Second, on the developer space, I think you understate Pivotal’s footprint there. And obviously the spring community, in particular, is a very strong community, 3-plus million developers in that community. The Bitnami community, 2-plus million developers there. So as we said, we have 5million-plus developers of the approximately 13 million developers in the world. So between these 2, we have 2 high-capacity reaches in the developer community. So those are important for us, but we clearly need to have more, right, developers and more things into the developer community, and that will be a key piece of our go-forward strategy. But I think you understate, right, the significance of the reach that we’ve now gotten just over the last 6 months, right? And as these build out, our developer relevance, the transition to Kubernetes, remember, this is all in flux, right? Everything in this space is in flux because everybody is sort of saying Kubernetes is here, but it’s not mature yet. We’re still in this Java stuff, or these are middle-ware. There are also some higher thing is going into motion, and we see this as a decisive move to say, here is the stack that the world will land on in the future, and we’re the best partner to deliver that at the developer level and the infrastructure level, and we uniquely bring those together. I think it’s going to be pretty compelling. And you’re going to see us market more, we’re going to be investing more in the open source community to, I’ll say, get our open source creds, right, which we’ve been working on for several years now because that’s very important to that developer community as well. So we have plans in all of those areas, but lots to work to get done.
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Karl Emil Keirstead - Deutsche Bank AG, Research Division - Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst
Karl Keirstead at Deutsche Bank. Maybe, Pat, for you. I think even for investors that get the strategic fit, some of the questions they had aren’t related to that so much, and it has more to do with the VMware independence question. So I want to give you an opportunity maybe to address that because this was an interfamily transaction. There was concerns about your independence in making this decision to combine with Pivotal. How much influence Michael Dell may have had? Do you want to just hit that head-on, Pat?
Patrick P. Gelsinger - VMware, Inc. - CEO & Director
Sure. And this is a VMware strategy. Period. We were looking to move and expand our developer activities. Obviously, it’s discussed with the Board, just like you expect, and Michael happens to be sitting at the Board, but this is a Board-level conversation as they’re supporting the VMware strategy.
Secondly, we looked at every alternative strategy that we could, right? Buying GitLabs and GitHubs and HashiCorp and all these other – we thoroughly looked at every other potential play that we could, just like you’d expect the good, right, diligence process to do. And what we found is, we could spend far more and we would get far less, right, in the process.
Also if you look at any acquisition, in some ways, you know your cousins too well, right, because essentially, you’ve been doing diligence on them, right, for the last several years, right? And you have all the unknowns right here. Well, we know the integration challenges that we’re going to have. We know, right, the differences and all of those kind of issues far better. So essentially, we’ve been de-risking this acquisition, which as the Board looks at, this is, right — I mean, what’s the probability of success? How are you going to go and make this successful as well? And then we put the appropriate independence process in place with our respective independent committees to go negotiate a good deal, right? At the end of the day, that’s exactly why they’re in place and we’ve demonstrated, I think, good governance processes throughout. And obviously, yes, it’s a family deal, and it also happens that the family had the best assets. And we think we have a very, I’ll say, cost-effective strategic deal that strengthens both VMware’s position and really leverages the unique assets of Pivotal.
One other related thing that I’ll just add to the answer as well, it’s not that simple. If that’s the case, why just spin it out in the first place, right? And that was 6 years ago before Kubernetes. That was 1.5 years before the first Kubernetes come in, right? So essentially, as I think Rob articulated pretty articulately, they had to build a lot of that infrastructure stuff because it wasn’t there yet. It’s only now that they’re starting to emerge.
Also think about the things that we’ve done over the 6 years since Pivotal was formed. And NSX and VSAN and cloud management, our cloud strategy, if Rob would have been inside of VMware, we had a couple hundred people we moved into Pivotal at the time, I would have given him like 2 incremental heads and a dog, right, because we’re putting all of our energies into NSX and VSAN and HCI and all of those stuff, we simply didn’t have the bandwidth and it was still a very turbulent market of where and how is the technology going to emerge. So I think, while everyoneof these things you can look back and say, well, maybe, I think we played this one super well and we’re quite thrilled with the outcome that we expect to be consummated shortly as the deal completes.
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Keith Frances Bachman - BMO Capital Markets Equity Research - MD & Senior Research Analyst
Keith Bachman from Bank of Montréal. Karl, I also think you look fine. I have 2 questions. Pat, I think I’m going to direct them for you. Or actually one question is. How do you improve the financial performance of Pivotal? And I’ll break it into the 2 parts. A, I think the stock would tell you the revenue has been very disappointing to investors. And so how do you improve the revenue profile? You mentioned some things like reach. Is there also product rationalization that probably perhaps seeps in there as well? And then part B is, VMware still trades a lot on free cash flow and the operating profits and the free cash flow of Pivotal relative to what you post are, frankly, pretty disappointing. So if there is an integration rationalization process, how do you tackle both the revenue performance as well as the profitability performance at the same time?
Patrick P. Gelsinger - VMware, Inc. - CEO & Director
Yes. And on it, and I think, Rob, if you just say Rob’s framework reach, a lot of how we’re going to improve the profitability is just being able to leverage the VMware footprint to get more sales, more apps, more places more rapidly. And having been — and again, this is a hometown crowd this week here at VMworld, but many customers, and I’ll say many, and I probably had 20 customer meetings over the last 2 days, many of those, they, we were thinking about Pivotal, we’re sort of early in this, okay, we’re not satisfied, right? So I think we started the acceleration of Pivotal last week, right? So I do think that we’re going to start to see that in deal flow commitments larger because they’re looking for that enterprise scale, that enterprise brand to go deliver it.
Obviously, we’re making some rationalizations, right, of the products because, now, when we come together, like Pivotal, they had a small little networking effort. Okay, cool. That’s done, right? It’s going to be part of the NSX team and what we’re doing with Service Mesh, right? There were some metrics things. They were in a boom. That’s going to become all leveraged in the work that we’re doing. So there are some modest areas there. There clearly is some G&A synergies, right, as well that we’re immediately going to take, some of that’s going to be in REW and other places where we start bringing real estate and some leverage. And out of that is what we said that we expect between the 2 will be op inc positive next year. Today, both are op inc negative. So we’re going to be taking some clear steps to bring them to profitability, accelerate the top line growth.
And I think what you’ll really see happen is Tanzu and the family of vSphere, the Tanzu Mission Control and this, I’ll say, refactoring of the Kubernetes-centric developer services, right, that are going to be industry world-class as those pieces come together next year. And I do think we have a lot of work. But by this time next year, all of those pieces are there, right? And we expect the velocity that starts to emerge as a result. We’re expecting good revenue acceleration, top line acceleration. These are very profitable segments to be in. If we get modest uplift on vSphere, nothing of that’s built into the plan or any of the financials, but if we’re able to get modest pull in vSphere, start being the developer layer of choice, the opportunities for us to see top line accelerations, I think, become very meaningful as well.
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Philip Alan Winslow - Wells Fargo Securities, LLC, Research Division - Senior Analyst
Phil Winslow, Wells Fargo. Jump to off for the team, I guess. I was thinking about the build side of the equation here. Rob, you said, one of thequestions is you help me build sort of what my applications of the future going to look like? Wanted to ask about serverless and PFS from – on Pivotal, and how sort of PFS fits in with PKS, with cloud, the full cloud foundry, just legacy applications fitting in? How do you see sort of the — maybe an update on PFS first off, and then how do you see sort of that fitting into the spectrum?
Patrick P. Gelsinger - VMware, Inc. - CEO & Director
Rob, do you want to start there?
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