>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum, World 2019 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> And welcome back here, San Francisco Moscow Centre, North John Walls along with John Troyer. We're live here on the Cuban Veum World 2019 and right now we're joined by Christmas. Reynolds, who's a product in court product management and Clyde on data service, is for Centurylink. It's good to see you, sir. Good to be here. Thank you. And And he's gonna tell us today why Milliseconds matter, right? You are. >> That is the goal. Your >> your subject of ah, coming presentation. Just about 45 minutes or so. But we'll get to that a little bit. First off, let's just paint the picture of centurylink your presence here quite obvious. But you know what your portfolio includes? There what you're up to, and maybe starting to hint a little bit about why milliseconds matter to you. >> Makes it so. Where a technology company, global in nature. A lot of our roots started with fiber connectivity. Basic networking service is I. P Service is. But over the years we've become far more of a nightie service company. So there was an acquisition of Savvas a long time ago that brought a lot of those capabilities to our company. And we've made more fold in acquisitions that have also bolster those capabilities. We have invested heavily in Security Service's recently and about two weeks ago we had an announcement that said, We're investing heavily an edge compute getting workloads closer to end users. And that's really where milliseconds matters. You want the performance of those applications to consumers or machinery or whatever it may be toe work effectively and work well. And sometimes that requires that those workloads air in close proximity to the end users. >> Would you bring up ej compute? We were just having this discussion before we started, John asked of you. Okay, What? How do you define the because of there A lot of different slices of that, right? Different interpretations, different definitions. So with that being said, how do you define and or at least in your mind, how do you separate edge or what's true edge? Yeah, >> good questions. I think he was John question, not mine. I chuckled time, so because there is no perfect answer. Uh, the broadest definition I've seen is that you have core, and you can think eight of us Azure. You can think where the big core cloud nodes are that are pretty central, maybe 50 milliseconds away from the end users. There's two intermediate edges, if you will, and this is where there are varying opinions. To me, there's really only one if you're within five milliseconds of where your end users are, I consider that to be a market edge. Some people say there's a closer edge that's in within a millisecond of the end users, but I just I personally have not seen the use cases come out yet that require that low of a late unsee that don't actually reside where the end users are so >> going. Well, that's, um, so that's, um, modules at a at a warehouse or ah, manufacturing facility. Is that what? Is that what you consider like an edge? Uh, media marketed? >> Yeah, in >> theirs. It's interesting if you have 10 manufacturing plants in a geographic area, or maybe a better example is if you're a logistics company and you have sorting and distribution centers, you have multiple of those in an area that can all use the same compute as long as it's within five milliseconds, you can do the sorting lines and keep the machinery working. You can get routed into the rate vehicles for distribution. That's a good market edge. When you get all the way to that, the deep edge or on premise they think of an autonomous vehicle is a good example. There are certain things you're not gonna want to transmit and make driving decisions that don't reside on that vehicle. You don't want to crash into anyone. You need almost instantaneous decisions. And that would be the edge that intermediate one millisecond that sits between the two of those. I think it pushes one direction or the other. >> So Chris, here in the emerald 2019 obviously a lot of talking about cloud, but very specifics. This year. We have a lot of specifics around what Veum, where is doing Hybrid Cloud Israel and of course, hybrid cloud implies the network. And so one of the latest announcement from Centurylink is that you're providing via more cloud on AWS you're managing. You are able to help manage provide that as a managed service. I know you already do. Manage service is where you managing stuff in your data centers. But you could, I guess you can also manage workloads on prim and talk a little bit about that portfolio and how adding Veum VMC on AWS few more cloud nebulas adds to that. And then maybe we'll slide into the networking peace and how important that is. >> So we have AH, tool called Cloud Application Manager that has been built over the past handful of years that allows customers to deploy workloads to AWS toe azure and now to be emcee on AWS as well as private cloud environment. So maybe customers want to host those workloads on premise. Maybe it's regulatory compliance or whatever the reason may be. So we have a lot of experience of helping customers deploy those workloads, and then a lot of customers come to us and want to manage. I want us to manage the life cycle of those workloads, those air, the core capabilities. I think the reason that VMC on AWS is so compelling to customers is a lot of customers may not want to deal with the hardware refresh cycles that they do when it's their own private cloud environment or their own hardware stack. This gives them the opportunity to migrate those workloads and a relatively seamless fashion into an environment that is sitting in Maur of, ah, public cloud type model where it's it's Op X versus the Catholics in the headache. >> Go ahead. John was good, just in terms of so and so. Part of why you would work with Centurylink is you are experienced manage service provider. But also you have ah lot of the networking set up to do that efficiently, right? So maybe you talk about some of the workload is that you see going up there and some of the tools and, uh, performance folks can expect, >> Yeah, that's near the core part of my products that so near and dear to me for sure. We've developed a lot of capabilities over the last year and 1/2 around dynamic networking. So if you have your existing VM wear environment in your own data center, or maybe it's a private cloud that's managed by century link, we now have the ability for customers to go in and create net new connections, private network connections that have better Leighton see have better through putting performance between those environments and AWS or, in this case, VMC on AWS. And it allows customers to do a couple of things if they have their own environment and they're happy with it today. But it's not scaling, and they need to add more capacity. They could do that in the hybrid fashion in VMC on eight of us. If they're done with their existing environment hardware stack and they just want a forklift and move that into VMC on eight of us, they can create a big, large connection, push a ton of data over a few weeks, shut it down, and our building models and hourly billing models such that we're only charging them for as long as it's necessary. This gives them flexibility to manage where their workloads air sitting between those two locations as they see fit over time. >> So you're talking about all these new flexibilities new capabilities, much more agile systems being, I guess, interconnected with each other, right? But whether it's hybrid or whether it's multi cloud, whatever the case is, >> how you how to get >> everybody or everything that talk to each other in a way that works and provides, You know, the addresses, the Leighton see challenge, because to me, I'm again outside looking in. That's Ah, that's a big hurdle. As new capabilities get developed, new possibilities exists, but we gotta make it fast way, and we have to make sure they're they're speaking the same language. >> Yeah, it's a great question, and it is very challenging, and it is not all automated today as much as we would like. We have great integration to deploy workloads between environments. We've spent a ton of time from a networking standpoint of integrating with different cloud providers, and they each have their loan little nuances and to make it common between all of them takes a lot of time and effort. Where a lot of our focus is going in the next 12 months is how do you take those application, migration and management capabilities we have in one tool set? How do you marry that? With all of the dynamic networking capabilities and standardization across the cloud providers, we've done so the now it's not only are you moving network workloads, you're also creating the right underlying network to support those workloads in that multi cloud fashion well to capabilities we have. We just need to marry him up a little more clearly. >> I mean, what are you saying out there in the market with your customers? Multi Cloud Bright is perhaps another overused word like EJ. Are you seeing multi cloud portfolios? Are you seeing applications? Talk, actually use have data in one place, and and the and the computer and another. And obviously network becomes increasingly important if that's a reality today. But is that is that real, or is that still science fiction? >> It's becoming more riel so that there are a lot of customers. My pain, A lot of enterprises really bet big on one cloud provider because you have to build up the competency of capabilities inside your own shop and you become really good with working in Azure. Eight of us or Google or of'em were on the hunt. BP BMC Oh, the companies that are doing true multi cloud and using multiple cloud providers. Well, our companies that probably reside around here, so I won't say any of these specifically or doing this mutt. Companies like uber companies like Spotify companies that are born in the cloud that started with those core competencies will take the best of multiple cloud providers. So maybe the Big Data Analytics sitting in Google is most intriguing to them. But they love the tale of the storage cost. Price points on eight of us, and they love this. Ask spit in azure. They'll piece together components since they built it in a containerized fashion. And they take the best of what each cloud has to offer and into your point. The cloud providers air coming to centurylink and saying We need a better way to stitch together all of these different cloud environments because people, the cutting edge developers are pushing us in that direction. Now >> what about the the application network relationship? Um, changing is, you know, you see a shift there of some kind of as, uh, we're talking about, obviously a lot of new opportunities, a lot of developments, and so does that alter the dynamics of that relationship in any way >> It does, and it's the same conversations I just mentioned. Actually, that's driving it. I think today it is network engineers and network infrastructure. People reacting to applications not performing well are reacting to a software developers requested toe add this Google region or that VM wear on on AWS region over time. What's gonna happen, I believe, is their service mesh orchestration capabilities like SDO is a good example is the one Google is pushing hard and it would it allows people to do is from a rules driven perspective. I want my application to have these Leighton see requirements and you can't find me a network solution that is any worse than that. Or if you're seeing packet loss greater than 80% I want you to add more capacity to the network. It won't be humans the network engineers doing that. It's going to be application saying here are my criteria for me to work well, networks Let me see all the options I have out there now. I'm gonna go pick the best one and change it if I need you to make make myself work the way I need to. As an application. >> I love that that I've never connected Is Theo down as as an at, sir, as an APP service layer down to the network. Thank you. I just have a new I got a new thought. Eureka another reason >> why milliseconds matter. That's right. Hey, Chris. Thanks for the time. We appreciate that. I know this is a very busy time for you on. You do have a speaking engagements. We're gonna cut you loose for that. But thanks for spending time with us. And good luck. It centurylink appreciate it. Enjoyed it. Looking forward, Thio. More success. Back with more for Vimal. World 2019 after this short break right here on the Q.

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, here on theCUBE, our live coverage continues here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We're at the Sands Exposition Center. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walsh. Glad to have you here with us on day one of our three days of coverage here. We're now joined by David Shacochis, who is the Vice President of Product IT Solutions and New Market Development at CenturyLink, and Jim Aluotto. Did I get it right, Jim? >> Jim Aluotto. >> Aluotto. We practiced this many times. Who is the Director of Cloud Provider Business, Americas, at VMware. Gentlemen, in all seriousness, thank you both for being with us. >> Jim: Thank you. >> We certainly appreciate your time. So talking software-defined data centers. First off, let's step really high level here, and just talk about main attributes, qualities. How would you, if your elevator speech would be about what the SDDC would be, how would you describe it, and what are the features? >> Sure, well I'll jump in front of the company that sort of coined the term, and get my answer first, and then let Jim expound from there. Really, I think we can sort of sum up the software-defined data center in a lot of what we've learned in creating a Managed Private Cloud, based on what you would call a software-defined data center platform, in that it minimizes the number of moving parts. We've been doing Managed Private Cloud for as long as Managed Private Cloud has been a thing. And what that used to mean, five, six, years ago, was provision to the network, provision to security devices, maybe it's a converge device, maybe it isn't, maybe it's two different vendors. Sure, you've got vSphere in the middle of it all, but now you're talkin' of different storage tiers. If you want different flavors of storage, you're talkin' to multiple vendors back there. Piecing together a private cloud solution used to mean talkin' to a number of different technology stacks, a number of different API frameworks. And so software-defined data center, where the rubber hits the road, and sort of, from the cold face, means just a simplified view of being able to automate all that together, have it all orchestrated, and have it be one common stack. >> Jim: Nicely done. >> Okay, well, you go do the bookish version. >> Well really, in its most simplistic form, spinning up end-to-end complete automation across compute, network, and storage assets. And lately we've gone to market with VMware Cloud Foundation, that CenturyLink is now spinning up as the root of their service that they're going to market with. And so we've gone through an evolutionary process over the years, where we've proven to the world the advantages of virtualization, virtualize and compute. VMware, in its Act II, is now virtualizing the network. We're virtualizing storage now with VSAN taking off like wildfire. But now we're stitching it all together, in the form of a complete, end to end, automated and provisioned, encapsulated, virtualized data center. >> And that's the big efficiency here, right? It's one-stop shop, basically. You don't have to go out and as you said, look for a number of different avenues, or different pieces of this puzzle. >> So it does, it drives efficiencies in the data center, but it also drives efficiencies and opportunities around the way you operate it. And one of the things that we've been seeing, and it's sort of foundational to our managed services practice, is that the software-defined data center actually drives software-defined managed services. You have to change the way you do managed services to take advantage of all that capability. We have a service we call Cloud Application Manager, which is really our tool that we use to model applications, deploy managed tooling to that application for 24/7 monitoring and management, and uptime and stability support, and then do analytics on that application, to be able to show cost-savings opportunities, best-practice opportunities, in more of an aggregated, reported way. So Cloud Application Manager is a much more automated version of managed services. It's not ITIL from 10 years ago, right? It's not up/down, just base-level ticketing. You need to be able to change the way you do managed services, and you can only do that if you have a reliable underpinning platform. So less moving parts, a software-defined data center lets you change that, let's you change the way you deliver managed services. >> So the CenturyLink has incredible technical chops. There's always a point where you have to decide, build versus buy. CenturyLink, you can choose to build all of this. You can take parts from the open source community, build extremely custom solutions. Why VMware? When you guys have the technical ability to build it, make a differentiating offering, why start with VMware as the base? >> Yeah, I think you go back to what VMware's been in the market doing, and I even sort of talked past it a second ago. The vSphere's foundation is really solid, right? The device, the flexibility you have with the hardware layer, the flexibility you have at the real core or nucleus of your compute and memory virtualization stack is super important. And then really the idea of building out into the software-defined very common ownership stack, and why VMware was great to partner with, with regards to building out our next-gen Managed Private Cloud offering, is because they've wired everything to work together. And you said there are things you could go and try to build on your own? I think it's interesting. What we're starting to see is that, just to use somethin' like OpenStack, as an example, building a private cloud out of OpenStack is certainly possible, but there's no one company owning it all end to end. And if you're a service provider, it's up to you to go figure it all out. Or you can go and work with maybe one integrator partner, but they're making their own set of choices, and now you're basically locked in to that particular deployment model. So I think working with VMware, what we found is, first off, they've accelerated our time to market, and our time to value around a Managed Private Cloud offering. There's a lot of interoperability in there. There's a lot we're able to do around hybrid applications, because something you deploy to VMware inside VCF is very similar to something you deploy in your own home-grown environment, to one of the Managed Private Clouds that we've been running for five or six years, where there's just a very clean migration and upgrade path with that interoperability. >> And really it's all about the market opportunity that VMware brings to the table. Our cloud strategy is incredibly simplistic, but yet it has such a compelling business and value proposition, not only to our mutual customers that we're going to market in joint pursuit with, but also to our cloud providers, 500,000 plus enterprise customers using VMware. As we take them along the journey, building out their private clouds, that represents over 60 million workloads, with the inevitability of them moving out to the cloud. So what we've teed up is a cloud provider community with our most strategic partner, like CenturyLink, to increase the odds of that, capturing those workloads onto a VMware platform. The market opportunity that we bring to the table for somebody like CenturyLink is quite extensive, let alone all the benefits that the mutual customer gets. They get to protect their data center, their data and application assets, all the reliability, compatibility, security, that they would expect from their own VMware infrastructure, they would expect from a VMware cloud provider, like CenturyLink. >> Well David, let's talk about the interface into CenturyLink. One of the things that customers are startin' to realize is that they have to differentiate, based on just internal IP. So there's the API to everything, now. What's, if you could describe, well, maybe there is. What's the API to CenturyLink, as I'm consuming this software-defined data center that you guys provide? >> Okay, so sure, so that's actually a really exciting opportunity for us, and it's one that we've been sort of pivoting. If you sort of look at the history of CenturyLink, there was a, and this sort of goes back 10 years, but there was a huge spike of CenturyLink's entry into the business to business market. Acquiring quests, getting the business that basically announced their entrance into the B2B marketplace. Then there was a number of more technology oriented and virtualization management oriented acquisitions, because it recognized two things: one, we needed to be in IT solutions, in cloud, in data center, but also that the network was heading towards a highly virtualized, highly orchestrated, highly software-defined model. The network of the 21st century was not going to be about buying a ton of big iron and putting it into pops anymore, it was going to be increasingly around managing x86 virtualization. So that set off a period of time within CenturyLink where we were acquiring managed services companies, IT solution companies, virtualization companies, that were helping really to increase two things: our ability to virtualize and manage virtualization, and then, secondly, develop software in new ways, and become much more familiar at the application layer. We spent about five or six years with companies like SAVAS, and Tier3, and Cognilytics, really adding to the company in terms of brain power, and know how, and workload fluency. And then now we've just recently closed on the merger and acquisition with Level 3. So now we're very much on a network scale ascendency. The interface into CenturyLink is really taking a lot of those assets that we've built up, and moving them together into more of a platform topology, which is re-architecting the way that we work. We've bought cloud companies, and we invested in virtualization to help us reorganize exactly what you're talking about, which is the way of interfacing with CenturyLink, driving customer experience, being able to have a common user experience, whether you're interacting with it at a CLI, or via an API call, or with a tutorial that you're following via an online interface, and having a common look and feel across those services. So it's a journey. We're still on our way there, but we have the very beginnings of a lot of commonality that's starting to occur, whereby if you log in to our public cloud management service, Cloud Application Manager, or if you log in to our network interconnect service, Network Exchange and Cloud Connect Solutions, or if you log in to our public and private cloud offerings, very common look and feel across the piece, where it's one identity, one billing collection, but then we allow each of those individual services to go and innovate on their own. And that's the key thing. You can go drive common user experience. That's super, but if you're waiting on a portal team to go design your UI for you, you're slowing down. And so we're really bein' able to design a framework whereby there's one common UI, but it's more design patterns that every internal team picks up and works with, and then integrates into their release. >> And it's very important for VMware as well, as we develop our IP that's relevant for cloud provider use cases, is to open up those APIs to do just that, give you the opportunity to own that customer experience and differentiate yourself within the marketplace. >> I think we talked about this last time, too, where VMware's entree into the service provider world really taught them some lessons, and they started adding things to their product that make it easier to be a service provider. And some of the things, like with vCloud Director, and some of the ways that you can now work with that at an HTML5 layer, and sort of create your own version around it, almost interact with vCloud Director at an API level, allows us to factor it in to that mentality of design pattern, thinking in a common UI across all of our services. Right now we're working with a lot of those features on vCloud Director to enable our Managed Private Cloud service. >> So what if the conversation is being then able to show it's all about making it real? What have the real conversations been? >> Yeah, so the real conversations with our customers that we're starting to have are really, and just to tie it a little bit back to this idea of a software-defined data center, I think they're excited by the possibilities. They're certainly looking to really drive instrumentation at more places than they ever were able to drive instrumentation before. And there's the obvious industry examples of IoT, and sensors, and things like that, but even things like business process, and being able to theoretically just rework the way a particular system works, turn it into a micro service, or an application that they can factor in to their overall IT strategy, but then have that start to feed in to a broader data lake that they can then start making business analytical decisions from. That's one of the big patterns that we see, whether it's occurring with a lot of our customers that we work with in the built environment, but in working with the customers that work with CenturyLink, in some of the most deep and influential ways, are the ones that are out there sort of "in space". And I don't mean in space, I mean out there in a geographic spread, like retail solutions, and physical facilities, and things like that, where you have people coming to your location, and you're tryin' to gather all that data back into more of a centralizing motion. That's where we're having some of our most interesting conversations, with those retail brands, with bigger facilities that we want to be able to bring on net, and basically have them turn into data sources for their data lake, that they can then start moving forward and analyzing with some either professional services or tooling, to go and start looking for where those insights lie. >> So for me this is music. What I'm seeing, customers want to wane off of IT functions altogether. They want to invest their resources around their core business. >> John: Their business, right. >> Yeah, exactly. So what they're doin' is, they're relying on the subject matter experts now. The whole notion of being concerned about security, and reliability out in the cloud, that's long gone. They recognize that folks like CenturyLink can deliver at greater economies of scale, more secure, highly available. >> Yeah, and one of the things, one of the best ways we can facilitate those conversations is to share a little bit of our own journey. And it's not because we want to stare at our own product catalog, and walk through it page by page, but to share some of our own journey with the perspective of realizing a long time ago that in our managed security business, it was a big data problem. It's not an implementation and controls problem. And so we've been driving a whole lot more of our story, and some of our service strategy is, not only is it, we feel a lot of these are very valuable services in their own right, but they show off a pattern of: instrument it, drive it back to a data lake, and then take more of an analytical approach to it to add value, as opposed to just being very transactional. >> We talked about the journey. It's been a good one, right? And continued success with that. >> Indeed. >> Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE, and we appreciate the time. >> Okay. >> Good, thank you very much Dave and Jim. Back with more. You're watching theCUBE. We are live, here at Dell Technologies World 2018 in Las Vegas. (percussive music)