[Narrator] Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering VMworld 2017. Brought to you by VMware, and it's ecosystem partner. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, here with my cohost Keith Townsend. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of VMworld 2017 here in Las Vegas. Happy to welcome to the program two guests who are going to dig into what's happening in the cloud space. A big, big hot topic of the show. Dave Shacochis, who is the vice president of product management at CenturyLink, Ajay Patel, SVP/GM of now Cloud Provider Software at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thank you Stu. >> Nice to see you again Stu. >> Alright, so Dave. Here's a question we've asked coming into this week. VMware was doing this vCloud Air for a bunch of years. They're a competitor, no they're a partner with the vCloud network ... vCloud air now went over to OVH, and I think they waited 48 hours before they made this big deal with AWS so, tell us how the relationship has been not just one of the 4,500 service providers, but you're sitting on panels with VMware, you're one of the larger partners. >> We were on a panel discussion and we were talking about this earlier today. I think when vCloud Air launched we had some of these same conversations, and there were probably cube discussions where almost the same question was asked. What I said back then, and what a lot of us in the service provider community said back then, and we say it again now, is that ... And this is true, not just of VMware, but this is true of any enterprise architect, you run a better system, you build better software when you're running it 24-7 as a live service. It's just better. The software is better. The user experience is better. You're thinking about integration angles, and availability issues. The software gets better when you run it operationally, and VMware's technology got better when they launched vCloud Air and figured out that their virtualization technology, what they had been working with the service provider community around for years, it improved when they went and launched it and lived the life of a service provider. So we're actually excited about that. We're aligning to the same architecture. What's nice is that what they're running in the cloud, in the VMware cloud foundation, is the same thing we're running in our cloud-neutral facilities inside of the CenturyLink data center footprint. So, it's very interoperable. >> Ajay please ... >> So my response would be there are a few things that I've changed. One is, there wasn't a Cloud provider software business unit. I am dedicated to making the likes of David successful. Taking that IP and commercializing that, that's fundamental to our strategy. Second one is, we rebranded this to VMware cloud providers. The idea is you can get VMware cloud in one of three ways. You can build it yourself, get it on VMware cloud or AWS, more importantly but get it through our partners. Your choice based on the best cloud that fits your needs. So it's that level playing field, both on go to market, in terms of Geoff Waters, now the cloud sales leader over all of the different programs, technology, IP being made available, compensation neutrality ... These are all the things we "learn" from our VCM experience, if you will to do this right. So that we continue driving multi-cloud strategy, and certainly about centered around customer choice. >> Can we talk about the basic difference between those three delivery methods? From a customer's perspective, what's the difference in the look and feel of those? >> I think at the end of the day it's about getting VMware value in an integrated fashion. But that's not just sufficient, so when you go to cloud it's no longer just say, "Give me a virtualized environment." That's the "hard bit" of packaging stuff infrastructure, but that's not enough value. On top of that is the application is really the value. Managing that application, and the life cycle of the value. This is where the likes of CenturyLink really come into play. So we believe we're kind of democratizing in terms of the consumption of a cloud stack in one of three ways. It's really customer preference, and really how much burden they want to take on. On the private cloud side they're building it instead of buying it as a service. They prefer to go on AWS for whatever reason for their cloud strategy. They now have a VMware choice. Or they can go to a partner like CenturyLink to help them manage the entire journey including managing multiple clouds. So it's really about the customer choice, what's right for them versus putting them in a silo. >> What's really been good for us especially around the VMware cloud foundation reference architecture is that it starts to make the private clouds react predictably. Our offer net has now been architected and based around VMware Cloud Foundation. It stands up with the software defined data center architecture at each layer of the stack. We don't have to orchestrate nearly as many technology sets in order to make a private cloud app. We've been running hosted private cloud for as long as there have been hosted private clouds. CenturyLink has been managing as part of the cloud service provider program and all its earlier naming variances. But what this latest architecture allows us to do is not only remove the number of things that we need to integrate against, the integration code we need to write and all the different vendor technologies we need to orchestrate against it, it pulls it all into one scale out software, a divine stack, which makes our customer experience better. It drives better self-service, more reliable self-service, into the hands of our customers so that they can move faster. It allows our private cloud to become more predictable so that we can start managing it with our multi-cloud cloud application manager product. So we launched that earlier this year. It was a combination of some of the managed hosting tools and capabilities that we've had back in the days. It combines in the abstraction software we got from a company called ElasticBox that we acquired last year. We weave that together into one multi-cloud layer, so it now looks at private clouds and other public clouds as just another deployment destination on that multi-cloud managing journey. >> Effectively competition moving above the SVC layer. We're kind of making SVC common. Let's compete on the value, and the solution that we both want. >> Ironically this was the promise of open source projects to make this common platform across private, public, and multi-clouds. You use the term that a lot of people may not be familiar with, cloud neutral facilities. What is that term? >> A cloud neutral facility is one that can basically get you connected to a number of different cloud deployment form factors. It's not a one note show, a one approach kind of model. It's really about a service provider that from... When you said the term facility, that can really just be a service provider environment that basically gets the particular workload to the best execution venue for that individual set of run time conditions. To us, being in more of a cloud neutral posture, certainly means we're bringing some parts of our hosted environment, whether it's private or We have a multi-tenant environment that we can provision to as well. We use that multi-tenant environment to actually speed up our own development of higher level services. And then we partner across the different cloud service providers like AWS and Microsoft Azure. We tie into that. It's really about looking at the data center as an extension of all the potential run time venues, both ones that you might build on your own, and then ones that are available to you. >> Dave, I want you to expand on that. One of the things I've been getting out of this week is that maturation of how we've been talking about clouds. A couple years ago I was critical of VMware. It was like, any device, any application, one cloud. I was like "Wrong". No. Amazon. Absolutely, 100 percent public cloud ... I think they understand, if not 100 percent, we'll see where Amazon goes in the future. You said you're tying into the likes of Amazon and Azure. I'm assuming that's direct connect, and those kinds of services. How do we think of CenturyLink? Where do you add value? How do you make money in these various pieces? I remember (old company name) was one of the vCloud era data centers, and boy margins were going to be real tight on something like that. >> Our multi-cloud posture and the direction we see things going is really one that starts and the largest anchor point for CenturyLink's strategy is the strength of our network. It's all the places that that network can take us. A lot of the investments that we've made in virtualization management, a lot of the investments we've made around managing workloads inside data centers we control has really been a precursor to how we need to evolve the core of our network, and how our networking is becoming more software defined. We built and we launched, as I said before, CenturyLink Cloud which is a multi-tenant hosting environment. That has been a huge IT accelerator for us. As we've started to advance and start to figure out how do we manage virtualization inside the core of our points of presence on the network, and as our network starts to expand, as most folks know, we're in the closing stages of the announced acquisition of level three, as that transaction completes and the whole network gets even stronger, and now we have more software assets to be able to drive even further into the core of that network. So it starts from the network and everything we do from either a cloud neutral or multi-cloud perspective is really around helping customers at the workload layer to really thicken that network value proposition. >> I'm also excited about the whole notion of competing on the edge. And once you have a network of this scale, and the ability to then distribute, compute, either on the edge, consult in the back, or even leverage third party probably clouds, seamlessly with a high bandwidth, low jitter network. I think that's a foundational infrastructure that's needed. These guys have really done a good job of kind of bringing that to bear. Pretty excited about that opportunity. >> Ajay, wondering if you can give us a little color on service providers. When I go to most service providers, most of them, networking key strength, obviously we know CenturyLink, Telco, all that kind of background. Management layer. Most service providers build their own. So there's a lot of pieces now, when I see the cloud foundation suite and they're embracing it. How did you work through some of those, "Hey, no, we've got our way of doing things. We know better." As opposed to embracing them. Where is that give and take? >> I think what's happening is, depending on the sophistication of the service provider, the larger ones have the ability to kind of create a bare metal service, kind of drive higher automation, have the infrastructure spend to drive that. As you go a little bit down the market, they're really looking for "a cloud in a box". You and I spoke about this last year, right? They want an easy to type experience for the end customers without the cost and the complexity of building one. So my opportunity as a service provider business is, how do I give them that platform? That multi-tenant platform that can cover resources? But in the future, elastically leverage a VMware cloud on AWS, right, as an endpoint that they can start to use for geo distribution, DR, or simply new capacity. So we're going to see a world where they're going to start mixing and matching what they build, what they buy and how they drive that. And the management solution around that, around a high performance network, is going to be the future that I see together. >> So one of the buzzwords over the past few year in the industry has been the invisible infrastructure. This concept that infrastructure should be something that people use and don't see. How does CenturyLink help support, not necessarily making an invisible infrastructure, but this concept that this is something we use and don't see. From the network, to the software layer that we're now talking about. Where's the differentiating value that CenturyLink brings versus me rolling my own? >> Yeah, I think where we've been making most of our investments, and where we've been driving and focusing on success for our customers has been up at that managed services and application layer. The way we view the infrastructure layer of the stack ... When we think of stacks, we think of the network at the base level of the foundation, data center infrastructure at the next tier up and then workloads and applications. It's not a groundbreaking tiered model, but it's helped me kind of think and organize a lot of what's in our business. When it comes to the infrastructure layer, as I said before, we're in a highly interoperable posture with a lot of the other partner clouds, because our network can link us there pretty seamlessly, and because we still know how to orchestrate enough at the infrastructure layer. But the investment has really been inside the core of the network, as we start driving that virtualization capabilities into the core, and then up at the workload layer, what we're really trying to work around is creating, as in all computer science problems, an abstraction layer. The trick about an abstraction layer in our part of the world, and in our part of the industry is not creating one that creates a new layer of lock in. That allows each of the individual underpinning infrastructure venues to do their thing, and do what they're good at. We build that abstraction layer with the idea of a best execution venue mindset that lets each of those individual underpinning infrastructure offerings, whether its the VCF architecture or hosted up on AWS, or whether it's one of the other particular software platforms because of geography or performance, or service capabilities that they're good at. The trick of creating an abstraction layer is not locking anybody in or reducing those platforms to lowest common denominator. So what our cloud application manager offering being able to manage our private cloud based on VCF, as well as manage other environments down the road ... That's really where we try to make that infrastructure invisible is to sort of create a lightweight abstraction layer that they can think more at the workload layer than at the individual nuts and bolts layer. >> The great thing about creating an abstraction layer, when you own the underlying infrastructure, it makes it a lot easier to support. So I want to make sure that I understand this concept from the ground up. You talked about the network as being the glue or the foundation that ties all this together, especially with the level three acquisition. From an ILT perspective, if I need those far flung services I have the physical network capability to get it there. If I need to put (data terminology) in at the edge, we just had a guest on talking about (data terminology), and at the edge. And get that data into a CenturyLink data center using VCF to get it there and consistently have that same level of abstraction, and then I can build cloud native applications on Azure, Google Compute... (cross talking) and it's a consistent experience across that whole abstraction layer. >> Right. Right. Going back to that idea that, what we call the hybrid IT stack of network infrastructure and workloads, what we're trying to build is a platform that spans those layers, that doesn't try to own or be one or indifferentiate at one of those layers, is build a connective tissue that spans them, so a workload running on the right infrastructure venue connected to the right networks. We're investing in orchestration that crosses all of that, and it's really some of the great conversations we've been having this week with VMware about what they're thinking, we think PTS is interesting because container based deployment models are going to be what makes the most sense as you get further into the core of the network and out towards the edge. We think Pulse is interesting. As we start to do more things in our smart cities, and smart venue type of initiatives, that we're doing at the Internet Of Things solutions base as well. >> Ajay, last thing I want to get to is when you look at your partners, how do you see them? Both that similarity that they're going to have, but how do they differentiate, and also how will they participate in the VMware on AWS piece that we've been talking about? >> Yes, so I think I'll break it into two parts. As I talk to customers, the consistent feedback I get is we made resource consumption ubiquitous. And we're hoping to standardize that with VMware Cloud Foundation and other approaches. What's hard is the experienced skillset and knowledge of how to use this technology. So increasingly we're constrained with the folks who know how to take this complexity, put an organized plan together, and drive the set of value in our own applications. So I believe the cloud provider program and the partnership is really about moving up from trying to build infrastructure, to build solutions, and offer value to our partners. And the differentiation is really moving up stack in terms that manage services value. The second part is- They themselves now have a choice. If I'm a regional player, or customer who, everyone's a multinational nowadays, you always have some customer who happens to reach beyond the boundaries ... How do I now go into a new market? How can I leverage VMware Cloud on AWS as another data center? So the management technology we're trying to provide is we will priority manage your endpoint, customer endpoint, or even VMware Cloud. You mix and match what makes business sense. Then abstract the complexity. As we talked about the cloud as a new hardware. How do we take that infrastructure and really make it easy? And the issues are on security, management, are going to be different ... So, application usage, value added services, being able to leverage resources, build or buy is really the basis of our strategy. >> Yep. So we're excited to ... As we know that that program starts to expand a little bit more in 2018 and we've had some early discussions with the VMware team around what that starts to look like, but at our most foundational level, because what we're already launching and what we launched here this week at VMware is just what we call our dedicated cloud compute product, which is now based on the VMware Cloud Foundation reference architecture. It's going to look the exact same as the VMware Cloud Foundation architecture that runs in AWS. Our approach towards managing both is to let their own individual control panels do what they do best, but then manage over the top of it with our cloud application manager service. >> Dave and Ajay. Thank you so much for sharing with us all the updates. Look forward to watching the continued maturation and development of what's happening in the cloud environment. >> Great chat, thank you. >> Thank you. >> Keith Townsend and I will be back with lots more coverage here of VMworld 2017. You're watching theCUBE. (electronic music)

>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel and their ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to the Sands. We're live in Las Vegas here on theCUBE as we continue our coverage of AWS re:Invent. Along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls. We're now joined by Dave Shacochis, who is Vice President of Product and Hybrid IT at Centurylink. Dave, good to see you again. >> Yeah, great to be back. Good to be back on theCube, good to talk to you John. >> Excellent. And by the way, you win the GQ award. >> All right. >> Everybody raving about that black, velvet you've got going on. >> 50,000 people here at re:Invent. If I'm in the lead- >> That looks very strong. >> I'm in the lead at the turn, that's good to hear. >> Best Dressed award. >> Very nice. All right, well big news though for you guys. Obviously being designated as the managed services provider, reaching that certification with AWS, tell us about that, about that process and what it's meaning to your business, and what it means to your customers. >> Yeah, AWS is such a customer-focused organization. They're very passionate about their end customers, and solving problems. But they've also built up a huge partner network, and what Terry Wise and the team have built is a real partner-relevant organization. And so what they've really done to make it a level playing field, to be as passionate about their partners as they are about their end customers, hopefully intending to solve problems for customers as well, is really to put a lot of thought into making sure that when they have a competency or a certification, that it's no joke to get through. It's a serious exercise to go through something like a managed service provider or an MSP certification. We had that get finished up for us several months ago, and we've been rolling that into our managed cloud practice, and really helping our customers with the three key criteria of what AWS really wants to have its partners do, which is really design and plan and be able to orchestrate workloads, and model workloads for customers, and understand how and where they're going to deploy and migrate into the cloud. They really want to see and make sure that you're doing next generation work during the operational run phase. Not just are you monitoring and managing those workloads in those environments, but are you doing predictive analytics? Are you starting to take a look at trends inside the data? Are you using Big Data to actually augment your management practices? Right? Not traditional ITEL just in a cloud location, but really next generation managed services. They measure and they certify all that. And then the third thing they want to do is take a look at how are you reporting? How are you helping the customer optimize and analyze cost, and become as efficient as they can with their deployment of AWS services. So it's a significant exercise to go through. It really made our service better. And quite honestly, that's a great example of AWS being customer-focused by making sure that the partners they want to work with can hit a certain level-- >> Step up your game. >> Hit a certain bar to be able to drive that value for their end customers. >> Yep. >> Yeah. So for the customers who were choosing Centurylink to come to something like AWS, what is it about Centurylink that they like? That they would rather deal with you than go, say direct to AWS and try to do everything themselves? >> I think there's really sort of two or three real differentiators for Centurylink when we work with our customers. Probably the first and foremost is that hybrid nature of how we can meet the customers where they are. Centurylink has been running and managing and working in the data center space for a good 15 to 20 years. We've been running and managing private clouds and hosted compute environments for as long as there has been such a category in the industry. With all the different heritage that rolls into Centurylink from an IT Services perspective. So they really come for the experience and the pedigree, and the complexity, friendliness. But they also come for the fact that we can meet them where they are, whether it's inside their current data center, help them do data center consolidation, help them move into hosted centers, and then help them on that journey, 'cause so much of the enterprise is still very much on a journey, right? There may be projects that are firing up to the cloud, there are a lot of organizations that are ready to make the full leap and go all-in on the cloud, but by and large there's some kind of a hybrid environment where they're still looking at the different form factors, and they're very much on a journey to get from where they are today to where they can be more agile. >> Yeah. >> So this is the experience that we have. But then what we really, and there's lots of companies out there that have good experience, they have good tools, they have experience running and managing and monitoring. There's a lot of other companies that have the MSB certification. What Centurylink has that's really a deep investment is all the network optionality and the network control that we have. So not only can we do managed services inside AWS, we can also do the managed network that gets the traffic and gets the workload to AWS. >> Right. >> And that's a real critical differentiator. Not only can we get those connections set up and configured, we can also manage those environments and then secure those environments. So there's a lot of investment that Centurylink has put into our managed cloud practice, augmented by managed networking and managed security. The assets that Centurylink brings to bear with regards to our security portfolio and our network portfolio, come from years of significant investment. One of the largest global IP backbones in the world. We've been gleaming network and security telemetry from that network, and building threat patterns and threat management services inside the core of our network. So really, customers who work with us have a secure, consistent, reliable path to the cloud, and then they get the managed services, the MSB certified managed services, once they're there. >> Yeah. So speaking of connections, I believe that you've announced a product in, I think it was October, called Direct Connections. >> Yes. >> Is that right? Tell me more about what that is. >> Sure so that's that sort of, for those of you tracking my hand waving at home, you know the network stuff over here. Inside our network portfolio there is ... our cloud connect service is one of most deeply connected to AWS services out there. So we're a significant direct connect partner. We drive an ethernet-based service into AWS in all their major regions, and then we have that cloud connect service run to hundreds of global multi-tenant data centers as well as hundreds of thousands of enterprise locations. So we have, what we launched there back in October was the latest version of cloud connect, which we call Dynamic Connections. It's a feature within cloud connect that allows us to take a global ethernet circuit, tying into AWS, and make that happen in minutes. That didn't exist before. So a lot of people think about AWS direct connect, and they can configure direct connect and tie it up to their VPC, then they start the Telecom process that could take weeks and or months, and it depends on who they're working with, and who they're buying from. >> Yeah. >> If you're in a building that's on net with us, or your traditional data center is one of the data centers, the many hundreds of data centers that are on net with us, we can go and get that connection turned up, all of the automation, and once you get that circuit created, you can dial it up and dial it back, a gig, ten gigs, anywhere in between. You can go below a gig, wherever you need to. You have complete control over the creation of a new circuit, which is great for retail locations. Retail customers like this as they're bringing in new facilities, and bringing mixed-use facilities on net, and they're bringing new facilities that they need to be able to trunk back to their data center in the cloud. We can use dynamic connections to go and help them create new locations, but then as the business needs change at those locations, they can dial up and dial down bandwidth, and really have a rich level of control for how the traffic is being routed and passed. >> Yeah, having spoken to customers in the past, that is actually quite valuable. It has been quite painful to go through that process. >> A lot of big cloud migrations, once they're done with them, one of the problems you run into is, "Well, I never really thought through and anticipated what the network path would look like after I made that move to the cloud." >> Yeah. >> And that's one of things we try to do with our customers at the onset of an engagement, is not just say, "Let's start stampeding to the cloud right away." Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but let's think through the network design first. Who are your users? What are the new traffic patterns going to look like? And what are the hybrids that you're going to be building, where something that's in the cloud needs to talk back to your corporate data center? Do you have enough bandwidth and do you have a low enough latency connection between the two? >> Yeah. >> Early this week you were talking about Milliseconds Matter, right? You had a presentation that you were featuring that. So what does that mean to your AWS customers? That's kind of intuitive, they do matter. >> Sure. >> What was the perspective that you were bringing to that and the latency issue? >> Yeah, so we did a presentation here earlier in the show, where we really illustrated that combination I was referring to earlier, of our MSP certified managed offering coupled with our cloud connect network automation. What we've really done a lot of work with around cloud connect is creating a service that has a few different user experiences. If you're a network engineer, if you're somebody who's running a corporate network, you really want to get in and really just get a layer to interface from Centurylink, optimize your BGP routing and do all of those sort of Telecom-grade configurations, you can do that with Centurylink cloud connect. We also have a very straight-forward version. In Andy's keynote this morning, one of the things he was really talking about, it really spoke to me, was this idea of, well there are builders who want to use the tools, and there are builders who just want instructions. >> Yeah. >> Builders who just want to dump the IKEA parts out and put the thing together. And then there's some people that want to sit there with a lathe and handcraft everything. So different types of builders. We have a version of cloud connect that can appeal to the builder who doesn't necessarily want to get down in the weeds of networking, and they just want to basically take a workload and connect it to the right private network link. And so that higher level version of cloud connect is what we demonstrated earlier today, and really the fundamental premise of Milliseconds Matter is network orchestration and cloud orchestration coupled together gives you a whole lot greater level of control. And that's where we're starting to see all these emerging use cases, where you can certainly think about migrating everything to the cloud, but then you have to start thinking about where do those workloads need to run? What does the future look like, in terms of IoT devices and sensors and video telemetry and environmental telemetry, all the different sources of data that organizations can use to go and innovate around. Where you're going to run that business logic is going to run closer and closer to the edge for a lot industries: in retail, in healthcare, in a lot of government institutions, in hospitality. So basically the fundamental premise of Milliseconds Matter is have control of your cloud, but then also have control over your network, and hopefully have the two in concert with one another. And that's what we're fundamentally driving at with our service platform. >> Sounds great. >> And real quick, when you talk about all this, in a 5G world, all of a sudden when you talk about edge, you talk about- >> Sure. >> That's a game changer, is it not? >> Well it is. 5G is still so emergent. There's a lot that's there. There's a lot there that's 5G. There's still 4GLTE. There's still lots of different ways to go and get all that data trunked together. And it doesn't stay on LTE forever, right? Eventually it all starts to get to an IP backbone, and then that's where you still have a lot of latency optimizations and route optimizations that you want to be able to deal with. So we absolutely look at LTE as something that we think is a huge opportunity with a lot of our partners that we're working with across our network footprint, to be able to use LTE as a new access strategy, just like we've used just about all the other access strategies that are out there. >> Excellent. Good to see you again. >> Yeah, great to see you, John. >> See you down the road soon, I hope. >> For sure. >> All right, thank you for joining us. Dave Shacochis joining us here from Centurylink. Back with more from AWS re:Invent. You're watching theCube. (electronic music)