(upbeat music) >> Hello, this is Dave Vellante, and we're here to talk about the massive $61 billion planned acquisition of VMware by Broadcom. And I'm here with Phil Brotherton of NetApp to discuss the implications for customers, for the industry, and NetApp's particular point of view. Phil, welcome. Good to see you again. >> It's great to see you, Dave. >> So this topic has garnered a lot of conversation. What's your take on this epic event? What does it mean for the industry generally, and customers specifically? >> You know, I think time will tell a little bit, Dave. We're in the early days. We've, you know, so we heard the original announcements and then it's evolved a little bit, as we're going now. I think overall it'll be good for the ecosystem in the end. There's a lot you can do when you start combining what VMware can do with compute and some of the hardware assets of Broadcom. There's a lot of security things that can be brought, for example, to the infrastructure, that are very high-end and cool, and then integrated, so it's easy to do. So I think there's a lot of upside for it. There's obviously a lot of concern about what it means for vendor consolidation and pricing and things like that. So time will tell. >> You know, when this announcement first came out, I wrote a piece, you know, how "Broadcom will tame the VMware beast," I called it. And, you know, looked at Broadcom's history and said they're going to cut, they're going to raise prices, et cetera, et cetera. But I've seen a different tone, certainly, as Broadcom has got into the details. And I'm sure I and others maybe scared a lot of customers, but I think everybody's kind of calming down now. What are you hearing from customers about this acquisition? How are they thinking about it? >> You know, I think it varies. There's, I'd say generally we have like half our installed base, Dave, runs ESX Server, so the bulk of our customers use VMware, and generally they love VMware. And I'm talking mainly on-prem. We're just extending to the cloud now, really, at scale. And there's a lot of interest in continuing to do that, and that's really strong. The piece that's careful is this vendor, the cost issues that have come up. The things that were in your piece, actually. And what does that mean to me, and how do I balance that out? Those are the questions people are dealing with right now. >> Yeah, so there's obviously a lot of talk about the macro, the macro headwinds. Everybody's being a little cautious. The CIOs are tapping the brakes. We all sort of know that story. But we have some data from our partner ETR that ask, they go out every quarter and they survey, you know, 1500 or so IT practitioners, and they ask the ones that are planning to spend less, that are cutting, "How are you going to approach that? What's your primary methodology in terms of achieving, you know, cost optimization?" The number one, by far, answer was to consolidate redundant vendors. It was like, it's now up to about 40%. The second, distant second, was, "We're going to, you know, optimize cloud costs." You know, still significant, but it was really that consolidating the redundant vendors. Do you see that? How does NetApp fit into that? >> Yeah, that is an interesting, that's a very interesting bit of research, Dave. I think it's very right. One thing I would say is, because I've been in the infrastructure business in Silicon Valley now for 30 years. So these ups and downs are, that's a consistent thing in our industry, and I always think people should think of their infrastructure and cost management. That's always an issue, with infrastructure as cost management. What I've told customers forever is that when you look at cost management, our best customers at cost management are typically service providers. There's another aspect to cost management, is you want to automate as much as possible. And automation goes along with vendor consolidation, because how you automate different products, you don't want to have too many vendors in your layers. And what I mean by the layers of ecosystem, there's a storage layer, the network layer, the compute layer, like, the security layer, database layer, et cetera. When you think like that, everybody should pick their partners very carefully, per layer. And one last thought on this is, it's not like people are dumb, and not trying to do this. It's, when you look at what happens in the real world, acquisitions happen, things change as you go. And in these big customers, that's just normal, that things change. But you always have to have this push towards consolidating and picking your vendors very carefully. >> Also, just to follow up on that, I mean, you know, when you think about multi-cloud, and you mentioned, you know, you've got some big customers, they do a lot of M & A, it's kind of been multi-cloud by accident. "Oh, we got all these other tools and storage platforms and whatever it is." So where does NetApp fit in that whole consolidation equation? I'm thinking about, you know, cross-cloud services, which is a big VMware theme, thinking about a consistent experience, on-prem, hybrid, across the three big clouds, out to the edge. Where do you fit? >> So our view has been, and it was this view, and we extend it to the cloud, is that the data layer, so in our software, is called ONTAP, the data layer is a really important layer that provides a lot of efficiency. It only gets bigger, how you do compliance, how you do backup, DR, blah blah blah. All that data layer services needs to operate on-prem and on the clouds. So when you look at what we've done over the years, we've extended to all the clouds, our data layer. We've put controls, management tools, over the top, so that you can manage the entire data layer, on-prem and cloud, as one layer. And we're continuing to head down that path, 'cause we think that data layer is obviously the path to maximum ability to do compliance, maximum cost advantages, et cetera. So we've really been the company that set our sights on managing the data layer. Now, if you look at VMware, go up into the network layer, the compute layer, VMware is a great partner, and that's why we work with them so closely, is they're so perfect a fit for us, and they've been a great partner for 20 years for us, connecting those infrastructural data layers: compute, network, and storage. >> Well, just to stay on that for a second. I've seen recently, you kind of doubled down on your VMware alliance. You've got stuff at re:Invent I saw, with AWS, you're close to Azure, and I'm really talking about ONTAP, which is sort of an extension of what you were just talking about, Phil, which is, you know, it's kind of NetApp's storage operating system, if you will. It's a world class. But so, maybe talk about that relationship a little bit, and how you see it evolving. >> Well, so what we've been seeing consistently is, customers want to use the advantages of the cloud. So, point one. And when you have to completely refactor apps and all this stuff, it limits, it's friction. It limits what you can do, it raises costs. And what we did with VMware, VMware is this great platform for being able to run basically client-server apps on-prem and cloud, the exact same way. The problem is, when you have large data sets in the VMs, there's some cost issues and things, especially on the cloud. That drove us to work together, and do what we did. We GA-ed, we're the, so NetApp is the only independent storage, independent storage, say this right, independent storage platform certified to run with VMware cloud on Amazon. We GA-ed that last summer. We GA-ed with Azure, the Azure VMware service, a couple months ago. And you'll see news coming with GCP soon. And so the idea was, make it easy for customers to basically run in a hybrid model. And then if you back out and go, "What does that mean for you as a customer?", it's not saying you should go to the cloud, necessarily, or stay on-prem, or whatever. But it's giving you the flexibility to cost-optimize where you want to be. And from a data management point of view, ONTAP gives you the consistent data management, whichever way you decide to go. >> Yeah, so I've been following NetApp for decades, when you were Network Appliance, and I saw you go from kind of the workstation space into the enterprise. I saw you lean into virtualization really early on, and you've been a great VMware partner ever since. And you were early in cloud, so, sort of talking about, you know, that cross-cloud, what we call supercloud. I'm interested in what you're seeing in terms of specific actions that customers are taking. Like, I think about ELAs, and I think it's a two-edged sword. You know, should customers, you know, lean into ELAs right now? You know, what are you seeing there? You talked about, you know, sort of modernizing apps with things like Kubernetes, you know, cloud migration. What are some of the techniques that you're advising customers to take in the context of this acquisition? >> You know, so the basics of this are pretty easy. One is, and I think even Raghu, the CEO of VMware, has talked about this. Extending your ELA is probably a good idea. Like I said, customers love VMware, so having a commitment for a time, consistent cost management for a time is a good strategy. And I think that's why you're hearing ELA extensions being discussed. It's a good idea. The second part, and I think it goes to your surveys, that cost optimization point on the cloud is, moving to the cloud has huge advantages, but if you just kind of lift and shift, oftentimes the costs aren't realized the way you'd want. And the term "modernization," changing your app to use more Kubernetes, more cloud-native services, is often a consideration that goes into that. But that requires time. And you know, most companies have hundreds of apps, or thousands of apps, they have to consider modernizing. So you want to then think through the journey, what apps are going to move, what gets modernized, what gets lifted-shifted, how many data centers are you compressing? There's a lot of data center, the term I've been hearing is "data center evacuations," but data center consolidation. So that there's some even energy savings advantages sometimes with that. But the whole point, I mean, back up to my whole point, the whole point is having the infrastructure that gives you the flexibility to make the journey on your cost advantages and your business requirements. Not being forced to it. Like, it's not really a philosophy, it's more of a business optimization strategy. >> When you think about application modernization and Kubernetes, how does NetApp, you know, fit into that, as a data layer? >> Well, so if you kind of think, you said, like our journey, Dave, was, when we started our life, we were doing basically virtualization of volumes and things for technical customers. And the servers were always bare metal servers that we got involved with back then. This is, like, going back 20 years. Then everyone moved to VMs, and, like, it's probably, today, I mean, getting to your question in a second, but today, loosely, 20% bare metal servers, 80% virtual machines today. And containers is growing, now a big growing piece. So, if you will, sort of another level of virtual machines in containers. And containers were historically stateless, meaning the storage didn't have anything to do. Storage is always the stateful area in the architectures. But as containers are getting used more, stateful containers have become a big deal. So we've put a lot of emphasis into a product line we call Astra that is the world's best data management for containers. And that's both a cloud service and used on-prem in a lot of my customers. It's a big growth area. So that's what, when I say, like, one partner that can do data management, just, that's what we have to do. We have to keep moving with our customers to the type of data they want to store, and how do you store it most efficiently? Hey, one last thought on this is, where I really see this happening, there's a booming business right now in artificial intelligence, and we call it modern data analytics, but people combining big data lakes with AI, and that's where some of this, a lot of the container work comes in. We've extended objects, we have a thing we call file-object duality, to make it easy to bridge the old world of files to the new world of objects. Those all go hand in hand with app modernization. >> Yeah, it's a great thing about this industry. It never sits still. And you're right, it's- >> It's why I'm in it. >> Me too. Yeah, it's so much fun. There's always something. >> It is an abstraction layer. There's always going to be another abstraction layer. Serverless is another example. It's, you know, primarily stateless, that's probably going to, you know, change over time. All right, last question. In thinking about this Broadcom acquisition of VMware, in the macro climate, put a sort of bow on where NetApp fits into this equation. What's the value you bring in this context? >> Oh yeah, well it's like I said earlier, I think it's the data layer of, it's being the data layer that gives you what you guys call the supercloud, that gives you the ability to choose which cloud. Another thing, all customers are running at least two clouds, and you want to be able to pick and choose, and do it your way. So being the data layer, VMware is going to be in our infrastructures for at least as long as I'm in the computer business, Dave. I'm getting a little old. So maybe, you know, but "decades" I think is an easy prediction, and we plan to work with VMware very closely, along with our customers, as they extend from on-prem to hybrid cloud operations. That's where I think this will go. >> Yeah, and I think you're absolutely right. Look at the business case for migrating off of VMware. It just doesn't make sense. It works, it's world class, it recover... They've done so much amazing, you know, they used to be called, Moritz called it the software mainframe, right? And that's kind of what it is. I mean, it means it doesn't go down, right? And it supports virtually any application, you know, around the world, so. >> And I think getting back to your original point about your article, from the very beginning, is, I think Broadcom's really getting a sense of what they've bought, and it's going to be, hopefully, I think it'll be really a fun, another fun era in our business. >> Well, and you can drive EBIT a couple of ways. You can cut, okay, fine. And I'm sure there's some redundancies that they'll find. But there's also, you can drive top-line revenue. And you know, we've seen how, you know, EMC and then Dell used that growth from VMware to throw off free cash flow, and it was just, you know, funded so much, you know, innovation. So innovation is the key. Hock Tan has talked about that a lot. I think there's a perception that Broadcom, you know, doesn't invest in R & D. That's not true. I think they just get very focused with that investment. So, Phil, I really appreciate your time. Thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks a lot, Dave. It's fun being here. >> Yeah, our pleasure. And thank you for watching theCUBE, your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage. (upbeat music)

>> Presenter: theCUBE presents UiPath FORWARD5 brought to you by UiPath. >> Back to theCUBE's coverage of UiPath FORWARD5, 2022. This is theCUBE's 4th UiPath FORWARD. They're mining automation gold here at the conference and in the customer base and we're creating Cube Gold, Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson. Cheryln Chin is here. She's the vice president of Global Alliances at UIPATH. Sameer Bohra, who's the director of Information Technology at Deloitte. Good to see you guys. >> Great. >> Thank you. >> Now normally we would be talking about, how Deloitte's out, doing its thing with its customers, but this is actually a case study on Deloitte's use of automation and UiPath, so that's cool. You not only partner with the GSIs you actually sell to them as well. Okay. What's that all about? What's your relationship like? Why don't you start there? >> Absolutely. So we're thrilled to be here. Thanks for having us. And really appreciate Sameer being here with us. Deloitte was an early adopter of UiPath not just as a partner, driving innovations and investing in getting skilled and building the capability. They were the first to become the US and certified partner network investing in thousands and thousands of skilling up their consultants and resources to help us address our customer needs together. But it's not just about being a great partner it's being a customer with what they've done and built their own business around UiPath and the automations. We've got an amazing story to tell you about today that we'd love to share. >> All right, Sameer, let's hear it. What's the story? What was the catalyst to bring in automation, UiPath? Where are you applying it? Where'd you start? >> Fantastic, well first of all, thanks for having me here. >> You're welcome. >> I'll start this journey with the predictions that we were making at some point. So, Deloitte, as a company, we are in the business of predicting the technology trends. We have been tracking automation as a trend for quite some time, and we have been following how this industries going to come along. And we then started placing our bets not just on the technology, but on the vendor as well in this case. Right around 2017, 18 is when we started kind of implementing automation with UiPath for our internal purposes. And as it happens, different constituents in our member firms started doing it at the same time without kind of consulting with each other. But the surprising thing is that we all ended up with the same results. We all ended up with UiPath. We all ended up using the same technology set and it was good that we all made the same choice because we would then all get along with it together. So we started our journey kind of disintegrated in a way and then we came along quickly all together. We then have COEs in each of our member firms, or at least the big member firms. And around January last year is when we signed an enterprise license agreement with UiPath that really brought some of our mature COEs together. And now we are kind of utilizing the product quite well. We are exploring the benefits of that ELA brings to us. So that has been our journey so far. Just in terms of some numbers, we are more than 400 millionaires saved for our member firm. We have hundreds of processes that we have automated. I'm kind of losing count of that already. And we have a good 70, 80 member team members across our three mature COEs that are constantly automating day in and day out. So there's a lot in terms of the history and there's a lot that we are looking forward to. >> Can you paint a picture of sort of where you're applying these automations in your business and maybe double click on that a little bit? >> Absolutely. So when we started our journey, there were some candidates right off the bat there were some of our enabling areas where we were looking at for instance, finance our talent which we also called as HR. Those were some of our preliminary areas that we started doing automations for. But another surprising thing is that our first automation use cases were actually contingent solutions that we built to help some of the other big deployments that were happening in the firm. And in absence of any good solution, we said, "Let's bring in RP and let's bridge the gap." And that basically opened the door for us to use automation at a bigger scale. So it's enabling area, talent, finance, business operations. Those are the prominent areas, marketing, chief culture, those are the areas that we are applying it. And then our services on the other hand are using automation as well because we need our services people to be armed with the valuable time to be able to invest on our clients rather than, being stuck in repetitive mundane tasks. So we are pretty much applying it all over the board now. >> So as director of IT at Deloitte, I'm curious about how this process works for you. You've heard the term drinking one's own champagne. >> Yeah. >> When you are looking... >> 'or jog fooding, but okay. >> I was trying to be polite, right? One throat to choke one bat to pat, back to pat. Are you immediately and at all times under a microscope when you're deploying something internally because someone else in Deloitte is thinking, "Okay, let's see how this works for us. Because if it works well, if we gain expertise, we can turn this into a line of business to help our clients." Is that something that starts day one? Or do people come to you six months into a project and say, "Hey, I hear you have something going on. That's cool." What's that look like? >> Very interesting question. The way I would like to describe it is we have a symbiotic relationship between our internal COE and our client facing teams that are out in the market selling automation along with UiPath. And the way that symbiotic relationship work for us is when we are doing anything interesting in terms of an automation use case, and we have many that I can talk about, we do have this constant connect with our client facing folks where we tell them about the use case. We tell them about the problem that we are solving and the way in which we are solving that problem. And in many cases, it generates interest. And then we get into conversations where we see, okay is it an asset that we can build out of it? Or is it simply a client use case that we could burn and implement and apply somewhere? So that's one side of the symbolic relationship. The other side is what our client service folks are seeing in the market. So when they see it, they come to us and they tell us, "Look, we see such and such client doing this and we did it for them. We should think about doing this in Deloitte and for ourselves." And then we say, "Fantastic, let's do it." So it's both ways. >> Dave: Both ways. And the fact that it is both ways. There is not that sense of pressure or you know that I'm under a microscope. It's all one big family. >> How do you measure success? >> It's a pretty interesting question again, success is subjective, right? When it comes to automation the typical metrics that people use to define and describe success is how many hours you have saved or how many hours, at least the way we use it how many hours you have reinvested, right? So we started with that as our measure and for some time that was really our measure of success. But lately we are seeing a change in that we are now shifting more over to other matrix like cost avoidance. So for instance, your firm is growing at a certain pace. Do all your enabling areas need to grow at that pace? Maybe not. Maybe we can avoid that cost and maybe we bring in more automation to support that. So cost avoidance is kind of emerging as a bigger matrix for us now, especially given that all low hanging automation fruits have been plucked. That's a big one we are looking at. I think the other matrix which is a bit difficult to measure directly is the employee satisfaction. There's somewhere I read that if you want happy clients you need to have happy employees first, right? And one way of making your employees happy is to give them the task that they really value that they really like to do. Now, again, being a professional services firm are ours are people's, our is our currency, right? So we want to give them as much of their valuable time back so they can invest it in their client facing activities as opposed to, you know doing mundane and ones. So those are some of the matrix and measures we are looking at. >> So I'd like to dig into that a little bit. If I could Sameer. So, aren't hours saved sort of related to cost avoidance? Is that an input to the cost avoidance calculation, if you will? >> So yeah, so yes and no. And the reason I say that is because yes, if you do the math, yes, it makes sense, >> 'not that it's direct. I understand it's not a direct relationship but it's somewhere related. Is it not? >> It is related in the sense that our saved is an immediate measure of automation, right? So if me as a practitioner, if I can hand over a task to the bar, which can take off five hours out of my week, that's an hour saved right away. But cost avoidance is more like, "Hey, I have these 10 engagements that are coming up. Do I need to amp up to meet boost end engagement or I simply amp up my automation, right?" So that's more around the cost avoidance piece. >> Okay. So there's an algorithm there. >> Yeah. >> Which makes sense. Do you find, so in other words, when you save hours at some point it's going to translate it to headcount avoidance. Okay, are you finding that when you run a project if you can automate that project, that the proportion of savings is greater on that automation of the project than it is for those sort of hours saved? I'm just sort of curious as to what the balance looks like. Is it like overwhelmingly speeding up the project? Is the real benefit there? I'm just kind of curious. >> There's absolutely a benefit there. With automation, you can obviously speed up your projects, you can do more with the staff and the team that you have. So that's definitely something that helps us a lot both internally and I believe on the client facing side as well. >> Okay. And just put my CFO hat on. Let's, so are those internal resources or are there sort of out of pocket expenses? In other words, it's the hard dollars that I don't spend or is it resources that I can deploy on another project or both? Or both. >> For the most part it's the resources right? >> So it's okay. >> Yeah, it's the resources that you can now have them do more value work with more clients as opposed to have them do many task at one place. >> Okay, I'm going to just keep going. So that's a productivity measure in my mind anyway, so I just like to keep peeling the onion on the metrics. So I would at some point, so the two things the cost avoidance and the employee satisfaction I would ultimately as the CFO want to see that show up in terms of productivity increases and decreases in turnover. And you probably don't have enough experience yet to measure that. But ultimately, isn't that where you want to go? >> I think that's essentially where it's going and I think that's the way it'll probably go for pretty much everyone who is in this journey of automation at your CFO will eventually want to look at, okay what after this investment, where is it leading us? So that's definitely the direction we are also heading. >> Yeah and so productivity revenue per employee, is that a good starting point? Maybe you get more sophisticated than that, but... >> Yeah, that's probably a good starting point. >> UiPath revenue employees about 250,000, which is pretty average for software companies. Now, maybe it's because they're investing more, but at some point I'd like to see that tick to 350,000 anyway. >> Yeah. >> I Digress. >> And we are on that journey where we are essentially looking to arm everyone with a bot right? There's a philosophy and UiPath around a bot for everyone. We are pretty close to getting to that stage where everybody should be able to leverage the technology. We shouldn't be limited to a certain business unit or certain pockets within a business unit. >> I want a bot. I do, I want a bot, I'm getting a bot. >> I wish I have a bot. >> I would, yeah, I want to a bot and I want to give that bot a very clever name. That's like you're thinking of naming bots. So are your activities evaluated in completely independently as sort of your own P and L or do you get credit for some of that symbiotic relationship that's developed? Because I can imagine a situation where you deploy something intelligent automation and you get a yield that translates into a practice for your firm that brings in a bunch of revenue with a bunch of satisfied customers. Do you get credit for that? Or is it like, no, no, no, no. I wouldn't >> I would love to get credit for that. But again, it's all in the family. It's all one big family. At this time we are simply focused on bringing the right use cases forward for our client facing folks and the other way around. So we haven't got into that stage as left. >> But you need to deliver standalone value. You're evaluated that way. >> And this COE. That's what we are evaluated upon. The matrix that I talked about earlier around cost avoidance, number of our saved employee satisfaction. Those are some of area that we are being rated upon. And that's across all our COEs. >> Oh, surely congratulations on landing Deloitte as a customer and of course a partner. And I'm sure there's big things in the future. We'll give you the last word, bring it home. >> You know, the takeaway here is we are leveraging partners like this who are going way beyond just automating processes for the sake of process and our save the using this to build their business make their consultants more productive and really driving profitability for the business. So really the automation flywheel going beyond that's really trying to fuel digital transformation by taking this, they make it go faster, more profitable, more agile, and they become an amazing customer and an amazing good market partner. >> Yeah, you guys take this pretty seriously behind us there's this, I don't know what you call it but this clouds floating above it. If you walk through there, there's some really inspiring commentary. And so I encourage you to do that if you're here at the show. All right, thanks guys, appreciate it. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> You're welcome. All keep it right there Dave Vellante and Dave Nicholson will be back at FORWARD5 UiPath customer event from Las Vegas. We're live right back. (soft music)

(gentle music intro) >> Okay, we're back. We're live here at theCUBE and at VMworld, VMware Explore, formally VMworld. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Three days of wall to wall coverage, we've got Vittorio Viarengo, the vice president of Cross-Cloud Services at VMware. Vittorio, great to see you, and thanks for coming on theCUBE right after your keynote. I can't get that off my tongue, VMworld. 12 years of CUBE coverage. This is the first year of VMware Explore, formerly VMworld. Raghu said in his keynote, he explained the VMworld community now with multi-clouds that you're in charge of at VMworld, VMware, is now the Explore brand's going to explore the multi-cloud, that's a big part of Raghu's vision and VMware. You're driving it and you are on the stage just now. What's, what's going on? >> Yeah, what I said at my keynote note is that our customers have been the explorer of IT, new IT frontier, always challenging the status quo. And we've been, our legendary engineering team, been behind the scenes, providing them with the tools of the technology to be successful in that journey to the private cloud. And Kelsey said it. What we built was the foundation for the cloud. And now it's time to start a new journey in the multi-cloud. >> Now, one of the things that we heard today clearly was: multi-cloud's a reality. Cloud chaos, Kit Colbert was talking about that and we've been saying, you know, people are chaotic. We believe that. Andy Grove once said, "Reign in the chaos. Let chaos reign, then reign in the chaos." That's the opportunity. The complexity of cross-cloud is being solved. You guys have a vision, take us through how you see that happening. A lot of people want to see this cross-cloud abstraction happen. What's the story from your standpoint, how you see that evolving? >> I think that IT history repeats itself, right? Every starts nice and neat. "Oh, I'm going to buy a bunch of HP servers and my life is going to be good, and oh, this store." >> Spin up an EC2. >> Yeah. Eventually everything goes like this in IT because every vendor do what they do, they innovate. And so that could create complexity. And in the cloud is the complexity on steroid because you have six major cloud, all the local clouds, the cloud pro- local cloud providers, and each of these cloud brings their own way of doing management security. And I think now it's time. Every customer that I talk to, they want more simplicity. You know, how do I go fast but be able to manage the complexity? So that's where cross-cloud services- Last year, we launched a vision, with a sprinkle of software behind it, of building a set of cloud-native services that allow our customers to build, run, manage, secure, and access any application consistently across any cloud. >> Yeah, so you're a year in now, it's not like, I mean, you know, when you come together in a physical event like this, it resonates more, you got the attention. When you're watching the virtual events, you get doing a lot of different things. So it's not like you just stumbled upon this last week. Okay, so what have you learned in the last year in terms of post that launch. >> What we learned is what we have been building for the last five years, right? Because we started, we saw multi-cloud happening before anybody else, I would argue. With our announcement with AWS five, six years ago, right? And then our first journey to multi-cloud was let's bring vSphere on all the clouds. And that's a great purpose to help our customers accelerate their journey of their "legacy" application. Their application actually deliver business to the cloud. But then around two, three years ago, I think Raghu realized that to add value, we needed- customers were already in the cloud, we needed to embrace the native cloud. And that's where Tanzu came in as a way to build application. Tanzu manage, way to secure manage application. And now with Aria, we now have more differentiated software to actually manage this application across- >> Yeah, and Aria is the management plane. That's the rebrand. It's not a new product per se. It's a collection of the VMware stuff, right? Isn't it like- >> No, it's, it's a... >> It's a new product? >> There is a new innovation there because basically they, the engineering team built this graph and Raghu compared it to the graph that Google builds up around about the web. So we go out and crawl all your assets across any cloud and we'll build you this model that now allows you to see what are your assets, how you can manage them, what are the performance and all that, so. No, it's more than a brand. It's, it's a new innovation and integration of a technology that we had. >> And that's a critical component of cross-cloud. So I want to get back to what you said about Raghu and what he's been focused on. You know, I remember interviewing him in 2016 with Andy Jassy at AWS, and that helped clear up the cloud game. But even before that Raghu and I had talked, Dave, on theCUBE, I think it was like 2014? >> Yeah. >> Pat Gelson was just getting on board as the CEO of VMware. Hybrid was very much on the conversation then. Even then it was early. Hybrid was early, you guys are seeing multi-cloud early. >> It was private cloud. >> Totally give you props on that. So VMware gets total props on that, being right on that. Where are we in that journey? 'Cause super cloud, as we're talking about, you were contributing to that initiative in the open with our open source project. What is multi-cloud? Where is it in the status of the customer? I think everyone will agree, multi-cloud is an outcome that's going to happen. It's happening. Everyone has multiple clouds and they configure things differently. Where are we on the progress bar in your mind? >> I think I want to answer that question and go back to your question, which I didn't address, you know, what we are learning from customers. I think that most customers are at the very, very beginning. They're either in the denial stage, like yesterday talked to a customer, I said, "Are you multi-cloud, are you on your multi-cloud journey?" And he said, "Oh we are on-prem and a little bit of Azure." I said, "Oh really? So the bus- "Oh no, well the business unit is using AWS, right? And we are required company that is using-" I said, "Okay, so you are... that customer is in cloud first stage." >> Like you said, we've seen this movie before. It comes around, right? >> Yeah. >> Somebody's going to have to clean that up at some point. >> Yeah, I think a lot, a lot of- the majority customers are either in denial or in the cloud chaos. And some customers are pushing the envelope like SMP. SMP Global, we heard this morning. Somebody has done all the journey in the private cloud with us, and now I said, and I talked to him a few months ago, he told me, "I had to get in front of my developers. Enough of this, you know, wild west. I had to lay down the tracks and galleries for them to build multi-cloud in a way that was, give them choice, but for me, as an operator and a security person, being able to manage it and secure it." And so I think most customers are in that chaos phase right now. Very early. >> So at our Supercloud22 event, we were riffing and I was asking you about, are you going to hide the complexity, yes. But you're also going to give access to the, to the developers if they want access to the primitives. And I said to you, "It sounds like you want to have your cake and eat it too." And you said, "And want to lose weight." And I never followed up with you, so I want to follow up now. By "lose weight," I presume you mean be essentially that platform of choice, right? So you're going to, you're going to simplify, but you're going to give access to the developers for those primitives, if in fact they want one. And you're going to be the super cloud, my word of choice. So my question to you is why, first of all, is that correct, your "lose weight"? And why VMware? >> When I say you, you want a cake, eat it and lose weight, I, and I'm going to sound a little arrogant, it's hard to be humble when you're good. But now I work for a company, I work for a company that does that. Has done it over and over and over again. We have done stuff, I... Sometimes when I go before customers, I say, "And our technology does this." Then the customer gets on stage and I go, "Oh my God, oh my God." And then the customers say, "Yeah, plus I realize that I could also do this." So that's, you know, that's the kind of company that we are. And I think that we were so busy being successful with on-prem and that, you know, that we kind of... the cloud happened. Under our eyes. But now with the multi-cloud, I think there is opportunity for VMware to do it all over again. And we are the right company to do it for two reasons. One, we have the right DNA. We have those engineers that know how to make stuff that was not designed to work together work together and the right partnership because everybody partners with us. >> But, you know, a lot of companies like, oh, they missed cloud, they missed mobile. They missed that, whatever it was. VMware was very much aware of this. You made an effort to do kind of your own cloud initiative, backed off from- and everybody was like, this is a disaster waiting to happen and of course it was. And so then you realize that, you learn from your mistakes, and then you embraced the AWS deal. And that changed everything, it changed... It cleared it up for your customers. I'm not hearing anybody saying that the cross-cloud services strategy, what we call multi, uh, super cloud is wrong. Nobody's saying that's like a failed, you know, strategy. Now the execution obviously is very important. So that's why I'm saying it's different this time around. It's not like you don't have your pulse on it. I mean, you tried before, okay, the strategy wasn't right, it backfired, okay, and then you embraced it. But now people are generally in agreement that there's either a problem or there's going to be a problem. And so you kind of just addressed why VMware, because you've always been in the catbird seat to solve those problems. >> But it is a testament to the pragmatism of the company. Right? You try- In technology, you cannot always get it right, right? When you don't get it right, say, "Okay, that didn't work. What is the next?" And I think now we're onto something. It's a very ambitious vision for sure. But I think if you look at the companies out there that have the muscles and the DNA and the resources to do it, I think VMware is one. >> One of the risks to the success, what's been, you know you watch the Twitter chatter is, "Oh, can VMware actually attract the developers?" John chimed in and said, >> Yeah. >> It's not just the devs. I mean, just devs. But also when you think of DevOps, the ops, right? When you think about securing and having that consistent platform. So when you think about the critical factors for you to execute, you have to have that pass platform, no question. Well, how do you think about, okay, where are the gaps that we really have to get right? >> I think that for us to go and get the developers on board, it's too late. And it's too late for most companies. Developers go with the open source, they go with the path of least resistance. So our way into that, and as Kelsey Hightower said, building new application, more applications, is a team sport. And part of that team is the Ops team. And there we have an entry, I think. Because that's what- >> I think it possible. I think you, I think you're hitting it. And my dev comment, by the way, I've been kind of snarky on Twitter about this, but I say, "Oh, Dev's got it easy. They're sitting in the beach with sunglasses on, you know, having focaccia. >> Doing whatever they want. >> Happy doing whatever they want. No, it's better life for the developer now. Open source is the software industry, that's going great. Shift left in CI/CD pipeline. Developers are faster than ever, they're innovating. It's all self-service, it's all DevOps. It's looking good for the developers right now. And that's why everyone's focused on that. They're driving the change. The Ops team, that was traditional IT Ops, is now DevOps with developers. So the seed change of data and security, which is core, we're hearing a lot of those. And if you look at all the big successes, Snowflake, Databricks, MinIO, who was on earlier with the S3 cloud storage anywhere, this is the new connective tissue that VMware can connect to and extend the operational platform of IT and connect developers. You don't need to win them all over. You just connect to them. >> You just have to embrace the tools that they're using. >> Exactly. >> You just got to connect to them. >> You know, you bring up an interesting point. Snowflake has to win the developers, 'cause they're basically saying, "Hey, we're building an application development platform on top of our proprietary system." You're not saying that. You're saying we're embracing the open source tools that developers are using, so use them. >> Well, we gave it a single pane of glass to manage your application everywhere. And going back to your point about not hiding the underlying primitives, we manage that application, right? That application could be moving around, but nobody prevents that application to use that API underneath. I mean, that's, that can always do that. >> Right, right. >> And, and one of the reason why we had Kelsey Hightower and my keynote and the main keynote was that I think he shows that the template, the blueprint for our customers, our operators, if you want to have- even propel your career forward, look at what he did, right? VI admin, going up the stack storage and everything else, and then eventually embrace Kubernetes, became an expert. Really took the time to understand how modern application were- are built. And now he's a luminary in the industry. So we don't have, all have to become luminary, but you can- our customers right here, doing the labs upstairs, they can propel the career forward in this. >> So summarize what you guys are announcing around cross cloud-services. Obviously Aria, another version, 1.3 of Tanzu. Lay out the sort of news. >> Yeah, so we- With Tanzu, we have one step forward with our developer experience so that, speaking of meeting where they are, with application templates, with ability to plug into their idea of choice. So a lot of innovation there. Then on the IR side, I think that's the name of the game in multi-cloud, is having that object model allows you to manage anything across anything. And then, we talk about cross-cloud services being a vision last year, I, when I launched it, I thought security and networking up there as a cloud, but it was still down here as ploy technology. And now with NSX, the latest version, we brought that control plane in the cloud as a cloud native cross-cloud service. So, lot of meat around the three pillars, development, the management, and security. >> And then the complementary component of vSphere 8 and vSAN 8 and the whole DPU thing, 'cause that's, 'cause that's cloud, right? I mean, we saw what AWS did with Nitro. >> Yeah. >> Five, seven years ago. >> That's the consumption model cloud. >> That's the future of computing architecture. >> And the licensing model underneath. >> Oh yeah, explain that. Right, the universal licensing model. >> Yeah, so basically what we did when we launch cloud universal was, okay, you can buy our software using credit that you have on AWS. And I said, okay, that's kind of hybrid cloud, it's not multi-cloud, right? But then we brought in Google and now the latest was Microsoft. Now you can buy our software for credits and investment that our customers already have with these great partners of ours and use it to consume as a subscription. >> So that kind of changes your go-to-market and you're not just chasing an ELA renewal now. You're sort of thinking, you're probably talking to different people within the organizations as well, right? So if I can use credits for whatever, Google, for Azure, for on-prem, for AWS, right? Those are different factions necessarily in the organization. >> So not just the technology's multi-cloud, but also the consumption model is truly multi-cloud. >> Okay, Vittorio, what's next? What's the game plan? What do you have going on? It's getting good traction here again, like Dave said, no one's poo-pooing cross-cloud services. It is kind of a timing market forces. We were just talking before you came on. Oh, customers don't- may not think they have a problem, whether they're the frog boiling water or not, they will have the problem coming up or they don't think they have a problem, but they have chaos reigning. So what's next? What are you doing? Is it going to be new tech, new market? What is the plan? >> So I think for, if I take my bombastic kind of marketing side of me hat off and I look at the technology, I think the customers in these scales wants to be told what to do. And so I think what we need to do going forward is articulate these cross-cloud services use cases. Like okay, what does mean to have an application that uses a service over here, a service over there, and then show the value of getting this component from one company? Because cross-cloud services at your event, how many vendors were there? 20? 30? >> Yeah. >> So the market is there. I mean, these are all revenue-generating companies, right, but they provide a piece of the puzzle. Our ambition is to provide a platform approach. And so we need to articulate better, what are the advantages of getting these components management, security, from- >> And Kit, Kit was saying, it's a hybrid kind of scenario. I was kind of saying, oh, putting my little business school scenario hat on, oh yeah, you go hardcore competitive, best product wins, kill or be killed, compete and win. Or you go open and you create a keiretsu, create a consortium, and get support, standardize or defacto standardize a bunch of it, and then let everyone monetize or participate. >> Yeah, we cannot do it alone. >> What's the approach? What's the approach you guys want to take? >> So I think whatever possible, first of all, we're not going to do it alone. Right, so the ecosystem is going to play a part and if the ecosystem can come together around the consortium or a standard that makes sense for customers? Absolutely. >> Well, and you say, nobody's poo-pooing it, and I stand by that. But they are saying, and I think it is true, it's hard, right? It's a very challenging, ambitious goal that you have. But yeah, you've got a track record of- >> I mean the old playbook, >> Exactly! >> The old playbooks are out. I mean, I always say, the old kill and be highly competitive strategy. Proprietary is dead. And then if you look at the old way of winning was, okay, you know, we're going to lock customers in- >> What do you mean proprietary is dead? Proprietary's not dead. >> No, I mean like, I'm talking- Okay, I'm talking about how people sell. Enterprise companies love to create, simplify, create value with chaos like okay, complexity with more complexity. So that's over, you think that's how people are marketing? >> No, no, it's true. But I mean, we see a lot of proprietary out there. >> Like what? >> It's still happening. Snowflake. (laughing) >> Tell that to the entire open store software industry. >> Right, well, but that's not your play. I mean, you have to have some kind of proprietary advantage. >> The enterprise playbook used to be solve complexity with complexity, lock the customers in. Cloud changed all that with open. You're a seasoned marketer, you're also an executive. You have an interesting new wave. How do you market to the enterprise in this new open way? How do you win? >> For us, I think we have that relationship with the C-level and we have delivered for them over and over again. So our challenge from a marketing perspective is to educate these executives about all that. And the fact that we didn't have this user conference in person didn't help, right? And then show that value to the operator so that they can help us just like we did in the past. I mean, our sales motion in the past was we made these people- I told them today, you were the heroes. When you virtualized, when you brought down 1000 servers to 80, you were the hero, right? So we need to empower them with the technology and the know-how to be heroes again in multi-cloud. And I think the business will take care of itself. >> Okay final question from me, and Dave might have another one of his, everybody wanted to know this year at VMworld, VMware Explore, which is the new name, what would it look like? What would the vibe be? Would people show up? Would it be vibrant? Would cross-cloud hunt? Would super cloud be relevant? I got to say looking at the floor last night, looking at the keynotes, looking at the perspective, it seems to look like, oh, people are on board. What is your take on this? You've been talking to customers, you're talking to people in the hallways. You've been brief talking to all the analysts. What is the vibe about this year's Explore? >> I think, you've been covering us for a long time, this is a religious following we have. And we don't take it for granted. I told the audience today, this to us is a family reunion and we couldn't be, so we got a sense of like, that's what I feels like the family is back together. >> And there's a wave coming too. It's not like business is dying. It's like a whole 'nother. Another wave is coming. >> It's funny you mention about the heroes. 'Cause I go back, I don't really have my last question, but it's just the last thought is, I remember the first time I saw a demo of VMware and I went, "Holy crap, wow. This is totally game changing." I was blown away. Right, like you said, 80 servers down to just a couple of handfuls. This is going to change everything. And that's where it all started. You know, I mean, I know it started in workstations, but that's when it really became transformational. >> Yeah, so I think we have an opportunity to do it over again with the family that is here today, of which you guys consider family as well. >> All right, favorite part of the keynote and then we'll wrap up. What was your favorite part of the keynote today? >> I think the excitement from the developer people that were up there. Kelsey- >> The guy who came after Kelsey, what was his name? I didn't catch it, but he was really good. >> Yeah, I mean, it's, what it's all about, right? People that are passionate about solving hard problems and then cannot wait to share it with the community, with the family. >> Yeah. I love the one line, "You kids have it easy today. We walk to school barefoot in the snow back in the day." >> Uphill, both ways. >> Broke the ice to wash our face. >> Vittorio, great to see you, great friend of theCUBE, CUBE alumni, vice president of cross-cloud serves at VMware. A critical new area that's harvesting the fruits coming off the tree as VMware invested in cloud native many years ago. It's all coming to the market, let's see how it develops. Congratulations, good luck, and we'll be back with more coverage here at VMware Explore. I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Stay with us after the short break. (gentle music)

>> Announcer: From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020, sponsored by Intel, AWS and our community partners. >> You're watching continued coverage of AWS re:Invent 2020. I'm sure you're joining just a couple of hundred thousand of your closest friends and family on the web as we engage this AWS builder community in a very different way this year. I'm super excited to have one, for the first time Flexera on theCUBE program, I'm Keith Townsend @CTOAdvisor on Twitter and I'm joined by the CEO of Flexera, Jim Ryan. Jim, welcome to the show. >> Thanks for having us Keith. >> And Marie Godfrey, Senior Vice President of Product at Flexera. >> Thanks. It's good to be here. >> Welcome to the show. So, first off, I think most of the industry knows Flexera from the famous survey you guys do every year. Help us understand, what's the purpose of the survey and the intent of it? >> I think the purpose of the survey is to continue to provide the pulse of the market to our customers and the market at large. This is not a revelation to say that cloud, hybrid cloud, multi-cloud is an ever-changing fast, fast moving target in the industry and we find that by pulsing our customers and pulsing the market and then in return, giving people a broader sense as to what's going on, how they view the current top three challenges that they're facing, allows people to just stay relevant and stay current without having to do so much heavy lifting themselves. >> So, talk to me about the other part that's not as famous. Marie, the product, what's the primary goal of Flexera? >> So, to take off from what Jim said, the state of the cloud report that we issue every year is just one of many that we do research on and we published and Flexera hasn't always been known as a cloud management tool or a cloud provider of optimization solutions for the cloud. We have grown up and our legacy is very much on software asset management. So, over the course of both organic and inorganic means, we find ourselves in this great position now to be able to talk to not only our core strengths as an organization and as a company, but also what we do to help our customers optimize their cloud cost. >> So, one of the interesting outputs or data points from the report is this 70/30 split. I've seen it as 80/20, 70/30, more or less the same ideal concept that we spend 30% of our time basically on these innovative projects but 70% of our time basically on traditional IT operations. How does that impact your team's view of the market? >> Well, I think it profoundly impacts our view. You can call it the elephant in the room or you can call it the immovable object. The fact of the matter remains is that although a lot of the focus, attention and an ever increasing share of everybody's budget is being focused and centered on the cloud, if you're a CIO or somebody working in the CIO's organization, what you've got to realize and focus on is that 70% of your applications in your spending in your tech stack, are still on premise and VMs and other things that simply cannot be ignored. So, our overarching value proposition above and beyond remaining relevant in the cloud and publishing the state of the cloud is we focus on giving CIOs and IT teams the insight as to what's going on in your on-prem estate and if we do our jobs properly with our technology stack, it's identifying overuse or cost optimization opportunities, so, you can take dollars from your legacy stack and throw it over to invest in more innovative things that's going to move the needle for your business. >> So, that's a pretty interesting, I think value pop especially where the public cloud show help me understand kind of the overall challenge when we're thinking about public cloud, where typically less than 30% of our resources are probably in the public cloud. For most people watching this interview and the majority are on the private cloud, how does like Flexera help me to extract the value of both environments? >> Well, that's by robbing Peter to pay Paul, right? So, for everybody listening in here, lean in and listen. The biggest problem that we have when we're talking with our customers is that the cloud people aren't talking to the legacy on-prem asset management people and like Americans or everybody else, we got to just get together and talk to one another so, there's money and budget dollars to be extracted on the legacy on-prem last glamorous stuff of the house here and I say with great certainty not knowing all of the situations with everybody that's watching this, that I'm sure that you fight for single Dollar, Euro, Pound, Yen, et cetera, et cetera that you want to spend on your cloud initiatives. By collaborating with your brethren and your sisters over on the other side of the aisle and by looking at what's going on on the on-prem estate here, you can identify opportunities where you can reallocate budget dollars. >> So Marie, you guys have this term that I've not seen before, Technology Value Optimization or TVO, explain that to me. >> So, TVO is just the latest evolution in terms of how we think about our portfolio and our place in this ecosystem. That includes not just your traditional infrastructure management but this bridging and this realization of value when it comes to how we help our customers extract the value from what we do really, really well which is all around discovery of IT assets. It's around knowing my entitlements, it's around understanding my usage and now of course we brought cloud assets into the picture and helping our customers not only understand and see into those cloud assets but really look at how do I right size? How do I reclaim dollars? How do I avoid failed audits and really understand my usage patterns and what it is I need to do to enact and move toward that digital transformation that Jim referred to? So, at the end of the day, how we think about technology value optimization is that critical factor which is all around understanding the return on the investment and how to better understand and monetize the value for our customers in terms of what they have today and where they need to go. >> Ken, I wanted you to shed some light in what we consider or what we should now consider assets in this new era of cloud, and that your traditional products that how could others understand the AS or the asset either is a server or a virtual machine on that server networks switch etcetera but as I look at SaaS and past platforms and infrastructure as a service platform, what is the asset in this new world? >> By my definition, an asset is anything that your company spend money on and you need to get a return on it. So, 10 years ago, if we were having this conversation, an asset would have been a desktop, a router, a server, or maybe it would be a multi-core server and as things started to get a little bit more complicated, we added virtual machines. So, assets weren't just physical devices, they were virtual devices where we really cut our teeth and made a name for ourselves at Flexera was in software license optimization or software asset management, which is you take all of your physical assets and then you throw software applications from IBM, Oracle SAP, Microsoft and you put those two together and what you have are licensable events or financial exposure, because it's not just as simple as buying a database from Oracle, Oracle is going to want to know how many cores you're running on the server, and all of those different combinations in a Rubik's cube of complexity throw off licensable or financial events and while I'd love to tell everybody that the cloud and hybrid cloud and multi-cloud is making it easier, it's actually making it more sophisticated and more complicated to try and get your head around it because now you have containers and just when we thought we had figured out VMs and what assets and things are running in VMs, you've got containers that are going up and down and trying to find out what assets are in containers across a hybrid multicloud environment says the latest instantiation of chasing your tail here in the business. >> And then help me think through, or at least visualize this concept of entitlements when it comes to the cloud era. When I had on premises assets, I could go and look at my Oracle license and maybe figure out what I was entitled to but now when I, especially when I think of multicloud multi-service and even hybrid where Microsoft gives me credits or on premises services versus off-prem services, help me understand how I should be looking at that and how Flexera helps. >> I think you've got to be looking at it at closely and you can't look at it in isolation. So what you can't do is look at what you've got spun up in an Azure environment and AWS or Google cloud environment, because you're only going to negotiate one agreement with Microsoft most likely. You're only going to negotiate one ELA with IBM or Oracle, or fill in the blank and you know what, Oracle's not going to care what you're running in just cloud if they come and audit you. They are going to perform an audit, and they're going to want to know what you're running in in an on-prem world in VMs, on your data center and your desktop, and then they're going to want you to bring to full account what you're running in your cloud environments as well. So the way Flexera helps you is that we can discover, and we can give you an unprecedented visibility into what's running throughout your IT assets estate, whether it's on-prem, on a desktop, in a data center, on a SaaS application and an infrastructure platform as a service, pull it back and normalize it and compare that to what you've actually signed with all of your suppliers and when we do our job right, our customers run our algorithms across what you're entitled to use and what you're actually using, and what we find is that there's anywhere from 30 zero to 30% of overused in spend in ways. >> Keith, I just want to add example of where I saw this in real time with one of our solution engineers this about two weeks ago, where he was demonstrating the power of what we deliver across entitlements and usage and understanding where a potential wasted spend is and the customer was really focused on Oracle, and making sure that the Oracle negotiation coming up was going to be one where the customer felt like they were in a position of strengths and really understood what entitlements and usage were but when we showed them that Oracle was one piece of a bigger puzzle and that their cloud spend and AWS spend, and even their spend with some of their largest SaaS applications was actually much smaller than the whole, it really showed the customer the power of looking at these assets back to your question around assets and how do we think about them in a way that compares them to one another so the customer gets a full point of view. >> It's very difficult to get an Apple's and Apple's comparison with hybrid versus public and it's no longer just, I don't know if it was ever simple, but it's just more complex these days. Last question, as you look at the past few years, and I go to the Flexera website and look at your product portfolio, talk to me about the relationship between your customer in the industry and how that's changed and how customers consume Flexera as a product. >> I think over the years, our customers like the market has shifted to our SaaS and cloud offering we back in the day we used to have perpetual licenses and we were focusing on an on-prem scenario only, and our customers rightfully so have become far more demanding much like the market has and they now expect things to be delivered in real time with an agile mindset on a SaaS or cloud native basis and with that becomes a much, much higher expectation in terms of customer success and service that they get, because they're on a subscription basis, they can cancel at any time, just like we can do with our cable service provider. So we've really had to invest a lot, not just in R&D and making sure that our technology delivers outcomes, but in the way that we work with and service our customers. They're far more demanding than that they ever have and I wouldn't want it any other way and we think that our strategic imperatives is just keeping up with that in their high demands and expectations in the future. >> Well, I really appreciate you two taking out the time out of your busy schedules, both of you on the East coast, I'm in a Midwest, couple of hundred thousand people tuning into AWS re:Invent 2020 virtual learning to tackle a lot of these complex problems. The pandemic, the new reality of the market has forced us to address implementing and managing enterprise IT in a completely different way. This conference is a great example of that. We thank our friends at Flexera for sponsoring this interview. You want to learn more about theCUBE's coverage? Subscribe to the YouTube channel. Plenty of content with me and my fellow co-host this year coming out of AWS re:Invent 2020 talk to you next installment of theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Man: from around the globe, it's "theCUBE" with coverage of "Kubecon" and "CloudNativeCon Europe 2020", virtual. Brought to you by Red Hat, the cloud native computing foundation and ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, I'm Stu Miniman, and this is "theCUBE's" coverage of KubeCon CloudNativeCon Europe 2020, the virtual edition of course, it, this ecosystem has been bustling, a lot of activity in the five years that we've been covering it with "theCUBE" we've watched very much the maturation of what's going on. Remember, in the early days, it was open source projects, companies pulling all the pieces together. Now, there's a lot more things to choose from lots of projects, not just Kubernetes, but all the other pieces, and still lots of new innovations and new startups coming into the space. So happy to welcome to the program, have two first time guests from Spectro Cloud, first of all, we have the co founder and CEO Tenry Fu, and also Tina Notle who's the Vice President of product, Tina and Tenry, thank you so much for joining us. >> Thank you for having us. >> Likewise. >> All right, so Tenry, as one of the co founders, I want to understand, you know, why Spectro Cloud? Why now, you know, many outsiders, would they have said for a while, you know, Kubernetes, it's just getting baked into all of the environment. They looked at all the platforms, whether you're talking, you know, Google and AWS or VMware, they all have their platforms, they all have their managed services offering. So help us understand, what your team does and how you differentiate from what's already existing. >> Absolutely yeah, so I actually used to work at VMware, I, and then, I saw clouds taking off right and then I left VMware, to start my first startup called CliQr Technologies, which focus on multicloud management. But at that time, really, multicloud management through a single pane of glass is obviously right, and then clicker later acquired by Cisco. So at Cisco, I kind of witness The Container and Kubernetes taking off, right? And it makes a lot of sense, right for the first time both the application workloads and infrastructure became truly portable across multiple environments, but also very interestingly at Cisco I observed there are many developer teams, right? That is adopting Kubernetes and everyone is doing a little bit different things, that because different teams, they have a different stack constructor requirements, like some for AI/ML, some, they need a different base OS, some they just don't want to have a different version, and a lot of existing solutions doesn't really provide this kind of flexibility to satisfy all the different needs, right? one size fit all, typically is a one size fit for nothing. So we asked ourselves, why can't we try to create a platform that will give people the flexibility, but not turning it into a DIY project, right, still have a full manageability, so that user don't need to worry about the upgrade, Day Two operations, governance so and so forth. >> Yeah to Tina, I know when I've looked at your product, it's discussed as layers, which my background's in networking. So I love seeing things visually and understanding the pieces as they lay out the stack. So maybe help us understand a little bit as to, you know, that the flexibility that you give and how it's not just the Paradox of Choice, just too many options out there and you know, developers left to create their own mess that they can't then support. (laughing) >> Yeah, so you know, as Tenry mentioned, offering folks flexibility without turning into a do it yourself, you know, hot mess is what we're what we're helping People do at Spectrol Cloud, the core of our solution, the core of the differentiation within our solution is around this concept of a cluster profile, and as you mentioned, cluster profile basically allows people to define in a layered fashion, what's part of their Kubernetes infrastructure stack? So at the bottom, you're talking, what's the base operating system? What's the version of Kubernetes, that's going to be part of clusters that uses profile? What's your networking and storage interface look like? And then on top of that, you have a number of optional layers. So again, you know, back to flexibility manageability, we give people options around what those other layers look like on top. They include everything from security, logging, monitoring, etc, just anything that you want to go ahead and kind of bake into a definition, a profile of what a cluster should look like in one of your deployed environments. >> All right, well, Want to make sure I understand when you talk about Kubernetes in there, can it be, you know, say VMware with Vsphere7, now has Kubernetes support. Red Hat open shift is an option, all of the cloud players have their, you know, AKS, EKS. And they're like, can I bake that Kubernetes in or are you taking a different approach? >> We're going with upstream vanilla Kubernetes today, that allows us to go ahead and provide what's newest within the ecosystem, and let people go ahead and have a really open, really open solution that's replying. >> Okay, so when I talk to, when you look out there, a lot of companies are saying how can I manage multiple clusters? So if you look at what Google, Microsoft and VMware, they're talking about, we can manage our clusters and we can also help you with those other clusters. How does that impact Tenry, your Solution, doesn't it need to be, it's just the upstream solution that I put into that cluster profile, or can I connect to, say a managed cloud solution? >> Yeah, so I think in terms the multi class management or the consistency is really the key, right. So through this class profile concept, not only it can be used as the initial template to deploy a cluster, but it can also use as a single source for choose, to drive the cluster Lifecycle Management income upgrade. So right now, as Tina mentioned, we primarily focus on upstream, so that we want to provide the maximum flexibility in terms of our end to end Kubernetes stack. But we do also have a plan, that down the road that we go into in Brownfield existing clusters. So that enterprise, existing investment to their Kubernete infrastructure can be under managed by us. >> Well there always reaches a time when the brand new technology gets called Brownfield. I think that's the first time I've heard something like, you know, EKS or the like, you know, referred to as Brownfield. Tina, you know, when I think back to my history with integrated solutions, obviously, if I have the various pieces, it should be easier for me to stay on the latest make upgrades, roll things forward or roll things back, but you know, what, give us if you could some of the, the key values of, you know, building these cluster profiles, what that enables for your customers. >> So the key around cluster profiles, we offer this policy based management, so you describe as an administrator, what it is that those clusters need to look like, right? And we've got, we adopt a declarative desired state, you know, management approach along what Kubernetes does itself, and so what you're able to get through adopting, utilize cluster profiles, is this guarantee that from deployment and then into day two as well, what you've described in this profile, winds up maintaining itself, it remains true of the clusters that have been deployed. So what it is that you require as far as the operating system, what is required as far as some configuration options, etc. So the profile itself winds up being ground source of truth and around what it is that you've got running at all these various locations, across clouds, across different clusters, etc. >> All right. Tenry, you mentioned that having things more standardized is going to help customers, absolutely, we saw that in data centers for a long time, and standardized, how do you help customers make sure that the configuration that they build are going to work, are going to be stable, if they make changes that they're not going to get things out of sync. Is there you know, interoperability matrix or some other ways that we're trying to make sure that customers, you know, stay on the rails, if you will. >> Absolutely right, So through our system, right, all the integration points, we carry the additional metadata, right to basically give the hint about compatibility, resource constraints, right, and also the upgradability, in terms of moving from one version to another. So this way, we can kind of give you some guidance, when they initially construct a class profile, what will work together nicely and then what will not, right. And then on top of that, when upgrading from one existing cluster to a new version of a class profile definition, then we can look at the environment, right to understand, right, if there's something that potentially incompatible will popping up right, so we call that pre pilot integration, check right and also post deployment, we also allow user to run additional conformance tests. So that make sure the cluster everything is actually is still acting as as it's supposed to be. >> Another way to explain that is that you know, the cluster profile concept has a lot of flexibility attached with to it, right? That's a lot of power, it can get you into trouble if you don't have the right safety nets and safety harnesses underneath you. So we have a multi layered approach to helping make sure that people are getting benefit out of that flexibility. >> Wonderful and I'm wondering did, when you've had more customers using this, is their shared information, and if there're community guidelines that help, you know, understand when it's going to be okay, hey, 1.19's out, we're looking at 1.20. You might want to do this or hey, if you're using this piece of networking, you might want to wait a little bit before you go to the next version. >> That's definitely the idea over time, folks that are engaging with us, are very interested in the fact that, because of the fact that we're SaaS management platform, SaaS space management platform today, that it offers them the opportunity to learn from their peers, if you will, right, and their peers experiences. On top of that, we also have the ability to watch just what's been going on in other deployments in the Kubernetes ecosystem and we can make sure that all that's available, as Tenry mentioned, you know, in the form of the metadata that's on top of those packs. >> All right, how about how do you price this solution? When I look out there, I talked about Kubernetes baked into all the platforms, oftentimes, it can be baked into ELA, It's part of, you know, my just general cloud spend from that platform. So how do you do the pricing and, you know, are you plugged into any of the cloud marketplaces yet? >> Yeah, so flexibility is really part of our DNA. So even for pricing, we want to provide the maximum flexibility to our customer. So unlike some traditional solution typically is priced based on number of pause, right, a year, or even number of nodes, right. So we actually price based on number of CPU cores of all workers node under management by hour. So what we call those, core hour under management, right, and then every thousand core hours at one unit, we call kilo core hours. So kind of similar to how electricity is consumed, right, so this way, based on these core hour consumption, we allow user to either pay as you go as amongst the on demand plan, or you can do an annual commitment. >> And we are in process on the marketplaces. >> Yeah. >> All right, how about, we talked about Kubernetes, I think service mesh are part of it. What in this Kube, kubecon cloud native con ecosystem, which projects are the most tied into what you're doing anything that specter cloud is particularly contributing to that you can share? >> Yeah, so our system is built on top of Kubernetes cluster API project. So we are one of the contributor to class API, we are actively adding additional functionality to enhance class API, especially by in some other VMware environment for some custom use case, such as static IP or some special placement behaviors, and also adding additional contribute on different cloud support. >> Yeah, and as far as things that we're watching, and clearly we're, we've seen a dramatic increase in the number of people on our customer front that are interested in actual deployment, of service mesh now. So that's something that you know, we're going to be more engaged in over time. And another one that we're hoping to see, check out more talks around Kubecon is AI ML, right? A lot of interest on the part of customers around AIML use cases. >> Yeah, absolutely edge and AI and ML. Definitely very hot topics to conversation this year at the, at the Europe show, expect that to continue. Tina, I'm wondering, do you have any customer examples, maybe even anonymized that could kind of just explain the key values that your customers are seeing using your solution? >> Yeah, sure, so we've got one of our earliest customers is a Canadian financial, who came to us because, they were looking to figure out how to manage consistently at scale, and they have the problem that Tenry described earlier, around, I've got different development teams, they have different needs, and you know, how do you satisfy all those guys without going crazy, right? They've got an AIML use case, that's a special snowflake they've got two separate teams in different groups that would like to be under an IT management umbrella. That's a convergence use case that they're looking at, so kind of a typical example of somebody that we think of is, you know, a really good set of people for us to be having conversations with. We've also been working with a telecom provider that it's in a similar, similar vein actually, there's an AIML, there are multiple teams of different infrastructure, and they want to be able to consistently manage it's a story that we're seeing over and over again, thankfully. >> Yeah, we also see right from I think, at individual group or team level, right. There are a lot of, kind of a product owner or data scientists that they really want to have a kind of an easy button to quickly be able to provision Kubernetes clusters that suit for their need, right. And a lot of these groups, their primary focus is really the application, right? It's not their interest to spend a lot of time and resource on Kubernete management, in terms of deploying update, or secure an operation. So through us, they can very easily spin up a Kubernetes cluster, whether it's for AIML or for developing experiment, they can very quickly do that But with the flexibility, because a lot of existing solution, they may limit the version of Kubernetes clusters, they may limit the what kind of integration they can do. >> Yeah, Tenry you, we talked a little bit earlier about, you know, potential integration down the road. I'm curious, just there's so many companies creating innovations out there, you know, say for example, one that I hear a lot of feedback on is AWS now has far gate support for their EKS offering. Is that Something down the line you should look at or do you have some guidance as to how customers should be thinking about that, and if they want that kind of functionality, how they would get that with a solution like yours? >> Yeah, actually, we really share the same vision as AWS, right. So we believe, ultimately is the infrastructure really should be transparent to application developers, right, and it should be boundary-less. So our goal is not only manage Kubernetes, across multiple environment, but eventually we will be able to link all these cluster together, to make them acting as a single infrastructure. So developers, they can still use their familiar Kubernetes interface to deploy and manage their application, but without worrying about the how infrastructure underneath is operated or managed, right. So this in a way will eventually become kind of a phallic model, but across multiple cluster and multiple clouds. >> Alright, Tina, if maybe if you could give us the final takeaway, people attending Kubecon, cloud native con, what's the one thing that if you know they have a problem, they should be coming to Spectro cloud to hear more about? >> Yeah, sure so what Spectrol cloud aims to do is help enterprises not have to trade off between flexibility and control of their infrastructure, and manageability of use that stuff's that's the main, the main thing that we would like people to remember. >> All right, well Tenry and Tina, thank you so much for sharing with our community a little bit about Specter Cloud great talking to you and look forward to hearing more in the future. >> Thanks so much. >> Thank you too. >> All right, and stay tuned more coverage from Kubecon Cloud Native Con 2020. I'm Stu MiniMan and thank you, for watching "theCUBE." (light music)

>> From Gillette Stadium, in Foxborough, Massachusetts, it's theCUBE covering VTUG Winter Warmer 2019, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE at VTUG Winter Warmer 2019 at Gillette Stadium, home of the New England Patriots, AFC Champions week out from going to Super Bowl 53. Joining me is a user from the great state of Maine, Dawnna Pease, who is the Director of Computing Infrastructure and Services for the state of Maine, thank you for joining us. >> Yes, thank you. >> Alright so Dawnna, you've been to a few VTUGs, of course the Summer Fest, which is, you know it might not be quite as big, as the winter one, but it is known even broader, I've known people come from out of the country because there's a giant lobster bake at the end of the day. I've been a few times, but you know tell us, you've been to VTUG before, yes? >> We have, so I have been to many, especially in Maine. And this is probably our fourth or fifth one that I've broughten the team from the state of Maine here and I feel it's really crucial and important because it allows them to network, to talk with their peers and to look at the technologies of how we can provide services for the constituents of the state of Maine and for our services that we offer within our office. >> Yeah so we always love talking to the users, we love to be able to help you share with your peers what you've been learning and actually I've had lots of great government discussions over the last few years, even attended, I attended a public sector show in the cloud space last year, and it's always fascinating because people have a misconception when it comes to what it's like to be IT in government, so let's dig into that a little bit. Tell us a little bit about your role, your group, what's kind of under your purview. >> Sure, I've been in state government going on 33 years as a public servant, very proud of that. I have a great group and I am the Director of Computing Infrastructure Services and it's really directory services, Microsoft stack. We have VMWare environment that we been probably nine years now and we're just implementing SimpliVity our hyperconverged, and after extensive research on that, we really solidified and selected HPE SimpliVity because in state government we had a lot of aging servers that needed to be replaced as well as our VM environment which was 44 nodes and it was a huge investment so not only on the licensing, hardware, storage, the compute part as well. So lookin' at the hyperconverged that was just one of many of our technologies that we looked at. >> So Dawnna take us back, how long ago did you start looking at that initiative? >> Oh 18 months. >> Okay, and was it a single location, multiple locations, can you give us any, how many you know servers or VMs or locations that this solution was going to span? >> For me it was actually spannin' and takin' on many of our on-prem solutions that we have. Like our SQL environment, our application hostin', the one offs, we're bringin' into that. As well as upgrading our existing VM cluster. So it's really taken on and morphed even more. We have a lot of net new as that want to participate in this environment so for us it is literally like a cloud solution, but it's for within our own private cloud solution on that. >> And these were critical business productivity applications that you're talking about? >> Absolutely >> This wasn't a new project to do, you know, early days of hyper converged, it was like oh I'm doing desktop virtualization, let me roll this out. I mean you're talking about databases and applications. >> Absolutely so we run close to, little over 600 servers for virtual and physical, so when all said and done within our hyperconverged our goal is to really be under 60 physicals left within state government. And currently today we have probably over 400 in our virtual environment today. So we're really expanding that more and bringing the services all into one knowing that we're going to have compute network and everything in our storage will all be in this environment. Plus we have a legacy storage environment, so when you're thinking of your legacy storage environment and you're looking at your refreshment of hardware and all the licenses around that our return on investment was huge for the state of Maine. So it was literally the wise choice for us to do within state government for tax payers, saving money. Also for the state as a whole. >> I have to imagine in addition to kind of the Capex piece if you're saying going from 900 to 400 and looking to get down to 60, operationally hopefully it makes the jobs of you know you and your team, a little bit easier once things are up and running. And that's one of the promises of hyperconverged, is it should be that cloud layer, it should be almost invisible when you talk about, it's just a pool that my virtualization lives on but I don't need to touch and rack and stack stuff the way that I might have in the past. >> Exactly, exactly, good point on that. Also on that we've really taken a broad look at how we can leverage the cloud so from a disaster recovery aspect and not only havin' the site resilience between two data centers, but how we can leverage the cloud for that continuity aspect. So we're really broadening that and the team's doing a fabulous, excellent job at that. >> Are you doing the Cloud DR today or is that a future plan? >> That is future. >> Okay, going to leverage a public cloud as that Are you far enough down? >> Government. So we have Azure today and we have a government tenant on that so we will use that aspect within the government tenant as well. >> Great so primarily Microsoft applications, you've moved into hyperconverged and you leveraged the Azure government certified cloud pieces. >> Correct >> Okay, awesome, when you started going down this path did you have in your mind hyperconverged or is that, how did you end up on that type of solution? >> So no, we didn't. Doin' the research on that and lookin' at all options, and really doin' the research with that, hyperconverged was more of makin' sense from the return on investment and also from a ... I want to say the simplified fashion, like you said it's simple you want to make it not so complex, it provided everything within that environment, and it was really based on how we were structured today, the investment that we would need to do if didn't go down this path. And taking in, so we did go with the hyperconverged. >> In your previous environment were you using HPE for the servers or the storage? >> So we were HPE, we are an HPE shop. And we have VMC, we have Pure Storage, we have different aspects of our storage today that exist so lookin' at that as well, we had an investment that we either needed to upgrade, replace, and, or invest. >> What I was poking at a little bit is were you HPE before, was that part of the decision to buy SimpliVity which is part of the HPE family or was that not a major factor? >> It was not a major factor, I mean we were ... We have always been a HPE shop, however we had criteria we were lookin' at, so you know after doing the research and we had 15, we were lookin' at 15 vendors at the time. We narrowed it down to like eight, and out of that we really narrowed it down to two that were in the quadrant, in the Gartner quadrant. And in doing our own research and study and bringin' all the vendors in and everything and what we had already invested what we currently had, it really came out to SimpliVity as the choice. >> And your 18 months into this, you've got some Cloud DR in the future, how are things going? What have you learned so far, is there anything you would have done differently or any advice you'd give to your peers if they're starting to go down this path? >> Do the research, do the research, be very thorough in what you're lookin' at for your requirements. And you know not only the research but look at what you've already invested in and take that into consideration and what your return on investment, what you're looking for your return on investment because you need to look just past not only your hosting environment but it really goes into can your network support that environment? Do you need to upgrade your network, your storage aspects, licensing aspects of that as well? So it's a huge investment, however look at the money they already pay in. >> Yeah licensing, one of those things when you talk about that great reduction of servers, are you today or do you expect in the future some of those licensing costs from the database, the virtualization, will those actually be able to be scaled down? >> Absolutely, and that was part of our ROI as well. By a lot, you know and that is one of the benefits of the hyperconverged as well. Once you set that up and purchase the proper licenses, I mean like data center licenses, you can put in as many VMs as you need within that environment and that's important. So you're really just looking at your compute at that, what you need for storage and compute. >> Yeah, I'm curious just spoke, cause we have, we've worked with clients for years on that and often times I've got a ELA or I've got a multi-year contract there and I have to renegotiate it, has that gone smoothly? Have there been any bumps along the road or is it pretty straightforward that licensing can be a huge chunk of your budget and like oh great, I'm two years later and I'm going to save myself a lot of money. >> So I actually am the administrator of our enterprise agreement with Microsoft, had been for many years, so I know what we have. And so I work very closely with that and I as far as the licensing and what we have, so for the renewals, I will say it gets easier. I found that being consolidated because when the agencies own their IT, at the time, we had many enterprise agreements and that was more complex so if you can actually consolidate and go into one, we have one enterprise agreement, or under the three I would say, it's much more manageable on that. So I don't find that that's a show stopper on that, it's gotten easier over the years. Simplified, it's more simplified. >> It's great to hear that and actually Microsoft has made great strides, Microsoft today is not the Microsoft of fives years ago or 10 years ago. >> Correct, I would agree. >> So, Dawnna Pease, pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences and be sure to check out thecube.net for all the recordings from the VTUG Winter Warmer 2019 as well as all of the other shows. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.

>> Narrator: Live from Nice, France. It's theCUBE covering .NEXT conference 2017 Europe brought to you by Nutanix. Hi, I'm Stu Miniman and this is theCUBE's coverage of Nutanix .NEXT. So there's a lot of executives from Nutanix we've had on the program many times. People who've been in job for quite a long time. So Lou Attanasio is the Chief Revenue Officer of Nutanix, and might hold the record for the shortest time in a new job before coming on theCUBE. I love it. Lou, it's like less than a week, right? It's less, five days. Five days? This is the fifth day. All right, so thank you so much for joining us. >> Lou: Nah, it's my pleasure, actually. So for our audience, give us a little bit about your background-- Sure. What brought you to Nutanix? That's a good question. The new IPO company. So I've been in the IT industry quite a long time. To give you a little history, started out actually at IBM, at their Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights. I had a great span. I was everything from research to a systems engineer to, in sales for a long time. Had many positions, and was there for 38 years at IBM. It was a good run. My last job at IBM was the GM for their cloud software business, and I also had mainframe software reporting to me, and it was a great team. Then, you know, it was time. There was some things that, you always want to see how you could do outside IBM, outside the mothership. I still have blue in my blood, but I went to another company,, an enterprise cloud data management company, Informatica, and had an incredibly good run there. Quite frankly, I wasn't looking for a job. You can probably tell, I'm not a job hopper, and an opportunity came about. And I'll answer your second, why Nutanix. Someone reached and said, hey, a CEO of an incredible company wants to just have a conversation with you. Frankly, I said no, (Stu laughs) and I have to be real honest with you, Dheeraj was pretty persistent, and we had a meeting. It was on a Sunday, and we spent four hours together. There was something very interesting about that meeting and it really kind of got my head spinned a little bit. In the four hours, we spent probably about two and half hours talking about family, but it wasn't just biological family. He talked about his team and the employees as his family, and then, that wasn't enough, then he talked about his clients and how they were family, and once I started realizing that, that's the kind of company that I was used to, that really cared about its people, that great products don't make great companies, great people make great companies. It was instantaneous, I realized that this is a company that was pretty special. Dheeraj was very special, and that's the reason why I came. Yeah, I think back to Dheerj's first keynote at the Nutanix show in Miami, the first one. I've been at all five of the Nutanix .NEXT events, and he got up on stage and spent time, I think he called it his constituencies. There's the employees, there's the partners, customers, of course, very important, and then he said, you know, not too distant future I'll have a new constituency, kind of alluding to going public eventually, and of course, we're there. So as Chief Revenue Officer, paint us a picture as to which of these constituencies do you actually interact with and-- It would really be all. Yeah. I mean, listen, the growth path that Nutanix is on right now is incredibly steep. I've been fortunate to have some very large teams and some big responsibilities in the past, and so my job is to do two things. One is obviously continue the growth, but also make sure that the foundation upon which this growth I going is solid. You need a good foundation, you know? So that's where I'm going to be first focusing. I'm not coming in here with any preconceived notion, and I've told my team this, is that, I'm not coming in here and saying, ah, we got to change everything. They're doin' pretty damn good on their own. They don't need me to change things. But what they do need is to make sure that that growth can continue, and that we put infrastructure and things in place to continue to help with that, and that's really what I'm spending time with. So my first week has been listening to the field teams and gettin' to know them and getting them to know me, but also probably the most important is I've been listening to clients, and I've never been part of any company where I've seen more clients who have more passion for the products that Nutanix has. It surprised me, and I shouldn't have been surprised, in what was told to me, but everything that has been told to me has come to fruition. So one of the things that you talk about, change, Nutanix is making some of their own changes themselves with how they're putting together, their expanding the product line, some of the go-to market pieces. Just had a conversation with Sudheesh yesterday, had a conversation with Dheeraj on theCUBE. Talked about how the goal for Nutanix has become an iconic software company. Right. And there's been things out in the financial news talking about, okay, does Nutanix become a software only company? So if, hypothetically that happened, what does that mean from a revenue, margin, growth, sales, I mean, that has a pretty big ripple effect. Yeah but, I would say this, if you look at any of the companies, IBM, if you look at how they've changed from a hardware company to a services company and then a software company and now it's a cognitive company, every company has gone through, and you need to change. Any company that stays in one place for too long will get crushed in the environment that we have. The beautiful thing about this coming into more of a software business is that now we can give our clients choice. Clients don't want us to go in there and say, you must do it this way and you have to do it this way. The fact that we're givin' 'em choice on the hypervisor, on the ability to run on multiple hardware. If a company's already invested in company that already has a different set of hardware, and then all of a sudden we introduce a new hardware, that just puts more burden on them. So I think that the, and, by the way, as you probably know, software has some very good profit margins. Yeah. And I'm not here to tell you what those profit margins are, but history has shown that it's a good thing for a business as a whole, and I think that the strategy that the board and Dheeraj is on, I think it's the absolute right one. All right, Lou, what about scaling sales? Whether the software piece being a piece of it, but how do you look at that from a philosophical standpoint? We're at an international event here. I've been watching Nutanix since it was a couple dozen people, and now it's 2,800 people. How do you look at growing sales direct, indirect, and that piece of the business? Sure, so one of the things that I think is unique here is that all our business goes through partners, so there's no real channel conflict and I think that's a great thing. I mean, I will tell you that I think the team, the growth that they've been on and the amount of reps and technical teams and everyone they've hired over the last couple years, I tell you what, in my first five days here I could tell ya, they've done a really, really good job. My hat's off to the team. Our job is to continue that momentum, and one of the key things is going to be enablement. We got to make sure that the people we bring in here, you know, I have a saying, and I'll continue to use it. It's, average is no longer good enough. We can't be average, not to compete in the marketplace that we're in. So my job is to make sure that we bring in the very best people we can, both on the technical side, on the channel side, on the sales side, the leadership side. And fortunately, what an incredible good base that I have to work off of because a lot of 'em are already here. Yeah. When I think about the slice of money, there's the partners on the technology side, you've got the OEMs, you've got a pretty large ecosystem of software partners helping out here. You've got the channel and you've got Nutanix. How do you balance that? How do you look at growing that and keeping all those various constituencies-- The interesting thing is, for any company and for any ones that I've been part of, the number one reason why anyone loses, the number one reason why you lose is you're not there. So you need to have routes to market. No matter how big of a sales team I have, I'll never be able to have the reach, and more importantly, the relationships that some of these partners have had for some of their clients for years and years and years. So my job and our job is to take advantage of those relationships and to give them the technology to help solve some of their clients' problems. So I think we're well positioned, and I want to use all the different routes to market, no matter where we are in different parts of the world. Some I may use more of in some areas, and also, I don't believe in, you know, we're a US-based company but I don't believe in, oh, well this is the way we're going to do it, and then go out to all the different geographies and say, well this is how we're doin' it. I like to listen, because things that are done in Europe, in EMEA, are going to be very different than what we do in AP, and I really want to make sure that each of those geographies can work the system culturally and business-wise for their geography. I treat my field leaders as CEOs of their own business, and I'll give them the tools that they need to be successful. Yeah, how do you deal with the lumpiness of the business, especially, I think, dealing with certain partners? You kind of got the end of quarter, end of year that comes onto those-- Yeah, well it's interesting. I think most of the lumpiness in most businesses is due to ELAs. ELAs, I always say it's a drug. It's drug that's tough to get off of, because you can have one really big quarter and because you did a couple ELAs and then others. I have to admit, this company is not on a, not been doin' it. Our whole premise is, start small and you can go in and then you can grow. Where other companies, it's, we're going to get you into a big ELA, and then we're going to trap you into that ELA. You'll never be able to get out of it because the penalties will be so high. And then you have a customer who, frankly, they have your products but they don't really want your products, but they have to have your products. We'd rather have them want our products and grow small and then grow big, so I think right now, any company, by the way, will have some lumps here and there, and we'll get a big deal now and then and sometimes it's tough. But the growth that they're on, I anticipate bein' a little less of that, and my view is, get that steady growth, no lumps. I think that we're positioned to do that. Yeah. Any commentary on kind of, just global economic conditions? How that plays into things? I've had many conversations with Dheeraj about kind of the timing of the IPO and the challenging of it, and he was like, well, we're going to go out, so in the long it doesn't matter really whether it was a down month or quarter. Right. Up, or anything like that. But there's a lot of uncertainty in the world these days, so how does that impact your thinking? Yeah but I, you know what, there's always uncertainty now. I think the interesting part is, we're so well positioned that we can actually, even if economic businesses are down or economy's down, I think that some of the solutions that we have, in some cases provide such great value that they could save money, so I think we're in a much better position even in a down economy. So, listen, I've been in businesses we've done really well when economies are down and when the economy's up. You just got to keep the focus. You can't keep changing strategy every time you hear a news report. If you stay to your goal, you keep pushin' on the goal, you got great leadership, and that's how great businesses are done. Okay, so Lou, want to just give you the final word. Sure. You've been, I think, in learning and listening mode for a lot of it. Anything we should be looking for, that we should be looking differently from Nutanix kind of over the next six to 12 months? I would just say this, the best thing I could say is, you're going to get more of the same. That's great news. More of the same means we're going to continue the growth that we've been on. I think that you're going to see, that comment of average is no longer good enough, we want to make sure that everything that we do, we're the very best at it. I think we have some of the best programmers and development people in the world. I think that we have incredibly good visionaries. We've got people who are backing us, we've got momentum, both on the press, oh, with our customers, probably most important is our customers. And then I also, before I came here I looked at all the commentary that employees have about the company, so all the way around I couldn't be more honored to be part of this team, and I'm proud to be part of it and I hope to add value to the team moving forward. All right, well, Lou Attanasio, in addition to being new to Nutanix, you're now a CUBE alumni too. So thank you so much for joining us. Of course. Look forward to catching up with you again once you've dug in a little bit more. That sounds good, thank you very much. All right, so I'm Stu Miniman. We'll be back with lots more coverage here. You're watching theCUBE. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: Live from Las Vegas. It's the Cube! Covering VMWorld 2017. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back everyone. Live in Las Vegas we are here in the VMware Village, VM Village. We're kicking off day two or ending day two wrap up here. It's the Cube, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante with our wrap up guests Peter Burris, head of research at Wikibon.com and Stu Miniman co-host of the Cube and analyst of Wikibon. Guys, great day two in the books. Another day tomorrow, another wall-to-wall coverage. Events tonight tonight stacked up, last night great hallway conversation. We covered that on our intro this morning. Day two was about Michael Dell, Pat Gelsinger conversation. A lot of announcements with Google crashing the party, and a one-on-one exclusive with Sam Ramjay who's VP at Product Management, head of Developer Platforms. Not just Google Cloud, they're brinhing all the developers to bear. Peter this telegraphs your point about Google not to be taken lightly. >> Oh yeah well look. We talked about this earlier, and there are some very real thing that have yet to happen. Just contrast this. Three years or two years ago, if you talked to the Google enterprise group and you said to them, well you have some really great opportunities. What are you going to do with them? They'd say, whatever the consumer guys give us, we'll repackage. And now if you see what Google is doing, they're actually going out and creating new partnerships, creating new technology. They're actually acting like a real enterprise company. It's a transformation that's happening very fast. My guess is there's an enormous amount of stuff that's going underneath the covers at the new Google campus. But it's interesting to see that company become a really enterprise player before our eyes, and it's going to be a consequential player. >> Stu and Dave I want to get your reaction to something, because we saw an observation this morning Peter, I think you started out by saying the whole world's upside down, a whole new way to engage the enterprise. You mentioned VMware transforming as a company, similar to what IBM did many years ago. But we saw Michael Dell here, we heard Sanjay Poonen the COO come on, talking about how they're collaborating. He even made reference to Vmware almost merging with-- Kind of hinting to that where there would be showing up at their show working together closely. A new kind of relationship is building on how to be competitive, yet Google and Microsoft have to kind of catch up. And the question on the table is is there dis-economies of scale in that? Can Google get the enterprise IQ to truly understand the digital transformation and bring that developer communication and that operational scale of Google, and can Microsoft bring that enterprise knowledge of Office, Windows, et cetera to the cloud, at the speed of the disruption, at the same time change how they engage? Stu. >> Yeah, so John it's pretty typical we talk about how when some of these technologies started, it's like oh wait no, they're not ready, don't look at them. Public cloud you know was a dirty word at VMware a couple of years ago. Now we're embracing it. I'm sure you talked about Michael Dell. He's a big partner of Microsoft's. They're going to be doing Azure Stack. The Amazon dynamic is amazing. John last year we said to Pat Kelsner, hey Pat you want to come on the Cube at Reinvent? He's like, oh, you're inviting me? Well we had Sanjen Poonen on at that show. I've mentioned it, I was at the AWS Summit in New York City. VMware was a partner presenting there. People are interested to look at it. How this bakes out. There was you know an interesting thing. A tweet went out from Kelsey Hightower. A lot of people in the open source community was like, you know one technology killing the other, and we always said, you know, VM's going to kill Bare Metal and containers will kill that, and server-less will kill that. And it's a joke of course, because nothing ever dies in IT, it's all additive. >> Man: The Hotel California. >> It's you know, we'll talk to IBM and talk about their Z customers that are running mainframe. Oh and you can run Linux and containers on that too. So IT is a complex world. We're all going to have to kind of live in this space. Heck, so many of our guests that we have on this program, we're interviewing them at the second or third or more company that they've been at. So it's the ebbs and flows of the people and the technology, and it's fun to document. >> Well the question is, is it a zero sum game? I've talked to a number of service providers, some of the 4,400. I haven't talked to the 4,400, but a handful. And they're frankly not happy about the AWS deal. Because they're all trying to compete against AWS, and they're just saying, their narrative is, oh, it's a big straw that's just going to suck everything out. But the question is, is it a zero sum game, or-- I mean datacenters booming, enterprise is booming. Is this one of those boom years that everybody benefits? >> Just note on that. VMware got out of VCloud Air. That actually made those 4,400 happier, because now VMware is no longer a threat as well as a partner-- >> However! >> The Amazon stuff and the Google stuff is bringing back-- >> Yeah they never liked VCloud Air, and yes getting out is a good thing. And then next day, boom. >> To me, the other part of the answer is, does a knowledge of the enterprise and how the legacy and traditional applications matter? And the reality is to Stu's point, since you can check in but you can never leave, that at the end of the day, it's going to matter. Your knowledge of how transaction processing works is going to matter. Your knowledge of how Z series handles storage or handles data is going to matter, in the enterprise. And so the reality is, it's not a zero sum game, there's going to be a lot of, because of the complexity, there's going to be an enormous premium place in experience. How you package that experience, how you present it, there's going to be a lot of niches in this marketplace. A lot of ways of getting to that scale. But there's no question that's what most important is getting there fast and early. >> And the big three, obviously Amazon Microsoft Google, all bring something different to the table. And the question is, what view of the cloud do they bring? VMware taps out of the cloud game with VCloud Air, has an arms dealer-like approach Dave. We talk a lot about being an arms dealer. You know Sanjay was teasing out like, you can have these native clouds, not cloud native. Native cloud players, one two and three, sucking the straw at the top of the power law. But then VMware could service an entire set of new clouds. I call maybe second tier or secondary native clouds, where hey someone's got-- Jeff Rick and I were talking about a drone farming cloud. With drones that have applications for farms. >> There's going to be specialization. >> That speaks to a new set of service providers. And the question is, is the cloud service provider market about to explode? What do you think? >> Explode? >> Meaning great, grow, big. Does that long tail fatten out the neck and the torso? >> Yeah. Because at the end of the day, at the end of the day, where you are located matters. Your ability to bring together classes of services is going to matter, and being able to enfranchise and federate all those things is going to matter. And if it is truly cloud, if it's a common cloud experience, the cost to customer of getting into that is going to be relatively low. And so what you're really testing is, is the cost of getting into a specialized cloud going to be more or less than the cost of going with a general cloud and start adding things? And there's going to be a lot of opportunity to serve particular classes of companies by different characteristics. Let me draw an analogy for you. That we talk about-- I'm going to get political for a second. But we talk about partisanship in the US, right? And many years ago people said, oh, the internet is going to democratize everything, and it's going to be this wonderful-- Well that really happened is the internet made it possible for media companies to enfranchise audiences independent of geography. And now we've got highly specialized media sources that are all retaining to a particular audience. Why wouldn't we expect, since software is effectively media, why wouldn't we expect to see the same exact economics and dynamic happen for some of these specialized audiences? >> John: Make software great again! That's my motto. (laughing) >> To that point, service has always been a highly fragmented and highly specialized market. Cloud is services, and I would expect yes, to answer your question, that you're going to see a lot more service providers explode. But they better have a differentiation strategy relative to AWS. >> So the Tam conversation around that is cool, but what's really happening here that was getting a lot of traction, and we talked about this earlier about the two private cloud report. I asked Sanjay Poonen and then I talked to Sam Ramjay at Google who heads up the development platform in Project Management. You know to your quote this morning, a lot of IT's been driving costs out of business, now we're putting revenue on their agenda. He goes, really? And I asked him, what's your metric for success at Google? And he started to think about it and went back to the business value of technology. So I know this is a research area for you. I want to give you a chance to describe, what's the cutting edge metric around the business value of technology? Because in the cloud, magic quadrants don't matter, okay? The scoreboards are changing. At the end of the day it's what value does technology contribute to business that drives top line revenue? Yeah cost containment I get that, but revenue. >> Well so the traditional way of thinking about ROI or business returns or business value is you say I'm going to say for a given application, for ERP, which is the numerator, which is the benefit, so that's why I classify it. Now I'm going to look at the denominator. Which of the different configurations of technologies make that given set of systems have the highest return? And it all becomes a cost question. So really where this goes is that increasingly what businesses are looking at are saying, my customers are demanding digital engagement. My partners are demanding digital engagement. I'm going to use my data differently. I'm going to turn products into services, I'm going to do all these different things with data. That's where the revenue side comes into play. Now can you argue that it all comes back to costs and automation? Yeah, there's things you can do. But at the end of the day the question is, what does your customer see? Does your customer see a better service or a better capability? A different approach of doing things? That is the non-standard numerator in the equation, and that's where IT is, with the business, is increasingly focusing it's attention. And so increasingly what's happening is we're looking at a common denominator, you know Amazon's pricing and Google's pricing and all these other guys' pricing is going to moderate to a set of common metrics, and that means now we can start talking about the numerator, and how doing the numerator differently is going to be the differential. >> Okay so let's take that and take it to Stu and Dave. I did a comment on, we heard this race to the bottom, race to zero, that's not happening. Your True Private Cloud report shows that the SaaS business and True Private Cloud just by itself is bigger than-- >> And we never believed that. We've never bought into that. >> And you know, it's funny, in some of the analyst sessions you get to talk to some of the customers and talking to some of my peers here, something we hear from a lot of companies, not all of them, but cost isn't number one on the list. Usually it's a agility, it's entering the business, it's being able to move faster. Cost and price of course does matter eventually, but you know it's that being able to react faster, that agility that needs to go there. And I mean there's all of these new technologies that are going to line up. Heck, we're spending all of this time talking about public and private cloud, and edge computing is just going to completely change that landscape even more, as we go forward. >> Look, and the other thing is, Amazon sets a pretty high price umbrella. I've never bought into the race to the bottom, I've always said Amazon's going to be more profitable than everybody. They're an infrastructure company with 30% operating margins which is like a software company! I mean that's basically VMware's operating margin. Maybe VMware's a little higher. And of course Amazon has a much higher capital cost. But there's a big price umbrella that Amazon has created. That's an awesome opportunity. I'm interested in what you guys think about the recent momentum behind VMware. The last two years we've seen a total change, right? Two years ago it was kind of negative, negative growth. And now it's tailwinds, positive momentum. Is this a product cycle, is it you know expanded ELAs? Kind of a one time thing? Or do we think this is a sustainable trend? I mean I've said I think the stock is undervalue. Am I right, is this sustainable? >> I think you're right. To me my observation is, I'll let you guys comment on it, but my observation is VMware was stuck in the middle of an identity crisis between the virtualization op side and trying to do cloud. And you nailed it on the earlier intro segment where you said that there's no cap X there, they've got better margins because of it. And by making a decision on not doing cloud and becoming much more of an arms dealer, you can move the ops into the dev, right? And that's been a big stuck in the mud point from VMware. They've got great ops, great enterprise, but they just weren't nailing the developer side. And that became a problem. Now you have clarity on the wave. Cloud IOT just pointed out, now it's very clear what's going on, and everyone knows where the game is. Then the shift is going to come to, and it's whether Kubernetes announcement with Google today didn't get them a lot of applause in my opinion, Stu I'd love to get your reaction. I don't think this audience can connect the dots yet on that long play of the orchestration. So they're still stuck in I got my house to clean up, I don't want to get the fluff and the head room and the future vision. I got problems to deal with on my upside. Yeah I want to do dev and I want to do dev ops, but shit I got to take care of business! >> Yeah so to Dave's question, VMware had reached a certain point, they'd kind of saturated the market for server virtualization. They made a number of number of bets. Some of them panned out. Airwatch, great acquisition. NICERA, phenomenal acquisition. NSX, we've talked extensively about that. Push towards the developer community? Well, I think they've understood now. Pivotal's going to handle that. We'll shove that over here. There's not a developer track at this show anymore. The cloud piece, they fumbled it, a few times, and now they've kind of understood it. Kind of a natural progression. They've made some moves. The ELA is something I think they've sorted out. Their license agreement, how have the partnerships with customers. We've talked extensively about some of the pricing. >> Some of the deck chairs, the mulligan on Virtustream. Carry on, please. >> So right, it's where they fit, where they partner. The relationship with the ecosystem. And a thing, what drove VMware to where they are, is those partnerships and the technology partnerships as well as the channel partnerships. Some of those things I hear, Kubernetes AWS, VMware on AWS, their partners are like, it's scary. I don't know if I make any money. Is this now VMware and Amazon just go to the bank and they cut me out of the whole thing? Some of these are interesting, right. Most people aren't ready for the container, they're definitely not ready. Kubernetes, they hear about it, but it's pretty early. >> Peter your reaction, 'cause this really points to what Stu's saying. I believe what's saying to be true, because I agree. They did their homework, they were listening. They weren't sticking their heads in the sand at your transformation point. >> So if you're a CIO and you're looking at a whole bunch of change, my business' stance towards digital and technology is changing, my relationships with the business are changing. I now foresee that I'm going to have to reorganize my IT organization to take advantage of things like hyper converge and whatnot. So I'm looking at an enormous transformation. In comes VMware and the first thing out of their mouth is, we really don't know what we're doing. We're throwing a bunch of spaghetti against a wall. Would help you sustain these assets until we figure this all out? The CIO's going to say thank you very much, where's Microsoft? So what's happened is VMware decided to get serious and stable. They decided to make some bets, and a lot of the best that we're making right now we're seeing at the show are probably not going to pan out. But that's okay, because it starts-- >> John: But the big ones are, maybe. >> We think so, we think so. We think anesthetics as well. Stu listed them, we don't have to go over them again. But what we are seeing is-- And Michael Dell and Pat and all the executives over and over. >> They're paying attention. >> Open with an opinion. It's very clear that businesses like the VMware opinion. I think Stu and I and all of us probably agree that they could probably go further with that opinion, they could probably lay out an even better vision of what the cloud experience is going to be as they foresee it and as they're going to engineer to it. But it's very very clear that customers today are saying, I've got all this installed, I'm willing to continue to invest in caretaking all this VMware stuff because they have done a better job of laying out what my options are, whereas a few years ago the options were all over the map, which means they had no options. >> They were groping for something. Okay we've got to wrap it up. I wanted to go around the horn on the final piece. We're going to go out tonight, we're going to party. We're going to socialize, stay up all night long, talking to people getting the data. Not all night, we'll be in bed by 11. (laughs) I'll be in bed by 11, I hope, I hope. Great conversations last night, lot of hallway conversations. Lot of good chatter. So around the horn, most compelling thing that you heard, not in a session, in the hallway, through conversations and interactions. Peter we'll start with you. >> Most compelling thing that I heard is, is there's some new stuff coming in the Google universe. That is going to potentially have a pretty significant impact ultimately on how enterprises look at Google. I found out some interesting stuff there. The most compelling thing just very simply on the VMware side of things was the probably coming out of some of the conversations we had with Chad this morning Dave. And the idea that increasingly you're going to look at these platforms. Platform wars are on the horizon. Where it's going to go back to what we were looking at many years ago in certain respects. But you know written much larger. But the increasingly the way people are going to evaluate the quality of a platform is not intrinsic to the platform, but how well it binds to other platforms. That's probably the most important statement that I heard on the floor today over what's happening. >> John: Stu. >> Continue on kind of Peter's theme. We're starting to see really you know, it's gelling. Some of this multi-cloud messaging, been really teasing out with a lot of people. Once again when I get to talk to the practitioners, as to what applications are they building, where do things go, how are they moving around, and you know VMware is a trusted partner, one they've really turned to for a lot of this. And the customers at least are optimistic about what they're hearing. I've heard a bunch of them are really excited for the VMware and AWS more than I expected to hear, and you know it'll be interesting to see. It's been interesting, we've kind of been saying Microsoft maybe there. When we go to Dell EMC World they're talking a lot about Microsoft. Microsoft Ignite's coming up, there will be a huge push. We've said for years, who has the best hybrid strategy? It's got to be Microsoft, hands down. >> Although we haven't mentioned Oracle. Oracle is still not out of this. >> Yeah, absolutely. I always say follow the applications, follow the data. Oracle, Microsoft, huge application portfolio. >> You know I haven't heard one person talk about Microsoft or Oracle here, not one. Dave? >> I want to chime in. >> I've spent the last 24 hours, I've talked to a number of customers. And I will tell you, they're strugglin' to move fast. And that's I think good news for VMware and Dell EMC, because you know all the vision that's put forth, and all this cloud native stuff, and they're really having a hard time digesting a lot of this stuff. You've been saying it for a while, hybrid cloud is BS, nobody's doing hybrid cloud, as it's sort of been defined in early days. Like federated apps, nobody's even thinking about it, not even close. Yeah multi-cloud because I'm getting inundated with all these clouds. So they're really having a hard time moving. So I think that's a good trend. >> Dave, I heard a great line in this. VMware is moving at the speed of the CIO. >> Yeah, it's true. >> That's a great line. >> That's a kind of double-edged comment, but you know absolutely. You want to stay at least up with most of your customers. >> I will say, I said hybrid cloud is BS. I did say it mainly because it's not ready for prime time in my opinion, but. >> Stu: Is it a way station, John? >> Yeah it's a halfway house or it's a way station, whatever you want to call it. >> It's a cul-de-sac! (laughing) >> Sanjay used that line today. Okay my final observation is more of kind of an epiphany from me that kind of wasn't really blind spot but it was an awakening. The customers I've been talking to are really struggling with the merging of multiple stacks. Hardware and software. In new use cases that have been untested and undocumented, and that's causing to the speed of the CIO conversation of, wait a minute we can't just deploy some of this stuff at scale until we do our homework. We've got to get the hardware stacks and the software stacks working together. We've heard it a lot, that's been the number one hallway conversation. That means there's a lot more work to do on that front. Well guys-- >> But it's a working together part. It's that how they bind together. >> It's these new use cases of working together. This is not a software vendor and a hardware vendor, it's all going to be a data vendor at the end of the day! And we'll see who can bring the stacks together. Okay Pat Gelsigner, we had Michael Del, Sanjay Poonen. Great day guys, great stuff. Let's go hit the hallway, go hit some of these parties and get more data for you guys. Thanks for watching the Cube, live in Las Vegas. Wrap of day two here. I'm John Furrier, Dave Vellante, Peter Burris and Stu Miniman. This is the Cube, thanks for watching.