#017 - A day in the life of a CTO with Joe Baguley

[Music] [Music] Welcome to the unexplored territory podcast. This week we have Joe Bagley as our guest, Joe is VMware's Emia, Chief Technology Officer, Chief Talking Officer, and Chief Therapy Officer. Welcome, Joe. Thanks for joining the podcast. Can you tell us a bit about yourself, your role at VMware and what your career looked like before becoming the Emia CTO of VMware? So yeah, so I am the Emia CTO of VMware. Oh dear, a little bit about myself and the roles. The roles quite interesting. I always divided it into three. It's three CTOs. The first one is Chief Technology Officer, which is what you'd expect, which is working with R&D folks and working between the field, working on what we're doing next, what our strategy is having conversations with people like Kit and Ragu and Chris Wolfe and others around what we're seeing and where we're going. The next is Chief Talking Officer, which is this. It's presenting all the shows and conferences and all the other stuff that I do, being the face of VMware in Emia certainly as I have been for nearly 11 years now. And the third is Chief Therapy Officer, which is I spend a lot of my time working with customers, mainly CIOs and others, sort of telling them, you know, you may think CIOs is the worst environment in the world, but trust me, I've seen worse than that. And you're not behind and here's what's really going on, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, really telling people things aren't that bad. So I've been here for 11 years. Before that, I was a quest software for 10 years. So, and before that, I did a whole bunch of stuff for never long as I've been sort of two or three years, various consulting gigs and other bits and pieces and helping right bits of code and developing and odds things up until I joined Quest Software and ultimately became the CTO at Quest Software. So, yeah, I've been in around and up and down, I teen out for what I've worked out is about 30 or years nearly, which feels like I always still think of myself as a young person, but every time I do graduate and sort of new hire training, I realize how old I actually am. That's quite, I'm starting to realize that I am the old man. And, you know, when your kids are now, you know, leaving university and getting their first job, it's quite grounding, I must say. So, yeah, I still think I'm a young kid, like just starting out my career, but a bit late for that now. Oh, that sounds so familiar. I have the same thing with my kids. My son is almost 20 and my daughter is almost 17, so I know how that feels. And what I find most interesting about your career personally is when I look at your career, I think one of the things that stand out the most is that you shifted between, you know, different technologies, different companies a few times and it always seems to happen at the right moment. So, the thing that I would be interesting in an understanding is, you know, how does that come naturally? Did you figure out, you know, for yourself, this is the next step? You know, how does that process actually go? Because it's an interesting thing, right? A lot of people are challenged with it. They may be looking into virtualization one day and, you know, what is next? And I think you actually were spot on when it comes to that. Lucky, I think, is the answer to that one, don't you know? Luckily, in the right place, the right time. I don't think there was ever a plan, right? So people often asked me this and I get asked quite a lot about, you know, doing, you know, mentoring, you know, what's my plan? I never really had a plan, but what I did throughout the career was so far is, is I've got involved in technology that I found really interesting, that I found, you know, was, was exciting me. And I figured excited other people at the time, I suppose, and you know, you get on those trends. I mean, you, I started out at Hualit Packard in support, really internal support working on some weird stuff. And then I mean, I always remember this, I had a problem, right? I, this is the weirdest story and some of the older people in the world will remember this one. I was responsible for managing the IP address allocation at Hualit Packard, right? And we had 15 dot internally, and I maintained essentially a spreadsheet in X windows where we used to hand them out because DHCP wasn't a thing. It hadn't been invented, right? And then we had this Windows version came out with this thing called DHCP in it. And I was like, that's really interesting. That's going to basically destroy my job. And, you know, there's loads of things like that. I go involved in wins and DNS and bind and all these other bits of weird networking stuff and other things and piece. I think, you know, you just have been around at those times, you know, when now that people don't even think about DHCP, but to us about then it was a wizard thing to change that for the industry. So, you know, and then what happened was I was getting another more dating. I was, I was trained. I was to administrator, administrator, Lotus Notes at HP as well, which was another thing I can tell lots of stories about. And this new piece of software came called Windows NT 3.1 came along and we went, all that looks interesting. And because I spent a lot of my time working around the IP stack within Unix. I was like, hang on, I recognize all of this because someone's stolen it and put it into an operating system. And I got dragged across as the networking guy into NT, HP when we were the first people to roll NT out in the world outside of Microsoft. And so I suppose I was the right place, the right time when sort of Windows NT was superseding arguably Unix and the time as the thing to do, you know, I went into Unix because Unix was the thing. But again, you know, right place, right time, I suppose, is being at the company that was deploying it first. And, you know, I then sort of follow through with NT. I picked up a bit of Mova, no, Val along the way, just because you had to. And then when we were involved heavily with NT and I got various consulting jobs and I moved on from HP and worked elsewhere. I then got involved in this thing called Active Directory or the first inklings back to directory, which actually was the underpinnings of Exchange 5.5 for those who remember Exchange 5 would then became what became a D and you know sort of went on with that and then realize there was a big piece missing with Active Directory and Group policy. Well, you know, didn't even exist. It was a thing we copied from from no val and got involved in things around that got involved at Microsoft and then we realized that there was an opportunity around a few things including a migration tool because this will sound familiar to some people what was happening is people were developing a whole new technology and expecting that customers would just somehow install this new technology and just move everything to it magically without having to worry about how it work and what they really needed was a migration tool that said if you've got massive NT will help you migrate to Active Directory seamlessly. And that was how I ended up at Quest software and you know sort of the rest is history from there really and it quest software I sort of moved from being in the field and being the person that was out doing these things and professional services and deploying them in reality. I then it's a funny story but I was asked to go and demos and products somewhere and I started making some jokes about you know the frankly the rubbish I was seeing out there and the way things weren't working and they resonated with the audience because they were all feeling the same pain as me and I then realized I quite like presenting and it kind of you know came from there and so this love of technology a love of presenting all sort of you know there are things that sort of happened in the right way at the right time and you know but I I I'd hate to say there was some plan because there wasn't a plan there was a plan but I think it was more about you know being there and seeing an opportunity around where something needs to happen with a technology and being so much part of it that you're feeling everyone else is feeling the same pain the same problems and realizing that you know if you can work out a soul those pains and those problems it's going to be big and you know when it came to joining the M. Where was the same thing I literally I was told you know someone said oh were you coming join the M. Where Paul Maritz actually talking to be and some others and I was like hang on you know this is 2011 all they do is a hypervisor you know the hypervisor is a dead if you not heard of the cloud no one's using hypervisor anymore everyone's going to be doing stuff in the cloud and I went and had a long chat and I'm going to be doing this because I had 23 interviews to join the M. Where which involves some quite infamous names in the industry now back then when they're at the M. Where and and at the end of that we kind of came to this discussion which which became the software defined data center I suppose and that persuaded me to join along with Cloud Foundry and and 11 years are 11 years later here we are and if I'm honest with you I joined the M. Where thinking I'll do this for two or three years it'll be an interesting thing and 11 years later there's still so many things going on and so many things I want to get involved in and so many things I feel I want to change and do that that I'm still here and I'm still looking forward to the next five years or whatever it is so yeah you people look at people in my role and go I you know how do I get there and I'm like I'm not really sure it just kind of happened to me so you mentioned just mentioned the five years that you like look ahead of what the five years may may look like is that also like a cycle you look ahead in general well I was I was coaching my daughter on this the other day I often mentor people in their careers because they look at me again and go you're a CTO how did you do that and I can't really like them and tell them it was all an accident but I pick sort of time periods in my life where I go okay I want to be this by this time so I had a picture of what I wanted to be when I was 40 I had a picture of what I wanted to be when I was 50 so you know when I was in my 30s I kind of a picture of what I'm 40 I'm going to be this and then when I was sort of approaching that was like okay when I'm 50 I'm going to be this and now I'm thinking when I'm 60 I'm going to be this because I'm an old man now and none of that was about my career this is really important to understand none of that was about what I'm doing in my job it was okay by 50 I want to you know I've paid off my mortgage you know I want to have have have had kids I want to you know do various things you know I have a holiday home here and it's more about what's me what does my family look like what am I doing for my hobbies what am I doing to What am I doing? to enjoy myself, what does my life look like? What life do I think I would be content doing? And then the career choice is kind of come as helping me towards that as a secondary thing. So when I sit here and go, when I say four to five years, it's a bit off-hand because that's the longest really ahead I can see in my career, really. No one can really sit and say, I can see 10 years ahead in my career. Most people can see two or three years. And I can kind of now having been here for 11, picture where I'll be in five years if I want to be at VMware. But I think you've got to have a series of much, much, you know, I'm not bigger, but abstracted from your career life goals. The worst thing of people goes, I want to be a CTA by the time I'm 40. I'm like, well, you'll never do that thing because that's not really, you might end up being one, but you won't be happy because you'll have done a whole bunch of stuff that maybe you didn't want to do together. So it's more a case that I want to be doing this in my life by this time. So that's really where that comes from. - Yeah, but besides your life planning, you did look at exciting things in technology and things that were interesting, right? And so, or at least that's what I picked up from your story when you reviewed your career. And so one of the things that I think we all heard people say is that, hey, I wouldn't mind having the role that Joe has. But I guess that most people don't understand what that role entails and one of the things that you said, well, my role as CTO are actually three parts and I really liked the therapy part of it. Kind of laughed at it. And but maybe it is actually good to explain what a typical week looks like for you. And also, because it's a combative question, can you also tell us what changed when the pandemic started? How it changed? - Yeah, so let's look at the typical week because there isn't one, right? I mean, it's like you guys and your roles in everyone else. I mean, I don't have a typical week. My week's very massively. There's not even a typical month because some weeks it could be the whole week's taken up with an event like radio or our internal R&D conference or the whole week's taken up with the VMworld Explorer or whatever it is. Other weeks might be like, I suppose last week, I spent two days hosting a bunch of CTOs from one of our partners for sort of an in-depth, what are you doing, what are we doing, literally showing what we're doing and from a very high level, a very low level in terms of technology, but a high level in terms of the organization's getting together and understanding how we're going to move together as partners going forward. So that was one. And if I look back at my calendar, as I'm actively doing right now, as I talk to you about this, it's kind of the way to remind it because my life is so mad and messed up. Previous to that was a keynote for our customer technical advisory board. Then meetings with McLaren, pretty cool, right? I can't deny that that's not a fun thing that I get to do. Customer meetings, there were two or three customer meetings last week, one in person, two or three remote. And also went out for industry dinner last week up in Wales, the cyber-UK dinner with presentations by the first minister and the minister for security, et cetera, in the UK. And next week, well, actually, this week I'm going to be meeting ministers in the UK and MPs, et cetera, and talking about what we do in our work. And before that might be presenting, a summary, it might be stuff to do involved with running our veterans pod, it might be to do with running mental health that I do internally, recording podcasts like innovation hunters that we do internally, these ones externally, hosting VBCs. It goes on and on and on, whether it's writing articles, talking to the press. It's massively varied. And I think that's the exciting thing to be honest with you, Frank, is that there's never the same thing. Look at a week and one month is never like the next month. I'm never getting stuck, I'm never getting stayed. And I remember actually, it was funny, talk about this, a huge uppack up when I worked that the reason why I chose to leave who the packer in the end was, I've been working the same office at the same desk for two and a half years. And one morning I got to my desk and I had absolutely no recollection of how I'd got there. It should become so automatic, getting out of bed, getting in my car driving. Now I couldn't have told you one thing that happened before I got to that desk. It was like, okay, I need to change. This is not good. You know, so that's kind of where that change happens. And yeah, I've ended up in a job that I like. That I've created for myself, I'll be honest with you. And then it's been cloned into other regions of this role of just being able to, the person that I best summarise my role is, most people come to me and I said this actually when I presented to Kit sort of recently on summarising the role is, people always start with approaching me with, well, we've asked everyone else, but which is kind of where it starts. We couldn't work out who would help us with this. So we thought we'd come to you and you might be able to know. So that's kind of where it fits in. I know in your roles, I think that probably happens a lot too, is like, well, I've tried everything else and I've kind of run out. So I figure if I come and ask you, you'll know. So yeah. And then the other part, you asked about the pandemic, right? The pandemic was a massive shock from, I'd be, I'm hate to sound like this, but it was also awesome in a way. So just prior to pandemic, I mean, very much my job as you probably just heard is travel. It's travel, it's flying over here, doing this, doing that. You know, literally the minute I leave this podcast, I'm gonna go out and jump in my car and drive to a customer meeting and then I'm gonna go back out because I'm going out for dinner and then I've got to get up tomorrow morning, go to a customer meeting and drive straight into London for something else. Then when I finish that drive up to Manchester and then I'm presenting in Manchester, it's just all, it's like some planes trains also a bills thing, which involves me getting on a plane to double in on Friday morning. And frankly, I'd had enough of it. Just prior to the pandemic, I was like, oh my god, I don't think I can do this much longer. I can't see myself doing this another five years. I really can't, you know. So the pandemic was a fabulous kind of reset for that. It was good because you realized how much of the travel you were doing was frankly unnecessary. And so now it means that I'm going back into it again now and I think we're all doing this where we're starting to say, actually, I don't need to be there in person for that. I can do that remotely. And in fact, if we plan this a little bit more carefully, I can get a bit more quality of life out of that. So yes, I'm back out there, I'm traveling, but I'm doing it on my terms, put it that way, in the way that I want to do it. But yeah, the pandemic was massively transformative. Also, I had the great fun, should I say, or the honor or privilege of being thrown into the contact tracing app in the UK. And there was been a blog written about that. That you guys can read as well. I'm sure we'll link to it from this, that occupied the first few months of the pandemic for me in more ways than one. So I was sort of taken out of my whirlwind world. And it wasn't like I was set at home and swiddling my thumbs going, well, what do I do now? I was like, I'm straight into something else. I think the other thing, here's an interesting one for you, that the one thing for me, if you'd asked me pre-pandemic to do a presentation over Zoom to a conference, I would have gone, no, that's never gonna work. Sorry, you can't do it. And now obviously I have to do it. I think it's not as bad as I thought it was gonna be. I'm getting better at it, but I've been back in a few rooms in front of live audiences recently. And oh my god, it's so much better. (laughs) - Yeah, the contact, right? The contact of seeing people and the reaction of people, it's nice again. - Energy, right? I can see and feel energy from the room. You're looking into people's eyes, you're seeing how they're reacting to what you're saying. It's so much different. - So one thing that I missed actually, when you did a great summary of all the things that you do, you didn't mention BBC World News. You mentioned McLaren and we're going to talk about McLaren, of course, because we're all like one fans here, but you didn't mention how you ended up being a regular on BBC World News and we're dying to know how you ended up there. - Well, it's funny. The studio's like three floors down in London in a basement for a start. And I remember going into it and the first time I went there, I said, so how many people are watching this? He went, oh, somewhere in the region of about 90 million globally. I was like, whoa, you know, that's quite scary. And it's, I generally go on with Aaron, who's a complete, he's mental. He speaks faster than me, which is saying something. And first of all, it was arranged by RPR agency. You know, they pitched us in, you know, do you want to talk about this topic? And then I got on like a house on fire with Aaron and he then sort of asked me back to do other things, really, for me, I'm going to say, oh, can you talk about Edge? Can you talk about this? Do you know about that? And it's really sort of going in as the, as the dumbing down expert. And I think that kind of sums up where I live in my career. And people have asked me this a lot, is that I am not that smart. And I'm not saying that to be humble. I'm not saying that to be amazingly wonderful or anything else. I don't have a degree, right? I quit my degree after two years, because I got bored and wanted to do something else. And I think that's more because of my ADHD than it is anything else. But you know, I, I, I, I, when something, some new concept arises, and this is very pertinent to BBC, it's very pertinent to what I do. I have to spend quite a while trying to understand it, picture it in my head, work out what it is. So when someone talked about virtualized networking, for example, I was like, you know, I know networking, but I had to go through quite a while to work that out. And I worked out a way in my head to explain it to myself, right? And finally, I was like, okay, this is how it works. And then when I explained that to someone else, they were like, oh, wow, that's genius. I'm like, is it? That's just, I was just so stupid, I struggled to understand it. So that's the only way I could work it out myself, you know? And so it reminded me of Douglas Adams. So Douglas Adams had a fantastic series of books called "Dirk Gently Solistic Detective Agency." And if you've not read them or watched the TV series, there's two sets of Netflix on a BBC series, it's brilliant, right? And they're completely mad guy. But some of the truth and intelligence that comes through in Douglas Adams writing is beautifully expressed in those books. And one of the quotes is, don't you understand that we need to be childish in order to understand? Only a child sees things with perfect clarity because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see. And so, you know, when I go on to BBC World News or when I'm doing a lot of these things, I'm trying to explain this concept to my mum. Right? Or to someone who's not technical. And that becomes really useful when you're going into a room and you're trying to explain a very technical concept to a CFO, for example, or to anyone else. And so, you know, why am I on BBC World News? Because I'm not very clever and I have to work out how to explain these things simply so I understand them and all I do is I go on TV and explain them simply to other people. Carl Sagan will tell you this, or would have told you the same thing and it's quoted the same thing. So yeah, sometimes being not that smart or not knowing everything about a subject allows you to come in with a whole new perspective that you probably didn't people didn't expect. Yeah, I'm not sure. I agree with the fact that you're not very clever because in my opinion, you have to be extremely clever to, you know, distill it down to the absolute core and I think that there's something that you've been doing perfectly for the past couple of years. And, you know, I think a few of us actually on the podcast have done a okay job as well of that in the last couple of years and, you know, it makes you stand out above the crowd because you're not making things overly complex. You're actually, you know, bringing it down to a common level. I think that is a skill set. But the one thing that I wanted to discuss because I picked up on this when you mentioned it already and of course Frank repeated it with the Formula One announcement. Because I think a lot of our listeners probably are Formula One fans. Maybe a lot of them are Red Bull fans, but we're not talking about Red Bull today. We're actually talking about McLaren. So I would be interesting to, you know, interested to understand what the announcement actually means and, you know, what is their VMware potentially is going to do for McLaren. Yeah. So I think the important thing is that it's a technology partnership and that's really the, I know they can be almost a lot of, you know, spoken mirrors around that, but it truly is a technology partnership. I can tell you the exciting thing was that when, you know, we started talking about this in the partnership that we could do, we walked into myself and a few others went into McLaren a few months ago actually. And there was a group of people that were absolutely overjoyed to be able to see, you know, VMware technologies coming into McLaren. They're excited on a lot of fronts and they were instantly, we sort of, we sat down and mapped out a bunch of the obvious and then of course my job is to bring them the, oh, did you know that VMware did kind of story and add to that. So, you know, the obvious is the stuff that we announced essentially in the first in the press release, which we can talk about already. But also it's very quick to deploy and I think that's a really good story in that as well. So our workspace one solutions have been massively important to them, the ability to do device management to be able to and don't forget you'll also notice that recently McLaren signed a deal with Android, right? So there's Android down the side of the car now and there's an awful lot of Android devices flying around. So we walked into a department and there's suddenly been given hundreds of Android devices and had to deploy and secure those to everyone quickly. You'd get them in time out there across all the race series they were doing. So that was an obvious one and that's one that very quickly we stood up and we're helping them with but we also help other F1 teams with that too. I think the other piece that we talk about is SD1. VMware very, you know, a lot of our customers don't know where the leaders in SD1 but we are. So we're helping them very much with SD1 in other series outside of F1, Indicare, ExtremeE, we're having some guaranteed quality connectivity in odd places or hard to reach places or like in Indicare where what they do is the Indicare provides the networking but they turn that off 45 minutes off the race finishes and so they need connectivity then etc. So providing that kind of connectivity is really important as well. And then, you know, very simple stuff I think but it seems to us simple stuff but again it's wizardry and magic to others. It's Cloud Health Secure State walking in and talking to them about what we can do in terms of securing the cloud operations and what they're doing, you know, and seeing how they can optimize around that. So those are sort of three very quick things where we can make a very big difference to my cloud operations and then, you know, what we have is a multi-year plan and the multi-year plan sort of rolls out so there's already some technology we can't talk about that we're trialing now that will hopefully get track side in in 2023 in terms of what we're doing with technology there. There's bits and pieces you can expect across our portfolio, things we're doing with tons of things we're doing with VMware Cloud and all those bits and pieces but it's genuinely this is McLaren getting cited about using our technology. It's not just put the name on the side of the car and find a way to make it relevant. It's very much the other way around. We need this technology, we love this technology. That's actually work on a partnership together and McLaren are, you know, very well as a British person I'm very proud of the fact that nearly all the decent F1 teams are based in the UK of course including Red Bull and there's a strong F1 heritage I've worked in and around F1 for nearly 30 years. I was a company as I worked with before I was working with Tyrell. I was working with Jordan F1 back in the day working on track side equipment so it's quite nice to go back in again and I'm working in those departments. You know, I also have my own personal interest in motorsport clearly. So yeah, I'm not going to be trading my Tesla in for a McLaren anytime soon. I've still got a reservation in for my Tesla Roadster but I'm also interested in talking to them and I've been talking to them with McLaren cars about what they're doing around their electrification plans too. And also you may have noticed that McLaren just launched a Formula E team as well this week, crying the Mercedes team from them. So it's really exciting times and actually the other thing that was most important to us was initially when you look at Formula One you don't think sustainability. It's like almost the opposite of sustainability. These guys are just flying around the world burning fuel off for no reason but sustainability of course is a huge focus for them. And really the team that was most focused on sustainability and it made some of the first steps in sustainability over the years was McLaren. And so again, there was quite a nice partnership there around sustainability too and what we're doing and so it talks a lot to our values there and helping them along that journey which we will be doing is also exciting to us. Yeah, those values are part of EMR's ESG strategy. Could you elaborate a bit on what ESG is and why it is so important to you? So ESG is massively important to me. I sort of lead as you say ESG in a mirror and I've formed part of the global team in guiding what we're doing in this space. So ESG stands for environmental, social and governance. It's kind of bringing together all the what good is a company doing under one banner. So under environmentally, you're looking at things like climate change, energy usage, waste pollution, water stewardship. You know, I was actually having a really interesting conversation with a data center company recently where they're focused on reducing water usage within data centers for example because your data centers are massive users of water and your waters are scarce resource. Under social is really important to mention too. It's not just about sustainability and lowering your energy cost and putting up wind farms and solar panels. Social is about diversity and equity, inclusion. It's about the working conditions, about the community impacts of the operations that you're doing. It's about health and safety. And then governance is really again talking into accountability and transparency as a company, ethics and corruption, the morals of what you're doing, political contributions, the composition of your board. And when you do surveys across employers and consumers and business leaders, you know, it's 80% plus across the board think that people should be doing the right thing around ESG obviously. And it's directly affecting how people are investing in companies. So investment funds and individuals are now choosing to invest more responsibly focused on ESG goals. So our conversations with customers are becoming increasingly led by ESG. And the great thing is we've got a fabulously strong story of VMware around what we've already done with ESG. You know, our 2030 agenda which covers those in great detail. And there's almost too much to put into that. But ESG for us has been an awesome story, you know, meeting our net zero, meeting our renewable goals, meeting an awful lot of other different goals that we set years early in some cases. I actually get asked, this has said this a few times quite weird, I got asked a couple of things. I've been asked to present to the boards of some of our largest customers not about VMware's technology, but about ESG, which is quite interesting, you know. And that's two elements. It's not just what can VMware do for them on ESG, but what's our ESG journey been like personally? You know, as VMware and how can they learn from it, which is a really good strong story. And then another thing I'm massively proud of, which talks through our values around diversity, equity, inclusion, and culture, is I'm on the board of another company. And when I asked the CEO why he wanted me on the board of that company, I said, you know, is it for technology advice? I went, no, I want you to come and teach us about the culture of VMware and how we can change to have a similar culture, because you've been part of that leadership team and you've been part of the team that helped change that culture. How do you do that? So the fact, I'm really proud of the fact that VMware has such a reputation around ESG, around culture, about being the right corporate citizen, that we're actually being actively, actively asked to tell other customers and other companies about how they can do that too. So you already mentioned the 2030 agenda of VMware and within that agenda, we cover these eagles extensively. And of course, too much, there are too many things to cover in the 45 minutes discussion that we are having. But can you talk about maybe the top three or the top five goals of that agenda? Yeah, if you go to the VMware website, you'll see the 2030 agenda goals. There are 30 of them, you know, 10 under each a sustainability equity and trust and you can look across those. You know, if we look at what we've done in the past, did get to be a leadership, we've been certified as carbon neutral since 2019. We've been 100% renewable energy usage since 2019. So it's in 2019, carbon neutral since 2018. We've got 100% skin. Let's look at the social side of things which I'm proud of. We've got 100% score on best places to work for LGBTQ equality, for example. Under governance, we've got, you know, measurable ESG milestones. But when we look forward at the targets for 2030, there are a bit more exciting, shall I say. So yeah, we're looking at workload, carbon efficiency. So making sure the workloads that are involved on VMware platforms are most efficient as possible. We've got a whole bunch of tools. There was stuff in V realising 8.6, stuff in VROPS and others around dashboards in that area and making sure people are being the most carbon efficient in their workload placing, even down to you know, you know, looking at zombie VM usage and zombie VM elimination. And there's much more beyond going in that. When we look at the equity one that I would pick out really in that is the sort of, is not just diversity and equity and diversity and inclusion, but supplier equity. So how does it supply diversity? So how do we look at having a more diverse supplier base, looking at our supply chain and making sure that we're being active in encouraging equitable pay, you know, accessible technology, just to really work for us in our supply chain. So if you're looking to supply the VMware, we're going to be examining you to see if your value is match up with our values, which I think is really important. And sub supply chain is a key thing when we look at ESG. So yeah, you know, those are the top two or three for me, is looking around to that workload carbon efficiency and zero carbon clouds and pushing our partners around being sustainable and our cloud partners being sustainable. And they've all signed up to be sustainable completely by 2030 as well. But then looking at our supply chain. So who are we supplying and who supplies us? Is just as important as what we do ourselves. And I think that's going to be a key thing across everyone. - That's interesting that you mentioned the supply chain because I think if you want to change things, it doesn't just start with yourself. It also starts with the others actually supplying you. And the same could be said for equity and diversity, it doesn't just start within your own company, but it starts at school or even earlier at home, et cetera, et cetera. If you don't talk about those things early on, nothing is ever going to change. At least it may change when it's already too late for some folks. So I think that's a very interesting thing. I also think it was interesting when you mentioned is that we're also working on different technologies to start help us reach those goals and help our customers reach those goals. So maybe we can talk a bit about innovation because that's a larger part of your job. So what are the different kinds of innovation you see within VMMAT and what are some of the projects that excite you that are happening right now that you can officially talk about because I don't want to get a phone call from HR again. (laughing) - Yeah, I have to be careful here what I can talk about. But it brings me back to another quote from Douglas Adams because I'm so cool. He said that Sherlock Holmes observed that once you've eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. It's a bit Ockham's razor. But he then asked, "I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible." So I think it's interesting that you quite often in our industry people say, "Well, you can't do that, we shouldn't do that." So there's a few things we're looking at. For me, areas of innovation that are absolutely hugely exciting is edge. I'm massively excited about what's going on at the edge. The distribution of applications and data and everything associated with them that is happening is unstoppable. It's going to continue. So unless people have strategies around the fact there will be data, there will be compute distributed. Everything's not going to be in one cloud. We won't move forward. So if we start to accept that, we then start to look at what are the operations models around that, how do we start to do highly distributed, highly connected infrastructure. And if you look at the future to 6G, which is an area that I've written about recently, again, sorry, it comes back to Dirk Jennings. That's not the Dirk Jennings podcast, it's not, but I'm just kind of cool. He talks about the fundamental interconnectedness of all things. And when you look at 6G and when you look at how that's going to be deployed, 6G is the ultimate democratization of technology in that at the moment, the internet is still very one way. It's still very broadcast. It's still very asynchronous. When we start to look at how and where technology's going to deploy, we're looking at a highly flat, democratized, everything talking to everything else kind of world. So for me, the innovations that excite me is, there's the incremental innovations, there's the little bits we can do in addition to our products. It's those huge leaps to what does it look like when there's billions of these things all talking to each other. And there's no central net, there's no central brain that thinks about what they're doing. How do you build a world where billions of things are talking to each other and somehow are controlling each other and working together in harmony? And I know, certainly Duncan and Frank, you remember this? I went through a period a few years ago walking around R&D in Amy Corner, sorry, I'm just talking about HP there. In Palo Alto, writing billions on the board and people are what's billions are like, well, you may be talking about V-San clusters now, but how is it going to cope when there's billions of V-San clusters? How are you going to cope when there's billions of endpoints? How are you going to cope when there's billions of V-San centers? How's that going to work? Have you thought about that? Because these are the millennium bug problems of our future, where we've architected things to stop at 65,000, whatever it is, things. We bump up against that all the time. So I think for me, when we look at what's happening exciting in innovation at the M-Ware, yes, it's the cool stuff. It's what are we doing around our processes? What are we doing around tiny things? What are we doing around highly distributed things? What are we doing? And that's where things like our sassy things we're doing around end user computing will start to merge with what we're doing with our sassy solutions, we'll merge with what we're doing with Velo Cloud, or merge ultimate into what we're doing with the VCF. And the whole thing will just become one huge distributed compute fabric. So if we think back to the SDDC, the SDDC was a very simple challenge. It was like, OK, well, what if we take virtualization and we virtualize networking and we virtualize compute to the point where I have this essentially layer of software that I pour over everything in a data center. And I create sort of an operating system for data centers. And underneath that, I just have hardware that I don't see or care about that I'm plugging in and out. But I have this one platform that I talked to. That's the SDDC. That's VCF and VMware Cloud, as we see in as various forms today. The next thing is what if that is now highly distributed everywhere, highly connected everywhere, and lots of tiny little forms? How does that work? And you're starting to see lead signs of this. You're starting to see bits like K3S and other bits and pieces that are out there in terms of small management planes and small operations planes, where the challenges are going to be around that operating model? And I'm not giving away any secrets there in terms of what we're doing in innovation projects specifically. And we'll also, I'm not getting excited about AR and VR and Metaverse, because everyone else does. That's the cool thing, trendy thing to do now. For me, it's that piece underneath. I think we're going to see some really huge changes there. Add into that alternative power sources. Add into that where things are going to be powered by different, not just by, you know, but the other thing that I'm going to do is things are going to be powered by different, you know, not just by fossil fuels, but you're now looking at, you know, how do we store energy? How do we move energy? How do we create energy? How do we do that efficiently? Pair that up with how things are talking to each other. And then realize that the future of connectivity is not land-based. It's in space. It all starts to get really exciting, right? So, you know, you fast forward 10 years, probably longer, you're looking at highly distributed world where comms is all done through low-orthal bits, satellites, and space, and so on and so on and so forth. And, you know, I can go wild over this, and I will be doing a V-Mug, you know, it's in the next year or so, as I start talking about what's going on in my brain in this space. But yeah, there's so much cool stuff going on. And it's not all about Elon Musk and SpaceX either, Duncan. - So, sounds very interesting. And I think one of the things that stands out to me, as you mentioned, distributed a couple of times. But one of the things that you did not mention is decentralized. So I'm wondering what your thoughts are around the whole, you know, decentralization, the web-free thing that is happening right now, maybe even NFTs or crypto. - I'm not sure if you want to go into that because I can see a rent coming up, but you know, who knows? - Yeah, no, no, look, so that's what I meant when I meant democratized. You know, when I used the word democratized, I could have been to change that with decentralized, I suppose, as well, interchangeable words. But yeah, you're looking at the same sort of thing. There are no central points of control in a lot of these things. So that's from a technology perspective, or whether that's from a political perspective, I think that's really interesting. NFTs, oh wow, you know, there's a fabulous video I tweeted about it recently, done by Steve Mold on NFTs and what you're actually buying within NFTs. I think, you know, the less set about NFTs, the better, I think there are a really nice, fun hype cycle that we're going through. I think when we talk about digital currencies, not crypto, but digital currencies, I think there's a huge opportunity around digital currencies. I think there's an awful lot to be done there. And if people are saying that digital currencies aren't the future, then they're literally just blingering themselves. I think we've got a bit of a bad reputation around crypto and Bitcoin and all the other kind of stuff that's going on. And I've said lots in public about how Bitcoin is immoral. Proof of work is a very bad thing, proof of stake, on the other hand, and where Ethereum's going, is a much, much better thing. So there's a lot of future for digital currencies. And obviously we have plays in that in blockchain, and what we don't have for the Australian stock exchange and so on and so forth. So I think there's excitement for me and that. I won't invest in Bitcoin just purely because of the energy corruptionist of it, I think, is the way to put that. But I don't know. There's a week of do a whole 45 minute podcast on that to be fair, and you could delve into the depths of my brain on the thoughts about that one. But I've got a couple of friends who are crypto traders. And they're not smiling so much this week, because they have been for the last couple of years. Let's put it that way. And equally, I've got some friends that bought some pictures of some apes that equally are just as upset about what happened. But I think the good thing about those is they kind of went to that with their eyes wide open and realized that you're messing about there. So what's good about this is this is human kind exploring. This is human kind playing. This is human kind working things out. And it's only by making these mistakes on a grand scale that something interesting and useful will come out of this. I very rarely think that we'll come out of NFTs with nothing. I very rarely think we'll come out of cryptocurrency with nothing. we will come out with something that we will build on it and use next. I just hope it's not as as us exploring energy using coal and steam instead of starting a electricity was to the planet, right? Yeah, so NFT is a misused technology if you look closely to NFT is just a way of ownership of data so think about if you look at ML and machine learning We're going to see that a lot of technology will be delivered by somebody else and models will be trained by somebody else by third-party vendors the only thing what you need to do is you need to deliver your data set now use an NFT type model to claim your your your data because that's your fuel, right? And you can use an NFT like model to do that, but now we're using it to sell apes Right, there's an interesting legal hole around that. It's not been well defined actually Which is really cool Duncan is that and also, you know and you know Frank, I don't think you probably thought this one through it. Well, maybe you have is that If you have a smart system, so you know a machine learning system and you train that machine learning system with a set of data Who owns the trained system so the IP and the training so you teach something basic becomes an an AI engine? Is it the owner of the data or is it the owner of the system? Right, so if I use your data to train my system Is it now how does the legality around that's really interesting? Oh, we talk about that every day Yeah, it's getting a hole around copyright and this yeah, yeah, it's really really interesting So it's like you know if I if I the problem is the parallels we have in the physical world don't work And we see this so many times that the physical world legal stuff just doesn't match up with the virtual world So you know the moment if you teach me Chinese Frank and I you don't then have the license on me speaking Chinese, right? You know I go you taught me I learned I go use that knowledge You know you can't then charge me for every time I speak Chinese But that's what people are essentially trying to do is if I give you my data set and you use that data set than they're for you It's weird. It's just huge problems You should you should find that would be a really interesting one of these unexplored territory ones to go and talk to someone like Quang Han or someone like that who who deals in that that sort of legal world because I you know I have fabs and it's fascinating conversations around that because that really interests me Well next to this being unexplored territory, you know that the show is called unexplored territory And as someone who's always working with the newest technologies, you know that technology wise There's a lot of unexplored territory. So which emerging technologies do you feel would be interesting for our listeners to explore in the upcoming years? Wow, okay, so From a from an IT perspective, it's kind of what I talked about earlier. It's the distributed stuff. It's the Decentralized it's the democratized how and what is popping up in that space if I have a look at the moment There's there's still a huge investment in distributed queries, you know I've got a massive distributed database. How do I how do I career a massive distributed database? There's still not a solve problem for example, and there's so much more in that space So for me it's that highly connected highly distributed world It is probably where the exciting stuff is so the technologies that are surrounding that so we're seeing new data stores coming out new data new new Technologies and techniques around how data is being transmitted stored Assessed etc etc. I think it's probably you know that the next big challenge in our industry is around you we keep saying this But it is around data. It's around what's going to happen with that data where it's going to be who owns it how it's managed Etc etc etc etc because your data is and I've been working on an article about this very subject very recently about this is that Yeah, that's that's for me is probably the most exciting area next in addition to all the stuff I talked about about edge and other bits and pieces and all my personal life gadget tree But that's a whole separate story around heated coffee mugs. Well, thank you Joe for a very fascinating episode Let's wrap it up Duncan and that's it We've reached the end of another episode of the unexplored territory podcast if after some rise today's episode Then my key takeaway will be that you don't need to be the smartest person to become a CTO But you definitely need to be the person who's able to explain the strategy and the technology in such a way that everyone at any level Can understand it that is the essential skill again. Thanks for listening Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast and rate the podcast wherever possible if you have any feedback send us a message on Twitter on @unisportpot I would like to thank my co host and of course Joe Bagley for a fantastic episode Cool, that alright. There's a lot of interesting exciting things for you [Music]