>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's the Cube. Covering VM World 2017. Brought to you by VM Ware and its ecosystem partners. >> I'm Stu Miniman, here with my cohost Keith Townsend, and you're watching wall to wall coverage of VM World 2017 on the Cube here in Las Vegas. You know, third day of programming. We've done so many interviews. A lot of people went to parties last night, you know up early for lots of executive meetings, but you know we go strong through the whole show because we've got great guests, so happy to welcome to the program first time guest, Peter FitzGibbon, Vice President and General Manager with Rackspace, and welcome back to the program Ajay Patel with VM Ware. >> Great to be here. >> Alright, so Peter, you know, Rackspace, interesting transformation over the last few years. You know we've had the Cube at OpenStack for a bunch of years. I've heard almost no discussion of OpenStack this week at the show. >> Man: I'm not complaining. >> I talked to Rackers though, at Reinvent. You have, you know, kind of reinvented the business there, but the VM partnership is one that's been going on for many years. Some people I talk to don't understand. I mean this is a sizable business that you've been doing. I said, you know, let's measure the Rackspace managed VM Ware business against the entire revenue stream of OpenStack outside of what RackSpace does, you know, and it's an interesting comparison. >> So RackSpace continues through the multi cloud company, offering our customers the choice and flexibility they want, so our OpenStack practice continues to grow strong and we continue to invest there, as we do in our VM Ware practice, which we have a great partnership with. Ajay and his team, over the last 10 plus years. >> Also for us, the partnership's only growing stronger. If you walk around WM World with all the banners, you've walked into the airports, the investment RackSpace is making around VM Ware technology, I couldn't be much more happier, so thank you for that. >> So Peter, to Stu's point, RackSpace has been part of the VM Ware community for a long time. I've run into a couple of Rackers on the show floor, talked through kind of what they're doing with their feet on the ground, great work. Can you talk through the relationship with the customer to this point? I mean RackSpace is known for fanatical support. How has that conversation changed over the past three years or so as we've gone through this changing VM Ware strategy to where we're at today? >> Yeah, we're continuing to try to support the customer on whichever technology they really want to land on, so it starts with the planning and analysis phase that we sit with customers and analyze their work loads and try to figure out what's the best fit for them outside of determining is it OpenStack, is it VM Ware? Is it our fanatical support on top of AWS? From a VM Ware perspective, we're really helping people to determine how to move out of the data center, or at least not extend the data centers as they have them right now. We recently launched our RackSpace private cloud powered by VM Ware Cloud foundations. It went to general availability last week, so that's a global effort that we're discussing with our clients and it's proving a very attractive options for those looking for an alternative to their own private cloud and moving to hosting private cloud model. >> Peter, that operating experience is one of the things that customers have been challenged with, and RackSpace, you know, known for, you know, they know how to do this. Talk to us about some of this journey as to how your customers are seeing things. You know RackSpace has had a few different private cloud options you talk about. You've given your customers choice, but what's different now in 2017 and what's the mindset of your customers? >> Yeah, we continue to offer 24 by seven, 365 fanatical support. It's what we really see as our true differentiator in the market, or we have 150 certified VM Ware Rackers on the team that really go beyond, above and beyond every single day for these customers, and looking at not just how to migrate into our private cloud, but how to optimize them when we're there, when they've landed on a VM Ware private hosted cloud solution, how do we really optimize it and really get the full value of the technology? And these are expensive and difficult technologies to use, so you want to make sure people are really getting the true value out of NSX and VSAN, and now with VCF, which we're really excited about. >> Yeah, for us, it's, you know, as you were speaking, I mean the biggest challenge and the constraints exclude resources. Having 150 specialists out there with fanatical support with the great VM Ware technology. And in some ways the VM Ware cloud announcement is kind of making the awareness that you have a cloud stack, that you can now get through, you know RackSpace private cloud, so for us it's really all boats are rising as a result, and not having the skilled capability to then accelerate deployment and delivery and operations is pretty exciting. >> So Ajay, can you talk a little bit about working with RackSpace specifically because RackSpace has a tradition of having a very pronounced way of supporting customers, whether you're a Fortune 500 or you're a small ma and pa shop, RackSpace is going to come with full engineering might and help build the most reliable solution, and that comes with kind of, I imagine, a predisposed position on something like VCF, VM Ware Cloud Foundation. What has it been like to engineer? >> I'll speak the best thing from one of the joint customers that we had the opportunity to be on a panel with, Show Tell, right, and it was interesting to say how Show Tell said RackSpace is part of their operating team, so they enrolled up front in terms of having a partner who can help them with the choice, they made the selection based on the excellent support, but more importantly, they're just an extension of the operating team, and being able to have a single team manage both the on prem and the cloud without having to build a separate kind of cloud team, that was a critical piece of this decision, so kind of this common operating model, which they seamlessly augment with skillset, you know, that was really what resonated for Show Tell and was the reason they chose. >> The operating model is something I was just going to go to in terms of really helping people how they're going to live in this multi cloud world across multiple different technology stacks, and that's what our fanatical support is intended to be, to really be an extension of their, of a homegrown IT team so we can really get the full benefit of these complicated technologies. >> Alright, Peter, you talk multi cloud, and one of the things we talk to customers is a lot of times they say they have a cloud strategy, but how they got there wasn't necessarily as plan full as they might have liked. I had somebody writing for Wikibon a couple years ago said we have composite cloud because you kind of look at it and you always said, you know, do I have Amazon? Yeah, everybody does, you know. Oh I've got some app that somebody needed on GCP. RackSpace is a manage service provider for a lot of different pieces. How do you help customers get their arms around it, you know, and you know, maybe talk, the VM Ware on Amazon, the VMC stuff, how do you look at that in the future, how does that tie into kind of the skillset that your team has? >> So we often see customers coming in with that composite cloud situation where they're like we think we're multi cloud, but we're not truly because they don't have a defined strategy about why they put certain workloads in certain places, it just grew up organically, often through lines of business. VMC is a really exciting offer for us and we're going to be launching it in early 2018. It really gives more choice for customers in terms of where they're going to run their workloads, be it running them in different availability zones that RackSpace doesn't cover or potentially used as a DR solution. >> So let's dive into that composite cloud space, and I really love that comment. What, cloud, multi cloud is one of those things, you don't know you don't have a multi cloud until you don't know you don't have a multi cloud. What are some of the surefire indicators that customers are in where a composite cloud experience or environment versus a true multi cloud? Like what is that conversation like? >> Man: What's a good best practice, yeah? >> Well I think there isn't a lot of good best practices from our customers' point of view. I think they often come in and we lay out their, look at their architectures, look at their different applications, and they're often just, central IT doesn't know where most of it is running half the time, so it's really like okay, let's look at each part of this and decide for you what's the best fit, where should it go? Should we be putting something on Azure or Azure Stack? Should it be better suited to OpenStack? Or is it, they're very familiar with VM Ware and they want to continue to leverage VM Ware either on a host model or internally in their own data center. >> What we're learning is you just don't have visibility, so the biggest interest and the demand when we launched our cross cloud or cloud services, the notion of having visibility of what's running where. And the second question is how much is it costing me, and what can I move and what are the data security leakages that I want to put in place because these things weren't controlled. So those are kind of just knowing, right, knowing where your data is, knowing where your workloads are and how much they're costing you. That's the first baseline they're looking for help on. Once they've got that, then they're like okay, how do I still provide some level of self service and control to the end user while putting some structure by which I can go to a multi cloud strategy? So that's the journey we're just about to see with IT coming into play. >> Peter, I have to mention human interest viewpoint on the ecosystem. RackSpace, I think I understand better now than a few years ago what services you did. VM Ware just launched a bunch of SAS offerings. There were some launched last year. I can't count how many companies are helping people with cloud cost management, licensing, you know, you name it, 12 different aspects to take bites out of this giant elephant of multi cloud and do that. What are the biggest pain points you're hearing from customers? How do you help advise some of them and bring some of the pieces together? >> And it's not even what we see from a customer standpoint. You think of RackSpace, we have to integrate all of these clouds into our own internal system, so we get to experience it firsthand as the customer how we create unified billing systems, how we have unified monitoring, how we integrate all their own legacy systems to deal with these clouds, so we effectively learn from integrating into our own systems, then can advise our customers on the pain points we've seen and bring them on that journey to help them through their true multi cloud approach. >> So if we blow it out and a customer comes to you and they want a multi cloud strategy, and you know, you kind of show them the ugly, you show them the truth for where they're at, what's the next step, like from a practical tactical perspective? What's like step one to helping with SAS applications and for viability for each one of the RackSpace offerings? >> Yeah, so we have a framework which we call PADMO. It's plan, analyze, design, migrate, optimize. It took me a second to get the last part out, and trying to, that planning stage is really where we sit with the customer aside, okay, what does your environment look like and why is it that way? Were things made in a conscious decision or did it just happen organically? So we try to figure out what did they do intentionally and what, what just grew up organically? And move from there into designing or analyzing what's best fit for the different cloud strategies, then start designing it, migrating it, and then effectively optimizing it when they land on RackSpace and show the value of our 24 seven, 365 fanatical support. >> For us, it's about, for us the technology part, and we want to enable the core VM Foundation, but we also believe that network connectivity's the next big thing, so things like NSXT is something we're already having conversation with, like how are we going to stitch these clouds together, how do we make it more software defined so as we move towards this kind of policy driven, you know management abstraction, how do we then open up the different clouds and service that capability? So that's really the next journey for both of us from VCM, or VM Ware Cloud Foundation to the broader multi cloud strategy. >> And Ajay, your, you know, cloud provider partners, what about services? Is there any joint engagement or things that VM Ware helps write that are? >> So one of the big service for all, we're kind of coming together is around DR. Consistently the easy step to get to a hybrid or a leverage cloud is disaster recovery. What if we made that a native feature of the VM Ware stack? We could have our customer right click on a VM and protected by all these service provider clouds. That's an example of something we're kind of trying to generalize. Now on each of them, the complexity of operating it, the scale, the visibility, the service levels, those are unique to each partner, but we're trying to make sure that the platform gives you this basic capability to capture workloads. >> I feel like DR is essential to everyone's road map right now. Most of our customers, maybe all of our customers are requiring DR when they land on RackSpace, and we're really looking at that on our 2018 roadmap to see how we make DR, as a service, consistently part of the offering. >> So what works well and what doesn't work well? When you go through that initial setup complication, so DR's a great example of oh, this is low hanging fruit. We either don't have a DR that's working or we don't have DR at all, and there's kind of this, you know, when you whiteboard it, it works extremely well. What are some of the practical business challenges that you see customers experience on that journey? >> There's definitely some easy options to move first for customers. DR is a common one that we see, DevTest as well in terms of okay, how can you test out our environments and do it in a low risk way? There's always going to be those more core applications, those mission critical applications that people will wait till the end until they migrate, so let's migrate them to RackSpace private cloud and see how it operates, maybe as a DR environment, or as a DEV environment test environment, and then as they build confidence and see what fanatical support we offer, then they start moving more mission critical workloads. >> I share the same. Tier one usually is high availability, high design, high touch, tier two often ignored, too expensive, too hard. We're trying to go after the tier two or tier three apps and just provide a convenient cloud economics for protecting those workloads. >> Peter, I'm curious, how often are customers trying one thing and then moving into another? You know I get calls all the time, you know, data gravity of course is a big issue, but you know if I'm building an application, sometimes it's like oh wait, you know maybe this isn't the best place to live. Lots of customers, you know, will build one place and run production in another place. You know we've seen that. How much is mobility in turn, is lock in still a challenge? You know, how much, what's real and what's not? >> I think lock in is still a challenge, but we're certainly looking into how we're helping our customers move from one cloud to another. We continue work in our different business units across RackSpace, be it VM Ware, AWS, Azure Open Stack, and see how we can offer flexibility for customers. When they realize they've gone too far on one or another, we're not seeing specific use cases of everybody moving from one to another, it's more of a pick and choose, and so we're helping customers migrate from one to another as needed. >> So I'd be interested to know what, not percentage, what type of customer kind of has this hybrid IT or hybrid cloud approach in RackSpace where they build cloud native applications and then connect them to a VCF or VM Ware private cloud, and I think more specifically, I think the question that I would like to get at is that a real thing that, not necessarily real thing, is that impacting friction between the public cloud with cloud native applications and your ability to manage that and add that fanatical support in the developer looking to consume that, to integrate it to VM Ware? >> I'm not seeing that friction between the different technologies. I think, at RackSpace we try work across all of them to offer the choice to our clients and our customers as much as possible, make sure we really offer them the best choice and put the workloads in where they really are best suited to run. >> And opposition is you know container and micro sourced architecture are going to provide an excellent frameworks and tools. The maturity's still in the works, and our goal is to say can we make, you know, either VM or physical, be it the best place for deploying, and what are the tools and capability you need to provide? So for us, networking, security, those are kind of fundamental problems regardless if you're building a cloud native app or a traditional app, and how do we insert our value into the equation versus trying to own the whole solution, right? >> Peter FitzGibbon, thank you so much for getting the update on RackSpace. Ajay, always a pleasure. I'm trying to remember what the five time award is. We'll talk to John Furrier, make sure we have it ready for the next time we have you on. For Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. This is VM World 2017 and you are watching the Cube. >> Man: Thank you guys. (upbeat instrumental music)