Well here we are at Dell EMC World. Now, I always think that our own conference is named pretty well, but this one, got a good name going for it. Very, very, how do you say that in French? Portman 2? That's right. It's an amalgamation. Let's make it really clear about what this is about. And we have graciously been given a press room. We're like in the big leagues now. I know. We've got a whole little room that's got a big TV in it. Do you spend a lot of time in rooms like this? Not if I have a choice, but I mean these sort of pop-up conference rooms really. And I feel like I'm in prison. That's good. Exactly. So this is like the last day. We've been here three days now. I think yesterday was our busiest day. We had a presentation. We were on a live thing with the guy with red shoes. He had two red shoes, not just one. So that checks out. And I think I was on the Cube. That was fun. I don't know. What do you think of this thing? We spent a lot of time discussing since we were going to be presenting like who's going to be in the room. Do you think we had a good characterization of it? I think we nailed it in terms of who actually attends this conference. And again, it's bigger than I thought. It's my first Dell EMC world. I guess it's the first one, period, since there never was a Dell EMC world before. But I think like 8,000 people at this bad boy. In our session. Yeah, in our session alone, it was like 79, 950. But no, look, it's a more business-oriented crowd. This is not where hackers and developers are spending their days. I think it's a little more ops-focused, more sport coat-focused. But at the same time, we had the nice crowd in our own group. And it seems like folks are definitely hungry for what we're doing as there were lots of unconscious head nods as you were delivering talks about transformation. Yeah. I mean, we gave the standard like how to do software better. And you had a great demo of a config server and just getting it up and running in PCF or Pivotal Cloud Foundry, as people like to say. And yeah, I think there were some people who like they left early from the session because they wanted to get to other things. But pretty much there was people nodding along.
2:00There was one person I was watching who rolled his eyes every now and then. But I think he was a good barometer of like, this is the marketing nonsense that, you know, everyone says that needs to be backed up. So that's comforting, at least. Yeah, that was a pivotal person. No, I'm just kidding. No, but for the most part, as you drop some of your standard lines about, you know, the need for, well, first of all, are you able to deliver every week? Right. Everyone's eyes drop because no one wants to make eye contact with you when you ask that question. Because no one in that room particularly, in most rooms, is able to say that their software is set up and their delivery process is set up to ship weekly. And you're telling people they need to be able to. And then you say, are you? And it's like, sigh. Like, no, I don't know. So, I mean, I think that's good for these rooms that, you know, we even heard before we went on the interview with the Red Shoes guy that he said, hey, can you guys be a little more, I don't know, realistic about some of the concerns? Because sometimes these chats are very much like, hey, everything's awesome. Microservices, DevOps, Cloud, everybody's doing it, you know, jump up in the air. And I think that we also hit that point pretty well in our talk. And I think people just want to hear that. Yeah, yeah. A, this isn't super easy. And B, not everyone's done yet and you're not way behind. Like, catch up or get moving. Right. But you're not like 10 years behind your peers. Yeah, there was a panel I went to that James Watters was on, our very own James Watters. And I think they also had the, let's see if I remember, they had Chris Wolf from VMware, who is, I don't know if he's the CTO or one of the CTOs or a CTO of something, but he's, you know, speaks authoritatively on stuff. And then there was, there was, I guess, the technical person from Virtustream was there. And then they had someone, he was from Canada? Like, some university or big institution in Canada. I feel like it was maybe Saskatchewan, but maybe I just like saying that word. Sure. And then, and then who am I missing? There was, there was the, a Dell EMC person as well. And
4:00yeah, it was, it was interesting. You know, the whole topic was about cloud trends, but it was, you know, I came, I've been to like three Dell worlds, I think. And when I was, the first few times I worked at Dell and I worked on cloud strategy. So I sort of knew what the strategy was. And, and it's, it's interesting that the, the sort of overall, at least represented by that panel speaking point of what cloud strategy is, was actually about applications and like managing your applications and doing things with it. You know, I guess on the Virtustream side, it's, it's a lot of what they do is, you know, managing your ERP applications and things like that. And then all the way to the, the pivotal side is like managing the applications you write yourself. But I don't know. I think that's great. That's what I'm, I'm like, I'm like even more biased now that I work at pivotal, but even when I was an analyst, I was biased because I used to be a developer, but that's what I would always try to walk people to is like storage is great. This other thing is, is fantastic, but really like applications are, are what, what you want to focus on for this aside from SAS, right? Like SAS is itself an application, but not one that you, uh, you sort of like we're finally in sync from a technology. And then whatever the heck you want to call it the business, which I hate that designation. Yeah. Yeah. All the freaking business. Yeah. Is HR the business? No, it's HR. Nonetheless, technology and non-technology teams are finally on the same page. I think cause you're talking about apps, you're talking about that thing that they use or they want to give to their customers or what have you. No one cares if you have a great VPN story like that just doesn't, it's, it's important. Did you say a great VPN story? Yeah. That's, you know, I started using that cloak VPN. Have you ever used that? It's, it's, it's just, it's, uh, it's actually interestingly, uh, I, I realized I interrupted your train of thought there, but, uh, the, uh, they were purchased. Remember that security company that came out of stealth all of a sudden and had already like several hundred million in funding. And it was headed by the, one of the former founders of a soft layer stack path. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and they, they, they had that in that same announcements announced that they had bought
6:00cloak, but anyways, uh, and, and it's a fast, I bring it up because I think it kind of aligns with what we're, uh, the, uh, the forest were wangling around here is it's that app that you install on your phone and also on your desktop. And it just automatically like gives you a VPN, of course, to their centralized things. So you have to trust them, but it's sort of like having configured and used corporate VPNs for many years. It's just like, it like truly is seamless. Like it just works. Yeah. And those things don't matter. It's just I want it to be so almost non, it's not even a talking point. And exactly. I mean, that's what I'm kind of like, like, uh, sauntering towards is like, I think, I think a lot of that stuff, it used to be necessary and difficult and therefore tedious and costly. Whereas now like with cloak, again, there's this whole thing of like, Oh, you've got to trust their data center. Cause if you know how VPN works, but whatever, just assume that you could route it through your own thing or, or you trusted them. Like, it's just like, it's easy. It's like a commodity to some extent. And I think, I think what that does, and I forget who I was discussing this with here. Maybe, maybe it was you, but like, uh, that basically, Oh, it was Peter Christie from an analyst at four or five one. Like there's all this resource, resources that you free up in corporate it to like, I guess you could get rid of them. That's always a, uh, uh, a favorite choice of some people, or you can allocate them to do more valuable things. And, and like, I don't know your VPN things, an example, right? Like, do you really need an extensive VPN team or do I need to sell that to the head of marketing? Like I hope not, like I'm not doing things right. If I'm talking to them about Dell servers, EMC storage, or even, you know, any of these components, they're super important. Like you can't function without these things, but that should not be something that goes to a board meeting and says, look, we're going to switch storage providers. Like, Oh my gosh, what that that's not differentiating my business at this point. So I just like that. We're talking at the app layer because apps are what matter. Data is what matters. You know, AI matters, machine learning, all these
8:02things that are trying to make me better at business through technology. And none of those things sit below what we call the value line. Yeah. And on that note, I mean, this reminds me of two things. One, I was on a, uh, a panel a long time ago. One of these like, you know, let's get together a bunch of, uh, they weren't attractive looking because I was there, but you know, let's get together a bunch of it people and record them talking about how cool it is. And I was sitting next to the, uh, the Safeway CIO and he was saying like, I don't want to build another data center ever. Right. He's, and then he told this, this great story of like, well, everything was cool. And then one of the AC units broke down and then it leaked. And that's like, that's not a good scene. And, and, and, and then so there's that. And then I was just talking with a, uh, uh, a pretty senior executive at a, at a very large company here this week who was saying, um, yeah, I've got this huge data center of storage that I don't really need anymore. Like I need some, I need to do something with it. And it, and it is like, I think you hear more and more of those stories of, and it's not so much like this used to be posed as a, I would, I would nuancedly phrase it as I, as is taking over private data centers. It's more of, I think what we're talking about where, well, the way you solve that problem is not a big deal anymore. Like you don't need to nurture and run it on your own. It's taken care of whether it's VPN or, you know, storage, just generic storage and all these things. I think that's one reason why I don't like the sticker t-shirt picture I keep seeing of people who say like cloud is just someone else's computer. Har, har, har. For me, I think that's dumb because it's not just someone else's computer. It's a different way of computing. And so it's not just, I literally picked up my server and now it's an Amazon. It's now I treat servers as this sort of disposable thing that I get anytime, anywhere, and everything else is taken care of. So it's not someone else's computer. It's an entirely different thing. And so again, I think that's what is interesting here. You mentioned the point of, you know, what happens to people who get displaced as these things become more commodity. Look, we have, you know, I'm working on a number of these case studies with Pivotal around replatforming. And sure, when people
10:03can say, look, I can turn off a bunch of machines because now I just have a smart Pivotal Cloud Foundry fabric on top. Like that's really gets rid of technical debt. Now people can actually go and spend their time automating stuff because we had no time for our ops people to automate a freaking thing because all they're doing is, you know, upgrading databases and patching servers and all the stuff that is not fun for almost anybody. So it's nice that if you can, you're not looking to just lay people off. Instead, take these people who are probably talented sysadmins and get them to automate your whole pipeline because now they have cycles. Yeah. I mean, to use like one wacky analogy, like, like, and it gets a little flawed because the robots is always, you remember that we were at some conference we had and we had the robot guy come and talk and he was just like, good luck not having a job. I remember that it was Cloud Foundry Summit. Yeah. At Santa Clara, I was, I was terrified about robots. But, but like, it's almost like, and again, it's fraught because cars are always the issue, but it seems like if you're a combustion engine car person and you're like, this Tesla people is going to take over and it's going to be terrible. You're like, no, no. Like what happens is like, and then that, those cars have to take over all the current market for cars. So like, we need to redo that. It's almost like if you were in the dirt road business and you're like these asphalt road business people, they're going to displace me. It's like, no, they need to replace every single dirt road with an asphalt one. And then like that analogy breaks down because there's a bunch of efficiencies in, in cloud. But there is, I mean, to your point, I mean, making it very pivotal centric, as I always like to joke, like if you look at the, if you look at the trajectory of customers that we have, and then the work that will be required to basically move all of their, their own software to running on our platform and to modernize it, it's sort of like, if anything, we at Pivotal are going to need a lot of people. So you should call us up. We need really, we need experienced ops people who know how to do all of that stuff. And I think, you know, not conversely, but additionally, all those companies who want to move their stuff over, like they're going to need operations people who help out with all of that. So it is, it is like the classic thing of like, well, you're going to have to do some new
12:04things, but the value is going to be there. I mean, we just, yeah, the domain knowledge I think is the same. It's like, there's still networking, there's still compute, there's still storage, there's still this, like how all that stuff fits together is different. There's just different stuff you have to type. And you may be coalescing around an actual business function versus like, hey, I just run ops. Like, hey, maybe now I run my service. And now I run a service that, you know, just looked at a case study last night where one of our customers is, could have changed a 5 million line monolith that's responsible for a billion dollars a year of revenue to the company. And they're going to replatform all that to PCF. And everybody on the team is super excited because they built this cross-functional team and they're going to build something that matters. Like this is happening. I think that's what's exciting is they're not trying to figure out how to build a new platform. And that's what comes up in these conferences too is, hey, we just got Kubernetes on Photon. Like that's cool. At some point, it's still about, am I building platforms or am I getting to work adding value? And I think for a lot of teams, it's, look, I just want to build apps that add value or replatform them. I don't want to build the platform because there's still hopefully 1% of companies in the world that need to build a platform. The rest of them should be able to buy something and then add cool stuff on top. So usually we have a little bit of news, but we've been so dedicated to our work here at the conference, making slides in hotel rooms, eating eggs, all of that stuff. But we do have, we did have one thing and I bet you're, you're in, in your role as, as, as not being a, whatever it is I am in bon, bon, vivant or something. Is that a word or phrase? I guess it would be technically. So we, we announced that we were available on Google cloud now. So what are the, what are the, what are the details of that? Yeah, we did a couple of things. And by we, I mean, pivotal cloud foundry, you and me had a, we've been heads down getting PCF on. We're actually standing on top of the Google cloud. No, I mean, it's, it's a huge story. And this is a terribly kept secret because we've talked about them, you know, SpringOne platform. They were on stage with us saying this stuff is coming. And so we've talked about this. This isn't like a ta-da moment, but this was a, you know, big story. Got a good writeup in fortune, Google blog, our blog. And basically
14:05what it's about is pivotal cloud foundry, now turnkey installation and management on GCP. So Google cloud platform has a really, really clear value prop. I mean, they're, if they were a telco, they'd be the third largest in the world. Their network's amazing. Their services are really interesting and they've integrated a bunch of those into PCF. So if you want to call their machine learning API, which we were demonstrating on stage today at a conference, you know, if you want to consume their big query, which does crazy performance for storage, you know, they have a number of, I think we did half a dozen services that integrate in. So, you know, if you're looking for a really innovative, high performing cloud platform, GCP is pretty awesome. You know, Home Depot is the one that has worked with us and has this up and running. You know, it's a great choice. And you have other reasons to choose Azure, AWS, OpenStack, whatever. But GCP is doing cool stuff. Heck, PCF, Pivotal themselves. We announced that we're going to be moving a lot of our Pivotal Web services onto GCP. Yeah. It's a performance and cost and what have you. Yeah. I think you must have been the one telling me, but there's essentially like when we were running the tests, running, it was some crazy order of magnitude of cost savings because, because it's, I guess one of the features that GCP, that Google Cloud has is they're really good at figuring out you don't need all this space. Like someone was telling me that like when you, when you run your processing on their cloud at the end of the month, they figure out like, oh, they'll, they downgrade you. You only consumed X. Right, right. And so like if you, if you overbuy, they actually return money to you or something like that, which, which what a kooky idea. We're going to spend half of what we spend on AWS. Yeah. And we're talking millions of dollars. So, and that is because of things like that. There's things like they've, you know, if you use a machine for so long, they'll immediately give you the kind of long use credit versus Amazon reserved instances and kind of lock you in for three years and you hope you guessed right on what you needed to use. Yeah. So just a lot of really innovative things, per minute billing. So even as you're standing up environments and maybe short lived test environments, whatever, we're getting some good stuff there. So just, it's a cool platform. We're happy to partner with them. We love all
16:07of our cloud IaaS partners. I think for us, you know, again, if you can implement 15 APIs, we can run on top of your IaaS. Right, right, right. And so I would just prefer that customers make this now a business decision versus purely a technical one. You could say, you know what, what's the best thing for our business to run geography-wise, partnership-wise, and let's pick that cloud versus necessarily, well, who has the best, you know, blockstores. And then we've like, I know we run on these, but we have this similar GA situation with Azure and AWS, right? Absolutely. I mean, it's fully, of course, on AWS. And so, you know, another thing that I think about maybe a year or sometime a year and a half ago, like we sort of, we in the marketing, speaking to people organization, we're sorting out what multi-cloud means and the value proposition of that. And I think at the time it was more about, not to demean this, but it was about half of what it means now, which is you can run it anywhere, right? Like multi-cloud where cloud is like a server. And you were just, you bumped up against something that I think is an intriguing addition to that, which is multi-cloud as in the middleware of the services that you can use, right? So like you were saying, you could use what's Amazon's Redshift, I forget, or it's Cogito or Cortisone or something that Azure has. Like they have one that starts with a C and then Google has their own, like, where Google, they should just call everything it's Google. Right. But each of them has their own sort of like data processing thing and variations on that in other services. And I think that's another intriguing angle is, you know, it gets a little more tricky if you're using a cloud proprietary service, but at least it sort of like allows you to use that, right? And it also means that you have the flexibility to use lots of them. Like you could, you're not locked into one of those bundles of services. You could potentially be using the same programming model. This is kind of like the Java and the .NET dream, like the same programming model on different, the analogies break down, but on different clouds that therefore give you different types of middleware. No, but then even, I mean, I can use the GCP service broker while running this on vSphere
18:09on premises. Like nothing means I have to be running a GCP. Right, right, that's true. If I'm doing a crazy data intensive latency service, I would be dumb to do that. But calling a machine learning API that maybe it's okay if it has a hundred milliseconds of latency to reach out to Google, maybe that's cool because that's an awesome service. So even then I could be running the best services in every place, but using the same platform. I think that gets to a really cool multi-cloud vision. Plus this week we announced and we shipped Spring Cloud Services Eureka that does cross-site service registry integration. So what that means is service registry sitting on-prem, service registry sitting in Azure, Google Compute. Those two will talk to each other so that wherever I am, my services can say, where's my service that does X? And it will give me a copy of it. Like that's really cool. That's multi-cloud software. Yeah, we're going to need to get a SOA Rosetta Stone at some point so that when we go talk with people, we can be like, this is like this, right? Because I mean, it's, you know, it's very similar. The, let's call it the 10 minute explanation of each thing is basically the same shape, right? Where you've got certain, you've got these things that I'm gesticulating in the air here. You've got these two things that are talking with each other. So there's a thing, a thing, a pipe. And in order to do that, they need a registry to look up each other and to do this. And then you've got to moderate that. I mean, it's all sort of distributed computing. And I can see that over the next, I mean, I'm sure it happens now, but over the next year or so, like having that Rosetta Stone will be... It's going to be huge. I don't know if you still get a real phone book anymore. Do you get one at home? You know, I think someone sends one to me and I just put it straight in the recycling bin. Yeah, you just have a sign on recycled input phone books here. Yeah, that's right. But I mean, that's, I mean, that's what a service registry is, is phone books. I mean, the idea almost would be, I almost wish if for some reason I wanted to call a florist in Seattle while I'm here in Austin, is if everyone got a copy of the same phone book. Now, logistically, that makes no sense. But the idea is like, you know, with a service registry like this is I want to know where my services are. I don't care where my application is sitting. And that sort of model, as we do more of these cross cloud integration services, again, for me, that's exciting multi-cloud, not fake hybrid cloud single pane of glass stuff.
20:10Yeah. I think this is about focusing again on the apps and making sure that they run awesome wherever they are. Yeah, yeah. All right. So, so last topic before we wrap up. Yeah. Like, so I have, I have been like waiting as I gallivant around for someone to ask me like what the big grand vision of like Dell and EMC and Pivotal is. And no one's actually asked me, which is exciting. So, so now I will, I'm asking myself and you and like, I have to admit, I haven't watched all of the keynotes and stuff in detail like I usually do, like a responsible little boy. But yeah, you know, I, I, I was debriefed in a kind of ironic turn, I guess, by some analyst friends of mine who are talking about it. And I think to, they of course put it in their cynical analyst way because that's what you do, but to like make it in a more, uh, less cynical way. Like it seems like, uh, essentially, I mean, we're basically part of one of the biggest behemoths in the tech world now. And I think, I think the, the, the play there is like, as, as you know, a lot of these things we're talking about causes consolidation of things that were previously, uh, not as efficient as they are now. And, and so as this consolidation happens, like, and I think this is true of markets that like the bigger a vendor is, the more successful they generally are at getting market share and therefore thriving and surviving in that environment. And I think, I mean, tell me if, if, if this seems wrong, but I think the, the, the position of pivotal and all that is the same position we pretty much always had, which is, well, you've got to come up with new things, right? Like you need to come up with the products of, of tomorrow and the next day and next week. And I think, I think if you look at, even though Bumi is an older thing, Bumi and us are a similar asset in this, um, Dell technologies of like, these are the newer ways of doing things that will be the, as they would say, the growth business. And so, I mean, I think to, I mean, I don't know, everything seems to fit together in that way. Now that's a whole sort of inward looking company thing. Sure. Like looking at it from a product perspective, I think it is like, if you have an IT department, you have an IT department
22:14that runs all this stuff and you're going to have that and keep running it. And we'll update that, you know, there's networking and various storage things. And then also when you're interested in building out new IT or modernizing the IT you have, you might be interested in what pivotal does for all the reasons we just talked about. And I don't know, that's what I've sussed out. That's your Dell take. That's right. Yeah. I mean, whatever strategically aligned business really is, I guess I refer to my kids as that too now. It's kind of cool, but I'll have to start thinking about how to portfolio manage my family and be like, nope, you're cut. No, my, you know, my dog is maybe strategically aligned, but your IRR is not panning out. Dell's a great investor. So is GE. So is Microsoft. So is Ford. Right. And so we're part of a really cool family here at Dell. We're also extremely independent in what we do. You know, there to the point, maybe you were touching on for a second there, the sort of consolidation thing. There's no looking at, well, Pivotal's got HR and so does Dell. Let's just have one HR. Like we're an independent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We got that email a little while ago. Yeah. I mean, our email addresses didn't change. Everything functions. We're an independent company that does our own thing. But again, the Dell synergy is awesome. We have all these Dell people who from the first day at the booth. Apparently most of it was Dell people coming up going, it's a story with you guys because we were supposed to be selling you now, which is awesome that we're going into major accounts with Dell reps and Dell teams and telling this really cool story together about Dell infrastructure, a platform that sits on top, integrated things like Boomi and Virtustream and whatever, that there's a cool story to tell. It's, it's not necessary to be all smashed together. If people want to buy independent components, there's no sort of converged requirement that all this thing is one stack, but we do have a nice integrated story, but also a really nice independent one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think having, having been here almost two years, it's, uh, and, and having worked in, in, in the federation of EMC, like it's pretty much a similar setup of just like collaborating about, about, uh, like you're saying basically as they would say, cross selling with each other, right. Which makes total sense. Right. And, or to put it, to put it in a, a extremely, uh, whatever centric way, helping our, our mutual customers be
24:16successful. Well, there's tons of overlap. Yeah. Yeah. Given the, the pivotal target customer base of who we have already and who we continue to aspire to, to work with that, I think it's a hundred percent overlap. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I think there's just a wider, a wider, uh, uh, what would you call it? A wider pipe to talk with the world through and vice versa. Right. So there should be like next week I, I, I have a, um, uh, Dell has like a, an EBC meeting up in Round Rock with just one of their customers and, and I'm going in to talk with him. And so it's a good like early example of like, well, there's more conversations to have and more things to do. Right. I mean, just like I was saying, if, if you sort of project out the, the next year or so for, uh, for pivotal things, if you kind of look at the customers we have and them actually going into production, like this would be like exciting or, or, you know, I mean, it'll work, I guess, but it'll be exciting to see like what they actually do. And it'll drive a, a lot of need to have people actually working on stuff. Yeah. And Dell's a customer themselves. We don't really have any outside venture funding at pivotal. We have customers who believe in us and invest in what we do. And Dell is one of those as well. And they're putting PCF in place. So it'll be fun for us to continue to be our own case study as it is a bigger company and see how that helps our customers. All right. Well, we'll be back, uh, next week, right? Yeah. Okay. For with that, with our regular format. I don't know if we have a guest lined up or not because I'm delinquent in scheduling something. I'll have to, maybe I'll rustle someone up or not, but as always, this has been Pivotal Conversations where you can find us at, uh, let's see, what is it? Pivotal.io slash podcast. Right. If you really are feeling sprightly, I think you can go to a pivotal.io slash pivotal hyphen conversations, but you know, do whatever you like. And of course, leaving reviews on iTunes. If you do leave a review in the next week, Coté will actually send you an autographed copy of his ebook. Sure. It's physically impossible. That sounds great. I, you have to tell me what your address is. Uh, although actually, I guess I could, I could, I could actually make a digital copy that could be printed out. Right. You would need a physical copy. And I might have to
26:16start adding that little thing to my email. That's like, please consider trees. Do you still get those? I do. I purposely print 10 copies of those. Yeah. Yeah. That, that would be hilarious. So you can also go to our not so secret backend at SoundCloud where we actually post these things about a week ahead of time. It's at, uh, soundcloud.com slash Pivotal Conversations. And, uh, yeah, it'd be great if you leave us a rating or a review or just write to us or say hello to us when we're around and we'll see everyone next time. Bye-bye.