(digital music) >> My, what a difference 10 years makes in the tech industry. At the beginning of the last decade, the cloud generally in AWS specifically ushered in the era where leading developers they tapped into a powerful collection of remote services through programmable interfaces you know, out there in the cloud. By the end of the decade this experience would shape the way virtually every IT professional thinks about acquiring, deploying, consuming and managing technology. Today that remote cloud is becoming ubiquitous, expanding to the "edge" with connections to on-premises, data centers and other local points throughout the globe. One of the most talked about examples of this movement is AWS Outposts, which brings the Amazon experience to the edge wherever that may be. Welcome everyone to this CUBE conversation. My name is Dave Vellante. We're going to explore the ever expanding cloud and how two companies are delivering on customer needs to connect their data center operations to the cloud and the cloud to their on-prem infrastructure and applications. And with me are Joshua Burgin who's the General Manager of AWS Outposts and Michael Sotnick who's the VP at Global Alliances at Pure Storage. Gents, welcome come inside theCUBE. >> Right on. Well, thrilled to be here Dave. >> Great. >> Pleasure is mine, thank you. >> Awesome to have this conversation with you it's really our pleasure. So Joshua, let's start with Outpost. Maybe you could for the audience describe what it is maybe some of the use cases that you're seeing you're heard by narrative upfront maybe you can course correct anything I missed. >> Oh sure. I mean, I think you got it right on. AWS Outpost is a fully managed service that allows you to use AWS, API systems, tools, technology, hardware software innovation in your own data center or a colocation facility. And coming later this year as you put the edge in quotes at almost any edge site, as we announced the small form factor one you and two you Outposts at this last year's re-invent. >> I was excited when I saw Outpost a couple of years ago we were doing theCUBE at reinvent and I said, wow, this is truly going to be interesting. And I'm wondering like, how's Amazon, how are they going to partner? Where do some of the ecosystem get folks fit in? So Michael, you're an AWS Outpost ready partner. You know, what is that program all about? What does that mean for customers? >> Yeah, it's a great question. And you know, like you, Dave, I think we're as a vendor in technology we're inspired by what AWS has done. And when we look at Pure and see the opportunity we have you know, shared customer obsession, focused on outcomes, focused on NPS, great customer experience seeing AWS deliver the cloud to the edge, deliver the cloud to the data center that's just a great fit for us. So we rallied internally across our flash array of block storage solution a unified fast file and object flash plate solution and our container solution Portworx and, you know, across the entire portfolio we're the first to be in our segment the first to be service ready with AWS Outposts. And to us, it's an opportunity to link arms with AWS and cover some ground that's very familiar to us in the data center and clearly cover some ground that's very familiar to AWS in terms of great customer relationships across the board. >> Right, and, you know, I got to say, I've been a student of of Andy Jassy I always have listened to all his talks and go back and read the transcripts and Joshua I've learned that I never say never when it comes to AWS. And you see you guys moving into that, whatever you call it, the hybrid cloud, the on-premises really leaning in in a big way with Outposts and I wonder if you could talk about what's behind that expansion strategy? >> Sure, I mean, the way we looked at it obviously is always kind of working backwards from our customers. We have people tell us that they had some applications with low latency needs or where data resonancy or sovereignty was driven by regulations or in some cases where they needed to do local data processing something like an autonomous vehicle workload or in a factory or a healthcare facility. And they really wanted to say like, look, we're going to move all of our applications, you know the bulk of them to one of your regions in the fullness of time, but what's holding us back is that we want a consistent environment on-prem and in what you call the cloud. So we wanted a continuum of offerings from AWS to be able to serve all those needs. And that's really where Outpost came from. And, you know, we're seeing a lot of traction across financial services with companies like Morningstar and First Abu Dhabi bank, the iGaming space as you can imagine highly regulated industry, every city and, you know, municipality around the world wants to get in on that but they have their own regulations and they really require the infrastructure to be in a specific location and run a certain way. A company like TYPICA, which is based out of Europe they don't want to deliver different solutions depending on whether something's deployed in Minnesota or Germany or, you know, Vancouver. So that's where AWS Outpost comes in and it kind of fits that it works the same way as the things do in the region they can use the same tooling. >> Yeah, so Michael I'm going to ask you this question and maybe Joshua, you can chime in as well. I mean, you've got this, it's sort of a, win-win-win you know, Pure, AWS, you bringing that experience to on-premises, the customer gets that experience that Joshua just explained. I wonder if you could, I mean, you've been out now for a little bit testing the market learning here and there. What are the big takeaways in the learnings you're getting from customers? >> Yeah, I'll start and I'm sure Joshua can compliment quite a bit. And like Joshua hit on, right. You know, I think we take our cues from our customers, Dave, and you know what the customers are looking for, you know is a commercial relationship and so in addition to the technological inspiration we've got from AWS we offer the solution for Outposts and a Pure as a service model. So it's 100% subscription-based for the customer and they're able to consume it, you know the same way that they would all of their services from AWS including Outposts and it's also available on the AWS marketplace. So you've got to meet the customer where they want to be met first and foremost and so they appreciate that. And they see that as a great value in the relationship. You know, the growth of object, you know, I think is another one of those macro trends that's happening in our space. And as customers are deploying locations that are putting out petabytes of object storage requirements there's an increasing need for high-performance object. And that's where we can really compliment an Outpost implementation and deliver high performance and that kind of ubiquitous experience, that hybrid experience to allow the customer on a policy based way to maximize that on-prem performance with Outpost and Pure around that object data set. And then also manage the life cycle of that data and the economics of that data in the cloud. >> So, but Joshua, so you guys obviously you invented that, you know, the modern subscription model for infrastructure but it's different, you're actually installing hardware. So you had to sort of rethink how you did that. What have you learned and how has that model... How do you get it substantially similar as possible to the public cloud? >> Yeah, I mean, I think you called it a win-win-win earlier. And as much as we like to innovate we also like to make things feel kind of comfortable and familiar to people 'cause you think about there's both the developer who's using the APIs and the tools and also the CFO and the people in finance or procurement who are looking at the spending. So with Outposts, it actually feels very similar to the region. If you're used to purchasing our compute savings plans or what people used to call reserved instances or RIs the underlying infrastructure on the Outpost works in a very similar way. You're not going to be deploying a multi-rack Outpost and then ripping it out three weeks later so on demand doesn't really make sense there. But for all the services that are deployed on top of Outposts whether it's application load balancer or elastic cash or Elastic MapReduce, those have the same kind of on demand service model, the pricing model that they do in the region. And so very similarly, the Outpost ready program which lets you use trusted and certified third-party solutions, such as ones from Pure those are also going to feel familiar, whether you're coming from the on-prem world and you're already that technology for your storage, your network monitoring, your security or if you're using that solution from the marketplace in the AWS region, it's going to be a totally seamless deploy on the Outpost. So you're going to get something that's kind of the best of both worlds, familiar to you economically and from an installation perspective but also removing all that undifferentiated heavy lifting of having to patch and manage firmware upgrades and you asked this earlier, what customers really want is that there's this whole world of innovation, things that haven't even been invented yet. A few years ago, we hadn't invented Outposts. People want to know that as those innovations get released to the market they can take advantage of them without having to redeploy and so that's what having an AWS Outpost means. That as third parties or Amazon innovates new services can be made available without shipping a DVD or kind of spinning up an entire staff to manage that. >> Yeah, it's kind of interesting watching this equilibrium you know, take place. And I think it's going to continue to evolve. Obviously AWS has a huge impact on how people think about price, as I said upfront. And it seems like, you know, culturally, Michael, there's a fit. I mean, you guys have always sort of been into that you know, your evergreen model, for the first one that subscription sort of mindset. So it's sort of natural for you whereas, you know, maybe a a legacy company might not (chuckles) be able to lean in as hard as you guys are. Maybe some quick thoughts on that. >> Yeah, look, I love the way you framed that up and couldn't agree more. I think AWS is famous for a lot of things some of the values that they embrace and putting the customer at the center of everything they do couldn't be more shared, you know, with Pure. I think, you know, we talk about our company as one that runs two fires right, to give the customer a great experience. And so we know our way around the data center and I think the opportunity to give that customer, you know a consistent experience with AWS as they deliver Outpost to the data center is a really powerful combination. You know, I think one thing, just look at the backdrop of the pandemic, Dave, you know, every part of a company's organization is going through significant change. And I think the data center is absolutely at the center of some of those changes. And I think every one now as they look at the next generation data center they're asking themselves what are containers what does Kubernetes mean to my business? And I think the opportunity that, you know we see jointly with EKS as a partner is really to help customers achieve that goal of, you know the application deployments anywhere and the ability to drive that application, you know modernize that next generation application cycle. So I love the way you framed it up, giving us credit for being highly differentiated from our legacy competitors and we take great pride in that and really want to give a cloud-like experience to our customers. And I think what we're able to do with AWS Outpost is kind of bring that cloud-like experience that they have come to love from AWS into the data center and at the same time shine a light on what we've always done in terms of a cloud-like experience for the Pure customer. >> There's a lot of ways to skin a cat but when you've invented the cloud and you don't have a lot of legacy baggage you can kind of move faster. And I think that, you know, we're really excited about what's occurring here because take the term digital transformation I mean, before the pandemic (groaning) it's like, yeah okay, it had some meaning but you really had to squint through it and a lot of people were complacent about it. Well, we know what digital means now if you're not a digital business, you're out of business. And so it was kind of this forced march to digital I call it and as a result it really increases the need for things like automation and that cloud experience on-prem because I don't have time to be provisioning LUNs anymore. It's just what you guys call it undifferentiated heavy lifting that is really a no-no these days I just absolutely can't afford it. Let's close on what's next. I mean, we've got new form factors coming we're like super excited about when we see things like what Amazon is doing with custom Silicon we see these innovations coming out with processing power going through the roof. Everybody says Moore's law is dead but processing power is increasing faster than it ever has when you combine all these innovations of GPU's and NPUs and accelerators, it's just, it's amazing. And the costs are coming down so you're going to be able to take advantage of that. Outpost will take advantage of that, Pure will, New Designs but specifically as it relates to Outpost, you got one you, you got two you, you coming optimizing for the edge what do customers need to know about these solutions? Why should they consider this combination of Pure and AWS? Maybe Joshua you can start and Michael you can bring us home. >> Yeah, I mean, you hit a lot of the reasons that people should consider it, right. The pace of innovation is not going to slow down here at AWS or of course, with Pure. Whether you have the need for a single server, or you're somebody like dish rolling out a new cloud enabled, you know cloud native 5G network you want to work with somebody who can deploy all the way at the Telco edge right, with hardware innovation up to a local zone all the way up to a region. You don't want to be working with different providers for that and you don't know what you're going to need in three or five years and frankly, I'm not sure that we know everything yet either but we're going to continue to listen to our customers and as you mentioned, deliver things like graviton and inferential and trainium which are our innovations in custom Silicon. Those are delivering 40% price performance improvements for people who are migrating, that's really an enormous benefit. And we're bringing all of those to the Outpost as well so you don't have to choose between moving to the cloud and that being your only modernization option, you can move to the cloud and at the same time still operate on-prem, you know, at a colo facility or all the way at the edge using all of the same tooling. And you can work with best-in-breed third-party technologies like what's offered by Pure. >> Well, and Michael, I'm going to cut you off before you get a chance to close, but I'll let you close. The Portworx acquisition was really interesting to us because it brings that kind of portability, new programming model and something that Joshua said struck in my mind is when I think about the edge word to me what's going to win the edge you know, obviously the flexibility, the agility but the programmability and the customization. So many different use cases. We're not just going to take general purpose boxes and throw them over the fence and say, here you go. You know, the general purpose, that's not what's going to win the edge it's really going to take a lot more thought than that. But, so I just wanted to put that in there. Michael, bring us home, please. (laughing) >> Right on. Well, look you two, and no surprise here right, you two covered so much great ground there. From first principles you know, what does Pure look at? Like what we did being first in terms of service ready across Portworx, for EKS, for flash plate across unified fast file on object and flash ray, you know for block storage, being first with Outposts we want to be first for the one you and to you solutions. So I think customers can expect, you know that our partnership is going to continue to deliver that cloud-like experience, that cloud experience in the AWS context, that cloud-like experience in the Pure context, you know for their on-prem and hybrid workloads. And I think you hit it up so well like if you're not digital business, you're not in business. And so I think one thing that everyone learned over the last year is exactly that. The other thing they learned is they don't know what they don't know. And so they need to make bets on partners that are modern that are delivering simple solutions that solve complex problems that are automated and that are being delivered with the customer first mindset. And I think in the combination of AWS, Outposts and Pure, we're doing exactly that. >> Great point, so a lot of unknowns out there. Hey guys, congratulations on the progress you've made. It's a great partnership, two super innovative companies and really pleasure to have you in theCUBE. Thank you for coming on. >> Thanks for having us. >> Yeah, always a pleasure. Thank you so much. >> All right, thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante. We'll see you next time. (digital music)

>>from >>around the globe. It's the Cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020. Special coverage sponsored by AWS Global Partner Network. >>Hi. Welcome to the Cube. Virtual and our coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 with special coverage of a PM partner experience. I'm John for your host. We are the Cube. Virtual. We can't be there in person with a remote. And our two next guests are We have pure storage. Michael Slotnick, VP of Worldwide Alliances, Pure storage. And Robert Czarnecki, principal product manager for a U. S. Outposts. Welcome to the Cube. >>Wonderful to be here. Great to see you. And thanks for having us, >>Michael. Great to see you pure. You guys had some great Momenta, um, earnings and some announcements. You guys have some new news? We're here. Reinvent all part of a W s and outpost. I want to get into it right away. Uh, talk about the relationship with AWS. I know you guys have some hot news. Just came out in late November. We're here in the event. All the talk is about new higher level services. Hybrid edge. What do you guys doing? What's the story? >>Yeah, Look, I gotta tell you the partnership with AWS is a very high profile and strategic partnership for pure storage. We've worked hard with our cloud block store for AWS, which is an extensive bility solution for pure flash array and into a W s. I think the big news and one of things that we're most proud of is the recent establishment of pure being service ready and outpost ready. And the first and Onley on Prem storage solution and were shoulder to shoulder with AWS is a W s takes outpost into the data center. Now they're going after key workloads that were well known for. And we're very excited Thio, partner with AWS in that regard, >>you know, congratulations to pure. We've been following you guys from the beginning since inception since it was founded startup. And now I'll see growing public company on the next level kind of growth plan. You guys were early on all this stuff with with with flash with software and cloud. So it's paying off. Rob, I wanna get toe Outpost because this was probably most controversial announcements I've ever covered at reinvent for the past eight years. It really was the first sign that Andy was saying, You know what? We're working backwards from the customers and they all are talking Hybrid. We're gonna have Outpost. Give us the update. What kind of workloads and verticals are seeing Success without post? Now that that's part of the portfolio, How does it all working out? Give us the update on the workloads in the verticals. >>Absolutely. Although I have to say I'd call it more exciting than controversial. We're so excited about the opportunities that outpost opened for our customers. And, you know, customers have been asking us for years. How can we bring AWS services to our data centers? And we thought about it for a long time. And until until we define the outpost service, we really I thought we could do better. And what outpost does it lets us take those services that customers are familiar with? It lets us bring it to their data center and and one of the really bright spots over the past year has just been how many different industries and market segments have shown interest. Outpost right. You could have customers, for example, with data residency needs, those that have to do local data processing. Uh, maybe have Leighton see needs on a specific workload that needs to run near their end users. We're just folks trying to modernize their data center, and that's a journey. That transformation takes time, right? So So Outpost works for all of those customers. And one of the things that's really become clear to us is that to enable the success that we think L Post can have, we need to meet customers where they are. And and one of the fantastic things about the outpost ready program is many of those customers air using pure and they have pure hardware and way. Send an outpost over to the pure lab recently, and I have to tell you a picture of those two racks next to each other looks really good. >>You know, 20 used to kind of welcome back my controversial comments. You know, I meant in the sense of that's when Cloud really got big into the enterprise and you have to deal with hybrid. So I do think it's exciting because the edges a big theme here. Can you just share real quick before I get in some of the pure questions on this edge piece with the hybrid because what what's the customer need? And when you talk to customers, I know you guys, you know, really kind of work backwards from the customer. What are their needs? What causes them to look at Outpost as part of their hybrid? What's the Keith consideration? >>Yeah, so? So there are a couple of different needs. John, right? One, for example, is way have regions and local zones across the globe. But we're not everywhere and and their their data residency regulations that they're becoming increasingly common and popular. So customers I come to us and say, Look, I really need to run, for example, of financial services workload. It needs to be in Thailand, and we don't have a reason or local zone in Thailand. But we could get him an outpost to to places where they need to be right. So the that that requirement to keep data, whether it's by regulation or by a contractual agreement, that's a that's a big driver. The other pieces there's There's a tremendous amount of interest in the that top down executive sponsorship across enterprise customers to transform their operations right to modernize their their digital approach but there, when they actually look a look at their estate, they do see an awful lot of hardware, and that's a hard challenge. Thio Plan the migration when you could bring an outpost right into that data center. It really makes it much easier because AWS is right there. There could be a monolithic architecture that it doesn't lend well toe having part of the workload running in the region, part of the workload running in their data center. But with an outpost, they can extend AWS to their data center, and that just makes it so much easier for them to get started on their digital transformation. >>Michael, this is This is the key trend. You guys saw early Cloud operations on premise. It becomes cloud ified at that point when you have Dev ops on on Premises and then cloud pure cloud for bursting all that stuff. And now you've got the edge exploding as well of growth and opportunity. What causes the customer to get the pure option on outputs? What's the What's the angle for you guys? Obviously storage, you get data and I can see this whole Yeah, there's no region and certainly outpost stores data, and that's a requirement for a lot of, you know, certainly global customers and needs. What's the pure angle on this? >>Yeah, I appreciate that. And appreciate Rob's comments around what AWS sees in the wild in terms of yours footprint in the market share that we've established his company over 11 years in business and, you know, over eight years of shipping product. You know, what I would tell you is one of the things that that a lot of people misses the simplicity and the consistency that air characteristically, you know very much in the AWS experience and equally within the pure experience and that that's really powerful. So as we were successful in putting pure into workloads that, you know, for for all the reasons that Rob talked about right data gravity, you know, the the regulatory issues, you know, just application architecture and its inability to move to the public cloud. Um, you know, our predictability are simplicity. Are consistency really match with the costumers getting with other work clothes that they had in AWS? And so with a W S outposts that's really bringing to the customer that single pane of glass to manage their entire environment. And so we saw that we made the three year investment in Outpost. Is Rob said Just having our solution? Inp Yours Data center. It's set up and running today with a solution built on flash Blade, which is our unstructured data solution and, you know, delivering fantastic performance results in a I and ML workloads. We see the same opportunity within backup and disaster recovery workloads and into analytics and then equally the opportunity toe build. You know, Flash Ray and our other storage solutions, and to build architectures with outposts in our data center and bring them to market >>real quick just to follow up on that. What use cases are you seeing that are most successful without post and in general in general, how do you guys get your customers to integrate with the rest of, uh, their environment? Because you you no one's got. Now this operating environments not just cloud public, is cloud on premise and everything else. >>Yeah, you know what's cool is, and then Rob hit right on. It is the the wide range of industries and the wide range of use cases and workloads that air finding themselves attracted to the outpost offering on DSO. You know, without a doubt there's gonna be, You know, I think what people would immediately believe ai and ml workloads and the importance of having high performance storage and to have a high performance outpost environment, you know, as close to the center as possible of those solutions. But it doesn't stop there. Traditional virtualized database workloads that for reasons of application architecture, aren't candidates to move. AWS is public cloud offering our great fit for outpost and those air workloads that we've always traditionally been successful within the market and see a great opportunity. Thio, you know, build on that success as an outpost partner. >>Rob, I gotta ask, you last reinvent when we're in person. When we had real life back then e was at the replay party and hanging out, and this guy comes out to me. I don't even know who he was. Obviously big time engineer over there opens his hand up and shows me this little processor and I'm like, closes and he's like and I go take a picture and it was like freaking out. Don't take a picture. It was it was the big processor was the big, uh, kind of person. Uh, I think it was the big monster. And it was just so small. See the innovation and hard where you guys have done a lot, there s that's cool. I like get your thoughts on where the future is going there because you've got great hardware innovation, but you got the higher level services with containers. I know you guys took your time. Containers are super important because that's going to deal with that. So how do you look at that? You got the innovation in the hardware check containers. How does that all fit in? Because you guys have been making a lot of investments in some of these cloud native projects. What's your position on that? >>You know, it's all part of one common story, John right customers that they want an easy path to delivering impact for their business. Right. And, you know, you've heard us speak a lot over the past few years about how we're really seeing these two different types of customers. We have those customers that really loved to get those foundational core building blocks and stitch them together in a creative way. But then you have more and more customers that they wanna. They wanna operate at a different level, and and that's okay. We want to support both of them. We want to give both of them all the tools that they need. Thio spend their time and put their resource is towards what differentiates their business and just be able to give them support at whatever level they need on the infrastructure side. And it's fantastic that are combination of investments in hardware and services. And now, with Outpost, we can bring those investments even closer to the customer. If you really think about it that way, the possibilities become limitless. >>Yeah, it's not like the simplicity asked, but it was pretty beautiful to the way it looks. It looks nice. Michael. Gotta ask you on your side. A couple of big announcements over that we've been following from pure looking back. You already had the periods of service announcement you bought the port Works was acquisition. Yeah, that's container management. Across the data center, including outposts you got pure is a service is pure. Is the service working with outpost and how and if so, how and what's the consumption model for customers there. >>Yeah, thanks so much, John. And appreciate you following us the way that you do it. Zits meaningful and appreciate it. Listen, you know, I think the customers have made it clear and in AWS is, you know, kind of led the way in terms of the consumption and experience expectations that customers have. It's got to be consumable. They've got to pay for what they use. It's got to be outcome oriented and and we're doing that with pure is a service. And so I think we saw that early and have invested in pure is a service for our customers. And, you know, we look at the way we acquired outposts as ah customer and a partner of AWS aan dat is exactly the same way customers can consume pure. You know, all of our solutions in a, you know, use what you need, pay for what you use, um, environment. And, you know, one of the exciting things about AWS partnership is its wide ranging and one of the things that AWS has done, I think world class is marketplace. And so we're excited to share with this audience, you know, really? On the back of just recent announcement that, pure is the service is available within the AWS marketplace. And so you think about the, you know, simplicity and the consistency that pure and AWS delivered to the market. AWS customers demand that they get that in the marketplace, and and we're proud to have our offerings there. And Port Works has been in the marketplace and and will continue to be showcased from a container management standpoint. So as those workloads increasingly become, you know, the cloud native you know, Dev Ops, Containerized workloads. We've got a solution and to end to support >>that great job. Great insight. Congratulations to pure good moves as making some good moves. Rob, I want to just get to the final word here on Outpost again. Great. Everyone loves this product again. It's a lot of attention. It's really that that puts the operating models cloud firmly on the in the on premise world for Amazon opens up a lot of good conversation and business opportunities and technical integrations or are all around you. So what's your message to the ecosystem out there for outposts? How do I What's the what's the word? I wanna do I work with you guys? How do I get involved? What are some of the opportunities? What's your position? How do you talk to the ecosystem? >>Yeah, You know, John, I think the best way to frame it is we're just getting started. We've got our first year in the books. We've seen so many promising signals from customers, had so many interesting conversations that just weren't possible without outposts. And, uh, you know, working with partners like pure and expanding our outpost. Ready program is just the beginning. Right? We launched back in September. We've We've seen another meaningful set of partners come out. Uh, here it reinvent, and we're gonna continue toe double down on both the outpost business, but specifically on on working with our partners. I think that the key to unlocking the magic of outpost is meeting customers where they are. And those customers are using our partners. And there's no reason that it shouldn't just work when they move there. Their partner based workload from their existing infrastructure right over to the outpost. >>All right, I'll leave it there. Michael saw the VP of worldwide alliances that pier storage congratulations. Great innovation strategy It's easy to do alliances when you've got a great product and technology congratulated. Rob Kearney Key principle product manager. Outpost will be speaking more to you throughout the next couple of weeks. Here at Reinvent Virtual. Thanks for coming. I appreciate it. >>Thank you. Thank you. >>Okay. So cute. Virtual. We are the Cube. Virtual. We wish we could be there in person this year, but it's a virtual event. Over three weeks will be lots of coverage. I'm John for your host. Thanks for watching.

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware Cloud on AWS. It's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred Wurden, VP of Commercial Services at AWS and Narayan Bharadwaj, who's the VP and General Manager of Cloud Solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on the showcase. >> Great to be here. >> Great. Thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. >> We've been covering this VMware cloud on AWS 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. What's this mean? And the press were not really on board with 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 AWS and it continues two years later and I want to 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 re:Invent, which is only a couple weeks away Feels like tomorrow. But as we prepare, a lot going on. Where are we with the evolution of the solution? >> I mean, first thing I want to say is October 2016 was a seminal moment in the history of IT. When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy 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 year after that at VMworld, back when we called it VMworld. I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we've learned from AWS also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we built a service offering now five years old. Pretty remarkable journey. In the first years we tried to get across all the regions, that was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. In the second year, we started going really on enterprise great features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretched Clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using vSAN and NSX-T across to AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nines of availability that applications 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. Along the way, Disaster Recovery, we punched out two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our Outposts partnership. We were up on stage at re:Invent, again, with Pat and 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 this has been the theme for AWS, man, since I can remember from day one, Fred. You guys do the heavy lifting as you always say for the customers. Here, VMware comes on board. Takes advantage of the AWS and just doesn't miss a beat. Continues to move their workloads that everyone's using, vSphere, and 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 skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on-prem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's evolving quickly 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 customers. 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 responding to what customers want. So pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to while at VMC. >> That's a great value proposition. We've been talking about that in context to 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 investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and continues to make in performance IaaS and PaaS, 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 in 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 early adopters of the AWS Nitro platform. The reinvention of EC2 back five years ago. And so we have been 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, compute storage networking on EC2, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally on AWS EC2 global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us, what customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service. 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 patches on top. So we took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud in AWS. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the Log4j debacle. Industry was just going through that. Favorite proof point from customers was before they could 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 were super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >> Narayan, that's a great point. The whole managed service piece brings up the security. You kind of teasing at it, but there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera more bits than ever before and at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's going to be a zero-day vulnerability out there. It happens. We saw one with Fortinet this week. This came out of 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 talk to customers on theCUBE about this. It was a real easy understanding of what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the AWS. But the question that comes up that we want to get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? >> Well, what's interesting about this is that 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 we're improving reliability in as a first order of principle between both companies. So from availability and reliability standpoint, it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're going to go help the customer resolve that. It works really well. >> On the VMware side, what's been the feedback there? What are some of the updates? >> Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we work phenomenal backend relationship with AWS. Customers call VMware for the service or any issues. And then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The key management that we jointly do. 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 the VMware Cloud in AWS. We're 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 had mentioned, I've got list here of some of the innovations. You mentioned the stretch clustering, getting the geos working, advanced network, Disaster Recovery, FedRAMP, public sector certifications, Outposts. All good, you guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a 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 list this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the new things, the list of accomplishments? People want to know what's next. They don't want to see stagnant growth here. They want to see more action as cloud continues to scale and modern applications cloud native. You're seeing more and more containers, more and more CI/CD pipelining with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new? What's the new innovations? >> Absolutely. And I think as a five year old 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 Explore. First of all, our new platform i4i.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 and separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS FSx with NetApp ONTAP, 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 called 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 vCPU memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, top of ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in the 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 Northstar. Our ability to have layer four through layer seven, 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 is sort at the heart of our (faintly speaking). >> 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 options there. The Flex Compute is interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the resource-defined versus hardware-defined? Because this is what we had saw at Explore coming out, that notion of resource-defined versus hardware-defined. 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. And so that's been super successful. But customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally. Lower the cost even more. And so this is the part where resource-defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers request before fiber machines, five containers. It's 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. That'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 host based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. >> It's cloud 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, we have some time. I want to unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard again on theCUBE 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 start consuming higher level services. That adoption next level happens and because it's in the cloud. 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 use cases? >> Sure. Well, there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that 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 i4 and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around 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 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 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 Tanzu or with any other container and or services within AWS. So 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 allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with Textract or any other really cool service that has monthly and quarterly innovations. So there's things that you just could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their current app base 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 many here. 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. >> Narayan, what's your perspective from the VMware side? 'Cause you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where it's being rolled out 'cause you now have a lot of hybrid too. So what's your take on what's happening in with customers? >> I mean, it's been phenomenal. The customer adoption of this and 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 I have a couple of really good examples. S&P Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS Markit, big conglomeration now. Both customers were using VMware Cloud and AWS in different ways. And 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 1000 workloads to VMware Cloud and 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 lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware Cloud and AWS. So that's 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, but constantly entering new markets with a limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap. >> 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. Congratulations. >> 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 seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which I like. We just all need to do our part there and this is a big part of it here. >> 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 issue is another one. You see that constraints. I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security. I mean, I remember interviewing Steven Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013 and 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, the stay current on the isolation there is hard. So I think the security and supply chain, Fred, is another one. Do you agree? >> I absolutely agree. 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 have the resources that are available and run them more efficiently. And then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is the only P1. 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 Narayan, your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things is really going to get better. All right, final question. I really want to thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I want to end with a curve ball and put you eyes on the spot. We're talking about a new modern shift. 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 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 like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What's changed for the better and what's still the same thing hanging around that people are focused on? Can you share your perspective? >> I'll tackle it. Businesses are complex and they're often unique, that's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine managed 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 could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of engineers can go actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only going to continue to accelerate that. That's my take, Narayan. >> You got a lot of platform to compete on. With Amazon, you got a lot to build on. Narayan, your side. What's your answer to that question? >> I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constantly (faintly speaking). 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 build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that production quickly and efficiently. I think we are seeing, we are at the very start of that sort of journey. Of course, we have invested in Kubernetes, the means to an end, but we're 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. >> Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on solving these complexities with distractions, whether it's higher level services with large scale infrastructure. At your fingertips, infrastructure as code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen and 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 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 AWS getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives. >> We appreciate it. Thank you so much. >> Thank you John. >> This is theCUBE 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 Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

(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)

(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)

>> Welcome back to the Seaport in Boston and this is theCUBE's coverage of Red Hat Summit 2022. I'm Dave Vellante with my co-host Paul Gillin. Rob Belson is here as the Developer Relations Lead at Verizon. Robbie great to see you. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. >> So Verizon and developer relations. Talk about your role there. Really interesting. >> Absolutely. If you think about our mobile edge computing portfolio in Verizon 5G Edge, suddenly the developer is a more important persona than ever for actually adopting the cloud itself and adopting the mobile edge. So the question then quickly became how do we go after developers and how do we tell stories that ultimately resonate with them? And so my role has been spearheading our developer relations and experience efforts, which is all about meeting developers in the channels where they actually are, building content that resonates with them. Building out architectures that showcase how do you actually use the technology in the wild? And then ultimately creating automation assets that make their lives easier in deploying to the mobile edge. >> So, you know, telcos get a bad rap, when you're thinking it's amazing what you guys do. You put out all this capital infrastructure, big outlays. You know, we use our phones to drop a call. People like, "Ah, freaking Verizon." But it's amazing what we can actually do too. You think about the pandemic, the shift that the telcos had to go through to landlines to support home, never missed a beat. And yet at the same time you're providing all this infrastructure for people to come over the top, the cost forbid is going down, right? Your cost are going up and yet now we're doing this big 5G buildup. So I feel like there's a renaissance about to occur in edge computing that the telcos are going to lead new forms of monetization new value that you're going to be able to add, new services, new applications. The future's got to be exciting for you guys and it's going to be developer-led, isn't it? >> Absolutely. I mean it's been such an exciting time to be a part of our mobile edge computing portfolio. If you think back to late 2019 we were really asking the question with the advent of high speed 5G mobile networks, how can you drive more immersive experiences from the cloud in a cloud native way without compromising on the tools you know and love? And that's ultimately what caused us to really work with the likes of AWS and others to think about what does a mobile edge computing portfolio look like? So we started with 5G Edge with AWS Wavelength. So taking the compute and storage services you know and love in AWS and bringing it to the edge of our 4G and 5G networks. But then we start to think, well, wait a minute. Why stop at public networks? Let's think about private networks. How can we bring the cloud and private networks together? So you turn back to late 2021 we announced Verizon 5G Edge with AWS Outposts but we didn't even stop there. We said, "Well, interest's cool, but what about network APIs? We've been talking about the ability and the programmability of the 5G network but what does that actually look like to the developers? And one great example is our Edge Discovery Service. So you think about the proliferation of the edge 17 Wavelength Zones today in the US. Well, what edge is the right edge? You think about maybe the airline industry if the closest exit might be behind you absolutely applies to service discovery. So we've built an API that helps answer that seemingly basic question but is the fundamental building block for everything to workload orchestration, workload distribution. A basic network building block has become so important to some of these new sources of revenue streams, as we mentioned, but also the ability to disintermediate that purpose built hardware. You think about the future of autonomous mobile robots either ground and aerial robotics. Well, you want to make those devices as cheap as possible but you don't want to compromise on performance. And that mobile edge layer is going to become so critical for that connectivity, but also the compute itself. >> So I just kind of gave my little narrative up front about telco, but that purpose built hardware that you're talking about is exceedingly reliable. I mean, it's hardened, it's fossilized and so now as you just disaggregate that and go to a more programmable infrastructure, how are you able to and what gives you confidence that you're going to be able to maintain that reliability that I joke about? Oh, but it's so reliable. The network has amazing reliability. How are you able to maintain that? Is that just the pace of technology is now caught up, I wonder if you can explain that? >> I think it's really cool as I see reliability and sort of geo distribution as inextricably linked. So in a world where to get that best in class latency you needed to go to one place and one place only. Well, now you're creating some form of single source of failure whether it's the power, whether it's the compute itself, whether it's the networking, but with a more geo distributed footprint, particularly in the mobile edge more choices for where to deliver that immersive experience you're naturally driving an increase in reliability. But again, infra alone it's not going to do the job. You need the network APIs. So it's the convergence of the cloud and network and infra and the automation behind it that's been incredibly powerful. And as a great example, the work we've been doing in hybrid MEC the ability to converge within one single architecture, the private network, the public network, the AWS Outposts, the AWS Wavelength all in one has been such a fantastic journey and Red Hat has been a really important part in that journey. >> From the perspective of the developer when they're building a full cloud to edge application, where does Verizon pick up? Where do they start working primarily with you versus with their cloud provider? >> Absolutely. And I think you touched on a really important point. I think when you often think about the edge it's thought of as an either, or. Is it the edge? Is it the cloud? Is it both? It's an and I can't emphasize that enough. What we've seen from the customers greenfield or otherwise it's about extending an application or services that were never intended to live at the edge, to the edge itself, to deliver a more performant experience. And for certain control plane operations, metadata, backend operations analytics that can absolutely stay in the cloud itself. And so our role is to be a trusted partner in some of our enterprise customers' journeys. Of course, they can lean on the cloud provider in select cases, but we're an absolutely critical mode of support as you think about what are those architectures? How do you integrate the network APIs? And through our developer relations efforts, we've put a major role in helping to shape what those patterns really look like in the wild. >> When they're developing for 5G I mean, the availability of 5G of particularly you know, the high bandwidth 5G is pretty spotty right now. Mostly urban areas. How should they be thinking in the future developing an application roll out two years from now about where 5G will be at that point? >> Absolutely. I think one of the most important things in this case is the interoperability of our edge computing portfolio with both 4G and 5G. Whenever somebody asks me about the performance of 5G they ask how fast? Or for edge computing. It's always about benchmark. It's not an absolute value. It's always about benchmarking the performance to that next best alternative. What were you going to get if you didn't have edge computing in your back pocket? And so along that line of thought having the option to go either through 4G or 5G, having a mobile edge computing portfolio that works for both modes of connectivity even CAN-AM IoT is incredibly powerful. >> So it sounds like 4G is going to be with us for quite a while still? >> And I think it's an important part of the architecture. >> Yeah. >> Robert, tell us about the developer that's building these applications. Where does that individual come from? What's their persona? >> Oh, boy I think there's a number of different personas and flavors. I've seen everything from the startup in the back of a garage working hard to try to figure out what could I do for a next generation media and entertainment experience but also large enterprises. And I think a great area where we saw this was our 5G Edge Computing Challenge that we hosted last year. Believe it or not 100 submissions from over 22 countries, all building on Verizon 5G Edge. It was so exciting to see because so many different use cases across public safety, healthcare, media and entertainment. And what we found was that education is so important. A lot of developers have great ideas but if you don't understand the fundamentals of the infrastructure you get bogged down in networking and setting up your environment. And that's why we think that developer education is so important. We want to make it easy and in fact, the 5G Edge portfolio was designed in such a way that we'll abstract the complexities of the network away so you can focus on building your application and that's such a central theme and focus for how we approach the development. >> So what kind of services are you exposing via APIs? >> Absolutely, so first and foremost, as you think about 5G Edge with say AWS Wavelength, the infra there are APIs that are exposed by AWS to launch your infra, to patch your infrastructure, to automate your infrastructure. Specifically that Verizon has developed that's our network APIs. And a great example is our Edge Discovery Service. So think of this as like a service registry you've launched an application in all 17 edge zones. You would take that information, you would send it via API to the Edge Discovery Service so that for any mobile client say, you wake up one morning in Boston, you can ask the API or query, "Hey, what's the closest edge zone?" DNS isn't going to be able to figure it out. You need knowledge of the actual topology of the mobile network itself. So the API will answer. Let's say you take a little road trip 1,000 miles south to say Miami, Florida you ask that question again. It could change. So that's the workflow and how you would use the network API today. >> How'd you get into this? You're an engineer it's obvious how'd you stumble into this role? >> Well, yeah, I have a background in networks and distributed systems so I always knew I wanted to stay in the cloud somewhere. And there was a really unique opportunity at Verizon as the portfolio was being developed to really think about what this developer community looked like. And we built this all from scratch. If you look at say our Verizon 5G Edge Blog we launched it just along the timing of the actual GA of Wavelength. You look at our developer newsletter also around the time of the launch of Wavelength. So we've done a lot in such a short period and it's all been sort of organic, interacting with developers, working backwards from the customer. And so it's been a fairly new, but incredibly exciting journey. >> How will your data, architecture, data flow what will that look like in the future? How will that be different than it is sort of historically? >> When I think about customer workloads real time data architecture is an incredibly difficult thing to do. When you overlay the edge, admittedly, it gets more complicated. More places that produce the data, more places that consume data. How do you reconcile all of these environments? Maintain consistency? This is absolutely something we've been working on with the ecosystem at large. We're not going to solve this alone. We've looked at architecture patterns that we think are successful. And some of the things that we found that we believe are pretty cool this idea of taking that embedded mobile database, virtualizing it to the edge, even making it multi-tenant. And then you're producing data to one single source and simplifying how you organize and share data because all of the data being produced to that one location will be relevant to that topology. So Boston, as an example, Boston data being produced to that edge zone will only service Boston clients. So having a geo distributed footprint really does help data architectures, but at the core of all of this database, architectures, you need a compute environment that actually makes sense. That's performant, that's reliable. That's easy to use that you understand how to manage and that the edge doesn't make it any more difficult to manage. >> So are you building that? >> That's exactly what we're doing. So here at Red Hat Summit we've had the unique opportunity to continue to collaborate with our partners at Red Hat to think about how you actually use OpenShift in the context of hybrid MEC. So what have done is we've used OpenShift as is to extend what already exists to some of these new edge zones without adding in an additional layer of complexity that was unmanageable. >> So you use OpenShift so you don't have to cobble this together on your own as a full development environment and that's the role really that OpenShift plays here? >> That's exactly right. And we presented pieces of this at our re:Invent this past year and what we basically did is we said the edge needs to be inextricably linked with the cloud. And you want to be able to manage it from some seamless central pane of glass and using that OpenShift console is a great way. So what we did is we wanted to show a really geo-distributed footprint in action. We started with a Wavelength zone in Boston, the region in Northern Virginia, an outpost in the Texas area. We cobbled it all together in one cluster. So you had a whole compute mesh separated by thousands of miles all within a single cluster, single pane of glass. We take that and are starting to expand on the complexity of these architectures to overlay the network APIs we mentioned, to overlay multi-region support. So when we say you can use all 17 zones at once you actually can. >> So you've been talking about Wavelength and Outposts which are AWS products, but Microsoft and Google both have their distributed architectures as well. Where do you stand with those? Will you support those? Are you working with them? >> That's a great question. We have made announcements with Microsoft and Google but today I focus a lot on the work we do with AWS Wavelength and Outposts and continuing to work backwards from the customer and ultimately meet their needs. >> Yeah I mean, you got to start with an environment that the developers know that obviously a great developer community, you know, you see it at re:Invent. What was the reaction at re:Invent when you showed this from a developer community? >> Absolutely. Developers are excited and I think the best part is we're not the only ones talking about Wavelength not even AWS are the only ones talking about Wavelength. And to me from a developer ecosystem perspective that's when you know it's working. When you're not the one telling the best stories when others are evangelizing the power of your technology on your behalf that's when the ecosystem's starting to pick up. >> Speaking of making a bet on Outposts you know, it's somewhat limited today. I'll say it it's limited today in terms of we think it supports RDS and there's a few storage players. Is it your expectation that Outposts is going to be this essentially the cloud environment on your premises is that? >> That's a great question. I see it more as we want to expand customer choice more than ever and ultimately let the developers and architects decide. That's why I'm so bullish on this idea of hybrid MEC. Let's provide all of the options the most complicated geo distributed hybrid deployment you can imagine and automate it, make it easy. That way if you want to take away components of this architecture all you're doing is simplifying something that's already automated and fairly simple to begin with. So start with the largest problem to solve and then provide customers choice for what exactly meets their requirements their SLAs, their footprint, their network and work backwards from the customer. >> Exciting times ahead. Rob, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It's great to have you. >> Appreciate it, thanks for your time. >> Good luck. All right, thank you for watching. Keep it right there. This is Dave Vellante for Paul Gillin. We're live at Red Hat Summit 2022 from the Seaport in Boston. We'll be right back.

(upbeat intro jingle) >> 'Kay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with your Matt Morgan, Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group of VMware, CUBE alumni. Matt, great to see you. Can't wait to see you in person, but thanks for coming in remotely for the virtual now hybrid CUBE for re:Invent. >> It's good to see you too, John. Thanks for having us. You know, it's our ninth year covering re:Invented, Remember the first year we went there, it was all developers, right? >> Right. >> And reminds me of the story that you guys have with AWS, you know, VMware Cloud, and VMware with vSphere pioneered operations in IT, you know, vSphere workloads, but now you move that all in the cloud. I remember Ragu when he announced that deal with Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy, we covered it extensively. People were like "What are they doing here? This is interesting". Boy- >> Yeah, you- >> The pundits all get it wrong. Their relationship has been blossoming. It's been really powerful, take us through the history here. >> Thanks, John, I mean, you're absolutely right. We have a phenomenal relationship with Amazon Web Services. The value of our partnership has been realized by customers all over the world, in every industry, as they embrace the seamless hybrid cloud experience powered by VMware, vSphere, and of course VM-ware Cloud Stack. Of course, we've recently expanded our operations here, including Japan and the launch of the Soccer Regions. And we're fully open for business with the U.S. Federal Government with VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud. There's strong alignment across the field with new go-to-market teams on both sides and a powerful resell agreement that enables AWS sellers to take VMware Cloud on AWS and all the associated VMware services, such as VMware cloud disaster recovery, NSX vRealize Cloud Management, to their enterprise customers. And we couldn't be doing better. >> Yeah, and you brought up a lot of things there. You mentioned Outpost, mentioned Gov Cloud, you mentioned Marketplace, which means you mentioned the acronym, which is basically, I think it's called EDP Credits, which essentially the enterprise, Amazon's Salesforce working together. So, essentially full business model and technical integrations with Amazon. So, success certainly being demonstrated there. So congratulations, that being said, there's still more to do. We got this whole big wave coming on, you see the edge, you seeing multicloud, you seeing hybrid becoming the operational model, both on premises and in the cloud. And so, customers really are asking themselves "Okay, I got VMware, I got AWS Cloud, I got to secure these clouds now. I got to start putting the business model together on top of the technical architecture". You know, microservices, Kubernetes, Tansu, all the things you guys are doing, but customers want to ask you "What about securing the cloud?", this is the number one question, what's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, it's a great topic, John, at the end of the day, this is about evolving the hybrid cloud. And if you think about it, originally, the hybrid cloud was about unifying both infrastructure and operations between the on-premises world, and the public cloud world. And now what's happening, is we are seeing people embrace that in spades, and as a result of that, their Tier 1 applications are running both on-premises and in the public cloud. And with our new announced local cloud capabilities with VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost, it's leading to this whole new enterprise architecture, which we call the distributed cloud. When you look at deploying enterprise applications in a distributed cloud environment, the conversation starts with consistent networking and importantly security. So, let's talk about that for a moment. Customers are asking us "How do we secure our data when we start having infrastructure in a variety of locations? Are our applications and networks... Are they really secure when they run in these completely different environments? And importantly, when we move an application, we take it from our on-premise data center, we move it to the public cloud are the security policies... Are they moving with it? Do I need to re-architect for that?". And the real question, all of this boils down to "Are we expanding that attack surface when we move to VMware Cloud on AWS?". And so we have to come back to what do we do here to really alleviate these concerns? With data security, it's all about encryption, universal insights. We have the super root capability within our platform to ensure that everything is measured, every message from an application, every data, it's great for Chain Of Custody, Audit. Of course we have backup DR Ransomware. On the application side, of course, segmentation is super important with application centric firewalls, VPNs, tunneling, EDR, IDS, IPS. And of course, none of that matters if you have to reset everything up every time an application moves. And this is a real unique value proposition for us, it's about portability. We deliver portable security. We can move an application, the APIs are standard. You can move it up to the public cloud, your policies, your integrations, even if it's third-party integrations, they're maintained. And that really delivers the ability to say "Look, we can make sure your attack surface is not expanding, it's a controlled environment for you". And that really shrinks the risk factors associated with moving to this distributed cloud environment. >> You know, that's the really, I think the key point, I think that you brought up this infrastructure, kind of, table stakes. Which keeps rising because security's, honestly is now there's no... There's a huge... There's no perimeter. It's huge surface area. Everything has to be secured and locked down. And the big theme at re:Invent this year is data, right? So, you know, data and security all go hand in hand. And so that brings up the aspect of the edge. The edge is now booming, you seeing 5G again, you're here hearing it here at reinvent again, more and more 5G. You mentioned local services, Outpost is evolving. This is kind of the new area, and certainly, attack factor as well. So, you mentioned this whole local services. Take me through that because this becomes interesting because this is an architectural issue for enterprises to figure out, "Okay, I got to distribute a computing architecture, it's called The Cloud and multiple clouds. Now, I've got this edge, whole 'nother opening opens up the case for the architecture conversation". What's the strategy? How do you guys view the case? How do you make the case for local services? >> So, we were super excited to announce VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost. This is a local cloud as a service offering. So, let me break that down a little bit. Of course, compute at the edge is nothing new, but the problem with traditional approaches is typically edge locations may lack IT excellence. Which means there's no one there to manage the service. VMware Cloud on AWS outposts is that local cloud as a service, meaning it's fully managed and at the edge, that's a perfect fit. It's hand in glove for those types of workloads that are out, pushed all the way out, whether it's part of an agricultural deployment or an energy production facility or retail store, where there isn't that typical IT excellence. VMware cloud on AWS outposts enables customers to deploy the same Cloud instance as they're running VMware Cloud on AWS, but be able to do it out at that edge environment. And when you look at the overall value of VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost, it's about delivering a simpler, cost effective, consistent cloud experience for those on-prem environments that matches the operating model of the public cloud. Think of the places that you really want to have cloud infrastructure, where it's critical. Going back to your point on data, getting real time insights on that data, to be able to process that, we call those perishable insights. The value is the immediacy understanding that value specific to the moment it's being captured. Think about the different types of sensor environments, where data's coming off expensive equipment, that's measuring temperature and speed. Understanding that value back to the operator - really, really important. You don't have time to pipe that data up to a cloud process and send the results back down. Edge environments require that real-time stuff. So, together with AWS, we jointly deliver a fully managed service right down to the AWS hardware on which we built the VMware cloud instance. We think about where we're seeing the most interest here. You can look across all kinds of industries and use cases, and we're seeing it specifically in healthcare, out of the hospital, manufacturing for equipment monitoring, government, higher education, where those end points are typically virtualized. There are others, but these are the big ones so far. >> You know, I was just talking to an AMD executive or product marketing person on the gaming side. And they're living this right now because they're putting all the virtual collaboration in the cloud, all the data, because they have so much data and they have so much need for these special instances, whether it's GPUs, and CPUs, a mix and match. So, as instances become more special purposed, that's going to enable them to have more productivity. But then, when you have that baseline in the cloud, the edge also has processing power. So, I think people are starting to see this notion of "Okay, I'm in the cloud, but I can also have that cloud edge without moving data back to the centralized cloud and processing it at the edge with software". >> Yeah, that's true. >> This is real. >> It's super real. And the one that really resonates with customers, is one that we all understand and that's healthcare. Anytime you're in a regional environment where you're at a hospital, think of an ICU, the criticality of that data being processed, providing the insights, this is more mission critical than any other environment, because we're dealing with human lives, think about the complex compute requirements of that environment. And then look at the beauty and elegance of this system, a cloud-based system on premises, doing that compute, providing those insights, giving reality back to the clinician, so they can make those decisions. Healthcare is super, super important. And we see customers across the spectrum, looking at what's happening at the edge and embracing it, whether it's healthcare or other industries. And again, it's a perfect fit for them. >> Yeah, real quick, before we move on to what's new, I'm want to get to that, the Tansu stuff as well. What other industries are popping out? Obviously, manufacturing. What can you talk with some industries and some verticals that are really primed for this local cloud service? >> So, let's talk about manufacturing for a moment. Manufacturing is another facility oriented compute requirement that is perfectly fit, from a system and solution way like VMware cloud on AWS Outposts. Within the manufacturing environment, there's tons of very critical machines. There's inventory management, there's a combination of time management, people management, bringing it all together to ensure that process lines are moving as required, that inventory is provided at the specific moment it's needed, and to make sure that everything, especially in today's supply chain world is provided when is required. This type of capability allows an organization to bring in that sensor data, bring in that inventory data, produce applications that manage that in real time, delivering that compute. And in the manufacturing floor, again, limited IT excellence. So, this provides that capability. Another one is energy production. Think about energy production that's out in the field in North Dakota, or out on an oil rig that might be in the Gulf of Mexico. Not only are you dealing with lack of IT excellence, you're also dealing with limited connectivity. This equipment needs to be monitored and censored and the data from those sensors help drive critical decisions. And with limited connectivity, I mean, you may not even have an LTE signal, the need to do that real time is paramount, local cloud provides that. >> Yeah, and I'd also just add, because we're going to move on, but higher ED is going to be completely transformed. Well, I think that's going to be kind of like a pleat revamp. Let's get into what's new on VMware Cloud on AWS give us the update on the new things that people should know about. That's important that they should review, take us through that, what's new? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the first is the integration with the AWS console. This is a big thing that we're delivering because VMware Cloud on AWS is a native service of AWS. I have to kind of say that twice, it's a native service of AWS. And because of that, we get the same operational and commerce experience for VMware Cloud instances as customers do with traditional AWS services. This means customers now have a choice between AWS centric operating model, which is highly relevant to DevOps and developers, or VMware centric operating model, which is very relevant to traditional operators, and IT users. VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud is expanded to the U.S., East Virginia Region, and achieved aisle five certification. This new region will make the service more relevant for the Eastern Seaboard where much of the Federal Government resides. And of course with aisle five, it opens up VMware Cloud on AWS to the U.S. military and defense contractors, which is huge because there's massive cloud transformation contracts currently in play. And of course, VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud provides the most secure enterprise cloud for those DOD customers, especially when they focus on those critical Tier 1 workloads. >> It's been three years since the GA of the VMware cloud on AWS, has been earlier, since you announced it> You're pumping on all cylinders, as we had predicted, others didn't, just FYI for the folks watching. What's the final vibe? End the segment with your view of what's going on with VMware Cloud on AWS? What's the bumper sticker? >> So, at the end of the day, every customer is looking to migrate and modernize their workloads. And VMWare cloud gives them that capability to do it faster than anyone else. Customers take their applications, tier 1 applications, move it to that secure distributed cloud construct, that idea of having VMware Cloud on AWS, sharing all those security policies, all of that consistent infrastructure and operations. And then they can modernize those applications, using all of those cloud services and the ability to use Tansu to containerize where applicable. We're excited about these capabilities, and our customers are adopting it faster each and every year. And we're thrilled about the traction we're had. And we're thrilled about the partnership we have with Amazon Web Services. So, lots more to come in this space. >> Lot of great stuff, people moving up the stack on the cloud, you're seeing more refactoring in the cloud. Matt Morgan, great to see you. We've been talking 'about this for years on theCUBE. Great to come on and give some insights. All happening. Infrastructure is code. And everyone's winning with containers and microservices. So, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks a lot, John, take care. >> Okay, Matt Morgan, the VP of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group of VMware. This theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat outro jingle)

(innovative music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. My name is Dave Vellante, and we are running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year. Hybrid as in physical, not a lot of that going on this year. But we're here with the AWS ecosystem, AWS, and special thanks to AMD for supporting this year's editorial coverage of the event. We've got two live sets, two remote studios, more than a hundred guests on the program. We're going really deep, as we enter the next decade of Cloud innovation. We're super excited to be joined by Danny Allan, who's the Chief Technology Officer at Veeam, and James Kirschner who's the Engineering Director for Amazon S3. Guys, great to see you. >> Great to see you as well, Dave. >> Thanks for having me. >> So let's kick things off. Veeam and AWS, you guys have been partnering for a long time. Danny, where's the focus at this point in time? What are customers telling you they want you to solve for? And then maybe James, you can weigh in on the problems that customers are facing, and the opportunities that they see ahead. But Danny, why don't you start us off? >> Sure. So we hear from our customers a lot that they certainly want the solutions that Veeam is bringing to market, in terms of data protection. But one of the things that we're hearing is they want to move to Cloud. And so there's a number of capabilities that they're asking us for help with. Things like S3, things like EC2, and RDS. And so over the last, I'll say four or five years, we've been doing more and more together with AWS in, I'll say, two big categories. One is, how do we help them send their data to the Cloud? And we've done that in a very significant way. We support obviously tiering data into S3, but not just S3. We support S3, and S3 Glacier, and S3 Glacier Deep Archive. And more importantly than ever, we do it with immutability because customers are asking for security. So a big category of what we're working on is making sure that we can store data and we can do it securely. Second big category that we get asked about is "Help us to protect the Cloud-Native Workloads." So they have workloads running in EC2 and RDS, and EFS, and EKS, and all these different services knowing Cloud-Native Data Protection. So we're very focused on solving those problems for our customers. >> You know, James, it's interesting. I was out at the 15th anniversary of S3 in Seattle, in September. I was talking to Mai-Lan. Remember we used to talk about gigabytes and terabytes, but things have changed quite dramatically, haven't they? What's your take on this topic? >> Well, they sure have. We've seen the exponential growth data worldwide and that's made managing backups more difficult than ever before. We're seeing traditional methods like tape libraries and secondary sites fall behind, and many organizations are moving more and more of their workloads to the Cloud. They're extending backup targets to the Cloud as well. AWS offers the most storage services, data transfer methods and networking options with unmatched durability, security and affordability. And customers who are moving their Veeam Backups to AWS, they get all those benefits with a cost-effective offsite storage platform. Providing physical separation from on-premises primary data with pay-as-you-go economics, no upfront fees or capital investments, and near zero overhead to manage. AWS and APM partners like Veeam are helping to build secure, efficient, cost-effective backup, and restore solutions using the products you know and trust with the scale and reliability of the AWS Cloud. >> So thank you for that. Danny, I remember I was way back in the old days, it was a VeeamON physical event. And I remember kicking around and seeing this company called Kasten. And I was really interested in like, "You protect the containers, aren't they ephemeral?" And we started to sort of chit-chat about how that's going to change and what their vision was. Well, back in 2020, you purchased Kasten, you formed the Veeam KBU- the Kubernetes Business Unit. What was the rationale behind that acquisition? And then James, I'm going to get you to talk a little bit about modern apps. But Danny, start with the rationale behind the Kasten acquisition. >> Well, one of the things that we certainly believe is that the next generation of infrastructure is going to be based on containers, and there's a whole number of reasons for that. Things like scalability and portability. And there's a number of significant value-adds. So back in October of last year in 2020, as you mentioned, we acquired Kasten. And since that time we've been working through Kasten and from Veeam to add more capabilities and services around AWS. For example, we supported the Bottlerocket launch they just did and actually EKS anywhere. And so we're very focused on making sure that our customers can protect their data no matter whether it's a Kubernetes cluster, or whether it's on-premises in a data center, or if it's running up in the Cloud in EC2. We give this consistent data management experience and including, of course, the next generation of infrastructure that we believe will be based on containers. >> Yeah. You know, James, I've always noted to our audience that, "Hey AWS, they provide rich set of primitives and API's that ISV's like Veeam can take advantage of it." But I wonder if you could talk about your perspective, maybe what you're seeing in the ecosystem, maybe comment on what Veeam's doing. Specifically containers, app modernization in the Cloud, the evolution of S3 to support all these trends. >> Yeah. Well, it's been great to see Veeam expands for more and more AWS services to help joint customers protect their data. Especially since Veeam stores their data in Amazon S3 storage classes. And over the last 15 years, S3 has helped companies around the world optimize their work, so I'd be happy to share some insights into that with you today. When you think about S3 well, you can find virtually every use case across all industries running on S3. That ranges from backup, to (indistinct) data, to machine learning models, the list goes on and on. And one of the reasons is because S3 provides industry leading scalability, availability, durability, security, and performance. Those are characteristics customers want. To give you some examples, S3 stores exabytes the data across millions of hard drives, trillions of objects around the world and regularly peaks at millions of requests per second. S3 can process in a single region over 60 terabytes a second. So in summary, it's a very powerful storage offering. >> Yeah, indeed. So you guys always talking about, you know, working backwards, the customer centricity. I think frankly that AWS sort of change the culture of the entire industry. So, let's talk about customers. Danny do you have an example of a joint customer? Maybe how you're partnering with AWS to try to address some of the challenges in data protection. What are customers is seeing today? >> Well, we're certainly seeing that migration towards the Cloud as James alluded today. And actually, if we're talking about Kubernetes, actually there's a customer that I know of right now, Leidos. They're a fortune 500 Information Technology Company. They deal in the engineering and technology services space, and focus on highly regulated industry. Things like defense and intelligence in the civil space. And healthcare in these very regulated industries. Anyway, they decided to make a big investment in continuous integration, continuous development. There's a segment of the industry called portable DevSecOps, and they wanted to build infrastructure as code that they could deploy services, not in days or weeks or months, but they literally wanted to deploy their services in hours. And so they came to us, and with Kasten K10 actually around Kubernetes, they created a service that could enable them to do that. So they could be fully compliant, and they could deliver the services in, like I say, hours, not days or months. And they did that all while delivering the same security that they need in a cost-effective way. So it's been a great partnership, and that's just one example. We see these all the time, customers who want to combine the power of Kubernetes with the scale of the Cloud from AWS, with the data protection that comes from Veeam. >> Yes, so James, you know at AWS you don't get dinner if you don't have a customer example. So maybe you could share one with us. >> Yeah. We do love working backwards from customers and Danny, I loved hearing that story. One customer leveraging Veeam and AWS is Maritz. Maritz provides business performance solutions that connect people to results, ensuring brands deliver on their customer promises and drive growth. Recently Maritz moved over a thousand VM's and petabytes of data into AWS, using Veeam. Veeam Backup for AWS enables Maritz to protect their Amazon EC2 instances with the backup of the data in the Amazon S3 for highly available, cost-effective, long-term storage. >> You know, one of the hallmarks of Cloud is strong ecosystem. I see a lot of companies doing sort of their own version of Cloud. I always ask "What's the partner ecosystem look like?" Because that is a fundamental requirement, in my view anyway, and attribute. And so, a big part of that, Danny, is channel partners. And you have a 100 percent channel model. And I wonder if we could talk about your strategy in that regard. Why is it important to be all channel? How to consulting partners fit into the strategy? And then James, I'm going to ask you what's the fit with the AWS ecosystem. But Danny, let's start with you. >> Sure, so one of the things that we've learned, we're 15 years old as well, actually. I think we're about two months older, or younger I should say than AWS. I think their birthday was in August, ours was in October. But over that 15 years, we've learned that our customers enjoy the services, and support, and expertise that comes from the channel. And so we've always been a 100 percent channel company. And so one of the things that we've done with AWS is to make sure that our customers can purchase both how and when they want through the AWS marketplace. They have a program called Consulting Partners Private Agreements, or CPPO, I think is what it's known as. And that allows our customers to consume through the channel, but with the terms and bill that they associate with AWS. And so it's a new route-to-market for us, but we continue to partner with AWS in the channel programs as well. >> Yeah. The marketplace is really impressive. James, I wonder if you could maybe add in a little bit. >> Yeah. I think Danny said it well, AWS marketplace is a sales channel for ISV's and consulting partners. It lets them sell their solutions to AWS customers. And we focus on making it really easy for customers to find, buy, deploy, and manage software solutions, including software as a service in just a matter of minutes. >> Danny, you mentioned you're 15 years old. The first time I mean, the name Veeam. The brilliance of tying it to virtualization and VMware. I was at a VMUG when I first met you guys and saw your ascendancy tied to virtualization. And now you're obviously leaning heavily into the Cloud. You and I have talked a lot about the difference between just wrapping your stack in a container and hosting it in the Cloud versus actually taking advantage of Cloud-Native Services to drive further innovation. So my question to you is, where does Veeam fit on that spectrum, and specifically what Cloud-Native Services are you leveraging on AWS? And maybe what have been some outcomes of those efforts, if in fact that's what you're doing? And then James, I have a follow-up for you. >> Sure. So the, the outcomes clearly are just more success, more scale, more security. All the things that James is alluding to, that's true for Veeam it's true for our customers. And so if you look at the Cloud-Native capabilities that we protect today, certainly it began with EC2. So we run things in the Cloud in EC2, and we wanted to protect that. But we've gone well beyond that today, we protect RDS, we protect EFS- Elastic File Services. We talked about EKS- Elastic Kubernetes Services, ECS. So there's a number of these different services that we protect, and we're going to continue to expand on that. But the interesting thing is in all of these, Dave, when we do data protection, we're sending it to S3, and we're doing all of that management, and tiering, and security that our customers know and love and expect from Veeam. And so you'll continue to see these types of capabilities coming from Veeam as we go forward. >> Thank you for that. So James, as we know S3- very first service offered in 2006 on the AWS' Cloud. As I said, theCUBE was out in Seattle, September. It was a great, you know, a little semi-hybrid event. But so over the decade and a half, you really expanded the offerings quite dramatically. Including a number of, you got on-premise services things, like Outposts. You got other services with "Wintery" names. How have you seen partners take advantage of those services? Is there anything you can highlight maybe that Veeam is doing that's notable? What can you share? >> Yeah, I think you're right to call out that growth. We have a very broad and rich set of features and services, and we keep growing that. Almost every day there's a new release coming out, so it can be hard to keep up with. And Veeam has really been listening and innovating to support our joint customers. Like Danny called out a number of the ways in which they've expanded their support. Within Amazon S3, I want to call out their support for our infrequent access, infrequent access One-Zone, Glacier, and Glacier Deep Archive Storage Classes. And they also support other AWS storage services like AWS Outposts, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS Snowball Edge, and the Cold-themed storage offerings. So absolutely a broad set of support there. >> Yeah. There's those, winter is coming. Okay, great guys, we're going to leave it there. Danny, James, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. Really good to see you guys. >> Good to see you as well, thank you. >> All right >> Thanks for having us. >> You're very welcome. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of 2021 AWS re:Invent, keep it right there for more action on theCUBE, your leader in hybrid tech event coverage, right back. (uplifting music)

(upbeat intro jingle) >> 'Kay, welcome back everyone to theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE, with your Matt Morgan, Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group of VMware, CUBE alumni. Matt, great to see you. Can't wait to see you in person, but thanks for coming in remotely for the virtual now hybrid CUBE for re:Invent. >> It's good to see you too, John. Thanks for having us. You know, it's our ninth year covering re:Invented, Remember the first year we went there, it was all developers, right? >> Right. >> And reminds me of the story that you guys have with AWS, you know, VMware Cloud, and VMware with vSphere pioneered operations in IT, you know, vSphere workloads, but now you move that all in the cloud. I remember Ragu when he announced that deal with Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy, we covered it extensively. People were like "What are they doing here? This is interesting". Boy- >> Yeah, you- >> The pundits all get it wrong. Their relationship has been blossoming. It's been really powerful, take us through the history here. >> Thanks, John, I mean, you're absolutely right. We have a phenomenal relationship with Amazon Web Services. The value of our partnership has been realized by customers all over the world, in every industry, as they embrace the seamless hybrid cloud experience powered by VMware, vSphere, and of course VM-ware Cloud Stack. Of course, we've recently expanded our operations here, including Japan and the launch of the Soccer Regions. And we're fully open for business with the U.S. Federal Government with VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud. There's strong alignment across the field with new go-to-market teams on both sides and a powerful resell agreement that enables AWS sellers to take VMware Cloud on AWS and all the associated VMware services, such as VMware cloud disaster recovery, NSX vRealize Cloud Management, to their enterprise customers. And we couldn't be doing better. >> Yeah, and you brought up a lot of things there. You mentioned Outpost, mentioned Gov Cloud, you mentioned Marketplace, which means you mentioned the acronym, which is basically, I think it's called EDP Credits, which essentially the enterprise, Amazon's Salesforce working together. So, essentially full business model and technical integrations with Amazon. So, success certainly being demonstrated there. So congratulations, that being said, there's still more to do. We got this whole big wave coming on, you see the edge, you seeing multicloud, you seeing hybrid becoming the operational model, both on premises and in the cloud. And so, customers really are asking themselves "Okay, I got VMware, I got AWS Cloud, I got to secure these clouds now. I got to start putting the business model together on top of the technical architecture". You know, microservices, Kubernetes, Tansu, all the things you guys are doing, but customers want to ask you "What about securing the cloud?", this is the number one question, what's your reaction to that? >> Yeah, it's a great topic, John, at the end of the day, this is about evolving the hybrid cloud. And if you think about it, originally, the hybrid cloud was about unifying both infrastructure and operations between the on-premises world, and the public cloud world. And now what's happening, is we are seeing people embrace that in spades, and as a result of that, their Tier 1 applications are running both on-premises and in the public cloud. And with our new announced local cloud capabilities with VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost, it's leading to this whole new enterprise architecture, which we call the distributed cloud. When you look at deploying enterprise applications in a distributed cloud environment, the conversation starts with consistent networking and importantly security. So, let's talk about that for a moment. Customers are asking us "How do we secure our data when we start having infrastructure in a variety of locations? Are our applications and networks... Are they really secure when they run in these completely different environments? And importantly, when we move an application, we take it from our on-premise data center, we move it to the public cloud are the security policies... Are they moving with it? Do I need to re-architect for that?". And the real question, all of this boils down to "Are we expanding that attack surface when we move to VMware Cloud on AWS?". And so we have to come back to what do we do here to really alleviate these concerns? With data security, it's all about encryption, universal insights. We have the super root capability within our platform to ensure that everything is measured, every message from an application, every data, it's great for Chain Of Custody, Audit. Of course we have backup DR Ransomware. On the application side, of course, segmentation is super important with application centric firewalls, VPNs, tunneling, EDR, IDS, IPS. And of course, none of that matters if you have to reset everything up every time an application moves. And this is a real unique value proposition for us, it's about portability. We deliver portable security. We can move an application, the APIs are standard. You can move it up to the public cloud, your policies, your integrations, even if it's third-party integrations, they're maintained. And that really delivers the ability to say "Look, we can make sure your attack surface is not expanding, it's a controlled environment for you". And that really shrinks the risk factors associated with moving to this distributed cloud environment. >> You know, that's the really, I think the key point, I think that you brought up this infrastructure, kind of, table stakes. Which keeps rising because security's, honestly is now there's no... There's a huge... There's no perimeter. It's huge surface area. Everything has to be secured and locked down. And the big theme at re:Invent this year is data, right? So, you know, data and security all go hand in hand. And so that brings up the aspect of the edge. The edge is now booming, you seeing 5G again, you're here hearing it here at reinvent again, more and more 5G. You mentioned local services, Outpost is evolving. This is kind of the new area, and certainly, attack factor as well. So, you mentioned this whole local services. Take me through that because this becomes interesting because this is an architectural issue for enterprises to figure out, "Okay, I got to distribute a computing architecture, it's called The Cloud and multiple clouds. Now, I've got this edge, whole 'nother opening opens up the case for the architecture conversation". What's the strategy? How do you guys view the case? How do you make the case for local services? >> So, we were super excited to announce VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost. This is a local cloud as a service offering. So, let me break that down a little bit. Of course, compute at the edge is nothing new, but the problem with traditional approaches is typically edge locations may lack IT excellence. Which means there's no one there to manage the service. VMware Cloud on AWS outposts is that local cloud as a service, meaning it's fully managed and at the edge, that's a perfect fit. It's hand in glove for those types of workloads that are out, pushed all the way out, whether it's part of an agricultural deployment or an energy production facility or retail store, where there isn't that typical IT excellence. VMware cloud on AWS outposts enables customers to deploy the same Cloud instance as they're running VMware Cloud on AWS, but be able to do it out at that edge environment. And when you look at the overall value of VMware Cloud on AWS Outpost, it's about delivering a simpler, cost effective, consistent cloud experience for those on-prem environments that matches the operating model of the public cloud. Think of the places that you really want to have cloud infrastructure, where it's critical. Going back to your point on data, getting real time insights on that data, to be able to process that, we call those perishable insights. The value is the immediacy understanding that value specific to the moment it's being captured. Think about the different types of sensor environments, where data's coming off expensive equipment, that's measuring temperature and speed. Understanding that value back to the operator - really, really important. You don't have time to pipe that data up to a cloud process and send the results back down. Edge environments require that real-time stuff. So, together with AWS, we jointly deliver a fully managed service right down to the AWS hardware on which we built the VMware cloud instance. We think about where we're seeing the most interest here. You can look across all kinds of industries and use cases, and we're seeing it specifically in healthcare, out of the hospital, manufacturing for equipment monitoring, government, higher education, where those end points are typically virtualized. There are others, but these are the big ones so far. >> You know, I was just talking to an AMD executive or product marketing person on the gaming side. And they're living this right now because they're putting all the virtual collaboration in the cloud, all the data, because they have so much data and they have so much need for these special instances, whether it's GPUs, and CPUs, a mix and match. So, as instances become more special purposed, that's going to enable them to have more productivity. But then, when you have that baseline in the cloud, the edge also has processing power. So, I think people are starting to see this notion of "Okay, I'm in the cloud, but I can also have that cloud edge without moving data back to the centralized cloud and processing it at the edge with software". >> Yeah, that's true. >> This is real. >> It's super real. And the one that really resonates with customers, is one that we all understand and that's healthcare. Anytime you're in a regional environment where you're at a hospital, think of an ICU, the criticality of that data being processed, providing the insights, this is more mission critical than any other environment, because we're dealing with human lives, think about the complex compute requirements of that environment. And then look at the beauty and elegance of this system, a cloud-based system on premises, doing that compute, providing those insights, giving reality back to the clinician, so they can make those decisions. Healthcare is super, super important. And we see customers across the spectrum, looking at what's happening at the edge and embracing it, whether it's healthcare or other industries. And again, it's a perfect fit for them. >> Yeah, real quick, before we move on to what's new, I'm want to get to that, the Tansu stuff as well. What other industries are popping out? Obviously, manufacturing. What can you talk with some industries and some verticals that are really primed for this local cloud service? >> So, let's talk about manufacturing for a moment. Manufacturing is another facility oriented compute requirement that is perfectly fit, from a system and solution way like VMware cloud on AWS Outposts. Within the manufacturing environment, there's tons of very critical machines. There's inventory management, there's a combination of time management, people management, bringing it all together to ensure that process lines are moving as required, that inventory is provided at the specific moment it's needed, and to make sure that everything, especially in today's supply chain world is provided when is required. This type of capability allows an organization to bring in that sensor data, bring in that inventory data, produce applications that manage that in real time, delivering that compute. And in the manufacturing floor, again, limited IT excellence. So, this provides that capability. Another one is energy production. Think about energy production that's out in the field in North Dakota, or out on an oil rig that might be in the Gulf of Mexico. Not only are you dealing with lack of IT excellence, you're also dealing with limited connectivity. This equipment needs to be monitored and censored and the data from those sensors help drive critical decisions. And with limited connectivity, I mean, you may not even have an LTE signal, the need to do that real time is paramount, local cloud provides that. >> Yeah, and I'd also just add, because we're going to move on, but higher ED is going to be completely transformed. Well, I think that's going to be kind of like a pleat revamp. Let's get into what's new on VMware Cloud on AWS give us the update on the new things that people should know about. That's important that they should review, take us through that, what's new? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, the first is the integration with the AWS console. This is a big thing that we're delivering because VMware Cloud on AWS is a native service of AWS. I have to kind of say that twice, it's a native service of AWS. And because of that, we get the same operational and commerce experience for VMware Cloud instances as customers do with traditional AWS services. This means customers now have a choice between AWS centric operating model, which is highly relevant to DevOps and developers, or VMware centric operating model, which is very relevant to traditional operators, and IT users. VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud is expanded to the U.S., East Virginia Region, and achieved aisle five certification. This new region will make the service more relevant for the Eastern Seaboard where much of the Federal Government resides. And of course with aisle five, it opens up VMware Cloud on AWS to the U.S. military and defense contractors, which is huge because there's massive cloud transformation contracts currently in play. And of course, VMware Cloud on AWS Gov Cloud provides the most secure enterprise cloud for those DOD customers, especially when they focus on those critical Tier 1 workloads. >> It's been three years since the GA of the VMware cloud on AWS, has been earlier, since you announced it> You're pumping on all cylinders, as we had predicted, others didn't, just FYI for the folks watching. What's the final vibe? End the segment with your view of what's going on with VMware Cloud on AWS? What's the bumper sticker? >> So, at the end of the day, every customer is looking to migrate and modernize their workloads. And VMWare cloud gives them that capability to do it faster than anyone else. Customers take their applications, tier 1 applications, move it to that secure distributed cloud construct, that idea of having VMware Cloud on AWS, sharing all those security policies, all of that consistent infrastructure and operations. And then they can modernize those applications, using all of those cloud services and the ability to use Tansu to containerize where applicable. We're excited about these capabilities, and our customers are adopting it faster each and every year. And we're thrilled about the traction we're had. And we're thrilled about the partnership we have with Amazon Web Services. So, lots more to come in this space. >> Lot of great stuff, people moving up the stack on the cloud, you're seeing more refactoring in the cloud. Matt Morgan, great to see you. We've been talking 'about this for years on theCUBE. Great to come on and give some insights. All happening. Infrastructure is code. And everyone's winning with containers and microservices. So, great stuff. Thanks for coming on. >> Thanks a lot, John, take care. >> Okay, Matt Morgan, the VP of Cloud Infrastructure Business Group of VMware. This theCUBE's coverage of AWS re:Invent, 2021. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (upbeat outro jingle)

(bright music) (logo whooshing) >> Welcome everyone to theCUBEs continuing coverage of AWS 2021. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We are excited to be running one of the industry's most important and largest hybrid tech events of the year with AWS and its ecosystem partners. We have two live sets, two remote studios, we've got over a hundred guests on the program, and we're going to be talking about the next decade of cloud innovation. We are pleased to welcome back one of our alumni to the program, Rob Lee, the CTO of Pure Storage. Rob, thank you so much for joining us today. >> Good to see you again, Lisa, and thanks for having me. >> Likewise and I was stalking you on LinkedIn. Looks like you've got a promotion since I last saw you. Congratulations >> Thank you. >> on your appointment as a CTO. >> No, thank you very much. Very excited to be taking the reins and for all the great stuff that's ahead of us. >> Lot of great stuff, I'm sure. I also saw that once again, Pure has been named a leader in several gartner magic quadrants for primary storage, for distributed file storage, and object storage. Lots of great things continuing to go on from the orange side. Let's talk about hybrid. I've seen so much transformation and acceleration in the last 20 plus months, but I'd love to see what you guys are seeing with respect to your customers and their hybrid cloud strategies. What problems are they in this dynamic day and age are they looking to solve? >> Yeah, absolutely. I think, all in all, I think, you know, customers are definitely maturing in their understanding and approach to all things around cloud. And I think when it comes to their approach towards hybrid cloud, one of the things that we're seeing is that customers are really, you know, focusing extra hard and just trying to make sure that they're making the best use of all their IT tools. And what that means is, you know, not just looking at hybrid cloud as a way to connect from on-prem to the cloud, but really being able to make use of and make the most use out of each, you know, each of the services and capabilities of the environments that they're operating in. And so a lot of times that means, you know, commonality in how they're operating, whether it's on-premise or in cloud, it means the flexibility that that commonality allows them in terms of planning and optionality to move parts of their application or environments between premise and cloud. You know, and I think overall, you know, we look at this as, you know, really a couple specific forces that customers are looking for. One is, you know, I think they're looking for ways to bring a lot more of the operating model and what they're used to in the cloud, into their own data center. And at the same time, they're looking to be able to bridge more of how they operate the applications they're powering and running in their own data centers today and be able to bridge and bring those into the cloud environments. And then lastly, I'd say that, you know, as customers, I think, you know, today are kind of one foot in their more traditional application environments and the other foot largely planted in developing and building some of their newer applications built on cloud native technologies and architectures driven by containers and Kubernetes, you know, a big focus area for customers, whether it's on-prem or in cloud or increasingly hybrid is, you know, supporting and enabling those cloud native application development projects. And that's certainly an area that you've seen Pure focus in as well. And so I think it's really those three things. One is customers looking for ways to bring more of the cloud model into their data center, two is being able to bring more of what they're running in their data center into the cloud today, and then three is building their new stuff and increasingly planning to run that across multiple environments, prem, cloud, and across clouds. >> So, Rob, talk to me about where Pure fits in the hybrid cloud landscape that your customers are facing in this interesting time we're living in. >> Yeah, absolutely. You know, we're really focused on meeting customer's needs in all three of the areas that I just articulated and so this starts with bringing more of the cloud operating model into customers' data centers. And, you know, we start by focusing on, you know, automation, simplicity of management, delivering infrastructure as code, a lot of the attributes that customers are used to in a cloud environment. In many ways, as you know, this is a natural evolution of where Pure has been all along. We started by bringing a lot of the consumer-like simplicity into our products and enterprise data centers. And now, we're just kind of expanding that to bring more of the cloud simplicity in. You know, we're also, this is an area where we're working with our public cloud partners such as AWS in embracing their management models. And so you saw, you know, you saw us do this as a storage launch partner for AWS Outposts and that activity is certainly continuing on. So customers that are looking for cloud-like management, whether they want to build that themselves and customize it to their needs or whether they want to simply use cloud providers management plans and extend those onto their premise, have both options to do that. You know, we're also, as you know, very committed to helping customers be able to move or bridge their traditional applications from their data center into the public cloud environments through products like Cloud Block Store. This is an area where we've helped numerous customers, you know, take the existing applications and more importantly, the processes and how the environments are set up and run that they're used to running in their data center production environments bridge those now into public cloud environments. And whether that's in AWS or in Microsoft Azure as well. And then thirdly with Portworx, right? This is where, you know, we're really focused on helping customers, not just by providing them with the infrastructure they need to build their containerized cloud native applications on, but then also marrying with that infrastructure, that storage infrastructure, the data flow operations such as backup, TR, migration that go along with that storage infrastructure, as well as now application management capabilities, which we recently announced during our launch event in September with Portworx Data Services. So really a lot of activities going on across the board, but I would say definitely focused on those three key areas that we see customers really looking to crack as they, I would say balance the cloud environments and their data center environments in this hybrid world. >> And I'm curious what you're saying, you know, the focus being on data. >> Customers, you know, definitely recognize the data is their lifeblood is kind of, you know, contains a lot of the, you know, the value that they're looking to extract, whether it's in a competitive advantage, whether it's in better understanding their customers, you know, and or whether it's in product development, faster time to market. I think that, you know, we're definitely seeing more of an elevated realization and appreciation for not just how valuable that it is, but, you know, how much gravity it holds, right? You know, customers that are realizing, "Hey, if I'm collecting all this data in my on-prem location, maybe it's not quite that feasible or sensible to ship all that data into a public cloud environment to process. Maybe I need to kind of look at how I build my hybrid strategy around data being generated here, services living over here, and how do I bridge those two, you know, two locations." I think you add on top of that, you know, newer, I would say realization of security and data governance, data privacy concerns. And that certainly has customers, I think, you know, thinking a lot more intently about, you know, their data management, not just their data collection and data processing and analysis strategy, but their overall data managements, governance, and security strategies. >> Yeah, we've talked a lot about security in this interesting time that we're living in. The threat landscape has changed massively. Ransomware is a household word and it's a matter of when versus if. As customers are looking at these challenges that they're combating, how are you helping them address those data security concerns as they know that, you know, we've got this work from anywhere that's hybrid work environment, that's going to process for probably some time, but that security and ensuring that the data that's driving the revenue chain is secure and accessible, but protected no matter where it is? >> Yeah, absolutely. And I think you said it best when you said it's a matter of when, not if, right? And I think, you know, we're really focused on helping customers plan for and have, you know, plan for it and have a very quick reaction remediation strategy, right? So, you know, customers that I would say historically have focused on perimeter security have focused on preventing an attack, and that's great, and you need to do that, but you also need to plan for, hey, if something happens where, you know, as we just said, when something happens, what is your strategy for remediating that, what is your strategy for getting back online very quickly? And so this is an area where, you know, we've helped countless customers, you know, form robust strategies for, you know, true disaster recovery from a security or ransomware since. We do this by through our safe mode features, which are available across all of our products. And, you know, quite simply, this is our capability to take read-only snapshots and then couple them with a heightened level of security that effectively locks these snapshots down and takes the control of the snapshots away from not just customer admins, but potential ransomware or malware, right? You know, if you look at the most recent ransomware attacks that have hit the industry, they've gotten more and more sophisticated where the first action, a lot of these ransomware pieces of software taking are going after the backups. They go after the backups first and they take down the production environment. Well, we stopped that chain or in the security world what's called the kill chain, we stopped that chain right at the first step by protecting those backups in a way that, you know, no customer admin, whether it's a true admin, a malicious admin, or a piece of software, a malware that's acting as an admin, has the ability to remove that backup. And, you know, that's a capability that's actually become one of our most popular and most quickly adopted features across the portfolio. >> That's key. I saw that. I was reading some reports recently about the focus of ransomware on backups and the fact that you talked about it, it's becoming more sophisticated. It's also becoming more personal. So as data volumes continue to grow and companies continue to depend on data as competitive advantage differentiators and, of course, a source of driving revenue, ensuring that the backups are protected, and the ability to recover quickly is there is that is table stakes, I imagine for any organization, regardless of industry. >> Absolutely, and I think, you know, I think overall, if we look at just the state of data protection, whether it's protecting against security threats or whether it's protecting against, you know, infrastructure failures or whatnot, I would say that the state of data protection has evolved considerably over the last five years, right? You go back 5, 10 years and people are really fixated on, "Hey, how quickly can I back here? How quickly can I back this environment up, and how can I do it in a most cost-effective manner?" Now people are much more focused on, "Hey, when something goes wrong, whether it's a ransomware attack, whether it's a hurricane that takes out a data center, I don't really care what it is." When something goes wrong, how quickly can I get back online because chances are, you know, every customer now is running an online service, right? Chances are, you've got customers waiting for you. You've got SLAs, you've got transactions that can't complete if you don't get this environment back up. And we've seen this, you know, throughout the industry over the last couple of years. And so, you know, I think that maturing understanding of what true data protection is is something that has A, driven, you know, a new approach from customers to and a new focus on this area of their infrastructure. And B I think it is also, you know, found a new place for, you know, performance and reliability, but really all of it, the properties of, you know, Pures products in this space. >> Last question, Rob, for you, give me an example, you can just mention it by industry or even by use case of a joint AWS Pure customer where you're really helping them create a very successful enterprise-grade hybrid cloud environment? >> Yeah, no, absolutely. You know, so we've got countless customers that, you know, I could point to. You know, I think one that I would or one space that we're particularly successful in that I would highlight are, you know, SAS companies, right? So companies that are, you know, are building modern SAS applications. And in one particular example I can think of is, you know, a gaming platform, right? So this is a company that is building out a scale-out environment, you know, is a very rapidly growing startup. And certainly is looking to AWS, looking to the public cloud environments, you know, as a great place to scale. But at the same time, you know, needs more capabilities than, you know, are available in the container storage for, you know, infrastructure that was available in the public cloud environment. They need more capabilities to be able to offer this global service. They need more capabilities to, you know, really provide the 24 by 7 by 365 around the world service that they have, especially dealing with high load bursts in different GEOS and just a very, very dynamic global environment. And so this is an area where, you know, we've been able to, you know, help the customer with Portworx. Be able to provide these capabilities by augmenting that AWS or the cloud environment is able to offer, you know, with the storage level replication and high availability and all of the enterprise capabilities, autoscaling, performance management, all the capabilities that they need to be able to bridge the service across multiple regions, multiple environments, and, you know, potentially over time, you know, on-premise data center locations as well. So that's just one of many examples, you know, but I think that's a great example where, you know, as customers are starting out, the public cloud is a great place to kind of get started. But then as you scale, whether it's because of bursty load, whether it's because of a data volume, whether it's because of compute volume and capacity, you know, customers are looking for either more capabilities, you know, more connectivity to other sites, potentially other cloud environments or data center environments. And that's where a more environment or cloud agnostic infrastructure layer such as Portworx is able to provide comes in very handy. >> Got it. Rob, thanks so much for joining me on the program today at re:Invent, talking about the Pure AWS relationship, what's going on there and how you're helping customers navigate, and then a very fast-paced, accelerating hybrid world. We appreciate you coming back on the program. >> Great, thanks for having me. Good to see you again. >> Likewise. Good to see you too. Per Rob Lee, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBES continuous coverage of AWS re:Invent 2021. (calm music)

(bright music) >> Hello, everyone, and welcome to this CUBE video exclusive. This is Dave Vellante, and as I've said many times what people sometimes forget is Oracle's chairman is also its CTO, and he understands and appreciates the importance of engineering. It's the lifeblood of tech innovation, and Oracle continues to spend money on R and D. Over the past decade, the company has evolved its Exadata platform by investing in core infrastructure technology. For example, Oracle initially used InfiniBand, which in and of itself was a technical challenge to exploit for higher performance. That was an engineering innovation, and now it's moving to RoCE to try and deliver best of breed performance by today's standards. We've seen Oracle invest in machine intelligence for analytics. It's converged OLTB and mixed workloads. It's driving automation functions into its Exadata platform for things like indexing. The point is we've seen a consistent cadence of improvements with each generation of Exadata, and it's no secret that Oracle likes to brag about the results of its investments. At its heart, Oracle develops database software and databases have to run fast and be rock solid. So Oracle loves to throw around impressive numbers, like 27 million AKI ops, more than a terabyte per second for analytics scans, running it more than a terabyte per second. Look, Oracle's objective is to build the best database platform and convince its customers to run on Oracle, instead of doing it themselves or in some other cloud. And because the company owns the full stack, Oracle has a high degree of control over how to optimize the stack for its database. So this is how Oracle intends to compete with Exadata, Exadata Cloud@Customer and other products, like ZDLRA against AWS Outposts, Azure Arc and do it yourself solutions. And with me, to talk about Oracle's latest innovation with its Exadata X9M announcement is Juan Loaiza, who's the Executive Vice President of Mission Critical Database Technologies at Oracle. Juan, thanks for coming on theCUBE, always good to see you, man. >> Thanks for having me, Dave. It's great to be here. >> All right, let's get right into it and start with the news. Can you give us a quick overview of the X9M announcement today? >> Yeah, glad to. So, we've had Exadata on the market for a little over a dozen years, and every year, as you mentioned, we make it better and better. And so this year we're introducing our X9M family of products, and as usual, we're making it better. We're making it better across all the different dimensions for OLTP, for analytics, lower costs, higher IOPs, higher throughputs, more capacity, so it's better all around, and we're introducing a lot of new software features as well that make it easier to use, more manageable, more highly available, more options for customers, more isolation, more workload consolidation, so it's our usual better and better every year. We're already way ahead of the competition in pretty much every metric you can name, but we're not sitting back. We have the pedal to the metal and we're keeping it there. >> Okay, so as always, you announced some big numbers. You're referencing them. I did in my upfront narrative. You've claimed double to triple digit performance improvements. Tell us, what's the secret sauce that allows you to achieve that magnitude of performance gain? >> Yeah, there's a lot of secret sauce in Exadata. First of all, we have custom designed hardware, so we design the systems from the top down, so it's not a generic system. It's designed to run database with a specific and sole focus of running database, and so we have a lot of technologies in there. Persistent memory is a really big one that we've introduced that enables super low response times for OLTP. The RoCE, the remote RDMA over convergency ethernet with a hundred gigabit network is a big thing, offload to storage servers is a big thing. The columnar processing of the storage is a huge thing, so there's a lot of secret sauce, most of it is software and hardware related and interesting about it, it's very unique. So we've been introducing more and more technologies and actually advancing our lead by introducing very unique, very effective technologies, like the ones I mentioned, and we're continuing that with our X9 generation. >> So that persistent memory allows you to do a right directly, atomic right directly to memory, and then what, you update asynchronously to the backend at some point? Can you double click on that a little bit? >> Yeah, so we use persistent memory as kind of the first tier of storage. And the thing about persistent memory is persistent. Unlike normal memory, it doesn't lose its contents when you lose power, so it's just as good as flash or traditional spinning disks in terms of storing data. And the integration that we do is we do what's called remote direct memory access, that means the hardware sends the new data directly into persistent memory and storage with no software, getting rid of all the software layers in between, and that's what enables us to achieve this extremely low latency. Once it's in persistent memory, it's stored. It's as good as being in flash or disc. So there's nothing else that we need to do. We do age things out of persistent memory to keep only hot data in there. That's one of the tricks that we do to make sure, because persistent memory is more expensive than flash or disc, so we tier it. So we age data in and out as it becomes hot, age it out as it becomes cold, but once it's in persistent memory, it's as good as being stored. It is stored. >> I love it. Flash is a slow tier now. So, (laughs) let's talk about what this-- >> Right, I mean persistent memory is about an order of magnitude faster. Flash is more than an order of magnitude faster than disk drive, so it is a new technology that provides big benefits, particularly for latency on OLTP. >> Great, thank you for that, okay, we'll get out of the plumbing. Let's talk about what this announcement means to customers. How does all this performance, and you got a lot of scale here, how does it translate into tangible results say, for a bank? >> Yeah, so there's a lot of ways. So, I mentioned performance is a big thing, always with Exadata. We're increasing the performance significantly for OLTP, analytics, so OLTP, 50, 60% performance improvements, analytics, 80% performance improvements in terms of costs, effectiveness, 30 to 60% improvement, so all of these things are big benefits. You know, one of the differences between a server product like Exadata and a consumer product is performance translates in the cost also. If I get a new smartphone that's faster, it doesn't actually reduce my costs, it just makes my experience a little better. But with a server product like Exadata, if I have 50% faster, I can translate that into I can serve 50% more users, 50% more workload, 50% more data, or I can buy a 50% smaller system to run the same workload. So, when we talk about performance, it also means lower costs, so if big customers of ours, like banks, telecoms, retailers, et cetera, they can take that performance and turn it into better response times. They can also take that performance and turn it into lower costs, and everybody loves both of those things, so both of those are big benefits for our customers. >> Got it, thank you. Now in a move that was maybe a little bit controversial, you stated flat out that you're not going to bother to compare Exadata cloud and customer performance against AWS Outposts and Azure Stack, rather you chose to compare to RDS, Redshift, Azure SQL. Why, why was that? >> Yeah, so our Exadata runs in the public cloud. We have Exadata that runs in Cloud@Customer, and we have Exadata that runs on Prem. And Azure and Azure Stack, they have something a little more similar to Cloud@Customer. They have where they take their cloud solutions and put them in the customer data center. So when we came out with our new X8, 9M Cloud@Customer, we looked at those technologies and honestly, we couldn't even come up with a good comparison with their equivalent, for example, AWS Outpost, because those products really just don't really run. For example, the two database products that Outposts promote or that Amazon promotes is Aurora for OLTP and Redshift for analytics. Well, those two can't even run at all on their Outposts product. So, it's kind of like beating up on a child or something. (laughs) It doesn't make sense. They're out of our weight class, so we're not even going to compare against them. So we compared what we run, both in public cloud and Cloud@Customer against their best product, which is the Redshifts and the Auroras in their public cloud, which is their most scalable available products. With their equivalent Cloud@Customer, not only does it not perform, it doesn't run at all. Their Premiere products don't run at all on those platforms. >> Okay, but RDS does, right? I think, and Redshift and Azure SQL, right, will run a their version, so you compare it against those. What were the results of the benchmarks when you did made those comparisons? >> Yeah, so compared against their public cloud or Cloud@Customer, we generally get results that are something like 50 times lower latency and close to a hundred times higher analytic throughput, so it's orders of magnitude. We're not talking 50%, we're talking 50 times, so compared to those products, there really is kind of, we're in a different league. It's kind of like they're the middle school little league and we're the professional team, so it's really dramatically different. It's not even in the same league. >> All right, now you also chose to compare the X9M performance against on-premises storage systems. Why and what were those results? >> Yeah, so with the on-premises, traditionally customers bought conventional storage and that kind of stuff, and those products have advanced quite a bit. And again, those aren't optimized. Those aren't designed to run database, but some customers have traditionally deployed those, you know, there's less and less these days, but we do get many times faster both on OLTP and analytic performance there, I mean, with analytics that can be up to 80 times faster, so again, dramatically better, but yeah, there's still a lot of on-premise systems, so we didn't want to ignore that fact and compare only to cloud products. >> So these are like to like in the sense that they're running the same level of database. You're not playing games in terms of the versioning, obviously, right? >> Actually, we're giving them a lot of the benefit. So we're taking their published numbers that aren't even running a database, and they use these low-level benchmarking tools to generate these numbers. So, we're comparing our full end-to-end database to storage numbers against their low-level IO tool that they've published in their data sheets, so again, we're trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, but we're still orders of magnitude better. >> Okay, now another claim that caught our attention was you said that 87% of the Fortune 100 organizations run Exadata, and you're claiming many thousands of other organizations globally. Can you paint a picture of the ICP, the Ideal Customer Profile for Exadata? What's a typical customer look like, and why do they use Exadata, Juan? >> Yeah, so the ideal customer is pretty straightforward, customers that care about data. That's pretty much it. (Dave laughs) If you care about data, if you care about performance of data, if you care about availability of data, if you care about manageability, if you care about security, those are the customers that should be looking strongly at Exadata, and those are the customers that are adopting Exadata. That's why you mentioned 87% of the global Fortune 100 have already adopted Exadata. If you look at a lot of industries, for example, pretty much every major bank almost in the entire world is running Exadata, and they're running it for their mission critical workloads, things like financial trading, regulatory compliance, user interfaces, the stuff that really matters. But in addition to the biggest companies, we also have thousands of smaller companies that run it for the same reason, because their data matters to them, and it's frankly the best platform, which is why we get chosen by these very, very sophisticated customers over and over again, and why this product has grown to encompass most of the major corporations in the world and governments also. >> Now, I know Deutsche bank is a customer, and I guess now an engineering partner from the announcement that I saw earlier this summer. They're using Cloud@Customer, and they're collaborating on things like security, blockchain, machine intelligence, and my inference is Deutsch Bank is looking to build new products and services that are powered by your platforms. What can you tell us about that? Can you share any insights? Are they going to be using X9M, for example? >> Yes, Deutsche Bank is a partnership that we announced a few months ago. It's a major partnership. Deutsche Bank is one of the biggest banks in the world. They traditionally are an on-premises customer, and what they've announced is they're going to move almost the entire database estate to our Exadata Cloud@Customer platform, so they want to go with a cloud platform, but they're big enough that they want to run it in their own data center for certain regulatory reasons. And so, the announcement that we made with them is they're moving the vast bulk of their data estate to this platform, including their core banking, regulatory applications, so their most critical applications. So, obviously they've done a lot of testing. They've done a lot of trials and they have the confidence to make this major transition to a cloud model with the Exadata Cloud@Customer solution, and we're also working with them to enhance that product and to work in various other fields, like you mentioned, machine learning, blockchain, that kind of project also. So it's a big deal when one of the biggest, most conservative, best respected financial institution in the world says, "We're going all in on this product," that's a big deal. >> Now outside of banking, I know a number of years ago, I stumbled upon an installation or a series of installations that Samsung found out about them as a customer. I believe it's now public, but they've something like 300 Exadatas. So help us understand, is it common that customers are building these kinds of Exadata farms? Is this an outlier? >> Yeah, so we have many large customers that have dozens to hundreds of Exadatas, and it's pretty simple, they start with one or two, and then they see the benefits, themselves, and then it grows. And Samsung is probably the biggest, most successful and most respected electronics company in the world. They are a giant company. They have a lot of different sub units. They do their own manufacturing, so manufacturing's one of their most critical applications, but they have lots of other things they run their Exadata for. So we're very happy to have them as one of our major customers that run Exadata, and by the way, Exadata again, very huge in electronics, in manufacturing. It's not just banking and that kind of stuff. I mean, manufacturing is incredibly critical. If you're a company like Samsung, that's your bread and butter. If your factory stops working, you have huge problems. You can't produce products, and you will want to improve the quality. You want to improve the tracking. You want to improve the customer service, all that requires a huge amount of data. Customers like Samsung are generating terabytes and terabytes of data per day from their manufacturing system. They track every single piece, everything that happens, so again, big deal, they care about data. They care deeply about data. They're a huge Exadata customer. That's kind of the way it works. And they've used it for many years, and their use is growing and growing and growing, and now they're moving to the cloud model as well. >> All right, so we talked about some big customers and Juan, as you know, we've covered Exadata since its inception. We were there at the announcement. We've always stressed the fit in our research with mission critical workloads, which especially resonates with these big customers. My question is how does Exadata resonate with the smaller customer base? >> Yeah, so we talk a lot about the biggest customers, because honestly they have the most critical requirements. But, at some level they have worldwide requirements, so if one of the major financial institutions goes down, it's not just them that's affected, that reverberates through the entire world. There's many other customers that use Exadata. Maybe their application doesn't stop the world, but it stops them, so it's very important to them. And so one of the things that we've introduced in our Cloud@Customer and public cloud Exadata platforms is the ability for Oracle to manage all the infrastructure, which enables smaller customers that don't have as much IT sophistication to adopt these very mission critical technology, so that's one of the big advancements. Now, we've always had smaller customers, but now we're getting more and more. We're getting universities, governments, smaller businesses adopting Exadata, because the cloud model for adopting is dramatically simpler. Oracle does all the administration, all the low-level stuff. They don't have to get involved in it at all. They can just use the data. And, on top of that comes our autonomous database, which makes it even easier for smaller customers to adapt. So Exadata, which some people think of as a very high-end platform in this cloud model, and particularly with autonomous databases is very accessible and very useful for any size customer really. >> Yeah, by all accounts, I wouldn't debate Exadata has been a tremendous success. But you know, a lot of customers, they still prefer to roll their own, do it themselves, and when I talk to them and ask them, "Okay, why is that?" They feel it limits their reliance on a single vendor, and it gives them better ability to build what I call a horizontal infrastructure that can support say non-Oracle workloads, so what do you tell those customers? Why should those customers run Oracle database on Exadata instead of a DIY infrastructure? >> Yeah, so that debate has gone on for a lot of years. And actually, what I see, there's less and less of that debate these days. You know, initially customers, many customers, they were used to building their own. That's kind of what they did. They were pretty good at it. What we have shown customers, and when we talk about these major banks, those are the kinds of people that are really good at it. They have giant IT departments. If you look at a major bank in the world, they have tens of thousands of people in their IT departments. These are gigantic multi-billion dollar organizations, so they were pretty good at this kind of stuff. And what we've shown them is you can't build this yourself. There's so much software that we've written to integrate with the database that you just can't build yourself, it's not possible. It's kind of like trying to build your own smartphone. You really can't do it, the scale, the complexity of the problem. And now as the cloud model comes in, customers are realizing, hey, all this attention to building my own infrastructure, it's kind of last decade, last century. We need to move on to more of an as a service model, so we can focus on our business. Let enterprises that are specialized in infrastructure, like Oracle that are really, really good at it, take care of the low-level details, and let me focus on things that differentiate me as a business. It's not going to differentiate them to establish their own storage for database. That's not a differentiator, and they can't do it nearly as well as we can, and a lot of that is because we write a lot of special technology and software that they just can't do themselves, it's not possible. It's just like you can't build your own smartphone. It's just really not possible. >> Now, another area that we've covered extensively, we were there at the unveiling, as well is ZDLRA, Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance. We've always liked this product, especially for mission critical workloads, we're near zero data loss, where you can justify that. But while we always saw it as somewhat of a niche market, first of all, is that fair, and what's new with ZDLRA? >> Yeah ZDLRA has been in the market for a number of years. We have some of the biggest corporations in the world running on that, and one of the big benefits has been zero data loss, so again, if you care about data, you can't lose data. You can't restore to last night's backup if something happens. So if you're a bank, you can't restore everybody's data to last night. Suppose you made a deposit during the day. They're like, "Hey, sorry, Mr. Customer, your deposit, "well, we don't have any record of it anymore, "'cause we had to restore to last night's backup," you know, that doesn't work. It doesn't work for airlines. It doesn't work for manufacturing. That whole model is obsolete, so you need zero data loss, and that's why we introduced Zero Data Loss Recovery Appliance, and it's been very successful in the market. In addition to zero data loss, it actually provides much faster restore, much more reliable restores. It's more scalable, so it has a lot of advantages. With our X9M generation, we're introducing several new capabilities. First of all, it has higher capacity, so we can store more backups, keep data for longer. Another thing is we're actually dropping the price of the entry-level configuration of ZDLRA, so it makes it more affordable and more usable by smaller businesses, so that's a big deal. And then the other thing that we're hearing a lot about, and if you read the news at all, you hear a lot about ransomware. This is a major problem for the world, cyber criminals breaking into your network and taking the data ransom. And so we've introduced some, we call cyber vault capabilities in ZDLRA. They help address this ransomware issue that's kind of rampant throughout the world, so everybody's worried about that. There's now regulatory compliance for ransomware that particularly financial institutions have to conform to, and so we're introducing new capabilities in that area as well, which is a big deal. In addition, we now have the ability to have multiple ZDLRAs in a large enterprise, and if something happens to one, we automatically fail over backups to another. We can replicate across them, so it makes it, again, much more resilient with replication across different recovery appliances, so a lot of new improvements there as well. >> Now, is an air gap part of that solution for ransomware? >> No, air gap, you really can't have your back, if you're continuously streaming changes to it, you really can't have an air gap there, but you can protect the data. There's a number of technologies to protect the data. For example, one of the things that a cyber criminal wants to do is they want to take control of your data and then get rid of your backup, so you can't restore them. So as a simple example of one thing we're doing is we're saying, "Hey, once we have the data, "you can't delete it for a certain amount of days." So you might say, "For the 30 days, "I don't care who you are. "I don't care what privileges you have. "I don't care anything, I'm holding onto that data "for at least 30 days," so for example, a cyber criminal can't come in and say, "Hey, I'm going to get into the system "and delete that stuff or encrypt it," or something like that. So that's a simple example of one of the things that the cyber vault does. >> So, even as an administrator, I can't change that policy? >> That's right, that's one of the goals is doesn't matter what privileges you have, you can't change that policy. >> Does that eliminate the need for an air gap or would you not necessarily recommend, would you just have another layer of protection? What's your recommendation on that to customers? >> We always recommend multiple layers of protection, so for example, in our ZDLRA, we support, we offload tape backups directly from the appliance, so a great way to protect the data from any kind of thing is you put it on a tape, and guess what, once that tape drive is filed away, I don't care what cyber criminal you are, if you're remote, you can't access that data. So, we always promote multiple layers, multiple technologies to protect the data, and tape is a great way to do that. We can also now archive. In addition to tape, we can now archive to the public cloud, to our object storage servers. We can archive to what we call our ZFS appliance, which is a very low cost storage appliance, so there's a number of secondary archive copies that we offload and implement for customers. We make it very easy to do that. So, yeah, you want multiple layers of protection. >> Got it, okay, your tape is your ultimate air gap. ZDLRA is your low RPO device. You've got cloud kind of in the middle, maybe that's your cheap and deep solution, so you have some options. >> Juan: Yes. >> Okay, last question. Summarize the announcement, if you had to mention two or three takeaways from the X9M announcement for our audience today, what would you choose to share? >> I mean, it's pretty straightforward. It's the new generation. It's significantly faster for OLTP, for analytics, significantly better consolidation, more cost-effective. That's the big picture. Also there's a lot of software enhancements to make it better, improve the management, make it more usable, make it better disaster recovery. I talked about some of these cyber vault capabilities, so it's improved across all the dimensions and not in small ways, in big ways. We're talking 50% improvement, 80% improvements. That's a big change, and also we're keeping the price the same, so when you get a 50 or 80% improvement, we're not increasing the price to match that, so you're getting much better value as well. And that's pretty much what it is. It's the same product, even better. >> Well, I love this cadence that we're on. We love having you on these video exclusives. We have a lot of Oracle customers in our community, so we appreciate you giving us the inside scope on these announcements. Always a pleasure having you on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having me. It's always fun to be with you, Dave. >> All right, and thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, and we'll see you next time. (bright music)

(soft electronic music) >> Welcome to this session of the Amazon EC2 15th Birthday Event. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm joined by Joshua Burgin, General Manager of AWS Outposts at AWS. Joshua, welcome back to the program. Thank you, it's great to be here again. >> So 15th birthday, a tremendous amount has gone on in the last 15 years, but I want to understand what brought you to AWS? What excited you about cloud and EC2, in particular? >> Yeah, I mean, that's a, it's a great question and it's kind of a fun story. I actually worked at Amazon back in the 90s for three years as a software engineer when I don't think anybody you asked back then would have said that cloud was in our future. And so I'd kind of obviously kept in touch with people over the years and I was working at a customer who, interestingly enough, had moved off of AWS thinking that they could build a better cloud. And then of course, over the years, found out that it's actually quite difficult and was in process of moving back to AWS. And so I reconnected with some of the senior leaders who I was still friendly with and they said, you know, come back in, the water's fine, there's still a lot of opportunity. And it's, it's really been true, right? There's been just a tremendous amount of growth in the last seven years that I've been back and obviously, over the last 15 years for EC2, in general. >> Well, this 15th birthday not only marks a big milestone for AWS, but also for the cloud computing world that it serves globally. Talk to me a little bit about the impact over the last seven years you've been there and 15 years of EC2's life. >> Well, I mean, we've really been transforming every industry that you could possibly imagine as everyone's had to develop a plan to move to the cloud to take advantage of the opportunities for innovation, for cost efficiency, for developer efficiency, for operational improvements. And so EC2 was one of the foundational services inside of AWS and, you know, a lot of things are built on top of it, and so it's been really great to work with all of these different customers in financial services, in Telco, in gaming, you know, healthcare, you name it, all around the world. >> So 15 years ago, EC2 obviously started quite small. Can you talk to us about some of the early trends that are emerging from the hybrid space? >> Yeah, I mean, we're fond of saying here that it's still day one and that's very true for the outposts and the hybrid business, in general, at AWS. The early trends, if I had to kind of bundle them together, would be that first of all, people are operating in more places than they ever thought they would have to. These are big customers, manufacturing, Telco, healthcare, public sector customers, people in gaming, they serve customers around the world. That's a trend that's kind of, irregardless of industry, that's what we're seeing. And so of course, having an outpost available everywhere, we're up to 60 countries now, having local zones in many countries which we hope is our longterm plan, having wavelength zones with lots of partners, you know, that's why we're doing those things 'cause customers are telling us that we need to operate everywhere. It's actually the reason we went from one availability zone or excuse me, three availability zones in one region 15 years ago, to 25 regions in 80 availability zones. And of course, hybrid is building on top of that. The other thing we're seeing, you know, real specifically for hybrid is low latency, local data processing, and data residency. Across every industry, those are the needs that are driving people to adopt hybrid technology and they're the ones pushing us forward here, at AWS to innovate on their behalf. >> Talk to me about some of the innovation in the last few years alone, that customers are helping drive where those regulations are becoming more and more critical. We're seeing more importance on security and ensuring that customer data is secure, protected, but also accessible. >> Yeah, absolutely, I mean, we're fond of saying at AWS that security is job zero. You know, we take it incredibly seriously, even though, of course, it's a shared responsibility model where we secure the underlying infrastructure and then provide tooling and services on top of that for customers to create the level of security that's appropriate for their application. Obviously, a government workload or a banking workload is different than a mobile game, even of course as customer data needs to be secured in all situations. So with outposts and with local zones, what we're giving people the ability to do is ensure that their compute and their storage are in whatever country or municipality or city or state that they need them to be. So you could take something as diverse as a bank or a healthcare company where they might need to have that compute and storage literally in a specific facility because of regulations, or in a specific state, you know, that's kind of happening around the world. You also see something you might not have thought about, but customer is in the iGaming space, so that's mobile betting. Tipico and FanDuel are a couple of early examples of those for outposts where as it becomes legal, at least in more states in the United States and more places in Europe, the regulations are requiring that the cloud computing, if they want to use it, is placed in a specific place. So the only way you can do that is either, of course, if we had a region everywhere, which we don't, or if you have something like outposts, otherwise you'd be forced to revert to like a bare metal solution and kind of take on all that heavy burden yourself. Your developers would be less efficient because they'd be using AWS in one place and bare metal kind of hardware somewhere else. So, you know, it's still really early, but I've been pleased to kind of see that kind of adoption across those diverse industries. >> It is really early, as you said. The philosophy at Amazon AWS is it's day one. Give me some feedback from customers now where, you know, we, we see a lot of different reports that suggest where businesses are, enterprises are in terms of cloud adoption. What are some of the things that you're seeing where you really think hybrid is going to be an absolute game changer? >> Yeah, I mean, one example that comes to mind is Telco which is one of the biggest industries with the smallest amount of cloud adoption to date. And so I think a lot of that was driven by specific requirements in that industry that required on-prem components for that ultra low latency. You can imagine they needed the compute and the storage to be at the cell site or distributed around the United States or other countries. And so that's where you have examples now with Dish Networks where we just announced a strategic partnership with them. They're going to be using this combination of the new small form factor outposts that we're releasing later this year. They're about the size of a pizza box or a couple of pizza boxes. They're also going to be using our network of local zones that we're building out, 15 of them across the United States, and they'll be using our regions for workloads that are, of course, less latency sensitive, and that can kind of be run centrally. So it's really kind of one of the best examples I can think of where people that were held back by the technology, by the offerings are now enabled to move really quickly. And so I think you're going to see a lot in that space and other industries where before they had to kind of not move to the cloud because a portion of their workload needed to remain on-prem, and now we're delivering a continuum of offerings, including, you know, to the very smallest locations. >> Let's look forward into the next decade. As barriers to adoption are being removed daily, you mentioned Dish Network. I saw that they're going to build their 5G, their core 5G network on AWS. That's huge, that's a big signal for the telecommunications industry. But what are some of the things that you think we're going to be able to open this book and there will maybe a crystal ball in the next decade can expect. >> Yeah, I mean, if I had a crystal ball, my roadmap would be perfect. >> Wouldn't it? >> It would be, it would be great. So if anybody's offering one of those I'm, I'm taking. But what I think you'll see is that, that the day one metaphor is going to continue. As big as AWS has become, and I think we're really proud of the accomplishments and innovation we've delivered for customers over the last 15 years, as I mentioned, we started with one instance type and one region, and now we have over 400 instance types in EC2. That's a lot of choice for people and that's just EC2, right? We have another 185 or 200 services these days, I can barely keep up with them which is exciting in its own right. And so the reason is that we're doing all that innovation is that customers are telling us what they want and a lot of that is, although they're driven to move to the cloud and they really want to move there quickly, somewhere between 75 and 90% of technology spending is still in the traditional hardware-software space. So again, I'd like you to think about that. 15 years in, you know, at the run rate that we're at, and obviously with other people in this space, there's still so much more to go that has already moved to the cloud. So I think you'll see more new instance types, more locations, more form factors, you know, from Outpost and us using Outpost to deliver infrastructure like local zones and wavelength which are built on top of Outposts, and so we don't force people to pick and choose between moving to the cloud and running the kinds of workloads they're already running. We want to be driven by the customer not force them into a narrow way of working that we think is best. That's probably the hallmark of AWS is giving people the choice. They can use EC2 and manage their own databases, they can use RDS or one of our, you know, 14 purpose-built databases, depending on what their application needs. And that's true across the board. Storage, compute, machine learning, container services, hybrid offerings, of course, which I manage for the AWS business, we're going to continue to do that. So the choice is going to proliferate, the performance is going to continue to improve, we're going to continue to bring down pricing and increase price for performance, and we're going to hopefully make things easier and more cost-effective for people, whether that's for their developers or their finance people, so that they can innovate on behalf of their customers versus handling all that undifferentiated muck and heavy lifting of managing the infrastructure themselves. >> That customer centricity has always been key to AWS. Just some of what you said, I think we can expect to see a ton more from AWS, announcements, customer-driven choices for customers. Joshua, thank you for joining me today. Happy 15th birthday to Amazon EC2. >> Thank you so much for having me. It's great to be here. >> For Joshua Burgin, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE. (soft electronic music)

(bright music) >> Welcome to this session of the AWS EC2 15th birthday event. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I'm joined by Meena Gowdar, the principal product manager for AWS Outposts at AWS. Meena, welcome to the program. >> Thanks Lisa. It's great to be joining here today. >> So you were the first product manager hired to lead the development of the Outpost service. Talk to us about back in the day. The vision of Outpost at that time. >> Yeah, Outpost vision has always been to extend the AWS experience to customers on premises location, and provide a truly consistent hybrid experience, with the same AWS services, APIs and suite of tools available at the region. So we launched Outpost to support customers' workloads that cannot migrate to the region. These are applications that are sensitive to latency, such as manufacturing, workloads, financial trading workloads. Then there are applications that do heavy edge data processing, like image assisted diagnostics and hospitals for example, or smart cities that are fitted with cameras and sensors that gather so much data. And then another use case was regarding data residency that need to remain within certain jurisdictions. Now that AWS cloud is available in 25 regions and we have seven more coming, but that doesn't cover every corner of the world, and customers want us to be closer to their end-users. So Outpost allows them to bring the AWS experience where customer wants us to be. To answer your question about the use case evolution, along the way, in addition to the few that I just mentioned, we've seen a couple of surprises. The first one is application migration. It is an interesting trend from large enterprises that could run applications in the cloud, but must first rearchitect their applications to be cloud ready. These applications need to go through modernization while remaining in close proximity to other dependent systems. So by using Outpost, customers can modernize and containerize using AWS services, while they continued to remain on premises before moving to the region. Here, Outpost acts as a launchpad, serving them to make that leap to the region. We were also surprised by the different types of data residency use cases that customers are thinking about Outposts. For example, iGaming, as sports betting is a growing trend in many countries, they're also heavily regulated requiring providers to run their applications within state boundaries. Outposts allows application providers to standardize on a common AWS infrastructure and deploy the application in as many locations as they want to scale. >> So a lot of evolution and it's short time-frame, and I know that as we're here talking about the EC2 15th birthday, Amazon EC2 Core to AWS, but it's also at the core of Outposts, how does EC2 work on Outposts? >> The simple answer is EC2 works just the same as Outposts does in the region, so giving customers access to the same APIs, tools, and metrics that they are familiar with. With Outposts, customers will access the capacity, just like how they would access them in an availability zone. Customers can extend their VPC from the region and launch EC2 instances using the same APIs, just like how they would do in the region. So they also get to benefit all the tools like auto-scaling, CloudWatch metrics, Flow Logs that they are already familiar with. So the other thing that I also want to share is, at GA, we launched Outposts with the Gen 5 Intel Cascade Lake Processor based instances, that's because they run on AWS Nitro Systems. The Nitro Systems allows us to extend the AWS experience to customers location in a secure manner, and bring all the capabilities to manage and virtualize the underlying compute storage and network capabilities, just the way we do that in the region. So staying true to that Outpost product vision, customers can experience the same sort of EC2 feature sets like EC2 placement groups on demand, capacity, reservations, sharing through resource access managers, IM policies, and security groups so it really is the same EC2. >> I imagine having that same experience, the user experience was a big advantage for customers that were in the last 18 months rapidly transforming and digitizing their businesses. Any customer examples pop up that to you that really speak to, we kept this user experience the same, it really helped customers pivot quickly when the pandemic struck. >> It almost feels like we haven't missed a beat Outpost being a fully managed service that can be rolled into customer's data center, has been a huge differentiator. Especially at a time where customers have to be nimble and ready to respond to their customers or end users. If at all, we've seen the adoption accelerate in the last 12 to 18 months, and that is reflected through our global expansion. We currently support 60 countries worldwide, and we've seen customers deploying Outposts and migrating more applications to run on Outpost worldwide. >> Right. So lots of evolution going on as I mentioned a minute ago. Talk to me about some of the things that you're most excited about. What do you think is coming down the pike in the next 6 to 10 months? >> We're excited about expanding the core EC2 instance offerings, especially bringing our own Graviton Arm processor based instances on Outposts, because of the AWS nitro systems. Most easy to instances that launch in the region will also become available on Outpost. Again, back to the vision to provide a consistent hybrid experience for AWS customers. We're also excited about the 1U and 2U Outpost server form factors, which we will launch later this year. The Outpost service will support both the Intel Ice Lake Processor based instances, and also Graviton Processor based instances. So customers who can't install and, you know, 42U form factor Outposts, can now bring AWS experience in retail stores, back office, and other remote locations that are not traditional data centers. So we're very excited about our next couple of years, and what we are going to be launching for customers. >> Excellent. Meena, Thank you for joining me today for the EC2 15th birthday, talking about the vision of outposts. Again, you were the first product manager hired to lead the development of that. Pretty exciting. What's gone on then the unique use cases that have driven its evolution, and some of the things that are coming down the pike. Very exciting. Thank you for your time. >> Thank you, Lisa, >> For Meena Gowdar, I'm Lisa Martin. Thanks for watching. (bright music)

>>From around the globe. It's the cube with digital coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 special coverage sponsored by AWS global partner network. >>Welcome everyone to the cube live covering AWS reinvent 2020. I'm your host Rebecca Knight. Today. We are joined by Joshua Virgin. He is the general manager at AWS outposts. Thanks so much for coming on the cube. Joshua, >>Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. >>It's great to have you, so tell our viewers a little bit about AWS, AWS outposts. >>Oh sure. It's one of my favorite subjects, obviously. So outposts is a service from AWS that allows you to use the same tools, technology, API APIs, programming interfaces that you do in the cloud, but install this and run it on your own premises or in a co-location facility. So it really extends the reach of AWS to far more locations than you could otherwise use it. >>So what are some of the advancements, uh, this year >>It's, it's been an amazingly busy year, even under unprecedented kind of circumstances where we've tried to turn the crank really hard and deliver value for our customers. We increased the number of countries you could order outposts in up to 51 countries. You can now connect outpost to all 22 AWS regions and our gov cloud regions, everything outside of China. And we delivered 15 new services or incremental features, including a S3 on outposts, which was the top thing that customers asked for, but also our application load balancer, Alasta cash, our relational database service RDS. Uh, you know, there's probably more than I'm missing here, but, um, you know, and we're definitely not slowing down in that regard. 2021 will probably be an even bigger year. >>So tell us a little bit about the, the response from customers since the launch of AWS outpost last year. What are, what are you hearing? >>Yeah, I mean, we're, we're hearing a lot, uh, I think we've been pleasantly surprised by the, the breadth and the depth of the customer use cases. One of the biggest things we heard from people was, you know, the, the outposts are great, but it's a, it's a full rack of compute or many racks of compute in some cases and storage, you know, their locations that people wanted to put it in that were smaller where their space constrained, maybe a restaurant or a factory floor or a small medical facility, uh, you know, a telco like a cell site. And so what we did based on that is something that we actually just announced in Andy's keynote. Uh, just a few days ago here, which is the new small form factor outposts that are one you and two use size, uh, servers. It's about the size of one or two pizza boxes stacked on top of each other. >>So that's even going to make outposts available to even more use cases, uh, you know, early on, uh, we kind of said to ourselves that it's important to kind of give people that consistent experience wherever they might need the compute and the storage and the other services. And so I've been, I've been really pleasantly surprised, as I mentioned earlier, by how many people have talked to us. We have customers like Phillips healthcare. They are, uh, they're bringing their medical imaging solution to outposts and it allows them to kind of modernize the way they deliver services to hospitals and medical research centers around the world. Something that really wouldn't be possible without having AWS everywhere. >>And that is much, much needed today. Um, tell us a little bit about more about this year in particular, you said it yourself at the beginning of our conversation, this is an unprecedented year for so many different reasons. How has the COVID-19 pandemic effected AWS outposts and how your team interacts with customers and, and gets your job done? >>Yeah, we, I think we have some unique challenges in that regard, obviously, as I mentioned earlier, AWS outposts are installed in a co-location facility or on a customer's own premises in a data center, you know, other things like that. So obviously we have to get our technicians out there to roll them in and hook them up to your network and, you know, to get them powered up. So that means that we are complying with, uh, COVID restrictions. And as I mentioned, 51 different countries. So there was even an install earlier this year at a mining location, uh, you know, far outside the U S where we had to get technicians working with, uh, local technicians from the customer following COVID guidelines, wearing protective gear, and actually installing the outpost, uh, you know, using kind of satellite conductivity and phones to phone home, and talk to us during the installation of course, cause it's not hooked up yet. So those are just kind of examples of the, the links to which we'll go to make sure that, of course we're safe, the customers are safe, but that they can kind of continue to modernize their application portfolio and get benefits from the outposts. >>And what are you hearing from clients and customers in terms of how they're thinking about their technology needs now and in the coming year? >>Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. I mean, it, it really varies by market segment. So you have customers like Ericsson and Telefonica. They're going to be using outpost to, uh, kind of run their 5g packet core technology, Abe it's, it's gotta be run at the edge right there, telcos, they need to minimize latency single digit milliseconds, or you might have a customer like Lockheed Martin. And what they've told us is they have projects that are subject to government contracts and regulations. And not only do they have of course compliance regimes, like fed ramp that they need to be aware of, but there's data residency requirements. So whether they're deploying in the United States or, you know, with our allies all around the world, the compute and the storage, they need to run in specific locations. So now outposts are going to be a key, uh, advancement and kind of a key differentiator for them in how they deliver services to their customers and still meet those data residency or compliance requirement. >>Joshua, tell our viewers more about AWS outpost ready? >>Oh, that's a, it's another thing I'm really glad you mentioned. So the outposts ready program, these are solutions from our APN and our Amazon AWS partner network that are, uh, validated and following our best practices on AWS outposts. They're certified to work and, you know, they're generally available to customers. And so it's a program where, you know, ISV and SAS providers can ensure that the technology that they provide that this third-party technology is going to work in the outpost environment. And there's, there's something about outposts that I think makes this, uh, a differentiator and uniquely valuable when I mentioned kind of that consistent hybrid experience. When you think about how outposts are deployed, you know, in a customer's data center, maybe alongside other technology they're already using. And so customers say, look, these AWS services are great, but I already use a variety of third party technology maybe from Veritas or trend micro Palo Alto networks Convolt size sense, PagerDuty, pure storage NetApp, or the, you know, the list is actually pretty extensive of what people are already using. >>And so they've said, you know, I do plan on using AWS services, but I also don't want to give up, uh, you know, what my team is already familiar with. So can you make sure that's going to work for me, whether I'm using it in the region or on the AWS outposts. And so the, the, the interest in kind of demand for this, both from customers and the enthusiasm from the partners has been off the charts. We started the program in just September, which is not that long ago, and we had 32 partners. And, uh, as of today we have an additional, uh, additional 25 partners, right? It's 57 partners, total 64 certified solutions. So that's a lot of momentum and just kind of a, a short amount of time. And I'm really happy that we can deliver that to the customer. >>So it does, it's already showing tremendous momentum. How do you think about it in terms of the primary benefits that it gives to customers and how it helps customers and partners, >>You know, in order to qualify, the solution has to be tested and validated upon, uh, against a bunch of, uh, criteria that we have very specific technical criteria, security requirements, operational, and, you know, they're, they're supported for customers with clear deployment guidelines. So, you know, the customers can kind of think of this as a guarantee that we're not just saying maybe this could work, but, but this will work. If you're already using it, it's going to continue to work in a way that's familiar to you. And again, that's important that consistent hybrid experience, whether you're using a solution from a third party or from AWS, whether you're using it in the region or on a local zone or in a wavelength zone, and some of our other kind of innovative infrastructure deployments or using it on an outpost, no matter where you're using it, it has to work the same way. >>And so this is something that customers have said, I want to be able to get up and running quickly. We had a customer riot games, uh, th they're the maker of league of legends, but also when they were launching their new game, Valerie hunt, uh, in, in June of 2020, they deployed outposts in four different locations to kind of ensure a level playing field in terms of latency and what they told us, uh, you know, very much like the service ready program is they were able to get up and running in just a matter of days once the outpost was deployed. And it's because we gave them those same API APIs, that same tooling. So I think that's really important for people and, you know, I hope we can continue to deliver on that promise. >>So to close this out here, I want you to look into your crystal ball and think ahead, 12 and 24 months, when you know, fingers crossed, things are back to somewhat more normal. Uh, what's in store for AWS outposts. >>Yeah. I mean, we're going to deliver on what we announced here at reinvent, which has the new small form factor outposts. And I think what we're going to continue to do is listen to customers. We develop outposts from the very beginning because customer said, could, could you deploy outposts in our, in our data center or, sorry, can you deploy AWS? And our data center didn't have a name back then. And so that's really the hallmark of AWS. You know, somewhere around 90% of our roadmaps are based on what customers tell us they want. And the other 10% is when we kind of look around the corner and hopefully delight people with something they didn't even know they needed. And I really hope for my team and that that's what 2021 and 2022 brings is more countries, more services, more value, more compliance, certifications, you know, all the things that people tell us they want. We're going to keep turning the crank as hard as we can. And delivering that as quickly as possible >>With the trademark Amazon customer delight. Yes, absolutely. Excellent. Well, Joshua, Virgin, thank you so much for coming on the cube. It was a pleasure having you. >>It was a pleasure talking to you. Thank you very much. >>I'm Rebecca Knight for more of the cubes coverage of AWS reinvent 2020 stay tuned.

>> Narrator: Live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage, it's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2019. Brought to you by VMware and its ecosystem partners. >> Well, welcome back everyone. Live CUBE coverage here in San Francisco, California for VMworld 2019. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, Dave 10 years continues, day one of three days of wall to wall coverage. Mark Lohmeyer, Senior Vice President, Cloud Platform Business Unit and general manager at the VMware, manage cloud for VMware. Great to see you again. >> Great to see you, yeah, thank you. >> So you got, you're managing all the VMware manage cloud on AWS and Dell EMC? >> Right. >> Which was a big part of today's keynote. Obviously a big part of your investments, so you know, you always look at someone's commitment to something. How they spend their resources and their time. So give us an update obviously a lot of resources on the VMware side. >> Mark: Right. >> To make this run, what customers want. Give us an update on what's going on. >> Yeah, yeah I mean so first of all VMware Cloud and AWS, I mean, we're really pleased with the momentum we're seeing for that in the marketplace. So, we compared what it looks like today versus a year ago. And we were talking about it, a year ago and we've increased the number of customers by 4x on the service. We've increased the numbers of VM's on the service by 9x. That's kind of interesting 'cause it shows you that you know, we're adding both new customers as well as existing customers are expanding their investment. So, that's great to see, right? And it's powered by a lot of the compelling Use Cases. You may have heard Pat or others talk about most notably, cloud migrations. You know from an investment perspective which is I think where you sort of started the question you know, significant investment from both VMware as well as AWS the end of the service. You know we say it's jointly engineered and that is absolutely the case. I mean we literally have hundreds of engineers that are optimizing the VMware software to be delivered as a service on top of the AWS infrastructure. >> And that's a lot just to get nuance on this point. Because in the press coverage, I've seen all the press coverage from the Microsoft and the Google. This is different than just Cloud Foundation because you're talking about something completely different. This is jointly engineered. These are specific, unique things. >> Yeah, I mean with the sort of distinction I would sort of articulate there is that in the case of VMware Cloud on AWS, it's a VMware managed, operated, supported, delivered service. Right, so it's our engineers that are pushing the bits into production in AWS. It's our engineers if there's an incident that deal with the you know, with the situation. You know, it's literally a service operated by us. In the case of what we're doing with Azure and GCP, you know first of all from a customer perspective what we heard them telling us is, I think many customers are using Azure, many customers are using GCP and they'd like to have the ability to have that same VMware consistent software stack on those clouds. But the operational model is different. So in those two cases there's a partner called CloudSimple. Who's a VCPP partner and they're taking our standard VMware Cloud Foundation software that customers use on Prem and they are operating and delivering that as a Cloud service on top of those Cloud platforms. >> Just to review so VMware Cloud on AWS and Outposts both your responsibility, there's two way street there? >> Yup. (laughing) >> Which is rare with Amazon usually it's a one way street. My words not yours. But so, and, so you manage both sides of that? Is that correct? >> Mark: Yeah, that's right, that's right. >> So you're happy to sell either one? >> Absolutely, yup. >> Right, and then the Dell EMC version is kind of the on Prem version of Outposts, if you will. Is that a fair characterization? >> Mark: Yeah, yeah, so. >> Without the public cloud. >> Yeah, I mean absolutely, I think one of the interesting things was you know, we've been in market now with the VMware Cloud on AWS for a couple years. And, you know it's going great but one of the things we've heard from customers was, "Hey, we sort of really like this VMware managed cloud model where you're taking all of the heavy lifting of worrying about the Lifecycle of the VMware software. Worrying about the you know upgrades to the hardware, you're taking that all off of our plate. But why can't we have that same cloud delivery model back on Prem?", right and so, that was the impetus for what we originally announced as Project Dimension and now we're launching this week as VMware Cloud on Dell EMC. >> So all the benefits go with the Dell infrastructure hardware? >> So, I got to ask you, so one are the attributes of those those solutions, is they're highly homogenous, right? And, Andy Jassy made a big deal about that same Control Plane, same Data Plane. >> Mark: Right. >> So my question is, help me square the circle with MultiCloud which is highly heterogeneous? (laughing) So, can I have my cake and eat it, too? Can I have this, you know unified vision of the world? This controlled, same compliance, government security, EDIx, management etc, and have all this heterogeneity? How does that? >> Yeah, so I think, I mean to me it starts from what the customer would like to do, right? And what we're seeing from customers is it's increasingly a MultiCloud world, right. That expands spans private cloud, public cloud and Ed. >> Dave: You're smiling when you say that. >> Mark: Yeah, now, now-- >> The chaos is an opportunity for VM. (laughing) >> Yeah, but it's a challenge for customers, right? And so, if you look at how VMware is trying to help there if you say sort of square the circle. I think that first piece is this idea of consistent operations, right. Then we have these management tools that you can use to consistently operate those environments, whether they're based on a VMware based infrastructure or whether they're based on a native cloud infrastructure. Right, so if you look at our cloud health platform for example, it's a great example where that service can help you under, get visibility to your cloud spend across different cloud platforms. Also B service platforms. It can help you reduce that spend over time. So that's sort of what we refer to as consistent operations. Right, which can span any cloud. You know what my team is responsible for is more in the consistent infrastructures base and that's really all about how do we deliver consistent compute network and storage service that spans on Prem, multiple public clouds and Edge. So that's really where we're bringing that same VMware Cloud Foundation stack to all those different environments. >> Mark, I want to get your thoughts on what Pat Gelsinger said on the keynote. He said, "modernize and migrate or migrate and modernize" he also mentioned live migrate as a big feature. >> Mark: Yes, yes. >> On the modernize and migrate and migrate then modernize, they basically pick one and people are doing both. >> Mark: Right, right, right. >> What's he mean by that give us some examples and then what's the impact to the customer? Is it just the behavior of the customer? >> Yeah, I mean, it varies a little bit based on what the customer's trying to accomplish. But you know the one thing I'll say is that, you know, historically it was a little bit tough to have that choice. Right, so you know the sort of the thought was, hey I have to like re-factor and re-platform everything upfront just to be able to get it to the public cloud. And then once it's there I can sort of start to modernize. I think in that can be a multi-year process, right? >> Yeah. >> I think one of the really interesting opportunities that we've opened up for customers with VMware Cloud on AWS is you don't necessarily have to re-factor everything just to be able to get to the public cloud. We could help them migrate to the public cloud very quickly without requiring any changes if they don't want to. And then when they're there, they can modernize at their own pace based on the needs of the business. All right, and so I think having that additional option is actually quite useful for customers that want to get to the cloud quickly and then from there begin to modernize. >> So two main paths with migration and modernize as the easiest one given the managed service. >> Yeah, yeah, and but you know that being said, I think also you see a set of customers that say "Look, sort of digital transformation and modernization is my primary goal." Right, and for them by enabling some of these things like Native Kupernetes as a service in vSphere and in VMware Cloud and AWS by enabling this AI and ML workloads with a Nivida partnership for that classic customers, they can also just start with the modernization piece, right? Directly on the-- >> So the migrate to modernize would be a lift in shift essentially and then modernize? >> Mark: Ah-hm. >> And that's what Amazon wants you to do? But, you're giving customers a choice, is what I'm-- >> Mark: We have, yeah no, I mean look at the end of the day I think both VMware and AWS believe strongly in understanding what customers are looking for and making sure we're delivering that value to them. And I think you know, this is one of the compelling new options that we've enabled for customers, I think with VMworld Cloud on AWS is that we could take a migration project that would have previously taken three years and we could do it in a few months. >> You know Mark I had a chance to talk to Carl Eschenbach two weeks ago before the show. He came in for an interview Sequoia Capital, Carl Eschenbach, former COO of VMware been there for years. He was part of the deal with AWS, graphing that deal. We were talking about the moment and time where your stock price started to move up this October 2016. That's right when the deal was announced. Since then the stock price has been up. For a lot of reasons, we've talked on theCUBE before. The question I have for you is, what have you learned? What surprises you from this relationship? Because one the clarity was easy, meet Cloud Air, no more. This is our cloud strategy. All on AWS and MultiCloud as it develops you certainly have had to clarify with customers. But now that you entered the managed service, what new things have popped up that might not have been on your radar? What did you expect? What are some surprises from this relationship from a customer behavior standpoint? >> Yeah, that's a real interesting question. So, I think you know in the early days we sort of had this concept of "Hey, let's enable the full VMware capabilities on AWS." And we were sort of talking about it as a tech, almost like a technical solution, right? And what, what we could enable. I think sort of what quickly became apparent is hey, sort of behind that technical approach there's actually some really compelling Use Cases here. And I think that, if I think back to two years ago, I don't think we fully anticipated how compelling this cloud migration Use Case would be. I mean I don't think we really realized internally within VMware how hard it was for customers before to do that. And, I think customers didn't realize sort of how much easier and faster and lower cost that we could make it for them with this type of service. So I think that one, although we were maybe talking about it a little bit in the early days. I think it surprised me at least at how sort of broad based the customer interest was in that type of capability. >> Any other broader market interest on things that were surprises or not surprises that are compelling? >> I mean, you know the other thing I wouldn't say it's a surprise per se, but I mean, I think the partnership with AWS has been fantastic. Right, I mean we sort of went into it, I think in the right way between Pat and Andy and focused on doing something meaningful together. The relationship has only gotten sort of deeper and deeper over time. And, one of the interesting things about it is that relationship spans not just engineering and product management and product strategy which is sort of my neck of the woods. But also the marketing organizations, the sales organizations, the support organizations. So it's, it's become I think a very deep partnership. We're able to speak to each other very openly and trying to solve together the, you know the problems that customers are putting in front of us. >> And what's with Outposts, what's the new update on Outposts? >> Yeah, yeah so you know no news on Outposts today obviously but we're working very closely with AWS to enable the VMware Cloud on AWS Outposts model second half of this year. And, the customer interest has just been fantastic, right. And in many ways it's basically the exact same value prop of VMC on AWS in terms-- >> In reverse. >> But, but in reverse and anywhere you want, right, at your door step, right, any Edge, any data center, so. >> I got to ask you, back to the AWS relationship. We were big fans of it always have been. Learned from both sides and believe in it. Having said that, EC2 is the bread and butter for Amazon despite it's hundreds and hundreds of services. That's where their revenue comes from, and compute, your compute business is you know, significant. So my question is, is it a zero some game long-term or when you look at the tam do you see all these other services that you can sell longer term providing you know, the growth engine for your respective companies? Or, does this whole you know, rising tide lift both boats, what are your thoughts on that? >> Yeah, I mean it's clearly rising tide lifts both boats. I mean, again I'll, I always bring it back to the customer right, 'cause that's the way I like to view the world and AWS-- >> And you've got some evidence now that's why I'm asking. >> Yeah and I mean what you're seeing is actually I mean if you take some of these customer examples. Let me give you one from the UK. So, Stagecoach. I don't know if you heard about these guys. But they're a major, so they provide transportation services in the UK, and other countries as well. So, they run a network of buses, trains and they're responsible for the transportation of three million commuters every day in the UK. So, they have this really mission critical application that they're building that is basically responsible for scheduling those buses and those trains and scheduling the conductors and the operators. So you can imagine this application is super mission critical for their business, right. And, they chose to run that application on VMware Cloud on AWS and one of the reasons they chose that is because we have a unique capability called stretch clustering. >> Sure. >> Which says "Hey, even if there's an issue in one AZ we can restart that application in a second AZ. So there's a really good reason for the customer to choose it. But now back to your question, right? If you think about the opportunity in that for both VM or in AWS, it's meaningful, right? You know, for us, we're selling the entire VMware Cloud on AWS service to that customer across those two AZ's for mission critical workload that's core to their business. For AWS, they're able to of course not only supply the infrastructure that we run on top of but also as that customer looks to do more interesting things they can attach an additional native AWS services, right? So, you know I think that's a great example where delivering value to the customer and if you focus on that the right things will kind of flow back to the companies that help make that possible. >> Good partnering helps you reduce friction and get to market faster. Thinking about the intense effort that both you know, Pat's described, Andy Jassy described, you've described in terms of that partnership, that deep engineering. Can you do multiples of those or is it that you don't because of the respect for the partnership or is it too intense and it's too resource intensive? How many of these types of partnerships can you actually have? >> Well I mean and I think Pat has said it pretty clearly, right? I mean AWS is our primary preferred partner, right. And, what we're doing with them is very unique, right? And it's something that we want to make sure that we have the right level of investment in and that we do an amazingly good job of, right. And I think they feel the same way. And so having that focus together between the two companies. I think is what, has allowed us to be you know, achieve some of the level of success we've had to date and we expect to do that going forward. >> Mark, final question for you. What's your objective this year in your business unit? What's your focus? What are some of the things that you're working on that people should know about? >> Yeah, so first of all. I had VMware Cloud VD but that's just to wrap that up I think the big thing we're focused on going forward is really this modernization kind of piece of the story. How do we enable Native Kupernetes in the service? How do we enable ML and AI workloads in this service? How do we do a better job of connecting to all of the AWS services? So, you're going to see a big kind of focus, there. Beyond VMware Cloud AWS, I mean we're really excited about bringing this VMC model back on Prem both with Dell and on top of AWS Outposts. I mean the customer interest has been, you know fantastic, right? And, you think about all the reasons that customers want to be able to run their applications, you know on Prem, data locality, latency, compliance, all sorts of really good reasons. We think that those services have really hit a sweet spot of that market. >> IT as a managed service, what an interesting idea, don't you think? (laughing) >> Mark: Yeah. >> Whole nother level same game, whole new ball game, right? >> Absolutely! >> Mark, thanks for sharing your insight. Congratulations on your success and we'll be following it. VMware Manage Solutions AWS certainly a big hit. Changed the game for the company and now they're bringing Dell EMC among other potential business model opportunities for customers. As Cloud 2.0 comes as theCUBE's coverage. Live at VMworld 2019, be right back with more from San Francisco after this short break. (bright music)

>> It's The Cube, covering WTG TRANSFORM 2019. Brought to you by WINSLOW Technology Group. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman. We're here in Boston, Massachusets, across the Mass Pike from Fenway Park, and happy to welcome back to the program Mike Berthiaume, who's Director of Systems Engineering at Nutanix, a good partner of Winslow Technology Group. Mike, thanks for joining us. >> Well as always Stew, it's great to be here. This is number three for us I think, this has become kind a bit of a tradition. >> The third year we've done at this, I've seen you at many of the local user groups here and as I say, a nice home game after lots of travels around the globe. Talking about lots of technologies. >> For sure, looking forward to it. >> What I've always loved, diggin in, in a show like this is we've got users. Scott and the team have a 189 users, many of them are Nutanix customers. So let's start there, what's top of mind from your customers today? >> A lot, so there's a lot happening, as we know in the industry. Things are changing and our customers are trying to figure out what it means for them. But at the end of the day it's all about IT, providing the value back to the business. I think CIOs, and we were just speaking about this in our session, are really pushing their staff to look at public cloud as a potential option. So in many of the folks working on the trenches realize, "Oh yeah, public cloud does make sense "for some things but not necessarily everything." The true strategy we have to have as an organization is multi-cloud, figure out how to make that work. So that's really what we're hearing, and the good news is from our product portfolio Nutanix, and what we're doing. We're really very much in lockstep with that. >> When I think back when that whole wave of hyper-converged infrastructure aged the eye which, Nutanix to its credit never was like, HCI, HCI. It was about simplicity, it was about working on the business, and underneath it that's software that drives the company. The founders of the company came from some of the hyperscalers, some of the file system design underneath there. So when you hear, well the promise of public cloud is supposed to be simple and economic. Well public cloud, we understand is neither simple nor cheap. >> That's right. >> Hyper-converged infrastructure did simplify environments, and changes the economics of how we think if it. When I talk to Nutanix customers it's like, "Oh hey, I don't no longer need to do constant care feeding "of this stack of wires and stuff put together, "much of it is much simpler." You talk about customers, they're going to that multi-cloud, hybrid cloud environment, they're trying to figure out their strategy. Rick Gowan in his presentation said something I thought resonated with me, which is, "You don't want to end up in hybrid cloud, "just you ended up there by mistake without plans," And unfortunately that's where IT is, I've got lots of projects that I do, and I do them as I need them and I realize, "Oh wait, somebody's manage, maintain, "and pull all these things together." So help us understand where Nutanix fits in that multi-cloud story today, which is more than just where people that might not of looked in a couple a years, know the appliance. >> Yeah sure, and I think from are, and mentioned before our roots come from those big large public cloud environments like Google, and Amazon, and others. But when we talk about multi-cloud, and you also made the point that simplicity is probably one of the core values that our customers see Nutanix as being on the forefront there. So I would say that for me, hybrid cloud and I think the mantra within Nutanix, hybrid cloud is not something that many manufacturers have been able to achieve. It's a lot a separate silos, right and as soon as you create multiple silos, you're actually creating operational disruption, and you're actually creating complexity. So if you have to manage public cloud a, public cloud b, your on-prem environment, and maybe your remote offices, and even your edge with different management tools. There's not a ton of value there from a simplicity stand point. So what we strive to do? Is we strive to create that abstraction, that single consistent control plane. That goes between your on-premises, your remote offices, and now truly extend that into the public cloud. So I can manage my resources in the public cloud, in the same way I would on premises. Whether that be next generation applications that probably truly do belong in a public cloud, like cloud-native apps, or my traditional legacy applications that have been running in my data center for years. So that's really what it comes down to, is being able to provide that true seamless experience for users. And at the end a the day businesses and users shouldn't really care where their applications are, it should be whatever most cost effective for the business. And based on who you are as a user, if you're a developer? Or you are a executive? Where my application is shouldn't matter, it should be available wherever I am. >> Mike one of the things that's been interesting watching Nutanix is not the growth of the core market, but its got this three-tier architecture. You have a lot of different software pieces, some of which, at least today are not necessarily directly tied back to the original hyper-converged infrastructure. Where are you with the customers locally? Any kind a proof points? You can give us that kind a help us understand the strategy a bit more. >> I think the majority of the customers are running Nutanix here locally in New England, and probably a good majority of the world are running Nutanix, running kind of the core Nutanix, right. And the value that they're driving from that, they're seeing there is immense. They're getting the simplicity having the ability to run their operations, click one button to do their upgrades without disruption. There is a lot of value there. That's solving many of the issues. Now the higher level capabilities, and the higher level features. In order to be able to deliver those in a consistent way, you have to have a solid core foundation. All right, so that sold core foundation is our core ACI platform, or our cloud like infrastructure. One of the things I'll always say to customers is, "When you look at your Nutanix infrastructure, "your software to find data center, "it actually resembles what's running in a public cloud." So whether, if you're running applications in Amazon for example, you're running in a highly scalable distributed architecture. That's the exact same thing you're doing with Nutanix, and the reason they've been able to deliver those higher value services is because they have that solid foundation underneath it. So if you want to run your environment in a similar way, and true hybrid cloud? You've got to follow their playbook, and the technology that you're choosing, and we believe Nutanix is that right choice. >> Yeah and in many ways we're seeing the blurring the lines between them. I've interviewed people from Nutanix that's on the Cooper Netty Show, that experience that I have and Nutanix has partnerships with some of the public cloud environments. So we're seeing that location matters a little bit less. >> Absolutely, I think the nirvana again if we can imagine, what is this all going to look like five years from now? It's a single portal, single interface where I'm requesting some sort of a business service, or an application. And when I deploy it, it's not going to ask me where it's going to go? It's going to out it where it belongs based on the cost and business logic that I've actually defined in the system. And if it needs to go on Amazon? Or it needs to go on Azure? The decision is going to be made based on business logic, as opposed to technology decision, which I think is what matters. >> So Mike, I can't let you go without talking about, Winslow Technology's here, is a big Dell partner. >> %100. And they sell the Dell XE solution here. They're people out there, there is well the Dell relationship. Yes, they are one Nutanix biggest partners, but they are also, if you look out into the market and you look at market share? The biggest alternative to a Nutanix agency I-Option is the Dell EMC VxRail. So help us understand that dynamic, and how that's playing out in your world? >> Yeah that's a great question, and I kind of expected the controversial questions, as always on theCube, so thanks Stu. In terms a that I would say that when you look at Nutanix, the first thing I'll say is all HCI is not created equal. There is pretty significant differences between the two platforms. Yeah combining and storage, we could loosely define as HCI, but we really can't look at competing solutions as true cloud like infrastructure. Running our controller virtual machine in the user space, and having mobility of applications across hypervisors, and across clouds on a single platform is something very unique to Nutanix. So we're absolutely seeing competitive pressure for sure, but when we have the opportunity to talk to customers about what their multi-cloud journey really means to them? The discussion usually moves forward in a positive way. So I think our view, our perspective. You mention simplicity, we're all about choice, freedom of choice, we don't want to lock our customers into anymore particular technology. Let's do what makes most sense for the business, whether it's alternative public cloud, alternative hardware, or even alternative hypervisors. We give customers choice, we don't have a religion around any one particular technology. We talk about containerization for example, and kubernetes. We give customers the ability to deploy kubernetes on crime, leveraging the source version in kubernetes. All of the capabilities within the Nutanix platform will run on of the hypervisors we support. Right, so that's an important distinction too, it's not like we're telling you have to run one particular hyupervisor to get x feature. So an important distinction point there is we truly do believe in giving our customers the freedom to choose. >> Yeah that's great, just last thing Mike I got to imagine your customers are asking a lot a questions. There's all these new things coming out there that look, sound, or feel a little like what Nutanix is doing. So from the big ones like AWS Outposts, Azure, had Azure stacked, now is the new Azure HCI. So what do you tell your customers when the start calling and asking about these technologies? >> Well, if you look at the history? We've been doing this for a long time now, I've been here for over five years, and Nutanix has been doing this sense two, we've released our product back in 2011, after a couple a years of development. So we've been doing it longer than anybody else, and we also really built our platform around a mantra, that we are highly scalable distributed architecture, along enabling choice, and providing a level of simplicity that customers won't see in any other platform. So just the amount of development and engineering and focus around our customers and the needs of our customers really makes us sustain that. And if you look at just the overall growth of Nutanix, and the transition we're making now to more of a subscription base business model. It makes sense for customers and we've given them the ability to consume in a way that is even more incremental than it was in the past, and certainly more differentiated than what our competitors do. >> All right, Mike Berthiaume always a pleasure to catch up with you on camera, as well as off. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you very much appreciate it Stu. >> All right, more coverage here from WTG Transform 2019. I'm Stu Miniman and thanks for watching theCube. (upbeat music)

(orchestral music) >> Hi, I'm Peter Burris, and welcome to another Cube conversation, from our awesome studios in beautiful Palo Alto, California. With every Cube conversation, we pick a topic, find someone to talk about. The topic today is hybrid cloud. A lot of conversation. AWS introduced Outposts, we've got Microsoft Azure talking about centralize, as well as distributed cloud offerings. Oracle is doing the same thing. A lot of conversation about hybrid cloud and what it means. To have that conversation, we've got David Floyer with us. David is the CTO of Wikibon. David, welcome back to theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, Peter. >> David, let's start by saying, that there has to be a way of representing different options when we think about hybrid cloud. You've done a lot of research in this domain. How are you representing the continuum, the taxonomy of hybrid cloud for customers? >> On the slide, it shows that there are essentially, five different multiple clouds or hybrid clouds. From left to right, it's multi-cloud, and at the bottom of the slide, it says that this essentially a set of clouds, with an integrated network. And then the next is loosely-coupled hybrid cloud, and that adds in the data plane, where we look after storage, and data protection, data management, et cetera. The middle one is tightly-coupled hybrid cloud, and that's where the control plane, is now tightly integrated along with everything else. The next one is "true" distributed hybrid cloud, and those are the ones that you were talking about. Those are the AWS Outposts, the Azure Stack, the Oracle Cloud at Customer-type environments. Also, you could put IBM, some of IBM's recent announcements into that as well. Last but not least, and certainly one of the most interesting and different, is the autonomous stand-alone clouds, are going to be at the edge. They have to be autonomous, because they can't guarantee network availability to them. >> So, five classes of cloud, each distinguished by the degree, to which they share different types of resources, including state, integration, automation, and the degree to which the application is going to be common across each of these cloud types. >> That's correct. >> Have I got that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. >> Obviously, while this is theoretical. >> Yeah. >> In a sense that we're trying to create some way, so understanding about how to represent these things. It's based on some practical observations, about where we are within the industry. >> Yeah. >> Let's start talking about multicloud. Who do you place into that bucket, of multicloud hybrid cloud styles? >> If we talk first of all about the cloud themselves, there would be clouds from AWS or Azure, or IBM or Google. Those are the clouds that you start with, you might have one on premise, but the connection between them is just on a network basis. The people who are doing that would be clearly, Cisco is one of the leading people in that area, where they already have a lot of enterprise equipment, and experience of dealing with clouds, across the whole of the area. They would be the people, that are going to be a foremost vendor, in connecting those different clouds together, on a network plane. >> Okay, let's move to the right, and talk about the loosely-coupled hybrid clouds. Now here we're having more than network, common network. We're having a common data plane, which really boils down to a common set of data services, that are rendered commonly. >> Right, yeah. >> Across different cloud instances. >> Right. >> Who's there? >> To do that, you've got to be able to have your data services, actually on each of the clouds. You have to have it in software on AWS, or Azure, or IBM, or whatever it is. Two of the people that's probably leading the charge in that area are IBM themselves. They've gone completely software, with all of their spectrum line of software in that area, and Pure. Pure Storage have been very aggressive again, in putting things up, so that they can be reflected in each of the clouds. >> And there's other vendors, that are coming in from a data protection standpoint. >> Sure. >> Data security standpoint, and they may-- Some people like Veeam. >> -not have the full set of services. >> Yes. But they are looking at how they can apply their services. >> Correct. >> Across multiple cloud instances. >> And there's a lot of vendors there. People like Veeam or Rubric, or Cohesity. DellEMC. >> Et cetera, yes. >> Okay, so let's move to the right. Now we've moved from loosely-coupled, to tightly-coupled hybrid clouds, where we're starting to share a common automation framework, more control, sharing control data so that we can start to understand, the state of applications in multiple different locations. >> Yes. >> Who's leading there? >> Some of the leads in this area, are some of the traditional ones, like IBM for example. IBM Sysplex, which came out what, 20 years ago. >> We're not. >> That is where you have state being, time and state being shared, across a whole number of different instances, or notion within that Sysplex. >> Yeah, let's talk about that specifically. So, we're talking about a global shared memory notion. >> Yes. >> More than just a name space, but actually-- >> Correct. >> -a control plane, that has global incite into where resources are, has names for them. >> Yeah. >> They may be multiple name spaces, but it's bringing a common set of controls to that global set of resources. >> Yes, and time is obviously a key aspect to help stay-- >> Well, it's got to be synchronized. >> Yes. >> Exactly. >> That's right. >> If we move to the right to true distributed hybrid cloud, in the tightly-coupled, we have a common control plane, but not necessarily common software. >> Correct. >> Common code. >> Correct. >> At the compile level. We're still utilizing distribution formats, maybe specific, et cetera. But now in a true hybrid, or true distributor hybrid cloud, it's common-common. >> Yes. >> Who's there? >> Yes, it's common code. It can run on any node without having to be recompiled, or retested. You know it's going to work. The people in there, are the people that we were talking about earlier. It's people like AWS with Outposts, Microsoft with Azure Stack, Cloud at Customer from Oracle. Three large vendors, who are using this to use a cloud first-type model, in which they can grow, the central cloud, as quickly as possible, add things to it, and push that down into the Cloud at Customer, or the Outposts, or the Stacks. >> To be clear, we're not talking about a common cloud experience, we're talking about absolute common cloud services. >> Correct. >> All the way down to the executables, so that the same software can run wherever it needs to run. >> Yes. >> Finally, let's move one step further to the right. This is the autonomous stand-alone clouds. >> Yes, this is at the edge. >> Who's there? >> This is the most different of all of these. It has to be autonomous. If you think about mobile vehicles or planes, or even think about a factory or a nuclear power plant. You have to be able to run that, assuming that the network is not going to get through. It's on the edge, so it's the most vulnerable to network. It has to be autonomous, therefore it has to be able to run by itself. That sort of cloud is mainly concerned with the state, the state of that edge. All of the devices in that edge, the windmills in that edge, or the factory robotics in that edge. In military terms, the automated units in that edge, or the drones. Whatever it is, you're concerned about the state of that. >> But specifically, sustaining local control of state. >> Correct. >> Against a common understanding. >> Yes. >> Of how these things interact with each other. >> Right. >> It brings almost a network realtime of flavor to it. >> It is realtime. It has to be realtime so it's a shared state across. For example, across the city, in terms of the traffic lights. You would see multiple of these small clouds, in different parts of a large city, for example. Which need to communicate with each other. So, you have devices, which have an inference code running on them, and they're dealing with the device, on to which it's attached. And then you have connecting all of those devices together, to make this overall system representation of the sate. >> Okay, so we've got five classes of hybrid cloud. How is a CIO going to use this taxonomy, to make better decisions? >> Clearly by making this decision, what we're doing from a taxonomy point of view, is making each one individual, and different from the others. There's no sharing between them. That means that from a description point of view, we can describe the whole of this industry. We can say how much is going on in each one, who are winners and losers in each one. >> We'll use this to size different classifications. >> Right, and give that-- >> Talk about leader, describe competition and all that stuff. >> Yes. >> But if I'm a CIO, do I think, oh, I got a business problem that's associated with applications, on various levels of common data sharing, control sharing, et cetera. Do I use this to help me chose the specific architecture that I use? >> The best way that I think that CIO's are going to use this to say, "Where am I aiming to be? What is most important to me and my business? If it is the edge, then how am I going to go through these? Because I'm not going to get to the edge on day one. How am I going to chose my vendors and my protocols, and my standards, and my data planes, and my control planes, such that I can get to that particular end point?" Within each one, you'd want to look at them individually, because you're going to put together a, first of all, in a multi-cloud environment. But you should be looking into the future, as to how you want to traverse across this, and who your major partners and vendors will be. Or, strategic partners and vendors. >> And we'll use this as you said, we'll use this specifically to size the market, describe the competitive factors, et cetera. >> Correct, yeah. All right. David Floyer, thanks very much for being on theCUBE. >> Thanks very much, indeed. >> Once again, I'm Peter Burris, and we have been talking about Cube conversations, related to true hybrid cloud taxonomies. Wikibon research. Thanks very much for watching, and until our next Cube conversation. (orchestral music)