(upbeat music) >> Hey everyone. Welcome to theCUBE's coverage of VMware Explore 2022. We are at Moscone West. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. Excited, really excited, whereas they were saying in the VMware keynote, pumped and jacked and jazzed to be back in-person with a lot of folks here. Keynote with standing room only. We've just come from that. We've got a couple of guests here from Expedient, going to unpack their relationship with VMware. Please welcome Brian Smith, the Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer at Expedient. And Brent Meadows, the Vice President of Advanced Solution Architecture at Expedient. Guys it's great to have you on the program. >> Appreciate it bringing us on. >> Yep, welcome. >> Isn't it great to be back in person? >> It is phenomenal to be back. >> So let's talk about obviously three years since the last, what was called VMworld, so many dynamics in the market. Talk to us about what's going on at Expedient, we want to dig into Cloud Different, but kind of give us a lay of the land of what's going on and then we're going to uncrack the VMware partnership as well. >> Sure, so Expedient we're a full stack cloud service provider. So we have physical data centers that we run and then have VMware-based cloud and we've seen a huge shift from the client perspective during the pandemic in how they've really responded from everything pre-pandemic was very focused with Cloud First and trying to go that route only with hyper scaler. And there's been a big evolution with how people have to change how they think about their transformation to get the end result they're looking for. >> Talk about Cloud Different and what it's helping customers to achieve as everyone's in this accelerated transformation. >> Yeah. So, Cloud Different is something that Expedient branded. It's really about how the transformation works. And traditionally, companies thought about doing their transformation, at first they kept everything in house that they were doing and they started building their new applications out into a hyper scale cloud. And what that really is like is, a good analogy would be, it's like living in a house while you're renovating it. And I know what that's like from my relationship versus if you build a new house, or move to a new property that's completed already. And that's really the difference in that experience from a Cloud Different approach from transformation is you think of all the things that you have internally, and there's a lot of technical debt there, and that's a lot of weight that you're carrying when you're trying to do that transformation. So if you kind of flip that around and instead look to make that transformation and move all that technical debt into a cloud that's already built to run those same types of applications, a VMware-based cloud, now you can remove all of that noise, move into a curated stack of technology and everything just works. It has the security in place, your teams know how to run it, and then you can take that time you really reclaim and apply that towards new applications and new things that are strategic to the business. >> That's really critical, Brent, to get folks in the IT organization across the business, really focused on strategic initiatives rather than a lot of the mundane tasks that they just don't have time for. Brent, what are you hearing in the last couple of years with the dynamics we talked about, what are you hearing from the customer? >> Right. So, one of the big things and the challenges in the current dynamic is kind of that staffing part. So as people have built their infrastructure over the years, there's a lot of tribal knowledge that's been created during that process and every day more and more of that knowledge is walking out the door. So taking some of that technical debt that Brian mentioned and kind of removing that so you don't have to have all that tribal knowledge, really standardizing on the foundational infrastructure pieces, allows them to make that transition and not have to carry that technical debt along with them as they make their digital transformations. >> We heard a lot this morning in the keynote guys about customers going, most of them still being in cloud chaos, but VMware wanting them to get to cloud smart. What does that mean, Brian, from Expedient's perspective? What does cloud smart look like to Expedient and its customers? >> Yeah, we completely agree with that message. And it's something we've been preaching for a couple years in part of that Cloud Different story. And it's really about having a consistent wrapper across all of your environments. It doesn't matter if it's things that you're running on-premises that's legacy to things that are in a VMware-based cloud, like an Expedient cloud or things that are in a hyper scale, but having one consistent security, one consistent automation, one consistent cost management, really gives you the governance so that you can get the value out of cloud that you are hoping for and remove a lot of the noise and think less about the technology and more about what the business is getting out of the technology. >> So what does that look like as a practical matter? I imagine you have customers whose on-premises VMware environments look different than what you've created within Expedient data centers. I'm thinking of things like the level of adoption of NSX, how well a customer may embrace VSAN on-prem as an example. Is part of this transmogrification into your data center, kind of nudging people to adopt frameworks that are really necessary for success in the future? >> It's less of a nudge because a lot of times as a service provider, we don't talk about the technology, we talk more about the outcome. So the nice thing with VMware is we can move that same virtual machine or that container into the platform and the client doesn't always know exactly what's underneath because we have that standardized VMware stack and it just works. And that's part of the beauty of the process. I dunno if you want to talk about a specific client or... >> Yeah, so one of the ones we worked with is Bob Evans Foods. So they were in that transformation stage of refreshing, not only their office space and their data center, but also their VMware environment. So we helped them go through and first thing is looking at their existing environment, figuring out what they currently have, because you can't really make a good decision of what you need to change until you know where you're starting from. So we worked with them through that process, completely evacuated their data center. And from a business perspective, what that allowed them to do as well is have more flexibility in the choice of their next corporate office, because they didn't have to have a data center attached to it. So just from that data center perspective, we gave them some flexibility there. But then from an operations perspective, really standardize that process, offloaded some of those menial tasks that you mentioned earlier, and allow them to really look more towards business-driving projects, instead of just trying to keep those lights on, keeping the backups running, et cetera. >> Brian, question for you, here we are, the theme of the event is "The Center of the Multi-cloud Universe" which seems like a Marvel movie, I haven't seen any new superheroes yet, but I suspect there might be some here. But as customers end up and land in multi-cloud by default not by strategy, how does Expedient and VMware help them actually take the environment that they have and make it strategic so that the business can achieve the outcomes, improving revenue, finding new revenue streams, new products, new routes to market to delight those customers. How do you turn that kind of cloud chaos into a strategy? >> Yeah. I'd say there's a couple different components. One is really time. How can you give them time back for things that are creating noise and aren't really strategic to the business? And so if you can give that time back, that's the first way that you can really impact the business. And the second is through that standardization, but also a lot of times when people think of that new standard, they're only thinking if you're building from scratch. And what VMware has really helped is by taking those existing workloads and giving a standard that works for those applications and what you're building new and brings those together under a common platform and so had a really significant impact to the speed that somebody can get to that cloud operating model, that used to be a multi-year process and most of our clients can go from really everything or almost everything on-prem and a little bit in a cloud to a complete cloud operating model, on average, in four to six months. >> Wow! >> So if I have an on-premises environment and some of my workloads are running in a VMware context, VMware would make the pitch in an agnostic way that, "Well, you can go and deploy that "on top of a stack of infrastructure "and anybody and anywhere now." Why do customers come to you instead of saying, "Oh, we'll go to "pick your flavor of hyper scale cloud provider." What's kind of your superpower? You've mentioned a couple of things, but really hone it in on, why would someone want to go to Expedient? >> Yeah. In a single word, service. I mean, we have a 99% client retention rate and have for well over a decade. So it's really that expertise that wraps around all the different technology so that you're not worried about what's happening and you're not worried about trying to keep the lights on and doing the firefighting. You're really focused on the business. And the other way to, I guess another analogy is, if you think about a lot of the technology and the way people go to cloud, it's like if you got a set of Legos without the box or the instructions. So you can build stuff, it could be cool, but you're not going to get to that end state-- >> Hold on. That's how Legos used to work. Just maybe you're too young to remember a time-- >> You see their sales go up because now you buy a different set for this-- >> I build those sets with my son, but I do it grudgingly. >> Do you ever step on one? >> Of course I do. >> Yeah, there's some pain involved. Same thing happens in the transformation. So when they're buying services from an Expedient, you're buying that box set where you have a picture of what your outcome's going to be, the instructions are there. So you also have confidence that you're going to get to the end outcome much faster than you would if you're trying to assemble everything yourself. (David laughing) >> In my mind, I'm imagining the things that I built with Lego, before there were instructions. >> No death star? >> No. Nothing close with the death star. Definitely something that you would not want your information technology to depend upon. >> Got it. >> Brent, we've seen obviously, it seems like every customer these days, regardless of industry has a cloud first initiative. They have competitors in the rear view mirror who are, if they're able to be more agile and faster to market, are potential huge competitive threat. As we see the rise of multi-cloud in the last 12 months, there's also been a lot of increased analyst coverage for alternate specialty hybrid cloud. Talk to us about, Expedient was in the recent Gartner market guide for specialty cloud. How are these related? What's driving this constant change out in the customer marketplace? >> Sure. So a lot of that agility that clients are getting and trying to do that digital transformation or refactor their applications requires a lot of effort from the developers and the internal IT practitioners. So by moving to a model with an enterprise kind of like Expedient, that allows them to get a consistent foundational level for those technical debt, the 'traditional workloads' where they can start focusing their efforts more on that refactoring of their applications, to get that agility, to get the flexibility, to get the market advantage of time to market with their new refactored applications. That takes them much faster to market, allows them to get ahead of those competitors, if they're not already ahead of them, get further ahead of them or catch up the ones that may have already made that transition. >> And I would add that the analyst coverage you've seen in the last 9 to 12 months, really accelerate for our type of cloud because before everything was hyper scale, everything's going to be hyper scale and they realized that companies have been trying to go to the cloud really for over a decade, really 15 years, that digital transformation, but most companies, when you look at the analysts say they're about 30% there, they've hit a plateau. So they need to look at a different way to approach that. And they're realizing that a VMware-based cloud or the specialty cloud providers give a different mode of cloud. Because you had of a pendulum that everything was on-premises, everything swung to cloud first and then it swung to multi-cloud, which meant multiple hyper scale providers and now it's really landing at that equilibrium where you have different modes of cloud. So it's similar like if you want to travel the world, you don't use one mode of transportation to get from one continent to the other. You have to use different modes. Same thing to get all the way to that cloud transformation, you need to use different modes of cloud, an enterprise cloud, a hyper scale cloud, working them together with that common management plan. >> And with that said Brian, where have customer conversations gone in the last couple of years? Obviously this has got to be an executive level, maybe even a board level conversation. Talk to us about how your customer conversations have changed. Have the stakeholders changed? Has things gone up to stack? >> Yeah. The business is much more involved than what it's been in the past and some of the drivers, even through the pandemic, as people reevaluate office space, a lot of times data centers were part of the same building. Or they were added into a review that nobody ever asked, "Well, why are you only using 20% of your data center?" So now that conversation is very active and they're reevaluating that and then the conversation shifts to "Where's the best place?" And that's a lot of, the conference also talks about the best place for your application for the workload in the right location. >> My role here is to dive down into the weeds constantly to stay away from business outcomes and things like that. But somewhere in the middle there's this question of how what you provide is consumed. So fair to assume that often people are moving from CapEx model to an OPEX model where they're consuming by the glass, by the drink. What does that mean organizationally for your customers? And do you help them work through that journey, reorganizing their internal organization to take advantage of cloud? Is that something that Expedient is a part of, or do you have partners that help them through that? How does that work? >> Yeah. There's some unique things that an enterprise doesn't understand when they think about what they've done on-prem versus a service provider is. There's whole models that they can purchase with us in consumption, not just the physical hardware, but licensing as well. Do you want to talk about how clients actually step in and start to do that evaluation? >> Sure. So it really kind of starts on the front end of evaluating what they have. So going through an assessment process, because traditionally, if you have a big data center full of hardware, you've already paid for it. So as you're deploying new workloads, it's "free to deploy." But when you go to that cloud operating model, you're paying for each drink that you're taking. So we want to make sure that as they're going into that cloud operating model, that they are right sized on the front end. They're not over-provisioned on anything that they're going to just waste money and resources on after they make that transition. So it's really about giving them great data on the front end, doing all that collection from a foundational level, from a infrastructure level, but also from a business and IT operations perspective and figuring out where they're spending, not just their money, but also their time and effort and helping them streamline and simplify those IT operations. >> Let's talk about one of the other elephants in the room and that is the remote hybrid workforce. Obviously it's been two and a half years, which is hard to believe. I think I'm one of the only people that hates working from home. Most people, do you too? Okay, good. Thank you, we're normal. >> Absolutely. (Lisa laughing) But VMware was talking about desktop as a service, there was so much change and quick temporary platform set up to accommodate offsite workers during the pandemic. What are some of the experiences that your clients are having and how is Expedient plus VMware helping businesses adapt and really create them the right hybrid model for them going forward? >> Sure. So as part of being that full sack cloud service provider, desktop in that remote user has to be part of that consideration. And one of the biggest things we saw with the pandemic was people stood up what we call pandemic VDI, very temporary solutions. And you saw the news articles that they said, "We did it in 10 days." And how many big transformational events do people plan and execute in 10 days that transform their workforce? So now they're having to come back and say, "Okay, what's the right way to deploy it?" And do you want to talk about some of the specifics of what we're seeing in the adjustments that they're doing? >> Sure. So it is, when you look at it from the end user perspective, it's how they're operating, how they're getting their tools through their day to day job, but it's also the IT administrators that are having to provide that service to the end users. So it's really kind of across the board, it's affecting everyone. So it's really kind of going through and helping them figure out how they're going to support their users going forward. So we've spun up things like VMware desktop as a service providing that multi-tenant ability to consume on a per desktop basis, but then we've also wrapped around with a lot of security features. So one of the big things is as people are going and distributing where they're working from, that data and access to data is also opened up to those locations. So putting those protections in place to be able to protect the environment and then be able, if something does get in, to be able to detect what's going on. And then of course, with a lot of the other components, being able to recover those environments. So building the desktops, the end user access into the disaster recovery plans. >> And talk more, a little bit Brent, about the security aspect. We've seen the threat landscape change dramatically in the last couple of years, ransomware is a household word. I'm pretty sure even my mom knows what that means, to some degree. Where is that in customer conversations? I can imagine in certain industries like financial services and healthcare with PII, it's absolutely critical to ensure that that data is, they know where it is. It's protected and it's recoverable, 'cause everyone's talking about cyber resilience these days. >> Right. And if it's not conversation 1, it's conversation 1A. So it's really kind of core to everything that we do when we're talking to clients. It's whether it's production DR or the desktops, is building that security in place to help them build their security practice up. So when you think about it, it's doing it at layers. So starting with things like more advanced antivirus to see what's actually going on the desktop and then kind of layering above there. So even up to micro-segmentation, where you can envelop each individual desktop in their own quasi network, so that they're only allowed kind of that zero trust model where, Hey, if you can get to a file share, that's the only place you should be going or do I need web apps to get my day to day job done, but really restricting that access and making sure that everything is more good traffic versus unknown traffic. >> Yeah. >> And also on the, you asked about the clouds smarter earlier. And you can really weave the desktop into that because when you're thinking of your production compute environment and your remote desktop environment, and now you can actually share storage together, you can share security together and you start to get economies of scale across those different environments as well. >> So as we are in August, I think still yeah, 2022, barely for a couple more days, lot of change going on at VMware. Expedient has been VMware America's partner of the year before. Talk to us about some of the things that you think from a strategic perspective are next for the partnership. >> That it's definitely the multi-cloud world is here. And it's how we can go deeper, how we're going to see that really mature. You know, one of the things that we've actually done together this year was we worked on a project and evaluated over 30 different companies of what they spend on IT. Everything from the physical data center to the entire stack, to people and actually build a cloud transformation calculator that allows you to compare strategies, so that if you look at Strategy A over a five year period, doing your current transformation, versus that Cloud Different approach, it can actually help quantify the number of hours difference that you can get, the total cost of ownership and the speed that you can get there. So it's things like that that help people make easier decisions and simplify information are going to be part of it. But without a doubt, it's going to be how you can have that wrapper across all of your different environments that really delivers that cloud-like environment that panacea people have been looking for. >> Yeah. That panacea, that seems like it's critical for every organization to achieve. Last question for you. When customers come to you, when they've hit that plateau. They come to Expedient saying, "Guys, with VMware, help us accelerate past this. "We don't have the time, we need to get this done quickly." How do you advise them to move forward? >> Sure. So it goes back to that, what's causing them to hit that plateau? Is it more on the development side of things? Is it the infrastructure teams, not being able to respond fast enough to the developers? And really putting a plan in place to really get rid of those plateaus. It could be getting rid of the technical debt. It could be changing the IT operations and kind of that, the way that they're looking at a cloud transformation model, to help them kind of get accelerated and get them back on the right path. >> Back on the right path. I think we all want to get back on the right path. Guys, thank you so much for joining David and me on theCUBE today, talking about Expedient Cloud Different, what you're seeing in the marketplace, and how Expedient and VMware are helping customers to succeed. We appreciate your time. >> Yep. >> Thanks for having us. >> For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from VMware Explorer '22, stick around, Dave and I will be back shortly with our next guest. (gentle upbeat music)

>> live from San Francisco, celebrating 10 years of high tech coverage. It's the Cube covering Veum, World 2019 brought to you by IBM Wear and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back. This is The Cube. Live at VM World, 2019 times. Too many men with my co host Justin Warren, David Dante, John Ferrier. John Wall's John Troyer. Like a certain founding fonder, Alexander Hamilton, the Cube is going non stop coverage for the three days Habito. Welcome back to our program. Two of our Cube alumni's Lynn Lucas, who is the chief marketing officer of Cohee City. And she's brought along John White, who is the chief innovation officer at Expedient. Thank you both for joining us. >> Happy to be here. Happy 10 year anniversary to the cute >> Well, thank you so much. And you know, so many people we've known over the years. Actually, the first time I met John wait was I believe in this whole, you know, at VM World, you know, talk about what's going on. Eso You know, I always love talking to the service riders because it's been going through just a massive transformation, you know, all along on you, John, you've got a different title Since the last time I interviewed you, You been involved in the strategy You and I have gone toe cloud shows together and some of the other things they're so bring us up to speed as to, you know, expedient here at the show. And, uh, what brings you here with cohesive? >> Yes. Oh, yeah, thanks to your right. But I think it's probably five or six years ago. Maybe I asked too. You said, Hey, what do you know about the service provider community? Cause I wanted to kind of educate you because it was something that's been fairly new and expedience been in that industry for a long time. We were mainly in infrastructure of the service provider, man. The service providers are rounding on all that I t. Stuff that people need and ah, this VM world is a huge one for us. Last year we launched Enterprise Cloud, which is a product based on VM. Where's full softer to find stack And that was something we wanted to go to market with to give an alternative people, When you say Hey, I need to go to the cloud and you realize that okay. I really can't just take my APS and lift and shift and go there. There's another place for you that's a little a little more familiar. And as we see 20,000 people know VM were obviously that air here. So that's usually what what's usually happening in the Enterprise. So we're talking with those folks, and so we would launch that platform. We thought about everything differently. We were running virtualization since, 06 of seven, and we wanted to change everything back up platforms as well as needing things like scale out now, as were necessity at that point. So this VM worlds are coming out because we had, ah, release that last year. And now we have a lot of good customers to talk about on that platform. 12 months later. >> Yeah, well, Lynn, first of all, congratulations because, you know, I know John sits on customer counsels for some of these events. I've dug into a bunch of the networking pieces with him and actually was, you know, we spent a bunch of years. We went to a bunch of shows together and he was looking at the some of the various vendors and a bunch of the new startups and cohesive E is the one that you know really stepped up provided the solution that he was looking for. So it's been interesting to hear service fighters. You were usually the first ones that companies were talking to. But bring brings the cohesive story there. >> Yeah, and so were a super pleased and honored to have expedient working with Cohee City. And John has been instrumental in really providing a lot of direction to us on what his needs are and how to make the product even better for for him and the service provider community, it's a huge part of our go to market strategy. We believe that with the massive growth in the interest in hybrid and Justus John was saying, There's so many customers that really aren't equipped to deal with How do I move to ah hybrid cloud strategy, whether that before compliance reasons, whether that be geographical reasons under you've seen them all. And so this is something where we feel really thrilled to have the, um, where's cloud partner of the Year working with us and to help serve customers with the expedient enterprise Cloud platform. >> Congratulations on that team. And right when we first met five years ago Public cloud for VM wear And for most of the service bodies, it was the enemy, all right. It's like, Oh, my gosh. There, you know, you went toe Amazon reinvent and create a little bit of partnership. So give us the update on hybrid. What that means and how solutions like, Oh, he city, you know, help you provide services to your customer. >> Yeah, it's funny you mentioned. I mean, that's you would ask me, What are you doing here? What are you doing here? Because it was going out doing this research, seeing where the market was on containers on adoption of Claude practices. So we wanted to make sure that we were very open with all the different solutions that are out there. And that's been our strategy from the from the start. So building enterprise cloud was one thing we need to do to come to market with a platform like everybody else. But multi cloud is really where we have focused. And it's funny. I mean, when I when I first started coming to the M world, it was very product centric, you know, you had this product, you could do X with it. And here's the return that you would get at it. And when you're coming to the emerald now it's more about platforms. And that's really what I found most interesting with Cohee City when I first met Mohit, probably two and 1/2 3 years ago, was that he was focusing on the platform of data management. And that's really what the problem was. It wasn't now, specifically, it wasn't data protection. Specifically, it was What all can you do with that with that data management? And we're You know, we're spending a ton of time with Cohee City on. We were building multi Tennessee with them to them, be able to support that. And that's what we're delivering on now. So it's it's it's the scale out now's it's ah, data protection. And then we're taking those service is and then putting him in eight of us in azure or wherever it might be because it doesn't matter to us, because long term we want to care about the long term I t care and feeding and focus on that as our value prop instead of just actually which silo >> it lives in. Yeah, and right from the very beginning, I remember speaking to Kohei City very, very early on when it just sort of come out of stealth. And it was baked into into the product the idea of data management that it was going to be much more, much more than just data protection. So, what are you seeing now that we have a lot of years of product development has clearly gone into it since we first looked at it then. But what are you seeing? Customers using the platform for here in 2019? >> Well, we started a little bit more unique than most other customers. I think we talked about this, you know, throughout CO e city. And we actually started on a scale out now's platform s. So we have one of our clients homes dot com who? They're with us this week because they have a really interesting you. No need for this type of enterprise. Cloud there with us and they're talking about all the different benefits they received out. And they started actually with on the file side of things homes dot com, real estate, online real estate. So I think you know about how many images and how many fouls you have out there. We have 2.6 billion images right now running on the cohesive platform. That was 2.6 billion and a 30% annual growth rate. Yes. So the numbers are crazy. You can't put those on any other traditional now, as that's out there. Uh, so we used a he city first to get started there, and then the backups really were the icing on the cake. So last October, we built We started going out the Nats platform to handle those images. And if you actually go to homes dot com right now, it's being served fully out Enterprise cloud from a container and virtual machine layer and then on the back end from Cohee City. And they were using that to protect it as well. >> And I think that if I add on to that is really a testament to the, you know, the foundation that mo it built, which is a true distributed file system, Google like, in that sense. And I think correct me if I'm wrong, John. But you know, you then also saw while that benefit of a platform approach and not another silo for the backup and having co he city help solve the challenges for both files as well as data protection and then maybe one day in the future. Looking at some of the things that we're doing now that we're doing more security on running APS and things like that on the platform as that may be an extension for you, >> Yeah, that's that's definitely a big focus of our effort, the global d duplication that you get with CO he city. When you add all those files in all the different customers, we have all the different virtue machines. Ah, the ratios were hitting or just insane. And it's something we decided as a service provider that we we said, OK, this technology, we actually want to give that benefit back to the customer. And so when somebody buys data stores from us on the data production, they buy what they're actually consuming on the disk. So you could have 100 terabytes in all of your V EMS. If you only need one terabyte, that's all you're buying from us. And that's a lot of the power of that platform that we get with cohesive. >> Yeah. So, John, wanna help? They want you to help us understand the nuance of something. We're platform? Yeah. Has a little bit of new Monsanto. Little bit, a little loaded thing. GM was the platform. Cohesive is a platform. You use both of them. So just help us understand how cohesive Ian Veum wear and all those things that they go together. They're not, you know, competing against each other in as your architectural Or are they? They're >> not competing there two layers, In my opinion, where you have your primary stores really living in and the M R and secondary storage is everything else on Cohee City. Ah, what? The nice thing is, they did a lot of cool things to kind of marry the two together. Um, one of the one of the tools that we're using Aesthetic ahi city is called Instant on or instant Restore a Virtue machines so we can actually spin up a virtual machine almost instantaneously. It lives on the Coast City platform. Once it's rehydrated, then does a storage the emotion automatically into the V, m or environment. So we're able to do migration or if we had, You know, we have a bad ransomware attack and we need to restore 100 V EMS within a few minutes. We can instantly bring those back up in the cohesive platform and then move them to a production virtual environment once it's done. And that's something that we weren't able to do with our existing vendor. And that was something we needed to actually go and focus on because being in the healthcare space being in the compliance space, that's that's a big problem for us. >> Yeah, just add, I think that, um Vienna, where is clearly one of our most important partners. The very first area that mo it developed was data protection, for I am where, I would say, well north of 70 75% of our customers are protecting their Veum, where environments We have a very large customer that's protecting over 18,000 V EMS on Cohee City. So with the certifications that we have with V. C. D. And with the integrations, as you've mentioned with of you realize it's it's really it's a partnership. Andi think we're adding a lot of value to the customers that are building on V. M. where is >> very complimentary for sure. >> Yeah, it's been interesting that to see how customers choosing to go with a platform like like expedient because, as you mentioned earlier, stewed like five years ago, Cloud was the enemy. And but we're being told that on a public card is gonna take everything, and it's just gonna own all of the environment where is now? In 2019 we found that the story is actually much more complicated than that. Some of us probably believe that at the time I put my hand up is one of those that customers actually needed to live in multiple places. It's not a story of or it's a story of end, so you do need to be ableto have something which can work well with others on the same way we've got. We've got co, he's ity and V M. Where is it? Well, they're not really competing with each other. They work better together and particularly as customers scale, we find my any any kind of enterprise customer is header a genius, so you have to have solutions that give them options and that work together well with you have to play nicely with others. >> I think that's exactly right. And part of what we've done is built a software to find solution and to also give John expedient flexibility. How do you want to deploy for your customers? The solution. Is it in the, uh, the hyper scaler? Is it Hello, somewhere? Is that your own cloud? And so that's part of the advantage. I think all in one solution that then you can give your customers some flexibility as well as to how they want to consume the service as well. >> Absolutely meaning the flexibility And you mentioned software only, and are, you know, software or suffer to find that was something that was big for us. When we're looking for partnerships, we have a standardized hardware build that we want to use. And that was all built on Del. And it was something that, you know, we were able to work with obesity to get that standardized so we can continue to roll out. Excuse that we were most comfortable with. And they could just have the software layer on top. >> Yeah. So you've managed to do this successfully. You're going really well. Yeah. What's next? >> Well, um you know we have, you know, So in we ordered in October of last year. Right now we have six petabytes online enrolling. So that's that's great. You know, that's that's good to see. That's going to continue to grow at a pretty rapid rate. Data is something that obviously, we all know is never gonna shrink on. We're gonna continue to grow that with new customer acquisitions, and that's everything where we want to continue to go with this, Uh, this product specifically is on the data management side. The things that they're doing in Helios to start to get understanding and awareness in value out of that data that's sitting there is really, really important and exciting for us in the future. We deal what tonic compliance PC idea says hip. And we want to make sure that the data that we're storing inside of there will be compliant by those. So being able to write an application to see if the credit card numbers in a file or in a database by using the cozy platform that we brought us value. Same thing goes with a lot of the ransomware protection they're doing. So if you see a foul that gets encrypted, then I know. Okay, I have a problem. I better go look at that and give me a time stamped, Actually. Go on, restore from instead of actually trying toe, you know, pick around. And hopefully I find it when it before it was encrypted. So we're really excited about those opportunities is the future and seeing what data management can just bring to it. >> Well, Lynn, always a pleasure to catch up with you. Thank you so much for joining us again. And John, my friend, this is your six time on the program, actually gonna have a celebration in New England in a little over unveil for, ah, six s o right in New England. So for Justin Warren, I'm stupid him in. We love talking about sports here, and, uh, yeah, the Cuban way have the Niners and the Patriots for the team there. But as always, Thank you for watching the cue

(light techno music) >> Announcer: Live from Boston, Massachusetts, it's The Cube. Covering ZertoCon 2018. Brought to you by Zerto. >> This is The Cube. We're at ZeratoCon 2018, Hines Convention Center in Boston. My name's Paul Gillin. My guest is John White, the VP of Product Strategy at Expedient. Why don't you start off by giving us just the elevator pitch on what Expedient is all about. >> Sure, Expedient is a cloud-service provider as well as managed service provider, and we also have data centers that we operate here mainly on the east coast. We have seven cities and 11 data centers. Those are in Boston here, locally as well as Baltimore, Maryland, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Cleveland, Columbus, Indianapolis, and Memphis, Tennessee. And then we actually, we'll put our private cloud services really anywhere. So we actually will put 'em on the customer's premises to meet that need as well as in partner data centers anywhere over the world, if they have to deal with compliance, security, whatever it might be, we'll go and tackle those problems for them. So our goal is to be an infrastructure as a service provider for, you know, really all the enterprise. >> So, when would a company do business with you verses a Microsoft or an Amazon? >> Yeah, so, if you kind of look at really three ways to kind of go cloud, right? You can still do it yourself. You can build some cloud-based services. And that's, again, you're in it on your own. You can go all the way to the extreme, which is the AWS or the Azures, and that's more, again, you're kind of in a do-it-yourself type of mentality. And your support structure there is a little bit different. It's maybe a little bit more mechanical, a little bit more robotical. If you need help in transitioning and figuring out where your workload should sit, and maybe creating more of a hybrid cloud so it's maybe on your premises, it's inside one of our data centers, and then maybe it's even in one of those AWS or Azures. You're going to work with a company like Expedient to go and help you figure out where you should put your workloads, first off. And then how to create that long-term strategy so you get the best of all worlds that are out there, not just one prescriptive cloud. >> So, you're kind of a high-touch cloud provider then. >> Very, very high touch, yeah. Our whole product service is actually a la carte menus. So you pick and choose what you want. We can manage servers, we can provide virtual infrastructure, we can do things like DR as a service, backups as a service, all those pieces. So you build, basically, your perfect IT strategy with us. And then direct connects into AWS and Azure and some other cool products coming soon to kind of make your life a little bit easier, consuming and running your work loads in public clouds. >> Well we hear a lot these days about multi-cloud, about customers wanting to shift their work load seamlessly around between multiple back-end cloud providers. Certainly vendors talk about that a lot. Do you hear customers talking about it? >> Yeah, we have some customers starting to talk about it. And, you know, in the beginning, they just wanted to see, okay, I'm running workloads in AWS, I'm running workloads in Expedient, I'm multi-cloud. And then they start to understand. well, our management's really hard. And the network's really hard, and the security's really hard. And we're doing backups another way than we've done it traditionally. And we're helping customers bridge that gap and saying, we can take some of the security policies that we've been running internally in our data center, and maybe you've been doing inside your data center, and take those out into the public cloud. Simplifying things with networking. We're a pretty big VM or NXS shop. So doing something where you can create tagging and policies local inside the Expedient data center, and then being able to translate those up into AWS and Azure, to make it, basically, one seamless network, is really, really big and key for our customers. It's something that I think is still new. We have a handful of customers that we're working on a lot of cool research projects on. But I think it's going to be something that's going to be the dominant force here in the next few years. >> You mention disaster recovery as a service. Now is that where Zerto fits into your plan? >> Correct, yeah. We've been working with Zerto for quite some time now really since they were just comin' to Boston. And we worked and spent a ton of time with them getting them to understand the needs of service providers, 'cause they were traditionally enterprise focused. And that partnership that we've built over the years has done tremendous value for not only our customers but our businesses. And we've actually had two year-over-year growth for the last three years with them. And actually, we just won the Service Partner Growth Partner of the Year Award with them. So we're creating some pretty cool solutions around DR as a service, and taking some of our network background and actually simplifying DR for our customers that way. So, we use Zerto as well as VM Ware, and some of our own product connectivity, NSX, to actually simplify the package of DR to get the recovery time objective down into 10, 15 minutes, instead of four hours or eight hours or multiple days that really most people are experiencing right now. >> So when you look at the landscape, there are a lot of disaster recovery solution providers you could've worked with. What does Zerto do that's really different? >> The part, well, on a technology wise, watching them take a look at the change block that's occurring that's out of the VM1 environment, making an agnostic from a storage layer, that was really big for us in the beginning on the technical tip-in. And then the partnership, as of late, really since the beginning, was the big value differentiator that we just couldn't find in other companies that're out there. We locked arms with their product management team and their product strategy team right away. We gave them literally two sheets of paper and said these are the things we need to be successful as a service provider using your software. They went down, checked 'em all off. We started goin' at it, and we started then growing that year-over-year for the last three years. So, it's been an amazing partnership. They have a strategic team that understands where the marketing industry's going. And we're going to use them, and leverage them, as much as we possibly can to help out our customers, give 'em the best outcomes they can possibly get. >> When your customers talk to you about backup, where do you see them going? Where is that market headed? >> So backup, traditional backup is something we've been doin' for quite some time. We do petabytes of backups every year for customers. Still using tape, believe it or not, as well. We have a lot of discs-- >> Tape will never die. >> Tape is still out there. I actually have a bumper sticker that I think EMC made when they bought Avamar saying Tape is Dead. And I don't think it's going to die anytime soon. >> Mainframe was dead, too. >> Yeah, right, mainframe has been dead and we still roll new ones into our data centers on a regular basis and then put cloud beside it. But on the backup side of it, if you look at some of the new disasters, right? Look at Atlanta. Their disaster was different. It wasn't a natural disaster, it was a-- >> Radsomeware attack. >> Ransomeware attack. Right, that's a new disaster. We're going to find new disasters, and you can't go and restore back from 24 hours ago and think that that's good. We don't live in that world anymore. It needs to be from five minutes, seven minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it might be. So, we use their journaling today to actually get those quick recoveries. And if they can extend that out, I think it's going to be pretty powerful for customers to say, okay, I want to go back to two years, three days, and six hours from now. And say, gimme that point in time, snap. That's the way I want to actually restore that data. Succeeding in that vision I think will definitely change the game for how we actually look at doing backup and restores in the future. >> A lot of talk at this conference about resilience. >> John: Um hmm. >> Is that a concept that you think customers, your customers, have really internalized? They understand what that means? >> They're getting it, yeah, definitely. I mean, DR even was something that we had to kind of walk them into. But now, if they have an outage, it's not just money that they're losing. It's the reputation. And as we all know now, reputation is key. And you look at Twitter. When somebody has an outage, or has a problem, I mean, their users essentially just blow 'em up and there's memes and all kinds of other stuff. There's a lot of funny ones for the airlines, from Delta and Southwest havin' those challenges. And so, our customers today are realizing that yeah, we can't go a day or two without having service to our customers. We can maybe go a minute or two, but that's about it. We need to make sure we're being resilient with our data. We need to make sure we're protecting it, we'll be able to create ways to quickly roll it back to make sure our customers are up on line. Because they just can't go down anymore. >> How important is security as a driver of resilience and spending on disaster recovery now? >> Yeah, security is definitely, with being able to quickly restore from like a ransomware, it's startin' to bring that infrastructure that has been, security's been a little different there, and where network security's been a little bit different, kind of bringing them together to create, say, we need to have a full package. We not only need to figure out how we're blocking it at the edge and blocking it internally east west, but we need to figure out, if we're going to get breached, 'cause we're going to get breached, how can we quickly restore from that? How can we make sure we're not being held ransom for Bitcoin or whatever the next currency's going to be that they're going to be held ransom for that they just can't pay because maybe it would knock them out of business. >> So, John, Expedient, being a small, specialized cloud service provider, you're kind of dancing with elephants when you're out there with Amazon and Microsoft. What's the secret? What keeps you guys successful and how do you keep viable? >> There's a lot of different things. I think the way we focus on technologies is a little bit unique. I mean, we're there to design the best technical solution for that customer. And not maybe fit them into a one-size-fits-all outfit. The other side of it is, a lot of our customers like the local touch and feel. Majority of our customers are at and around our data centers. That way they can get to learn the facility, they can, even if they're running cloud services with us, they know where it lives. That maybe eases their minds from a compliance standpoint, security standpoint. Or just in a trust, saying, I'm going to take my data that's been living inside of my data center, that's key to my business, and I'm going to give it to somebody, I at least want a face and a name so I can know who to call and who to talk to if there is ever a problem. >> Face to face still matters. >> It does, and I think it's always going to matter. And I think we're always going to have some sort of high interaction with every enterprise out there. And that's what they're going to need. 'Cause this stuff can never commoditize all the way. Creating the solution is still hard. Maybe the bits and pieces underneath it are a little bit easier, but the whole packages is going to always be unique and really hard to define in a one-size-fits-all for a lot of those enterprises. >> John White, thanks so much for joining us. >> Thanks for having me. >> We'll be back from Zertocon 2018 here in Boston. I'm Paul Gillin, this is The Cube. (light techno music)

>> Narrator: From Austin, Texas it's the Cube, covering DockerCon 2017, brought to you by Docker and support from its ecosystem partners. (upbeat music) >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman, and this is the Cube's coverage of DockerCon 2017 here in Austin, Texas. Getting towards the end of our two days of coverage. Really been geeking out on a lot of the technology here, and I was happy to be able to pull in two guys I know, I've had them on the Cube before, to really go in into how this who container wave is impacting their business, to go into the technology some. So I want to welcome back to the program, first you know John White. He's the Vice President of Product Strategy with Expedient and who I'm happy to see not wearing his football jersey. John, thanks for joining me again. >> (laughs) Good to see you. >> And Joep Piscaer, who is the CTO of OGD. I had the pleasure of interviewing Joep over in Europe last year at a show, so, you know, welcome over to Austin. I think Vienna and Austin, woe meet coma at both of those places. >> Oh yeah. >> So yeah, it seems every time we get together there's a lot of that going around. >> There's always a meet excuse, right? >> Right, so maybe start with you, have you been to DockerCon before? What's your experience been here at the show so far? >> Yeah, so this is my second DockerCon. I've been here last year as well, in Seattle. And I'm kind of liking the vibe this time round. So last year it was really, you know, all about developers. I'm kind of liking it, more about the enterprise right now. You know, as an enterprise guy, work for an MSP, so you know, we deal with a lot of enterprises. And it's good to see that Docker is, you know, giving the enterprise a lot of thought and a lot of attention because, you know, that was one area where they were lacking last year. >> So John, you know, you look at a lot of the ecosystem, you're also a service provider. What's your take so far? >> Yeah, so this is the first time for me at DockerCon. I go to a lot of conferences, so I read the room a little bit differently, I guess, than most. It's been interesting for me. These two days have been jam-packed. I've been soaking up a lot of new knowledge and new vendors, new potential partners for us to look into. But I'll agree, I think a lot of the focus on the enterprise, figuring out maybe how this is relevant to them and the future is actually a really great way to go and I hope to see more of that. Looking for those use cases right now is a little bit hard, especially when you have people like Visa that have been working on this for, you know, a few years now and only six months into production. We're just so very, very early in this technology that I think we're still walking, maybe, probably still crawling even, through it. >> Yeah, before we go into the tech, let's talk about ecosystems. So it's a word that I heard over and over again in the keynotes. You know, John, I was talking with you at VN World at AWS Free Invent, as a service provider sometimes, it feels like body blows and head shots, going to some of these shows because how they're partnering with you, how do you see Docker? What kind of things do they build? How does that, you know, help or hurt your business? >> Yeah, so Docker is a company, we really haven't worked with them quite yet. The ecosystem, though, is interesting here. There's a lot of new faces here, a lot of faces that I've interacted with on the Virtualization Days, now kind of porting over to here, so, you know, I've already started to reach out to some of them to kind of get an understanding, like for instance, of risks on the network side, what they're doing, how they're actually interacting with Docker. And think that's going to be really important because I think that's going to be one of my bigger challenges in the future, is how I actually network all this stuff together. You know, I can see us definitely starting to work closer with Docker, with Docker Data Center. I think customers are going to demand something like that. And they're not going to want to host it inside of their data centers. They're going to want to host it in probably a third party service provider. >> Yeah, I'm sure both of you were looking at, I think it was the Visa case study, we talked about utilization of what they had and I thought of you guys, cause it was like, oh, wait, big surprise, my utilization is really low because wait, why am I doing this in house when I should be going to somebody to handle that. Your thoughts on the ecosystem, you know, we talked at the Nucanic Show, you know, when you look at technology partners, you know, how does Docker and their ecosystem fit in to your thoughts? >> So it's like a whole new ecosystem to get into, right? So it's kind of discovering from ground zero again, what's the ecosystem look like? Who's doing what, who's developing what kind of new trends? So it's good to be there early, just to get a good feel about the ecosystem, get to know the people and be able to kind of develop a strategy around Docker, because it is early days, right? So it's way too early to go in to a customer and say we have a complete package for you. That's just not going to happen between now and like six months. So the issue really is how you get to a point with the customer where you can jointly develop a strategy to get Docker into your service profile. And going to events like DockerCon really helps to actually kind of achieve that goal. >> So you guys are always in an interesting space, you know, you're consuming some of the technologies from the vendor, you've got your customers, you know, putting demands on you, so you know, CTO sets strategy, why not dig in for us a little bit as to what your seeing, what's good, what's bad, you know. There's networking, there's storage, there's security, you know. Maybe John, start with you. I don't know if networking would be the one to start, but I'll let you choose. >> Yeah I think we're going to run, I mean, we're an infrastructure company. We've been running virtual infrastructure since 2007. We know it, we understand it. And you start to understand where the pitfalls are. This is going to change it. I mean, the bin packing problem is going to change significantly over the next few years. Some of the people, I went to their use case session, they're saying they're seeing 70% reduction in resources. Now, they're not saying 70% reduction in resources, you know, just because they made things smaller. They just packed them tighter into a smaller group of boxes. That's going to be interesting. And you know, discovering how we can actually provide that at the true infrastructure layer for our customers is going to be a really big challenge for us. And it's going to revolve around us having pretty strong partner relationships since we don't do the professional services to kind of figure out how to transform your application. We're going to need somebody to help us there. We're going to handle the infrastructure underneath. >> Maybe explain that a little more. Like you know, if I'm saying well, if I'm Amazon and I can just do that, they've got kind of infinite resources there and therefore as a customer I don't need to worry about that, you know. What do you have to worry about? And should your customers care or will you make that transparent to them? >> Let's think about, you know, we went to virtualization. We had P to V converters, right? We all used them, we all tested them. We said okay, this physical server now can run as a virtual server, that works. You really don't have, even though they announce something where you can take a VMDK to an image, Docker image, you really don't have a clean way to do that unless you think that building a big monolithic container is going to save you time and money. Maybe it will. But there's going to be some sort of application transformation that you have to do to be really successful inside of this new platform in the future. And that's something where I think you're going to have to have partners really ingrained to help build the cultural, help build the bridges to the operational teams, help to show the value to the executive team and why you're going to save money, why you're going to do something more secure, you know, how it's going to benefit you in the future. And those are just pretty big challenges that are out there in front of us. >> Joep? >> Yeah so that's the major issue, right? So from our perspective, we use ISVs for the software we deploy for customers, you know, a lot. I'd probably say like 90% of the applications we deploy, we didn't develop or the customer didn't develop in house. It's just all, you know, standardized V stuff. And having a networks of ISVs around you to help you transition from virtual machines into some kind of container format, to address the bin packing problem, that's going to be, that's going to be the biggest challenge to solve, right? It's not just packing up an application and moving it into a container. It's actually transforming it from whatever it is now into something more efficient, more scalable, more resilient. And that's you know really the issue we're trying to tackle, as far as looking at the ecosystem, looking at how to build our practice around it. It's not just infrastructure anymore. It is really all about the application now. So you have to develop a whole new set of skills. You have to develop new people around you. You have to develop new services. And that's interesting because it does have real advantages for the customers, but it's going to take a while to have that mature to a level the customers can actually pull it off the shelf and implement it in their own companies. >> One thing I think on the infrastructure side that I just was in Visa's use case, they were talking about how they're doing it on bare metal. That's different for us. We've been running virtualization for so long, now to say to the engineers, hey look, we're actually just going to run a Linux operating system, or even a Microsoft operating system now on bare metal, and we're going to run containers and get rid of that hypervisor. That's going to be a pretty unique conversation to have. We've already created the monitoring tools and unit performance tools, looking all at the VM. Now we might go back to just running servers again. It'll be a new challenge. >> Yeah really interesting. So there was a lot of focus in the keynote about how they've been maturing security. Want to get your take on that. You know, two years ago it was like oh wait, that's one of the biggest barriers to putting things in production. It feels at a high level like we've made some good progress. Is security still an issue? Are you comfortable with where we are? Maybe anything that still needs to be done? >> You want to go first? >> Sure. (laughing) >> This is a can of worms. >> Yeah so security is always, you know, it's always a can of worms. But you know, my take on it, it doesn't actually matter if it runs in a container or VM. Like 90% of the threads come from outside the compute right? So it's going to come off the network, off the internet, off the users. So really from a security perspective, I'm kind of ambiguous which way to go. But again, the ecosystem story comes back into play, right? Is the ecosystem mature enough to actually deliver security products for containers? The VMware ecosystem was completely mature in that sense. It can just pick off, you know, 20 products and basically do that same thing. And for Docker, that's going to be, you know, a challenge to say the least, to get up to a point where you can pick whatever you actually need. And it's going to be a discovery and it's going to be a little while before we get there. >> Yeah, so I have to read through your tweets to find the answer, John? >> No, no, I'll give you, I think well, security's a mess kind of in general but it's, I think some of the things that they're doing you know, early on, that before there's any critical mass adoption yet, making sure encrypted traffic and handling TLS certificates in an easy fashion, that's great. I was impressed with the notary function, where it can go and look at the image and know if there's any vulnerabilities, and go and identify the problems. It really helps the developers kind of understand the operational asks that people actually have to make sure, okay look, you're going to roll out this new image, this new code? Let's make sure it's secure to get started, at least. We all know it's going to kind of, maybe fall out of the norm once it actually gets up and running operational and production. But let's make sure it's secure at least to boot the thing. >> What do you see containers, when does it have a significant impact on your business? Does it transform the way that you deliver your service? Will it change pricing? >> Yeah, I think it's going to. I mean, a few things that are going to happen. I mean, it's going to increase in scale, so you're going to have more to actually manage, which is going to be a new challenge. That's one side of it. But you're going to probably end up consuming more infrastructure in the long run. And that infrastructure is going to get commoditized even more than it already is right now. And you're going to have to make sure that that's down to the minimum dollars or the minimum cents that you need to provide that very small segment of actual storage or RAM or compute that you need. And that's going to really shift the business. And especially when you look at a lot of containers where you have some that may be run on a monthly basis, a lot of them are only going to be running maybe a few seconds, a few minutes. So you're going to have to have very granular tracking and understanding for that show back charge back to the CFO that you're actually running the services for so they know exactly what they can expect for the bill that month. That's really different than what we're doing today. >> You know will that be a challenge for you to continue to compete against the public clouds, where it seems that that's a more natural fit for some of the pricing and the models that they've built? >> I don't think so. I think this is something where you're even getting more high touch with the application. You know, data sovereignty, that was listed up there I think on Met Life's use case today. That's always going to be important. They're going to want to know where the data's living, why it's living there, how to audit, how to do compliance against it. That's always going to be really important, that'll make us be a little bit different than the public cloud. >> Alright, your business? >> So I agree, right. So the pricing is going to be something to kind of readjust. But I kind of see a lot of advantages in terms of security, the secure software supply chain. So I'm really liking that message. So instead of having a big unknown in terms of whatever is coming into your data center, you now can say with a certain degree of certainty that the application you are running is secure, it's been tested, it's been tested by the compliance team. And I think enterprises in the end are really looking at how to mitigate those security risks and having such a secure software supply chain is absolutely going to help in that respect. >> Alright, so what feedback would you give to the community, what more do you want to see developed, areas where you think we need to make some progress, you know? Joep, I'll start with you. >> So the biggest is monolithic applications. So a lot of enterprises still have legacy applications. >> Well, you've got Oracle in the Docker store now. >> Yeah, exactly. (laughs) But it's still a monolith, right? So addressing that problem one way or the other, but especially in terms of availability, recoverability, I think that's one major area where Docker needs to focus on in the coming months. >> Alright, so John, same question, with a little twist for you is what you'd like to see and anything that if you're talking to VM Ware, what they should be doing more in this space. >> Okay, yeah. I think, I want to see from Docker a lot more use cases. I want to see them start to build their user group and community a little bit more, a lot more sharing needs to occur. The use case session that they had, it was basically two days of use cases running, were great. A lot of those companies, I had a hard time relating to my customers, I mean, Visa, Met Life, they're huge. I really don't, our service, you know, small to medium into the large, but those, they don't have the same use cases. So continue to focus on, you know, how we can actually work on this together with these new customers. On the VMware side of it, VMware's in every data center in the world. And they have a story around VIC, they have a story around Photon. They need to continue to figure out how to build that bridge to, maybe that VM decay to container tool that they have. Work on it together, see what you can do together to take this on to the next level of understanding of really how we can actually transform these applications that were all built in Vms. >> Alright, well, John, Joep, really appreciate you guys coming through. You never hold back sharing your opinions on it. Look forward to reading, I'm sure you'll probably do write ups from the show, too. And we've actually got Visa on as our next guest here. You've probably given me a couple of questions to ask there too, when I go into it. But getting towards the end of Cube's coverage here at DockerCon 2017. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

(intense orchestral music) >> Hello and welcome to this special VMworld preview, I'm John Furrier, co-host of theCUBE, here in the Silicon Valley, Palo Alto offices for theCUBE. I'm here with Peter Burris, head of research at SiliconANGLE media and Wikibon team. We're hear kickin' off, what we're going to talk about at VMworld, what we expect to see at the event in Las Vegas; and what are some of the highlights from the news, what's going to be discussed. Peter, great to see you. >> Great to be here John. >> I know you've been workin' hard, we're going to talk about this new true private cloud report that you put out, very comprehensive, a lot to go through, so, we're going to digest that, we're going to unpack that. But first, we're going to have theCUBE there for you know three days. >> Two sets right? >> Two sets. So, second year in a row we have two sets at VMworld. 72 thought leaders and interviews in the middle of the hang space, if you're going to to to VMworld, go to the hang space and look for us, come say hello there's some little cough areas to hang out. Come visit us, say hello, check in if you're an influencer, we're going to come preview some new technology we're going to show there, so, don't forget to ask about that, take a look at the video or the variety of tools we have with theCUBE Digital Tooling and Video Services. But, most notably, there's going to be a lot of headline news, Andy Jassy's going to be giving a keynote, we've got that confirmed on Twitter; and a lot of discussion around the future of the data center, future of IT, certainly of how cloud and on-premises are going to intersect. This is has been a groundbreaking report from Wikibon for the third year of the true private cloud report. So let's unpack that, because I think this is a notable backdrop to VMworld is that as everyone's been saying hybrid cloud, now multi cloud, essentially the same thing. The cloud is a great resource, on-premises (laughs) is not going away. It used to be aspirational to have this notion of having cloud operations. Your report is now definitively saying it's no longer aspirational, it's actually happening. So take a minute to explain the report in it's third year some of the key findings. >> Well the, we might want to, we want to step back a little bit and say what's goin' on with VMware? Because VMware's progress and both what it's enabling, and what constraints it still faces, are going to have a lot to do with what happens in the report. But speaking about the report specifically, True private cloud was a concept that David Floyer, Stu Miniman, kind of devised a number of years ago, and the simple observation is that ultimately a lot of hardware vendors, a lot of system vendors, were just taking the word cloud and slapping it on their hardware and saying oh here's our replacement strategy, does it have anything to do with cloud? Well, kind of, yeah, but not really. And their observation was increasingly, customers are going to want that cloud experience and the basic notion of true private cloud, and what all of our research shows, is that inevitably what's going to happen is the customer's not going to move their data to the public cloud en mass; there's going to be certainly some important elements that are going to there, it's no question about that, but then increasingly they're going to try to bring cloud, the cloud operating model, the cloud experience, down to where the data resides; and that's going to be at the edge, and that's going to be at what others call the core, on-premises. And near premises, so, you know side-by-side with public cloud players in in a number of different hosting companies. So the very concept is the requirements or the attributes of the data are going to dictate where the workloads operate, and increasingly those, that's going to demand an on-premises capability that still satisfies the basic notions of cloud. >> Great, that's a great backdrop. Now let's talk about VMware, and let's, I have something that I want to talk about the direct cloud report, we'll get into that. VMware had two or three years ago, Pat Gelsinger was under the gun, you know with the pressure of the Dell merger looming, what the future is going to be in there. Since then the performance of VMware has been spectacular financially, he's really proud of that. Some new products pivoting, I want to get what you're hearing first, but what I'm hearing is and I want to give you something, give you a chance to respond, I want to get your reaction. VMware has seen some acceleration over the years around vSphere, around kind of good, stable, that haven't lost anything with vSphere, so, one of their core products, virtualization storage; but their large accounts are stable in the Fortune 500, losing some business maybe in the lower accounts, but as the AWS, Azures, and Google Cloud, cloud native players are growing, the emerging products are front and center for VMware. vSAN, NSX, obviously the driver which we'll want to double click on, and the vCHS, the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service. These are, specifically the vSAN getting momentum, and these emerging products, how important is that for VMware? Obviously their stability is IT footprint. But why is the cloud driving some of these new emerging behaviors? >> Look, every company wish they had the install base that VMware has, and that install base is predicated on VDI, or Video Desktop Integration, Virtual Desktop Integration. It's vSAN, which is the use of VMware as a basis for virtualizing storage, and obviously all the stuff that's associated with virtualizing hardware. You know, John, it's interesting, if you think about what made the cloud possible, certainly AWS took on the heavy duty the heavy lifting associated with actually creating a business, and it's obviously you know very successful, but it all started with the idea of virtualization, and the notion that you could in fact bring virtualization in on top of hardware sources and generate a lot of not only cost avoidance, but also increasing flexibilities; you can get better utilization but also increase your flexibility, and that's one of the things that made the cloud possible. And so if we think about the VMware install base, that's where it all starts. It's the ability to get greater utilization and greater flexibility on-premise, and now it's moving into the cloud. So we got three basic questions for for VMware that we're looking at. One, there's been a lot of chatter about the relationship between Dell EMC and VMware, and what does that mean? You know Dell EMC is carrying a pretty significant debt load these days, and, there is visibility in where it's going to go, but VMware, as a brand is worth an enormous amount of money. So how does Dell EMC better you know increasingly attach itself to VMware is an interesting question, and what does that mean for the ecosystem? >> Having perverse incentives possibly versus-- >> Possibly, possibly, but we want to get that, there has to be a constant promise from VMware that they're going to take care of the ecosystem first with Dell EMC as a big participant in that. So that's the first thing, especially these days with all the financial chatter. Second thing is, this AWS agreement is really really important, and a lot of people are questioning is it a one way street? Do you just, you know, sure we have virtualization in cloud, we got virtualization here, does it make it easy to bring stuff up to VMware? What happens once it, or up to AWS, what happens once workloads get up there? Is AWS going to try to you know facilitate a migration? That's still a very very challenging technical problem, but we'll see a lot more, Andy Jassy has the keynote as you said, about how that partnership is working and where it's actually going. Because there will be a requirement also to be able to take workloads out of AWS, and out of public clouds, and bring 'em down on-premise. >> Hence the two-way street that you're looking for. >> Got to be a two-way street. A simple example, we're going to see increasing, in the AI world, we're going to see more modeling occurring in cloud, more training occurring in cloud, and more inferencing learning out on the edge and the core. Well, we want to see, you know VMware certainly wants to see more of those workloads being virtualized. And that leads to the third question what's the VMware story with IOT, with the edge? That is very very unclear at this point in time, and there's a lot of work that's going to have to be required to put into. And so I think that those are the three things that we're really focusing on, and how does VMware answer those questions can have a lot to do with future architectures, future business models, and future partnerships. >> And it's important, I think the edge one is clearly obvious that the don't have much announced, but that have to put a stake in the ground at some point. >> Absolutely. And you know, the reality is, the edge has real-time, often is associated with real-time, high performance, every throughput, very lightweight execution. >> Uses the cloud, uses the data center. >> Uses the cloud, uses the cloud, uses you know servos computing is an example, containers, those things all don't require a virtualized machine. >> I want to get your reactions on something, I sent an email out to a bunch of buyers, of friends in the network of theCUBE alumni and our networks and I asked them a question, I said: what do you think about VMware's prospects going forward as a buyer of technology, as you're transforming your organization from the obvious on-premise operating model to hybrid? Which they're all doing pretty much, and are agreeing to it. So the aspirational aspect was confirmed, to your point. So they responded, (laughs) and they said look it, VMware remains largely flat across server, infrastructure, storage, and virtualization buying. >> In terms of growth? >> No, what they're buying and growth, growth, no they're not really paying much attention to that, they're saying it's pretty flat, we're not going anywhere it's not going down, it's not going up per se, in the core segments. They said the main thing is going to be the emerging technology so vSAN, NSX, and vCHS. Then I asked 'em I said: What do you like about VMware, what do you think they're strong in? They said: well, we like the fact that they got, that they have technology, okay, and if they can keep the technology lead we're interested, so that's a question also, I'll get that in a second, the relationships that they've had with VMware, the supplier relationships, rinse reset a feature of products, and then compatibility with their existing IT footprint. I then asked 'em what're you worried about? (laughs) And they said: well, if there's a discussion about replacing VMware, it's around price cost and technology lag. Your reaction to those two points? >> First point is, again, there's no question that VMware has a great install base of customers that are thinking about what it's going to mean, and I think the most important observation is that, and we'll learn more about how many enterprises really are starting to move their virtual machines up to AWS, for example, more than VMware next week. But I also think that it provides cover for you know a CIO or VP of infrastructure to say yeah I'm going to continue to invest here, and I'm going to, you know, have the option of moving to something else. And there will be a lot more options for what you do with a VMware virtual machine in the future. Regarding the question of whether it's flat or not, I think one of the reasons why that perception is there, is because the hardware business overall has been flat, and VMware is a derivative of play in the hardware business, so, at least until recently. In many respects now it's dragging some of it forward because VMware allows you to put off additional hardware purchases. So we'll see where that cycle ends up, we might be at the nadir of that cycle, but I certainly think that we're seeing-- >> It's mature for sure, I mean. >> It's mature. But it used to be that you'd buy new hardware and then you'd put VMware on top of it to virtualize it, so you could get more productivity out of it. But as hardware's slowed down, why would you buy more VMware? But I think what's happening now is people are thinking first in terms of buying VMware, and what workloads you need to put on there, how they want to set those workloads up, and then looking for hardware to do that, and increasingly looking through the cloud. The third thing I'd say is that look, the VMware cloud foundation, and NSX, are two incredibly important technologies. For example-- >> Well hold on before you go there, 'cause I want to drill down on this because, one of the things that I mentioned in there which is a key word is existing IT footprint; this is a reality, some call it legacy. Having an IT footprint with VMware is not going to get you in trouble because of the path of the cloud, 'cause you've got cloud native, things like Kubernetes down the road, but that footprint's the base foundation. So as NSX comes in, (laughs) and the cloud foundation, interesting new lever. How does those enabling components fit for the enterprise who's sittin' there sayin' I got an existing IT footprint, I got all these clouds on the horizon, why NSX, why is the vCloud foundation important? >> Yeah, so let's start with VCF, VCF provides, or is a, takes you maybe 75, 80% of the way there to that cloud experience on-premises; a VMware based cloud experience on-premises. So, it's a really nice bundling of technology, that provides a relatively simple way of deploying, configuring, maintaining, and ultimately retiring workloads. So, it's a nice package for a lot of enterprises that have that VMware experience. That's a different story from NSX, so, on the cloud foundation standpoint, if you need to demonstrate to your board and to your CXO, and to your line of business people, that you are not just have an option to go to the cloud, but you're actually bringing that experience more to the business, a lot of customers are kickin' the tires on VCF, and it's a good thing to do. NSX is a little bit different. NSX, if we think about the long term, there has always been a need to flatten networks in the enterprise. Having that network, and that network, and that network, and trying to inter-network them together through bridging and gateways, is extremely problematic, even at the network level. It requires-- >> In terms of sprawl and complexity, or both? >> In terms of complexity, in terms of the amount of processing, I mean the cost of doing address translation and takin' packets and re-formatting them for different workloads in the network; very, very difficult to do. Now, you add programmability atop of that, 'cause at the end of the day, cloud is effectively a network program model. Very, you know, hey, you got a big problem on your hands. Somebody at some point in time is going to make, is going to build a $50 billion company around the idea of inter-networking clouds. I don't know who it is. >> Cisco wants to do it. >> Cisco would like to do it, but Cisco, quite frankly, probablyyyy, you know they could have started this process five or six years ago, and they didn't get out there. VMware took some steps to do that. NSX is a pretty good candidate right now, if we're thinking about how we build inter-networked multi cloud environments. >> So, you used the example before you came on camera, that you have this segment that in the old world of network stacks SNA, DECnet, variety whether stacks had proprietary things and bridges happened, to your point, to your explanation. And then TCP/IP came up and flattened it, TCP/IP. >> Yeah, just flattened it all out, made 'em all go away. >> So clouds aren't networks, but they're cloud environments, same concept, but flattening 'em out. >> Well, they are networks, at the end of the day they really are networks. >> They're a network of machines. >> Yeah, they're a network of services, they're a network of machines. >> So, explain the flattening piece, is it, are we still in the early stages of that, are you seeing visibility? >> Very much so. >> What are some data points around this? >> So the, and you said earlier, that the multi cloud, hybrid cloud are really the same, well today they are. We might envision a day when they're not, here's why. Hybrid cloud is I got this cloud, I got that cloud, it's more of a where is the data located, how am I going to run those environments together. Multi cloud is I got multiple clouds that I have to inter-network, and I have to bring together. I want to run a job in one of the Oracle application clouds, that also touches some of the machine learning that you get out of Google Cloud, and increase and include some of the retail capabilities you get out of AWS. That is a very very realistic scenario, it's going to happen, people are doing that kind of stuff right now. >> And that's the preferred outcome people are looking for? >> That's the preferred outcome that people are lookin' for. Well, each of those different environments are going to have an economic incentive to say yeah, that's great do that, but bring more of the workload into my cloud, 'cause I'm going to create interfaces that are a little bit better at working together than you know you can get from the inter-networking side. Well, they'll still have to stay open, but you know some of those environments are going to be better at that than others; but at the end of the day you want no penalty whatsoever, other than latency and where the data's located from amongst these different services. And so eventually what we're going to want to do is we're going to see the inter-networking itself flatten, where're the jobs, how the jobs are set up: flattened. Make it easier to move data, and jobs or workloads out of one cloud and be able to put it in another, because of any number of different reasons. And so, that's-- >> Yeah, competitive advantage, different economics, different product features >> Regulatory regimes change, you know what happens if if in Germany they decide to do something else from other than GDPR, what's it going to mean? >> So is NSX going to be that connector, you kind of think? >> NSX-- >> Has the opportunity. >> Has the potential to be that kind of connector. So an enterprise that's looking at how they can increase their set of options, their flexibility, their ability to bring networking closer to workload. NSX is as good of, that I know about, that we know about, as good an option out there as any. >> I want to ask you before we move onto the true private cloud versus private cloud and that whole report you did to private cloud in the third year. We're seeing a trend around the operating side, the personas are developing Google Cloud Next conference, the notion of an SRE, you know sight reliability engineer. Public cloud has always been known as developer friendly, very developer oriented, cloud native, all the developers love containers, Kubernetes, Istio, and a lot of cool services are coming out. But now with VMware, they kind of own the IT footprint from an operating model, operating the networks. The bridging of those two worlds are kind of coming together, right now we don't see a lot of cross over yet between pure cloud native developers in VMware ecosystem. Your thought on that connection to those personas, how it relates to how the ecosystem's rolling out, your thoughts? >> Yeah, you know John, I think that's going to be the big challenge for the next couple of years, literally, in the next couple of years. That ultimately, developers love the public cloud because they can avoid operations of people. Increasingly the public cloud players are going to have to provide platforms. And you know everybody talks about I, you know infrastructure as a service versus pass as a service, or platform as a service. But when, in Amazon, Google, Azure, Oracle, IBM Software, all of these guys are going to have to add capabilities that are that much more intriguing and interesting to developers. Bringing the enterprise developer into this ecosystem is the next big round of competition, 'cause those people aren't going to go away, they're too important to the future of business. And, to the degree that VMware can provide, and I think this is the best that they can do, a neutral platform for those guys as opposed to starting to introduce you know machine learning services on VMware or or, you know, anything beyond some of the platform stuff that Dell EMC has Pivotal, and what not, on VMware. Yeah, we can expect to see greater integration for that, but I think ultimately what VMware needs to be is a phenomenal target for stuff that's written over here, that needs to run over there, and have it run on VMware, I think that's ultimately what's going to happen. >> Alright Peter, great stuff, now let's talk about the true private cloud report, 'cause I think VMworld is always a beacon, always a bellwether for what's going on in IT, with respect to on-premises private cloud, or true private cloud, or hybrid cloud, IBM as well, and some others, they're always a leader in engineering. Before we get into the report, first describe the difference between what true private cloud is and what people have called private cloud. Because the term private cloud's been kicked around, going back I think 2012 I first heard-- >> Oh, private cloud, I first heard the term private cloud in probably 2005, 2006. >> But you guys have nailed this definition called true private cloud. What does it mean, what's the difference? >> So, the idea is, the cloud experience wherever the data requires it, and increasingly data is going to require it at the edge, in the core, in the data center, you know, local to the business; because of latency issues, because of cost of bandwidth issues, because of regulatory issues, because of IP control issues, any number of other issues, there's going to be an increasing distribution of data; workloads are going to follow that distribution of data, and the systems have to be there to run it. But we want to have a common vision of how those workloads are operated, and a common model for how we pay to run those workloads. So when you think about true private cloud, it's basically, we want the cloud experience, which includes, you know simplicity, the one throat to choke, the regular and non-invasive upgrades and enhancements to software; we want to add to it, kind of the management interfaces that we're associating with the cloud, but also the pay as you go, and the flexibility to scale up and the greater plasticity to be able to add services. We want all of that, but in a footprint on premise. >> And that's for true private cloud? >> And that's what we mean by true private cloud. Now if you go back a few years, companies would you know, you'd get a hardware company that'd say oh look, cloud is Linux plus some manned control interfaces, no problem, we can put that directly into our operating system or have a management interface on our platform, now we can go on cloud. >> And put it in your data center. >> And put it in your data center. But you still paid for everything up front, you have to deal with software patches and upgrades, because it's software that's installed. >> So it's an operating model, how you're consuming technology, how you're buying it. >> Operating model, how you consume the technology, and the flexibility, and the future of the modern application approach, which is services oriented, and networks and data. >> And so one of the findings obviously, you're pretty strong on this sayin' this is no long aspirational, it's realistic. What does the report show, what're the numbers, how did you break down the report? >> Sure. >> What are the categories, and what are some of the data? >> So the aspirational notion was that we kept talking about true private cloud, but, the hardware vendors were slow to actually deliver on it, especially on that service oriented approach as opposed to a product oriented approach. By that I mean product approach is, you buy it all upfront, and it's caviat after I'm a consumer, service oriented approach is you know we have enough belief in what we're selling that you're only paying for the services you consume, which is what AWS and Azure and others do. So we're seeing that actually happen. That's number one. You take a loot at what HPE's with a technology called GreenLake. IBM is advancing it's cause with software. Dell EMC is doing some interesting things with both VMware but also some related types of technologies. All of that is happening right now, so the server companies, or traditional server companies, are introducing true and honest to goodness capabilities that mimic the cloud, so that's happening. The second thing that's happening is you know the AWSs the Google Clouds, and the big hyper scalers, are also starting to introduce technology that allows at least elements of their platform to run on-premise. The big holdover was AWS, but now, through snowballs, through their their kind of ranked box, data box, you can now put a fair amount of processing on there, and a fair amount of AWS stuff, and you can actually run workloads down on this box. So it extends the AWS platform out to locations in a very novel way. So we're seeing on the one hand the server companies truly will introduce technology and services that actually do a better job of mimicking the cloud. We're seeing the cloud players come up with technologies that allow them to extend their footprint, their cloud presence, down to where data needs to reside, and that's where everybody's goin' right now, everybody's goin for that spot in the marketplace. >> So, you have categories here, on-premise-- >> We have on-premise, which is kind of the traditional true private cloud, and the leaders from a hardware packaging standpoint are Dell EMC, HPE are two of the big leaders. Then we have-- >> Cisco's right behind them. >> Cisco's right behind 'em. We've got what we call the near-premise, or the host of true private cloud, and this is where you have AWS right next to your private cloud box so that they can communicate really fast, or it's hosted. IBM is very big here, but there is a number of other players-- >> IBM's got a sizable lead, it's 12% by your numbers, and Rackspace coming second and four-- >> Rackspace is good. And then you've got some very interesting and very important smaller players, like Expedient for example. And then-- >> So there's two main categories, there's hosted, >> Correct. >> And then on-premise. >> On-premise. >> And then there's another category >> So near premise, and on-premise. >> Near premise and on-premise or hosted. >> And there's the ecosystem side, there's a software that's actually utilized to do this, this is where VMware excels in. >> Explain what the ecosystem, so you called true private cloud ecosystem pull through shares, what is that? >> So, we have, so, VMware as we've been talking about, is one of those technologies that allows one to devise a true private cloud platform. Increasingly that's what they're doing, with some of the technologies that we're talking about. And so ultimately they are putting the software out to customers and customers are defaulting to that software, as their approach to building that true private cloud, and then pulling hardware through as a second decision. So the first decision is I'm going to build my cloud, my private cloud, my true private cloud with VMware, and I'll find hardware that doesn't get in the way. >> So it's leaders who are pulling hardware sales. >> It's the software leaders that are putting the software for building true private clouds out there, and then through partnerships dragging hardware in. >> And so there, they're there and everyone wants to talk to them. So that's VMware (laughs) 24% >> That's VMware, Nutanix is moving along. >> HPE, Microsoft, IBM. >> HPE's in there. >> Interesting, that's awesome. And any other findings that you've found, in terms of growth? Number sizes I think this year you had 21 billion roughly 2017. >> Yeah, it's just over 20, it's 20.3 billion, it's going to go to, you know over 260 billion in 10 years, it's going to be bigger than the infrastructure as a service marketplace, it is the true private cloud segment, the on-premise segment for the first time exceeded the size of the near premise segment as the software matures, as you figure out how to make these business models go. But this is going to be, you know Diane Greene said something very very interesting at Google Next. And she said look, nobody really understands how this business is going to work in 10 years, and she's right. Some companies clearly have a better understanding than others. >> So do you think your numbers are short or over? >> I think-- >> But that implies you know. (laughs) >> Well no, I don't know if it's short or over, but let me give you an example. That our numbers presume a relatively constant approach in thinking about how we price and how we generate exchange for this stuff. But how fast the cloud operating model, that pay as you go moves into the true private space, is going to have an enormous implication on what those revenues look like. The degree to which companies demand a three year commitment like Salesforce is starting to do with SaaS. It's going to have an enormous implication on how those revenues actually get realized. >> Well, we've debated this, you and I have debated this before with Dave as well, Dave this it's a trillion, Dave Vellante, so, you know I think you're sure, I think you took a conservative approach, and you know just my personal observation. >> Well we think the overall cloud market's going to be, if we add SaaS in there, it's going to be 260 to 300, probably a total of 700 billion, something like that, and so it's pretty sizable. So we're just talking about that on-premise true private cloud. >> Yeah, the true private cloud you know, $250 billion by 2027. Okay, so I got to ask you a question, since, I like that Diane Greene quote by the way, just kidding you about the forecast numbers, but, I think she's right. So I got to ask you, what is your observation around what this report says vis-a-vis the buyer market out there who are squinting through the fud, and, all these rankings around who's got the most market share. We hear, you know there was a post on Forbes from my friend Bob Evans that said: oh, Microsoft's number one in cloud! So, how you define cloud is a function of how you define cloud. Someone defines it by bundling an office and apps and, eventually, the level of granularity is going to have to be at least segmented a bit. How do you view how customers should keep a score card for market share, leadership, and besides customers, and number of services, I mean is there an approach that anything coming out of this data you would see and saying maybe the market might want to be sized this way, maybe we should be thinking about not so much market share numbers on some graph on some analyst firm. Is there any thoughts on that? Because it's a big thing, and true private cloud's just one sector. >> Yeah, yeah. >> You've got SaaS, and you've got PaaS, and you've got-- >> So I think John, there've been at least, you know we could probably say there're more, but just making it up off the top of my head, there have been at least three eras that users focused on. Era number one is the hardware as the asset, how do we get the most out of our hardware. That dominated probably until the late '80s or so. And then it became the application as the asset, and then we bought into the application, and we bought hardware and all the other stuff underneath that application, and that was pretty much the 2000's, up until maybe 2010. And now we're thinking of data as the asset, and what does that mean? What it means is that ultimately, I think that the way that, we think that the way that architecture is going to be thought of, is not on application architecture, but around data architecture; I don't mean data architecture like a DBA, I mean what is your brand promise, what, what activities do you have to deliver that brand promise, what data and services do you need to perform those activities. Get that data in as close as you possibly can to those activities, wherever they have to be performed, so that you can perform them predictably, reliably, at the lowest cost, and in the greatest, shortest period of time. So I would start with the idea, you know what I'm going to focus on where my data's going to be located to run my business, that's where I would focus. The second thing, as I think when we think about market shares, and we think about a lot of these other questions, it's okay which, this is a transformative period of time, which of these companies is going to be most likely to deliver a product now, but also create better options for how I do stuff in the future; and we like to talk to our clients about the idea of buy the stuff that provides the best portfolio of options on future data value. And so, data today, and helping think about architecture, work with companies that are demonstrating that they're going to be able to create the options that you need in the future, 'cause this is going to change a lot over the next five, six, eight years. And so, you want to work with companies that are demonstrating that they're able to create new technology, through IP, through things like opensource, >> Okay so the question is-- >> Are sharing it appropriately too. >> So, who's number one? Again, I don't think this is going to be one score, I think it's going to be level of services, how many services you're using. There was one angle I wanted to do, but I can't, I'm still having a hard time. But I guess I'll ask ya, to put ya on the spot. If I'm a customer, Peter, who's the number one in cloud, gimme the top three players. >> AWS, Azure, Google. >> Okay, (claps once) there ya go. (laughs) The top three clouds. Well we're going to keep an eye on it-- >> Let's go to four though, so AWS, Azure, Google, and then again, from that true private cloud-- >> IBM. >> Because that's a, no, no, it's got to be Vmware; because that's, that's where the pull through is right now, right. But when you think about it, the big question is is AWS and Google Cloud going to come down to the edge, and down to the true private cloud as fast as some of these other cloud players are going to go up to the bigger cloud? If I were to pick the one that's most likely to win, it's located somewhere near ribbon. So Microsoft or... In Seattle area AWS. Again, again, it's so early, I think if people, going to have to figure out what to do, that's going to determine the winners and losers. Certainly a true private cloud report, great report. Check out the true private cloud report from Wikibon.com, go to wikibon.com and check it out, preview for VMworld. I'm John Furrier with Peter Burris, a lot of exciting news, two large sets, 72 interviews, three days, come visit theCUBE team, we got to full team down there, we're going to have a lot of our team down there lookin' to talk to you. Join our community, join our network, we're going to have a lot of fun, and also learn a lot at VMworld, talk to some really smart people. Thanks for watching. (intense orchestral music)

>> Voiceover: Live from Austin, Texas, it's the CUBE. Covering DockerCon 2017. Brought to you by Docker in support from its ecosystem partners. >> Hi I'm Stu Miniman here with the final wrap with Jim Kobielus at DockerCon 2017. The CUBE's really excited that we were here for the third year. Have to have a big shout out to our partners and our sponsors that allow us to be here. Of course, Docker's been a great partnership. They talk a lot about ecosystem, really bringing some media people like ourselves giving us some of the great speakers from their company, the partner ecosystem and their customers, and the sponsors for the show, for ourselves, App Lariat, CISCO, Iguazio, Skelety, Cononical, and Red Hat. Without them we couldn't bring you this programming. Really excited to be able to be here. They're starting to tear down the show here, so not a lot of time, so many things to dock to. >> The show itself is containerized. >> We're not even going to be able to talk about the Franklin's barbeque. >> You just did. >> But Jim ... Absolutely. Jim, you've gotten to be on the CUBE here, see some of the show. Give us your quick hits. >> Sure. >> on your takeaways from the show. >> First of all, my first takeaway is this is a vibrant developer ecosystem, clearly. This show is much larger than the year before, and the year before that. It'll probably be twice as large next year. That's my prediction based on the sheer amount of developers migrating into the Docker ecosystem because so many organizations are Dockerizing their applications, containerizing their applications. That's a huge focus for me and Wikibon, as an analyst, is the containerization of application development with microservices and all that, for cloud deployment and multi-clouds, hot, hot, hot across all niches. So, vibrant ecosystem. Docker as the core solution-provider and the centerpiece of this community. Amazing show. The Enterprise Edition, of course, that preceded the announcement of that and the release preceded this show. That's critically important in getting Docker into new accounts that, with a full stack. Clearly it's enterprise ready. Developers, more developers will be exposed to Docker through the EE. Docker, at this show, had a couple of really important announcements for developers. Moby. Project Moby, for customization of container images and so forth, clearly that's going to be a multiplier effect on the ecosystem of developers, ISVs and so forth, Building applications, and customizing containerized Docker applications and images for a wide range of opportunities. >> Yeah, Jim, just want to comment on the Moby piece here 'cause it was really interesting. I think the last couple of years, it's been that pull and tug as to what was the open-source piece, what is the company itself doing, and I think it's clarifying. Kubernetes is a big rising tide in the environment, and all they cared about is they've got the open-source pieces that they need to be able to do Kubernetes. So, with Moby Project it's like okay, now I understand what's out and open. I understand what Docker's doing. I saw some humility from Solomon Hykes, talking, it's like we're listening. We're working, you know, ecosystem, ecosystem, ecosystem. So it was good to see that maturity. I mean, there were some people that I talk to, and they're like, "Oh, will this be the last DockerCon?" I'm like, "I don't think anybody watching this show would say that coming out." As you said, I expect the show to grow; it's doing really well. >> Solomon's totally partner-focused. Look at him. >> Kudos to what they're doing. The partners are excited. It's not just lip service. "Oh yeah. We did some little announcement on the side." No. We're excited. This is there. I know you've got a bunch of pieces, but I want to ask you, are developers excited about taking this legacy ... >> There's lots of news I'm going to analyze. >> Legacy applications, and like helping to move those in, or they only want to work on the cool new stuff? >> Oh, that's a huge theme. MTA. I forget what exactly the acronym stands for, but it's wrapping legacy applications, containerizing them in the Docker ecosystem. That is so important so all of these legacy applications will be Dockerized before long, and refactored, in addition to all the Greenfield development of containerized applications. So the MTA announcement, just as critical as the Moby announcement and so forth in terms, and EE as part of the show, of getting Docker, getting their ecosystem, getting developers working in this environment, more and more developers. This entire Docker, this entire ecosystem has a magnetic force on the developer community, or will. Those are very important. Also I thought the announcements with Microsoft, in terms of containers are going into Windows in a larger way, Linux containers and so forth, that also, 'cause Microsoft has a huge presence obviously in not only enterprise but small to midsize businesses. We're going to see Docker in ever-smaller deployments, hosts and so forth, across the board. More buyers, in other words, more companies will be Dockerizing more applications thanks to, in part, Microsoft as clearly a forerunner. >> Jim, absolutely. I say it at almost every cloud show. I want to follow the data and I want to follow the applications, and you had Microsoft and you had Oracle. You had two of the big players from an application standpoint, Oracle's now in the Docker store. >> Oracle's in the Docker store. That is huge. >> Yeah. >> That has validated containers and Docker for ... >> How about you? From the data standpoint, I heard, we talked to Iguazio about some of the analytics and things ... >> Jim: I'm a data guy, yeah. >> Yeah, you're a data guy. What's a data guy think at a show like this? Is it too infrastructure-focused, or did you see some of the data future here? >> No. It's infrastructure-focused in the sense that it needs to be to harden this technology for enterprise deployment, but it's really dev-ops focused, you know, Kubernetes and everything, and Swarm and whatnot. Look at all these vendors. Here are these tools for the dev-ops life cycle, Kubernetes and everything. That's really, really important. It's all about developers and speeding of development, and putting containerized Docker applications and images into production, and managing them and securing them and so forth. Just the sheer range of dev-ops tools on this show floor that's packing up now was amazing. I'm just uncracking my research here. Very important. So I'm going to wrap up. So, the adoption is amazing. I mean, all these industries, including like Visa. We had a swap-meet, who have adopted Docker into core applications that they're running major businesses on. That's some serious validation in its own right. >> Jim, one of the feedback I got from, it was actually John White from Expedient. >> Okay. >> talked about, and he said he deals with kind of small to mid, to little bit large enterprises, and he said, all that this keynote reminds us of AWS Re:Invent a couple of years ago. >> Oh yeah. >> Big global names. I mean, it's, you know, Visa. You know. Around the globe. Northern Trust. These are not, you know, your regional companies that did a little initiative. It's virtualization started in a lot of small environments. Containerization really started in the likes of Google. I remember the first DockerCon. It was Google and Facebook, and they're the ones that have been doing these projects pre-Docker, and it's slowly moving down. Part of the things I look at is where's the watermark >> Jim: Yeah. >> Where below this you're probably not going to do containers because you're going to go live on a platform that leverages container. The service writers I talked to ... >> Jim: They're going to live in a public cloud like Microsoft, or you know. >> Stu: The cloud guys. I'm going to go to, right, I'm going to go to Microsoft. I'm going to go to Oracle. >> Jim: AWS or IBM. >> Stu: I'm going to go AWS. >> Jim: Whoever it might be. >> Right. Any of them because they're going to just take care of that, and I won't care that it was containerized, so at the end of the day, it's not that tool, it's the wave of that modernization. >> Oh. Yeah, I want to end on a data note because we were talking about data. Okay. I thought Iguazio, I thought Yaron was very, that was very good to have him. There's a lot of storage foundations like Veritas and so forth, so storage in a Docker environment and persistent storage and data protection, pretty important, but also containerizing the new wave of applications that are machine-learning and deep learning and artificial intelligence. We got a fair look at some of that from Solomon yesterday because Solomon mentioned that the open AI consortium is based in their internal test bed training network on Docker, on Swarm and so forth. I, in my prior life, I just joined Wikibon a few weeks ago, I've focused on data science, which is a key development theme, by the way, I'll focus on for Wikibon. I saw a lot of containerization. I saw a fair amount of Docker and a lot of the data science oriented app dev that was going on in the business world. That's going to be a huge theme for me under Wikibon, but also, I mean Solomon sort of alluded to a lot, and so did Yaron, a lot of the work that's going on in the AI community Dockerized their application. Tenser flowing, all that. Huge theme we'll probably see much more of at next year's DockerCon I predict containerizing AI. >> All right. Well. >> For deployment into autonomous vehicles. Whatever. >> Jim, you've long been a CUBE alumn, but now you are a veteran of doing the CUBE. I really appreciate you coming on. >> I'm on this side of the table now. It's amazing. >> Stu: I want to give a shout out to the whole team here. John Furrier, I know, was really disappointed. He loves this show. Usually my co-host. A lot of these open-sourced shows. John, you better be down here in Austin for CUBECon at the end of the year with me. So many shows now through July 4th. The CUBE has so many activities going on. If you go to theCUBE.net, you can see all of our upcoming shows. Always watch us live. If we're not at the show that you think we should be at, go ahead and Ping us. Reach out to us through Twitter or through the website. Jim's research, a lot of it's going to be on Wikibon.com. Siliconangle.com is also where we have some research corner, some of the other pieces there, so check out the whole SiliconANGLE Media for Jim, myself, Ava, Leonard, Brandon, Jay, Sam, who's already heading to the airport. Thank you so much for watching The CUBE. Hope to see you at lots of shows coming around and thank you for sharing.