Duncan Epping - Chief Technologist at VMware HCI

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Hello, my friends. Today we are talking to Duncan, the Chief Technologist at VMware HCI, and we discuss stepping out of your comfort zone, how public speaking will help you master your communication skills, and the importance of understanding how different cultures work in a global organization. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:24) This is the Modern CTO Podcast. Hey, Duncan.

(Duncan at 00:00:37) Hey. How are you?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:39) Fantastic. Let me just get the audio going through the correct output here.

(Duncan at 00:00:45) Sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:46) I had to get new AirPods because the batteries don't last through an episode anymore.

(Duncan at 00:00:51) Oh, really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:52) Yeah.

(Duncan at 00:00:54) That's not good.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:56) For about a year they worked, right? And I use them a lot. I use them when I run in the morning, and then I use them when we record the podcast. But then, you know, about six weeks ago, just at 45 minutes into the podcast, it just cut out. And I tried it again because I was starting with a 100% battery charge. I was like, I guess the batteries just, you know, they wear out like anything, right? With the iPhones, with any type of battery, it's going to wear out.

(Duncan at 00:01:20) Yeah, but you wouldn't expect it to be 12 months. I mean, 12 months is a bit short, actually. So yesterday, one of my headphones actually died, and this is Audio Technica. I had it for 11 years. So, you know, that is a decent time to work for a pair of headphones, but a year is a bit short, I would say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:43) I know. I know. I thought they were your—I was just stalking you on Twitter—I thought they were your daughter's headphones.

(Duncan at 00:01:49) Yeah, well, they used to be mine. So I bought them 11 years ago to use them on flights, but I switched over to the Bose in-ear, and I have a pair of Sony as well, the noise-canceling. Those are pretty decent. So I have like four or five different headsets, but I actually ended up giving these to my daughter because she had a couple of JBL headphones, actually two pairs, that already broke in the past 12 months. So, you know, that's the problem with kids these days. They don't see the value in stuff, and they don't realize how fragile, you know, some of these newer technologies are, right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:30) Yeah, I know. Absolutely. I love the phrase "the kids these days" because it makes us feel old.

(Duncan at 00:02:35) Well, you know, I'm halfway 40, so I am pretty old. My kids—that's what my kids would say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:41) Yeah, I've got two little ones too, both about three and one and a half. So I'm just getting started with the kids.

(Duncan at 00:02:49) Yeah, I mean, mine are 18 and 15. So, yeah, that makes you feel really old, I can tell you that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:56) So I wanted to give you a shout-out because I saw that you were doing this crowdfunding campaign for your friend that lost their house in a fire. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

(Duncan at 00:03:07) Yeah, sure. As you know, there were wildfires in California not too long ago, and he lives near Santa Cruz in a small town. Unfortunately, at some point during the week, they were evacuated out of the house around, you know, three at midnight. Basically, they were told, you know, grab anything you can grab and get out as fast as possible because the fire is coming close. It's heading towards this direction, and he actually lives on the mountain. So they needed to get out very quick because there's only one road up and one road down. So they got out, fortunately, safe. They managed to grab a couple of things. But after about a week or so, they found out that the whole house is gone. They took some pictures, and I've been there a couple of times. I've stayed at his home a couple of times, and there's literally—it's only ashes. That's the only thing that is left. It was, yeah, it was ridiculous. I dropped him a couple of phone calls, and yeah, it's just very sad to see, you know, what has happened. Everything is gone, you know. I mean, it's not just the clothes and, you know, your books and stuff like that, but it's also all of the memories, pictures, or other kinds of memorabilia that they had from the family or whatever it ended up being, right? So it's all gone. There's nothing left.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:26) Yeah. Well, it's just, it's an interesting experience because like, I'll still drive by the home where I grew up in, right? So just the symbolic aspect of that being your home, your place on this planet, that can just be, you know, very difficult. So we'll put a link in the show notes to their, I think it's like a GoFundMe type crowdfunding campaign, so that people can check that out if they want. But this isn't your only, like, giving back type of thing that you've done. I also saw that you did this cool project that I really liked where you bought Chromebooks for orphanages. Can you tell me about that?

(Duncan at 00:05:04) Yeah. So a couple of years ago actually, it's been pretty long, it's a long time ago. I was part of a group of people that for VMware actually went to Vietnam to help out this organization setting up these computer labs for orphanages. So back then, we actually went to Vietnam itself, and we set up these computer labs, but they weren't using Chromebooks just yet. They were using regular laptops and they had just, you know, regular WiFi and stuff like that. But what they quickly found out after we visited and we created some content as well for them to deliver is that a lot of the technology that we were using back then, the regular laptops, were too expensive, but they also weren't very resilient, so they would break pretty fast. And what they noticed is they started testing with some of the Chromebooks, that the Chromebook technology is actually geared towards, you know, kids and the way kids handle these types of things. And especially in environments like Vietnam, as you can imagine, it's pretty humid, it's pretty warm. You know, there's multiple classes using these laptops, and, you know, they switched over to those Chromebooks. And not too long ago, I was actually in contact with them, and they mentioned to me that they were planning on refreshing some of these lab environments. And because I've been with the company for 12 years, VMware gave me about $3,000 to donate to charity. So I could have picked any charity, but, you know, I recalled the conversation that I had with these guys. So I emailed them again and I said, you know what? What would an average environment cost you? What would a classroom setup cost you? And he said, well, the classroom would be about, you know, roughly $3,000, give or take. Could be $3,000, could be $3,600, depending on when they would buy these Chromebooks. So I figured, you know what? I'm going to do some form of crowdfunding campaign to see if other people want to chip in, and maybe, you know, we get an additional couple hundred dollars and they would be able to replace some of the WiFi routers that they have or 4G routers and whatever it is, right? So a couple hundred dollars can go a long way in a country like Vietnam. I was very fortunate to, you know, have a great response to that crowdfunding campaign because an additional $7,000 came in. So we raised, including my contribution from VMware and then a personal donation, it was, you know, slightly over $10,000, which allows these guys to actually, you know, buy three full classroom setups, and they probably have some spare change left. We're talking about 45 Chromebooks, roughly. You know, the great thing about this is because I visited this place myself, and I've seen the people from KidSpire actually, you know, give these classes to these kids, these orphans in Vietnam. But what struck me the most is when we were there and they were teaching these kids, right, if you go to any school in the US or in Europe, wherever you end up being, right, you never see kids fairly eager, you know, or even happy to walk into a classroom. Maybe now after COVID, right, that they can get back to school. But these kids, every single day, they came from school and then they had the computer classes in the orphanage itself, and they were jumping up and down. They were waiting in line just to get in, to get a seat at the table, to start, you know, learning new technology. And the other thing, of course, is, you know, at that point in time, they're also connected to the internet. So they could go to Facebook, they could go to Instagram, they could, you know, chat to some of their friends on the other side of the country, maybe the other side of the world. You know, the world opened up for these kids, and the joy on their faces is something that I will, you know, never forget. And that's one of the reasons I set up this fundraising campaign because these guys do great work, and I know it means a lot for these kids as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:08) So is KidSpire, is that like the parent organization?

(Duncan at 00:09:12) Yeah, KidSpire is the parent organization. They used to do two things. Basically, they would help with adoption for orphans from Vietnam to the US specifically. But lately, their focus has been more around enabling the kids in Vietnam, which I think probably scales better, and it allows or enables probably more kids to have a, you know, better chance of being successful in life. A lot of these kids will go to school, but they typically stay in, and, you know, if they're lucky, they get adopted by a decent family. But a lot of them actually end up staying in the orphanage until they're old enough, you know, to start living on their own. But the problem, of course, is when you only have, you know, a certain amount of education and you don't have the right skill set, it's very difficult to get a decent job. And, you know, they typically would start with, you know, probably being, you know, 10 steps behind the average person in Vietnam. And the average person in Vietnam, of course, isn't, you know, as wealthy or rich or lucky as we are, unfortunately. So, you know, this program that KidSpire started is huge for these kids. I mean, they are teaching these kids to, you know, do math and counting in binary and all of these different types of things. And, you know, whether they are building a website or they're learning how to count, they enjoy every single thing, and that was the amazing thing to see for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:41) Yeah, it's like, I wonder how you could do it more and do it bigger and better. It'd be like a good question for Elon Musk because he's got some experience. He started that school for his kids and some close friends, and he, you know, he's always thinking. But, you know, orphanages are tough because, you know, it's one thing to grow up poor. It's another thing to grow up an orphan. It's like just poor plus difficult. And you need those positive role models. You need to see that there's a better option out there, to like—we're little AI algorithms. We mimic the behaviors we see and we learn. And so we need to get them processing good data so they have the best chance of success.

(Duncan at 00:11:22) Yeah, and I think that's a very good point that you just mentioned, that we mimic what we end up seeing. And that is also something that we've noticed in the orphanages because there was a big difference between these orphanages. We visited orphanages where all the kids, unfortunately, had HIV. So, you know, talking about a bad situation, right? You're an orphan, and on top of that, you have HIV as well. These were the most positive kids that I've ever seen, but it's mainly by the leadership within that orphanage. They were very positive. You know, they're very encouraging. You name it. But of course, there were also some orphanages where, you know, the leadership wasn't as prevalent as in other orphanages. So, you know, these kids were kind of on their own, just hanging out. And you notice that as well in terms of their behavior. So even there, there's, you know, big differences between what the situations are like. They could both be in an orphanage, but, you know, whether you're in orphanage A or B could make a big difference.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:17) Yeah, and I'd be willing to bet that if you went and you talked to the leaders of the orphanage with the HIV that were leading the orphanage better, I bet you those individuals have more adversity and understand difficult things better. Because I'm always a seeker of truth, like, in the universe as I go about my life. And what I just find that's like an inescapable truth is, like, this adversity creates this mental toughness, and then it gives you control over your emotions and your feelings, and you can choose to have a better life. And so, like, whenever I—just the other day, I was doing an interview, and I asked the girl, I asked her, I said, "What's the most difficult thing that's ever happened to you in your life?" right? And somebody who was listening to the interview was like, "I can't believe you asked her that." And I was like, well, you know, I'm interested. Is it that your ham sandwich wasn't the way you wanted it? Is that the most difficult thing that you've experienced in life, or have you gone through some really difficult human moments and you've, you know, you've got big boy pants on, right?

(Duncan at 00:13:19) Yeah, that's definitely a good question to ask. And the other thing that I would like to mention is in terms of KidSpire, one thing that I also found very interesting to see is that some of the people that were doing the teaching came from the orphanage that they were teaching at themselves. So that was also something that was really good to see, that they actually had, you know, these people doing the teaching that would often stem themselves and actually used to be in that orphanage. So, you know, talking about giving back, that is also something that I think is, you know, something that is truly unique. It's not something you see often.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:58) Well, the next time one of these projects comes up, whether it's the orphanage or something else that you're passionate about, just make sure to add me to your email list of people who donate and we'll contribute and do the best that we can, you know, here at the podcast. And I'd love to support things like that. I actually have a children's charity where we make books and give them away to homeless pregnant women facilities. So there's, like, specific shelters for homeless pregnant women. And so we made these children's books after my mom passed away. We took her life insurance money. She left us, like, $25,000 between me and my siblings. And instead of spending that on a vacation or anything, we decided to form a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and then print all—I think we got, like, 10,000 of these children's books—and then just gave them away.

(Duncan at 00:14:42) How awesome is that? I mean, that is something, you know, first of all, it's very admirable because not a lot of people would do that, right? The first thing that you would think about is buying something for themselves or, you know, like you said, go on holiday. But the second thing as well, you're impacting the lives of, you know, many others. And I think that is something that is truly amazing. And a lot of people don't realize, you know, what a great feeling it is. I mean, you've probably seen the kids, you know, walking around with those books or reading it or whatever it is, or with the moms reading it to their kids. That is something that, you know, you can't put a price to that. It's extremely valuable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:16) Yes. That type of experience, having children yourself, that type of experience and then watching people that you work with professionally, being part of their growth. Those types of intangibles, the feelings you get from that are far superior than acquiring any object. They last longer. They feel different.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:38) And so it's interesting how our bodies... what is it called? Altruism. Our bodies, you know, physiologically reward us for doing good things.

(Duncan at 00:15:49) Yep. And I couldn't agree more, to be honest.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:52) So tell me a little bit about VMware. I saw that you're head of HCI. Can you tell me a little bit about what that is?

(Duncan at 00:15:59) Yeah. Sure. For those who don't know, I think first and foremost, VMware started out as a pure virtualization company. In other words, what we allowed you to do, primarily in the early days, was taking any physical machine—talking about a server or a desktop with Windows or Linux or whatever it ended up being—and creating a virtual machine out of that, which basically allowed you to run multiple virtual machines on top of the physical instance.

(Duncan at 00:16:28) So this resulted in, you know, for a lot of data centers, a lot more efficiency, especially back in the days. I'm talking about twenty-plus years ago. And before a lot of the companies, probably fifteen years ago, they started looking into virtualization. But a lot of those companies or a lot of organizations started running out of data center space. They had issues with cooling. They had issues with power consumption. So they started looking into solutions where they could potentially change the density of their data center. So that is something that VMware brought to them, and VMware was one of the first to market, or at least the first to market to do x86 virtualization. Of course, there were already virtualization-type platforms out there, but then we're talking about mainframe-like solutions. But for x86, VMware brought a very unique solution to market, and they've been a dominant player in that space for the longest time. Now, of course, as soon as you start becoming the dominant player in that space, it means that the growth of your company will start slowing down as soon as you capture 70% of the market.

(Duncan at 00:17:35) And, you know, in that 70% market or 80% market space that you own, the majority of workloads are virtualized. It basically means that the growth starts slowing down. So one of the things that VMware started looking into is, okay, you know, what other things can we do to make life easier for data center administrators or people managing virtual desktops or laptops or even potentially iPhones or Androids or whatever it ends up being? So what we ended up doing is creating a multitude of different types of solutions. We have solutions focusing on the end-user computing space where we can manage not only your desktop, your laptop, but also your phone, for instance, and help you deliver applications to those types of devices.

(Duncan at 00:18:26) But where I focus on the most is on the data center aspect of things, and HCI is one of those solutions in that particular space. Now for those who don't know, HCI stands for hyperconverged infrastructure, which basically refers to the situation where we are taking compute and storage and combine that function into a single server. So normally, traditionally, you would have multiple different physical appliances or servers that would host this functionality. So you would have a storage system, and then on the other hand, you have multiple compute systems.

(Duncan at 00:19:03) What we did in our case is we virtualized that storage system, and we embedded that in our hypervisor. So in our virtualization layer so that the management of those systems at the installation and the configuration becomes extremely simple. On top of that, of course, you can imagine that we also can layer additional tools on top of that particular platform to manage the environment. So look at logging, look at monitoring, but potentially also leverage the platform to deploy particular applications that could be anything ranging from cloud-native all the way to something like Oracle or SAP or whatever it ends up being.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:42) And so I saw that you were at the company for a while prior to moving into this position. It looks like HCI is a business unit of VMware, and you're the CTO of the HCI. Is that pretty accurate?

(Duncan at 00:19:55) Yeah. So just to give some background around that, we used to have a business unit called Storage and Availability, which was mainly focused on storage, which in our case is vSAN, and then availability, which is more or less Site Recovery Manager, which is our solution that allows you to replicate data between locations and recover the data if something happens in your environment. After that, what happened is we had another product somewhere else in the company, which was called VMware Cloud Foundation, which is basically a suite of different components that allows you to set up a software-defined data center or, as some people refer to it, the full-stack hyperconverged infrastructure, leveraging that complete suite of software. So what they did is they actually merged those two teams into a new team, which was then called the HCI business unit, which then recently merged again with a different group called the Cloud Platform business unit.

(Duncan at 00:20:53) So now within the Cloud Platform business unit, we have the people focusing purely on things like vSphere, which is our virtualization layer, the management aspect of things with solutions like vCenter Server, for instance. And on top of that, we also have our side of the house, which is more focused on storage and availability. In my case, my focus is purely storage and availability. So I'm primarily focusing on things like vSAN, but also things like Site Recovery Manager, virtual volumes, anything that is related to storage and availability in our business unit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:26) That's very cool. And so you kind of got there through the merging of these teams. But if someone were asking for professional advice, what would you say is one of the big reasons or big learnings that you took away from going from team leader to a larger leadership position, like VP, CTO, director-level position?

(Duncan at 00:21:56) Yeah. That's a good question, and it's an interesting question as well. If you look at how I started at VMware, I kind of had a crazy career, to be honest. I started out as a senior consultant as part of professional services. Before I joined VMware, I actually was a consultant working for a smaller consultancy company in the Netherlands. So I was mainly doing four, five hosted deployments, relatively small VMware environments. But I was also doing some blogging on the side. People started picking up on some of my blog articles, and through my blog articles, I actually got recruited into VMware as a consultant. So I joined VMware as a consultant.

(Duncan at 00:22:37) But, you know, I'm as Dutch as it can get. I'm very open and I'm very honest. And, you know, I have no problem in terms of providing feedback. If something is not working the way customers would expect it to work or I would expect it to work, the one thing that I always end up doing is I try to reach out to the developers. I will try to reach out to the product managers and, potentially, if needed, if the problem isn't getting solved the way I would think customers would expect it to be solved, you know, I would even go one level higher. And that is something that people picked up on.

(Duncan at 00:23:06) Based on that, I was recruited within VMware into a different group that focused more on larger cloud deployments. So I did some of the larger cloud deployments for VMware in Europe, and I started creating all of the content around that as well. And after that, you know, I was thinking about what I wanted to do next. A position opened up in the technical marketing team. Fortunately for me, some of the technical marketing guys had used some of my content that I wrote for my blog for some of the white papers. So I reached out to the manager and ended up moving towards technical marketing. And I think this is where it gets interesting for the majority of people, because if you look at the role I have, which is, by the way, chief technologist, not chief technology officer, a part of the Office of CTO, but there's a distinction here. And I'll explain in a second what the distinction is, at least from a VMware side of things. As soon as I moved towards technical marketing, one of the things that I started focusing on more and more, and I was already doing this with my blogging, but it was the social media aspect of things, the public speaking and what have you.

(Duncan at 00:24:13) I was terrified of public speaking before I actually even started doing this. Right? I was, you know, I couldn't even stand up in a meeting of about ten, fifteen people and explain which direction we should be heading towards. That was definitely not my thing. But I felt that in order to grow to the next level, you know, in order to be promoted within the technical marketing team, even from being a technical marketing manager to being a technical marketing architect or a senior architect or principal or whatever it ends up being, I needed to make sure that I didn't only make a name for myself within the company, right, which you can do by sending emails, talking to various people.

(Duncan at 00:24:50) But I also needed to make sure that within the community, you know, people not only knew who I was, but also felt that I had something valuable to contribute. And that is something that I started focusing on, and that's actually where it started picking up significantly. I wrote a couple of books. I did a slew of presentations at various user group conferences. VMware organizes their own event, which is called VMworld, where you will have twenty, twenty-five thousand people attending. So I presented at those as well the past twelve years. And I did many podcasts and what have you. And that's more or less when, you know, my name started bubbling up more and more often. And at some point in time, I focused a lot on storage and availability during my talks. So that is something that stood out to some of our EVPs and general managers.

(Duncan at 00:25:46) And one of the general managers, which back in the day was about to start the vSAN business unit, the Storage and Availability business unit, they were looking for someone to help them evangelize the product. Basically, go out to customers, the larger customers, and do the events where needed. So he reached out to me and asked me if I wanted to join his team. And, you know, that's basically how I got into that position.

(Duncan at 00:26:13) Now I briefly mentioned that there's a distinct difference in terms of the role CTO and chief technologist. And for me specifically, and I think that goes for a lot of the people who have a chief technologist role within VMware, the emphasis typically tends to be more towards the customer and the events, where a lot of the people who have a CTO role within VMware primarily tend to focus on the inbound aspect of things. So they are more towards the development side of the house. So they have a development background typically. They, in a lot of cases, they were either a principal engineer or they managed a large group of developers. In the case of the majority of the chief technologists, I would say that probably 95% have some kind of field background. They have a huge affinity with customers, and they know how to explain technology to our customers in the simplest way. And I think that is a distinct difference, but also really important to understand when you go through the motion of your career. Right?

(Duncan at 00:27:19) Do you want to focus on becoming a CTO? Or, you know, potentially you could be a chief technologist. I'm not saying that if you're a chief technologist, you can't become a CTO because we have those as well. But in general, for a lot of these technology companies, you will see that the focus for the CTO tends to be more towards the development side of things, where I tend to focus more on the outbound aspect. But of course, all the feedback that I get during talking to customers is something that I will bring back to the development teams as well. So it's more a mix than it is really inbound-focused.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:53) I love that because, well, it's completely new. I've never heard it before, but it sounds good, and it makes sense. And it's always interesting because you know the humans and the types of people that you need to have success, and then it's just how you go about labeling them, you know, for the outside world. And so I like when I hear new stuff. And so next time I see that CT role, I'll be on the lookout, and I won't think it's a typo. I think it's a CT.

(Duncan at 00:28:19) Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:20) Yeah.

(Duncan at 00:28:21) Yeah. And of course, there's things as well like levels. Right? So it's always a difficult discussion because before I actually became a chief, I was the first chief technologist within VMware. And that's an interesting story also, because I was being put forward for promotion back then, and it was only one level to go to. But when the review board for promotions looked at my job profile and the work that I was doing, it didn't match that level that I was supposed to be promoted towards. So naturally, they said, you know what? It's not a good fit. We don't feel that he may deserve the title, but he doesn't meet the profile that is associated with that particular title. So that's when they came up with this chief technologist role within the company.

(Duncan at 00:29:05) They wanted to have a role within the company that is on the same level as something comparable within the development space, but then had a slightly different expectation with it. So that is interesting. And it's, for me, it was an interesting experience because, you know, you can imagine what happens when they phone you up: "Well, you know, you didn't get the promotion." And then three months later, they will tell you, "Oh, we're actually working on something else, which is based on what you've been doing the past two years." And it's, yeah, it's interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:38) So there was a three-month gap from the time that you found out you didn't get it until, you know, there was something else coming?

(Duncan at 00:29:44) Oh, yeah. It was probably even longer than that. But the thing is, keep in mind, right? VMware is a company of about 34, 35,000 people, roughly. We have a huge HR department, and whenever new roles and new responsibilities are defined, it needs to go... well, it needs, first of all, it needs to be approved, but it needs to go through different levels. Right? And depending on the level that you're at, it will go either high up or extremely high up. So, you know, you can imagine that these types of things need to go through different levels. On top of that, within most companies, certain titles are actually protected.

(Duncan at 00:30:21) Like within VMware, for instance, you can't simply create a job role which has the word "principal" in it or the word "chief." And the key reason for it is fairly simple. Right? From a principal engineering standpoint, that is only obtainable by people within R&D who are developers, and they've gone through the ranks. Right? They start at the bottom, go all the way at the top. So there's multiple steps that they will need to take. From a chief perspective, well, they give you that particular title for a reason, because it opens up certain doors amongst different types of customers. But if you end up with 500 CTOs or 250 chief technologists, there is no value anymore. If everyone that comes in is a chief technologist or a principal engineer, the customer doesn't see the value anymore.

(Duncan at 00:31:09) So those are protected job roles within the company. You know, you can imagine that as a result, it takes time for these to be approved. And not only does the title need to be approved, but the responsibilities and the different levels within the company, whether that's director, senior director, VP, also need to be associated with it and also will need to be approved.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:31) Yeah. I remember seeing some smaller companies have field CTOs for every state, and I'm like, okay, who's that? They're just the highest level technical salesperson for that state.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:46) But then I also remember a funny one was when I first got into B2B marketplace rather than just building contract apps, which is what I had done for the first ten years of my career. I started looking for the correct people to reach out to with different ideas and ways to grow business and work together. And I kept seeing Business Development Representative, BDR, at the companies. And I was contacting these people, and I'm not getting anything back from them. Now that I own a company and we have BDRs, I'm like, it's the worst name for the title. It was like everyone was calling them salespeople, and then they started to hate that title. And so then all the companies switched the titles to be something less salesy, and it's just fascinating the evolution of how these titles work.

(Duncan at 00:32:31) Yeah. You see them in the sales space a lot, right, with the system engineers who used to be sales engineers, then it became system engineers. Now majority of them are actually solution engineers or solution architects. Because I mean, in the end, it makes sense, right? Sales engineer, you have the feeling someone will show up on my door to actually sell me something. Then system engineer sounds a bit more technical, so it's probably a guy explaining the technology. Solution engineer or solution architect means that he's not only looking to create a solution for what they are doing, but he's trying to build something end to end. So they may help me solve some business problems along the way. So the evolution of those types of titles, it makes sense.

(Duncan at 00:33:10) And also the field CTO thing, I think a lot of startups started coining that title. And it's pretty straightforward, right? The majority of those people used to be technical marketing architects back in the day. And then after a while, people started using this back then new job role, which was called evangelist. And then some people after that became a chief technologist, and a lot of them actually started labeling themselves as field CTO, which typically means that they are the most senior person that does something from a technical perspective and has an engagement with an X amount of customers. It's kind of a dilution of value in terms of the roles. And you see that with startups a lot, right? Everyone is a senior director or a vice president as well. And if you move from a startup to a larger company, whether that's Google or Facebook, you will see that the person that was a VP or a senior director at the startup now just becomes a manager. Or the VP becomes a director instead of a senior director or even a VP because Google or Facebook or VMware or whatever it ends up being, they'll look at the amount of people that you're managing, the revenue stream that is coming in, and then they will figure out what the level should be. Because that's what in the end, what it's all about. What value are you creating, and what's the revenue that's coming in for the company?

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:32) I love that you say that because that is it. That is so everything that we do. How is this action or this process going to bring value? And because value, your revenue is just value converted, right? They're essentially interchangeable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:50) And it's just absolutely fascinating how much I've learned growing a business, and it's almost like it's a very difficult thing. Obviously, Musk, I listen to all those guys, Musk, Bezos, Branson, and they all talk about how it's the most difficult thing, and then going out and doing it. And what it does is it peels back and allows me to see stuff from the highest level of perspective. And then you're at the top, and so it's just a quicker, more difficult way to get to the top, founding a startup and having success. At least, when I'm saying top, I mean top of an organization to understand this. If you would have explained to me ten years ago or tried to get me to understand ten years ago this concept of value creation and people pay for problems or people pay for solutions to problems and all of these things, I just wouldn't do it. But after going through the motions, it's so obvious and right in front of us. And so I love that your mind is right on value creation.

(Duncan at 00:35:56) Yeah. I mean, that is a key thing, and I think that's the key thing in everything you do. You asked the question a couple of minutes ago in terms of creative element and stuff like that. How do you go from senior or from a senior consultant to chief technologist? And I think there are a couple of things that are really important. First of all, providing value. If you don't provide any value, then you're not gonna get noticed in any shape or form. And then secondly, which is what I tell, I do some mentoring for people. And one of the things I always mention to people is that what's really crucial is communication, right? If you don't speak up, right, if something is not right and you don't speak up, then you're never going to stand out. And in some cases, you may find yourself in a situation. I've been there, right, where the whole company or a large portion of the company doesn't appreciate the feedback that you've provided. But in the end, if it solves the problems for customers, then at some point in time, those people will look back at it and be like, you know what? He actually had a point. He wasn't just trying to be a nasty person, and they've used some pretty nasty names when it comes to me when providing feedback. But he was trying to solve a problem for customers, and in the end, he actually did have a point. And he did it to make sure that not only the company, but the products that those people were responsible for in the end became successful. I think those are the key things.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:24) I love that you mentioned that because it's like, when giving feedback, there's almost two types of responses. There's the person hating you and then going off and just continuing to hate you because they just respond to feedback. Nobody likes feedback. I mean, you could say you like feedback and train yourself to say that thing, but you still feel that human emotion inside when you're getting it. And then there's the person who, the second one would be the person who gets the feedback, doesn't like it, but then goes and changes because they're like, you don't like it in the moment. When you're getting it, you're just like, ugh. But then you go back, you think about it, you know in your core that you've decided you wanna be better and do better, and then so you make that change.

(Duncan at 00:38:08) Yeah. And it's a difficult thing, right? And as I mentioned at the start, I'm as Dutch as it gets. And especially when you work for a company like VMware and there's a huge variety of a huge diversity within the company, right? So we have people from various different countries. Of course, the majority of our engineers are actually based in Palo Alto or near Palo Alto. It doesn't mean that they are white male engineers. We have people from China. We have people from India. We have people from Germany, Denmark, The Netherlands, Israel. You name it, right? There's such a huge variety of people at the company. That also means from a cultural perspective, when it comes to providing feedback, you need to try to take that in consideration as well. And that's probably one of my biggest mistakes in the early days. Because I mean, I came from The Netherlands. People are very open and honest. If they don't like your t-shirt, they will tell you that, you know, it's not the nicest t-shirt you could wear for that particular occasion or whatever it is. Where in a lot of other countries, usually, they will tell you, oh, you look nice, right? And all of them will say, yeah, not so much. So it's tough. It's tough. Those are things you need to get used to. And it's still problematic occasionally because some of the feedback that you provide is not always what people would like to hear. So it's trying to find that balance in terms of how can I tell them, A, what works, but B, more importantly, try to explain to them what doesn't work in hopefully a nice way, which is not always easy. It's something that is difficult and especially in this day and age, right? Everyone has a thousand things on the mind. So you open up the email. You open up the email client. You don't even start with good morning. Hope all is well. You simply start typing away. You send and then you realize, oh, I probably should have opened up differently. Good morning, right? And just try to have at least this buffer in between your name and the feedback so that they don't instantaneously think that you're trying to call their baby ugly because that's not what you're trying to do. You're trying to solve or prevent issues from occurring, but it's, that's not always easy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:21) No. And that's where the culture being strong in one direction or another is really useful. One example, when I want direct interactions, my Israeli friends. So I think part of that's because every citizen has to go through the military in Israel. So they get that military style of behavior and training. But, man, I feel so comfortable. I feel, I'm not on edge because I know that they are saying everything that they think, and they're being incredibly direct. And the first time I, I just remember the feeling, the first time I'd met an Israeli person, and it was just, it was unbelievable. I just felt immediately comfortable. I was like, these people have taken all social filters and turned them off, and they just communicate. And it's, you know, it's its own style. It's its own culture. It's, you know, it just is. But I found it refreshing because I like that instant direct feedback.

(Duncan at 00:41:22) Yeah. I agree. I wouldn't say the Dutch are as extreme as the people from Israel, but it's fairly close to be honest. I've been to, I know a couple of, I haven't been there, but I've been in the region and I know some folks from Israel and actually visited customers with a couple of sales engineers from Israel as well. And I know they can be very direct. I personally appreciate it, but I can also imagine that for people with a different background, especially if you go more towards Asia for instance, right? It can be very difficult to hear some of the feedback that could be provided. Actually, it wouldn't even be accepted and you could find yourself at risk of being kicked out of the office. So that is the challenging thing. So that's why I always try to tell people that communication and your style of communication is really important when it comes to the career progression because without being heard, you won't get anywhere.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:16) So let's say we've got some people listening and they're like, I wanna progress in my career. I hear these two individuals talking about these concepts of providing value and communication that they need to get better at understanding these two things. Where do you point people that you mentor? How do you tell them to get better at understanding value and get better at communication?

(Duncan at 00:42:35) Yeah. I mean, of course, there is a, there are a multitude of books that you could start reading. Typically, well, I do read books, but I'm not the biggest book reader. So one of the podcasts, I mean, you may have heard of the podcast, but one of the podcasts that I tend to listen to is The Art of Manliness. And The Art of Manliness, they have an insane amount of episodes that typically discuss anything from public speaking, communication in general, how to work, how to work at being uncomfortable. So how to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, which has everything to do, you know, it could be part of your career as well, right? Everyone wants to progress to the next level. But in order to progress to the next level, you need to move out of your comfort zone, which isn't always the most pleasant space to be at. So you need to get comfortable with getting out of your comfort zone. But that is one of the things that I've been focusing on listening to some of the podcasts and especially The Art of Manliness. They have some really great episodes where they discuss things like communication and stuff like that. The other thing that I would say, what probably helped me personally the most is public speaking. I mentioned that at the start, I used to be terrified of public speaking. So even at school back in the days, when I was 14, 15, I wouldn't do any presentation whatsoever. I would get physically sick. So I would call in at eight in the morning, tell them that I was sick and I would actually be sick just thinking about the fact that I had to do a presentation at school. I forced myself to start doing that at smaller events and larger events. Unfortunately for me, I wasn't the smartest when I started out. So I started out with one of the largest IT conferences that there is in this space. So I started out at VMworld, unfortunately, which is not a smart thing to do, which I would never ever recommend anyone doing. So if you're interested in learning how to communicate, how to speak to an audience, whether that's a small group or a larger group, public speaking is key. Because the one thing that I think it taught me most is to think about what you're going to say. Think about the key points that you like to get across. And before you do, you need to get an understanding of the audience. And I think those things are key in general when it comes to communication. Because you and I can be talking for an hour. But if I don't understand at what level, for instance, in terms of technology you are, right? You may have heard about VMware. You may have not heard about VMware. And I can start talking about things like transparent page sharing and our DRS scheduler and whatever it is. But if you barely know what a virtual machine is, you're not going to understand, right? So by doing public speaking, you basically, it will force you to get a better understanding of the audience. And then it will force you to learn how to interact with the audience as well. You can see their responses, what to say at certain points in time, and will allow you to learn how to make or how to figure out what is absolutely crucial in terms of the message to get across. So I think that is probably the most important thing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:55) Yeah. And I was going to say usually the way the world works is even if you wanna get up and get in front of a lot of people, you can't because you just don't have those, you had the title and you had C at the end.

(Duncan at 00:46:08) It's an interesting thing because, let me tell you the story. This is probably funny for the people listening. So it is probably about eleven years ago. I had just joined the company.

(Duncan at 00:46:20) I was still a senior consultant, and I was already doing a lot of blogging on the topic of vSphere high availability. So it's very specific for our space. I just provided one of the engineers some feedback, and that engineer was actually—he submitted a session for the conference. I didn't submit a session for the conference. He submitted the session with the conference.

(Duncan at 00:46:41) And after we had a couple of conversations, he reaches out to me and says, "You know what? Would you like to join me during this session?" Well, I'm terrified of public speaking, so my first answer was, "No, not really. I'm not interested."

(Duncan at 00:46:52) "I don't want to do it. You know, I've got too much things going on." I'm trying to find an excuse. And he's like, "You know what? Could you help me create the deck? Because you are in touch with customers on a daily basis. I just want to make sure that my content actually reflects what these guys would like to hear." I said, "You know what? Sure. I'm happy to help you with the deck."

(Duncan at 00:47:10) So the two of us started creating this deck. And then, you know, after two months of going back and forth, going back and forth, having meetings, conference calls, and going over the content, he was like, "You know what? You know the content really well. Why don't you just present half of the deck?" I'm like, "Yeah, I don't know. I don't really want to do it." But at that point in time, I realized that, like I mentioned, in order to move forward, I need to make sure to get my name out there, and I need to get comfortable with public speaking. Because, you know, at some point in time when you get to a certain level, you will need to present in front of a large group. So I said yes. But before I said yes, I asked him, I said, "How many people are going to show up to this session?"

(Duncan at 00:47:48) He said, "Well, on average, about 100 people. If we're very lucky, 125, 150." I'm like, "Oh, okay." So I immediately started to get nervous. Now two weeks before the event, he drops me an email and he says, "You know, Duncan, I've got a problem. We have this release coming up after VMworld. I have six escalations that I need to take care of. So I need to solve these bugs. Otherwise, we can't ship the release." So, you know, that's obviously not an option.

(Duncan at 00:48:20) I'm like, "Okay. So now what?" He said, "Well, you need to deliver the session on your own." "Okay." I said, "Well, you know what? It's 100 people probably. Who cares? I'll do it." So he emails the VMworld team and says, "You know what? I can't be part of the session any longer. Please register the session fully to Duncan's name." So VMworld registers the session to my name, and I get an email that mentions the session is registered to your name. "Here's the back end system. You can see how many people signed up."

(Duncan at 00:48:51) Well, you can probably already guess what happened. I click on the link. I go to the session itself, and I notice that it doesn't say 100 or 125 or 150, but it actually says 730 people. So they bumped us up to, like, four times to the biggest room that they had available within the Moscone Conference Center in San Francisco. Not only did they have the session once, but they scheduled the session twice because there were so many people that wanted to see the session.

(Duncan at 00:49:21) As you can imagine, when you need to go up in front of 700-plus people, you know, a room which is literally, you know, hundreds of meters deep, you know, probably 100 meters wide—it's just terrifying. It's terrible. And like I said, that's why I would never ever recommend anyone to start out with a large conference, because it just, you know, it wipes you out. I was drained for the rest of the day when I delivered that session, I could tell you that. I was sweating. I couldn't eat. I couldn't drink. I felt sick.

(Duncan at 00:49:51) It was horrible. But in the end, although it wasn't my best session ever, it was, you know, probably the worst session I ever done. I knew it was. I realized that as well. That wasn't good. But I knew, you know, I did it, and it can't get worse than this. So I just need to make sure I get more practice. I do it more often. And probably the next time, hopefully, it's going to be a smaller session, which, of course, at VMworld will never happen. But at some of the user conferences, it will happen.

(Duncan at 00:50:21) So, you know, I made sure to just do it more and more often to ensure that, you know, at this point in time, I could do a decent job at it. Because it's not a great feeling when you get off stage in front of 700 people and you know that it wasn't what you would hope for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:40) No. But when you crush it, when you get off stage after you crushed it, that is an unbelievable feeling.

(Duncan at 00:50:48) Yeah. That, I mean, that definitely happens, of course, but definitely usually not the first time. That happens when you've done it a bunch of times.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:55) Yeah. For me, it was, like, you know, standing up in front of, you know, a team or just a small group of people and then, you know, giving my first presentation. I think there's, like, 10 people in the room. And then did another one, 10 or 15, and then did another one, like, 30 people, 35, and then, you know, 50, and then 100. And then I, you know, did that for a couple months. I was speaking to rooms of 100, and then it went 500, 5,000. And then I noticed that there wasn't really much of a difference between, like, 5,000, because you can only—the room can only feel so big. There can only be so much energy. I think, like, if you go to, like, 25,000, if it would be different if you were, like, in a stadium, right? But as long as you're in the rooms where they're just, like, pulling down those walls and expanding it deeper and wider, you kind of get that, like, front stage. You get the feeling of the room, and I don't know, it's fantastic.

(Duncan at 00:51:49) But that also very much depends on how often you've done it. So the one thing that I noticed the very first time that I did my session at VMworld, which was the one that I was just talking about, is because I was so nervous, I got really hypersensitive. So, you know, if someone would drop his pen all the way at the end of the room, I could hear it. I noticed, you know, every single thing in the room, but it was mainly because I was so freaking nervous. These days, you know, if someone's phone will ring, you know, I will probably make a joke and continue with the conversation, right? It's not a problem anymore. But especially when you get started with these types of things, you tend to get hypersensitive. The thing that I probably learned most is that the most common mistake that people make is when they start presenting, and especially when they have a slide deck and they've rehearsed it many, many times, they are so focused on the content. They're so focused on delivering every single bullet point that's on the slide. And then when they forget a bullet point, they tend to get extremely nervous. What a lot of people don't realize is that no one in the audience knows what your talking track is for the slide, right?

(Duncan at 00:53:03) It's just that the slide is there to support your story. So make sure that it doesn't contain an insane amount of detail, right? A picture, a couple of words—that usually works really well, something that supports your story. But more importantly, if you forget to say something, don't get nervous because you can repeat it. You can say it the next slide or five slides down the line. You could take a step back and come back again, right? It doesn't really matter. People don't know what you're going to say.

(Duncan at 00:53:28) And the other thing that I think is really important, something that I didn't realize, is that especially with these, you know, technology conferences, every single person in the room is there to learn something. So if you're speaking, you don't need to get nervous that someone's going to be heckling you or, you know, they are looking for you to fail. They are spending, you know, their time during a conference to learn something. They're not going to sit there for an hour waiting for you to fail. They're there to learn something.

(Duncan at 00:53:54) So you probably have something valuable to mention. Otherwise, they wouldn't have picked the session. Yeah, they don't want to get nervous.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:00) Yeah. They are on your side for sure.

(Duncan at 00:54:03) For sure. But then it's easy to forget, right? When you have 700 people staring at you or 50 people, whatever it ends up being, the first few times you will forget about that. But it's definitely something you need to ingrain, you know, in your memory because it's important. It will help you deliver the story.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:18) Now I like what you said too about keeping it simple with the slides. When I'm doing a talk, what I'll do is I'll say, you know, in one week, what's the one or two things the person's going to remember from this talk, like, in a week? And then I try to gear everything around supporting that and just to make sure that those are the core points. One time, I did this—I was doing a tour last year. I did, like, 50 talks, and I had two different talks that I was giving. And, you know, they print the talk information in the programs, right? And so I get to this one—I think it was in Chicago, a couple, like, 500 people or something—but I had the wrong deck loaded for the one that they were going to give me. And they were very specific about this, but I knew the talk well enough to where I just left everything on the first screen, which is just like a branding screen. And I just gave the talk without the slides because when I very first started giving talks, I did it without slides. I was just telling a story. And then people requested slides so much that I ended up making slides for my story.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:25) And then when I didn't have the slides once, I was like, "Oh, this is fine." And, honestly, like, nobody even noticed that I didn't use the slides because if you just talk to them and you tell them a story and they're interested in the content of that story, they're just going to sit there and listen to you.

(Duncan at 00:55:42) Yeah. And, of course, it also very much depends on the content that you're delivering. For me, a lot of the content is extremely—well, I probably shouldn't say extremely technical—but we do deep dives. We do, you know, just average-level, you know, technology type of sessions. So depending on the content that you're delivering, you will need to have some slides supporting you.

(Duncan at 00:56:04) The other thing which I also always really enjoy is doing some form of demo, because we have, I mean, we have a multitude of products and a lot of people haven't seen the product or they're not really sure what it looks like. So I always like to do the demos. And the one thing that I think is always probably the hardest thing to do for the majority of people, but I can play a demo behind me without seeing what is happening on the screen and actually talk to the demo, right? I don't know what it is, but for some whatever reason, I'm pretty good at remembering the flow of these types of demos.

(Duncan at 00:56:40) I can immediately talk through them without watching the screen, and that is also something that a lot of people tend to appreciate, right? It's just a video, and it's just a way of delivering those types of things, which makes you seem very comfortable up on stage. Even if you're not, it makes you seem very comfortable.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:00) And the more time you spend on stage, the more comfortable you get too. Now we were talking about, like, mimicking earlier, the behaviors. Do you have any speakers that you personally like that I could maybe post some links in our show notes? People could see—we'll find some of your talks. We'll post them in there. But any other speakers you're a fan of?

(Duncan at 00:57:23) Well, I think when I started out in my career, there was one guy who was doing a lot of sessions from a virtualization VMware perspective, which was Chad Sakac. He's just a natural when it comes to public speaking, right? You have people that, you know, like myself and some of my other colleagues, we really had to learn, you know, to get comfortable up on stage and tell a story. This guy, it doesn't matter what he's talking about. He will get up and he will crush it, right? It's like this little energizer bunny. He's just so energetic. You know, he knows how to talk to the crowd, and it's just very entertaining.

(Duncan at 00:58:06) The other one—there are two people within VMware which I also think deliver excellent content. I mean, first of all, our CEO, Pat Gelsinger—he had some, you know, really good stories in general to share about what customers are doing and, you know, what kind of technologies we have and what they are seeing out there. One of the other people that I've seen presenting many different times is Joe Bagley. Joe is the CTO for EMEA specifically in VMware, and he is the CTO for VMware as a company. So he represents all different types of technologies.

(Duncan at 00:58:52) And what I always find very interesting in his talks is that he mixes, you know, various things, whether it's consumer technology, what's happening in the consumer space, how it may reflect on the enterprise space. And then he mixes it, you know, with all various things of life and the interesting stories that he's heard from customers, interesting stories that he's heard from his kids, and what have you. And somehow he always ties it back to what we are doing and how VMware can make life, you know, basically for everyone easier. It's very interesting, his conversations.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:25) Yeah. I have one to recommend for you that you might like. David Isbitsky. He's the chief evangelist for Amazon Alexa. He's like—I don't know. I'm just a fan of—I think he sounds a lot like the last guy you mentioned, Joe Bagley. I think that's his name. But, yeah, the way he tells the stories and weaves them in and has the energy, just in all around—just, you know, when you speak and then you start to gain skill at it and learn all the little tricks and, you know, all the things that make up a good talk, and then you see people execute it differently, you start to gain this, like, spectator view.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:03) He's just one of the people I've come across that I think is pretty great. I also have this book. It's down here. I don't know if you can see it on the screen. I'll grab it. It's called "Storynomics." So this guy's name is Robert McKee, and he is, like, a part of basically every, like, major movie or TV show. His list is ridiculous if you go to his website. But this is a book that he wrote on storytelling, like the storytelling within a B2B-type world slash public talks. It's just—it's got the principles of great stories. It's like low-level principles of great stories, and I found that to be extraordinarily useful as, like, an improvement to public speaking. Now I'm curious—you mentioned earlier—and do you have, like, about 10 more minutes? Is that okay?

(Duncan at 01:00:57) Can we go ahead? No problem.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:59) If you don't, we can wrap up. Let me know.

(Duncan at 01:01:01) No worries. No worries.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:02) Okay. So I have, like, two more things I want to get to. So the first one is we were talking earlier about getting out of your comfort zone. I'm just curious, like, how are you getting out of your comfort zone today?

(Duncan at 01:01:15) Yeah. That's a great question. Actually, not too long ago, you may have read it on my blog as well—within VMware, when you've been with the company for five years, we have the ability to go on what they call a "Take Three." Basically, it allows you to spend three months within a year, three consecutive months working on something completely different than your day-to-day job.

(Duncan at 01:01:38) So I've been with the company for twelve years. I already had the option five years ago, but I never really took it on because I was doing different things back then. I was extremely busy with moving from one team to the other team, building products and what have you. But now it was the time. I had been focusing on the same thing for the past six years. I've been part of this business unit for the past six years, which means I've been telling a similar story for the past six years as well.

(Duncan at 01:02:01) So I started to notice that I was getting extremely comfortable, not only in my job, but you also notice that from a personal growth perspective, it kind of stops. So that's why I mentioned you need to get uncomfortable. You need to make sure that you get out of your comfort zone. And Take Three within VMware allows you to do that. So I decided to take a Take Three opportunity within VMware with our virtual reality/augmented reality team.

(Duncan at 01:02:28) And the interesting thing for me was that, first of all, I didn't know anything about AR and VR whatsoever. I knew they were planning on, at least they told me, that they were looking for someone to build some kind of reference architecture around remote rendering. Remote rendering is where the content that is being presented or being shown within your augmented reality or virtual reality device is being rendered on a physical server somewhere else. So it's not a physical, so it's not a system sitting next to you, or it's not an application running within the, or an application running within the headset that is doing the rendering. The rendering actually happens somewhere in a remote data center.

(Duncan at 01:03:11) So they asked me if I was interested in focusing on that project, and that took me completely out of my comfort zone. Because besides getting to learn about AR and VR, I needed to understand the use cases that customers had. I needed to get familiar with remote rendering and the remote rendering solutions out there. And then I quickly found out that, you know, that doesn't work without having some form of GPU out there to render the graphics. So I needed to understand what a GPU is and how that works.

(Duncan at 01:03:40) Then I need to figure out, you know, in order to create an optimal solution, if there was a way that we could, that you could virtualize the GPU. We have that technology available within VMware. And then, of course, you know, how that actually works and how you need to set that up. And that was a, you know, pretty interesting, at least in my opinion, a pretty interesting project to go through.

(Joel Beasley at 01:04:05) Did you get to build something specific for a specific application?

(Duncan at 01:04:10) Yeah, we actually ended up building a reference architecture that allows us, or allowed us, to remote render extremely graphic intense applications to an Oculus Quest. So the Oculus Quest is one of the cheapest headsets out there. You can buy it for $400, and it's not really suitable for high end graphics, mainly because it has a low spec CPU and a low spec GPU within that set. And typically don't connect it to a physical machine.

(Duncan at 01:04:40) So in our case, what we ended up doing is we used a remote rendering protocol, and we used GPU technology to render the graphics on a physical server. And we stream that over Wi-Fi to the headset itself. So that was the solution that we ended up building, and it is the solution that a bunch of customers are interested in. And the reason, I mean, it's stuff that you find out, right, when you go through this exercise. The reason that they are interested in it is because of the fact that this allows them to not only use cheap devices, but on top of that, all of their intellectual property or data isn't stored on the device.

(Duncan at 01:05:16) It simply streams as a graphic image to the device itself. So if one of the devices gets lost or is stolen, the IP doesn't disappear. Because as soon as the thing is switched off, that data is gone. The data only exists within the data center. It's the image that is being streamed.

(Duncan at 01:05:34) So it's not the fact that they can use cheap devices. It's the fact that they actually have a secure solution which is managed by the data center team and can be monitored as well by the data center team. That was really important for these types of customers. So that was a very interesting exercise. And like I said, for me, especially because I didn't know anything about these types of technologies, it was very interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 01:06:00) Check this out. I, let me see if I can share this here. We were looking today for different companies to have on the podcast. It was part of our routine. This company makes AR for firefighters to see through when there's smoke. And I mean, doesn't that just look like the future?

(Duncan at 01:06:19) Yeah. That's insane. And the other thing is, well, we had a discussion with a couple of firefighters on this, you know, on this topic, not about AR, but about virtual reality specifically. And so what they do to train these guys and girls typically is they have a container, and they set up a room in a container, and they burn a container down. And then they have these teams going in to try to figure out, you know, what to do, in order to learn how to investigate arson and stuff like that, right? But the problem with that is that if they want to train multiple teams per day, but let's say they train six teams per day, right, they're not going to burn down six containers because that's too expensive. So what they do is all six teams will go into the same container. But the first five teams can't touch any of the objects because that contaminates the crime scene. So it's not really a great way of training them.

(Duncan at 01:07:15) So what they ended up doing from a virtual reality perspective is they simply burn down a couple of containers. They 3D scan the whole environment, picking up objects, putting it back, picking up object, putting it back. And then they rendered that whole scene. And now they simply give these firefighters a headset, and they can go in in virtual reality and do the full training, right? And every single person can do the training as if they are the first to enter, and they can touch anything they want. They could pick it up. They could put it back, right? And when the next person does the training, they simply reset the scene. And voilà, you know, they can go ahead and do it. It's, you know, those types of use cases were very interesting to hear. It's the stuff you don't think about, right?

(Joel Beasley at 01:07:57) I love it. I love it. I'm also excited about, I saw in the news that you guys, or VMware, did a deal with Space Force, right? Like, I thought that was very cool because, I mean, I'm just a huge fan of space. I'm a fan of all the amazing business opportunities that will happen in space, like, you know, space mining asteroids. And I see your TIE fighter type things back there too in your background. Are you excited about, well, first of all, did you get to be involved with any of the Space Force projects?

(Duncan at 01:08:33) No. So that, so the problem with these types of projects is that I've been involved with, I'll mention one later, been involved with some interesting projects. But, of course, these types of projects, and especially when it comes to Space Force, it's a very select group of people that get involved with these types of deals and these types of conversations, and mainly because, you know, a lot of the things that are being discussed are highly classified. So it requires you to be at a specific security level. And, you know, as a Dutch person, it's almost impossible to get, you know, it's not almost impossible. It's impossible to get at that security level because they expect you to be a U.S. citizen. So that is challenging. But if you look in Europe, you know, I've had some really, really interesting conversations with various people, right? People that were creating, for instance, you know, submarine technology, the data center technology for submarines. I've had conversations with customers that, you know, build airplanes that do, you know, anything from a military point of view, whether that's, you know, deploying units in the Middle East or, you know, whatever it ends up being. But it's, we have some really interesting conversations. We have a lot of interesting customers. And I think that's something that a lot of people don't realize, right?

(Duncan at 01:09:52) When you talk about technology companies, I'm pretty sure your listeners will have the same thing. I've seen a list of people you've interviewed. You know, I've listened to a lot of the interviews. When people think about technology companies, people ask them, name five technology companies, right? They will tell you, you know, probably Google, Amazon, Facebook, Tesla, Uber. It's those types of companies which aren't all necessarily 100% technology companies, probably 99%, right? Because without the technology, they wouldn't be where they are today. What a lot of people don't think about or realize is that if you look at the majority of companies out there, like, look at the Fortune 500. The majority of them are probably an extremely high percentage. I don't know the exact percentage from the top of my head, but I can guarantee you they are running some kind of VMware technology underneath, whether that's in the data center or for managing, you know, any of the end user devices, or it's something around monitoring or automation, whatever it is. A lot of them are actually using our technology, and that's the interesting thing about a company like VMware. You know, you're in touch with so many different organizations and companies out there. It's, you know, you have conversations, you know, one day about a grocery store, the next day you're talking about a submarine, or, you know, someone trying to do a data setup on the train or whatever it ends up being.

(Joel Beasley at 01:11:16) That is super exciting. Yeah. I had talked to some people off the podcast about what they were doing with cruise ships and software because they have that unique aspect that they're off the grid essentially, components failing between port visits and all of this interesting technology. But as we start to wrap up here, I know that there's VMworld 2020. Are you speaking there?

(Duncan at 01:11:43) Yeah. I actually have two sessions at VMworld 2020. So one of my sessions is very specific. So for those who are into VMware technology, I have a session which is HCI1814. I'm presenting together with my colleague, Cormac Hogan, on the topic of vSAN, a platform for virtual machines and containerized workloads. So we'll be discussing how vSAN can help running those types of workloads. And then the other session that I have, which is ETPD43, is a session about the Take Three that I was just talking about. So my journey around being, you know, uncomfortable and getting out of my comfort zone and what I did during those three months, specifically. So I'll be discussing some of the findings around virtual reality, augmented reality, some of the use cases, you know, some of the interesting things that I encountered when I went through the project itself. So I have two sessions at the event.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:37) Excellent. We'll post links in the show notes for people to register for the event and find out more there. This is awesome. We did it. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Duncan at 01:12:47) I feel awesome. That was a really good conversation. I didn't know what to expect. So it's, yeah, it went really well. Thanks.

(Joel Beasley at 01:12:54) Figured we'd make it a format to where I enjoy doing it. We just kind of hang out and talk, you know? Well, thank you so much. Have a fantastic day, Duncan.

(Duncan at 01:13:03) You too. Thanks for your time.

(Joel Beasley at 01:13:04) Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you would like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.