>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering the AWS re:Invent 2017. Presented by AWS, Intel, and our ecosystem of partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman joined by my co-host, Keith Townsend, and this is one of the interviews we've been really excited. Of course, we've got about 60 interviews. We love all of them. Lots of good excitement. Lots going on at this ecosystem. Over 43 thousand in attendance here in Las Vegas, but happy to welcome back to the program, Chris Wolf, who's the Vice President and CTO of Global Field and Industry at VMware. Chris, great to see you. >> Thanks Stu, thanks Keith. Great to see you guys. >> So for the year, the whole VMware on AWS has been a hot buzz discussion. We've all been arguing internally and on theCUBE about you know, partnering and how does that work and who gets the most benefit out of it, but let's start, Chris I'd love to hear your viewpoint, you know. You talk to a lot of customers. I've talked to some customers that are really excited about it, especially at VMWorld, that were there testing it and doing it. Give us the customer viewpoint. What's really exciting them? What's interesting them? And I know there's a lot of new news we're wanna gonna get into. >> Yeah, you know, there's so much that I think is exciting to customers because you know, they're struggling with being more agile, being more software defined, being able to have more flexibility in their environments. And to be able to leverage VMware Cloud on AWS allows them to go through data center consolidation easier. It allows them to get applications to the Cloud to take advantage of Cloud services. One of the things people, I think kind of falls between the cracks in VMware Cloud on AWS is the fact that if I want to modernize an application or a traditional application, refactoring an application is enormously expensive. It's very hard to do. It's very time consuming. If I can start to move an application into the VMware Cloud on AWS and then start to integrate that with other native AWS services, I get the benefit of modernizing that application without having to touch any of the application code, which is a huge benefit to customers. >> Yeah, we've spent the last couple of years at this show, which well, do I lift and shift? Do I just re-platform it? Do I refactor it? Do I totally rewrite it? You know, the number of customers that I've talked to at this show, their advice that they give to their peers is like well, go faster. And how do we go faster? Do I just take my VMware stuff that I was doing in my own data center, stick it in VMware on AWS, start using all the cool stuff. Is that kind of the path that you see? >> That's part of it. You know, I think there's a couple threads here. There's the notion that you know, I wanna go faster, but to go faster, I have to slay some old demons in IT. Where I have to change my mindset. You know, I can't say I want to be more software defined and more agile and then have specific hardware requirements in my architecture. Of course, that's not for all applications, but that's part of that shift in mindset is how can I go faster? And if it's harder to transform some of my data centers, if I can get into that operational model by getting on Amazon quicker, then that's good for my business. >> Yeah, let me just poke on one more thing on that and I know Keith wants to jump in here, but one of the great things, I think back to 15 years ago. It was like, you know my Windows operating system going end to life. I'm gonna stick it in VM and keep it there forever. But, boy that application was all the technical data. My users hated it and everything like that. How does VMware go from I managed what you had to enabling your future? >> The thing that we're really focused on here in terms of enabling the future, when you think about programmatic compute and networking and storage and security, all applications need them. I can abstract all that away with a Lambda function or whatever, but at the end of the day, somebody has to do it and that part of the fabric becomes really important for things like having a security auto-trell. The other thread there is where VMware's strategic to customers is that they say, "You know I might wanna start this in the Cloud, "but I wanna maintain full control "of all of the intellectual property, "so I wanna use Kubernetes, I wanna use containers, "I wanna use a variety of open source projects. "I wanna use their native API's for my software engineers, "but I wanna have flexibility to build these applications "without pre-destining their future." Maybe it runs in a Cloud today, maybe it runs in a data center tomorrow, maybe it runs out at the edge. Maybe I do an acquisition and it has to run in that facility. The bottom line is, I don't always know what the future holds for my apps. And for the aspect of the apps that are core to your business, there's a lot value in running them on VMware because we can allow you to maintain that flexibility and independence, just like we've done way back in the past with your traditional enterprise applications. >> So Chris, that's a great setup for the next set of questions, which is, VMware has been known to move at the speed of the CIO. We're at AWS re:Invent. These folks move much faster than the speed of the CIO. The question is around, what's VMware's focus? You know, there's VMware Cloud on AWS, there's PKS, there's VIG. You guys came out with Openstack, VMware integrated Openstack 4.0, and then even VMware Cloud on AWS, the promised innovation three and a half months after the release. Iteration on that. That's much faster than what the CIO used to have. How are those conversations balanced between the CIO and the new business user here at AWS? >> Yeah, way to sugarcoat Keith. That's a good question. Look at CIOs today. There's very innovative CIOs. We had the NFL CIO up on stage in the morning Keynote, right? And I thought that was highly dynamic, really talking about how you have to transform business. What we're really focused on in terms of helping customers is making sure that that fabric that runs their business applications is just as fluid and dynamic as their businesses. The security has to be as fluid and dynamic or more dynamic than the threats that you face. So, these are areas that we're focused on, but your point is: how can VMware continue to deliver quick innovation? I think VMware integrated Openstack actually is an example of VMware integration or innovation, so I'm glad you brought it up. We don't talk about Openstack that much now, but VMware was the very first Openstack distro-vendor to make upgrades of Openstack versions they feature as software. Where our competitors in that space were making it a professional services engagement. You look at us, what we've done in terms of supporting containers natively on vSphere. We announced PKS and we were very quick to embrace Kubernetes. We announced Greengrass preview that we're bringing to market as well on vSphere. So, you're absolutely right to give us the feedback that in the past, you could say Vmware was a bit conservative of a company. We were slow and deliberate in some of our innovations. They were important and we were deliberate because we had a reputation to uphold for product quality. That's what our customers expect, but at the same time, it's very good feedback to say that we have to work quicker, and that's the model that we're in. I think that the AWS partnership for Vmware is one example of how we've had a couple of companies learning from each other in terms of AWS and interacting with the enterprise and VMware in terms of innovating a Cloud space, and you're staring to see the benefits and the fruits of that labor now. >> So, ironically I ran into the VMUG president, Ben Clayton doing a show floor. It's amazing to see the crossover between the VMware community and the AWS community. I think VMware Cloud on AWS has been a boom, a realizing that Cloud is coming into the enterprise in a great way. Let's talk about the community and the users. How do you help move that traditional community of, I think VMUG is 200,000 users. How do you help move that membership forward to this new speed of IT? >> It's a terrific question. There's definitely some challenges with getting folks. Part of it is IT folks, we're builders at heart. We love building everything. We love the pieces and parts. We can understand how they matter, but even if they matter like this much, it doesn't necessarily mean that I should build a snowflake for my business because some of the problems that VMware solves, you could say that every business in the world has to solve the same problems. So why focus on some of those smaller nuisances? What we've been really after is providing much more content into the VMUG communities around transformation, around how more modular IT architectures are important. Even beyond the VMUG community, if you think about some traditional VMware channel partners, where their core focus was on some very tightly integrated hardware-based solutions. Those partners, the more innovative ones, are now building hybrid applications across VMware and AWS components and modernizing enterprises that way. We're trying to encourage our VMUG community to do the same thing. I've had talks with VMUG events this year talking to them about Edge Compute and how VMware is investing there and what R&D looks like. Part of this is, I think all of us in IT, we have to have that point in time where we say "I have to let go, "I know the market's shifting, "I know I have to do something different." If I didn't let go in my past, I would still be known for being a Certified Novell Engineer, right? Times change and we have to change too, so it's really important to be prescriptive and give our community all the tools they need to evolve with us. >> Chris, you mention the Greengrass thing that you have in preview for a bit. I want you talk about that a little bit and when I heard Andy Jassy this morning, he talked about the continuum. Instances, which underneath, that's virtualization from VMware. There's containers and there's serverless. Andy says if he was to build IWBS today, he'd build it all serverless. We know it's not a zero sum game and nothing changes overnight, but virtualization is not decimated by containers overnight and containers doesn't go away now that serverless comes out. I want you to talk about the Greengrass and how that spectrum fits into the customers you're talked to in the VMware journey. >> I think it's really, really exciting and certainly I'm a huge proponent of serverless. My 14 year old son has an Echo Dot in his bedroom and he likes to program it to do really fun things. My favorite example is he had it talking about who the ugliest person in the world is and wanted Alexa to name his sister. There's a part of me that's like "No don't do that, son" but then the other part's like "I'm so proud of you." >> That's awesome. But if we step back, there's this huge press to start doing more in terms of getting the analytics and the intelligence to either where the data's being created or where the data's being consumed. We've had a lot of customers come to us jointly, saying "Look, I can't move the data to the Cloud "to do deep analytics or machine learning. "It defies the laws of physics "or the networking costs are just too much. "Or there's latency considerations. "I need a faster transaction execution time." We have a customer, a joint customer, where they're monitoring the heat of the brake pad on a train and they're trying to understand in real time, how that impacts the train's maintenance schedule and when they should take it out of service. They need to get the intelligence of the Cloud closer to where these things are occurring. Let's bring that all back to Greengrass on vSphere. You heard an announcement of machine learning on Greengrass today. To do machine learning, I need some considerable compute horsepower to really make it effective. Most of our customers already have a lot of that horsepower already out at the edge. One of our customers has six to 10 servers. This is very common of a lot of retail organizations, six to 10 servers per stores times 10,000 stores. They're trying to do more with IOT and more analytics. They want to leverage the investments that they already have an infrastructure. The other part that's strategically important to VMware is this: we want to have Cloud services be able to execute where the data's being created and that's a natural use case for virtualization. Then second, we want to have a platform that can allow the most popular opensource technologies to also run there to give customers all of that choice. So for us, it's all about promoting heterogeneity at the edge. We see those Cloud services as really that new generation of application platforms that customers, they don't want some artificial constraint of a Cloud data center to say "this is where it has to run." I want it to run wherever the business requirements say it needs to run and that's what's important and that's what we're doing with this announcement. >> Chris, we talk to a lot of CTOs, senior architects, CIOs and even looking at VMware, trust that part of it has been very stable in the environment for years, the product selection can be overwhelming. CIOs, CTOs need to focus their investment and their strategies in a certain area. Conversations, where are you telling CTOs, CIOs to focus their investment? >> It's a really good question. You definitely have to have a focus area and for us, it's about a platform for rapid agility and innovation. That's really key. We don't know what the future's gonna be. We can guess and you are both two very visionary guys and you have a general idea of what's gonna happen over the next 12, 18 months, but there's things that are just unexpected, especially in the business context. We can understand technology, but business dynamics change very quickly. Helping CTOs and CIOs understand how to build a fabric that can make them more agile and flexible is really key. That's one. So, greater automation, greater efficiencies, rapid innovation, but even more importantly for a lot that's really top of mind is security. Giving them a way to do rapid recovery, being able to start to segment some of their resources, being able to dynamically offer and adjust security and understand threats in real time and combat them in real time is key. The traditional model of security is: I have a dynamic threat so I'm gonna have increased layers of static security to combat it and I'll just add more layers. Doesn't work. We've had customers have massive outages that we've worked with because they've had ransomware attacks and things like that, so they want to be more agile and more dynamic. Their VMware environments, they've been able to get up very quickly, but these lessons are teaching organizations that they have to think differently. So really, that security and agility I see is really top of line for a lot of folks. >> Chris, I've seen lots of traffic at the VMware booth, talked to a lot of customers that are interested. The elephant in the room when I talk to all of them is cost. We've looked at Big Bear Metal, Amazon released that instance. That's a big hunking instance, a lot of memory, a lot of networking. I've talked to a couple customers that said, "I did the analysis on VMware over AWS "versus heck, just buying a rack "and stick it in my environment." You get a significant difference in there. One customer is like "Hey, it was 3x the cost "for me to just buy it and do it myself, "and I didn't feel I was gonna get any "operational efficiencies even doing it "'cause I know VMware and I know how to run it." What do you say to those customers? What are they missing? I'd love any misconceptions that you're hearing out there. >> I'll give ya an example. Let's use the cost analogy. My daughter wants a new radio for Christmas. I can go to Best Buy and buy a really nice stereo, but that's actually 3x the cost of me buying the circuit board kit, say on Amazon, and soldering in the components myself. When you think about that in a practical, real world example, we used to buy motherboards and build PCs and servers back in the day. We don't even think about doing it anymore and even if I could save 25 dollars doing it, I still wouldn't do it because there's more important things I can be doing with my time to differentiate my business. Look, we are-- >> I wanna poke at that. Because you're partners at Delium Sig and I buy one of the VX whatever family from their team. It's pretty easy to ploy, I do that. I understand how to do VMware. It's not gonna take me months to deploy. I know how to a VMware environment and it's that type of configuration. They're saying it's not building versus buying and I understand there's a spectrum there, but just the raw VMware and AWS. They said "I'm gonna get two bills. "I'm gonna get one from VMware and one from Amazon" and the price of it does seem pretty massive compared to what they were doing. So, are they wrong about that? >> I'm really surprised at that. We're not hearing that from our customers We're seeing them have very solid in terms of cost saving, in terms of running on AWS because unlike a traditional Cloud environment, I can oversubscribe physical hosts, I can run more workloads because it is native VMware. You're also getting additional benefits. I'm getting V-SAN storage, I'm getting NSX for networking and security. To say I'm just gonna take vSphere and compare, I would say that that's probably not the closest comparison. There's other aspects that we're providing that operate in a Cloud environment. And, listen, we had this before. Five years ago, people were saying, "Well, Cloud's too expensive so I'm gonna stay on premises." We don't even think that way anymore. There's other benefits that you're getting in the Cloud model that you have to weigh into consideration and we've seen VMware Cloud on AWS is as price competitive as a lot of the native public Cloud services are without all the added benefits of networking and security and management and other things that we throw in. >> Chris, wanna give you the final word. What's exciting you these days? You used to sit on kind of this side of the table, look at the environment. You're deep in some of the emerging pieces. What's getting you excited? I'd love to hear any final insights on partnering between VMware and Amazon, which a lot of us on the outside are like cats and dogs living together. >> Okay, let's hit a couple of them. First, certainly for me, the innovation that's occurring at the edge, I think is extremely exciting. Driving new use cases around augmented reality, more machine learning. How we're looking in terms of moving services to where data's being generated instead of moving the data, which is always problematic. That's a new wave of innovation that I think is really exciting. So that's the certainly the area I'd say that's most exciting for me, is how we can innovate there. It's also around hybrid applications. It's the integration of things like Lambda functions in a traditional file system. I was with a major global financial services organization yesterday and we were not talking about traditional Lambda function use cases. We were talking about integrating Lambda with database and file system events and VM's running on vSphere. So, there's this whole new way to modernize applications that we're just at the cusp of. That pace of innovation's happening faster and faster. I'll say this about Amazon: we are really committed to working together and I think what you're seeing in the industry in general, it's not just VMware with AWS, but it's with our partners in the container spaces. An example is containers as a service and platform as a service, is we're being very pragmatic about focusing on what we're really, really good at. And there's areas where VMware is fantastic at it, in terms of reliability and heterogeneity at the edge and there's natural synergies where we can work together with Amazon web services. In my opinion, they've been a fantastic partner. All of the work that we've done with the Greengrass team and the IOT team, in terms of bringing Greengrass to market on vSphere, has been an enormously positive experience. We share lessons learned, we share engineering, work together. It's extremely collaborative because just like all of our technology partners, there's always areas where we're going to compete a little bit and there can be some overlap, but there's a lot more areas where we get to work together and that's what we're really focused on with VMware and AWS. >> Well, Chris, I know Keith and I always appreciate your perspectives, the VMware community engagement, know you're always open to having some good, real discussions here, so really appreciate you coming sharing all our viewpoints. Congratulations on all the progress here. We're certainly excited to see where it goes. >> I appreciate the opportunity. >> Alright, for Keith Townsend, I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here. 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