to be something of a legacy model of cloud interaction where it's it solves the problem of on premises, which is I'm really bad at running data centers. So I'm just going to treat the cloud like a data center. And for some companies and some workloads. great that's fine but isn't that i guess a v1 vision of cloud and if it is why is vmware relevant today great question corey and i think it's great to it's straight up on a topic a lot of what happens yeah i think you're right listen the v in vmware is virtualization the vm is virtual machines a lot of what is the underpinning of what made the private cloud as we call it today but the data center in the past successful was this virtualization. The VM is virtual machines. A lot of what is the underpinning of what made the private cloud, as we call it today, but the data center of the past successful was this virtualization technology. In the old days, people would send us electricity bills before and after

VMware and how much they were saving. So this energy saving concept of virtualization has been profound in the modernization of the data center and the advent of what's called the private cloud. But as you looked at the public cloud innovate, whether it was AWS or even the SaaS applications, I mean, listen, the most popular capability initially on AWS was EC2 and S3, and the core of EC2 is virtualization. I think what we had to do as this happened was the foundation was certainly those services like EC2 and S3, but very quickly, the building phenomenon that attracted hundreds of thousands, and I think now probably a few million customers to AWS, was the large number of services, probably now 150, 200-odd services that were built on top of that for everything from data to AI to a variety of other things that every year, Andy Jast and the team would build up.

So we had to make sure that over the course of the last, I'd say certainly the last five to maybe eight years, we were becoming relevant to our customers that were a mix. There were customers who were large. I mean, we have about half a million customers. And in many cases, they have about 80, 90% of their workloads running on-prem, and they want to move those workloads to the cloud, but they can't just refactor and replatform all of those apps that are running in the on-premise world. When they would try to do it,

by the end of the year, they may have a thousand applications, they got 10 done. Oh, and it's unrealistic and it's unfair. I mean, there's the idea of, oh, that's legacy, which is condescending engineering speak for it actually makes money because it's been around for longer than six months. And sure, you can at Twitter for pets, roll stuff out every day that you want. When you're a bank, you have different constraints forced upon you. And I'm very sympathetic to folks who are in scenarios where they aren't, for whatever reason, able to technically, culturally, or through regulatory reasons, be able to do continuous deployment of everything.

I want to be very clear that I'm in no way passing judgment on an entire sector of enterprise. But while that sector is important, there was also another sector starting to emerge, the Airbnbs, the Pinterest, the modern companies who may not need VMware at all as their building native,

but may need some of our container and our new open source capabilities. So all stack was one of them. We'll talk about that, I'm sure. So we need to be relevant to both customer communities because the Airbnbs of today will be the Marriotts of tomorrow. So we had to really rethink what is the future of VMware? What's our existence in a public cloud phenomenon. That's really what led to a complete watershed moment. I called it publicly in the past, sort of a Berlin Wall moment where Amazon and VMware were positioned pretty much as competitors

for a long period of time when AWS first started. Not that Andy was going around talking negatively about VMware, but I think people view these as two separate doors and never the twain would meet. But when we decided to partner with them, I mean, quite frankly, the precursor to that was us divesting our public cloud strategy.

We tried to build a competitive public cloud called vCloud Air between the period of 2012 and 2015, 2016. We had to reach an end of that movement and catharsis of that divested asset and it opened the door for a strategic partnership. But now we can go back to those customers and help them move their applications in a way that's highly efficient, like almost like a house on wheels. And then once it's in that location in AWS or one of the other public clouds, you can

modernize it too. So then you get to both get the best of both worlds, get it into the public cloud, maybe retire some of your data centers if that's what you want to do, and then modernize it with all the beautiful services. And that's the best of both worlds. Now, if you have a thousand applications,

you're moving hundreds of them into the public cloud and then using all of the powerful developer services on that VMware stack that's built onto bare metal of AWS. So we started out with AWS, but very quickly then all the other public clouds, you know, maybe the five or six that are named in the Gartner magic quadrant came to us and said, well, you know, if you're doing that with AWS, would you consider doing that with us too? There's definitely been an evolution of VMware. I mean, it's in the name, you have the term VM sitting there. It's easy to, at least from

where I sit, think of, oh, VMware back when running virtual machines was novel. And there was a lot of skepticism around the idea. I'm at a level with you. I was a skeptic around virtualization, then around cloud, then around containers. And now I'm sort of trying, I don't want to be in favor of serverless, which is almost certain to doom it, because everything else that I've been skeptical of in this sense, beyond any reasonable measure. So there is this idea that VMs are this sort of old school thinking, and that's great if you have an existing workload that needs to be migrated, but there are a finite number of those in the world. As we turn towards net new and greenfield buildouts, a lot of things are a lot more cloud native than just hosting a bunch of, if we take the AWS example, EC2 instances, hanging out in a network, talking

to other EC2 instances, taking advantage of native offerings definitely seems to be on the rise. And there have been acquisitions that VMware has made. You talk about SaltStack, which was a great example, given that I wrote part of that very early on and i don't think the internet has ever forgiven me for it but also bitnami or bitten ami as i insist on pronouncing it and you also acquired wavefront there's a lot of interesting stuff that feels almost like a setting up a dichotomy of new vmware versus old vmware what are the points of commonality there what is the vision for the next 15 years of the company? Yeah, I think when we think about it, it's very important that, you know, first off, we acknowledge that our roots are what give us sustenance because we have a large customer base that uses us.

We have 80 million workloads running on that VMware infrastructure, formerly ESX, now vSphere. And that's our heritage. And those customers are happy. In fact, they're not like fleeing like birds into that. So we want to care for those customers. But we have to have a North Star, like a magnet that pulls us into the modern world. And that's been, you know, I talked about phase one was this really charting of the future VMware for the cloud.

Just as important has been our focus in cloud native and containers the last three, four years. So we acquired Heptio. As you know, Heptio was founded by some of the inventors of Kubernetes who left Google, you know, Joe Beta and Craig McClucky. And with that came a strong, you know, I would say relevancy. And for us to the Kubernetes, we've become one of the leading contributors to open source Kubernetes. That brain trust now, you know, some of whom are VMware and many are in the community, think of us very differently. And then we've supplemented that with many other moves that are much more cloud native.

You mentioned two or three of them, Bitnami for that sort of marketplace, and then SaltStack for what we have been able to do in configuration management and infrastructure automation, Wavefront for container-based workloads. We're not done. And we think, listen, there will be many, many more things. The first 10, 15 years of VMware was very much about optimizing the private cloud.

The next 10, 15 years could be optimizing for that app modernization cloud-related world. And we think that customers will want something that can work in a multi-cloud fashion. The multi-cloud for us is certainly private cloud and edge cloud, which may have very little to do with hardware that's in the public cloud, but also AWS Azure and two or three other clouds. And if you think of each of these public clouds as mini skyscrapers, so AWS has 50 billion

in revenue. I'm going to guess Azure is like 30, and then Google is, I don't know, 12, 13, and everyone else. And they're all skyscrapers of different side. If we can be that company that sort of fills the crevasses between them with cement that's valuable so that people can then build their houses on top of that, you're probably not going to be best served with a container stack that's trapped to just one cloud.

And then over time, you don't have reasonable amount of flexibility if you choose to change that direction. Now, some people might say, listen, multi-cloud is who cares about that. But I think increasingly we're hearing from customers a desire to have more than just one cloud for a variety of reasons. They want to have options, portability, flexibility, negotiating price in addition to their private cloud. So it's a two plus one.

Sometimes it might be a two plus two, meaning it's a private cloud and the edge cloud. And I think VMware is a tremendous proposition to be that Switzerland-type company that's relevant in a private cloud, one or two public clouds, and an edge cloud environment, Corey. Are you seeing folks having individual workloads that they want to flow from one cloud to another in a seamless

way? Or is it more aligned along an approach of having workload A lives in this cloud and workload B lives in this cloud? You're in a terrific position to opine on that more than most, given who you are. Yeah, we're not yet as yet seeing kind of these floating workloads that start here and move around. That's when usually you build a application with purpose, like it sits here in this cloud and of course, but we're seeing increasingly interest at customers not tethering it to proprietary services only. I mean, certainly if you're going to optimize it for AWS,

you're going to take advantage of EC2 S3 and then many of the kind of very capable server, Aurora, others that might be there. But over time, especially the open source movement that brings out open source data services, open source tooling, containers, all of that stuff, give ultimately customers the hope that certainly they should add economic value

and developer productivity value, but they should also create some potential portability so that if in the future you wanted to make a change, you're not bound to that cloud platform. And a particular cloud may not like us saying this, but that's just the fact of how CIOs today are starting to think much more so as they bathe these up and as many of the other public clouds start to climb in functionality. Now, there are other use cases where particular SaaS applications or SaaS services are optimized for a particular life.

For example, Office 365, someone's using a collaboration app. Typically, there's choices of one or two. You're either using a G Suite and then it's tied to Google or it's Office 365. But even there, we're starting to see some nibbling around the edges. Just the phenomenon of Zoom, that wasn't a capability that Microsoft brought very, and the services from Google or Amazon or Microsoft were just not as good as Zoom. And Zoom just took off and has become

the leading video collaboration platform because they're just simple, easy to use and delightful. It doesn't matter what infrastructure they run on, whether it's AWS, I mean, now they're running some of their workloads on Oracle, who cares? It's a SaaS service. So I think increasingly, I think there will be a propensity towards SaaS applications over custom building.

If I can buy, why would I want to build a video collaboration app myself internally if I can buy it as a SaaS service from Zoom or whoever have you? Oh, building it yourself would be ludicrous unless that was one of your core competencies. And Zoom seems to have that on lock. Right. And so similarly, to the extent that I think IT folks can buy applications that are more SaaS than custom built or even on-prem, I mean, Salesforce, the success of Salesforce and Workday and Adobe, and then of course, the smaller ones like Zoom and Slack and so on,

clear evidence that the world is going to move towards SaaS applications. But where you have to custom build an application because it's very unique to your business or to something you need to very snap quickly, I think there's going to be increasingly a propensity towards using open source types of tooling or open source platforms, Kubernetes being the best example of that, that then have some multi-cloud characteristics. In a similar note, and I know that the term is apparently, at least this week on Twitter, being argued against, but what about cloud repatriation? A lot of noise has been made about people moving workloads from public cloud back to

private cloud. And the example they always give is Dropbox moving its centralized storage service into an on-prem environment. And the second example is basically a pile of tumbleweeds because people don't really have anything concrete to point at does that align with your experience is there a i guess a hidden wave of people doing a reverse cloud migration that just doesn't get discussed i think there's a couple of phenomenal stories that we watch clearly a company of the scale of dropbox has economics on data and storage and i've talked to Drew and a variety of the folks there, as well as Box, on how they think about this.

Because at their scale, they probably could get some advantages that I'm sure they've thought through in both the engineering and the cost. I mean, there's both engineering optimization and cost that I'm sure Drew and the folks there are thinking through. But there's a couple of phenomena that we do. I mean, if you go back to, I think, maybe three or four quarters ago, Brian Monaghan, who's CEO of Bank of America, I think in 2019, mid to late 2019, made a statement in his earnings call.

He was asked, like, how do you think about cloud? And he said, listen, I can run a private cloud cheaper and better than any of the public clouds. And I saved $2 billion and 40%. If I remember the data right now, his private cloud and Bank of America is a key customer that drives the run of us. We find that some of the bigger companies at scale are able to either get hardware at really good pricing, are able to engineer because they have hundreds of thousands.

They're almost mini VMware businesses themselves because they've got so many engineers. They can do certain things that a company that doesn't want to hire those many companies, Pinterest or Airbnb, may not do. So there are customers who are going to basically say, even prior to repatriation, that the best opportunity is a private cloud. And in that place, we have to work with our private cloud partners,

whether it's Dell or others, to make sure that that stack of hardware from them, plus the software, VMware, and the containers on top of that is as competitive, is best cost of ownership, best ROI. Now, when you get to your second, your question around repatriation, what we have found in certain regions outside the US

because of sovereign data, sovereign cloud, sometimes some distress of some of those countries of big US public cloud, they're worried about them getting too big, fear about monopoly, all those types of things lead certain countries outside the U.S. to think about something that they would need that's sovereign to their country. And the idea of sovereign data and sovereign clouds does lead those to then investing in local cloud providers.

I mean, for example, in France, there is a provider called OVH that's kind of trying to do some of that. In China, there's a whole bunch of them, obviously, Alibaba being the biggest. And I think that that's going to continue to be a phenomenon where there's a federated set VMware cloud provider program, where there's 4,000 cloud providers, Corey, who built their stack on VMware. We've got to feed them. Now, while they are in individual revenue, way small in the public cloud squares,

but collectively, they represent a significant mass of where those countries want to run in a public cloud squares, but collectively, they represent a significant mass of where those countries want to run in a local cloud provider. And from our perspective, we spent years and years enabling that group to be successful. We don't see any decline. In fact, that business for us has been growing. I would have thought that business would just completely decline with the hyperscalers. If anything, they've grown. So there's a little bit of the rising tide is helping all boats rise, so to speak. And the hyperscalers growth has also relied on many of these sort of sovereign clouds.

So there's repatriation happening. I think those sovereign clouds will benefit some. And it could also be in some cases where customers will invest appropriately in private cloud. But I don't see that. I think, if anything, it's going to be the public cloud growing, the private cloud and edge cloud growing, and then some of these sort of country-specific sovereign clouds also growing. I don't see this being a huge threat to the public cloud phenomenon that we're in. This episode is sponsored in part by our friends at Lumigo. If you've built anything from serverless, you know that if there's one thing that can be said universally about these applications, it's that it turns every outage into a murder mystery. Lumigo helps make sense of all of the various functions that wind up tying together to build applications.

It offers one-click distributed tracing so you can effortlessly find and fix issues in your serverless and microservices environment. You've created more problems for yourself. Make one of them go away. To learn more, visit Lumigo.io. I want to be very clear. I think that there's a common misconception that there's this somehow ongoing fight between all the cloud providers and all this cloud growth and all this revenue is coming at the expense of other cloud providers. I think that it is simultaneously workloads that are being migrated from on-premises environments, yes, but a lot of it also feels like it's net new. It's not just about increasingly capturing ever larger portions of the market, but rather

about the market itself expanding geometrically. For a long time, it felt like that was what tech was doing. Looking at the global IT spend numbers coming out of Gartner and other places, it seems like it's certainly not slowing down. Does that align with your perception of it? Or are there clear winners and losers that are, I guess, differentiating out? I think, Corey, you're right. I think if you just use some of the data, the entire IT market, let's just say it's about 1 trillion. Some estimates have it higher than that. Let's break it down a little bit inside that 1 trillion market. It is growing. I mean, obviously, COVID and GDP decline last year in calendar 2020 did

affect overall IT. But I think let's assume that we have some kind of U-shape or other kind of recovery going into the second half of certainly into next year, technology should lead GDP in terms of its incline. But inside that trillion dollar market, if you add up the SaaS market, it's about $115 billion market. And these are companies like Salesforce and Adobe and Workday and ServiceNow, you add them all up and those are growing. I think the numbers were in the order of 15 or 20% in aggregate, but that SaaS market is no less. and that's growing certainly faster than the on-prem applications market just evidenced by the growth of that those companies relative to on-premise investments in sap or oracle and then if you look at the infrastructure market slightly bigger it's about 125 billion growing slightly faster 20 25 and there you have

the companies like aws azure and google and and Alibaba, and whoever have you. And certainly that growth is faster than some of the on-premise growth. But it's not like the on-premise folks are declining. They're growing at slower paces. It is harder to leave an on-premise environment running and rack up charges and blow out the bill that way. I mean, not impossible, I suppose, but it's harder to do than it is in public cloud. But I definitely agree that the growth rate surpasses what you would see if it were just people turning things on, forgetting to turn them off all the time. Yeah. And I think that that phenomenon certainly is a shift in spending where certainly last year we saw more spending in the cloud than on-premise. I think

the on-premise vendors have a tremendous opportunity in front of them, which is to optimize every last dollar that is going to be spent in the data center's private cloud. And, you know, between us and our partners like Dell and others, we've got to make sure we do that for our customer base that we've accumulated the last 10, 15 years. But there's also a significant investment now moving to the edge. When I look at retailers, CPG companies, consumer packaged goods companies, manufacturers, the conversation I'm having with their C-level tech or business executives is all about putting compute in the stores. I mean, listen, what is the retailer concerned about fraud and some of those other things and empowering a quick self-service experience for a consumer who comes in and wants to check

out of a Safeway or Walmart really quickly? These are just simple applications with local compute in the store. And the more that we can make that possible on top of almost like a nano data center or a micro data center running in the store with those applications resident there talking, you know, you can't just take all of that data, go back and forth to the cloud,

but with resident services and, you know, kind of capability right there, that's a beautiful opportunity for the VMWares and the Dells of the world. And that's going to be a significant place where I think you're going to see expansion of their focus. The edge market today is, I think, projected about $6 or $8 billion this year and growing to $25 billion in the next four or five years. So much smaller than the previous numbers I shared,

$125, $115 billion for SaaS and IaaS. But I think the opportunity there, especially these industries that are federated, CPG, consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, retail, and logistics too. FedEx made a big announcement with VMware and Dell a few months ago about how they're thinking about putting compute and local infrastructure at their distribution sites. I think this phenomenon, Corey, is going to happen in a number of different properties and is a tremendous opportunity. Certainly, the public cloud vendors are trying to do that with Outposts and Azure Stack, but I think it does favor the on-premise vendors also having a very strong proposition

for the edge cloud. I assume that the whole discussion with FedEx started by someone dramatically misunderstanding what it meant to ship code to production. I mean, listen, at the end of the day, all of these folks who are in traditional industries are trying to hire world-class developers like software companies because all of them are becoming software companies.

And I think the open source movement and all of these ways in which you have a software supply chain that's more modernized, it's affecting every company. So I think if you went into the engineering product teams of Rob Carter, who runs technology for FedEx, you'll find them, and they may not have all of the sophistication you guys have as a world-class software company, but they're getting increasingly very much digital in their focus of next generation. And the same thing with UPS. I was talking to the CEO of UPS. We had her come and speak at our kickoff. It's amazing how much her lingo, she was the former CFO of Home Depot. I felt like I was

talking to a software executive and this is the CEO of UPS, a logistics company. So I think increasingly every company is becoming a software company at their core. And you have, you don't need to necessarily know all the details of containers and virtualization, but you need to understand how software and digital transformation, how technology can power your digital transformation. One thing that I've noticed, the more I get to talk to people doing different things in different roles, was at first I was excited

because I'd get to talk to the people where they're really doing it right and everything's awesome. And I've increasingly of the opinion that those sites don't actually exist. Everyone talks about the great things that they're doing and aspirationally in certain areas in the terms of conference wear,

but you get down into the weeds and everyone views their environment as being a burning tire fire of sadness and regret. Everyone thinks other people are doing it way better than they are. And in some cases they're embarrassed about it. In some cases they're open about it. But I feel like we're still in the early days

where no one is doing things in the quote unquote, right ways, but everyone thinks everyone else is. Yeah, I think Corey, that's absolutely right. We are very much early days in all of this phenomenon. I mean, listen, even the public cloud, Andy himself would say it's, he wouldn't say it's quite day one, but he would say it's very early, even though they've had 15 years of incredible success in a $50 billion business. But I would agree. And when you look at the customers and the person, when I ask a CIO, what percentage of an established company, not one of the modern ones who have built all cloud native, but what percentage of your workloads are in a public cloud versus private cloud, the

vast majority is still in a data center or private cloud, but with the intent, if it's 90, 10, let's say 90 private 10 for for that to become 70-30, 50-50. But very rarely do I hear one of these large companies sort of say it's going to be 10-90 the opposite way in three, five years. Now, listen, I think every company as it grows that is more modern, I mean, the Zooms of the world, the Modernas, the Airbnbs, as they get bigger and bigger, they represent a completely new phenomenon of how they're building applications that are all cloud native. And the beautiful thing for me is just, you know, as a former engineer and a developer, I mean, I grew up writing code in C and C++ and then came BEA, WebLogic and IBM WebSphere

and J2E. And I was so excited for these frameworks. I'm not writing code, thankfully, anymore because it would create lots of problems if I did. But when I watch the phenomenon, I think to myself, man, if I was a 22-year-old entering the workforce now, it's one of the most exciting times to write code and be a developer, because what's available to you, both in the combination of these cloud frameworks and open source frameworks, is immense to be able to innovate much, much faster than we did 25, 30 years

ago when I was a developer. It's amazing. There's the pace of innovation. If cloud has changed nothing else, from my perspective, it's been the idea that you can provision things without these hefty waiting periods. But I want to shift gears slightly because we've been talking about cloud for a bit in the context of infrastructure and containers and the rest. But if we start moving up the stack a little bit, that's also considered cloud, which just seems to have that naming problem of namespace collision, just to confuse folks.

But VMware is also active in this space too. You've got things like Workspace ONE. You've got a bunch of other endpoint options as well that are focused on the security space. Is that aligned? Is that just sort of a different business unit? How does that, I guess, resonate between the various things that you folks do? Because it turns out you're kind of a big company

and it's difficult to keep it all straight from an external perspective. Well, I think, listen, we're, you know, roughly a little less than $12 billion in revenue last year. You can think of us in sort of two buckets. Everything is the first bucket is all that we talked about. Think of that as modernization of applications and cloud infrastructure, or what people might think about PaaS and IaaS without the underlying hardware. We're not trying to build servers and storage and networking at the hardware level, you know, so-and-so, but the software layers, but that's the first conversation we had for the last, you know, 15, 20 minutes. The second part of our business is where we're touching end users and infrastructure and securing it.

And we think that that's an important part because that also is something through software and the cloud could be optimized. And we've had a long standing digital workspace. In fact, when I came to VMware, it was the first business I was running in terms of all the products and end user computing. And our thesis was many of the current tools, you know, whether it's the virtual desktop technology that people have from existing vendors, or even today, the security tools that they use, is just too cumbersome.

It's too heavy. In many cases, people complain about the number of agents they have on their laptops or the way in which they secure firewalls. It's too expensive and too many. And we felt we could radically, VMware gets involved in problems where we can radically simplify things with some disruptive innovation. And the idea was, first in the digital workspace, was to radically reduce cost with software that was built for the cloud. And Workspace ONE and all of those things radically reduce the need for disparate technologies for virtual desktops, identity management, and endpoint management. And we've done very well in that. We're a leader in that segment, If you look at any of the analysts,

you know, ratings, whether it's Gartner or others. But security has been a more recent phenomenon where we felt like, you know, it leads us very quickly into securing those laptops because on those same laptops, you have antivirus, you have a variety of tools. And on the average, the CISOs, chief security officers tell me,

they have way too many agents, way too many consoles, way too many consoles, way too many alerts. And if we could reduce that and have a single agent on a laptop, or maybe even agentless technology that's secure with this, that's the new round. And if you look at some of the recent things that have happened with it, SolarWinds or Petra, WannaCry in the past, you know, security is a top concern, Corey, to boards. And the more that we could do to clean that up, I think we can emerge, which we're already starting to as a cybersecurity layer.

So that's a smaller part of our business, but I mean, it's multi-billion now. And we think it's a tremendous opportunity for us to take what we're doing in workspace and security and make that a growth vector. So I think both of these core areas, the cloud infrastructure and modern applications, topic number one, workspace and security topic number two, are both tremendous opportunities for VMware and our journey to grow from a $12 billion company to one day, hopefully a $20 billion company. Would that we all had such problems on some level. It's really interesting seeing the evolution of companies going from relatively small companies

of humble beginnings to these giant, I guess I want to use the term colossus, but I'm not sure if that's insulting or not. It's phenomenal just to see the different areas of business that VMware has expanded into. I mean, I've had other folks from your org talking about what a Tanzu is or might be. So we aren't even going to go down that rabbit hole due to time constraints at this point. But one thing that I do want to get into slightly has been a recurring theme of the show, which is where does the next generation of leaders come from where do the next generation of engineers come from and you've been devoting a bit of time to this i think i saw one of your youtube videos somewhat recently about your leadership values

talk to me a little bit about that yeah corey listen i'm glad that we're kind of you know closing out this on some of the soft topics because I love talking to you or other talented analysts and thought leaders around technology. It's my roots. I'm a technical person at heart. I love technology. But, you know, I think the soft stuff is often the hard stuff and the hard stuff is often the soft stuff. And what I mean by that is when all this peels away, you know, your lasting legacy at a company are the people you invest in, the character you build. And, you know, I mean, as an immigrant who came to this country when I was 18 years old, $50 in my pocket. I was very fortunate to have a scholarship to go to a really nice university, Dartmouth, course to study computer science.

I mean, I grew up in India and if it wasn't for the opportunity to come here on a scholarship, you know, I wouldn't have been. So everything I consider a blessing and a learning opportunity where I'm looking at the advent of life as a growth mindset. What can I learn, right? And we all need to cultivate more and more aspects of that growth mindset where we move from being sort of know-it-alls to learn-it-alls. And one of the key things that I talk about, and all of you listeners on this, listening to this,

are welcome to go to YouTube and search Sanjay Poonen Leadership. There's a 10-minute video. I'll pick one of them. Most often, you know, as we get higher and higher in an organization, leaders tend to view things as a pyramid. And they're kind of like this chief bird sitting at the top of the pyramid, and all these birds that are looking below them on branches are looking up, and all they see is crap falling downhill, literally. That's what happens when you look at the bird up. And our job as leaders is to invert that pyramid and to actually think about

the person who is on the front lines. In a software company, it's an engineer and a sales rep. They are the folks who are on the front line. They're writing code or selling code. They are the true people who are making things happen. And when we as leaders look at ourselves as the bottom of the pyramid, some people call that servant leadership, whatever way you call it, the phrase isn't the point. The point is to invert that pyramid and to take obstacles out of people from the front line. You really become not interested as much around what your own personal well-being is about, ensuring that those people in the middle layers and certainly at the leaf levels of the organization are enormously successful. Their success becomes your joy and it becomes almost like a parent, right?

You know, Corey, you have kids, I've got kids. Imagine if you're a parent and you were jealous of your kid's success. I mean, I want my three children, my daughter, my two children to do better than me, running races or whatever it is that they do. And I think as a leader, the more that we celebrate the successes of our teams and people and our lasting legacy is not our own success. It's what we have left behind other people. I say often there's no success without successors. So that mindset takes a lot of work because the natural tendency of the human mind and the human behavior is to be selfish and to think about ourselves. It's a natural phenomenon.

We're born that way. We live and act that way. But the more that we start to kind of create that, then taking that not just to our team, but also to the community allows us to build a better society. And that's something I'm deeply passionate about. Try to do my small piece for it. In fact, I'm sometimes more excited about these topics of leadership than even technology. It feels like it's the stuff that lasts. It has staying power. I can record a video now about technology choices and how to work with those

technologies. And unless it's about Git, it's probably not going to be too relevant in 10 years. But leadership's one of those eternal things where it's once you've experienced a certain level of success, you can really see what people do with that. The people that I like to surround myself with generally make it a point to send the elevator back down, so to speak. I agree, Corey. I'm glad that you do it. I'm always looking for people that I can learn from, and it doesn't matter where they are in society. I mean, I think you often, I mean, this is classic Dale Carnegie, one of the books that my dad gave to me at a young age that I encourage everyone to read, How to Win Friends and Influence People. Talked about, you know, how you can detect a person's character based on the way they treat the receptionist or their assistants, the people who might be lower down the totem pole from them.

And most often you have people who kiss up and kick down. And I think when you build an organization that that's typical, where a lot of companies are built that way, where they kiss up and kick down, you actually have an inverted sense of values. And I think you have to kind of go back to some of those old school ways that Dale Carnegie or Stephen Covey talked about, because you don't have to build a culture that's obnoxious. You can build a company that's both nice and competitive. It doesn't mean that anything we've talked about, Corey, the last few minutes means that I'm any less competitive and I don't want to beat the competition and win a deal, but you can do it nicely. And even that's something

that I've had to grow in. So I think when we all look at ourselves as sculptures, work in progress, you know, and we're perfecting our craft so to speak both on the technical front and the product front and our customer relationship but then also on the leadership and the personal growth front we actually become both better people and then we also build better companies and sometimes that's really all that we can ask for if people want to learn more about what you have to say and get your opinion on these things where can they find you listen I'm very approachable you can follow me on twitter i'm on linkedin pretty anything or my email s500vmware.com i'm i'm out there i read voraciously i'm probably not as responsive

sometimes only but i try to certainly customers will hear from me within 24 hours because i try to be very responsive to our customers but you But you can connect with me on social media and I'm honored to be on your show, Corey. I've been reading your stuff since it first came out and been obviously a fan of the way you're thinking about things. Sometimes I feel I need to correct your opinion and some of that we did today, but you've been- Oh, I would agree.

I come out of this conversation with a different view of VMware than I went into it with. I'm being fully transparent on that. And you've helped us, I mean, quite frankly, your blogs and your focus on this and like, is the V in VMware like a bad word? Is it legacy? It's forced us to think. So I think, you know, it's iron sharpens iron. I'm really delighted that we connected. I don't know if it was a year ago or two years ago. And I've been a fan. I watch the stuff that you do at reInvent. So keep going with what you're doing. I think all of what you write and what you talk about is hopefully making an impact on people who read and listen

and, you know, look forward to continuing this dialogue, not just with me, but I think you're talking to other people at VMware in the future. I'm not the smartest person at VMware, but I'm very fortunate to be surrounded by many of them. So hopefully you get to talk to them also in the near future. And of course, we'll put links to all that in the show notes. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Corey, and all the best to you and your organization. Sanjay Poonen, Chief Operating Officer of VMware.

I'm cloud economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice. Whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a condescending comment telling me that in fact it is a best practice to ship your code to production via FedEx. If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need the Duck Bill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duck Bill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.

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