(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome to theCUBE special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, or videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and AWS. This is the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS Showcase: Accelerating Business Transformation. Here in the Showcase at Samir Kadoo, worldwide VMware strategic alliance solution architect leader with AWS. Samir, great to have you. And Daniel Rethmeier, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are working together, you're the key players in this relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, greatly appreciate it. >> Great to have you guys both on. As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Gelsinger, then CEO, and then then CEO AWS at Andy Jassy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success of VM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later, we got this whole inflection point coming, you're starting to see this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side, more automation, more serverless, I mean and AI. I mean, it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kind of a whole 'nother level. Where are we? Samir, let's start with you on the relationship. >> Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced. And then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware Cloud on AWS. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware. Day in, day out, as far as advancing VMware Cloud on AWS. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with the solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements. You know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right, more recently. One of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware Cloud on AWS. And even with VMware to other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware Cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware Cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint, there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >> Great stuff. Daniel, I want to get to you in a second upon this principal architect position you have. In your title, you're the global AWS synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly VMworld, talking about how the workloads on IT has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AIOps, you got ITOps changing a lot, you got a lot more automation, edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the relationship? >> So at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware Cloud and AWS, we are also enabling us mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembles globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers. That's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the best benefits out of VMware Cloud on AWS. And over the time, we really have involved the solution. As Samir mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware Cloud on AWS. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of workloads. So for example, we just edited the I4i host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as, you mentioned it, AI workloads. >> Yeah, so I want to get us just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation, you know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in theCUBE in the past couple weeks in a big way that the ops teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds a little bit weird, but IT operations is now part of a lot more DataOps, security, writing code, composing. You know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing, what are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >> That's a great point, because originally, VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people and customers. So for example, AWS, very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the ITOps area. And usually these are very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customer needs, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, "Well, we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service. Recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure." That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on-premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >> Samir, talk about your perspective. I want to get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS re:MARS, actually it was Amazon re:MARS, machine learning automation, robotics and space was really kind of the confluence of industrial IoT, software, physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code, automation, you know, "Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster." Yeah, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services, meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >> Yeah. Yeah, totally, right? And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware Cloud on AWS, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you want to leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's going to give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with IoT, even with utilizing Alexa, or if there's any other service that you want to utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings right off the top. Though with digital transformation, right, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology even in your business. Leaders are looking to reinvent their business, they're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy, maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. >> Okay. >> Then also- >> Oh, go ahead, finish your thought. >> No, no, no, I was going to say what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that vStor admin that's used to their on-premises environment. Now with VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, you still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware Cloud on AWS too. >> Daniel, I want to get your thoughts on this because at Explore and after the event, as we prep for CubeCon and re:Invent coming up, the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators, and it's like hundreds of thousands of users and millions of people talking about and peaked on VMware, interested in VMware. The common thread was one person said, "I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to put my career in the next 10 to 15 years." And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm going to be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet. Architects, is it solution architect, SRE? So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are going to try to make these career decisions. Like what am I going to work on? And then it's kind of fuzzy, but I want to get your thoughts, how would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity? And what's going to happen? >> So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills and trainings? Is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the answer is to make digital transformation a success, we need not just to talk about technology, but also about process, people, and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware Cloud on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment, you can use the same managing and monitoring tools, if you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware Cloud on AWS. And that gives not just leaders, but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in such a complex project. >> The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go. And then now that once they're confident, they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because on your side, you've got higher level services, you've got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, a lot improvements. So, okay, nothing's changed, I can still run my job, now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the customer there? >> Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware Cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud. But if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you want to utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on-premises or even in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you want to expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >> Great stuff, I love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, 'cause people want to know what's goes on behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationships? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? Do you guys just have a Zoom meeting, do you guys fly out, you write code, go do you ship things? I mean, I'm making it up, but you get the idea. How does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >> So we hope to get more frequently together in-person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to Zoom conferences and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if you are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have regular assembles now also in-person, geo-based, so for AMEA, for the Americas, for APJ. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >> What's interesting, you know, as events are coming back, Samir, before you weigh in this, I'll comment as theCUBE's been going back out to events, we're hearing comments like, "What pandemic? We were more productive in the pandemic." I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in-person, they're happy to see people, but no one's really missed the beat. I mean, it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More, if anything, productivity gains. >> Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is even if you look at AWS's, and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said and meant earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in-person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation in VMware Cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology, we've been able to still communicate, work with our customers, even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot, we had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. So even with the on-premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >> In our last segment we did here on this Showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean geo, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and people can reference that, we won't get into it here. But I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Because again, I think right now, we're at an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with re:Invent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >> So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked for over the last years. Whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have to add additional nodes. Now we have three different node types with different ratios of compute, storage, and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay for it. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS6 wanted a ONTAP and VMware Cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements, at the upcoming events. >> Samir, what's your reaction take on what's coming down on your side? >> Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scaled with their needs, right? So with VMware Cloud on AWS, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are going to be announcements, innovations, and whatnot with upcoming events. But together, we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS. To Daniel's point, storage for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right? Now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware Cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's going to be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events, that's going to give us the options to even advance our own services together. >> Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I want to get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in the open conversations on theCUBE is in the old days, let's go back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem, AWS had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships, and they do business together and they sell each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture, 'cause we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining and you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides, they come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem interplay. What's your thoughts on this? Because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much innovations only. You got to do innovation, but when you do innovation, you got to integrate it, you got to connect it. So how do you guys see this as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >> So we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware Cloud on AWS, moving to the cloud, firstly it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise, you can do this. If you decide you want to stay with some of your services on-premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can man manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead end, it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on-premise or the cloud, it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both worlds, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware Cloud on AWS either way in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich, later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by AWS, more than 200 different services ranging from object-based storage, load balancing, and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >> We call that super cloud in the way that we generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is kind of where cloud is right now. You guys are not commodity, amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things happen. You got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. >> Absolutely. >> And everybody wins. >> Yeah, I 100% agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with AWS, maybe more proficient with the VMware's technology. But then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud, maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are, maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware Cloud on AWS. Maybe you want to leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top, 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skillset, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the day. >> I mean, I just think it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean you don't have to do anything. You still run it. Just spear the way you're working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >> Yeah, absolutely. And if you look, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time, they can free up resources to develop new innovations and grow their business. >> Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Daniel, thank you for coming to Germany. >> Thank you. Oktoberfest, I know it's evening over there, weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir, give you the final word. AWS re:Invent's coming up. We're preparing, we're going to have an exclusive with Adam, with Fryer, we'd do a curtain raise, and do a little preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at re:Invent this year? The big show? >> Yeah, so I think Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what are called chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there, but if they want to be hands-on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, been in sysadmin world and whatnot, being hands-on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. >> Yeah, and re:Invent's an amazing show for the in-person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at theCUBE and it's becoming popular. We have more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media. So thanks for sharing that. Samir, Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the Showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS, really accelerating business transformation with AWS and VMware. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to the Cube special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Foer, host of the Cube. We've got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, our videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and aws. This is the customer successes with VMware cloud on AWS showcase, accelerating business transformation here in the showcase with Samir Candu Worldwide. VMware strategic alliance solution, architect leader with AWS Samir. Great to have you and Daniel Re Myer, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are, are working together. You're the key players in the re relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Greatly appreciate it. >>Great to have you guys both on, As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Geling, then CEO and then then CEO AWS at Andy Chasy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success. OFM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since, and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later we got this whole inflection point coming. You're starting to see, you know, this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side. More automation, more serverless, I mean, and a, I mean it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kinda a whole nother level. Where are we, Samir? Let's start with you on, on the relationship. >>Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced, and then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware cloud on aws. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware day in, day out. As far as advancing VMware cloud on aws. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with a solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements, you know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right? More recently, one of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. >>And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware cloud on aws, and even with VMware's, other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >>Great stuff. Daniel, I wanna get to you in a second. Upon this principal architect position you have in your title, you're the global a synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly world, talking about how the, the workloads on it has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AI ops, you got it. Ops changing a lot, you got a lot more automation edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the >>Relationship? So at at, at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. We are also enabling US mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembled globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers, that's, that's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the, the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. And over the time we, we really have involved the solution. As Samia mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware cloud on aws. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of, of workload. So for example, we just added the I four I host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as you mentioned it, AI workloads. >>Yeah. So I wanna guess just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation. You know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in the queue in the past couple weeks in a big way that the OPS teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds OP a little bit weird, but operation IT operations is now part of the, a lot more data ops, security writing code composing, you know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing? What are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >>That, that's a great point because originally VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people at customers. So for example, aws very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the IT ops area. And usually these are very different, very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's, it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customers, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, well we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service, recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure. That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >>Samir, talk about your perspective. I wanna get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS remar of, actually it was Amazon res machine learning automation, robotics and space. It was really kinda the confluence of industrial IOT software physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code automation, you know, Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster. Yeah, I mean, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on, on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >>Yeah, totally. Right. And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware cloud on aws, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's gonna give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with iot, even with utilizing Alexa or if there's any other service that you wanna utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings. Right off the top though, with digital transformation, right? You, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology. Even in your business leaders are looking to reinvent their business. They're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy. Maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. Okay. Then also, Oh, >>Go ahead, finish >>Your thought. No, no, I was gonna say, what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that VS four admin that's used to their on-premises at environment. Now with VMware cloud on aws, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, yeah. You still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware cloud on AWS two. >>Danielle, I wanna get your thoughts on this because at at explore and, and, and after the event, now as we prep for Cuban and reinvent coming up the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators and it's like hundreds of thousands of, of, of, of users and millions of people talking about and and peaked on VM we're interested in v VMware. The common thread was one's one, one person said, I'm trying to figure out where I'm gonna put my career in the next 10 to 15 years. And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm gonna be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet architects, is it Solution architect sre. So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are gonna try to make these career decisions, like how, what am I gonna work on? And it's, and that was kind of fuzzy, but I wanna get your thoughts. How would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity and what's gonna happen? >>So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means in, in to to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills? And, and trainings is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the, the answer is to make digital transformation a success. We need not just to talk about technology, but also about process people and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware cloud on a, on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment. You can use the same managing and monitoring tools. If you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of, of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware cloud on aws. And that gives not just leaders, but but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in, in such a complex project, >>The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go and, and then now that once they're confident they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because you know, on your side you've got higher level services, you got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, lot improvement. So, okay, nothing's changed. I can still run my job now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the, for the, for the customer there? >>Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud, but if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you wanna utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on premises or even in VMware cloud on aws, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you wanna expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >>Great stuff. I love, love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, cuz people wanna know what's goes on in behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationship? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? You guys just have a zoom meeting, Do you guys fly out, you write go do you ship thing? I mean I'm making it up, but you get the idea, what's the, what's, how does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >>So we hope to get more frequently together in person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to zoom conferences and and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if we are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have reg regular assembled now also in person geo based. So for emia, for the Americas, for aj. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >>What's interesting, you know, as, as events are coming back to here, before you get, you weigh in, I'll comment, as the cube's been going back out to events, we are hearing comments like what, what pandemic we were more productive in the pandemic. I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in person, they're happy to see people, but there's no one's, no one's really missed the beat. I mean it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More if anything, productivity gains. >>Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, even if you look at AWS's and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said met earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation and VMware cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there have been, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology we've been able to still communicate work with our customers. Even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot. We had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware cloud on AWS outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware cloud on AWS outposts. So even with the on premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >>And our last segment we did here on the, on this showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean go, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and, and people can reference that. We won't get into it here, but I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Cuz again, I think right now we're in at a, an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with reinvent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >>So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked us for over the last years. Whenever, whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware cloud on aws, you have to add additional notes. Now we have three different note types with different ratios of compute, storage and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS six one, NetApp onap, and VMware cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements at the upcoming events. >>Samir, what's your, what's your reaction take on the, on what's coming down on your side? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scale with their needs, right? So with VMware cloud on aws, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are gonna be announcements, innovations and whatnot with outcoming events. But together we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS to Daniel's point storage, for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's gonna be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events that's gonna give us the options to even advance our own services together. >>Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I wanna get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in, in the open conversations on the cube is in the old days it was going back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem they did best, had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships and they do business together and they, they sell to each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture cuz we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining. >>And this, you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides. They come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem, you know, interplay. What's your thoughts on this? And, and, and because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much. Innovation is only, you gotta do innovation, but when you do innovation, you gotta integrate it, you gotta connect it. So what is, how do you guys see this as a, as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >>So we are, we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even, even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware cloud on aws moving to the cloud, firstly it's, it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe it's some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise. You can do this if you decide you want to stay with some of your services on premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can mana manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead and it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on premise or the cloud. It it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both works, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware cloud on aws, by the way, in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by aws. More than 200 different services ranging from object based storage, load balancing and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >>We, we call that super cloud in, in a, in a way that we be generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is gonna where cloud is right now, you guys are, are not commodity. Amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things. Having got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. Absolutely. And everybody wins. >>Yeah. And a hundred percent agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it it, it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with aws, maybe more proficient with the viewers technology, but then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud. Maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are. Maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware cloud on aws. Maybe you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skill, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of, back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the >>Day. I mean, I just think it's, it's a, it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean, you don't have to do anything. You still run the fear, the way you working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >>Yeah, absolutely. And if, if you look, not every, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we gave, we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time they can free up resources to develop new innovations and, and grow their business. >>Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Danielle, thank you for coming to Germany, Octoberfest, I know it's evening over there, your weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir final give you the final word, AWS reinvents coming up. Preparing. We're gonna have an exclusive with Adam, but Fry, we do a curtain raise, a dual preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at reinvent this year? The big show? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what I call a chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking for to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there. But if they wanna be hands on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, you know, been in CIS admin world and whatnot, being hands on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. Yeah, >>Reinvents an amazing show for the in person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at the cube. It's becoming popular. We more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media, so thanks, thanks for sharing that. Samir Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud Ons, really accelerating business transformation withs and VMware. I'm John Fur with the cube, thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to this cube showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware cloud on it's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred and VP of commercial services at aws and NA Ryan Bard, who's the VP and general manager of cloud solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on this showcase. >>Great to be here. >>Hey, thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. You know, we, we've been covering this VMware cloud on abus since, since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch the evolution from people saying, Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. It's what's this mean? And depress work were, we're kind of not really on board with kind of the vision, but as it played out as you guys had announced together, it did work out great for VMware. It did work out great for a D and it continues two years later and I want just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going. I'll see multiple years. Where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware explorer just recently and going in to reinvent, which is only a couple weeks away, feels like tomorrow. But you know, as we prepare a lot going on, where are we with the evolution of the solution? >>I mean, first thing I wanna say is, you know, PBO 2016 was a someon moment and the history of it, right? When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jessey came together to announce this and I think John, you were there at the time I was there, it was a great, great moment. We launched the solution in 2017, the year after that at VM Word back when we called it Word, I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we have learned froms also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we build a service offering now five years old, pretty remarkable journey. You know, in the first years we tried to get across all the regions, you know, that was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. >>In the second year we started going really on enterprise grade features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretch clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using VSA and NSX across two AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nine s availability that applications start started to get with that particular feature. And we kept moving forward all kinds of integration with AWS direct connect transit gateways with our own advanced networking capabilities. You know, along the way, disaster recovery, we punched out two, two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our outposts partnership. We were up on stage at Reinvent, again with Pat Andy announcing AWS outposts and the VMware flavor of that VMware cloud and AWS outposts. I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well with our federal and high certification more recently. So all in all, we are super excited. We're five years old. The customer momentum is really, really strong and we are scaling the service massively across all geos and industries. >>That's great, great update. And I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship. And, and this has kind of been the theme for AWS since I can remember from day one. Fred, you guys do the heavy lifting as as, as you always say for the customers here, VMware comes on board, takes advantage of the AWS and kind of just doesn't miss a beat, continues to move their workloads that everyone's using, you know, vSphere and these are, these are big workloads on aws. What's the AWS perspective on this? How do you see it? >>Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the, the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on Preem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's, that's evolving quickly and, and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about. But that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the, for the customer. So it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint, from a business standpoint. And obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and, and responding to what customers want. So pretty, pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to bmc. Yeah, >>That's what great value publish. We've been talking about that in context too. Anyone building on top of the cloud, they can have their own supercloud as we call it. If you take advantage of all the CapEx and and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and, and and continues to make in performance IAS and pass all great stuff. I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level, what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options on the market? What makes it different? What's the combination? You mentioned jointly engineered, what are some of the key differentiators of the service compared to others? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things Fred talked about is this jointly engineered notion right from day one. We were the earlier doctors of AWS Nitro platform, right? The reinvention of E two back five years ago. And so we have been, you know, having a very, very strong engineering partnership at that level. I think from a VMware customer standpoint, you get the full software defined data center or compute storage networking on EC two, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally, right on aws EC two global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us that customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service, right? And this was somewhat new to VMware, but we took away the pain of this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers had to provision rack, stack hardware, configure the software on top, and then upgrade the software and the security batches on top. >>So we took, took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud and aws. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the lock for j debacle industry was just going through that, right? Favorite proof point from customers was before they put even race this issue to us, we sent them a notification saying we already patched all of your systems, no action from you. The customers were super thrilled. I mean these are large banks, many other customers around the world, super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >>Nora, that's a great, so that's a great point. You know, the whole managed service piece brings up the security, you kind of teasing at it, but you know, there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. You know, Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera, there's more bits than ever before and, and at at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's gonna be a zero day vulnerability out there. Just, it happens. We saw one with fornet this week, this came outta the woodwork. But moving fast on those patches, it's huge. This brings up the whole support angle. I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well, because to me we see the value when we, when we talk to customers on the cube about this, you know, it was a real, real easy understanding of how, what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the aws. But the question that comes up that we wanna get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? >>Well, what's interesting about this is that it's, it's done mutually. We have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer, including all the way up into the app layer, as you think about some of the other workloads like sap, we'll go end to end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them. And on top of that, we look at where, where we're improving reliability in, in as a first order of, of principle between both companies. So from an availability and reliability standpoint, it's, it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're gonna go help the customer resolve. That works really well >>On the VMware side. What's been the feedback there? What's the, what are some of the updates? >>Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we have a phenomenal backend relationship with aws. Customers call VMware for the service for any issues and, and then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The BASKE management that we jointly do, right? All of the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about. I think on the front end, we also have a really good group of solution architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution. Do complex things like cloud migration, which is much, much easier with VMware cloud aws, you know, we are presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways. And so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day. >>You know, you had mentioned, I've got a list here, some of the innovations the, you mentioned the stretch clustering, you know, getting the GOs working, Advanced network, disaster recovery, you know, fed, Fed ramp, public sector certifications, outposts, all good. You guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a good, good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship. The question that I'm interested in is what's next? What recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in what's on the lists this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the, the new things, the list of accomplishments, people wanna know what's next. They don't wanna see stagnant growth here, they wanna see more action, you know, as as cloud kind of continues to scale and modern applications cloud native, you're seeing more and more containers, more and more, you know, more CF C I C D pipe pipelining with with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new, what's the new innovations? >>Absolutely. And I think as a five yearold service offering innovation is top of mind for us every single day. So just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explorer. First of all, our new platform i four I dot metal, it's isolate based, it's pretty awesome. It's the latest and greatest, all the speeds and feeds that we would expect from VMware and aws. At this point in our relationship. We announced two different storage options. This notion of working from customer feedback, allowing customers even more price reductions, really take off that storage and park it externally, right? And you know, separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS Fsx, with NetApp on tap, which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based, really excited about this offering as well. >>And the second storage offering for VMware cloud Flex Storage, VMware's own managed storage offering. Beyond that, we have done a lot of other innovations as well. I really wanted to talk about VMware cloud Flex Compute, where previously customers could only scale by hosts and a host is 36 to 48 cores, give or take. But with VMware cloud Flex Compute, we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the V C P memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, talk about ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in industry. We are seeing many, many customers ask for this. We are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware cloud DR solution. >>A lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots and backups are actually safe to use. So there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well. A lot of networking innovations with Project Knot star for ability to have layer flow through layer seven, you know, new SaaS services in that area as well. Keep in mind that the service already supports managed Kubernetes for containers. It's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines. And so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMs and containers and sort of at the heart of our office, >>The networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on. Every year it's the same, same conversation, get better, faster networking, more, more options there. The flex computes. Interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the Drew screen resource defined versus hardware defined? Because this is kind of what we had saw at Explore coming out, that notion of resource defined versus hardware defined. What's the, what does that mean? >>Yeah, I mean I think we have been super successful in this hardware defined notion. We we're scaling by the hardware unit that we present as software defined data centers, right? And so that's been super successful. But we, you know, customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally, right? Lower their costs even more. And so this is the part where resource defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, you know, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers request for fiber machines, five containers, its size exactly for that. And then as utilization grows, we elastically behind the scenes, we're able to grow it through policies. So that's a whole different dimension. It's a whole different service offering that adds value and customers are comfortable. They can go from one to the other, they can go back to that post based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. >>It's kind of cloud of flexibility right there. I like the name Fred. Let's get into some of the examples of customers, if you don't mind. Let's get into some of the ex, we have some time. I wanna unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard again on the cube is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship, they love the cloud positioning of it. And then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like, feels great. It's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they would start consuming higher level services, kind of that adoption next level happens and because it it's in the cloud, so, So can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware cloud on AWS on getting started, and then how do they progress once they're there? How does it evolve? Can you just walk us through a couple of use cases? >>Sure. There's a, well there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that, you know, like you said, as there's more and more bits you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the I four and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around a lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds. But what customers are doing with it, like the college in New Jersey, they're accelerating their deployment on a, on onboarding over like 7,400 students over a six to eight month period. And they've really realized a ton of savings. But what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native services too. So connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this. The, the options there obviously are tied to all the innovation that we have across any services, whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with Tanu or with any other container and or services within aws. >>So there's, there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing, which is moved quickly with full compliance, whether it's in like healthcare or regulatory business is, is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with tech extract or any other really cool service that has, you know, monthly and quarterly innovations. So there's things that you just can't, could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their, their current app base in, in a rapid fashion. So pretty excited about it. There's a lot of examples. I think I probably don't have time to go into too, too many here. Yeah. But that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform. >>Nora, what's your perspective from the VMware sy? So, you know, you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's, you know, higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where's being rolled out? Cuz you now have a lot of hybrid too, so, so what's your, what's your take on what, what's happening in with customers? >>I mean, it's been phenomenal, the, the customer adoption of this and you know, banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production grade applications, tier one applications on the service over the last five years. And so, you know, I have a couple of really good examples. S and p Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS market, big sort of conglomeration. Now both customers were using VMware cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the, with the use case, one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers? And then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the global, which there were many. And so one specific example for this company was how they migrated thousand 1000 workloads to VMware cloud AWS in just six weeks. Pretty phenomenal. If you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process, people process technology and the beauty of the technology going from VMware point A to VMware point B, the the lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware, VMware cloud, and aws. So that's, you know, one of my favorite examples. There are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see. The good thing is we are seeing rapid expansion across the globe that constantly entering new markets with the limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap there. >>Yeah, it's great to see, I mean the data center migrations go from months, many, many months to weeks. It's interesting to see some of those success stories. So congratulations. One >>Of other, one of the other interesting fascinating benefits is the sustainability improvement in terms of being green. So the efficiency gains that we have both in current generation and new generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic, they're also saving power, which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time. They're, they're seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is just a, not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads is, are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which I like. We just all need to do our part there. And, and this is a big part of it here. >>It's a huge, it's a huge point about the sustainability. Fred, I'm glad you called that out. The other one I would say is supply chain issues. Another one you see that constrains, I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security, right? I mean, I remember interviewing Stephen Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013, and you know, at that time people were saying the cloud's not secure. And he's like, listen, it's more secure in the cloud on premise. And if you look at the security breaches, it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities, not so much hardware. So there's a lot you gotta to stay current on, on the isolation there is is hard. So I think, I think the security and supply chain, Fred is, is another one. Do you agree? >>I I absolutely agree. It's, it's hard to manage supply chain nowadays. We put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and, and have the resources that are available and run them, run them more efficiently. Yeah, and then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is, it is the only P one. And if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers, there's nothing more important. >>And naron your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things, it's really gonna get better. All right, final question. I really wanna thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I wanna kind of end with kind of a curve ball and put you eyes on the spot. We're talking about a modern, a new modern shift. It's another, we're seeing another inflection point, we've been documenting it, it's almost like cloud hitting another inflection point with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer. Continue to put a lot of pressure and, and innovation in the infrastructure side. So the question is for you guys each to answer is what's the same and what's different in today's market? So it's kind of like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What are the, what's, what's changed for the better and where, what's still the same kind of thing hanging around that people are focused on? Can you share your perspective? >>I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll tackle it. You know, businesses are complex and they're often unique that that's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine manage services and new innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today. Leveraging world class hardware that you don't have to worry about that's elastic. You, you could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a, at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the, the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of of engineers can go actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only gonna continue to accelerate that. That's my take. All right. >>You got a lot of platform to compete on with, got a lot to build on then you're Ryan, your side, What's your, what's your answer to that question? >>I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constant. I think what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly, you know, build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that motor production quickly and efficiently. I think we, we are seeing, you know, we are at the very start of that sort of of journey. Of course we have invested in Kubernetes the means to an end, but there's so much more beyond that's happening in industry. And I think we're at the very, very beginning of this transformations, enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we are inherently part of it. >>Yeah. Well gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on, you know, solving these complexities with distractions. Whether it's, you know, higher level services with large scale infrastructure at, at your fingertips. Infrastructures, code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen in Fred with AWS on your side. And we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator, again, being a cloud operator and developer. So the developer ops is kind of, DevOps is kind of changing too. So all for the better. Thank you for spending the time and we're seeing again, that traction with the VMware customer base and of us getting, getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives, >>I appreciate it. Thank you so >>Much. Okay, thank you John. Okay, this is the Cube and AWS VMware showcase, accelerating business transformation. VMware cloud on aws, jointly engineered solution, bringing innovation to the VMware customer base, going to the cloud and beyond. I'm John Fur, your host. Thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to the special cube presentation of accelerating business transformation on vmc on aws. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We have dawan director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on adb. This is a great showcase and should be a lot of fun. Ashish, thanks for coming on. >>Hi John. Thank you so much. >>So VMware cloud on AWS has been well documented as this big success for VMware and aws. As customers move their workloads into the cloud, IT operations of VMware customers has signaling a lot of change. This is changing the landscape globally is on cloud migration and beyond. What's your take on this? Can you open this up with the most important story around VMC on aws? >>Yes, John. The most important thing for our customers today is the how they can safely and swiftly move their ID infrastructure and applications through cloud. Now, VMware cloud AWS is a service that allows all vSphere based workloads to move to cloud safely, swiftly and reliably. Banks can move their core, core banking platforms, insurance companies move their core insurance platforms, telcos move their goss, bss, PLA platforms, government organizations are moving their citizen engagement platforms using VMC on aws because this is one platform that allows you to move it, move their VMware based platforms very fast. Migrations can happen in a matter of days instead of months. Extremely securely. It's a VMware manage service. It's very secure and highly reliably. It gets the, the reliability of the underlyings infrastructure along with it. So win-win from our customers perspective. >>You know, we reported on this big news in 2016 with Andy Chas, the, and Pat Geling at the time, a lot of people said it was a bad deal. It turned out to be a great deal because not only could VMware customers actually have a cloud migrate to the cloud, do it safely, which was their number one concern. They didn't want to have disruption to their operations, but also position themselves for what's beyond just shifting to the cloud. So I have to ask you, since you got the finger on the pulse here, what are we seeing in the market when it comes to migrating and modern modernizing in the cloud? Because that's the next step. They go to the cloud, you guys have done that, doing it, then they go, I gotta modernize, which means kind of upgrading or refactoring. What's your take on that? >>Yeah, absolutely. Look, the first step is to help our customers assess their infrastructure and licensing and entire ID operations. Once we've done the assessment, we then create their migration plans. A lot of our customers are at that inflection point. They're, they're looking at their real estate, ex data center, real estate. They're looking at their contracts with colocation vendors. They really want to exit their data centers, right? And VMware cloud and AWS is a perfect solution for customers who wanna exit their data centers, migrate these applications onto the AWS platform using VMC on aws, get rid of additional real estate overheads, power overheads, be socially and environmentally conscious by doing that as well, right? So that's the migration story, but to your point, it doesn't end there, right? Modernization is a critical aspect of the entire customer journey as as well customers, once they've migrated their ID applications and infrastructure on cloud get access to all the modernization services that AWS has. They can correct easily to our data lake services, to our AIML services, to custom databases, right? They can decide which applications they want to keep and which applications they want to refactor. They want to take decisions on containerization, make decisions on service computing once they've come to the cloud. But the most important thing is to take that first step. You know, exit data centers, come to AWS using vmc or aws, and then a whole host of modernization options available to them. >>Yeah, I gotta say, we had this right on this, on this story, because you just pointed out a big thing, which was first order of business is to make sure to leverage the on-prem investments that those customers made and then migrate to the cloud where they can maintain their applications, their data, their infrastructure operations that they're used to, and then be in position to start getting modern. So I have to ask you, how are you guys specifically, or how is VMware cloud on s addressing these needs of the customers? Because what happens next is something that needs to happen faster. And sometimes the skills might not be there because if they're running old school, IT ops now they gotta come in and jump in. They're gonna use a data cloud, they're gonna want to use all kinds of machine learning, and there's a lot of great goodness going on above the stack there. So as you move with the higher level services, you know, it's a no brainer, obviously, but they're not, it's not yesterday's higher level services in the cloud. So how are, how is this being addressed? >>Absolutely. I think you hit up on a very important point, and that is skills, right? When our customers are operating, some of the most critical applications I just mentioned, core banking, core insurance, et cetera, they're most of the core applications that our customers have across industries, like even, even large scale ERP systems, they're actually sitting on VMware's vSphere platform right now. When the customer wants to migrate these to cloud, one of the key bottlenecks they face is skill sets. They have the trained manpower for these core applications, but for these high level services, they may not, right? So the first order of business is to help them ease this migration pain as much as possible by not wanting them to, to upscale immediately. And we VMware cloud and AWS exactly does that. I mean, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to create new skill set for doing this, right? Their existing skill sets suffice, but at the same time, it gives them that, that leeway to build that skills roadmap for their team. DNS is invested in that, right? Yes. We want to help them build those skills in the high level services, be it aml, be it, be it i t be it data lake and analytics. We want to invest in them, and we help our customers through that. So that ultimately the ultimate goal of making them drop data is, is, is a front and center. >>I wanna get into some of the use cases and success stories, but I want to just reiterate, hit back your point on the skill thing. Because if you look at what you guys have done at aws, you've essentially, and Andy Chassey used to talk about this all the time when I would interview him, and now last year Adam was saying the same thing. You guys do all the heavy lifting, but if you're a VMware customer user or operator, you are used to things. You don't have to be relearn to be a cloud architect. Now you're already in the game. So this is like almost like a instant path to cloud skills for the VMware. There's hundreds of thousands of, of VMware architects and operators that now instantly become cloud architects, literally overnight. Can you respond to that? Do you agree with that? And then give an example. >>Yes, absolutely. You know, if you have skills on the VMware platform, you know, know, migrating to AWS using via by cloud and AWS is absolutely possible. You don't have to really change the skills. The operations are exactly the same. The management systems are exactly the same. So you don't really have to change anything but the advantages that you get access to all the other AWS services. So you are instantly able to integrate with other AWS services and you become a cloud architect immediately, right? You are able to solve some of the critical problems that your underlying IT infrastructure has immediately using this. And I think that's a great value proposition for our customers to use this service. >>And just one more point, I want just get into something that's really kind of inside baseball or nuanced VMC or VMware cloud on AWS means something. Could you take a minute to explain what on AWS means? Just because you're like hosting and using Amazon as a, as a work workload? Being on AWS means something specific in your world, being VMC on AWS mean? >>Yes. This is a great question, by the way, You know, on AWS means that, you know, VMware's vse platform is, is a, is an iconic enterprise virtualization software, you know, a disproportionately high market share across industries. So when we wanted to create a cloud product along with them, obviously our aim was for them, for the, for this platform to have the goodness of the AWS underlying infrastructure, right? And, and therefore, when we created this VMware cloud solution, it it literally use the AWS platform under the eighth, right? And that's why it's called a VMs VMware cloud on AWS using, using the, the, the wide portfolio of our regions across the world and the strength of the underlying infrastructure, the reliability and, and, and sustainability that it offers. And therefore this product is called VMC on aws. >>It's a distinction I think is worth noting, and it does reflect engineering and some levels of integration that go well beyond just having a SaaS app and, and basically platform as a service or past services. So I just wanna make sure that now super cloud, we'll talk about that a little bit in another interview, but I gotta get one more question in before we get into the use cases and customer success stories is in, in most of the VM world, VMware world, in that IT world, it used to, when you heard migration, people would go, Oh my God, that's gonna take months. And when I hear about moving stuff around and doing cloud native, the first reaction people might have is complexity. So two questions for you before we move on to the next talk. Track complexity. How are you addressing the complexity issue and how long these migrations take? Is it easy? Is it it hard? I mean, you know, the knee jerk reaction is month, You're very used to that. If they're dealing with Oracle or other old school vendors, like, they're, like the old guard would be like, takes a year to move stuff around. So can you comment on complexity and speed? >>Yeah. So the first, first thing is complexity. And you know, what makes what makes anything complex is if you're, if you're required to acquire new skill sets or you've gotta, if you're required to manage something differently, and as far as VMware cloud and AWS on both these aspects, you don't have to do anything, right? You don't have to acquire new skill sets. Your existing idea operation skill sets on, on VMware's platforms are absolutely fine and you don't have to manage it any differently like, than what you're managing your, your ID infrastructure today. So in both these aspects, it's exactly the same and therefore it is absolutely not complex as far as, as far as, as far as we cloud and AWS is concerned. And the other thing is speed. This is where the huge differentiation is. You have seen that, you know, large banks and large telcos have now moved their workloads, you know, literally in days instead of months. >>Because because of VMware cloud and aws, a lot of time customers come to us with specific deadlines because they want to exit their data centers on a particular date. And what happens, VMware cloud and AWS is called upon to do that migration, right? So speed is absolutely critical. The reason is also exactly the same because you are using the exactly the same platform, the same management systems, people are available to you, you're able to migrate quickly, right? I would just reference recently we got an award from President Zelensky of Ukraine for, you know, migrating their entire ID digital infrastructure and, and that that happened because they were using VMware cloud database and happened very swiftly. >>That's been a great example. I mean, that's one political, but the economic advantage of getting outta the data center could be national security. You mentioned Ukraine, I mean Oscar see bombing and death over there. So clearly that's a critical crown jewel for their running their operations, which is, you know, you know, world mission critical. So great stuff. I love the speed thing. I think that's a huge one. Let's get into some of the use cases. One of them is, the first one I wanted to talk about was we just hit on data, data center migration. It could be financial reasons on a downturn or our, or market growth. People can make money by shifting to the cloud, either saving money or making money. You win on both sides. It's a, it's a, it's almost a recession proof, if you will. Cloud is so use case for number one data center migration. Take us through what that looks like. Give an example of a success. Take us through a day, day in the life of a data center migration in, in a couple minutes. >>Yeah. You know, I can give you an example of a, of a, of a large bank who decided to migrate, you know, their, all their data centers outside their existing infrastructure. And they had, they had a set timeline, right? They had a set timeline to migrate the, the, they were coming up on a renewal and they wanted to make sure that this set timeline is met. We did a, a complete assessment of their infrastructure. We did a complete assessment of their IT applications, more than 80% of their IT applications, underlying v vSphere platform. And we, we thought that the right solution for them in the timeline that they wanted, right, is VMware cloud ands. And obviously it was a large bank, it wanted to do it safely and securely. It wanted to have it completely managed, and therefore VMware cloud and aws, you know, ticked all the boxes as far as that is concerned. >>I'll be happy to report that the large bank has moved to most of their applications on AWS exiting three of their data centers, and they'll be exiting 12 more very soon. So that's a great example of, of, of the large bank exiting data centers. There's another Corolla to that. Not only did they manage to manage to exit their data centers and of course use and be more agile, but they also met their sustainability goals. Their board of directors had given them goals to be carbon neutral by 2025. They found out that 35% of all their carbon foot footprint was in their data centers. And if they moved their, their ID infrastructure to cloud, they would severely reduce the, the carbon footprint, which is 35% down to 17 to 18%. Right? And that meant their, their, their, their sustainability targets and their commitment to the go to being carbon neutral as well. >>And that they, and they shift that to you guys. Would you guys take that burden? A heavy lifting there and you guys have a sustainability story, which is a whole nother showcase in and of itself. We >>Can Exactly. And, and cause of the scale of our, of our operations, we are able to, we are able to work on that really well as >>Well. All right. So love the data migration. I think that's got real proof points. You got, I can save money, I can, I can then move and position my applications into the cloud for that reason and other reasons as a lot of other reasons to do that. But now it gets into what you mentioned earlier was, okay, data migration, clearly a use case and you laid out some successes. I'm sure there's a zillion others. But then the next step comes, now you got cloud architects becoming minted every, and you got managed services and higher level services. What happens next? Can you give us an example of the use case of the modernization around the NextGen workloads, NextGen applications? We're starting to see, you know, things like data clouds, not data warehouses. We're not gonna data clouds, it's gonna be all kinds of clouds. These NextGen apps are pure digital transformation in action. Take us through a use case of how you guys make that happen with a success story. >>Yes, absolutely. And this is, this is an amazing success story and the customer here is s and p global ratings. As you know, s and p global ratings is, is the world leader as far as global ratings, global credit ratings is concerned. And for them, you know, the last couple of years have been tough as far as hardware procurement is concerned, right? The pandemic has really upended the, the supply chain. And it was taking a lot of time to procure hardware, you know, configure it in time, make sure that that's reliable and then, you know, distribute it in the wide variety of, of, of offices and locations that they have. And they came to us. We, we did, again, a, a, a alar, a fairly large comprehensive assessment of their ID infrastructure and their licensing contracts. And we also found out that VMware cloud and AWS is the right solution for them. >>So we worked there, migrated all their applications, and as soon as we migrated all their applications, they got, they got access to, you know, our high level services be our analytics services, our machine learning services, our, our, our, our artificial intelligence services that have been critical for them, for their growth. And, and that really is helping them, you know, get towards their next level of modern applications. Right Now, obviously going forward, they will have, they will have the choice to, you know, really think about which applications they want to, you know, refactor or which applications they want to go ahead with. That is really a choice in front of them. And, but you know, the, we VMware cloud and AWS really gave them the opportunity to first migrate and then, you know, move towards modernization with speed. >>You know, the speed of a startup is always the kind of the Silicon Valley story where you're, you know, people can make massive changes in 18 months, whether that's a pivot or a new product. You see that in startup world. Now, in the enterprise, you can see the same thing. I noticed behind you on your whiteboard, you got a slogan that says, are you thinking big? I know Amazon likes to think big, but also you work back from the customers and, and I think this modern application thing's a big deal because I think the mindset has always been constrained because back before they moved to the cloud, most IT, and, and, and on-premise data center shops, it's slow. You gotta get the hardware, you gotta configure it, you gotta, you gotta stand it up, make sure all the software is validated on it, and loading a database and loading oss, I mean, mean, yeah, it got easier and with scripting and whatnot, but when you move to the cloud, you have more scale, which means more speed, which means it opens up their capability to think differently and build product. What are you seeing there? Can you share your opinion on that epiphany of, wow, things are going fast, I got more time to actually think about maybe doing a cloud native app or transforming this or that. What's your, what's your reaction to that? Can you share your opinion? >>Well, ultimately we, we want our customers to utilize, you know, most of our modern services, you know, applications should be microservices based. When desired, they should use serverless applic. So list technology, they should not have monolithic, you know, relational database contracts. They should use custom databases, they should use containers when needed, right? So ultimately, we want our customers to use these modern technologies to make sure that their IT infrastructure, their licensing, their, their entire IT spend is completely native to cloud technologies. They work with the speed of a startup, but it's important for them to, to, to get to the first step, right? So that's why we create this journey for our customers, where you help them migrate, give them time to build the skills, they'll help them mo modernize, take our partners along with their, along with us to, to make sure that they can address the need for our customers. That's, that's what our customers need today, and that's what we are working backwards from. >>Yeah, and I think that opens up some big ideas. I'll just say that the, you know, we're joking, I was joking the other night with someone here in, in Palo Alto around serverless, and I said, you know, soon you're gonna hear words like architectural list. And that's a criticism on one hand, but you might say, Hey, you know, if you don't really need an architecture, you know, storage lists, I mean, at the end of the day, infrastructure is code means developers can do all the it in the coding cycles and then make the operations cloud based. And I think this is kind of where I see the dots connecting. Final thought here, take us through what you're thinking around how this new world is evolving. I mean, architecturals kind of a joke, but the point is, you know, you have to some sort of architecture, but you don't have to overthink it. >>Totally. No, that's a great thought, by the way. I know it's a joke, but it's a great thought because at the end of the day, you know, what do the customers really want? They want outcomes, right? Why did service technology come? It was because there was an outcome that they needed. They didn't want to get stuck with, you know, the, the, the real estate of, of a, of a server. They wanted to use compute when they needed to, right? Similarly, what you're talking about is, you know, outcome based, you know, desire of our customers and, and, and that's exactly where the word is going to, Right? Cloud really enforces that, right? We are actually, you know, working backwards from a customer's outcome and using, using our area the breadth and depth of our services to, to deliver those outcomes, right? And, and most of our services are in that path, right? When we use VMware cloud and aws, the outcome is a, to migrate then to modernize, but doesn't stop there, use our native services, you know, get the business outcomes using this. So I think that's, that's exactly what we are going through >>Actually, should actually, you're the director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on Aus. I wanna thank you for coming on, but I'll give you the final minute. Give a plug, explain what is the VMware cloud on Aus, Why is it great? Why should people engage with you and, and the team, and what ultimately is this path look like for them going forward? >>Yeah. At the end of the day, we want our customers to have the best paths to the cloud, right? The, the best path to the cloud is making sure that they migrate safely, reliably, and securely as well as with speed, right? And then, you know, use that cloud platform to, to utilize AWS's native services to make sure that they modernize their IT infrastructure and applications, right? We want, ultimately that our customers, customers, customer get the best out of, you know, utilizing the, that whole application experience is enhanced tremendously by using our services. And I think that's, that's exactly what we are working towards VMware cloud AWS is, is helping our customers in that journey towards migrating, modernizing, whether they wanna exit a data center or whether they wanna modernize their applications. It's a essential first step that we wanna help our customers with >>One director of global sales and go to market with VMware cloud on neighbors. He's with aws sharing his thoughts on accelerating business transformation on aws. This is a showcase. We're talking about the future path. We're talking about use cases with success stories from customers as she's thank you for spending time today on this showcase. >>Thank you, John. I appreciate it. >>Okay. This is the cube, special coverage, special presentation of the AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hi everyone. Welcome to theCUBE special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, or videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and AWS. This is the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS Showcase: Accelerating Business Transformation. Here in the Showcase at Samir Kadoo, worldwide VMware strategic alliance solution architect leader with AWS. Samir, great to have you. And Daniel Rethmeier, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are working together, you're the key players in this relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to theCUBE. >> Thank you, greatly appreciate it. >> Great to have you guys both on. As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Gelsinger, then CEO, and then then CEO AWS at Andy Jassy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success of VM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later, we got this whole inflection point coming, you're starting to see this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side, more automation, more serverless, I mean and AI. I mean, it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kind of a whole 'nother level. Where are we? Samir, let's start with you on the relationship. >> Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced. And then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware Cloud on AWS. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware. You know, one of the key things... Together, day in, day out, as far as advancing VMware Cloud on AWS. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with the solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements. You know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right, more recently. One of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware Cloud on AWS. And even with VMware to other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware Cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware Cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint, there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >> Great stuff. Daniel, I want to get to you in a second upon this principal architect position you have. In your title, you're the global AWS synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly VMworld, talking about how the workloads on IT has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AIOps, you got ITOps changing a lot, you got a lot more automation, edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the relationship? >> So at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware Cloud and AWS, we are also enabling us mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembles globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers. That's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the best benefits out of VMware Cloud on AWS. And over the time, we really have involved the solution. As Samir mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware Cloud on AWS. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of workloads. So for example, we just edited the I4i host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as, you mentioned it, AI workloads. >> Yeah, so I want to get us just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation, you know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in theCUBE in the past couple weeks in a big way that the ops teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds a little bit weird, but IT operations is now part of a lot more DataOps, security, writing code, composing. You know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing, what are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >> That's a great point, because originally, VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people and customers. So for example, AWS, very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the ITOps area. And usually these are very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customer needs, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, "Well, we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service. Recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure." That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on-premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >> Samir, talk about your perspective. I want to get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS re:MARS, actually it was Amazon re:MARS, machine learning automation, robotics and space was really kind of the confluence of industrial IoT, software, physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code, automation, you know, "Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster." Yeah, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services, meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >> Yeah. Yeah, totally, right? And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware Cloud on AWS, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you want to leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's going to give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with IoT, even with utilizing Alexa, or if there's any other service that you want to utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings right off the top. Though with digital transformation, right, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology even in your business. Leaders are looking to reinvent their business, they're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy, maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. >> Okay. >> Then also- >> Oh, go ahead, finish your thought. >> No, no, no, I was going to say what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that vStor admin that's used to their on-premises environment. Now with VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, you still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware Cloud on AWS too. >> Daniel, I want to get your thoughts on this because at Explore and after the event, as we prep for CubeCon and re:Invent coming up, the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators, and it's like hundreds of thousands of users and millions of people talking about and peaked on VMware, interested in VMware. The common thread was one person said, "I'm trying to figure out where I'm going to put my career in the next 10 to 15 years." And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm going to be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet. Architects, is it solution architect, SRE? So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are going to try to make these career decisions. Like what am I going to work on? And then it's kind of fuzzy, but I want to get your thoughts, how would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity? And what's going to happen? >> So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills and trainings? Is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the answer is to make digital transformation a success, we need not just to talk about technology, but also about process, people, and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware Cloud on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment, you can use the same managing and monitoring tools, if you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware Cloud on AWS. And that gives not just leaders, but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in such a complex project. >> The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go. And then now that once they're confident, they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because on your side, you've got higher level services, you've got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, a lot improvements. So, okay, nothing's changed, I can still run my job, now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the customer there? >> Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware Cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud. But if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you want to utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on-premises or even in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you want to expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >> Great stuff, I love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, 'cause people want to know what's goes on behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationships? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? Do you guys just have a Zoom meeting, do you guys fly out, you write code, go do you ship things? I mean, I'm making it up, but you get the idea. How does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >> So we hope to get more frequently together in-person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to Zoom conferences and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if you are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have regular assembles now also in-person, geo-based, so for AMEA, for the Americas, for APJ. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >> What's interesting, you know, as events are coming back, Samir, before you weigh in this, I'll comment as theCUBE's been going back out to events, we're hearing comments like, "What pandemic? We were more productive in the pandemic." I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in-person, they're happy to see people, but no one's really missed the beat. I mean, it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More, if anything, productivity gains. >> Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is even if you look at AWS's, and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said and meant earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in-person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation in VMware Cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology, we've been able to still communicate, work with our customers, even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot, we had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts. So even with the on-premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >> In our last segment we did here on this Showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean geo, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and people can reference that, we won't get into it here. But I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Because again, I think right now, we're at an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with re:Invent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >> So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked for over the last years. Whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware Cloud on AWS, you have to add additional nodes. Now we have three different node types with different ratios of compute, storage, and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay for it. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS6 wanted a ONTAP and VMware Cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements, at the upcoming events. >> Samir, what's your reaction take on what's coming down on your side? >> Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scaled with their needs, right? So with VMware Cloud on AWS, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are going to be announcements, innovations, and whatnot with upcoming events. But together, we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS. To Daniel's point, storage for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right? Now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware Cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's going to be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events, that's going to give us the options to even advance our own services together. >> Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I want to get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in the open conversations on theCUBE is in the old days, let's go back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem, AWS had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships, and they do business together and they sell each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture, 'cause we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining and you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides, they come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem interplay. What's your thoughts on this? Because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much innovations only. You got to do innovation, but when you do innovation, you got to integrate it, you got to connect it. So how do you guys see this as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >> So we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware Cloud on AWS, moving to the cloud, firstly it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise, you can do this. If you decide you want to stay with some of your services on-premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can man manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead end, it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on-premise or the cloud, it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both worlds, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware Cloud on AWS either way in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich, later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by AWS, more than 200 different services ranging from object-based storage, load balancing, and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >> We call that super cloud in the way that we generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is kind of where cloud is right now. You guys are not commodity, amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things happen. You got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. >> Absolutely. >> And everybody wins. >> Yeah, I 100% agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with AWS, maybe more proficient with the VMware's technology. But then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud, maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are, maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware Cloud on AWS. Maybe you want to leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top, 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skillset, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the day. >> I mean, I just think it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean you don't have to do anything. You still run it. Just spear the way you're working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >> Yeah, absolutely. And if you look, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time, they can free up resources to develop new innovations and grow their business. >> Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Daniel, thank you for coming to Germany. >> Thank you. Oktoberfest, I know it's evening over there, weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir, give you the final word. AWS re:Invent's coming up. We're preparing, we're going to have an exclusive with Adam, with Fryer, we'd do a curtain raise, and do a little preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at re:Invent this year? The big show? >> Yeah, so I think Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what are called chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there, but if they want to be hands-on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, been in sysadmin world and whatnot, being hands-on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. >> Yeah, and re:Invent's an amazing show for the in-person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at theCUBE and it's becoming popular. We have more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media. So thanks for sharing that. Samir, Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the Showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud on AWS, really accelerating business transformation with AWS and VMware. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(light corporate music) >> Welcome back, everyone, to VMware Explore 22. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE with Dave Vellante. Our 12th year covering VMware's User Conference, formerly known as VMworld, now rebranded as VMware Explore. Two great cube alumnus coming down the cube. Ricky Cooper, SVP, Worldwide Partner Commercials VMware, great to see you. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> We just had a great chat- >> Good to see you again. >> With the Discovery and, of course, Joseph George, vice president of Compute Industry Alliances. Great to have you on. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> So guys this year is very curious in VMware. A lot goin' on, the name change, the event. Big, big move. Bold move. And then they changed the name of the event. Then Broadcom buys them. A lot of speculation, but at the end of the day, this conference kind of, people were wondering what would be the barometer of the event. We're reporting this morning on the keynote analysis. Very good mojo in the keynote. Very transparent about the Broadcom relationship. The expo floor last night was buzzing. >> Mhm. >> I mean, this is not a show that's lookin' like it's going to be, ya' know, going down. >> Yeah. >> This is clearly a wave. We're calling it Super Cloud. Multi-Cloud's their theme. Clearly the cloud's happenin'. We not to date ourselves, but 2013 we were discussing on theCUBE- >> We talked about that. Yeah. Yeah. >> Discover about DevOps infrastructure as code- >> Mhm. >> We're full realization now of that. >> Yep. >> This is where we're at. You guys had a great partnership with VMware and HPE. Talk about where you guys see this coming together because customers are refactoring. They are lookin' at Cloud Native. The whole Broadcom visibility to the VMware customer bases activated them. They're here and they're leaning in. >> Yeah. >> What's going on? >> Yeah. Absolutely. We're seeing a renewed interest now as customers are looking at their entire infrastructure, bottoms up, all the way up the stack, and the notion of a hybrid cloud, where you've got some visibility and control of your data and your infrastructure and your applications, customers want to live in that sort of a cloud environment and so we're seeing a renewed interest. A lot of conversations we're having with customers now, a lot of customers committing to that model where they have applications and workloads running at the Edge, in their data center, and in the public cloud in a lot of cases, but having that mobility, having that control, being able to have security in their own, you know, in their control. There's a lot that you can do there and, obviously, partnering with VMware. We've been partners for so long. >> 20 years about. Yeah. Yeah. >> Yeah. At least 20 years, back when they invented stuff, they were inventing way- >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. >> VMware's got a very technical culture, but Ricky, I got to say that, you know, we commented earlier when Raghu was on, the CEO, now CEO, I mean, legendary product. I sent the trajectory to VMware. Everyone knows that. VMware, I can't know whether to tell it was VMware or HP, HP before HPE, coined hybrid- >> Yeah. >> 'Cause you guys were both on. I can't recall, Dave, which company coined it first, but it was either one of you guys. Nobody else was there. >> It was the partnership. >> Yes. I- (cross talking) >> They had a big thing with Pat Gelsinger. Dave, remember when he said, you know, he got in my grill on theCUBE live? But now you see- >> But if you focus on that Multi-Cloud aspect, right? So you've got a situation where our customers are looking at Multi-Cloud and they're looking at it not just as a flash in the pan. This is here for five years, 10 years, 20 years. Okay. So what does that mean then to our partners and to our distributors? You're seeing a whole seed change. You're seeing partners now looking at this. So, look at the OEMs, you know, the ones that have historically been vSphere customers are now saying, they're coming in droves saying, okay, what is the next step? Well, how can I be a Multi-Cloud partner with you? >> Yep. Right. >> How can I look at other aspects that we're driving here together? So, you know, GreenLake is a great example. We keep going back to GreenLake and we are partaking in GreenLake at the moment. The real big thing for us is going to be, right, let's make sure that we've got the agreements in place that support this SaaS and subscription motion going forward and then the sky's the limit for us. >> You're pluggin' that right into GreenLake, right? >> Well, here's why. Here's why. So customers are loving the fact that they can go to a public cloud and they can get an SLA. They come to a, you know, an On-Premise. You've got the hardware, you've got the software, you've got the, you know, the guys on board to maintain this through its life cycle. >> Right. I mean, this is complicated stuff. >> Yeah. >> Now we've got a situation where you can say, hey, we can get an SLA On-Premise. >> Yeah. And I think what you're seeing is it's very analogous to having a financial advisor just manage your portfolio. You're taking care of just submitting money. That's really a lot of what the customers have done with the public cloud, but now, a lot of these customers are getting savvy and they have been working with VMware Technologies and HPE for so long. They've got expertise. They know how they want their workloads architected. Now, we've given them a model where they can leverage the Cloud platform to be able to do this, whether it's On-Premise, The Edge, or in the public cloud, leveraging HPE GreenLake and VMware. >> Is it predominantly or exclusively a managed service or do you find some customers saying, hey, we want to manage ourself? How, what are you seeing is the mix there? >> It is not predominantly managed services right now. We're actually, as we are growing, last time we talked to HPE Discover we talked about a whole bunch of new services that we've added to our catalog. It's growing by leaps and bounds. A lot of folks are definitely interested in the pay as you go, obviously, the financial model, but are now getting exposed to all the other management that can happen. There are managed services capabilities, but actually running it as a service with your systems On-Prem is a phenomenal idea for all these customers and they're opening their eyes to some new ways to service their customers better. >> And another phenomenon we're seeing there is where partners, such as HPA, using other partners for various areas of their services implementation as well. So that's another phenomenon, you know? You're seeing the resale motion now going into a lot more of the services motion. >> It's interesting too, you know, I mean, the digital modernization that's goin' on. The transformation, whatever you want to call it, is complicated. >> Yeah. >> That's clear. One of the things I liked about the keynote today was the concept of cloud chaos. >> Yeah. >> Because we've been saying, you know, quoting Andy Grove at Intel, "Let chaos rain and rain in the chaos." >> Mhm. >> And when you have inflection points, complexity, which is the chaos, needs to be solved and whoever solves it kicks the inflection point, that's up into the right. So- >> Prime idea right here. Yeah. >> So GreenLake is- >> Well, also look at the distribution model and how that's changed. A couple of points on a deal. Now they're saying, "I'll be your aggregator. I'll take the strain and I'll give you scale." You know? "I'll give you VMware Scale for all, you know, for all of the various different partners, et cetera." >> Yeah. So let's break this down because this is, I think, a key point. So complexity is good, but the old model in the Enterprise market was- >> Sure. >> You solve complexity with more complexity. >> Yeah. >> And everybody wins. Oh, yeah! We're locked in! That's not what the market wants. They want some self-service. They want, as a service, they want easy. Developer first security data ops, DevOps, is already in the cycle, so they're going to want simpler. >> Yeah. >> Easier. Faster. >> And this is kind of why I'll say, for the big announcement today here at VMware Explore, around the VMware vSphere Distributed Services Engine, Project Monterey- >> Yeah. >> That we've talked about for so long, HPE and VMware and AMD, with the Pensando DPU, actually work together to engineer a solution for exactly that. The capabilities are fairly straightforward in terms of the technologies, but actually doing the work to do integration, joint engineering, make sure that this is simple and easy and able to be running HPE GreenLake, that's- >> That's invested in Pensando, right? >> We are. >> We're all investors. Yeah. >> What's the benefit of that? What's, that's a great point you made. What's the value to the customer, bottom line? That deep co-engineering, co-partnering, what does it deliver that others don't do? >> Yeah. Well, I think one example would be, you know, a lot of vendors can say we support it. >> Yep. >> That's great. That's actually a really good move, supporting it. It can be resold. That's another great move. I'm not mechanically inclined to where I would go build my own car. I'll go to a dealership and actually buy one that I can press the button and I can start it and I can do what I need to do with my car and that's really what this does is the engineering work that's gone on between our two companies and AMD Pensando, as well as the business work to make that simple and easy, that transaction to work, and then to be able to make it available as a service, is really what made, it's, that's why it's such a winner winner with our- >> But it's also a lower cost out of the box. >> Yep. >> Right. >> So you get in whatever. Let's call it 20%. Okay? But there's, it's nuanced because you're also on a new technology curve- >> Right. >> And you're able to absorb modern apps, like, you know, we use that term as a bromide, but when I say modern apps, I mean data-rich apps, you know, things that are more AI-driven not the conventional, not that people aren't doing, you know, SAP and CRM, they are, but there's a whole slew of new apps that are coming in that, you know, traditional architectures aren't well-suited to handle from a price performance standpoint. This changes that doesn't it? >> Well, you think also of, you know, going to the next stage, which is to go to market between the two organizations that before. At the moment, you know, HPE's running off doing various different things. We were running off to it again, it's that chaos that you're talking about. In cloud chaos, you got to go to market chaos. >> Yeah. >> But by simplifying four or five things, what are we going to do really well together? How do we embed those in GreenLake- >> Mhm. >> And be known in the marketplace for these solutions? Then you get a, you know, an organization that's really behind the go to market. You can help with sales activation the enablement, you know, and then we benefit from the scale of HPE. >> Yeah. >> What are those solutions I mean? Is it just, is it I.S.? Is it, you know, compute storage? >> Yeah. >> Is it, you know, specific, you know, SAP? Is it VDI? What are you seeing out there? >> So right now, for this specific technology, we're educating our customers on what that could be and, at its core, this solution allows customers to take services that normally and traditionally run on the compute system and run on a DPU now with Project Monterey, and this is now allowing customers to think about, okay, where are their use cases. So I'm, rather than going and, say, use it for this, we're allowing our customers to explore and say, okay, here's where it makes sense. Where do I have workloads that are using a lot of compute cycles on services at the compute level that could be somewhere else like networking as a great example, right? And allowing more of those compute cycles to be available. So where there are performance requirements for an application, where there is timely response that's needed for, you know, for results to be able to take action on, to be able to get insight from data really quick, those are places where we're starting to see those services moving onto something like a DPU and that's where this makes a whole lot more sense. >> Okay. So, to get this right, you got the hybrid cloud, right? >> [Ricky And Joseph] Yes. >> You got GreenLake and you got the distributed engine. What's that called the- >> For, it's HPE ProLiant- >> ProLiant with- >> The VMware- >> With vSphere. >> That's the compute- >> Distributed. >> Okay. So does the customer, how do you guys implement that with the customer? All three at the same time or they mix and match? What's that? How does that work? >> All three of those components. Yeah. So the beauty of the HP ProLiant with VMware vSphere-distributed services engine- >> Mhm. >> Also known as Project Monterey for those that are keeping notes at home- >> Mhm. >> It's, again, already pre-engineered. So we've already worked through all the mechanics of how you would have to do this. So it's not something you have to go figure out how you build, get deployment, you know, work through those details. That's already done. It is available through HPE GreenLake. So you can go and actually get it as a service in partnership with our customer, our friends here at VMware, and because, if you're familiar and comfortable with all the things that HP ProLiant has done from a security perspective, from a reliability perspective, trusted supply chain, all those sorts of things, you're getting all of that with this particular (indistinct). >> Sumit Dhawan had a great quote on theCUBE just an hour or so ago. He said you have to be early to be first. >> Yeah. (laughing) >> I love that quote. Okay. So you were- >> I fought the urge. >> You were first. You were probably a little early, but do you have a lead? I know you're going to say yes, okay. Let's just- >> Okay. >> Let's just assume that. >> Okay. Yeah. >> Relative to the competition, how do you know? How do you determine that? >> If we have a lead or not? >> Yeah. If you lead. If you're the best. >> We go to the source of the truth which is our customers. >> And what do they tell you? What do you look at and say, okay, now, I mean, when you have that honest conversation and say, okay, we are, we're first, we're early. We're keeping our lead. What are the things that you- >> I'll say it this way. I'll say it this way. We've been in a lot of businesses where there, where we do compete head-to-head in a lot of places. >> Mhm. >> And we know how that sales process normally works. We're seeing a different motion from our customers. When we talk about HPE GreenLake, there's not a lot of back and forth on, okay, well, let me go shop around. It is HP Green. Let's talk about how we actually build this solution. >> And I can tell you, from a VMware perspective, our customers are asking us for this the other way around. So that's a great sign is that, hey, we need to see this partnership come together in GreenLake. >> Yeah. >> It's the old adage that Amazon used to coin and Andy Jassy, you know, they do the undifferentiated heavy lifting. >> [Ricky And Joseph] Yeah. >> A lot of that's now Cloud operations. >> Mhm. >> Underneath it is infrastructure's code to the developer. >> That's right. >> That's at scale. >> That's right. >> And so you got a lot of heavy lifting being done with GreenLake- >> Right. >> Which is why there's no objections probably. >> Right. >> What's the choice? What are you going to shop? >> Yeah. >> There's nothing to shop around. >> Yeah, exactly. And then we've got, you know, that is really icing on the cake that we've, you know, that we've been building for quite some time and there is an understanding in the market that what we do with our infrastructure is hardened from a reliability and quality perspective. Like, times are tough right now. Supply chain issues, all that stuff. We've talked, all talked about it, but at HPE, we don't skimp on quality. We're going to spend the dollars and time on making sure we got reliability and security built in. It's really important to us. >> We had a great use case. The storage team, they were provisioning with containers. >> Yes. >> Storage is a service instantly we're seeing with you guys with VMware. Your customers' bringing in a lot of that into the mix as well. I got to ask 'cause every event we talk about AI and machine learning- >> Mhm. >> Automation and DevOps are now infiltrating in with the CICD pipeline. Security and data become a big conversation. >> [Ricky And Joseph] Agreed. >> Okay. So how do you guys look at that? Okay. You sold me on Green. Like, I've been a big fan from day one. Now, it's got maturity on it. I know it's going to get a lot more headroom to do. There's still a lot of work to do, but directionally it's pretty accurate, you know? It's going to be a success. There's still concern about security, the data layer. That's agnostic of environment, private cloud, hybrid, public, and Edge. So that's important and security- >> Great. >> Has got a huge service area. >> Yeah. >> These are on working progress. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> How do you guys view those? >> I think you've just hit the net on the head. I mean, I was in the press and journalist meetings yesterday and our answer was exactly the same. There is still so much work that can be done here and, you know, I don't think anybody is really emerging as a true leader. It's just a continuation of, you know, tryin' to get that right because it is what is the most important thing to our customers. >> Right. >> And the industry is really sort of catching up to that. >> And, you know, when you start talking about privacy and when you, it's not just about company information. It's about individuals' information. It's about, you know, information that, if exposed, actually could have real impact on people. >> Mhm. >> So it's more than just an I.T. problem. It is actually, and from HPE's perspective, security starts from when we're picking our suppliers for our components. Like, there are processes that we put into our entire trusted supply chain from the factory on the way up. I liken it to my golf swing. My golf swing. I slice right like you wouldn't believe. (John laughing) But when I go to the golf pros, they start me back at the mechanics, the foundational pieces. Here's where the problems are and start workin' on that. So my view is, our view is, if your infrastructure is not secure, you're goin' to have troubles with security as you go further up. >> Stay in the sandbox. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. So to speak, you know, they're driving range on the golf analogy there. I love that. Talk about supply chain security real quick because you mentioned supply chain on the hardware side. You're seeing a lot of open source and supply chain in software, trusted software. >> Yep. >> How does GreenLake look at that? How do you guys view that piece of it? That's an important part. >> Yeah. Security is one of the key pillars that we're actually driving as a company right now. As I said, it's important to our customers as they're making purchasing decisions and we're looking at it from the infrastructure all the way up to the actual service itself and that's the beauty of having something like HPE GreenLake. We don't have to pick, is the infrastructure or the middle where, or the top of stack application- >> It's (indistinct), right? >> It's all of it. >> Yeah. >> It's all of it. That matters. >> Quick question on the ecosystem posture. So- >> Sure. >> I remember when HP was, you know, one company and then the GSIs were a little weird with HP because of EDS, you know? You had data protector so we weren't really chatting up Veeam at the time, right? And as soon as the split happened, ecosystem exploded. Now you have a situation where you, Broadcom, is acquiring VMware. You guys, big Broadcom customer. Has your attitude changed or has it not because, oh, we meet with the customers already. Well, you've always said that, but have you have leaned in more? I mean, culturally, is HPE now saying, hmm, now we have some real opportunities to partner in new ways that we don't have to sleep with one eye open, maybe. (John laughing) >> So first of all, VMware and HPE, we've got a variety of different partners. We always have. >> Mhm. >> Well before any Broadcom announcement came along. >> Yeah, sure. >> We've been working with a variety of partners. >> And that hasn't changed. >> And that hasn't changed. And, if your question is, has our posture toward VMware changed at all, the answer's absolutely not. We believe in what VMware is doing. We believe in what our customers are doing with VMware and we're going to continue to work with VMware and partner with the (indistinct). >> And of course, you know, we had to spin out ourselves in November of last year, which I worked on, you know, the whole Dell thing. >> Yeah. We still had the same chairman. >> Yeah. There- (Dave chuckling) >> Yeah, but since then, I think what's really become very apparent and not, it's not just with HPE, but with many of our partners, many of the OEM partners, the opportunity in front of us is vast and we need to rely on each other to help us as, you know, solve the customer problems that are out there. So there's a willingness to overlook some things that, in the past, may have been, you know, barriers. >> But it's important to note also that it's not that we have not had history- >> Yeah. >> Right? Over, we've got over 200,000 customers join- >> Hundreds of millions of dollars of business- >> 100,000, over 10,000, or 100,000 channel partners that we all have in common. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Yep. >> There's numerous- >> And independent of the whole Broadcom overhang there. >> Yeah. >> There's the ecosystem floor. >> Yeah. >> The expo floor. >> Right. >> I mean, it's vibrant. I mean, there's clearly a wave coming, Ricky. We talked about this briefly at HPE Discover. I want to get an update from your perspectives, both of you, if you don't mind weighing in on this. Clearly, the wave, we're calling it the Super Cloud, 'cause it's not just Multi-Cloud. It's completely different looking successes- >> Smart Cloud. >> It's not just vendors. It's also the customers turning into clouds themselves. You look at Goldman Sachs and- >> Yep. >> You know, I think every vertical will have its own power law of Cloud players in the future. We believe that to be true. We're still testing that assumption, but it's trending in when you got OPEX- >> [Ricky And Joseph] Right. >> Has to go to in-fund statement- >> Yeah. >> CapEx goes too. Thanks for the Cloud. All that's good, but there's a wave coming- >> Yeah. >> And we're trying to identify it. What do you guys see as this wave 'cause beyond Multi-Cloud and the obvious nature of that will end up happening as a state and what happens beyond that interoperability piece, that's a whole other story, and that's what everyone's fighting for, but everyone out in that ecosystem, it's a big wave coming. They've got their surfboards. They're ready to go. So what do you guys see? What is the next wave that everyone's jacked up about here? >> Well, I think that the Multi-Cloud is obviously at the epicenter. You know, if you look at the results that are coming in, a lot of our customers, this is what's leading the discussion and now we're in a position where, you know, we've brought many companies over the last few years. They're starting to come to fruition. They're starting to play a role in, you know, how we're moving forward. >> Yeah. >> Some of those are a bit more applicable to the commercial space. We're finding commercial customers that never bought from us before. Never. Hundreds and hundreds are coming through our partner networks every single quarter, you know? So brand new to VMware. The trick then is how do you nurture them? How do you encourage them? >> So new logos are comin' in. >> New logos are coming in all the time, all the time, from, you know, from across the ecosystem. It's not just the OEMs. It's all the way back- >> So the ecosystem's back of VMware. >> Unbelievably. So what are we doing to help that? There's two big things that we've announced in the recent weeks is that Partner Connect 2.0. When I talked to you about Multi-Cloud and what the (indistinct), you know, the customers are doing, you see that trend. Four, five different separate clouds that we've got here. The next piece is that they're changing their business models with the partners. Their services is becoming more and more apparent, et cetera, you know? And the use of other partners to do other services, deployment, or this stuff is becoming prevalent. Then you've got the distributors that I talked about with their, you know, their, then you route to market, then you route to business. So how do you encapsulate all of that and ensure your rewarding partners on all aspects of that? Whether it's deployment, whether it's test and depth, it's a points-based system we've put in place now- >> It's a big pie that's developing. The market's getting bigger. >> It's getting so much bigger. And then you help- >> I know you agree, obviously, with that. >> Yeah. Absolutely. In fact, I think for a long time we were asking the question of, is it going to be there or is it going to be here? Which was the wrong question. (indistinct cross talking) Now it's everything. >> Yeah. >> And what I think that, what we're seeing in the ecosystem, is that people are finding the spots that, where they're going to play. Am I going to be on the Edge? >> Yeah. >> Am I going to be on Analytics Play? Am I going to be, you know, Cloud Transition Play? There's a lot of players are now emerging and saying, we're- >> Yeah. >> We're, we now have a place, a part to play. And having that industry view not just of, you know, a commercial customer at that level, but the two of us are lookin' at Teleco, are looking at financial services, at healthcare, at manufacturing. How do these new ecosystem players fit into the- >> (indistinct) lifting. Everyone can see their position there. >> Right. >> We're now being asked for simplicity and talk to me about partner profitability. >> Yes. >> How do I know where to focus my efforts? Am I spread too thin? And, you know, that's, and my advice that the partner ecosystem out there is, hey, let's pick out spots together. Let's really go to, and then strategic solutions that we were talking about is a good example of that. >> Yeah. >> Sounds like composability to me, but not to go back- (laughing) Guys, thanks for comin' on. I think there's a big market there. I think the fog is lifted. People seeing their spot. There's value there. Value creation equals reward. >> Yeah. >> Simplicity. Ease of use. This is the new normal. Great job. Thanks for coming on and sharing. (cross talking) Okay. Back to live coverage after this short break with more day one coverage here from the blue set here in Moscone. (light corporate music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to San Francisco, "theCUBE" is live, our day two coverage of VMware Explore 2022 continues. Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. Dave and I are pleased to welcome Jason Collier, principal member of technical staff at AMD to the program. Jason, it's great to have you. >> Thank you, it's great to be here. >> So what's going on at AMD? I hear you have some juicy stuff to talk about. >> Oh, we've got a ton of juicy stuff to talk about. Clearly the Project Monterey announcement was big for us, so we've got that to talk about. Another thing that I really wanted to talk about was a tool that we created and we call it, it's the VMware Architecture Migration Tool, call it VAMT for short. It's a tool that we created and we worked together with VMware and some of their professional services crew to actually develop this tool. And it is also an open source based tool. And really the primary purpose is to easily enable you to move from one CPU architecture to another CPU architecture, and do that in a cold migration fashion. >> So we're probably not talking about CPUs from Tandy, Radio Shack systems, likely this would be what we might refer to as other X86 systems. >> Other X86 systems is a good way to refer to it. >> So it's interesting timing for the development and the release of a tool like this, because in this sort of X86 universe, there are players who have been delayed in terms of delivering their next gen stuff. My understanding is AMD has been public with the idea that they're on track for by the end of the year, Genoa, next gen architecture. So can you imagine a situation where someone has an existing set of infrastructure and they're like, hey, you know what I want to get on board, the AMD train, is this something they can use from the VMware environment? >> Absolutely, and when you think about- >> Tell us exactly what that would look like, walk us through 100 servers, VMware, 1000 VMs, just to make the math easy. What do you do? How does it work? >> So one, there's several things that the tool can do, we actually went through, the design process was quite extensive on this. And we went through all of the planning phases that you need to go through to do these VM migrations. Now this has to be a cold migration, it's not a live migration. You can't do that between the CPU architectures. But what we do is you create a list of all of the virtual machines that you want to migrate. So we take this CSV file, we import this CSV file, and we ask for things like, okay, what's the name? Where do you want to migrate it to? So from one cluster to another, what do you want to migrate it to? What are the networks that you want to move it to? And then the storage platform. So we can move storage, it could either be shared storage, or we could move say from VSAN to VSAN, however you want to set it up. So it will do those storage migrations as well. And then what happens is it's actually going to go through, it's going to shut down the VM, it's going to take a snapshot, it is going to then basically move the compute and/or storage resources over. And once it does that, it's going to power 'em back up. And it's going to check, we've got some validation tools, where it's going to make sure VM Tools comes back up where everything is copacetic, it didn't blue screen or anything like that. And once it comes back up, then everything's good, it moves onto the next one. Now a couple of things that we've got feature wise, we built into it. You can parallelize these tasks. So you can say, how many of these machines do you want to do at any given time? So it could be, say 10 machines, 50 machines, 100 machines at a time, that you want to go through and do this move. Now, if it did blue screen, it will actually roll it back to that snapshot on the origin cluster. So that there is some protection on that. A couple other things that are actually in there are things like audit tracking. So we do full audit logging on this stuff, we take a snapshot, there's basically kind of an audit trail of what happens. There's also full logging, SYS logging, and then also we'll do email reporting. So you can say, run this and then shoot me a report when this is over. Now, one other cool thing is you can also actually define a change window. So I don't want to do this in the middle of the afternoon on a Tuesday. So I want to do this later at night, over the weekend, you can actually just queue this up, set it, schedule it, it'll run. You can also define how long you want that change window to be. And what it'll do, it'll do as many as it can, then it'll effectively stop, finish up, clean up the tasks and then send you a report on what all was successfully moved. >> Okay, I'm going to go down the rabbit hole a little bit on this, 'cause I think it's important. And if I say something incorrect, you correct me. >> No problem. >> In terms of my technical understanding. >> I got you. >> So you've got a VM, essentially a virtual machine typically will consist of an entire operating system within that virtual machine. So there's a construct that containerizes, if you will, the operating system, what is the difference, where is the difference in the instruction set? Where does it lie? Is it in the OS' interaction with the CPU or is it between the construct that is the sort of wrapper around the VM that is the difference? >> It's really primarily the OS, right? And we've not really had too many issues doing this and most of the time, what is going to happen, that OS is going to boot up, it's going to recognize the architecture that it's on, it's going to see the underlying architecture, and boot up. All the major operating systems that we test worked fine. I mean, typically they're going to work on all the X86 platforms. But there might be instruction sets that are kind of enabled in one architecture that may not be in another architecture. >> And you're looking for that during this process. >> Well usually the OS itself is going to kind of detect that. So if it pops up, the one thing that is kind of a caution that you need to look for. If you've got an application that's explicitly using an instruction set that's on one CPU vendor and not the other CPU vendor. That's the one thing where you're probably going to see some application differences. That said, it'll probably be compatible, but you may not get that instruction set advantage in it. >> But this tool remediates against that. >> Yeah, and what we do, we're actually using VM Tools itself to go through and validate a lot of those components. So we'll look and make sure VM Tools is enabled in the first place, on the source system. And then when it gets to the destination system, we also look at VM Tools to see what is and what is not enabled. >> Okay, I'm going to put you on the spot here. What's the zinger, where doesn't it work? You already said cold, we understand, you can schedule for cold migrations, that's not a zinger. What's the zinger, where doesn't it work? >> It doesn't work like, live migrations just don't work. >> No live, okay, okay, no live. What about something else? What's the oh, you've got that version, you've got that version of X86 architecture, it-won't work, anything? >> A majority of those cases work, where it would fail, where it's going to kick back and say, hey, VM Tools is not installed. So where you would see this is if you're running a virtual appliance from some vendor, like insert vendor here that say, got a firewall, or got something like that, and they don't have VM Tools enabled. It's going to fail it out of the gate, and say, hey, VM Tools is not on this, you might want to manually do it. >> But you can figure out how to fix that? >> You can figure out how to do that. You can also, and there's a flag in there, so in kind of the options that you give it, you say, ignore VM Tools, don't care, move it anyway. So if you've got less, some VMs that are in there, but they're not a priority VM, then it's going to migrate just fine. >> Got It. >> Can you elaborate a little bit on the joint development work that AMD and VMware are doing together and the value in it for customers? >> Yeah, so it's one of those things we worked with VMware to basically produce this open source tool. So we did a lot of the core component and design and we actually engaged VMware Professional Services. And a big shout out to Austin Browder. He helped us a ton in this project specifically. And we basically worked, we created this, kind of co-designed, what it was going to look like. And then jointly worked together on the coding, of pulling this thing together. And then after that, and this is actually posted up on VMware's public repos now in GitHub. So you can go to GitHub, you can go to the VMware samples code, and you can download this thing that we've created. And it's really built to help ease migrations from one architecture to another. So if you're looking for a big data center move and you got a bunch of VMs to move. I mean, even if it's same architecture to same architecture, it's definitely going to ease the pain of going through and doing a migration of, it's one thing when you're doing 10 machines, but when you're doing 10,000 virtual machines, that's a different story. It gets to be quite operationally inefficient. >> I lose track after three. >> Yeah. >> So I'm good for three, not four. >> I was going to ask you what your target market segment is here. Expand on that a little bit and talk to me about who you're working with and those organizations. >> So really this is targeted toward organizations that have large deployments in enterprise, but also I think this is a big play with channel partners as well. So folks out there in the channel that are doing these migrations and they do a lot of these, when you're thinking about the small and mid-size organizations, it's a great fit for that. Especially if they're kind of doing that upgrade, the lift and shift upgrade, from here's where you've been five to seven years on an architecture and you want to move to a new architecture. This is really going to help. And this is not a point and click GUI kind of thing. It's command line driven, it's using PowerShell, we're using PowerCLI to do the majority of this work. And for channel partners, this is an excellent opportunity to put the value and the value add and VAR, And there's a lot of opportunity for, I think, channel partners to really go and take this. And once again, being open source. We expect this to be extensible, we want the community to contribute and put back into this to basically help grow it and make it a more useful tool for doing these cold migrations between CPU architectures. >> Have you seen any in the last couple of years of dynamics, obviously across the world, any industries in particular that are really leading edge for what you guys are doing? >> Yeah, that's really, really interesting. I mean, we've seen it, it's honestly been a very horizontal problem, pretty much across all vertical markets. I mean, we've seen it in financial services, we've seen it in, honestly, pretty much across the board. Manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, we have seen kind of a strong interest in that. And then also we we've actually taken this and presented this to some of our channel partners as well. And there's been a lot of interest in it. I think we presented it to about 30 different channel partners, a couple of weeks back about this. And I got contact from 30 different channel partners that said they're interested in basically helping us work on it. >> Tagging on to Lisa's question, do you have visibility into the AMD thought process around the timing of your next gen release versus others that are competitors in the marketplace? How you might leverage that in terms of programs where partners are going out and saying, hey, perfect time, you need a refresh, perfect time to look at AMD, if you haven't looked at them recently. Do you have any insight into that in what's going on? I know you're focused on this area. But what are your thoughts on, well, what's the buzz? What's the buzz inside AMD on that? >> Well, when you look overall, if you look at the Gartner Hype Cycle, when VMware was being broadly adopted, when VMware was being broadly adopted, I'm going to be blunt, and I'm going to be honest right here, AMD didn't have a horse in the race. And the majority of those VMware deployments we see are not running on AMD. Now that said, there's an extreme interest in the fact that we've got these very cored in systems that are now coming up on, now you're at that five to seven year refresh window of pulling in new hardware. And we have extremely attractive hardware when it comes to running virtualized workloads. The test cluster that I'm running at home, I've got that five to seven year old gear, and I've got some of the, even just the Milan systems that we've got. And I've got three nodes of another architecture going onto AMD. And when I got these three nodes completely maxed to the number of VMs that I can run on 'em, I'm at a quarter of the capacity of what I'm putting on the new stuff. So what you get is, I mean, we worked the numbers, and it's definitely, it's like a 30% decrease in the amount of resources that you need. >> That's a compelling number. >> It's a compelling number. >> 5%, 10%, nobody's going to do anything for that. You talk 30%. >> 30%. It's meaningful, it's meaningful. Now you you're out of Austin, right? >> Yes. >> So first thing I thought of when you talk about running clusters in your home is the cost of electricity, but you're okay. >> I'm okay. >> You don't live here, you don't live here, you don't need to worry about that. >> I'm okay. >> Do you have a favorite customer example that you think really articulates the value of AMD when you're in customer conversations and they go, why AMD and you hit back with this? >> Yeah. Actually it's funny because I had a conversation like that last night, kind of random person I met later on in the evening. We were going through this discussion and they were facing exactly this problem. They had that five to seven year infrastructure. It's funny, because the guy was a gamer too, and he's like, man, I've always been a big AMD fan, I love the CPUs all the way since back in basically the Opterons and Athlons right. He's like, I've always loved the AMD systems, loved the graphics cards. And now with what we're doing with Ryzen and all that stuff. He's always been a big AMD fan. He's like, and I'm going through doing my infrastructure refresh. And I told him, I'm just like, well, hey, talk to your VAR and have 'em plug some AMD SKUs in there from the Dells, HPs and Lenovos. And then we've got this tool to basically help make that migration easier on you. And so once we had that discussion and it was great, then he swung by the booth today and I was able to just go over, hey, this is the tool, this is how you use it, here's all the info. Call me if you need any help. >> Yeah, when we were talking earlier, we learned that you were at Scale. So what are you liking about AMD? How does that relate? >> The funny thing is this is actually the first time in my career that I've actually had a job where I didn't work for myself. I've been doing venture backed startups the last 25 years and we've raised couple hundred million dollars worth of investment over the years. And so one, I figured, here I am going to AMD, a larger corporation. I'm just like, am I going to be able to make it a year? And I have been here longer than a year and I absolutely love it. The culture at AMD is amazing. We still have that really, I mean, almost it's like that underdog mentality within the organization. And the team that I'm working with is a phenomenal team. And it's actually, our EVP and our Corp VP, were actually my executive sponsors, we were at a prior company. They were one of my executive sponsors when I was at Scale. And so my now VP boss calls me up and says, hey, I'm putting a band together, are you interested? And I was kind of enjoying a semi-retirement lifestyle. And then I'm just like, man, because it's you, yes, I am interested. And the group that we're in, the work that we're doing, the way that we're really focusing on forward looking things that are affecting the data center, what's going to be the data center like three to five years from now. It's exciting, and I am having a blast, I'm having the time of my life. I absolutely love it. >> Well, that relationship and the trust that you will have with each other, that bleeds into the customer conversations, the partner conversations, the employee conversations, it's all inextricably linked. >> Yes it is. >> And we want to know, you said three to five years out, like what? Like what? Just general futurist stuff, where do you think this is going. >> Well, it's interesting. >> So moon collides with the earth in 2025, we already know that. >> So we dialed this back to the Pensando acquisition. When you look at the Pensando acquisition and you look at basically where data centers are today, but then you look at where basically the big hyperscalers are. You look at an AWS, you look at their architecture, you specifically wrap Nitro around that, that's a very different architecture than what's being run in the data center. And when you look at what Pensando does, that's a lot of starting to bring what these real clouds out there, what these big hyperscalers are running into the grasps of the data center. And so I think you're going to see a fundamental shift. The next 10 years are going to be exciting because the way you look at a data center now, when you think of what CPUs do, what shared storage, how the networking is all set up, it ain't going to look the same. >> Okay, so the competing vision with that, to play devil's advocate, would be DPUs are kind of expensive. Why don't we just use NICs, give 'em some more bandwidth, and use the cheapest stuff. That's the competing vision. >> That could be. >> Or the alternative vision, and I imagine everything else we've experienced in our careers, they will run in parallel paths, fit for function. >> Well, parallel paths always exist, right? Otherwise, 'cause you know how many times you've heard mainframe's dead, tape's dead, spinning disk is dead. None of 'em dead, right? The reality is you get to a point within an industry where it basically goes from instead of a growth curve like that, it goes to a growth curve of like that, it's pretty flat. So from a revenue growth perspective, I don't think you're going to see the revenue growth there. I think you're going to see the revenue growth in DPUs. And when you actually take, they may be expensive now, but you look at what Monterey's doing and you look at the way that those DPUs are getting integrated in at the OEM level. It's going to be a part of it. You're going to order your VxRail and VSAN style boxes, they're going to come with them. It's going to be an integrated component. Because when you start to offload things off the CPU, you've driven your overall utilization up. When you don't have to process NSX on basically the X86, you've just freed up cores and a considerable amount of them. And you've also moved that to where there's a more intelligent place for that pack to be processed right, out here on this edge. 'Cause you know what, that might not need to go into the host bus at all. So you have just alleviated any transfers over a PCI bus, over the PCI lanes, into DRAM, all of these components, when you're like, but all to come with, oh, that bit needs to be on this other machine. So now it's coming in and it's making that decision there. And then you take and integrate that into things like the Aruba Smart Switch, that's running the Pensando technology. So now you got top of rack that is already making those intelligent routing decisions on where packets really need to go. >> Jason, thank you so much for joining us. I know you guys could keep talking. >> No, I was going to say, you're going to have to come back. You're going to have to come back. >> We've just started to peel the layers of the onion, but we really appreciate you coming by the show, talking about what AMD and VMware are doing, what you're enabling customers to achieve. Sounds like there's a lot of tailwind behind you. That's awesome. >> Yeah. >> Great stuff, thank you. >> It's a great time to be at AMD, I can tell you that. >> Oh, that's good to hear, we like it. Well, thank you again for joining us, we appreciate it. For our guest and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching "theCUBE Live" from San Francisco, VMware Explore 2022. We'll be back with our next guest in just a minute. (upbeat music)

(bright intro music) >> Welcome back everyone to VMware Explore '22. I'm John Furrier, host of the key with David Lante, our 12th year covering VMware's user conference, formerly known as VM-World now rebranded as VMware Explore. You got two great Cube alumni coming on the Cube. Ricky Cooper, SVP worldwide partner commercial VMware. Great to see you, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> We just had a great chat-- >> Good to see you again. >> At HPE discover. And of course, Joseph George, Vice President of Compute Industry Alliances. Great to have you on. Great to see you. >> Great to see you, John. >> So guys, this year is very curious, VMware, a lot going on. The name change of the event. Big move, Bold move. And then they changed the name of the event. Then Broadcom buys them. A lot of speculation, but at the end of the day, this conference... Kind of people were wondering what would be the barometer of the event. We were reporting this morning on the keynote analysis. Very good mojo in the keynote. Very transparent about the Broadcom relationship. The expo floor last night was buzzing. I mean, this is not a show that's looking like it's going to be, you know, going down. This is clearly a wave. We're calling it super cloud, multi-cloud's their theme. Clearly the cloud's happening. Not to date ourselves, but 2013 we were discussing on the-- >> We talked about that, yeah. >> HPE Discover about DevOps infrastructure as code. We're full realization now of that. This is where we're at. You guys had a great partnership with VMware and HPE. Talk about where you guys see this coming together because the customers are refactoring, they are looking at cloud native, the whole Broadcom visibility to the VMware customer bases activated them. They're here and they're leaning in. What's going on? >> Yeah absolutely, we're seeing a renewed interest now as customers are looking at their entire infrastructure, bottoms up all the way up the stack and the notion of a hybrid cloud, where you've got some visibility and control of your data and your infrastructure and applications. Customers want to live in that sort of a cloud environment. And so we're seeing a renewed interest, a lot of conversations we're having with customers now, a lot of customers committing to that model, where they have applications and workloads running at the edge in their data center and in the public cloud in a lot of cases. But having that mobility, having that control, being able to have security in their own control. There's a lot that you can do there. And obviously partnering with VMware. We've been partners for so long. >> 20 years, at least. >> At least 20 years. Back when they invented stuff. They were inventing way-- >> VMware's got a very technical culture, but Ricky, I got to say that we commented earlier when Ragu was on the CEO now CEO, I mean legendary product guy, set the trajectory to VMware, everyone knows that. I can't know whether it was VMware or HP, HP before HPE coined Hybrid. Cause you guys were both on, I can't recall Dave, which company coined it first, but it was either one of you guys. Nobody else was there. >> It was the partnership. (men chuckle) >> Hybrid Cloud I had a big thing with Pat Gelsinger, Dave. Remember when he said he got in my grill on theCube, live, but now you see. >> You focus on that multi-cloud aspect. So you've got a situation where our customers are looking at multi-cloud and they're looking at it, not just as a flash in the pan. This is here for five years, 10 years, 20 years. Okay. So what does that mean then to our partners and to our distributors, you're seeing a whole seed change. You're seeing partners now looking at this. So look at the OEMs, the ones that have historically been vSphere customers and now saying they're coming in, drove saying, okay, what is the next step? Well, how can I be a multi-cloud partner with you? How can I look at other aspects that we're driving here together? So GreenLake is a great example. We keep going back to GreenLake and we are partaking in GreenLake at the moment. The real big thing for us is going to be right. Let's make sure that we've got the agreements in place that support this Sasson subscription motion going forward. And then the sky's the limit for us. >> You're plugging that right into. >> Well, here's why, here's why, so customers are loving the fact that they can go to a public cloud and they can get an SLA. They come to an on-premise, you've got the hardware, you've got the software, you've got the guys on board to maintain this through its life cycle. I mean, this is complicated stuff. Now we've got a situation where you can say, Hey, we can get an SLA on premise. >> And I think what you're seeing is it's very analogous to having a financial advisor, just manage your portfolio. You're taking care of just submitting money. That's really a lot of what a lot of the customers have done with the public cloud. But now a lot of these customers are getting savvy. They have been working with VMware technologies and HPE for so long. they've got expertise. They know how they want their workloads architected. Now we've given them a model where they can leverage the cloud platform to be able to do this, whether it's on premise, the edge or in the public cloud, leveraging HPE GreenLake and VMware. >> Is it predominantly or exclusively a managed service or do you find some customers saying, hey, we want to manage ourself. What are you seeing is the mix there? >> It is not predominantly managed services right now. We're actually, as we are growing last time we talked at HPE discover. We talked about a whole bunch of new services that we've added to our catalog. It's growing by leaps and bounds. A lot of folks are definitely interested in the pay as you go, obviously the financial model, but are now getting exposed to all the other management that can happen. There are managed services capabilities, but actually running it as a service with your systems on-prem is a phenomenal idea for all these customers. And they're opening their eyes to some new ways to service their customers better. >> And another phenomenon we're seeing there is where partners such as HPA, using other partners for various areas of the services implementation as well. So that's another phenomenon. You're seeing the resale motion now going into a lot more of the services motion. >> It's interesting too. I mean the digital modernization that's going on, the transformation whatever you want to call it, is complicated, that's clear. One of the things I liked about the keynote today was the concept of cloud chaos, because we've been saying quoting Andy Grove, Next Intel, let chaos rain and rain in the chaos. And when you have inflection points, complexity, which is the chaos, needs to be solved and whoever solves it and kicks the inflection point, that's up and to the right. >> So prime idea right here. So. >> GreenLake is, well. >> Also look at the distribution model and how that's changed a couple of points on a deal. Now they're saying I'll be your aggregator. I'll take the strain and I'll give you scale. I'll give you VMware scale for all of the various different partners, et cetera. >> Yeah. So let's break this down because this is, I think a key point. So complexity is good, but the old model in the enterprise market was, you solve complexity with more complexity and everybody wins. Oh yeah, we're locked in. That's not what the market wants. They want self- service, they want as a service, they want easy, developer first security data ops. DevOps is already in the cycle. So they're going to want simpler, easier, faster. >> And this is kind of why I I'll say for the big announcement today here at VMware Explorer around the VMware vSphere distributed services engine, project Monterey that we've talked about for so long, HPE and VMware and AMD with the Pensando DPU actually work together to engineer a solution for exactly that. The capabilities are fairly straightforward in terms of the technologies, but actually doing the work to do integration, joint engineering, make sure that this is simple and easy and able to be running HPE GreenLake. >> We invested in Pensando right, we are investors. >> What's the benefit of that. That's a great point. You made what's the value to the customer bottom line, that deep, co-engineering, co-partnering, what is it deliver that others don't do? >> Yeah. Well, I think one example would be a lot of vendors can say we support it. >> Yep. That's great. That's actually a really good move, supporting it. It can be resold. That's another great move. I'm not mechanically inclined to where I would go build my own car. I'll go to a dealership and actually buy one that I can press the button and I can start it and I can do what I need to do with my car. And that's really what this does is the engineering work that's gone on between our two companies and AMD Pensando as well as the business work to make that simple and easy that transaction to work. And then to be able to make it available as a service is really what made, that's why it's such a winner here... >> But, it's also a lower cost out of the box. Yes. So you get in whatever it's called a 20%. Okay. But there's nuance because you're also on a new technology curve and you're able to absorb modern apps. We use that term as a promo, but when I say modern apps, I mean data, rich apps, things that are more AI driven. Not the conventional, not that people aren't doing, you know, SAP and CRM, they are. But, there's a whole slew of new apps that are coming in that traditional architectures aren't well suited to handle from a price performance standpoint. This changes that doesn't it? >> Well, you think also of going to the next stage, which is the go to market between the two organizations that before at the moment, HPE is running off doing various different things. We were running off to. Again, that chaos that you're talking about in cloud chaos, you got to go to market chaos, but by simplifying four or five things, what are we going to do really well together? How do we embed those in GreenLake and be known in the marketplace for these solutions? Then you get an organization that's really behind the go to market. You can help with sales, activation, the enablement. And then we benefit from the scale of HPE. >> Yeah. What are those solutions, I mean... Is it just, is it IS? Is it compute storage? Is it specific SAP? Is it VDI? What are you seeing out there? >> So right now for this specific technology, we're educating our customers on what that could be. And at its core, this solution allows customers to take services that normally and traditionally run on the compute system and run on a DPU now with project Monterey. And this is now allowing customers to think about where are their use cases. So I'm rather than going and say, use it for this. We're allowing our customers to explore and say, okay, here's where it makes sense. Where do I have workloads that are using a lot of compute cycles on services at the compute level? That could be somewhere else like networking as a great example, and allowing more of those compute cycles to be available. So where there are performance requirements for an application where there are timely response that's needed for results to be able to take action on, to be able to get insight from data really quick. Those are places where we're starting to see the services moving onto something like a DPU. And that's where this makes a whole lot more sense. >> Okay, so to get this right? You got the hybrid cloud, right? You got GreenLake and you got the distributed engine. What's that called? >> It's HPE Proliant Proliant with the VMware, VSphere. >> VSphere. That's the compute distributed. Okay. So does the customer, how do you guys implement that with the customer all three at the same time or they mix and match? How's that work? >> All three of those components. So the beauty of the HP Proliant with VMware vSphere distributed services engine also now is project Monterey for those that are keeping notes at home. Again already pre-engineered so we've already worked through all the mechanics of how you would have to do this. So it's not something you have to go figure out how you build, get deployment, work through those details. That's already done. It is available through HPE GreenLake. So you can go and actually get it as a service in partnership with our customer, our friends here at VMware. And because if you're familiar and comfortable with all the things that HP Proliant has done from a security perspective, from a reliability perspective, trusted supply chain, all those sorts of things, you're getting all of that with this particular solution. >> Sumit Dhawan had a great quote on theCube just a hour or so ago. He said you have to be early to be first. Love that quote. Okay. So you were first, you were probably a little early, but do you have a lead? I know you're going to say yes. Okay. Let's just assume that okay. Relative to the competition, how do you know? How do you determine that? >> If we have a lead or not? >> Yeah, if you lead, if you're the best. >> We go to the source of the truth, which is our customers. >> And what do they tell you? What do you look at and say, okay, now, I mean, when you have that honest conversation and say, okay, we are, we're first, we're early, we're keeping our lead. What are the things that you look at, as indicators? >> I'll say it this way. We've been in a lot of businesses where we do compete head-to-head in a lot of places and we know how that sales process normally works. We're seeing a different motion from our customers. When we talk about HPE GreenLake, there's not a lot of back and forth on, okay, well let me go shop around. It is HP GreenLake, let's talk about how we actually build this solution. >> And I can tell you from a VMware perspective, our customers are asking us for this the other way around. So that's a great sign. Is that, Hey, we need to see this partnership come together in GreenLake. >> Yeah. Okay. So you would concur with that? >> Absolutely. So third party validation. >> From Switzerland. Yeah. >> Bring it with you over here. >> We're talking about this earlier on, I mean, of course with I mentioned earlier on there's some contractual things that you've got to get in place as you are going through this migration into Sasson subscription, et cetera. And so we are working as hard as we can to make sure, Hey, let's really get this contract in place as quickly as possible, it's what the customers are asking us. >> We've been talking about this for years, you know, see containers being so popular. Now, Kubernetes becoming that layer of bringing people to bringing things together. It's the old adage that Amazon used to coin and Andy Jassy, they do the undifferentiated, heavy lifting. A lot of that's now that's now cloud operations. Underneath is infrastructure's code to the developer, right. That's at scale. >> That's right. >> And so you got a lot of heavy lifting being done with GreenLake. Which is why there's no objections probably. >> Right absolutely. >> What's the choice. What do you even shop? >> Yeah. There's nothing to shop around. >> Yeah, exactly. And then we've, that is really icing on the cake that we've, we've been building for quite some time. There is an understanding in the market that what we do with our infrastructure is hardened from a reliability and quality perspective. Times are tough right now, supply chain issues, all that stuff, we've talked about it. But at HPE, we don't skimp on quality. We're going to spend the dollars and time on making sure we got reliability and security built in. It's really important to us. >> We get a great use case, the storage team, they were provisioning with containers. Storage is a service, instantly. We're seeing with you guys with VMware, your customers bringing in a lot of that into the mix as well. I got to ask. Cause every event we talk about AI and machine learning, automation and DevOps are now infiltrating in with the Ci/CD pipeline security and data become a big conversation. >> Agreed. >> Okay. So how do you guys look at that? Okay. You sold me on green. I've been a big fan from day one. Now it's got maturity on it. I know it's going to get a lot more headroom to do there. It's still a lot of work to do, but directionally it's pretty accurate. It's going to be going to be success. There's still concerns about security, the data layer. That's agnostic of environment, private cloud hybrid, public and edge. So that's important and security has got a huge service area. These are a work in progress. How do you guys view those? >> I think you've just hit the nail on the head. I mean, I was in the press and journalist meetings yesterday and our answer was exactly the same. There is still so much work that can be done here. And I don't think anybody is really emerging as a true leader. It's just a continuation of trying to get that right. Because it is what is the most important thing to our customers. And the industry is really sort of catching up to that. >> And when you start talking about privacy and when you... It's not just about company information, it's about individuals information. It's about information that if exposed actually could have real impact on people. So it's more than just an IT problem. It is actually, and from HP's perspective, security starts from when we're picking our suppliers for our components. There are processes that we put into our entire trusted supply chain from the factory on the way up. I liken it to my golf swing, my golf swinging. I slice, right lik you wouldn't believe. But when I go to the golf pros, they start me back at the mechanics, the foundational pieces, here's where the problems are and start working on that. So my view is our view is if your infrastructure is not secure, you're going to have troubles with security as you go further up. >> Stay in the sandbox, so to speak, they're driving range on the golf analogy there. I love that. Talk about supply chain security real quick. Because you mentioned supply chain on the hardware side, you're seeing a lot of open source and supply chain in software trusted software. How does GreenLake look at that? How do you guys view that piece of it? That's an important part. >> Yeah, security is one of the key pillars that we're actually driving as a company right now. As I said, it's important to our customers as they're making purchasing decisions. And we're looking at it from the infrastructure all the way up to the actual service itself. And that's the beauty of having something like HP GreenLake, we don't have to pick is the infrastructure or the middle where, or the top of stack application, we can look at all of it. Yeah. It's all of it. That matters. >> Question on the ecosystem posture, so, I remember when HP was one company and then the GSIs were a little weird with HP because of EDS, you know, had data protector. So we weren't really chatting up Veeam at the time. And as soon as the split happened, ecosystem exploded. Now you have a situation where your Broadcom is acquiring VMware. You guys big Broadcom customer, has your attitude changed or has it not because, oh, we meet where the customers are. You've always said that, but have you have leaned in more? I mean, culturally is HPE, HPE now saying, hmm, now we have some real opportunities to partner in new ways that we don't have to sleep with one eye open, maybe. >> So I would some first of all, VMware and HPE, we've got a variety of different partners, we always have. If well, before any Broadcom announcement came along. We've been working with a variety of partners and that hasn't changed and that hasn't changed. And if your question is, has our posture toward VMware changed that all the answers absolutely not. We believe in what VMware is doing. We believe in what our customers are doing with VMware, and we're going to continue to work with VMware and partner with you. >> And of course we had to spin out ourselves in November of last year, which I worked on the whole Dell, whole Dell piece. >> But, you still had the same chairman. >> But since then, I think what's really become very apparent. And it's not just with HPE, but with many of our partners, many of the OEM partners, the opportunity in front of us is vast. And we need to rely on each other to help us solve the customer problems that are out there. So there's a willingness to overlook some things that in the past may have been barriers. >> But it's important to note also that it's not that we have not had history, right? Over... We've got over 200,000 customers join. >> Hundreds of millions of dollars of business. >> 100,000, over 10,000 or a 100,000 channel partners that we have in common. Numerous , numerous... >> And independent of the whole Broadcom overhang there, there's the ecosystem floor. Yeah, the expo floor. I mean, it's vibrant. I mean, there's clearly a wave coming. Ricky, we talked about this briefly at HPE Discover. I want to get an update from your perspective, both of you, if you don't mind weighing in on this, clearly the wave we calling it super cloud. Cause it's not just, multi-cloud completely different looking successes, >> Smart Cloud. >> It's not just vendors. It's also the customers turning into clouds themselves. You look at Goldman Sachs. I think every vertical will have its own power law of cloud players in the future. We believe that to be true. We're still testing that assumption, but it's trending in when you got OPEX has to go to in fund statement. CapEx goes to thanks for the cloud. All that's good, but there's a wave coming and we're trying to identify it. What do you guys see as this wave cause beyond multi-cloud and the obvious nature of that will end up happening as a state and what happens beyond that interoperability piece? That's a whole nother story and that's what everyone's fighting for. But everyone out in that ecosystem, it's a big wave coming. They got their surfboards. They're ready to go. So what do you guys see? What is the next wave that everyone's jacked up about here? >> Well, I think the multi-cloud is obviously at the epicenter. If you look at the results that are coming in, a lot of our customers, this is what's leading the discussion. And now we're in a position where we've brought many companies over the last few years, they're starting to come to fruition. They're starting to play a role in how we're moving forward. Some of those are a bit more applicable to the commercial space. We're finding commercial customers are never bought from us before never hundreds and hundreds are coming through our partner networks every single quarter. So brand new to VMware, the trick then is how do you nurture them? How do you encourage them? >> So new logos are coming in? >> New logos are coming in all the time, all the time from across the ecosystem. It's not just the OEMs, it's all the way back. >> So the ecosystem's back for VMware. >> Unbelievably. So what are we doing to help that? There's two big things that we've announced in the recent weeks is that partner connect 2.0. When I talk to you about multi-cloud and multicardt the customers are doing, you see that trend. Four, five different separate clouds that we've got here. The next piece is that they're changing their business models with the partners. Their services is becoming more and more apparent, etc. And the use of other partners to do other services deployment or this stuff is becoming prevalent. Then you've got the distributors that I talked about were there. Then you route to market, then you route to business. So how do you encapsulate all of that and ensure your rewarding partners on all aspects of that? Whether it's deployment, whether it's test and debt, it's a points based system we've put in place now. >> It's a big pie. That's developing the market's getting bigger. >> It's getting so much bigger and then help. >> You agree obviously with that. >> Yeah, absolutely, in fact, I think for a long time we were asking the question of, is it going to be there or is it going to be here? Which was the wrong question now it's everything. Yes. And what I think that what we're seeing in the ecosystem is people are finding the spots where they're going play. Am I going to be on the edge? Am I going to be an analytics play? Am I going to be a cloud transition play? A lot of players are now emerging and saying, we now have a place, a part to play. And having that industry view, not just of a commercial customer at that level, but the two of us are looking at Telco, are looking at financial services, at healthcare, at manufacturing. How do these new ecosystem players fit into it? >> ... is lifting, everyone can see their position there. >> We're now being asked for simplicity and talk to me about partner profitability. How do I know where to focus my efforts? Am I've spread too thin? And my advice that a partner ecosystem out there is, Hey, let's pick out spots together. Let's really go to, and then strategic solutions that we were talking about is good example of that. >> Sounds like composability to me, but not to go back guys. Thanks for coming on. I think there's a big market there. I think the fog is lifted, people seeing their spot there's value there. Value creation equals reward. Yeah. Simplicity, ease of use. This is the new normal great job. Thanks for coming on sharing. Okay. Back live coverage after this short break with more day one coverage here from the blue set here in Moscone.

>>Welcome to the cubes coverage of Dell Technologies world 2021. The digital experience. I'm lisa martin. I've got two guests here with me today. Adam Glick is here. Senior Director of portfolio marketing for Apex at Dell Technologies. Adam welcome to the cube >>lisa. It's great to be here with you >>likewise. And Andrew Glinka is here VP of Competitive intelligence at Dell Technologies as well. Andrew welcome to you as well. >>Thank you. Glad to be here. >>So the last Dell Technologies world was only about six months or so ago and sadly I was sitting in the same room doing that. We're not in Vegas at the convention center but hopefully one day we will be soon. But a lot of news there um Adam was about Apex and this big transformation about what Dell wants to do, give us a little bit of a history and what's transpired in the last six months. >>Well, a lot of things have happened in the past six months with what we were calling Project Apex before probably the first most obvious one is we've removed project from the name as we've made the offering generally available. We've also added a lot to it. There's a lot of new pieces of technology that are part of Project Apex now, we've talked about bringing in the cloud, bringing the custom solutions, hear a lot about that at Dell Technologies where all this time and really practicing that all up together in a single experience for customers, giving them something that's super simple agile and gives them all the control that they want to use their infrastructure where they want it all of that as a service. >>Big changes Andrew. Let's go over to you now. Talk to me about some of the players in the market. >>Well, he has a service market is growing incredibly fast and will continue to grow over the next number of years. And what we're seeing is a lot of players trying to enter that market because it is growing so fast. So you have some of the traditional infrastructure players that are entering like HP has their offer out in the market and pure storage and that happened many others. And you also have the public cloud providers like amazon web services, google Microsoft azure that are starting to develop um on prem tech capabilities to kind of validate this hybrid cloud as a service, all things everywhere model. So uh rapidly growing market a lot changing in a lot of players entering this space very quickly. >>So a lot of acceleration we've seen with respect to digital transformation Andrew in the last year. So talk to me about how Apex compares to those infrastructure players, you mentioned peer storage, Netapp HP. Talk to me about the comparison there. >>Yeah, so one of the things is we continue to develop, Apex is we're going to offer the broadest portfolio of as a service solutions for customers, all with different consumption models. So we'll be offering outcome based meter based as well as custom solutions, which is a little bit different than what others can provide all delivered using market leading technology and all Dell supported. So we're not using third party to deliver any of the asset service, it's all Dell supported, um some other very tactical things like single rate, so we don't charge for over usage or charge extra, which is different than some um and also it's all self service. So through the console you can place an order for a new system or upgraded system and you're avoiding the lengthy sale cycles and all the back and forth. So just a couple of questions you can get the outcome that you're looking for. >>Adam. Talk to me about how apex compares to the public cloud providers, customers obviously have that choice as well. AWS google cloud platform. What's the comparison contrast there? >>So when we think about what's going on with public cloud providers, we really look at them as partners and people that we work with. There's a Venn diagram if you think about it and the reality is that although there is some overlap between, there's also a lot of differentiated value that we look at, that we bring their and it's how do we work together on those pieces? So the most obvious of those is when you're thinking about things like a hybrid cloud and how people work together to make sure that they've got a cloud that meets their needs, both on prem in their Coehlo locations out of the edge as well as whatever they're doing with public >>cloud. >>And so we're looking at how do we bring all those pieces together? And there are certain things that work better in certain places, certain ones that work better than others. We do a lot of things around the simplicity of billing to make that easy for customers, giving them really high performance ways to to work well that really meet the needs of a lot of workloads that might need regulatory needs or might have specific performance mapping, high performance computing, things like that. But it works together. And that's really the point is that what customers tell us is that they have needs for on premises, They have needs for things in their private cloud and follows. They also have needs in the public cloud. And how do they bring that together? And so we're working to say, how do we bridge that gap to make the best possible outcome for customers? We work on partnerships with the partnership that we announced with Equinix to bring together co location facilities around the world and bring apex services customers easily when they want to say reduce the latency between what they're running and what they control within their own hardware stacks and what might be running in the public cloud. It's kind of a merger of both that really helps customers get the best of all that they need because at the end of the day that's the goal is helping our customers get the best I. T. Outcomes for their businesses as possible. >>Right? And you mentioned Hybrid cloud and we talk about that so often customers are in that hybrid world for many reasons. So basically what you're saying is there is partnerships that Dell Technologies has with Apex and the other hyper scholars so that when customers come in, if they're most likely already using some of those other platforms, they actually could come in and work with Apex too, develop a solution that works very synergistically. >>Yeah, we're helping them pull together what they need. And if you take a look, 72 of organizations say that they're taking a hybrid cloud approach, they want to be able to bring the best of both worlds to what they're doing and really choose what's right for them. Where do they need to be able to really control what's happening with their data? Where do they want to be able to maintain and control the costs that they have and also be able to access the other services that might be out there that they would need. So how do they bring those together? And those ways that we work together for the benefit of customers? And we bridge those two pieces is really what we're aiming to do here. >>Excellent. So Andrew, let's go back over you. I want to talk about workloads here because you know when we look at some of the numbers, the 8020 rule with the cloud, 80 of those workloads still on prem customers needing to determine which workloads should go to the cloud. How does apex work with customers to facilitate making those decisions? Um about the workloads that are best suited for apex versus club? >>Well, I think that's the beauties, it's very flexible. And so some of those traditional workloads that are still on prem can be run as a service without a whole lot of change. So you don't have to re platform, you don't have to reengineer them and you can move them into an as a service model, continue to run them easily. But then there's a whole lot of new development like high performance computing and Ai And machine learning, particularly at an edge where Gartner says by 2025 75 of all data will be processed at the edge. So as these new capabilities are being built out, uh customers have been asking us to start to run that infrastructure in these new workloads and and at as a service model and so high performance computing ai. Ml these edge workloads are fantastic use cases just get started with as a service and can certainly extend back into some of the more traditional workloads that they've been running >>adam. Can you talk to us a little bit about what's transpired in the last six months from the customers lens as we talked a little bit about, we talked a lot in the last year about the acceleration of digital transformation and so many businesses having to pivot multiple times in the last year. A lot of acceleration of those getting to cloud for, for to survive. Talk to me about the customer experience, what you see in the last six months. >>So what we've heard a lot from our customers is that they're really looking for the benefits of consumption as a service that especially as you see the financial impacts that happened over the past year, People looking at ways to preserve capital and what are the ways that they can go and maintain what they want to do or perhaps even grow and accelerate. Take advantage of those new opportunities in ways that don't require large capital purchases and the ability to go in and purchase as a service is something we've heard from multiple customers is something that is really attractive to them as they look at. Hey, there's no opportunities they've opened up and how do they be able to expand on those as well as how do they be able to preserve the capital? They have, be able to continue with the projects that they're looking at but be able to take a more agile approach for those things. And so the as a service offerings that we've been talking to our customers about have been really something they've been excited about and they come to us kind of, hey, what do you have? What's the roadmap? How can we have more of those kinds of things? And that's why we're so excited Dell Technologies world to be talking about how we're bringing even more apex services as a service available to our customers. >>And I'm just curious in the last year since we've seen so many industries, every industry really rocked by the very dynamic market, but some of the things like healthcare and government, I'm just curious if you've seen any industries in particular really take a leading edge here and working with you in apex. >>one of the most >>interesting things that I've seen from the customers that I've been talking to is that it really is broad ranging that I've talked to customers who are governmental customers who are interested in expanding what they're doing with it but very concerned about things like data, locality and data sovereignty. That's very interesting to them. I've talked to manufacturing organizations, they're looking at how do they expand their operations in asian manufacturing for instance. And they're going from, how do they operate within the United States to how do they expand their operations? Be able to do that in a more quick fashion? What they're doing? Talk to healthcare organizations, they're looking at, how do they be able to bring digital healthcare and as you to think about what's happening more virtually that people are doing, What does that mean in terms of health care? Both from people who are actually doing virtual visits with their doctors as well as even things like digital surgery. So there's so many things that are happening really. I could talk to you about dozens of industries. But the takeaway that I've had is that there's no real one industry, it's really something that has impacted just operations globally and different folks. Look at different things in different ways. I talked to a company that does train that actually train company. They do logistics and they're looking at edge scenarios and how do they do train inspections faster to be able to provide better turnaround times for their trains because there's a limited amount of track and so if they miss a maintenance window like that's time that they not only have to wait for the next window, they have to wait for all the other trains to pass too. So it's really breathtaking, just the scope of all that's changing in it and all the opportunities that are coming up as people think about what consuming it services as a service can mean for them. >>Yeah, amazing opportunities. And you talked about, you know, the virtual and there's so much of it that's going to persist in in a good way, silver linings, right? Um and you want to go back over to you talk to me when we, when we talked about apex at Dell technologies world 2026 months ago, this was kind of revolutionary and really looking at it as a really big change to Dell's future strategy. Talk to me about that. >>Well, it's a change for the entire company, so having to rethink how we deliver all these services and outcomes to customers. So it's it's not just about the product. The product is now the service and the service is the product, so it's very different in how we approach it. Thinking more about how we can help our customers achieve these outcomes um and help deliver these services that get them there, which is a little different than just developing the products themselves. And so that's been a big thing that we've been taking on and making sure that we deliver these outcomes for our customers. >>Yeah. And then adam last question for you talk to me about kind of same perspective of looking at this as as how Dell intends to compete in the future and what customers can expect. Also how can they engage? Is this something that is available with Channel Partners? Dell Direct? >>So this is the beginning of a huge journey and transformation as Andrew spoke about, like this is a transformation of not only what we're providing, but a transformation across all of Dell. We're looking at how do we expand the X portfolio to bring a portfolio of options to our customers? You know, we're starting with with storage and cloud and some are custom solutions, but we really have a vision of how do we bring all of Dell's business products and into services for our customers? You know, it's a huge transformation, it's something I'm incredibly excited about because it really aligns what we do with what our customers do. We've never had an opportunity to be so closely connected with our customers and create great outcomes for them. So the transformation, like we're just at the beginning of this and it's an incredible path that we're on that's providing amazing value for the people that we've already started working with. For people that want to find out more about it. You can certainly come to our website, Dell technologies dot com slash apex. People who have a relationship with Dell already contact their sales representative will be more than happy to talk to them about what their current needs are and what effects can do to help them continue their digital transformation and create better outcomes for their organization. >>Excellent, Adam Andrew, Thank you for joining me today to talk about what's going on. Project apex to apex the tremendous amount of opportunities that it's helping customers in any industry uncover. We look forward to seeing down the road some of those great customer outcomes that come from this. I thank you both for joining me today. >>Thank you very much. Thank you >>for Adam Glick and Andrew Glinka. I'm lisa martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of Dell Technologies World 2021 The Digital Experience.

>> Voiceover: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to this announcement with VMware cloud on AWS update. Happy to welcome back to the program, Matt Morgan. He is the Vice President of global marketing with VMware cloud services. And welcome into the program Fred Wurden, he's the general manager of EC2 enterprise at Amazon Web Services. Thank you so much both for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Same, thanks Stu. >> Matt, and Fred, the VMware AWS partnership is one that has gotten a lot of attention. I know any time back in the day when we used to go to physical trade shows, I could know when there was a session talking about this because it was usually full and overflowing. When I've written about this topic or doing videos about it it definitely gets quite a lot of attention. So it's been over three years since the partnership was announced but still, when I talk to people, they don't necessarily really understand the depth of the integration and the work that gets done on both sides even though you get clear messages from both Andy Jassy and Pat Gelsinger about how important this is. Matt, maybe start with you and Fred would love your commentary as to this three year partnership and where we are today here in 2020. >> Absolutely, since the initial announcement of the VMware AWS relationships, we have actually built a very special cloud service. And today, we're actually deepening our partnership. In fact, today, VMware goes to market saying that AWS and only AWS is our preferred public cloud partner for all vSphere based workloads. VMware cloud on AWS is a jointly engineered service. Meaning, our product teams our r&d teams are all working together to deliver VMware enterprise class Software Defined data center solution to the AWS cloud. VMware Cloud foundation is the core technology that's behind our service. And it gives us the capability to deliver that same level of infrastructure familiarity and consistency that our customers use today, across every data center location, the edge and of course inside the public cloud. VMware cloud on AWS attracts an enormous amount of interest from customers. And these customers are in every vertical, whether you're speaking of healthcare, media and entertainment, transportation, financial services, manufacturing, energy, government, education, professional services, and of course technology. And together with AWS, we're bringing together services that are being used across the whole portfolio of cloud optionality. This includes cloud migration from whether you're talking about a single app or complete data center, disaster recovery, whether you're talking about replacing a legacy system or building new disaster recovery in the cloud. Data center extension building that hybrid cloud. And of course, modernizing applications which we classify under the term application modernization. >> Great, and Fred from the Amazon side. >> Yeah, the partnership is been fantastic over three years. And I can't express enough how hard it is to actually deliver a simple solution that customers are asking for from all levels of both organizations. And to do that it takes both AWS and VMware to deliver a solution that allows companies to leverage what they know today and extend that into the cloud. And leverage all of the benefits that we're going to go over and a rapid delivery of new features which they haven't had before ever. So it's fantastic a partnership. I love what we've been doing at all levels. And I say it's going to continue. The scale at which we're growing is fantastic. And with that, I'm happy to go over some of the announcements and why we're doing what we're doing which is all based on listening and what our customers want. >> Excellent. Well, Fred, hey, we're glad first of all, that it did not get called VMC on AWS SS. Because we have enough acronyms already in tech. Matt, VMware and AWS, of course, clear leadership in the marketplace. With three years, bring us inside as to you talked about all the verticals that were used, but where's the proof on the adoption of this technology? Love to hear a little bit about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we have customer examples across the verticals we spoke of, but it's the customer stories that are the real value demonstrator. Let's pick up a couple of those. IHS market, they were able to move 1000 plus workloads to the public cloud. And that story is kind of common in the world. But what's unique about this particular story is IHS market moved them in just six weeks. If you look at the cloud migration strategy in general, for someone to move that fast with that many workloads, it's unheard of. VMware empowers that because the operating setup that organizations have standardized in their data center is identical in the public cloud. So organizations can move workloads we see them move hundreds of workloads in a week from their data center up to the public cloud. In addition to that, we have customer examples like the Pennsylvania Lumberman's Mutual Insurance Company. They were able to demonstrate 20% cost savings by moving their disaster recovery systems to VMware cloud on AWS. And that was initial savings right off the rip. Other customers like William Hill, George St. PA, Stage Coast, PHS Mortgage, they're all demonstrating the significant value adds when people move over to the public cloud, but leverage that VMware cloud solution. >> And Fred obviously, AWS also plays across these environments. We would like to hear your side too. >> Yeah, a couple examples like S&P global ratings, they spin up a new application environment in a few hours instead of months. Let alone taking all the burden off of their supply chain and management of that. Like Matt said in terms of seeing cost savings. So agility and speed allows them to really focus on their applications and start to modernize and innovate in areas that really differentiate them. They've had 100% uptime for regulatory applications and a 50% improved disaster recovery time. Other customers have built out a disaster recovery plan and then actually spun to VMware cloud on AWS as their primary because they had better performance. So it's the whole range of options in terms of better performance, better TCL and economics and mostly agility on what they can do going forward with applications that may already be built on AWS as well with native services. >> Matt, you touched on some great customer examples, maybe maybe give us some, broad themes as to what are the key drivers as to why customers are adopting VMware cloud on AWS? >> Yeah, absolutely. As with any infrastructure conversation, total cost of ownership is a big piece of the equation. Organizations want to look at their footprint today. They want to look at their footprint next year, and then of course, many years out. So when you look at the public cloud, cloud economics are a big driver. VMware, of course adopts the whole concept of cloud economics whole full horse. Meaning that we give you the capability to recognize the advantages of an apex object model, the ability to have on demand services, the ability to have a managed IaaS, all of that is part and parcel to our service. But on top of that, there's unique capabilities that VMware cloud on AWS delivers that deliver unique economic value. The first is this concept of zero refactoring. Our customers tell us that this alone allows them to eliminate what they call is rework, sometimes called the rework tax. Which prevents organizations from moving applications to the cloud without reworking them, without working their data layer, re architecting how they run, they can move them because the operating layer is consistent. Another area of value that's unique to VMware cloud on AWS is the leverage of existing skill sets. Today's operators are trained on vCenter. They're trained on all the supporting infrastructure around VMware. All of that applies with VMware cloud on AWS. So the ability to translate those skills into a cloud skill set right off the bat is of enormous value. Of course flexibilities another big one, as organizations embrace what it being seen as composite applications, which are applications that span the data center, the public cloud out to the edge. The ability to move logic as needed to be able to have portability is something we deliver. Again, that's an economic value that we are able to provide. Now this has been quantified by third parties. There's been several major third parties, including Forrester, including IDC, that have published value added statements around the total economic impact of VMware cloud on AWS. In fact, just last year, there was a study that was commissioned by Forrester that demonstrated a 59% reoccurring savings in terms of infrastructure and operating savings, compared to an on premise implementation. When you look at migration that accelerates to 69% 'cause organizations can save almost 70% of moving applications by eliminating rework and refactoring. That's an IDC statistic. >> All right Matt. Maybe it would make sense to talk about just overall adoption of the solution. I believe you've got some stats you can share. >> So yeah, if you look at the adoption, we have delivered enormous growth over the last year of the service. Total number of hosts year over year are up 2.5x. Total number of running VMs year over year is actually larger at 3.5x. Which indicates that customers are not just adopting, but they're accelerating their adoption. We now have 21,000 plus number of hands on labs that have been consumed since July of 2019, a year ago. And there are now 300 plus validated technology partner solutions available. And on top of that, 530 channel partners with VMware cloud service competency are now registered and available to assist. These are tremendous statistics for 12 short months. >> Well, congratulations on to both VMware and AWS on that progress. Maybe talk a little bit about trends. Just briefly, if I look over the last three months we've talked about AWS and VMware customers. Obviously, with the global pandemic, there's been certain things that they've needed to rapidly do things like, VDI, end user computing, remote contact centers are something that they need to rapidly expand on. But, is there anything different or general trends that that you would both like to share? Matt, we'll once again, start with you and then Fred get your take on it. >> Yeah, there's a regional school district in the US that in light of COVID, needed to spin up 10,000 plus people working remotely. And by leveraging VMware cloud on AWS, they were able to conduct virtual classrooms in very short order by leveraging this broad scale infrastructure powered by VMware cloud on AWS. Over time, that provided flexibility and agility, but it also reduced their costs. They've been able to eliminate hardware replacement plans that were going to cost significant amount of money. In fact, they're showing and telling us that they're able to save 75% of those forecasted costs. But everything is really about business continuity today. Today's unfortunate economic environment where we're working through this pandemic, this global pandemic, IT organizations and businesses, they're embracing a tried and true understanding of what it means to move to the cloud. But they're embracing it in a more aggressive way because the supply chain has been disrupted. If you think about a traditional supply chain, where organizations have to receive machines, set up those machines, have them wired in have certain people on site to get those machines configured, move application. That's a lot of steps in the process, many of which have been totally disrupted during the pandemic. The idea of VMware cloud on AWS is that you replace an analog supply chain with a digital supply chain. We can now help organizations get new equipment, new capacity, new resources up and running instantly. They don't have to worry about all the steps that were previously required that have been disrupted in a pandemic. The cloud provides that operating environment that maps one for one to the realities of today's world. And they're also able to understand that looking forward, that that setup enables them to be more future ready. Ready for whatever comes next to deliver what the business needs. >> Yeah, there's a number of reasons that you just touched on Matt, that are examples that we can bring out on that elasticity. For example, Penny Mac, anytime there are changes in the market, for example, on either both for VDI or just on processing of loans. When the pandemic hit, a lot of people actually paused on both looking and or changing their patterns. And this solution has been fantastic for either scaling up or scaling down both ways. And they can do it very quickly. They can do it within a number of a variety of means whether it's a single VM, or it's moving an entire migration into VMware cloud on AWS. So great results there. The case studies speak for themselves. There's a lot of examples that we have up on both of our sites. We'd really be good to take a look at those in detail if you're interested, it's fun to see. Helps a lot of people out. >> If I could follow up with you on something here. I want to talk about I go to the cloud, often that movement is step one, how do I take advantage of modernization, whether that be for my application standpoint, or leveraging new services? I wonder you can give me the AWS side there? And, Matt would love to hear how VMware is helping customers along this journey too. >> Well, the first is we want to meet people they're at with their knowledge set and their skill set. And this is a fantastic part. Customers can move quickly with the domain knowledge that they've go. We can assist in translating and making sure that the environment and the STDC is set up in a way that is tailored to what their needs are. Whether it's an extension, or if it's a complete migration of step one. But step two really is once they're leveraging VMware cloud on AWS is they have a lot of needs in terms of their CICD, their development tools, or samples and applications around automation. And we can take and help them with that. That content is already posted on our developer tool site and our developer center for this solution. It really assists them in learning about how to leverage the elasticity and the security and the networking capabilities that allow them to go in and then use all the rest of the rich AWS services as well. So, if you look at some of the things that are coming out for example, VMware Transit Connect. Which allows, a layer three solution to be built on top of our AWS transit gateway so that we can interconnect multiple VPCs in an environment that may be running either software as a solution on AWS or a native application that was built with managed services, completely in sync and in harmony, with VMware cloud on AWS. So that's what's happening at a rapid pace. It allows people to bite off the chunks that they want to modernize and reuse tools that are either familiar with them, and or automation improvements that we've got between code tools across the board. So it's great to see the work that they're doing >> Great, and Matt on the modernization piece. >> Yeah, so our surveys tell us that customers want to modernize their existing applications. But those same customers don't want to start over. So this is an important value proposition that we deliver in partnership with AWS. Organizations can take a business process application, they can migrate it to the cloud, they can extend and reach that application with AWS services. They can extend and reach that applications with additional machine learning capabilities, they can extend it with containerized extensions. They can support a broader modern agenda without having to start over. And I think that that is a value proposition that resonates with everyone, because people often need must leverage what they already have built with what the baseline is for the business itself. In addition to this, composite applications are now becoming the norm. With data and processing being more CO located, end to end Applications often consist of processing and data for certain tasks to be either pushed out to the edge or remain on premises in the data center in addition to the cloud. That value proposition of VMware delivering a hybrid cloud with consistent infrastructure and operations enables those composite applications to be built and deployed in a highly efficient way, which is a big piece to the modernization story. In addition to this with tons of Kubernetes grid as a customer managed option, organizations can run those containerized components right on top of our service, all of which integrates very cleanly with a whole library of services that AWS offers. End to end, you have all the optionality you need plus the speed of migration and capabilities once you get up to the public cloud. >> All right, let's get into the new pieces of the partnership here. Matt, first of all, when I think about VMware cloud on AWS, the customers that I've mostly spoken to over the last couple of years have tended to be some of the larger enterprises. I've heard you're alluding towards some capabilities to the small and medium business. I know I'm looking forward to talking to PLM insurance, one of the companies that are leveraging this solution as part of this announcement. What's new and the impact that this will have on the addressable market that VMware cloud can hit for AWS? >> Yeah, so with this announcement, VMware cloud on AWS, we're extending it to offer three new capabilities. Three new announcements of capabilities. The first one is all about what you just spoke of. Which is about extending the VMware cloud on AWS value proposition to more customers. So currently, customers can spin up production clusters with three hosts are, of course much more than that. But three hosts was kind of the entry level for a production cluster. What we're announcing is the ability to create production clusters with all the capable abilities that go into what we define as a production cluster with just two hosts. That means customers will be able to deploy production environments with two hosts in a cluster, dramatically reducing their costs. In fact, the traditional costs will come down by 33%. So this is all about providing the full capabilities of VMware cloud on AWS, but to be able to do it at a smaller investment envelope. So in addition to this, we're rolling out enhancements to VMware cloud director offering it as a service. VMware cloud director now will deliver multi tenancy to VMware cloud on AWS specifically designed for MSPs. As you know VMware partner ecosystem is filled with managed service providers. We have a mean enormous collection of these that add value on top of VMware cloud on AWS. Here by using VMware vcloud director service, they can deliver multi tenancy to their customers. And this is designed specifically to serve the needs of small to medium sized enterprises. These capabilities enable MSPs to serve those needs and it will be available initially in North America. And this will give them the opportunity to say, hey, if you want to get started on VMware cloud on AWS, we can give you bite sized pools designed specifically for what you need. And this is a very asset light pay as you grow model, which aligns specifically to that market. >> It's fascinating to watch Matt, I think, not that many years ago, if I had attended VMworld and talked to the MSPs. And they talk how deeply they appreciate the VMware partnership and that cloud company was the enemy. And, today AWS and VMware partnering with them, helping to make sure that in this hybrid world that they play a role to help get to the enterprise. Fred, anytime we go to reinvent, new announcements usually come to a huge fanfare, even something like a new bare metal instance. Last year it was the I3en metal instance. People get pretty excited. Help us understand you know what this really means, what advantages it has? Are there any limitations? What should we know about the capabilities AWS has now available to the VMware cloud? >> Well, first off, thanks Stu, I3en is really exciting that we're launching. It will meet the need of storage intensive workloads. And it'll do it far better than what we've had before. It takes advantage of all the learnings and the investments that we put into instances across the board for AWS such as Nitro. If you have, high random IO access, such as needed for relational database or workloads that have additional security that we have baked in, it's going to meet those needs. Compared to I3 metal, it has more memory, more usable, high performance storage and additional security. The example of a yield compared to I3 is about a 22% performance improvement and value. We're delivering four times the raw storage for about 2.2 times the cost. So in essence, you're getting raw storage at half the cost of an I3. So customers are excited. it's one of many instances that we will launch in the future for VMware cloud on AWS. And that's one of the advantages, is people can instantly take advantage of these innovations that we have. Just like we've done across all of the other instance families to meet workloads that customers are talking to us about that they want to run on this platform. >> Excellent, well, we really look forward. I know we're going to have a deep dive with Colbert to go into a little bit under the hood. And as I mentioned, got one of your joint customers PLM Insurance to understand their use case and how they're doing it. Matt and Fred, if you could just give us final takeaway, VMware cloud on AWS, Matt, and then Fred. >> Well, first off, thank you Stu for this opportunity to speak. I always enjoy spending time with you and certainly with Fred. We're just super excited and thrilled about our partnership. VMware couldn't be happier with our partnership with AWS from engineering to marketing, customer experience. Our teams are working together hand in glove to ensure success for our customers. VMware cloud on AWS is a truly unique service. Customers can continue business operations with minimal disruption in case of any uncertain event, they can migrate their workloads fast in a very cost effective manner with minimal risk. And we're really all about helping large enterprises as well as small and medium businesses accelerate their cloud migration and modernization journey. In fact, if you look across the board, we have seen enormous uptake. And now with these new offerings that we talked about, especially the two hosts production cluster, and VMware cloud Director service, we believe we're going to be more attractive to more organizations of various sizes. We're excited about the road ahead. >> And Fred. >> Customers are excited about this road, I would add. One, thank you guys for having us on. It's great to tell this story. The feedback has been phenomenal . The growth in the adoption and what we're seeing in terms of the use cases across the board is much stronger than we could have imagined. So it's really great to see this work that is hard to do to really merge the best of VMware and the best of AWS in a true deep partnership. And that takes work at all layers, whether it's a commerce system integration, or if it's the instance engineering and roadmap work across the board or networking. And customer support across the board for solutions that run on this platform. Both of us are joined to make sure customers are satisfied regardless of what it takes. That's something that no one else has. And it is unique. And it's a long term commitment that we have with each other to do the right thing for the solution. 'Cause we can't do it individually. This is something that truly only a joint partnership as strong as this is, and has gotten stronger can deliver. So we're super excited about it. I think you're going to continue to see the pace of innovation on what we're delivering increase. And so, with that, it's been great to work with VMware on this. It's really fun. >> Well, thank you, Fred. Thank you, Matt. Yeah, congratulation to your team. And of course, love hearing the customer stories and feedback. >> Thank you Stu. >> All right. Be sure to check out the other interviews as part of this announcement and check out theCUBE.net of course, we're covering VMware and AWS deeply including their shows whether they are in person or virtual. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.

>>from around the globe. It's the Cube covering HP. Discover Virtual experience Brought to you by HP. >>Welcome to the Cube's coverage of HP Discover 2020 Virtual Experience. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm pleased to be joined by two guests from HP longtime partner Tech Data. We have calling Blair the vice president of sales and marketing of I. O. T. And Data Solutions and David Smith, H P E Pre Sales Field Solutions are common. And David, Welcome to the Cube. Thanks, Lisa. Great to see. So let's start with the calling. HP and Technical have been partners for over 40 years, but tell our audience a little bit about tech data before we get into the specifics of what you're doing and some of the cool I o. T. Stuff with HP. I >>think that the Tech data is a Fortune 100 distributor. We continued to evolved to be a solutions aggregator in these next generation technology businesses. As you've mentioned, we've been serving the I T distribution markets globally for for 40 plus years, and we're now moving into next generation technologies like Wild Analytics, I O. T and Security bubble Lifecycle Management services. But to be able todo position ourselves with our customer base and the needs of their clients have. So I'm excited to be here today to talk a little bit about what we're doing in I, O. T. And Analytics with David on the HPC side >>and in addition to the 40 plus years of partnership calling that you mentioned that Detected and HP have you've got over 200 plus hp. Resource is David, you're one of those guys in the field. Talk to us about some of the things that you're working on with Channel Partners Table David to enable them, especially during such crazy times of living and now >>absolutely, absolutely so. What we can do is we can provide strong sales and technical enablement if your team, for example, wants to better understand how to position HP portfolio if they require assistance and architect ing a secure performance i o t. Solution. We can help ensure that you're technical team is fully capable of having that conversation, and it's one that they're able to have of confidence, weaken validate the proposed HP solutions with the customers, technical requirements and proposed use case. We can even exist on a customer calls, if it would, would benefit our partner to kind of extend out to that. We also have a a a deep technical bench that Colin can speak to in the OT space toe lean on as well. For so solution is that kind of span into the space beyond where HP typically operates, which would be edge, compute computing and network. Sic security. >>Excellent call and tell me a little bit about Tech Data's investments in I o. T. When did this start? What are you guys doing today? >>Sure, we started in the cloud space. First tackle this opportunity in data center modernization and hybrid cloud. That was about seven years ago. Shortly thereafter we started investing very materially in the security cyber security space. And then we follow that with Data Analytics and then the Internet of things. Now we've been in those spaces with our long term partners for some time. But now that we're seeing this movement to the intelligent edge and a real focus on business outcomes and specialization, we've kind of tracked with the market, and we feel like we've invested a little bit ahead of where the channel is in terms of supporting our ecosystem of partners in this space. >>So the intelligent edge has been growing for quite some time. Poland in the very unique times that we're living in in 2020 how are you seeing that intelligent edge expand even more? And what are some of the pressing opportunities that tech data and HPC i O T solutions together can address? >>So a couple. So the first is a Xai mentioned earlier just data center modernization. And so, in the middle of code 19 and perhaps postcode 19 we're going to see a lot of clients that are really focused on monetizing the things that they've got. But doing so to drive business outcomes. We believe that increasingly, the predominance of use cases and compute and analytics is going to move to the edge. And HP has got a great portfolio for not just on premise high performance computing but also hybrid cloud computing. And then when we get into the edge with edge line and networking with Aruba and devices that need to be a digitized and sense arised, it's a really great partnership. And then what we're able to do also, Lisa, is we've been investing in vertical markets since 2000 and seven, and I've been a long the ride with that team, most all of that way. So we've got deep specialization and healthcare and industrial manufacturing, retail and then public sector. And then the last thing we've kind of turned on here recently just last month is a strategic partnership in the smarter cities space. So we're able to leverage a lot of those vertical market capabilities. Couple that with our HP organization and really drive specialized repeatable solutions in these vertical markets, where we believe increasingly, customers are going to be more interested in a repeatable solutions that can drive quick proof of value proof of concepts with minimal viable what kinds of products. And that's that's kind of the apartment today with RHB Organization and the HP Corporation >>David. Let's double click into some of those of vertical markets that Colin mentioned some of the things that pop into minor healthcare manufacturing. As we know, supply chains have been very challenged during covered. Give us an insight into what you're hearing from channel partners now virtually, but what are some of the things that are pressing importance? >>So from a pressing and important to Collins exact point, and your exact point as well is really it's all about the edge computing space now from a product perspective Azaz Colin had mentioned earlier. HP has their edge line converged systems, which is kind of taking the functionality of OT and edge T Excuse me of OT and I t and combine it into a single edge processing compute solution. You kind of couple that with the ability to configure components such as Tesla GP, use in specific excellent offerings to offer an aid and things like realtime, video processing and analytics. Uh, and a perfect example of this is, ah so for dissing and covert space. If if I need to be able to analyze a group of people to ensure they're staying as far apart as possible or, you know within self distant guidelines, that is where kind of the real time that's like an aspect of things can be taken advantage of same things with with the leveraging cameras where you could actually take temperature detection as as well, so it's really kind of best to think of Edge Lines Solutions is data center computing at the edge kind of transition into the Aruba space. Uh Rubio says offerings aid in the island Security is such a clear pass device inside, which allows for device discovery of network and monitoring of wired and wireless devices. There's also Aruba asset tracking and real time location of solutions, and that's particularly important in the healthcare space as well. If I have a lot of high value assets, things like wheelchairs, things like ventilation devices, where these things low located within my facilities and how can I keep keep track of them? They also, and by that I mean HP. They also kind of leveraging expanse ecosystem of partners. As an example, they leverage thing works allow their i o t solutions as well, when you kind of tying it all together with HP Point. Next to the end, customers provided with comprehensive loyalty solution. >>So, Colin, how ready? Our channel partners and the end user customers to rapidly pivot and start either deploying more technologies at the edge to be able to deliver some of the capabilities that David talked about in terms of analytics and sensors for social distancing. How ready are the channel partners and customers to be able to understand, adopt and execute this technology. >>So I think on the understanding side, I think the partners are there. We've been talking about digital transformation in the channel for a couple of years now, and I think what's happened through the 19 Pandemic is that it's been a real spotlight on the need for those business outcomes to to solve for very specific problems. And that's one of the values that we serve in the channel. So we've got a solution offering that we call our solution factory. And what we do really says is we leverage a process to look outside the industry. At Gartner, Magic Quadrant Solutions forced a Wave G two crowd. You know, top leaders, visionaries and understand What are those solutions that are in demand in these vertical markets that we talked about? And then we do a lot of work with David and his team internally in the HP organization to be able to do that and then build out that reference architectures so that we know that there's a solution that drives a bill of materials and a reference architecture that's going to work that clients are going to need and then we can do it quickly. You know, Tech data. Everything's about being bold, acting now getting scale. And we've got a large ecosystem partners that already have great relationships. So we pride ourselves on being able to identify what are those solutions that we can take to our partners that they can quickly take to their end users where you know we've We've kind of developed out what we think the 70 or 80% of that solution is going to look like. And then we drive point next and other services capabilities to be able to complete that last mile, if you will, of some of the customization. So we're helping them. For those who aren't ready, we're helping them. For those who already have very specific use cases and a practice that they drive with repeatable solutions were coming alongside them and understanding. What can we do? Using a practice builder approach, which is our consultative approach to understand where our partners are going in the market, who their clients are, what skill sets do they have? What supplier affinities do they want to drive? What brand marketing or demand generation support do they need? And that's where we can take some of these solutions, bring them to bear and engage in that consultative engagement to accelerate being ready as, as you rightly say, >>so tech. It has a lot of partners. You in general. You also have a lot of partners in the i o T space calling What? How do you from a marketing hat perspective? How do you describe the differentiation that Tech data and HP ease Iot solutions delivered to the channel to the end user? >>A couple of different things? I think that's that's differentiation. And that's one of the things that we strive for in the channel is to be specialized and to be competitively differentiated. And so the first part, I say to all of my team, Lisa, is you know, whether it's our solution consultants or our technical consultants, our solutions to the developers or the software development team that works my organization. Our goal is to be specialized in such a way that we're having relevant value added conversations not only our channel partners, but also end users of our partners want to bring us into those conversations, and many do. The next is really education and enablement as you would expect. And so there's a lot of things that are specialized in our technical. We drive education certification programs, roadshows, seminars, one of the things that we're seeing a lot of interest now. Lisa is for a digital marketing, and we're driving. Some really need offerings around digital marketing platforms that not only educate our partners but also allow our partners to bring their end users and tour some of this some of these technologies. So whether it's at our Clearwater office, where we've got an I. O T. Solution center, that we we take our partners and their clients through or we're using our facilities Teoh to do executive briefings and ideation as a service that, you know, kind of understanding the art of the possible. With both our resellers and their clients work, we're using our solution. Our solution catalogs that we've built an interactive pdf that allows our partners to understand over 50 solutions that we've got and then be able to identify. Where would they like to bring in David and his team and then my consultants to do that, that deep planning on business development, uh, that we talked about a little bit earlier. >>So the engagement right now is maybe even more important than it has been in a while because it's all hands off and virtual David. Talk to me about some of the engagement and the enablement piece that call and talked about. How are you able to really keep a channel partner and their end user customers engaged and interested in what you're able to deliver through this from New Virtual World? >>That's a great, great question. And we work in conjunction with our marketing teams to make sure that as new technologies and quite in I O. T space as well as within the HP East base as well that that our channel partners are educated and aware that these solutions exist. I know for a fact that for the majority of them you kind of get this consistent bombardment of new technology. But being able to actually have someone go out and explain it and then being able to correspondingly position it's use case and it's functionality and why it would provide value for your end customer is one of the benefits of tech data ads to kind of build upon that previous statement. The fact that We have such a huge portfolio of partners, so you kind of have HP and the edge compute space. But we have so many different partners in the OT space where it's really just a phone call, an email, a Skype message, a way to have that conversation around interoperability and then provide those responses back to our partners. >>Excellent. One more question before we go. Colin for you, A lot of partners. Why HP fry Mt. >>So a couple of reasons? One of the one of the biggest reasons as HP is just a great partner. And so when you look at evaluating I. O. T solutions that tend to be pretty comprehensive in many cases, Lisa it takes 10 or 12 partners to complete a really i o t solution and address that use case that that's in the field. And so when you have a partner like HP who's investing in these programs, investing in demand generation, investing in the spectrum of technology, whether it's hybrid Cloud Data Center, compute storage or your edge devices and Iot gateways, then to be able to contextualize those into what we call market ready solutions in each one of these vertical markets where there's references and there's use cases. And there were coupling education that specific rest of solutions. You know HP can do all of those things, and that's very important. Because in this new world, no one can go it alone anymore. It takes it takes partnerships, and we're all better together. And HP really does embrace that philosophy. And they've been a great partner for us in the Iot space. >>Excellent. Well, Colin and David, thank you so much for joining me today on the Cube Tech data. H p e i o t better together. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure talking with you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you. Lisa. >>And four Collet and David. I am Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube's virtual coverage of HP Discover 2020. Thanks for watching. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

>>from Miami Beach, Florida It's the key. You covering a Cronus Global Cyber Summit 2019. Brought to you by a Cronus. >>Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Cube coverage here in Miami Beach Front and Blue Hotel with Cronus Global Cyber Summit 2019 2 days of coverage. Where here, Getting all the action. What's going on in cyber tools and platforms are developing a new model of cybersecurity. Cronus Leader, Fast growing, rapidly growing back in here in the United States and globally. We're here. William Toll, head of product marketing Cronus. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. >>Thanks, John. I'm excited. You're >>here so way were briefed on kind of the news. But you guys had more news here. First great key notes on then special guest Shark tank on as well. That's a great, great event. But you had some news slip by me. You guys were holding it back. >>So we've opened our A p I, and that's enabling a whole ecosystem to build on top of our cyber protection solutions. >>You guys have a platform infrastructure platform and sweet asserts from backup all the way through protection. All that good stuff as well. Partners. That's not a channel action platforms are the MoD has been rapidly growing. That's 19 plus years. >>And now, with the opening of our AP, eyes were opening the possibility for even Maur innovation from third parties from Eyes V's from managed service providers from developers that want to build on our platform and deliver their solutions to our ecosystem. >>You guys were very technical company and very impressed with people. Actually, cyber, you gotta have the chops, you can't fake it. Cyber. You guys do a great job, have a track record, get the P I. C B Also sdk variety, different layers. So the FBI is gonna bring out more goodness for developers. You guys, I heard a rumor. Is it true that you guys were launching a developer network? >>That's right. So the Cronus developer network actually launches today here in the show, and we're inviting developed officials. That's official. Okay. And they can go to developers that Cronus dot com and when they go in there, they will find a whole platform where they can gain access to forums, documentation and logs, and all of our software development kids as well as a sandbox, so developers can get access to the platform. Start developing within minutes. >>So what's the attraction for Iess fees and developers? I mean, you guys are here again. Technical. What is your pitch developers? Why would they be attracted to your AP eyes? And developer Resource is >>sure it's simple. Our ecosystem way have over 50,000 I t channel partners and they're active in small businesses. Over 500,000 business customers and five million and customers all benefit from solutions that they bring to our cyber cloud solutions >>portal. What type of solutions are available in the platform today? >>So their solutions that integrate P s a tools professional service is automation are mm tools tools for managing cloud tools for managing SAS applications. For example, one of our partners manages office 3 65 accounts. And if you put yourselves in the shoes of a system administrator who's managing multiple SAS applications now, they can all be managed in the Cronus platform. Leverage our user experience. You I s t k and have a seamless experience for that administrator to manage everything to have the same group policies across all of this >>depression. That success with these channel a channel on Channel General, but I s freeze and managed service ROMs. Peace. What's the dynamic between Iess, freeze and peace? You unpack that? >>Sure. So a lot of m s peace depend on certain solutions. One of our partners is Connectwise Connectwise here they're exhibiting one sponsors at at this show and their leader in providing managed to lose management solutions for M s. He's to manage all of their customers, right? And then all the end points. >>So if I participate in the developer network, is that where I get my the FBI's someone get the access to these AP eyes? >>So you visits developer data cronies dot com. You come in, you gain access to all the AP eyes. Documentation way Have libraries that'll be supporting six languages, including C sharp Python, java. Come in, gain access to those documentation and start building. There's a sandbox where they could test their code. There's SD K's. There's examples that are pre built and documentation and guides on how to use those s >>So customer the end. You're in customers or your channel customers customer. Do they get the benefits of the highest stuff in there? So in other words, that was the developer network have a marketplace where speed push their their solutions in there. >>Also launching. Today we have the Cronus Cyber Cloud Solutions portal and inside there there's already 30 integrations that we worked over the years to build using that same set of AP eyes and SD case. >>Okay, so just get this hard news straight. Opening up the AP eyes. That's right. Cronus Developer Network launched today and Cloud Solutions Portal. >>That's right, Cyber Cloud Solutions Portal Inside there there's documentation on all the different solutions that are available today. >>What's been the feedback so far? Those >>It's been great. You know, if we think about all the solutions that we've already integrated, we have hundreds of manage service providers using just one solution that we've already integrated. >>William, we're talking before we came on camera about the old days in this business for a long time just a cube. We've been documenting the i t transformation with clouds in 10 years. I've been in this in 30 years. Ways have come and gone and we talked to see cells all the time now and number one constant pattern that emerges is they don't want another tour. They want a solid date looking for Jules. Don't get me wrong, the exact work fit. But they're looking for a cohesive platform, one that's horizontally scaled that enables them to either take advantage of a suite of service. Is boy a few? That's right. This is a trend. Do you agree with that? What you're saying? I totally agree >>with that, right? It makes it much easier to deal with provisioning, user management and billing, right? Think about a man of service provider and all of their customers. They need that one tool makes their lives so much easier. >>And, of course, on event would not be the same. We didn't have some sort of machine learning involved. How much his machine learning been focused for you guys and what's been some of the the innovations that come from from the machine. I mean, you guys have done >>artificial intelligence is critical today, right? It's, uh, how we're able to offer some really top rated ransomware protection anti malware protection. We could not do that without artificial intelligence. >>Final question for you. What's the top story shows week If you have to kind of boil it down high order bit for the folks that couldn't make it. Watching the show. What's the top story they should pay attention to? >>Top story is that Cronus is leading the effort in cyber protection. And it's a revolution, right? We're taking data protection with cyber security to create cyber protection. Bring that all together. Really? Democratize is a lot of enterprise. I t. And makes it accessible to a wider market. >>You know, we've always said on the Q. Go back and look at the tapes. It's a date. A problem that's right. Needed protection. Cyber protection. Working him, >>Cronus. Everything we do is about data. We protect data from loss. We protect data from theft and we protect data from manipulation. It's so critical >>how many customers you guys have you? I saw some stats out there. Founded in 2003 in Singapore. Second headquarters Whistle in 2000 a global company, 1400 employees of 32 offices. Nice nice origination story. They're not a Johnny come lately has been around for a while. What's the number? >>So five million? Any customers? 500,000 business customers. 50,000 channel partners. >>Congratulations. Thanks. Thanks for having us here in Miami Beach. Thanks. Not a bad venue. As I said on Twitter just a minute ago place. Thanks for Thanks. All right, John. Just a cube coverage here. Miami Beach at the front in Blue Hotel for the Cyber Global Cyber Security Summit here with Cronus on John Kerry back with more coverage after this short break.

>> CUBE, covering Cisco Live 2018 brought to you by Cisco, NetApp, and theCUBe's Ecosystem Partners. (techno music) >> Welcome back. >> Welcome back. I'm Stu Miniman, and this is theCUBE's coverage. Wait, we're surrounded by green. I've got two gentlemen from Veeam here. No, but we're not at VeeamON. We're at Cisco Live 2018 here in Orlando, happy to welcome back to the program Carey Stanton and Rob Emsley. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Ace too. >> All right, yeah, so I was with you guys not too long ago at the VeeamON conference. I had a lot of fun in Chicago, brought back some of the famous popcorn for my family, but we're here in Orlando, so way bigger convention center, 26,000 people. We're all walking a lot, talking a lot about networking in Multi-Cloud and everything there. Tell us a little bit about your experience here at the show and what you've taken. >> Yeah, it's great, thanks, Stu. We have as you may know a tier-one partnership with Cisco. We're a platinum sponsor at this event and we're here all around our relationships with them on their data protection with their hyper-flex and their 32-60 and S2-40 relationships and we continue to see rapid growth in the channel and we have a direct-dedicated team selling with them on a global basis, so here making a lot of new connections across their other business units. >> Rob, I see the Green Veeam booth at almost every show I go to. >> Absolutely. >> How's Cisco different from some of the other ones that we go to? >> Well, one of the the things that Chuck Robins talked about in his keynote yesterday was how they summarize the focus of the company, and there's two specific areas that Veeam works very closely with Cisco on. One is the powering the Multi-Cloud, and unlocking the power of data. Those are two big focuses for us. You remember in Chicago, we're all about Multi-Cloud, On-Premises, Manage Cloud, Software as a Service, the Public Cloud; that's the reality of where data lives, so we're very much in lock-step with Cisco. We've been working with Cisco for several years. We last year became available through their global price list, so we're actually finding that Cisco in the data sensor, especially when you think about conversion infrastructure and hyper-conversion infrastructure, it's an area where we can really compliment what they're doing with their opportunities. >> Yeah, Carey, it's interesting because we go a lot of shows and we're hearing a lot of similar themes. Even I think the last time I'd come to the Cisco Live US show was 2009. Applications and data, it's like, oh, come on, those are just bits running through our pipes. It's not really a big deal. Well, we're here in the DevNet zone. We're talking about how Cisco's been moving up the stacks, how they're enabling companies to build new application, do cool things with wireless and SD-WAN and everything like that. I'm sure you must be seeing big change in a lot of your infrastructure partners that fits, as Rob said, that power of data and where that fits. >> Yeah, we're seeing it across the board and what we like about the relationship we have with Cisco is they look to us as their data availability experts, right? That we go into the data center conversation and they bring us in as their subject-matter experts, and that's where I think they want to expand their footprint in their TEM with their product lines, and whether it's UCS or hyper-flex, and they're bringing us into those discussions because we solve a unique problem that they otherwise wouldn't be able to solve. >> Yeah, Rob, you saw the keynote yesterday. I think we were a little surprised. Diane Green comes walking out there. Cisco of course, big push in Cloud. I've actually interviewed a number of Cisco executives of things like AWS Reinvent and the like. Does the Veeam partnership with Cisco, do you touch on some of the Public Cloud pieces as well as? >> Yeah, very much so. One of the things that Cisco is very focused on is their SOS provider right to market, so that's an area where we've been very focused over the last probably three to four years, building out and enabling often our resellers to become managers providers themselves, but the reality is that you're starting to look at that Public Cloud tie-in, whether it be Microsoft Azure, whether it be AWS or IBM Cloud, so these are really all areas where we can provide an on-ramp to connect any Cisco data center environment and provide a relationship with the Public Cloud, provide that data management level layer. >> Yeah, I think back. Cisco really helped a lot of the channel community mature their market. Went from being the silo network to building data center businesses back eight years ago when we started talking about conversion infrastructure. Today, this week I've interviewed Presidio and WWT. They're talking a lot about how they're helping customers, enabling that Cloud. I'd love to hear your perspectives on the maturation of the channel and how they fit in this multi-cloud world. >> Yeah, I mean, if you look at Veeam, where there are 55,000 channel partners our brand promises to remain a 100% channel-driven company, but having these relationships that are primary Cisco-predominant partners, like WWT, Presidio, ePlus, I think it's just opening up discussions that we otherwise wouldn't have had, and we're seeing 50% of the opportunities that we're closing in the field are Cisco-led opportunities that are being driven from these new channel partners, and so again, I think this is the one plus one equals three story that we talk a lot about, that we're bringing a lot to the table and 50% of the opportunities for them and vice versa for us. >> Yeah, one of the things that we really like about Cisco is their focus on their partner community is extremely high, both from the enablement perspective and the educational perspective. They have a fully resourced partner marketing team, and we've been doing a lot of work with them. One of the things that Cisco has been transitioning to, it sort of fits into your space, is the whole move to marketing in a digital world and the whole need to change the type of content, and this type of content you can think about the video sort of assets becomes so much more important, so we've been working very closely with them to do joint digital marketing. It's very easy sometimes to do joint event-based marketing, but when you start getting into digital, you really have to think outside the box about how you bring two companies together to meet in the digital world, so we've been really doing that to drive joint opportunities, and that's been something that we've really got some some success with from our relationship with Cisco. >> In fact, you were just in Barcelona. >> Yeah, every year they run a marketing summit for their channel partners and ecosystem partners, and we actually won the Cisco marketing innovation award for a digital marketing always on campaign slope, just full of assets for joint digital, for joint Cisco and Veeam customers. >> Congratulations, I did see some of that on some of the social media. Yeah, it's interesting to look at how marketing changes in this new digital world. I ask every CMO I talk to these days is to, "How is digital changing the way things happen?" >> Yeah, and you mentioned our other infrastructure partners and there's no other partner that we've worked with at the size of Cisco that embraced it day one, so they look to Veeam as, "Okay, we're going "to work with Veeam, we're going to go deeper, "we're going to bring them on our global prices," and day one they were, "How can we get intertwined "into what Veeam does extremely well as our digital marketing machine?" And just from the get-go they've just continued to accelerate through that process. >> Yeah, one of the things I know every partner loves when they come to an event like this, there's a lot of customers here. Give us a little insight if you can, either specific examples or give us some of the themes you're hearing from customers at the show. What's top of mind? What're some of the biggest challenges that they're facing today? >> Yeah, I mean, I think what they're looking at doing is from a refresh of legacy backup solutions and replication solutions into modernizing their data center, and so they're looking to Cisco as their experts through the last decade plus, and now that Veeam is tied directly in with Cisco in some of those relationships, so it's from a refresh standpoint, from a modernizing their data center to the hybrid Cloud strategies that it's intertwined. We fit very well into those discussions, and we're seeing our customers come to us in these large ELAs, where Cisco is bringing us in as part of those discussions, so again, where otherwise we would have had a hard time getting into it, their customers are coming and saying, "What is the relevancy? "Should I really be looking at this," and Cisco's backing up those discussions. >> Certainly, to tap down on the data sensor, conversion infrastructure and hyper-conversion infrastructure is top of mind for a lot of the customers that come in by the booth. Certainly, which works well for us, because some of our relationships with our other storage alliance partners, whether it be Pure or NetOut, big partners of Cisco, so rather than one plus one equals three, it's one plus one plus one equals five quite often. We're going together as a group in order to go after opportunities, so that's definitely an area. If you think about conversion, IP Converge, it's always highly virtualized, so that plays very well to where we've built the company from: a big focus on virtual machine availability, but we're just more moving that now to the whole concept of data management across a Multi-Cloud world. >> Yeah, absolutely. One of the things we talk at all the shows is the pace of change and how receptive are customers to making changes. What are you hearing from the customers here? The storage market has long been it's sticky, it's a little bit entrenched, making changes, and networking we used to measure in decades as to you roll this out and then I'll wait for the next major speed bump before we'll do that, and you'll roll that out over years. Today, we think things are moving faster, but we'd love to hear points or counterpoints that you're hearing. >> Well, I think that the customers are looking to Cisco, indirectly to Veeam from removing complexity, and I think what they've seen in the past is they've deployed solutions that have bogged down their process. They look to the Cloud as an agile environment and they look back with their Legacy systems that they know they can't continue, and so from my standpoint, the customers that we talk to consistently is, "Are you gonna be the platform that's gonna allow me "to embrace a hybrid Cloud and to remove the complexity "that I have and to be agile," and so that's constantly what the Veeam messaging is solving, right? Mission critical backup and recovery workloads and doing it at a fraction of the cost and accelerating that Veeam speed. >> Yeah, I mean, if you just take the Legacy backup market, Legacy back up installed base, it seems that the openness to change is greater now than I've ever seen it, and you know I've been playing around in this space for quite a few years, but certainly recently we've found the openness to people to look for something new. Our friends that gotten it always used to say the three things that people worry about, the three Cs: Cost, complexity, and capabilities, and those are still very much top of mind around what causes a customer to say, "Hey, what I've been doing for the last several years "hasn't quite been getting it done for me." I think the big change is that backup as an insurance policy is no longer good enough. I think the ability to leverage your backup infrastructure and the data contained within it is really driving people to think about, that's more of a value to me than simply having an insurance policy. >> Absolutely, backup was never enough. We do backup, I need to restore, but it's about that data. Want to give you the opportunity. Veeam is I think we said kind of a tweener. You're not what I would consider an old company. You've always been a software company, born in the virtualization age, but there's a bunch of newer developer focused and Cloud-native. How does Veeam stay and fight and compete against some of the new ones coming after this multi-billion dollar market? >> Want to take that? >> Yeah, well, I think that we pride ourselves on innovation. We pride ourselves on iterating very quickly, and we pride ourselves on adhering to our NPS score of 73, where there at 300,000 customers, and what we are gonna continue on our path, on what's made us successful, and we know that there's always competition. There's lots of VC money out there, and it's not that we're looking away from what the competition is doing. It's that we believe with our 4000 customers a month, our 133 customers that we close on a daily basis across all segments of SNB, commercial, and enterprise is indicative that our strategy is working. We're not going to stray away. We're just going to look to partners like Cisco and others to expand our target market, but stay true to the solution that we've provided in that virtualization environment. You were at VeeamON. You saw the announcements that we're making to support additional workloads and additional environments in the days to come. >> Yeah, I think our ability to evolve and adapt is second to none, and some of that is just based upon the structure of the company. We're still private, we're still pretty much driving our own growth, and I think that allows us to make decisions quickly and very strategically to allow us to go into the areas that I think people instinctively know what is needed to evolve in this space around supporting multi-Cloud, supporting data as an asset, leveraging it as an asset, and I think that's where we've been fueling, both in an engineering perspective, in a capacity to meet with customers and grow, and that's certainly what's going to I think sustain us as we keep going forward. >> All right, gentlemen, I want to give you a final word as to key takeaways you see here from Cisco Live 2018. >> That we will be here for the duration of the time, and our relationship with Cisco will continue to expand, and that we look forward to meeting everyone at the Veeam booth and walking through our product solutions and meeting the Veeam team and answering any questions they may have, but we're thrilled to be part of the Cisco family, and hopefully, again, in the years to come that we'll just continue to expand our relationship. >> And I'll leave you with an African proverb. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. >> Absolutely. Rob Emsley, Carey Stanton, always a pleasure to catch up with you. I'll leave with the final aphorism of my own, which is, never confuse activity with progress. Ben Franklin, so I'm Stu Miniman, back with lots more coverage here from Cisco Live 2018. Thanks for watching theCUBE. (techno music)

>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas. It's the CUBE. Covering HPE Discover 2017. Brought to you by Hewitt Packard Enterprise. >> Welcome back everyone. We are live in Las Vegas for HPE Discover 2017. This is the CUBE's exclusive three days of coverage. Day three here on the floor in Las Vegas. I'm John Furrier. My co-host Dave Vellante with Silicon Angle the CUBE. Our next guest is Denzil Samuels. Who's the Global Chief Channel Officer for HPE. Welcome to the CUBE. >> John, thank you. Good to be here, thank you. >> So we... Dave and I like to talk about the channels. I have a history with HP. Everyone knows I've worked there for a good almost nine years. And a lot of that time in the channel business. A lot of people also know that HP has always been channel friendly. >> It has. >> Really for a long time. >> Absolutely, we were born in the channel. >> Now more that ever with the cloud here. And the cloud really being multi cloud and pervasive. The channel part is going to be a huge opportunity. And they're close to the customers. They're on the front lines. What is the mix of business? What is the strategy? How are you guys taking the transformation message? The digital transformation to the channel and what are they doing with it? >> Wow, there's a lot of questions thrown in there. (laughing) Let me start with the channel business. The channel business is 70% of Hewitt Packard's revenue. We have 87,000 channel partners around the world. Every region of the world. Many, many countries. And you're right John. We were born in the channel. Right, so we're channel centric. We're channel friendly. We've got the best partner program in the world. And it's not us saying that. It's the partners telling us and industry analysts telling us that as well. In terms of the opportunity right now. You know, the cloud wars are still going on between the cloud players. But I think that what that's done is it's changed the model with respect to the fact that we're now looking more to congeal model. Right, where customers want to buy on a consume basis. Pay as you go. Pay as you use it. And that represents an incredible opportunity for the channel. And the channel has really embraced that. They realize that they've got to be more than just valueated resellers. They've realized they've got to morph and evolve into being service providers as well. And we're seeing that transition occur at a fairly accelerated pace. >> I'm assuming the channel guys would... And you see the global systemic race. Clearly lining up. They see that opportunity and a lot of transformation conversations. But as you go into the long tail of the channel. You said a ton of partners. They've always been hungry for services because that's where their gross profits are. Right, so you know, they take in hardware. The solutions. Very solution centric. But as the business model shifts to the customers renting versus buying per say. They're kind of teed up for the services. How has that specific transition taken place? I'm sure that they've probably been eager for being more of a service provider. >> Yeah. >> With the sense of actually maybe having their own cloud service or a variety of other services. What's the makeup and how is that going? >> Well, what they love about our message is the fact that we know that the customers are not only going to go to pure cloud. We also know the customers want a choice. They want to know if they can actually have their processing. Their compute done. Not just in their data centers. Or maybe even on Prime but even at the edge. And so because we have really the only simple hybrid IT strategy out there. That's why the channel partners love us. Because they're giving their customers a choice. They're saying it doesn't matter where your processing this. Whether it's on a consumption basis. Whether it's on the edge. In the cloud. On Prime, off Prime. We can do that for you and we can do that with HP. So they're embracing that. They love the consumption model. They love our flex capacity offerings. And our HP financial services offerings as well. So it's exciting for them. >> So my simple mental model of the channel. You talked about transformation before. As you've got sort of box sellers. I know it's kind of a pejorative. But it's still probably the largest component of the business. You've got solution providers and then I guess cloud service providers. Maybe ISV's are sort of a separate channel. You could make that argument. Maybe the hoodies are becoming a new channel as well. But, thinking about box sellers and solution providers. The box sellers have to transform. We all know that. They got big boats. Big houses. A lot of them are happy. They're going to retire. But the up and comers, they better transform. Solution providers, it used to be okay was it SAP or Oracle. Now it's IoT Solutions and different solutions. My specific question is. What's happening with that transformation from box seller to solution provider? And how is HP sort of helping it's channel get there? >> Great question Dave. I think one of the things that I love about it is that it's been going on for a few years. So it's not new. I talked, for example, to a partner yesterday in New Zealand. And I said, hey how's your transition to service provider been going? Cause they were a traditional evaluated reseller or box seller as you say. And they said, "Oh yeah, we became a service provider nine years ago." (laughing) And I talked to a distributor in Germany yesterday. And they said, I said. How many resellers are you actually converting to or helping transform their business into becoming service providers. And they said, "About 20 a week." So the shift has been going on for a few years. And there's a lot of information out there. There's white papers, there's training. There's sales plans, compensation plans have been modified. A lot of that material is there. We've helped through a lot of it. We have a playbook for making that transition. We have a service offering that we offer them. To help them if they don't know. But for the most part, the distributors. And the big evaluated resellers, they know it. It's the smaller guys that are making that change. >> And if we're starting a business. The three of us starting a business tomorrow. We'd say okay, let's build a subscription business. And we'll have a monthly revenue steam. Okay which is great. But if you're already used to the heroin of the big heap up front. Transitioning that model. The same is true for Hewitt Packard Enterprise I would imagine. As you're customers shift to a ratable model. You've got to change your financial model. You see a number of cases on Wall Street where companies are trying to make that transformation. Particularly software companies. >> Yeah. >> What kind of discussions are you having with the channel with regard to that pay as you go model. And how that affects their cash flow and income statements. >> Yeah, I think that what we're doing is, to help that. In terms of leasing options with the HP financial solutions. But I'm also helping with our flex capacity offerings. Those are two great triggers for the channel. They love that. They also like the fact that we're trying to be one step ahead of them, right. So I think the power of this is really around what the customer's buying. And they know that if they don't sell the way the customer's buying. They're going to be irrelevant. >> Denzil, can you explain how a flex capacity is not just renting. >> Yeah, I think one of the big, see... When you're rent you're buying. You're buying a size. Right, and you may use to the full size of your needs. Or you may not. But you're buying that. Whatever your capacity is that you're buying. You're buying that up front. If you don't use it, you loose it. Flex capacity is the opposite. You're actually paying for what you use. And some months you may use more. And some months you may use less. But you're paying for what you need. That's a huge advantage to the end customer. >> And HPE has figured out how to make a profitable business out of accommodating that. Cause you have to put the capacity there. Whether it's used or not. If it doesn't get used. You take the margin hit. Right? But you've figured out how to sort of maximize your profitability in that model. >> Yeah, we haven't just figured out how to do it. We've actually got a consulting practice that allows other to forget how to do it. So we actually help our. We actually help our partners morph to that as well. >> Is that just experience or is it some kind of magic analytics. >> I think it's a combination of a bunch of things. But let me tell you one thing that's really important in this transition to service providers. We used to do when we were dealing with the box sellers. The traditional certifications, right. You get a certification on a product. A product type. And you measure it on that. As part of the partner program. We've changed and evolved that partner program to say. Hey, listen. It's not just certifications on product. It's competencies. Right, data central analytics would be a competency. Understanding SAP HANA. How to implement that is a competency. So, as you move a program to embrace service providers away from traditional resellers. Having those competencies is huge. Understanding verticals is huge. And that all plays in to the usage question that you asked. >> This is a really great opportunity I think for partners. And this is what we've been kind of talking about on the CUBE. And a variety of different events we go to is. The cloud is really a amazing enabler because it's horizontally scalable but you need specialism in those unique domains. >> That's exactly right. >> Whether it's SAP. And big data highlights this. So you got to have that scale. And then you can also be specialized. So this opens the door up for a huge opportunity for your partners. So I totally get that. So I want to ask you guys how HP's changed? How you engage with your partners with digital? Because now you have to then be more efficient. >> Yes. >> With these guys. It's going to be there's 1,000 flowers are blooming and all these ridicules and these industries. >> Right. >> How are you guys using digital specifically to make yourself more efficient to move the market forward? >> That's a great question. So first, let me answer that by saying in the world of digital transformation. There isn't a single partner category. We're not just talking about service providers. We're not just talking about valued resellers or distributors. We're talking about independent software vendors and developers. We're talking about systems integrators. Sentiment manufacturers, device manufacturers. >> IoT opens a huge door. >> IoT. And let me tell you something. There may be partner categories we don't even know about today. But they'll be partner categories tomorrow. So the program we've built encompasses all of that. It encompasses all of these partner categories. Every region, every vertical, everywhere around the world. In terms of the digital piece of it specifically. The transformation. There's some interesting things going on with companies like GE Digital. You know, they've got jet engines now that they can actually transmit information on the wear and tear of every single blade within that jet engine. We can connect. We can connect that and collect and connect that data. We can analyze it. We can run inserts on it. And we can feedback powerful information that makes then drive outcomes to the customer, right. And all of that is linked through the IRT technology. Our edge technology and our hybrid IT approach. >> So you guys have the ABB cloud like in the sense of. Standing up programs with automation so we see Tesla self driving cars. Are you going to have a self driving channel? I mean. (laughing) At the end of the day you need to have these agile capabilities. This is kind of what you have to kind of get on right? >> You know, I think everyone has to do that. And I think there's no company right now in my mind that's more positioned to do that better than we are. And let me tell you why. We have billions of dollars of cash in the bank. We have no debt. Meg, over the last few years, has trimmed us down to be nimble to take advantage of this. The last thing you want to be in a market that's moving at this speed is be slow. And what we're seeing with some of our competitors is that they're getting very, very big. Very, very fat. And a lot in their burden with debt. That is not where you want to be in a market that's moving at the pace that this is moving in. You want to have the ability and the cash to invest. And as you say, do things real time. Do things that are just at speed of light. >> Well, if you guys can. I mean, talk about Dell and MC obviously. They think bigger is better. But I think your point is if you can be nimble. And by the way, decentralize the way the organizational structure is. You can ride many waves. >> You can ride many waves. And we don't have the 50 billion dollars of debt that Dell and MC have. >> Right. >> Right. >> Denzil, thanks so much for coming on the CUBE. I really appreciate it. And you know the strategic nature of the channel. Again 70% of the business probably will grow. And again, that's always been the good mix. And a lot of leverage there. Cost of sales is lower. Everyone is making money. That's the key thing too, right? >> That is the key thing. That's the key thing. >> And the channel part is profitability. >> Yeah. I agree. It's 70% of our business that will continue to grow. What will change though, is the mix. Right, we'll move. We'll move from the 80% box sellers. And we'll move more and more. So that will be probably 60% of our business over the next two to three years. And we're going to see 40% of the channel businesses it's going to be the value at. >> We'll be watching you guys. And of course as Meg Whitman says the right mix. Is her message here. >> Yes. >> HPE Discover. We're going to check in and see how that evolves. Thanks for coming and sharing your insights here at the CUBE. >> Awesome. >> Really appreciate it. Live coverage here from HPE Discover. I'm John Furrier with David Vellante. You're watching the CUBE. Stay with us for day three as it continues. Our three days of wall to wall coverage. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back. (tech music)