Jason Lopez: Well, how does this fit into the way a lot of enterprise software is developed? You know, a lot of it is not just sold off the shelf, but is the result of, of long term partnerships. And then there's the idea of lock in. What's your sense of these dynamics?
Steve McDowell: If I'm an IT practitioner who's leveraging VMware products or similar products, if I'm heavily invested in vSphere and VMware infrastructure, the switching cost is tremendous. So I really have to be motivated. In the near to midterm those customers are not gonna be disrupted. If I'm looking to start something new greenfield, or if I'm an existing VMware customer and I'm expanding to new projects for new infrastructure, trying to manage my hybrid multi-cloud in a different way. I'm not gonna default to VMware at this point. I'm gonna look at what the other options are in the industry because I don't know yet what Broadcom's going to do with them. And if you look at Broadcom historically, there may never be another giant innovation out of that group of engineers. There may be, but historically Broadcom tends to be very incrementally innovative in the technologies that they acquire.
Jason Lopez: When you talk about options, what, what do you mean exactly?
Steve McDowell: The value of VMware at this point, apart from the core virtualization pieces is, you know, I'm abstracting my infrastructure, every data center now, every IT infrastructure now is virtual. And the software that controls that data plane and that control plane, you know, in some cases that's VMware Cloud Foundation and others, that's Nutanix offerings. Beyond those two, the list gets very, very tight and with less credible players underneath. So I think this is gonna be a huge opportunity for VMware competitors simply because they don't have kind of that same stigma and that same uncertainty facing them.
Jason Lopez: What does Broadcom do? And the context for a simple sounding question like this, I guess, is why a hardware company is adding software companies like CA and Symantec and now VMware.
Steve McDowell: Here's who I think Broadcom is. Broadcom likes to provide infrastructure components for the data center. Traditionally that has been very hardware centric. They make parts for, you know, ethernet switches, storage, networking, all of these things around that. But what's happened over the past, you know, half decade even is there's very much a trend toward a virtual infrastructure. The more people move to the cloud, the worse that is for Broadcom and its portfolio products and companies. Seventy two percent of enterprises. I think I saw a survey recently has assets in one or more clouds plus they're on-prem data center stuff. And that's all managed with software defined data center. It's very real, and I think Broadcom recognizes this, and they're starting to bring more software companies into the fold. VMware is an example, right? So VMware is now part of the virtual data center. Now, certainly back to your question, who is Broadcom? They wanna provide the infrastructure for your data center.