Who wouldn’t want to be the most cutting-edge technology company in Silicon Valley? Perhaps a company that wants to sell to enterprises in the real world. Despite the apparent contradiction, there may be a space in the world for companies with one foot in the enterprise and one foot in futuristic research and development.

VMware Inc. is emerging as the company to fill that space. The virtualization giant is rationing its research and development efforts among a range of domains.

“VMware prides themselves on doing 15% R&D that’s way outside the box,” said John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio. “The rest is all done within the constrains of what they’re doing in the market.”

Furrier and co-host Lisa Martin (@LisaMartinTV) spoke during the RADIO event in San Francisco. They discussed VMware’s R&D efforts and how the company will transform itself in the coming years (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

The real R&D world

Though VMware may seem synonymous with reliable — and predictable — enterprise technology, its roots are actually similar to those of Google LLC. Both came out of Stanford University; both have an academic ethos, Furrier explained. The difference is in how they’ve presented their wares to the market. Google has typically not brought its advanced tech to the market as usable products; VMware has. 

RADIO stands for R&D Innovation Offsite. VMware’s R&D manifesto is about taking R&D out of the lab and into enterprises and abroad. “What RADIO has done successfully, was take it from the Palo Alto bubble, which Google lives in, and they’ve extended it [to] the rest of world,” Furrier said. 

Fifty percent of the attendees at today’s conference are from outside the U.S. RADIO solicits over 1,000 R&D papers from technologists who share their ideas transparently in an environment of learning and collaboration.

“People … here are passionate about these A&R projects that they’re doing outside of their day jobs,” Martin said. 

There is a ton of diversity of opinion, work, experience and skills among VMware’s R&D community; this will help the company formulate new technology and inject it into its portfolio. “It’s going to be a different company next 10 years … than it was in the past 10 years,” Furrier stated. 

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: VMware Inc.