>> Announcer: 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. >> Welcome back, this is theCUBE two stages, three days of coverage, our tenth year here at the VMworld show. I'm Stu Miniman and my co-host for this segment is Bobby Allan. And welcome back, two of our CUBE alumni. >> How are you? >> As I said back in 2010 we didn't even know what a CUBE alumni was. People were trying to figure out what we're doing but now we have thousands of them and both of these gentlemen have been on the program, a few times. >> Thanks for having us back. >> You're welcome. So, first, over we have Ajay Patel, who I believe was doing another filming evening with our crew-- >> Absolutely >> Earlier today. >> The Accenture Innovation Center. >> Ah, excellent. Beautiful building Accenture has here in San Francisco. >> Ajay: Beautiful (mumbles) >> One of the other benefits of being back in San Francisco is we brought in people and it's really easy to get in and out and do other things in the Valley. But Ajay is the senior vice president and general manager of the cloud provider software business unit inside VMware. And one of his partners is Rackspace. We have Peter FitzGibbon who is the vice president of Product Alliances, with for mentioned Rackspace. >> Yeah, super to be back in San Francisco. It's a great change from Vegas. >> Yeah, you know, there is some debate in the community of course it's a little more expensive here in San Francisco and there are other logistic challenges. We're excited to be back here and yeah, really excited to be talking with both of you. Peter, let's start, you know Rackspace has had a long, long partnership with VMware. When I remember back to like VMware Environments Hosted it's like, Rackspace was the one with the lion's share in that market. And, you know, Rackspace has gone through a lot of changes in the last 10 years that we've been doing this coverage. When I think about multi cloud, all of these environments you've got a nice perspective on this and lots of customers you've worked with. So, give us the update on what you're hearing from customers and your relationship with VMware. >> Yeah, so, 20-year history with VMware that we're very proud of. I would say it's almost being re-birthed in the last two years though. Two years ago, we were one of the first VMware Cloud Verified partners. We launched our VMware Cloud VMware Cloud Foundation Private Cloud. We added that about six months later in customer data centers. We're now one of the major partners of VMware Cloud AWS >> Ajay: VMware Cloud AWS yep. >> And that's one of the areas that we're continuing to expand upon. We announced some new services this week, specifically around VMware Cloud AWS or support of HDX, both for migrations for ongoing support as well as a number of, what we call Rackspace service blocks. Which are additional manage services that we are applying, specifically for VMware Cloud and AWS. So, exciting times at Rackspace and VMware continues to be a look, a major part of our portfolio. >> Ajay: And thank you for all the support, Peter. >> Yeah, so Ajay, bring us up to speed of what's happening in your space you know, a lot of attention gets paid, you know Every time, you know, I saw Sanjay Poon, up on stage at the Goolge clould event, and of course the AWS partnership has been one of the biggest stories in all of tech, for the last couple of years. And that's been extending to, you know first it was like, wait, you know Rackspace has data centers and many of your other partners have data centers, but how did these all, play together and how does the VMware software pull them all together. >> So Stu, I think, you and I have been talking about this world of hybrid multi and we've been arguing, whether it's just a transitionary stage, or here to stay. Hopefully that debate's over, right? Hybrid's a new reality, multi cloud's a new reality and we talk about these hyper scales but you know, Rackspace and many of my VCP partners they've been longstanding in this journey with us. I don't know if you caught Pat's keynote? We demonstrated, that we have over 10 000 data centers through our VCPP network and Rackspace being one of our top 10 partners. So you start, to start seeing this mix of VMware everywhere. Whether it's trough our service provider cloud the customer manage cloud or even a hyper scale VMware cloud. You now have the ubiquitous VMware infrastructure to play with. >> At some point it's just cloud. (chattering) >> That is a great point, when I talk to customers most of them, they have a cloud strategy it's usually not a hybrid or a multi or all these things. Here's the nuance I want to, you know, ask for a second then I definitely want Bobby to jump in with what he's been talking to customers about. You know, hybrid cloud is a reality because customers have their own data centers and they have public cloud. The ideal of multi cloud, customers have multiple clouds, but, you know, one of the definitions I put out there is, multi cloud exists when the multi cloud solution is more valuable than the sum of the pieces. And I'm not sure that we're quite there yet. I think we're starting to move down that path. But what are you both seeing? And does that resonate with what you see today? >> Yeah like, all of our customers have workloads in multiple locations and trying to provide the assessments of where to put the right workloads at the right time is one of the key values that we hold dear. And before we ever talk about where we're going to but a workload we assess whether, what our clients environments is and determine, maybe this is an AWS workload maybe this is a WMS workload maybe this workload really belongs in the data center for, due to laws of the lands laws of gravity and physics. >> And I think, what's happening, really is any application, typically choosing a platform or the cloud service that's driving the decision. Collectively what ends up happening because of that, you are in multiple clouds. So, I think what's it's a result of the reality that applications are driving location and platform choices and the way to drive consistency is trying to pick a few common things whether it's kubernetes as a platform or VMware, right? Those are a way to, kind of, unify these desperate choices that are made individually. That are collectively making each of our customers multi cloud, right? >> Ajay, I want to piggyback on that because you talked about the applications driving a lot of the choices, when applications teams in my experience are, kind of, making the choices they don't care about a centralized strategy and obviously, this very powerful partnership can support multiple places and ways around your workloads. How do you lead the witness, a little bit towards simplification and just because you can do it doesn't mean you should do it. >> Yes, so I think what's happening from our perspective is depending on which side of the IT house you're at if you're part of the core IT that's running and maintaining mission critical systems you're really looking for something that's reliable, performance scalable, secure. And you, maybe, looking at a hardware refresher looking at your data center strategy and you're looking to migrate that workload. You're not really looking to re-change the app just because it's cool. >> Bobby: Right. >> If you're part of digital transformation effort you're looking to say, okay how do I get something out there quickly? >> Bobby: Right. >> How do I integrate on the average my data and application assets while leveraging cloud services? >> Bobby: Right. So, we're seeing this tension in some ways where the, kind of, net new is really pushing the envelope of cloud with self service elasticity, new capability while as the old guard is like I got to keep my running business, running keep it secure. And how do you bridge these two worlds and bring them together? We call it DevOps and, you know, ITA and the traditional, kind of new developer. Reality is, you're trying to bring the two worlds on a common platform. Whether it's VM's or containers and so the exciting part for us is, how do we unify? How do we deliver this experience and give them the choice, where it makes more sense. And blur the lines between public and private. Those are just locations and makes more sense for your customer or your application that you can drive. >> Bobby: Right, excellent. >> We find ourselves in those conversations, all the time trying to bridge two sides of the equation at a customer and trying to get them together on a uniformed strategy and weighing the pros and cons of different locations or different workloads. So, it's not easy, it's not a challenge of course. >> Peter, I'd love you to bring us inside some of those VMware on AWS customers because, you know, some of the first customers I talked to, it was, you know, I'm a VMware shop and there's a part of your group that's like oh my gosh, I can't change and this was a driver saying hey, you don't need to, we can bring you along. But, the value, once again needs to be Oh hey, I need to do some innovative things I want to be able to access some of those cool amazing services that, you know everybody is providing on a daily basis. So, you know, are you seeing that progression are there any interesting use cases that are coming out? >> Progression is the word, we could call it progressive transformation inside Rackspace. Like, you're a VMware customer let's bring you ion the journey towards public cloud. And let's help you leverage those address services. So, we find ourselves in a great position where a very large number of engineers, that support our native AWS workloads, we've brought those two groups together from our VMware expertise and address expertise. So when a customer lands on a VMware address I consider it a failure, if they haven't transformed part of the application in three months. If they're not really consuming those native AWS services. And that's what we really try inject. It's like, get our AWS engineers looking at those workloads let's start consuming those native services and that's what we're finding really exciting about how customers are starting to adopt and starting to plug and play into some of those services. >> Oh I look at it, as you know, you'll see a team Sanjay called it M&MS, migrate and modernize but a part of the migrate is often modernize your infrastructure first by putting on a modern cloud platform. And then modernize your application using cloud services. How it says, it's M-M and M, right, to follow through because it's not just about lifting and shifting keeping the old crap as it is. You got to really start to look at how do you drive innovation drive your Cube to a better place. So that you can operate it more affectively and then modernize for application results. And your service blocks, are really catered to helping that customers. So you can talk a little bit about how they're building the services that compliment our offer. >> Yeah, so our service blocks is... In the past, we offered them one big block manage service to a customer. We realized, let's decompose that and offer the customer what they need at a specific point in time. So we, think about Lego blocks, where at some point you may need, just some support or at some point you might need some architectural services and design and other times you might say cost optimization. That sort of stuff. So over time, we're adding on these Lego blocks if you will, to add a customer, to give them what they need at the point they need it, and not more. So, it's an exciting concept that every month, we're adding more services. We launched a Rackspace manage security service block today specifically for VMware cloud. So, we continue to add these and provide incremental value. >> I want to ask you a little bit of a controversial question. There's a saying, pioneers take the arrows but settlers take the land. >> Right >> So, if I'm a technology leader how do I embrace all this newness without getting shot, partnering with your firms. >> So, you know, we always say lock-ins bad but reality is, we always choose to reject technology platforms. And if you're a VMware customer I hate to say it, you're running on VMware infrastructure you have VMware ecosystem, you have VMware run books you have VMware partners, managing your on-prem assets what if I could you a path forward on any cloud of your choice without having to change any of your day-tot-day operation while leveraging the innovation future. What is the safest path for you, Mr Customer? And so, in this world, you can think of us being laggard in some sense. Because we're not pushing them to a single destination. We're giving them that choice, leveraging the strength. I think the innovative part that we've done today has really brought containers and VM'S in a single solution. We talked about containers killing VM'S two years ago, right? You know, VMware was getting trouble with docker VMware was going to be trouble with Openstack. Where are those two companies today and where is VMware? It's about simplifying for the customer a common solution. And we're taking those choices away and making this easy. Giving partners who can help them on their journey. So, I would say we're the safer choice. >> Okay >> That will be my response. >> Peter, we're not going to ask you about Openstack. (Giggles) >> I'm really back to VMware, it's working progress. (Giggles) >> Interesting point, the settlers right? At this point VMSware and AWS is two years old I think that first year, what was definitely some pioneers our there. But now I think we're really in there where the settlers are coming on and we're seeing large-scale adoption in the platform and now that VMware is offering more and more services, natively we can add more those managed services and help those customers really transform and not worry about the underlying IS that's rock-solid at this point. >> Peter, I would like you to get into it a little bit, kind of, the containerization and the kubernetes, you know, Docker, obviously a lot of hype, but containerization that's hugely important, you know a lot of the keynote this morning was talking about cloud native. I talked to lots of customers, you know there's some that, yes, they will want the VMware journey but many of them say, well, If I'm going to cloud I can just use containers. Why would I have the overhead of VM's? when cloud founders was originally created it was not for that type of environment. So where does that fit into, you know your world containers? >> Yeah, we actually launched some more services on that today as well, some more professional services and manage services, so safely around advanced kubernetes support, across all our platforms so this isn't just a VMware announcement this is on AWS, Microsoft, Badger and Google. So, another exciting progression, or hybrid could story and making investments in those resources to deliver kubernetes. We also launched a cloud native service block today, as well, that is really giving customers access to deep engineering skills and giving them cloud reliability engineers that can help them transform their workloads and get them ready for the cloud. >> I think, for us, if you... Project (mumbles) sorry tan zoo as a solution, and project pacific. Our two marquee announcements we made this week and if you look at the way we're focusing on the bull run manage aspects of the full life cycle and our active participation in the kubernetes community we're starting the beginnings of what I felt, like Java in 2000 when I was at BA, right? Where Weblogic and Java was the runtime for rolling and building new apps. Kubernetes and containers are the new runtime for building distributed apps across Cal platforms. And we're in this early journey and we are uniquely in opposition with the combination of pivotal for build. With project Pacific we're bringing containers into V&V-sphere, so VM's and containers become first class. Trough your point, we demonstrated eight percent performance improvement over bare metal on a V-sphere container based solution. Starting to engineer, based on a key scheduling work that we do in the kernel and in the hypervisor we're driving that deep into the kubernetes platform into the core platform itself. And then manage is going to be the new interesting bit. What is that control panel that everyone is going to fight over? And the manage services partner can help them choose. So, I think the battleground is more and more going to manage I think we secured our base with the runtime. And the bill will be about choice. (Mumbles) >> And Tan zoo is music to our ears we can now, again, focus on what's the additional manage services and service-- >> How do you help customers build apps? And change the engineering culture is what you provide. We just give you the runtime across any of these clouds. >> We want to help everyone, transform applications also transform the culture and how they do their business all that rapport-- >> Engineering transformation is a big one. Sajay transformation we talked about, internally for us VMware, same with our customers. You got to change the mindset of how you build the applications. In this container service based architecture >> Agree, agree >> What else is keeping folks up at night? That you talk to? Love to know that, just hot tail. >> Nothing keeps me up at night it's an exciting world we live in so loaded question, what excites me? What excites me is the progression, that VMware is making and the announcement Lydon video and GPU access link I think, early next year. I think that can be another wave of VMC adoptions. So, not keep me up at night but keep me interesting and excited. >> I think to that point I can build on what Pat said about tech for good, I mean we have a joined customer feeding America, right? We're now taking technology and making it available so that, you know, the 60 000 plus distribution centers they have, are up all the time. They're not even worried about infrastructure. They can focus on feeding the cause which is, I think 47 million people being fed. It's scary, right? >> Well, we want to bring it back to the organization of the discussion, you said you're helping customers with because we are worried you know, about how racking, stacking, configuring how doing all of those things, you know how do you help them? I talked to a number of customers at this show and they said look, my roles in my organization is still hardware to find And it's tough to move into a software role but if I want to get into the6 tech for good I need to be able to uplift my skills uplift my organizations, yeah. >> It's difficult, right? Organizational changes differ for every company but as part of the digital transformation there is also organizational transformation so we're having customers think about what is the progression form a VMware administrator to a DevOps-- >> Or cloud, I bet. (Giggles) >> It's not easy, it's your short answer on that. >> I think for us, is really starting to drive the cultural chance providing the tools and bring the self service in where they can be a coach, right? Be the trailblazer, who can come in and help change your organization. Teach them how to do it right. Not everyone will get there, hopefully bulk of the organization can shift right. >> Peter, I want to give you the final word you know, your partners and customers to understand. Take aways from VMware 2019. >> Yeah, it's great to be here, as usual thanks for having us. I think, Tan Zoo is really exciting. The progression that we're making with adding service blocks on top of VMware and AWS and or other hybrid cloud announcements. So, great to be here, but the Tan Zoo is kind of the story of the show. >> For me, it's a VMware is here to stay. We want to be, be have been, your strategic partner for the last decade. We're here to stay for the next decade. We're going to help you solve these hard complex problems and give you the choice you need. Across a broader ecosystem of partners and solutions. so, very excited to be here and to deliver that value. >> And Peter, thank you so much for joining us again, Bobby Allen, thank you for co-hosting. I'm Stu Miniman and as always thank you for watching theCUBE.