Technology companies by nature generally prefer to keep research and development projects pretty close to the vest. Silicon Valley R&D labs usually have more layers of security than weapons of world domination in a “Mission Impossible” film, and the public rarely sees what goes on behind the curtain until a company is ready to reveal new products or innovative advances to the global community.

By this standard, VMware Inc. made a recent decision to be anything but typical. Since 2001, the cloud computing and virtualization software provider has brought only engineers to Radio, the company’s “Research And Development Innovation Offsite.” This year, the company pulled back the curtain and invited media and analysts to join the fun for the first time at its Radio 2018 event in San Francisco.

While visitors to Radio’s expo floor had to sign non-disclosure agreements, VMware held keynote sessions and made executives available to talk in general terms about future projects under consideration. And one of the company’s top research executives made it clear the growth of Radio to now include over 1,700 attendees from 25 countries was a positive and necessary step for future innovation.

“This is really for the developers, by the developers,” said David Tennenhouse (pictured), chief research officer of VMware. “When you’re working on innovation, you want a breadth component. You want everybody doing a little.”

Tennenhouse spoke with John Furrier (@furrier), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Radio 2018 event. They discussed enterprise mobility technology, the company’s foray into the public cloud, a project to clone virtual machines, blockchain’s potential, and the need for risk taking. (* Disclosure below.)

This week theCUBE features David Tennenhouse as our Guest of the Week.

AirWatch powers enterprise mobility

To better understand where VMware may be headed, it’s instructive to look at where the company has been. One guidepost can be found in the company’s 2014 acquisition of AirWatch, a specialist in the management of apps and data on mobile devices.

Since the purchase, AirWatch has become a key element of VMware’s enterprise mobility management strategy, which has grown in significance as more connected devices move to the edge and the “internet of things” generates increasing amounts of valuable data.

“We’re working hard … to get that presence right at the edge of the gateways that bridge between the things that connect to the physical world and bring it into the virtual world,” Tennenhouse said. “I think that’s strategically really key because it gives us a little bit of presence on the edge devices that touch people.”

vCloud Air built partnerships

Another glance back in time looks at VMware’s decision to become a public cloud provider.  vCloud Air was designed to provide hybrid cloud service and was rebranded in 2014.

The cloud venture did not go well. In 2015, Wikibon published a report that raised questions about the platform’s long-term viability. VMware sold its vCloud Air division to the French hosting firm OVH two years later.

Yet, VMware was able to channel its growing cloud services business into the relationships it built while running vCloud Air. Rather than offering one public cloud to many, the company today provides services to thousands in the cloud space.

“We’ve got literally thousands of people running public clouds in either specialized markets or particular countries that are running on our platform,” Tennenhouse pointed out. “That whole vCloud effort helped push that forward.”

Too soon for machine cloning

There were also ideas incubated out of Radio that had the potential to advance forward significantly, only to be shelved because customers weren’t ready for the technology yet. One example of that is VM Fork, a project to rapidly clone and deploy virtual machines 10 times faster than currently possible.

The proposal originated four years ago and was based on a belief that container users would welcome the faster technology. But VM Fork wasn’t quite ready for early adoption.

“It was funded, we incubated it, got vSphere containers, hit the market at exactly the right time,” Tennenhouse recalled. “But what we learned as we started doing trials with customers is that they actually didn’t need the instant clone on containers. What they needed was throughput; they wanted to know they could do large numbers per second, so we’ll probably come back to it.”

Taking a closer look at blockchain

VMware executives made it clear during the Radio event that the company is actively researching blockchain technology, with a particular focus on the use of trusted records for data exchange. “Anywhere you want to pull together essentially a club for the exchange of data with a persistent record of what happened, you’ve now got a common way of doing it,” Tennenhouse said.

But don’t expect VMware to embrace cryptocurrencies anytime soon. The company’s head of research has no interest in bitcoin and abhors the energy-intensive nature of bitcoin mining, which requires time-consuming computational proofs.

“That’s proof of energy wasted, and we’re not going there,” Tennenhouse said. “We’re not even looking at cohabiting on the bitcoin blockchain. Do you really want to run your business in the same place that a whole bunch of other people are running illegal businesses?”

In his current role with VMware, Tennenhouse brings a perspective honed over many years at the forefront of tech research and innovation. An earlier role as chief scientist for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, gave him an opportunity to see a number of advances that contributed to the establishment of the internet.

That experience was followed by various positions with Intel Corp., Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp. Tennenhouse has learned that as frustrating as it can be to abandon a research project, it’s a willingness to take risks that counts in the end.

“What I really hate is if, for some reason, we have to end a project and we haven’t actually gotten to the bottom of it,” Tennenhouse said. “You’ve got to take risks. Not everything is going to work.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Radio 2018. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for Radio 2018. Neither VMware Inc., the event sponsor, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE