It’s All-Stars season for VMware Inc. The virtualization company rounds out a week of recognition with RADIO, a one-day gathering to honor VMware’s elite engineers. The annual research and development event follows close behind VMware’s Sales Club ceremonies. For Chief Executive Officer Pat Gelsinger (pictured), the back-to-back events are characteristic of VMware’s culture and worthy of his personal attention.

“[RADIO] long preceded me, but when I got here, I’m going to keep doing it, of course,” Gelsinger said. “This is like the party for the top engineers. They get to come geek out, share their best ideas, and interact with each other. It’s become one of those unique pieces of our development culture.”

Gelsinger spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livstreaming studio, during the RADIO event in San Francisco. They discussed the impact of VMware’s research and development culture on the company’s acquisitions strategy, how the resulting innovation reaches customers, and where VMware will position itself to ride the next wave of computing trends (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Investing in companies and cultures

From partnerships to purchases, VMware has been investing time and money across the major cloud platform providers in an effort to enable fully virtualized data centers. VMware has landmark team-ups with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM and Alibaba, positioning it well no matter who wins the cloud wars. Recent acquisitions, including software packager Bitnami, push VMware’s objectives to abstract away as much data center management as possible.

“As a company [Bitnami] definitely had this ability — this respect and rapport — with the open-source community. Being able to cross between open source [software] and enterprise credibility — that’s exactly where VMware sees and wants to be able to position ourselves,” Gelsinger said.

Bitnami’s experience in delivering enterprise packages for the progressive open-source space helps fill some gaps in VMware’s marketplace of software applications, according to Gelsinger. As hybrid computing becomes the de facto standard, Bitnami’s open-source perspective boosts VMware’s efforts in container technology for better application portability.

Yet such acquisitions are only beneficial to VMware if the cultures fit. “As with every one of our acquisitions, I personally meet with every CEO before they do the deal. Are they going to fit our culture?” Gelsinger said.

It’s convenient, then, that VMware’s Sales Club and RADIO events are so close together. Gelsinger has an unmatched opportunity to hear out the sales and engineering teams regarding acquisitions under consideration.

“Engineers are almost always part of the decision with respect to acquisitions,” said Gelsinger, explaining that RADIO can even be a chance for engineers at the company under consideration. “They take to RADIO like fish to water. They just jump right in and start interacting with their peers. It’s such a diverse pool that all of the sudden, ideas are being bounced off each other, homogenized and challenged. Just getting back from Sales Club, the sales leaders say, ‘Hey, this is pretty good. I like this,’ for many of those acquisitions. But the engineers — this is even better for them.”

Kubernetes will define the new middleware abstraction

Preserving VMware’s R&D culture also means catching the next wave, otherwise “you’re just driftwood,” as goes the saying penned by Gelsinger himself. For Gelsinger, the next wave is Kubernetes. The open-source tool for managing containerized applications has caught on like wildfire, each major cloud platform spinning up its own flavor of Kubernetes.

“Containers — Kubernetes — the next middleware abstraction, and we see Kubernetes becoming the next native [application programming interface] that the VMware [software-defined data center] will support,” Gelsinger stated. “We’re going to make containers in Kubernetes so seamless with regard to the core [virtual machine] infrastructure that a customer never needs to decide what impact this will have.”

Gelsinger expects the Kubernetes layer to impact both up and down the stack, making it critical for VMware to “get it right,” he said. Representative of the enterprise’s appetite for API infrastructure services, Kubernetes could eventually displace Red Hat Inc.’s OpenStack solutions as the middleware of choice, according to Gelsinger.

“[Kubernetes] also then defines the middleware abstraction of choice, so all your WebSpheres, WebLogics and Java communities get displaced as well, as they are re-factored into this automated, containerized, scale-out world,” Gelsinger concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the RADIO event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the VMware RADIO 2019 event. Neither VMware Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE