>>Hello, wonderful humans and welcome back to The Cube's Thrilling live coverage of AWS Reinvent here in Las Vegas, Nevada. I'm joined by my fantastic co-host, John Farer. John, things are really ramping up in here. Day one. >>Yep, it's packed already. I heard 70,000 maybe attendees really this year. I just saw that on Twitter. Again, it continues to show that over the past 10 years we've been here, you're seeing some of the players that were here from the beginning growing up and getting bigger and stronger, becoming more platforms, not just point solutions. You're seeing new entrants coming in, new startups, and the innovation you start to see happening, it's really compelling to fun to watch. And our next segment, we have multi 10 time Cube alumni coming on and a first timer, so it should be great. We'll get into some of the innovation, >>Not only as this guest went on the cube 10 times, he also spoke at the first AWS reinvent, just like you were covering it here with Cube. But without further ado, please welcome Ronan and Kevin from NetApp. Thank you gentlemen, both for being here and for matching in your dark blue. How's the show going for you? Ronan, I'm gonna ask you first, you've been here since the beginning. How does it feel in 2022? >>First, it's amazing to see so many people, right? So many humans in one place, flesh and blood. And it's also amazing to see, it's such a celebration for people in the cloud, right? Like this is our, this is our event, the people in the cloud. I'm really, really happy to be here and be in the cube as well. >>Fantastic. It, it is a party, it's a cloud party. Yes. How are you feeling being here, Kevin? I'm >>Feeling great. I mean, going all the way back to the early days of Spot T, which was the start that eventually got acquired as Spot by NetApp. I mean this was, this was our big event. This is what we lived for. We've gone, I've gone from everything, one of the smaller booths out here on the floor all the way up to the, the huge booth that we have today. So we've kind of grown along with the AWS ecosystem and it's just a lot of fun to get here, see all the customers and talk to everybody. >>That's a lot of fun. Fun. That's the theme that we've been talking about. And we wrote a story about on, on Silicon Angle, more that growth from that getting in and getting bigger, not just an ISV or part of the startup showcase or ecosystem. The progression of the investment on how cloud has changed deliverables. You've been part of that wave. What's the biggest walk away, what's, and what's the most important thing going on now cuz it's not stopping. You got new interests coming in and the folks are rising with the tide and getting platforms built around their products. >>Yeah, I would say, you know, years ago is, is cloud in my decision path and now it's cloud is in my decision path. How much is it and how am I going to use it? And I think especially coming up over the next year, macroeconomic events and everything going on is how do I make my next dollar in the cloud go further than my last dollar? Because I know I'm gonna be there, I know I'm gonna be growing in the cloud, so how do I effectively use it to run my business going forward? >>All right, take a minute to explain Spot now part of NetApp. What's the story? What take us through for the folks that aren't familiar with the journey, where it's come from, where it's today? >>Sure. So SPOT is all about cloud optimization. We help all of our customers deploy scale and optimize their applications in the cloud. And what we do is everything from VMs to containers to any type of custom application you want to deploy, we analyze those applications, we find the best price point to run them, we right size them, we do the automation so your DevOps team doesn't have to do it. And we basically make the whole cloud serverless for you at the end of the day. So whatever you're doing in the cloud, we'll manage that for you from the lowest level of the stack all the way up to the highest level financials. >>Is this what you call the evolved cloud state? >>It is in the evolve clouds a little bit more, and Ronan can touch on that a little bit too. The Evolve clouds not only the public cloud but also the cloud that you're building OnPrem, right? A lot of big companies, it's not necessarily a hundred percent one way or the other. The Evolve cloud is which cloud am I on? Am I on an OnPrem cloud and a public cloud or am I on multiple public clouds in an OnPrem cloud? And I think Ronan, you probably have an opinion on that too. >>Yeah, and and I think what we are hearing from our customers is that many of them are in a situation where a lot of their data has been built for years on premises. They're accelerating their move to the cloud, some of them are accelerating, they're moving into multiple cloud and that situation of an on-prem that is becoming cloudy and cloudy all the time. And then accelerated cloud adoption. This is what the customers are calling the Evolve cloud and that's what we're trying to support them in that journey. >>How many customers are you supporting in this Evolve cloud? You made it seem like you can just turnkey this for everyone, which I am here >>For it. Yeah, just to be clear, I mean we have thousands of customers, right? Everything from your small startups, people just getting going with a few VMs all the way to people scaling to tens and thousands of VMs in the cloud or even beyond VM services and you know, tens of millions of spend a month. You know, people are putting a lot of investment into the cloud and we have all walks of life under our, you know, customer portfolio. >>You know, multi-cloud has been a big topic in the industry. We call it super cloud. Cause we think super cloud kind of more represents the destination to multi-cloud. I mean everyone has multiple clouds, but they're best of breed defaults. They're not by design in most cases, but we're starting to see traction towards that potential common level services fix to late. See, I still think we're on the performance game now, so I have to ask, ask you guys. Performance has becoming back in VO speeds and feeds back during the data center days. Well, I wouldn't wanna talk speeds and feeds of solutions and then cloud comes in. Now we're at the era of cloud where people are moving their workloads there. There's a lot more automation going on, A lot more, as you said, part of the decision. It is the path. Yeah. So they say, now I wanna run my workloads on the better, faster infrastructure. No developer wants to run their apps on the slower hardware. >>I think that's a tall up for you. Ronan go. >>I mean, I put out my story, no developer ever said, give me the slower software performance and and pay more fast, >>Fastest find too fastest. >>Speed feeds your back, >>Right? And and performance comes in different, in different parameters, right? They think it is come throughput, it comes through latency. And I think even a stronger word today is price performance, right? How much am I paying for the performance that that I need? NetApp is actually offering a very, very big advantage for customers on both the high end performance as well as in the dollar per performance. That is, that is needed. This is actually one of the key differentiator that Fsx for NetApp on top is an AWS storage based on the NetApp on top storage operating system. This is one of the biggest advantages it is offering. It is SAP certified, for example, where latency is the key, is the key item. It is offering new and fastest throughput available, but also leveraging some advanced features like tiering and so on, is offering unique competitive advantage in the dollar for performance specifically. >>And why, why is performance important now, in your opinion? Obviously besides the obvious of no one wants to run their stuff on the slower infrastructure, but why are some people so into it now? >>I think performance as a single parameter is, is definitely a key influencer of the user experience. None, none of us will, will compromise our our experience. The second part is performance is critical when scale is happening, right? And especially with the scale of data performance to handle massive amounts of data is is becoming more and more critical. The last thing that I'll emphasize is again is the dollar for performance. The more data you have, the more you need to handle, the more critical for you is to handle it in a cost effective way. This is kind of, that's kind of in the, in the, in the secret sauce of the success of every workload. >>There isn't a company or person here who's not thinking about doing more faster for cheaper. So you're certainly got your finger on the pulse With that, I wanna talk about a, a customer case study. A little birdie told me that a major US airline recently just had a mass of when we're where according to my notes response time and customer experience was improved by 17 x. Now that's the type of thing that cuts cost big time. Can one of you tell me a little bit more about that? >>Yeah, so I think we all flew here somehow, right? >>Exactly. It's airlines matter. Probably most folks listening, they're >>Doing very well right now. Yes, the >>Airlines and I think we all also needed to deal with changes in the flights with, with really enormous amount of complexity in managing a business like that. We actually rank and choose what, what airline to use among other things based on the level of service that they give us. And especially at the time of crunch, a lot of users are looking through a lot of data to try to optimize, >>Plus all of them who just work this holiday weekend sidebar >>E Exactly right. Can't even, and Thanksgiving is one of these crunch times that are in the middle of this. So 70 x improvement in performance means a loss seven >>Zero or >>17 1 7 1 7 x Right? >>Well, and especially when we're talking about it looks like 50,000, 50,000 messages per minute that this customer was processing. Yes. That that's a lot. That's almost a thousand messages a second. Wow. I think my math tees up there. Yeah. >>It does allow them to operate in the next level of scale and really increase their support for the customer. It also allows them to be more efficient when it comes to cost. Now they need less infrastructure to give better service across the board. The nice thing is that it didn't require them for a lot of work. Sometimes when the customers are doing their journey to the cloud, one of the things that kind of hold them back is like, is either the fear or, or maybe is the, the concern of how much effort will it take me to achieve the same performance or even a better performance in the cloud? They are a live example that not only can you achieve, you can actually exceed the performance that I have on premises and really give customer a better service >>Customer a better service. And reliability is extremely important there. 99.9%. 99% >>99. Yes. >>Yes. That second nine obviously being very important, especially when we're talking about the order of magnitude of, of data and, and actions being taken place. How much of a priority is, is reliability and security for y'all as a team? >>So reliability is a key item for, for everybody, especially in crunch times. But reliability goes beyond the nines. Specifically reliability goes into how simple it is for you to enable backup n dr, how protected are you against ransomware? This is where netup and, and including the fsx for NETUP on top richness of data management makes a huge difference. If you are able to make your copy undeletable, that is actually a game changer when it comes to, to data protection. And this is, this is something that in the past requires a lot of work, opening vaults and other things. Yeah. Now it becomes a very simple configuration that is attached to every net up on top storage, no matter where it is. >>We heard some news at VMware explorer this past fall. Early fall. You guys were there. We saw the Broadcom acquisition. Looks like it's gonna get finalized maybe sooner than later. Lot of, so a lot of speculation around VMware. Someone called the VMware like where is VMware as in where they now, nice pun it was, it was actually Nutanix people, they go at each other all the time. But Broadcom's gonna keep vse and that's where the bread and butter, that's the, that's the goose that lays the Golden eggs. Customers are there. How do you guys see your piece there with VMware cloud on AWS that integrates solution? You guys have a big part of that ecosystem. We've covered it for years. I mean we've been to every VM world now called explorer. You guys have a huge customer base with VMware customers. What's the, what's the outlook? >>Yeah, and, and I think the important part is that a big part of the enterprise workloads are running on VMware and they will continue to run on VMware in, in, in the future. And most of them will try to run in a hybrid mode if not moving completely to the cloud. The cloud give them unparallel scale, it give them DR and backup opportunities. It does a lot of goodness to that. The partnership that NetApp brings with both VMware as well ass as well as other cloud vendors is actually a game changer. Because the minute that you go to the cloud, things like DR and backup have a different economics connected to them. Suddenly you can do compute less dr definitely on backup you can actually achieve massive savings. NetApp is the only data store that is certified to run with VMware cloud. And that actually opens to the customer's huge opportunity for unparalleled data protection as well as real, real savings, hard savings. And customers that look today and they say, I'm gonna shrink my data center, I'm gonna focus on, on moving certain things to the cloud, DR and backup and especially DR and backup VMware might be one of the easiest, fastest things to take into the cloud. And the partnership betweens VMware and NetApp might actually give you >>And the ONAP is great solution. Fsx there? Yes. I think you guys got a real advantage here and I want to get into something that's kind of a gloom and doom. I don't have to go negative on this one, Savannah, but they me nervous John. But you know, if you look at the economic realities you got a lot of companies like that are in the back of a Druva, Netta, Druva, cohesive rub. Others, you know, they, you know, there's a, their generational cloud who breaks through. What's the unique thing? Because you know there's gonna be challenges in the economy and customers are gonna vote with their wallets and they start to see as they make these architectural decisions, you guys are in the middle of it. There's not, there may not be enough to go around and the musical chairs might stop or, or not, I'm not sure. But I feel like if there's gonna be a consolidation, what does that look like? What are customers thinking? Backup recovery, cloud. That's a unique thing. You mentioned economics, it's not, you can't take the old strategy and put it there from five, 10 years ago. What's different now? >>Yeah, I think when it comes to data protection, there is a real change in, in the technology landscape that opened the door for a lot of new vendors to come and offer. Should we expect consolidation? I think microeconomic outside and other things will probably drive some of that to happen. I think there is one more parameter, John, that I wanna mention in this context, which is simplicity. Many of the storage vendors, including us, including aws, you wanna make as much of the backup NDR at basically a simple checkbox that you choose together with your main workload. This is another key capabilities that is, that is being, bringing and changing the market, >>But it also needs to move up. So it's not only simplicity, it's also about moving to the applications that you use, use, and just having it baked in. It's not about you going out and finding a replication. It's like what Ronan said, we gotta make it simple and then we gotta bake it into what they use. So one of our most recent acquisitions of Insta Cluster allows us to provide our customers with open source databases and data streaming services. When those sit on top of on tap and they sit on top of spots, infrastructure optimization, you get all that for free through the database that you use. So you don't worry about it. Your database is replicated, it's highly available, and it's running at the best cost. That's where it's going. >>Awesome. >>You also recently purchased Cloud Checker as well. Yes. Do you just purchase wonderful things all the time? We >>Do. We do. We, >>I'm not >>The, if he walk and act around and then we find the best thing and then we, we break out the checkbook, no, but more seriously, it, it rounds out what customers need for the cloud. So a lot of our customers come from storage, but they need to operate the entire cloud around the storage that they have. Cloud Checker gives us that financial visibility across every single dollar that you spend in the cloud and also gives us a better go to market motion with our MSPs and our distributors than we had in the past. So we're really excited about what cloud checker can unlock for us in >>The future. Makes a lot of sense and congratulations on all the extremely exciting things going on. Our final and closing question for our guests on this year's show is we would love your, your Instagram hot take your 32nd hot take on the most important stories, messages, themes of AWS reinvent 2022. Ronan, I'm gonna start with you cause you have a smirk >>And you do it one day ahead of the keynotes, one day ahead with you. >>You can give us a little tease a little from you. >>I think that pandemic or no pandemic face to face or no face to face, the innovation in the cloud is, is actually breaking all records. And I think this year specifically, you will see a lot of focus on data and scale. I think that's, these are two amazing things that you'll see, I think doubling down. But I'm also anxious to see tomorrow, so I'll learn more about it. >>All right. We might have to chat with you a little bit after tomorrow. Is keynotes and whatnot coming up? What >>About you? I think you're gonna hear a lot about cost. How much are you spending? How far are your dollars going? How are you using the cloud to the best of your abilities? How, how efficient are you being with your dollars in the cloud? I think that's gonna be a huge topic. It's on everybody's mind. It's the macro economics situation right now. I think it's gonna be in every session of the keynote tomorrow. All >>Right, so every >>Session. Every session, >>A bulk thing. John, we're gonna have >>That. >>I'm with him. You know, all S in general, you >>Guys have, and go look up what I said. >>Yeah, >>We'll go back and look at, >>I'm gonna check on you >>On that. The record now states. There you go, Kevin. Thank both. Put it down so much. We hope that it's a stellar show for Spotify, my NetApp. Thank you. And that we have you 10 more times and more than just this once and yeah, I, I can't wait to see, well, I can't wait to hear when your predictions are accurate tomorrow and we get to learn a lot more. >>No, you gotta go to all the sessions down just to check his >>Math on that. Yeah, no, exactly. Now we have to do our homework just to call him out. Not that we're competitive or those types of people at all. John. No. On that note, thank you both for being here with us. John, thank you so much. Thank you all for tuning in from home. We are live from Las Vegas, Nevada here at AWS Reinvent with John Furrier. My name is Savannah Peterson. You're watching the Cube, the leader in high tech coverage.

(lively music) >> Good morning. Welcome back to theCUBE's coverage at Supercomputing Conference 2022, live here in Dallas. I'm Dave Nicholson with my co-host Paul Gillin. So far so good, Paul? It's been a fascinating morning Three days in, and a fascinating guest, Ian from AWS. Welcome. >> Thanks, Dave. >> What are we going to talk about? Batch computing, HPC. >> We've got a lot, let's get started. Let's dive right in. >> Yeah, we've got a lot to talk about. I mean, first thing is we recently announced our batch support for EKS. EKS is our Kubernetes, managed Kubernetes offering at AWS. And so batch computing is still a large portion of HPC workloads. While the interactive component is growing, the vast majority of systems are just kind of fire and forget, and we want to run thousands and thousands of nodes in parallel. We want to scale out those workloads. And what's unique about our AWS batch offering, is that we can dynamically scale, based upon the queue depth. And so customers can go from seemingly nothing up to thousands of nodes, and while they're executing their work they're only paying for the instances while they're working. And then as the queue depth starts to drop and the number of jobs waiting in the queue starts to drop, then we start to dynamically scale down those resources. And so it's extremely powerful. We see lots of distributed machine learning, autonomous vehicle simulation, and traditional HPC workloads taking advantage of AWS Batch. >> So when you have a Kubernetes cluster does it have to be located in the same region as the HPC cluster that's going to be doing the batch processing, or does the nature of batch processing mean, in theory, you can move something from here to somewhere relatively far away to do the batch processing? How does that work? 'Cause look, we're walking around here and people are talking about lengths of cables in order to improve performance. So what does that look like when you peel back the cover and you look at it physically, not just logically, AWS is everywhere, but physically, what does that look like? >> Oh, physically, for us, it depends on what the customer's looking for. We have workflows that are all entirely within a single region. And so where they could have a portion of say the traditional HPC workflow, is within that region as well as the batch, and they're saving off the results, say to a shared storage file system like our Amazon FSx for Lustre, or maybe aging that back to an S3 object storage for a little lower cost storage solution. Or you can have customers that have a kind of a multi-region orchestration layer to where they say, "You know what? "I've got a portion of my workflow that occurs "over on the other side of the country "and I replicate my data between the East Coast "and the West Coast just based upon business needs. "And I want to have that available to customers over there. "And so I'll do a portion of it in the East Coast "a portion of it in the West Coast." Or you can think of that even globally. It really depends upon the customer's architecture. >> So is the intersection of Kubernetes with HPC, is this relatively new? I know you're saying you're, you're announcing it. >> It really is. I think we've seen a growing perspective. I mean, Kubernetes has been a long time kind of eating everything, right, in the enterprise space? And now a lot of CIOs in the industrial space are saying, "Why am I using one orchestration layer "to manage my HPC infrastructure and another one "to manage my enterprise infrastructure?" And so there's a growing appreciation that, you know what, why don't we just consolidate on one? And so that's where we've seen a growth of Kubernetes infrastructure and our own managed Kubernetes EKS on AWS. >> Last month you announced a general availability of Trainium, of a chip that's optimized for AI training. Talk about what's special about that chip or what is is customized to the training workloads. >> Yeah, what's unique about the Trainium, is you'll you'll see 40% price performance over any other GPU available in the AWS cloud. And so we've really geared it to be that most price performance of options for our customers. And that's what we like about the silicon team, that we're part of that Annaperna acquisition, is because it really has enabled us to have this differentiation and to not just be innovating at the software level but the entire stack. That Annaperna Labs team develops our network cards, they develop our ARM cards, they developed this Trainium chip. And so that silicon innovation has become a core part of our differentiator from other vendors. And what Trainium allows you to do is perform similar workloads, just at a lower price performance. >> And you also have a chip several years older, called Inferentia- >> Um-hmm. >> Which is for inferencing. What is the difference between, I mean, when would a customer use one versus the other? How would you move the workload? >> What we've seen is customers traditionally have looked for a certain class of machine, more of a compute type that is not as accelerated or as heavy as you would need for Trainium for their inference portion of their workload. So when they do that training they want the really beefy machines that can grind through a lot of data. But when you're doing the inference, it's a little lighter weight. And so it's a different class of machine. And so that's why we've got those two different product lines with the Inferentia being there to support those inference portions of their workflow and the Trainium to be that kind of heavy duty training work. >> And then you advise them on how to migrate their workloads from one to the other? And once the model is trained would they switch to an Inferentia-based instance? >> Definitely, definitely. We help them work through what does that design of that workflow look like? And some customers are very comfortable doing self-service and just kind of building it on their own. Other customers look for a more professional services engagement to say like, "Hey, can you come in and help me work "through how I might modify my workflow to "take full advantage of these resources?" >> The HPC world has been somewhat slower than commercial computing to migrate to the cloud because- >> You're very polite. (panelists all laughing) >> Latency issues, they want to control the workload, they want to, I mean there are even issues with moving large amounts of data back and forth. What do you say to them? I mean what's the argument for ditching the on-prem supercomputer and going all-in on AWS? >> Well, I mean, to be fair, I started at AWS five years ago. And I can tell you when I showed up at Supercomputing, even though I'd been part of this community for many years, they said, "What is AWS doing at Supercomputing?" I know you care, wait, it's Amazon Web Services. You care about the web, can you actually handle supercomputing workloads? Now the thing that very few people appreciated is that yes, we could. Even at that time in 2017, we had customers that were performing HPC workloads. Now that being said, there were some real limitations on what we could perform. And over those past five years, as we've grown as a company, we've started to really eliminate those frictions for customers to migrate their HPC workloads to the AWS cloud. When I started in 2017, we didn't have our elastic fabric adapter, our low-latency interconnect. So customers were stuck with standard TCP/IP. So for their highly demanding open MPI workloads, we just didn't have the latencies to support them. So the jobs didn't run as efficiently as they could. We didn't have Amazon FSx for Lustre, our managed lustre offering for high performant, POSIX-compliant file system, which is kind of the key to a large portion of HPC workloads is you have to have a high-performance file system. We didn't even, I mean, we had about 25 gigs of networking when I started. Now you look at, with our accelerated instances, we've got 400 gigs of networking. So we've really continued to grow across that spectrum and to eliminate a lot of those really, frictions to adoption. I mean, one of the key ones, we had a open source toolkit that was jointly developed by Intel and AWS called CFN Cluster that customers were using to even instantiate their clusters. So, and now we've migrated that all the way to a fully functional supported service at AWS called AWS Parallel Cluster. And so you've seen over those past five years we have had to develop, we've had to grow, we've had to earn the trust of these customers and say come run your workloads on us and we will demonstrate that we can meet your demanding requirements. And at the same time, there's been, I'd say, more of a cultural acceptance. People have gone away from the, again, five years ago, to what are you doing walking around the show, to say, "Okay, I'm not sure I get it. "I need to look at it. "I, okay, I, now, oh, it needs to be a part "of my architecture but the standard questions, "is it secure? "Is it price performant? "How does it compare to my on-prem?" And really culturally, a lot of it is, just getting IT administrators used to, we're not eliminating a whole field, right? We're just upskilling the people that used to rack and stack actual hardware, to now you're learning AWS services and how to operate within that environment. And it's still key to have those people that are really supporting these infrastructures. And so I'd say it's a little bit of a combination of cultural shift over the past five years, to see that cloud is a super important part of HPC workloads, and part of it's been us meeting the the market segment of where we needed to with innovating both at the hardware level and at the software level, which we're going to continue to do. >> You do have an on-prem story though. I mean, you have outposts. We don't hear a lot of talk about outposts lately, but these innovations, like Inferentia, like Trainium, like the networking innovation you're talking about, are these going to make their way into outposts as well? Will that essentially become this supercomputing solution for customers who want to stay on-prem? >> Well, we'll see what the future lies, but we believe that we've got the, as you noted, we've got the hardware, we've got the network, we've got the storage. All those put together gives you a a high-performance computer, right? And whether you want it to be redundant in your local data center or you want it to be accessible via APIs from the AWS cloud, we want to provide that service to you. >> So to be clear, that's not that's not available now, but that is something that could be made available? >> Outposts are available right now, that have this the services that you need. >> All these capabilities? >> Often a move to cloud, an impetus behind it comes from the highest levels in an organization. They're looking at the difference between OpEx versus CapEx. CapEx for a large HPC environment, can be very, very, very high. Are these HPC clusters consumed as an operational expense? Are you essentially renting time, and then a fundamental question, are these multi-tenant environments? Or when you're referring to batches being run in HPC, are these dedicated HPC environments for customers who are running batches against them? When you think about batches, you think of, there are times when batches are being run and there are times when they're not being run. So that would sort of conjure, in the imagination, multi-tenancy, what does that look like? >> Definitely, and that's been, let me start with your second part first is- >> Yeah. That's been a a core area within AWS is we do not see as, okay we're going to, we're going to carve out this super computer and then we're going to allocate that to you. We are going to dynamically allocate multi-tenant resources to you to perform the workloads you need. And especially with the batch environment, we're going to spin up containers on those, and then as the workloads complete we're going to turn those resources over to where they can be utilized by other customers. And so that's where the batch computing component really is powerful, because as you say, you're releasing resources from workloads that you're done with. I can use those for another portion of the workflow for other work. >> Okay, so it makes a huge difference, yeah. >> You mentioned, that five years ago, people couldn't quite believe that AWS was at this conference. Now you've got a booth right out in the center of the action. What kind of questions are you getting? What are people telling you? >> Well, I love being on the show floor. This is like my favorite part is talking to customers and hearing one, what do they love, what do they want more of? Two, what do they wish we were doing that we're not currently doing? And three, what are the friction points that are still exist that, like, how can I make their lives easier? And what we're hearing is, "Can you help me migrate my workloads to the cloud? "Can you give me the information that I need, "both from a price for performance, "for an operational support model, "and really help me be an internal advocate "within my environment to explain "how my resources can be operated proficiently "within the AWS cloud." And a lot of times it's, let's just take your application a subset of your applications and let's benchmark 'em. And really that, AWS, one of the key things is we are a data-driven environment. And so when you take that data and you can help a customer say like, "Let's just not look at hypothetical, "at synthetic benchmarks, let's take "actually the LS-DYNA code that you're running, perhaps. "Let's take the OpenFOAM code that you're running, "that you're running currently "in your on-premises workloads, "and let's run it on AWS cloud "and let's see how it performs." And then we can take that back to your to the decision makers and say, okay, here's the price for performance on AWS, here's what we're currently doing on-premises, how do we think about that? And then that also ties into your earlier question about CapEx versus OpEx. We have models where actual, you can capitalize a longer-term purchase at AWS. So it doesn't have to be, I mean, depending upon the accounting models you want to use, we do have a majority of customers that will stay with that OpEx model, and they like that flexibility of saying, "Okay, spend as you go." We need to have true ups, and make sure that they have insight into what they're doing. I think one of the boogeyman is that, oh, I'm going to spend all my money and I'm not going to know what's available. And so we want to provide the, the cost visibility, the cost controls, to where you feel like, as an HPC administrator you have insight into what your customers are doing and that you have control over that. And so once you kind of take away some of those fears and and give them the information that they need, what you start to see too is, you know what, we really didn't have a lot of those cost visibility and controls with our on-premises hardware. And we've had some customers tell us we had one portion of the workload where this work center was spending thousands of dollars a day. And we went back to them and said, "Hey, we started to show this, "what you were spending on-premises." They went, "Oh, I didn't realize that." And so I think that's part of a cultural thing that, at an HPC, the question was, well on-premises is free. How do you compete with free? And so we need to really change that culturally, to where people see there is no free lunch. You're paying for the resources whether it's on-premises or in the cloud. >> Data scientists don't worry about budgets. >> Wait, on-premises is free? Paul mentioned something that reminded me, you said you were here in 2017, people said AWS, web, what are you even doing here? Now in 2022, you're talking in terms of migrating to cloud. Paul mentioned outposts, let's say that a customer says, "Hey, I'd like you to put "in a thousand-node cluster in this data center "that I happen to own, but from my perspective, "I want to interact with it just like it's "in your data center." In other words, the location doesn't matter. My experience is identical to interacting with AWS in an AWS data center, in a CoLo that works with AWS, but instead it's my physical data center. When we're tracking the percentage of IT that's that is on-prem versus off-prem. What is that? Is that, what I just described, is that cloud? And in five years are you no longer going to be talking about migrating to cloud because people go, "What do you mean migrating to cloud? "What do you even talking about? "What difference does it make?" It's either something that AWS is offering or it's something that someone else is offering. Do you think we'll be at that point in five years, where in this world of virtualization and abstraction, you talked about Kubernetes, we should be there already, thinking in terms of it doesn't matter as long as it meets latency and sovereignty requirements. So that, your prediction, we're all about insights and supercomputing- >> My prediction- >> In five years, will you still be talking about migrating to cloud or will that be something from the past? >> In five years, I still think there will be a component. I think the majority of the assumption will be that things are cloud-native and you start in the cloud and that there are perhaps, an aspect of that, that will be interacting with some sort of an edge device or some sort of an on-premises device. And we hear more and more customers that are saying, "Okay, I can see the future, "I can see that I'm shrinking my footprint." And, you can see them still saying, "I'm not sure how small that beachhead will be, "but right now I want to at least say "that I'm going to operate in that hybrid environment." And so I'd say, again, the pace of this community, I'd say five years we're still going to be talking about migrations, but I'd say the vast majority will be a cloud-native, cloud-first environment. And how do you classify that? That outpost sitting in someone's data center? I'd say we'd still, at least I'll leave that up to the analysts, but I think it would probably come down as cloud spend. >> Great place to end. Ian, you and I now officially have a bet. In five years we're going to come back. My contention is, no we're not going to be talking about it anymore. >> Okay. >> And kids in college are going to be like, "What do you mean cloud, it's all IT, it's all IT." And they won't remember this whole phase of moving to cloud and back and forth. With that, join us in five years to see the result of this mega-bet between Ian and Dave. I'm Dave Nicholson with theCUBE, here at Supercomputing Conference 2022, day three of our coverage with my co-host Paul Gillin. Thanks again for joining us. Stay tuned, after this short break, we'll be back with more action. (lively music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello everyone, welcome to this CUBE Showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware Cloud on AWS. It's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred Wurden, VP of Commercial Services at AWS and Narayan Bharadwaj, who's the VP and General Manager of Cloud Solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on the showcase. >> Great to be here. >> Great. Thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. >> We've been covering this VMware cloud on AWS since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch the evolution from people saying, Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. What's this mean? And the press were not really on board with the vision, but as it played out as you guys had announced together, it did work out great for VMware. It did work out great for AWS and it continues two years later and I want to just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going. I'll see multiple years. Where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware explorer just recently and going in to re:Invent, which is only a couple weeks away Feels like tomorrow. But as we prepare, a lot going on. Where are we with the evolution of the solution? >> I mean, first thing I want to say is October 2016 was a seminal moment in the history of IT. When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jassy came together to announce this. And I think John, you were there at the time I was there. It was a great, great moment. We launched the solution in 2017 year after that at VMworld, back when we called it VMworld. I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we've learned from AWS also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we built a service offering now five years old. Pretty remarkable journey. In the first years we tried to get across all the regions, that was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. In the second year, we started going really on enterprise great features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretched Clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using vSAN and NSX-T across to AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nines of availability that applications started to get with that particular feature. And we kept moving forward, all kinds of integration with AWS Direct Connect, Transit Gateways with our own advanced networking capabilities. Along the way, Disaster Recovery, we punched out two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our Outposts partnership. We were up on stage at re:Invent, again, with Pat and Andy announcing AWS Outposts and the VMware flavor of that, VMware Cloud and AWS Outposts. I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well with our federal and high certification more recently. So all in all, we are super excited. We're five years old. The customer momentum is really, really strong and we are scaling the service massively across all geos and industries. >> That's great, great update. And I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship. And this has been the theme for AWS, man, since I can remember from day one, Fred. You guys do the heavy lifting as you always say for the customers. Here, VMware comes on board. Takes advantage of the AWS and just doesn't miss a beat. Continues to move their workloads that everyone's using, vSphere, and these are big workloads on AWS. What's the AWS perspective on this? How do you see it? >> Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on-prem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's evolving quickly and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about. But that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the customers. So it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint, from a business standpoint. And obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and responding to what customers want. So pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to while at VMC. >> That's a great value proposition. We've been talking about that in context to anyone building on top of the cloud. They can have their own supercloud, as we call it, if you take advantage of all the CapEx and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and continues to make in performance IaaS and PaaS, all great stuff. I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level, what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options in the market? What makes it different? What's the combination? You mentioned jointly engineered. What are some of the key differentiators of the service compared to others? >> Yeah. I think one of the key things Fred talked about is this jointly engineered notion. Right from day one we were the early adopters of the AWS Nitro platform. The reinvention of EC2 back five years ago. And so we have been having a very, very strong engineering partnership at that level. I think from a VMware customer standpoint, you get the full software-defined data center, compute storage networking on EC2, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally on AWS EC2 global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us, what customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service. And this was somewhat new to VMware. But we took away the pain of this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers had to provision rack stack hardware, configure the software on top, and then upgrade the software and the security patches on top. So we took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud in AWS. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the Log4j debacle. Industry was just going through that. Favorite proof point from customers was before they could even race this issue to us, we sent them a notification saying, we already patched all of your systems, no action from you. The customers were super thrilled. I mean, these are large banks. Many other customers around the world were super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >> Narayan, that's a great point. The whole managed service piece brings up the security. You kind of teasing at it, but there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera more bits than ever before and at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's going to be a zero-day vulnerability out there. It happens. We saw one with Fortinet this week. This came out of the woodwork. But moving fast on those patches, it's huge. This brings up the whole support angle. I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well, because to me, we see the value when we talk to customers on theCUBE about this. It was a real easy understanding of what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the AWS. But the question that comes up that we want to get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? >> Well, what's interesting about this is that it's done mutually. We have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer, including all the way up into the app layer, as you think about some of the other workloads like SAP, we'll go end-to-end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them. And on top of that, we look at where we're improving reliability in as a first order of principle between both companies. So from availability and reliability standpoint, it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're going to go help the customer resolve that. It works really well. >> On the VMware side, what's been the feedback there? What are some of the updates? >> Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we work phenomenal backend relationship with AWS. Customers call VMware for the service or any issues. And then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The key management that we jointly do. All of the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about. I think on the front end, we also have a really good group of solution architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution, do complex things like cloud migration, which is much, much easier with the VMware Cloud in AWS. We're presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways. And so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day. >> You had mentioned, I've got list here of some of the innovations. You mentioned the stretch clustering, getting the geos working, advanced network, Disaster Recovery, FedRAMP, public sector certifications, Outposts. All good, you guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship. The question that I'm interested in is what's next? What recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in? What's on the list this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the new things, the list of accomplishments? People want to know what's next. They don't want to see stagnant growth here. They want to see more action as cloud continues to scale and modern applications cloud native. You're seeing more and more containers, more and more CI/CD pipelining with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new? What's the new innovations? >> Absolutely. And I think as a five year old service offering, innovation is top of mind for us every single day. So just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explore. First of all, our new platform i4i.metal. It's isolate based. It's pretty awesome. It's the latest and greatest, all the speeds and feeds that we would expect from VMware and AWS at this point in our relationship. We announced two different storage options. This notion of working from customer feedback, allowing customers even more price reductions, really take off that storage and park it externally and separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS FSx with NetApp ONTAP, which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based really excited about this offering as well. And the second storage offering called VMware Cloud Flex Storage. VMware's own managed storage offering. Beyond that, we have done a lot of other innovations as well. I really wanted to talk about VMware Cloud Flex Compute where previously customers could only scale by hosts and a host is 36 to 48 cores, give or take. But with VMware Cloud Flex Compute, we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the vCPU memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, top of ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in the industry. We are seeing many, many customers ask for this. We are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware Cloud DR solution. A lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots and backups are actually safe to use. So there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well. A lot of networking innovations with Project Northstar. Our ability to have layer four through layer seven, new SaaS services in that area as well. Keep in mind that the service already supports managed Kubernetes for containers. It's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines. And so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMs and containers is sort at the heart of our (faintly speaking). >> The networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on. Every year it's the same, same conversation, get better faster, networking more options there. The Flex Compute is interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the resource-defined versus hardware-defined? Because this is what we had saw at Explore coming out, that notion of resource-defined versus hardware-defined. What does that mean? >> Yeah, I mean I think we have been super successful in this hardware-defined notion. We we're scaling by the hardware unit that we present as software-defined data centers. And so that's been super successful. But customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally. Lower the cost even more. And so this is the part where resource-defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers request before fiber machines, five containers. It's size exactly for that. And then as utilization grows, we elastically behind the scenes, we're able to grow it through policies. So that's a whole different dimension. That's a whole different service offering that adds value and customers are comfortable. They can go from one to the other. They can go back to that host based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. >> It's cloud flexibility right there. I like the name. Fred, let's get into some of the examples of customers, if you don't mind, let's get into some of the, we have some time. I want to unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard again on theCUBE is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship, they love the cloud positioning of it. And then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like feels great. It's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they start consuming higher level services. That adoption next level happens and because it's in the cloud. So can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware cloud on AWS on getting started and then how do they progress once they're there? How does it evolve? Can you just walk us through a couple use cases? >> Sure. Well, there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that like you said, as there's more and more bits, you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the i4 and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds. But what customers are doing with it, like the college in New Jersey, they're accelerating their deployment on onboarding over like 7,400 students over a six to eight month period. And they've really realized a ton of savings. But what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native services too. So connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this. The options there obviously are tied to all the innovation that we have across any services, whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with Tanzu or with any other container and or services within AWS. So there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing, which is moved quickly with full compliance, whether it's in like healthcare or regulatory business is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with Textract or any other really cool service that has monthly and quarterly innovations. So there's things that you just could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their current app base in a rapid fashion. So pretty excited about it. There's a lot of examples. I think I probably don't have time to go into too many here. But that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform. >> Narayan, what's your perspective from the VMware side? 'Cause you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where it's being rolled out 'cause you now have a lot of hybrid too. So what's your take on what's happening in with customers? >> I mean, it's been phenomenal. The customer adoption of this and banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production-grade applications, tier one applications on the service over the last five years. And so I have a couple of really good examples. S&P Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS Markit, big conglomeration now. Both customers were using VMware Cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the use case, one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers? And then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the global, which there were many. And so one specific example for this company was how they migrated 1000 workloads to VMware Cloud and AWS in just six weeks. Pretty phenomenal if you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process, people process technology. And the beauty of the technology going from VMware point A to VMware point B. The lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware Cloud and AWS. So that's one of my favorite examples. There are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see. The good thing is we are seeing rapid expansion across the globe, but constantly entering new markets with a limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap. >> It's great to see. I mean, the data center migrations go from months, many, many months to weeks. It's interesting to see some of those success stories. Congratulations. >> One of the other interesting fascinating benefits is the sustainability improvement in terms of being green. So the efficiency gains that we have both in current generation and new generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic, they're also saving power, which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time. They're seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which I like. We just all need to do our part there and this is a big part of it here. >> It's a huge point about the sustainability. Fred, I'm glad you called that out. The other one I would say is supply chain issue is another one. You see that constraints. I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security. I mean, I remember interviewing Steven Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013 and at that time people were saying, the cloud's not secure. And he's like, listen, it's more secure in the cloud on-premise. And if you look at the security breaches, it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities, not so much hardware. So there's a lot, the stay current on the isolation there is hard. So I think the security and supply chain, Fred, is another one. Do you agree? >> I absolutely agree. It's hard to manage supply chain nowadays. We put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and have the resources that are available and run them more efficiently. And then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is the only P1. And if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers, there's nothing more important. >> And Narayan, your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things is really going to get better. All right, final question. I really want to thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I want to end with a curve ball and put you eyes on the spot. We're talking about a new modern shift. We're seeing another inflection point. We've been documenting it. It's almost like cloud hitting another inflection point with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer. Continue to put a lot of pressure and innovation in the infrastructure side. So the question is for you guys each to answer is, what's the same and what's different in today's market? So it's like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What's changed for the better and what's still the same thing hanging around that people are focused on? Can you share your perspective? >> I'll tackle it. Businesses are complex and they're often unique, that's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine managed services and new innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today. Leveraging world class hardware that you don't have to worry about, that's elastic. You could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of engineers can go actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only going to continue to accelerate that. That's my take, Narayan. >> You got a lot of platform to compete on. With Amazon, you got a lot to build on. Narayan, your side. What's your answer to that question? >> I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constantly (faintly speaking). I think what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that production quickly and efficiently. I think we are seeing, we are at the very start of that sort of journey. Of course, we have invested in Kubernetes, the means to an end, but we're so much more beyond that's happening in industry and I think we're at the very, very beginning of this transformations, enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we are inherently part of it. >> Well, gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on solving these complexities with distractions, whether it's higher level services with large scale infrastructure. At your fingertips, infrastructure as code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen and Fred with AWS on your side. And we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator again, being a cloud operator and developer. So the developer ops is kind of, DevOps is changing too. So all for the better. Thank you for spending the time and we're seeing again that traction with the VMware customer base and AWS getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives. >> We appreciate it. Thank you so much. >> Thank you John. >> This is theCUBE and AWS VMware showcase accelerating business transformation, VMware Cloud on AWS. Jointly engineered solution bringing innovation to the VMware customer base, going to the cloud and beyond. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (gentle music)

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to the Cube special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Foer, host of the Cube. We've got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, our videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and aws. This is the customer successes with VMware cloud on AWS showcase, accelerating business transformation here in the showcase with Samir Candu Worldwide. VMware strategic alliance solution, architect leader with AWS Samir. Great to have you and Daniel Re Myer, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are, are working together. You're the key players in the re relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Greatly appreciate it. >>Great to have you guys both on, As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Geling, then CEO and then then CEO AWS at Andy Chasy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success. OFM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since, and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later we got this whole inflection point coming. You're starting to see, you know, this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side. More automation, more serverless, I mean, and a, I mean it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kinda a whole nother level. Where are we, Samir? Let's start with you on, on the relationship. >>Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced, and then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware cloud on aws. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware day in, day out. As far as advancing VMware cloud on aws. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with a solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements, you know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right? More recently, one of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. >>And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware cloud on aws, and even with VMware's, other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >>Great stuff. Daniel, I wanna get to you in a second. Upon this principal architect position you have in your title, you're the global a synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly world, talking about how the, the workloads on it has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AI ops, you got it. Ops changing a lot, you got a lot more automation edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the >>Relationship? So at at, at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. We are also enabling US mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembled globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers, that's, that's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the, the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. And over the time we, we really have involved the solution. As Samia mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware cloud on aws. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of, of workload. So for example, we just added the I four I host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as you mentioned it, AI workloads. >>Yeah. So I wanna guess just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation. You know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in the queue in the past couple weeks in a big way that the OPS teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds OP a little bit weird, but operation IT operations is now part of the, a lot more data ops, security writing code composing, you know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing? What are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >>That, that's a great point because originally VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people at customers. So for example, aws very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the IT ops area. And usually these are very different, very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's, it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customers, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, well we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service, recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure. That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >>Samir, talk about your perspective. I wanna get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS remar of, actually it was Amazon res machine learning automation, robotics and space. It was really kinda the confluence of industrial IOT software physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code automation, you know, Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster. Yeah, I mean, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on, on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >>Yeah, totally. Right. And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware cloud on aws, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's gonna give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with iot, even with utilizing Alexa or if there's any other service that you wanna utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings. Right off the top though, with digital transformation, right? You, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology. Even in your business leaders are looking to reinvent their business. They're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy. Maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. Okay. Then also, Oh, >>Go ahead, finish >>Your thought. No, no, I was gonna say, what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that VS four admin that's used to their on-premises at environment. Now with VMware cloud on aws, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, yeah. You still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware cloud on AWS two. >>Danielle, I wanna get your thoughts on this because at at explore and, and, and after the event, now as we prep for Cuban and reinvent coming up the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators and it's like hundreds of thousands of, of, of, of users and millions of people talking about and and peaked on VM we're interested in v VMware. The common thread was one's one, one person said, I'm trying to figure out where I'm gonna put my career in the next 10 to 15 years. And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm gonna be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet architects, is it Solution architect sre. So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are gonna try to make these career decisions, like how, what am I gonna work on? And it's, and that was kind of fuzzy, but I wanna get your thoughts. How would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity and what's gonna happen? >>So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means in, in to to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills? And, and trainings is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the, the answer is to make digital transformation a success. We need not just to talk about technology, but also about process people and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware cloud on a, on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment. You can use the same managing and monitoring tools. If you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of, of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware cloud on aws. And that gives not just leaders, but but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in, in such a complex project, >>The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go and, and then now that once they're confident they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because you know, on your side you've got higher level services, you got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, lot improvement. So, okay, nothing's changed. I can still run my job now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the, for the, for the customer there? >>Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud, but if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you wanna utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on premises or even in VMware cloud on aws, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you wanna expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >>Great stuff. I love, love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, cuz people wanna know what's goes on in behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationship? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? You guys just have a zoom meeting, Do you guys fly out, you write go do you ship thing? I mean I'm making it up, but you get the idea, what's the, what's, how does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >>So we hope to get more frequently together in person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to zoom conferences and and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if we are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have reg regular assembled now also in person geo based. So for emia, for the Americas, for aj. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >>What's interesting, you know, as, as events are coming back to here, before you get, you weigh in, I'll comment, as the cube's been going back out to events, we are hearing comments like what, what pandemic we were more productive in the pandemic. I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in person, they're happy to see people, but there's no one's, no one's really missed the beat. I mean it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More if anything, productivity gains. >>Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, even if you look at AWS's and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said met earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation and VMware cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there have been, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology we've been able to still communicate work with our customers. Even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot. We had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware cloud on AWS outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware cloud on AWS outposts. So even with the on premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >>And our last segment we did here on the, on this showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean go, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and, and people can reference that. We won't get into it here, but I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Cuz again, I think right now we're in at a, an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with reinvent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >>So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked us for over the last years. Whenever, whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware cloud on aws, you have to add additional notes. Now we have three different note types with different ratios of compute, storage and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS six one, NetApp onap, and VMware cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements at the upcoming events. >>Samir, what's your, what's your reaction take on the, on what's coming down on your side? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scale with their needs, right? So with VMware cloud on aws, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are gonna be announcements, innovations and whatnot with outcoming events. But together we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS to Daniel's point storage, for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's gonna be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events that's gonna give us the options to even advance our own services together. >>Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I wanna get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in, in the open conversations on the cube is in the old days it was going back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem they did best, had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships and they do business together and they, they sell to each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture cuz we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining. >>And this, you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides. They come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem, you know, interplay. What's your thoughts on this? And, and, and because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much. Innovation is only, you gotta do innovation, but when you do innovation, you gotta integrate it, you gotta connect it. So what is, how do you guys see this as a, as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >>So we are, we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even, even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware cloud on aws moving to the cloud, firstly it's, it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe it's some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise. You can do this if you decide you want to stay with some of your services on premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can mana manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead and it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on premise or the cloud. It it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both works, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware cloud on aws, by the way, in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by aws. More than 200 different services ranging from object based storage, load balancing and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >>We, we call that super cloud in, in a, in a way that we be generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is gonna where cloud is right now, you guys are, are not commodity. Amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things. Having got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. Absolutely. And everybody wins. >>Yeah. And a hundred percent agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it it, it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with aws, maybe more proficient with the viewers technology, but then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud. Maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are. Maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware cloud on aws. Maybe you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skill, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of, back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the >>Day. I mean, I just think it's, it's a, it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean, you don't have to do anything. You still run the fear, the way you working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >>Yeah, absolutely. And if, if you look, not every, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we gave, we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time they can free up resources to develop new innovations and, and grow their business. >>Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Danielle, thank you for coming to Germany, Octoberfest, I know it's evening over there, your weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir final give you the final word, AWS reinvents coming up. Preparing. We're gonna have an exclusive with Adam, but Fry, we do a curtain raise, a dual preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at reinvent this year? The big show? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what I call a chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking for to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there. But if they wanna be hands on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, you know, been in CIS admin world and whatnot, being hands on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. Yeah, >>Reinvents an amazing show for the in person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at the cube. It's becoming popular. We more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media, so thanks, thanks for sharing that. Samir Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud Ons, really accelerating business transformation withs and VMware. I'm John Fur with the cube, thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to this cube showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware cloud on it's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred and VP of commercial services at aws and NA Ryan Bard, who's the VP and general manager of cloud solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on this showcase. >>Great to be here. >>Hey, thanks for having us on. It's a great topic. You know, we, we've been covering this VMware cloud on abus since, since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch the evolution from people saying, Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever seen. It's what's this mean? And depress work were, we're kind of not really on board with kind of the vision, but as it played out as you guys had announced together, it did work out great for VMware. It did work out great for a D and it continues two years later and I want just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going. I'll see multiple years. Where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware explorer just recently and going in to reinvent, which is only a couple weeks away, feels like tomorrow. But you know, as we prepare a lot going on, where are we with the evolution of the solution? >>I mean, first thing I wanna say is, you know, PBO 2016 was a someon moment and the history of it, right? When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jessey came together to announce this and I think John, you were there at the time I was there, it was a great, great moment. We launched the solution in 2017, the year after that at VM Word back when we called it Word, I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we have learned froms also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we build a service offering now five years old, pretty remarkable journey. You know, in the first years we tried to get across all the regions, you know, that was a big focus because there was so much demand for it. >>In the second year we started going really on enterprise grade features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretch clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using VSA and NSX across two AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nine s availability that applications start started to get with that particular feature. And we kept moving forward all kinds of integration with AWS direct connect transit gateways with our own advanced networking capabilities. You know, along the way, disaster recovery, we punched out two, two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our outposts partnership. We were up on stage at Reinvent, again with Pat Andy announcing AWS outposts and the VMware flavor of that VMware cloud and AWS outposts. I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well with our federal and high certification more recently. So all in all, we are super excited. We're five years old. The customer momentum is really, really strong and we are scaling the service massively across all geos and industries. >>That's great, great update. And I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship. And, and this has kind of been the theme for AWS since I can remember from day one. Fred, you guys do the heavy lifting as as, as you always say for the customers here, VMware comes on board, takes advantage of the AWS and kind of just doesn't miss a beat, continues to move their workloads that everyone's using, you know, vSphere and these are, these are big workloads on aws. What's the AWS perspective on this? How do you see it? >>Yeah, it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the, the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on Preem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's, that's evolving quickly and, and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about. But that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the, for the customer. So it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint, from a business standpoint. And obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and, and responding to what customers want. So pretty, pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to bmc. Yeah, >>That's what great value publish. We've been talking about that in context too. Anyone building on top of the cloud, they can have their own supercloud as we call it. If you take advantage of all the CapEx and and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and, and and continues to make in performance IAS and pass all great stuff. I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level, what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options on the market? What makes it different? What's the combination? You mentioned jointly engineered, what are some of the key differentiators of the service compared to others? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things Fred talked about is this jointly engineered notion right from day one. We were the earlier doctors of AWS Nitro platform, right? The reinvention of E two back five years ago. And so we have been, you know, having a very, very strong engineering partnership at that level. I think from a VMware customer standpoint, you get the full software defined data center or compute storage networking on EC two, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally, right on aws EC two global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us that customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service, right? And this was somewhat new to VMware, but we took away the pain of this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers had to provision rack, stack hardware, configure the software on top, and then upgrade the software and the security batches on top. >>So we took, took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud and aws. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the lock for j debacle industry was just going through that, right? Favorite proof point from customers was before they put even race this issue to us, we sent them a notification saying we already patched all of your systems, no action from you. The customers were super thrilled. I mean these are large banks, many other customers around the world, super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >>Nora, that's a great, so that's a great point. You know, the whole managed service piece brings up the security, you kind of teasing at it, but you know, there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. You know, Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera, there's more bits than ever before and, and at at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's gonna be a zero day vulnerability out there. Just, it happens. We saw one with fornet this week, this came outta the woodwork. But moving fast on those patches, it's huge. This brings up the whole support angle. I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well, because to me we see the value when we, when we talk to customers on the cube about this, you know, it was a real, real easy understanding of how, what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the aws. But the question that comes up that we wanna get more clarity on is how do you guys handle support together? >>Well, what's interesting about this is that it's, it's done mutually. We have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer, including all the way up into the app layer, as you think about some of the other workloads like sap, we'll go end to end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them. And on top of that, we look at where, where we're improving reliability in, in as a first order of, of principle between both companies. So from an availability and reliability standpoint, it's, it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land, we're gonna go help the customer resolve. That works really well >>On the VMware side. What's been the feedback there? What's the, what are some of the updates? >>Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we have a phenomenal backend relationship with aws. Customers call VMware for the service for any issues and, and then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The BASKE management that we jointly do, right? All of the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about. I think on the front end, we also have a really good group of solution architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution. Do complex things like cloud migration, which is much, much easier with VMware cloud aws, you know, we are presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways. And so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day. >>You know, you had mentioned, I've got a list here, some of the innovations the, you mentioned the stretch clustering, you know, getting the GOs working, Advanced network, disaster recovery, you know, fed, Fed ramp, public sector certifications, outposts, all good. You guys are checking the boxes every year. You got a good, good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship. The question that I'm interested in is what's next? What recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in what's on the lists this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the, the new things, the list of accomplishments, people wanna know what's next. They don't wanna see stagnant growth here, they wanna see more action, you know, as as cloud kind of continues to scale and modern applications cloud native, you're seeing more and more containers, more and more, you know, more CF C I C D pipe pipelining with with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new, what's the new innovations? >>Absolutely. And I think as a five yearold service offering innovation is top of mind for us every single day. So just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explorer. First of all, our new platform i four I dot metal, it's isolate based, it's pretty awesome. It's the latest and greatest, all the speeds and feeds that we would expect from VMware and aws. At this point in our relationship. We announced two different storage options. This notion of working from customer feedback, allowing customers even more price reductions, really take off that storage and park it externally, right? And you know, separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS Fsx, with NetApp on tap, which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based, really excited about this offering as well. >>And the second storage offering for VMware cloud Flex Storage, VMware's own managed storage offering. Beyond that, we have done a lot of other innovations as well. I really wanted to talk about VMware cloud Flex Compute, where previously customers could only scale by hosts and a host is 36 to 48 cores, give or take. But with VMware cloud Flex Compute, we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the V C P memory and storage that maps to the applications, however small they might be. So this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that that we are launching in the market this year. And then last but not least, talk about ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in industry. We are seeing many, many customers ask for this. We are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware cloud DR solution. >>A lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots and backups are actually safe to use. So there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well. A lot of networking innovations with Project Knot star for ability to have layer flow through layer seven, you know, new SaaS services in that area as well. Keep in mind that the service already supports managed Kubernetes for containers. It's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines. And so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMs and containers and sort of at the heart of our office, >>The networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on. Every year it's the same, same conversation, get better, faster networking, more, more options there. The flex computes. Interesting. If you don't mind me getting a quick clarification, could you explain the Drew screen resource defined versus hardware defined? Because this is kind of what we had saw at Explore coming out, that notion of resource defined versus hardware defined. What's the, what does that mean? >>Yeah, I mean I think we have been super successful in this hardware defined notion. We we're scaling by the hardware unit that we present as software defined data centers, right? And so that's been super successful. But we, you know, customers wanted more, especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally, right? Lower their costs even more. And so this is the part where resource defined starts to be very, very interesting as a way to think about, you know, here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customers request for fiber machines, five containers, its size exactly for that. And then as utilization grows, we elastically behind the scenes, we're able to grow it through policies. So that's a whole different dimension. It's a whole different service offering that adds value and customers are comfortable. They can go from one to the other, they can go back to that post based model if they so choose to. And there's a jump off point across these two different economic models. >>It's kind of cloud of flexibility right there. I like the name Fred. Let's get into some of the examples of customers, if you don't mind. Let's get into some of the ex, we have some time. I wanna unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments. One of the things we've heard again on the cube is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship, they love the cloud positioning of it. And then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like, feels great. It's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they would start consuming higher level services, kind of that adoption next level happens and because it it's in the cloud, so, So can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware cloud on AWS on getting started, and then how do they progress once they're there? How does it evolve? Can you just walk us through a couple of use cases? >>Sure. There's a, well there's a couple. One, it's pretty interesting that, you know, like you said, as there's more and more bits you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the I four and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around a lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds. But what customers are doing with it, like the college in New Jersey, they're accelerating their deployment on a, on onboarding over like 7,400 students over a six to eight month period. And they've really realized a ton of savings. But what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native services too. So connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this. The, the options there obviously are tied to all the innovation that we have across any services, whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with Tanu or with any other container and or services within aws. >>So there's, there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing, which is moved quickly with full compliance, whether it's in like healthcare or regulatory business is, is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with tech extract or any other really cool service that has, you know, monthly and quarterly innovations. So there's things that you just can't, could not do before that are coming out and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their, their current app base in, in a rapid fashion. So pretty excited about it. There's a lot of examples. I think I probably don't have time to go into too, too many here. Yeah. But that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform. >>Nora, what's your perspective from the VMware sy? So, you know, you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's, you know, higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where's being rolled out? Cuz you now have a lot of hybrid too, so, so what's your, what's your take on what, what's happening in with customers? >>I mean, it's been phenomenal, the, the customer adoption of this and you know, banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production grade applications, tier one applications on the service over the last five years. And so, you know, I have a couple of really good examples. S and p Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS market, big sort of conglomeration. Now both customers were using VMware cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the, with the use case, one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers? And then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the global, which there were many. And so one specific example for this company was how they migrated thousand 1000 workloads to VMware cloud AWS in just six weeks. Pretty phenomenal. If you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process, people process technology and the beauty of the technology going from VMware point A to VMware point B, the the lowest cost, lowest risk approach to adopting VMware, VMware cloud, and aws. So that's, you know, one of my favorite examples. There are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see. The good thing is we are seeing rapid expansion across the globe that constantly entering new markets with the limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap there. >>Yeah, it's great to see, I mean the data center migrations go from months, many, many months to weeks. It's interesting to see some of those success stories. So congratulations. One >>Of other, one of the other interesting fascinating benefits is the sustainability improvement in terms of being green. So the efficiency gains that we have both in current generation and new generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic, they're also saving power, which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time. They're, they're seeing those benefits. If you're running really inefficiently in your own data center, that is just a, not a great use of power. So the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads is, are pretty phenomenal just in being more green, which I like. We just all need to do our part there. And, and this is a big part of it here. >>It's a huge, it's a huge point about the sustainability. Fred, I'm glad you called that out. The other one I would say is supply chain issues. Another one you see that constrains, I can't buy hardware. And the third one is really obvious, but no one really talks about it. It's security, right? I mean, I remember interviewing Stephen Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013, and you know, at that time people were saying the cloud's not secure. And he's like, listen, it's more secure in the cloud on premise. And if you look at the security breaches, it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities, not so much hardware. So there's a lot you gotta to stay current on, on the isolation there is is hard. So I think, I think the security and supply chain, Fred is, is another one. Do you agree? >>I I absolutely agree. It's, it's hard to manage supply chain nowadays. We put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and, and have the resources that are available and run them, run them more efficiently. Yeah, and then like you said on the security point, security is job one. It is, it is the only P one. And if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers, there's nothing more important. >>And naron your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things, it's really gonna get better. All right, final question. I really wanna thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I wanna kind of end with kind of a curve ball and put you eyes on the spot. We're talking about a modern, a new modern shift. It's another, we're seeing another inflection point, we've been documenting it, it's almost like cloud hitting another inflection point with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer. Continue to put a lot of pressure and, and innovation in the infrastructure side. So the question is for you guys each to answer is what's the same and what's different in today's market? So it's kind of like we want more of the same here, but also things have changed radically and better here. What are the, what's, what's changed for the better and where, what's still the same kind of thing hanging around that people are focused on? Can you share your perspective? >>I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll tackle it. You know, businesses are complex and they're often unique that that's the same. What's changed is how fast you can innovate. The ability to combine manage services and new innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today. Leveraging world class hardware that you don't have to worry about that's elastic. You, you could not do that even five, 10 years ago to the degree you can today, especially with innovation. So innovation is accelerating at a, at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the, the set of services that are available to them. It's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of of engineers can go actually develop in a week. It is phenomenal. So super excited about this space and it's only gonna continue to accelerate that. That's my take. All right. >>You got a lot of platform to compete on with, got a lot to build on then you're Ryan, your side, What's your, what's your answer to that question? >>I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constant. I think what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly, you know, build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that motor production quickly and efficiently. I think we, we are seeing, you know, we are at the very start of that sort of of journey. Of course we have invested in Kubernetes the means to an end, but there's so much more beyond that's happening in industry. And I think we're at the very, very beginning of this transformations, enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we are inherently part of it. >>Yeah. Well gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on, you know, solving these complexities with distractions. Whether it's, you know, higher level services with large scale infrastructure at, at your fingertips. Infrastructures, code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen in Fred with AWS on your side. And we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator, again, being a cloud operator and developer. So the developer ops is kind of, DevOps is kind of changing too. So all for the better. Thank you for spending the time and we're seeing again, that traction with the VMware customer base and of us getting, getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives, >>I appreciate it. Thank you so >>Much. Okay, thank you John. Okay, this is the Cube and AWS VMware showcase, accelerating business transformation. VMware cloud on aws, jointly engineered solution, bringing innovation to the VMware customer base, going to the cloud and beyond. I'm John Fur, your host. Thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to the special cube presentation of accelerating business transformation on vmc on aws. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We have dawan director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on adb. This is a great showcase and should be a lot of fun. Ashish, thanks for coming on. >>Hi John. Thank you so much. >>So VMware cloud on AWS has been well documented as this big success for VMware and aws. As customers move their workloads into the cloud, IT operations of VMware customers has signaling a lot of change. This is changing the landscape globally is on cloud migration and beyond. What's your take on this? Can you open this up with the most important story around VMC on aws? >>Yes, John. The most important thing for our customers today is the how they can safely and swiftly move their ID infrastructure and applications through cloud. Now, VMware cloud AWS is a service that allows all vSphere based workloads to move to cloud safely, swiftly and reliably. Banks can move their core, core banking platforms, insurance companies move their core insurance platforms, telcos move their goss, bss, PLA platforms, government organizations are moving their citizen engagement platforms using VMC on aws because this is one platform that allows you to move it, move their VMware based platforms very fast. Migrations can happen in a matter of days instead of months. Extremely securely. It's a VMware manage service. It's very secure and highly reliably. It gets the, the reliability of the underlyings infrastructure along with it. So win-win from our customers perspective. >>You know, we reported on this big news in 2016 with Andy Chas, the, and Pat Geling at the time, a lot of people said it was a bad deal. It turned out to be a great deal because not only could VMware customers actually have a cloud migrate to the cloud, do it safely, which was their number one concern. They didn't want to have disruption to their operations, but also position themselves for what's beyond just shifting to the cloud. So I have to ask you, since you got the finger on the pulse here, what are we seeing in the market when it comes to migrating and modern modernizing in the cloud? Because that's the next step. They go to the cloud, you guys have done that, doing it, then they go, I gotta modernize, which means kind of upgrading or refactoring. What's your take on that? >>Yeah, absolutely. Look, the first step is to help our customers assess their infrastructure and licensing and entire ID operations. Once we've done the assessment, we then create their migration plans. A lot of our customers are at that inflection point. They're, they're looking at their real estate, ex data center, real estate. They're looking at their contracts with colocation vendors. They really want to exit their data centers, right? And VMware cloud and AWS is a perfect solution for customers who wanna exit their data centers, migrate these applications onto the AWS platform using VMC on aws, get rid of additional real estate overheads, power overheads, be socially and environmentally conscious by doing that as well, right? So that's the migration story, but to your point, it doesn't end there, right? Modernization is a critical aspect of the entire customer journey as as well customers, once they've migrated their ID applications and infrastructure on cloud get access to all the modernization services that AWS has. They can correct easily to our data lake services, to our AIML services, to custom databases, right? They can decide which applications they want to keep and which applications they want to refactor. They want to take decisions on containerization, make decisions on service computing once they've come to the cloud. But the most important thing is to take that first step. You know, exit data centers, come to AWS using vmc or aws, and then a whole host of modernization options available to them. >>Yeah, I gotta say, we had this right on this, on this story, because you just pointed out a big thing, which was first order of business is to make sure to leverage the on-prem investments that those customers made and then migrate to the cloud where they can maintain their applications, their data, their infrastructure operations that they're used to, and then be in position to start getting modern. So I have to ask you, how are you guys specifically, or how is VMware cloud on s addressing these needs of the customers? Because what happens next is something that needs to happen faster. And sometimes the skills might not be there because if they're running old school, IT ops now they gotta come in and jump in. They're gonna use a data cloud, they're gonna want to use all kinds of machine learning, and there's a lot of great goodness going on above the stack there. So as you move with the higher level services, you know, it's a no brainer, obviously, but they're not, it's not yesterday's higher level services in the cloud. So how are, how is this being addressed? >>Absolutely. I think you hit up on a very important point, and that is skills, right? When our customers are operating, some of the most critical applications I just mentioned, core banking, core insurance, et cetera, they're most of the core applications that our customers have across industries, like even, even large scale ERP systems, they're actually sitting on VMware's vSphere platform right now. When the customer wants to migrate these to cloud, one of the key bottlenecks they face is skill sets. They have the trained manpower for these core applications, but for these high level services, they may not, right? So the first order of business is to help them ease this migration pain as much as possible by not wanting them to, to upscale immediately. And we VMware cloud and AWS exactly does that. I mean, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to create new skill set for doing this, right? Their existing skill sets suffice, but at the same time, it gives them that, that leeway to build that skills roadmap for their team. DNS is invested in that, right? Yes. We want to help them build those skills in the high level services, be it aml, be it, be it i t be it data lake and analytics. We want to invest in them, and we help our customers through that. So that ultimately the ultimate goal of making them drop data is, is, is a front and center. >>I wanna get into some of the use cases and success stories, but I want to just reiterate, hit back your point on the skill thing. Because if you look at what you guys have done at aws, you've essentially, and Andy Chassey used to talk about this all the time when I would interview him, and now last year Adam was saying the same thing. You guys do all the heavy lifting, but if you're a VMware customer user or operator, you are used to things. You don't have to be relearn to be a cloud architect. Now you're already in the game. So this is like almost like a instant path to cloud skills for the VMware. There's hundreds of thousands of, of VMware architects and operators that now instantly become cloud architects, literally overnight. Can you respond to that? Do you agree with that? And then give an example. >>Yes, absolutely. You know, if you have skills on the VMware platform, you know, know, migrating to AWS using via by cloud and AWS is absolutely possible. You don't have to really change the skills. The operations are exactly the same. The management systems are exactly the same. So you don't really have to change anything but the advantages that you get access to all the other AWS services. So you are instantly able to integrate with other AWS services and you become a cloud architect immediately, right? You are able to solve some of the critical problems that your underlying IT infrastructure has immediately using this. And I think that's a great value proposition for our customers to use this service. >>And just one more point, I want just get into something that's really kind of inside baseball or nuanced VMC or VMware cloud on AWS means something. Could you take a minute to explain what on AWS means? Just because you're like hosting and using Amazon as a, as a work workload? Being on AWS means something specific in your world, being VMC on AWS mean? >>Yes. This is a great question, by the way, You know, on AWS means that, you know, VMware's vse platform is, is a, is an iconic enterprise virtualization software, you know, a disproportionately high market share across industries. So when we wanted to create a cloud product along with them, obviously our aim was for them, for the, for this platform to have the goodness of the AWS underlying infrastructure, right? And, and therefore, when we created this VMware cloud solution, it it literally use the AWS platform under the eighth, right? And that's why it's called a VMs VMware cloud on AWS using, using the, the, the wide portfolio of our regions across the world and the strength of the underlying infrastructure, the reliability and, and, and sustainability that it offers. And therefore this product is called VMC on aws. >>It's a distinction I think is worth noting, and it does reflect engineering and some levels of integration that go well beyond just having a SaaS app and, and basically platform as a service or past services. So I just wanna make sure that now super cloud, we'll talk about that a little bit in another interview, but I gotta get one more question in before we get into the use cases and customer success stories is in, in most of the VM world, VMware world, in that IT world, it used to, when you heard migration, people would go, Oh my God, that's gonna take months. And when I hear about moving stuff around and doing cloud native, the first reaction people might have is complexity. So two questions for you before we move on to the next talk. Track complexity. How are you addressing the complexity issue and how long these migrations take? Is it easy? Is it it hard? I mean, you know, the knee jerk reaction is month, You're very used to that. If they're dealing with Oracle or other old school vendors, like, they're, like the old guard would be like, takes a year to move stuff around. So can you comment on complexity and speed? >>Yeah. So the first, first thing is complexity. And you know, what makes what makes anything complex is if you're, if you're required to acquire new skill sets or you've gotta, if you're required to manage something differently, and as far as VMware cloud and AWS on both these aspects, you don't have to do anything, right? You don't have to acquire new skill sets. Your existing idea operation skill sets on, on VMware's platforms are absolutely fine and you don't have to manage it any differently like, than what you're managing your, your ID infrastructure today. So in both these aspects, it's exactly the same and therefore it is absolutely not complex as far as, as far as, as far as we cloud and AWS is concerned. And the other thing is speed. This is where the huge differentiation is. You have seen that, you know, large banks and large telcos have now moved their workloads, you know, literally in days instead of months. >>Because because of VMware cloud and aws, a lot of time customers come to us with specific deadlines because they want to exit their data centers on a particular date. And what happens, VMware cloud and AWS is called upon to do that migration, right? So speed is absolutely critical. The reason is also exactly the same because you are using the exactly the same platform, the same management systems, people are available to you, you're able to migrate quickly, right? I would just reference recently we got an award from President Zelensky of Ukraine for, you know, migrating their entire ID digital infrastructure and, and that that happened because they were using VMware cloud database and happened very swiftly. >>That's been a great example. I mean, that's one political, but the economic advantage of getting outta the data center could be national security. You mentioned Ukraine, I mean Oscar see bombing and death over there. So clearly that's a critical crown jewel for their running their operations, which is, you know, you know, world mission critical. So great stuff. I love the speed thing. I think that's a huge one. Let's get into some of the use cases. One of them is, the first one I wanted to talk about was we just hit on data, data center migration. It could be financial reasons on a downturn or our, or market growth. People can make money by shifting to the cloud, either saving money or making money. You win on both sides. It's a, it's a, it's almost a recession proof, if you will. Cloud is so use case for number one data center migration. Take us through what that looks like. Give an example of a success. Take us through a day, day in the life of a data center migration in, in a couple minutes. >>Yeah. You know, I can give you an example of a, of a, of a large bank who decided to migrate, you know, their, all their data centers outside their existing infrastructure. And they had, they had a set timeline, right? They had a set timeline to migrate the, the, they were coming up on a renewal and they wanted to make sure that this set timeline is met. We did a, a complete assessment of their infrastructure. We did a complete assessment of their IT applications, more than 80% of their IT applications, underlying v vSphere platform. And we, we thought that the right solution for them in the timeline that they wanted, right, is VMware cloud ands. And obviously it was a large bank, it wanted to do it safely and securely. It wanted to have it completely managed, and therefore VMware cloud and aws, you know, ticked all the boxes as far as that is concerned. >>I'll be happy to report that the large bank has moved to most of their applications on AWS exiting three of their data centers, and they'll be exiting 12 more very soon. So that's a great example of, of, of the large bank exiting data centers. There's another Corolla to that. Not only did they manage to manage to exit their data centers and of course use and be more agile, but they also met their sustainability goals. Their board of directors had given them goals to be carbon neutral by 2025. They found out that 35% of all their carbon foot footprint was in their data centers. And if they moved their, their ID infrastructure to cloud, they would severely reduce the, the carbon footprint, which is 35% down to 17 to 18%. Right? And that meant their, their, their, their sustainability targets and their commitment to the go to being carbon neutral as well. >>And that they, and they shift that to you guys. Would you guys take that burden? A heavy lifting there and you guys have a sustainability story, which is a whole nother showcase in and of itself. We >>Can Exactly. And, and cause of the scale of our, of our operations, we are able to, we are able to work on that really well as >>Well. All right. So love the data migration. I think that's got real proof points. You got, I can save money, I can, I can then move and position my applications into the cloud for that reason and other reasons as a lot of other reasons to do that. But now it gets into what you mentioned earlier was, okay, data migration, clearly a use case and you laid out some successes. I'm sure there's a zillion others. But then the next step comes, now you got cloud architects becoming minted every, and you got managed services and higher level services. What happens next? Can you give us an example of the use case of the modernization around the NextGen workloads, NextGen applications? We're starting to see, you know, things like data clouds, not data warehouses. We're not gonna data clouds, it's gonna be all kinds of clouds. These NextGen apps are pure digital transformation in action. Take us through a use case of how you guys make that happen with a success story. >>Yes, absolutely. And this is, this is an amazing success story and the customer here is s and p global ratings. As you know, s and p global ratings is, is the world leader as far as global ratings, global credit ratings is concerned. And for them, you know, the last couple of years have been tough as far as hardware procurement is concerned, right? The pandemic has really upended the, the supply chain. And it was taking a lot of time to procure hardware, you know, configure it in time, make sure that that's reliable and then, you know, distribute it in the wide variety of, of, of offices and locations that they have. And they came to us. We, we did, again, a, a, a alar, a fairly large comprehensive assessment of their ID infrastructure and their licensing contracts. And we also found out that VMware cloud and AWS is the right solution for them. >>So we worked there, migrated all their applications, and as soon as we migrated all their applications, they got, they got access to, you know, our high level services be our analytics services, our machine learning services, our, our, our, our artificial intelligence services that have been critical for them, for their growth. And, and that really is helping them, you know, get towards their next level of modern applications. Right Now, obviously going forward, they will have, they will have the choice to, you know, really think about which applications they want to, you know, refactor or which applications they want to go ahead with. That is really a choice in front of them. And, but you know, the, we VMware cloud and AWS really gave them the opportunity to first migrate and then, you know, move towards modernization with speed. >>You know, the speed of a startup is always the kind of the Silicon Valley story where you're, you know, people can make massive changes in 18 months, whether that's a pivot or a new product. You see that in startup world. Now, in the enterprise, you can see the same thing. I noticed behind you on your whiteboard, you got a slogan that says, are you thinking big? I know Amazon likes to think big, but also you work back from the customers and, and I think this modern application thing's a big deal because I think the mindset has always been constrained because back before they moved to the cloud, most IT, and, and, and on-premise data center shops, it's slow. You gotta get the hardware, you gotta configure it, you gotta, you gotta stand it up, make sure all the software is validated on it, and loading a database and loading oss, I mean, mean, yeah, it got easier and with scripting and whatnot, but when you move to the cloud, you have more scale, which means more speed, which means it opens up their capability to think differently and build product. What are you seeing there? Can you share your opinion on that epiphany of, wow, things are going fast, I got more time to actually think about maybe doing a cloud native app or transforming this or that. What's your, what's your reaction to that? Can you share your opinion? >>Well, ultimately we, we want our customers to utilize, you know, most of our modern services, you know, applications should be microservices based. When desired, they should use serverless applic. So list technology, they should not have monolithic, you know, relational database contracts. They should use custom databases, they should use containers when needed, right? So ultimately, we want our customers to use these modern technologies to make sure that their IT infrastructure, their licensing, their, their entire IT spend is completely native to cloud technologies. They work with the speed of a startup, but it's important for them to, to, to get to the first step, right? So that's why we create this journey for our customers, where you help them migrate, give them time to build the skills, they'll help them mo modernize, take our partners along with their, along with us to, to make sure that they can address the need for our customers. That's, that's what our customers need today, and that's what we are working backwards from. >>Yeah, and I think that opens up some big ideas. I'll just say that the, you know, we're joking, I was joking the other night with someone here in, in Palo Alto around serverless, and I said, you know, soon you're gonna hear words like architectural list. And that's a criticism on one hand, but you might say, Hey, you know, if you don't really need an architecture, you know, storage lists, I mean, at the end of the day, infrastructure is code means developers can do all the it in the coding cycles and then make the operations cloud based. And I think this is kind of where I see the dots connecting. Final thought here, take us through what you're thinking around how this new world is evolving. I mean, architecturals kind of a joke, but the point is, you know, you have to some sort of architecture, but you don't have to overthink it. >>Totally. No, that's a great thought, by the way. I know it's a joke, but it's a great thought because at the end of the day, you know, what do the customers really want? They want outcomes, right? Why did service technology come? It was because there was an outcome that they needed. They didn't want to get stuck with, you know, the, the, the real estate of, of a, of a server. They wanted to use compute when they needed to, right? Similarly, what you're talking about is, you know, outcome based, you know, desire of our customers and, and, and that's exactly where the word is going to, Right? Cloud really enforces that, right? We are actually, you know, working backwards from a customer's outcome and using, using our area the breadth and depth of our services to, to deliver those outcomes, right? And, and most of our services are in that path, right? When we use VMware cloud and aws, the outcome is a, to migrate then to modernize, but doesn't stop there, use our native services, you know, get the business outcomes using this. So I think that's, that's exactly what we are going through >>Actually, should actually, you're the director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on Aus. I wanna thank you for coming on, but I'll give you the final minute. Give a plug, explain what is the VMware cloud on Aus, Why is it great? Why should people engage with you and, and the team, and what ultimately is this path look like for them going forward? >>Yeah. At the end of the day, we want our customers to have the best paths to the cloud, right? The, the best path to the cloud is making sure that they migrate safely, reliably, and securely as well as with speed, right? And then, you know, use that cloud platform to, to utilize AWS's native services to make sure that they modernize their IT infrastructure and applications, right? We want, ultimately that our customers, customers, customer get the best out of, you know, utilizing the, that whole application experience is enhanced tremendously by using our services. And I think that's, that's exactly what we are working towards VMware cloud AWS is, is helping our customers in that journey towards migrating, modernizing, whether they wanna exit a data center or whether they wanna modernize their applications. It's a essential first step that we wanna help our customers with >>One director of global sales and go to market with VMware cloud on neighbors. He's with aws sharing his thoughts on accelerating business transformation on aws. This is a showcase. We're talking about the future path. We're talking about use cases with success stories from customers as she's thank you for spending time today on this showcase. >>Thank you, John. I appreciate it. >>Okay. This is the cube, special coverage, special presentation of the AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

foreign [Music] welcome to this Cube showcase accelerating business transformation with VMware Cloud on aw it's a solution Innovation conversation with two great guests Fred Ward and VP of Commercial Services at AWS and Narayan bardawaj who's the VP and general manager of cloud Solutions at VMware gentlemen thanks for uh joining me on the Showcase great to be here hey thanks for having us on it's a great topic you know we we've been covering this VMware Cloud on AWS since since the launch going back and it's been amazing to watch The Evolution from people saying oh it's the worst thing I've ever seen what's this mean uh and depressed we're we're kind of not really on board with kind of the vision but as it played out as you guys had announced together it did work out great for VMware it did work out great for a divs and it continues two years later and I want to just get an update from you guys on where you guys see this has been going obviously multiple years where is the evolution of the solution as we are right now coming off VMware Explorer just recently and going in to reinvent uh which is only a couple weeks away uh this feels like tomorrow but you know as we prepare a lot going on where are we with the evolution of the solution I mean the first thing I want to say is you know October 2016 was a seminal moment in the history of I.T right when bad girls singer and Andy jassy came together to announce this and I think John you were there at the time I was there it was a great great moment we launched the solution in 2017 the year after that at vmworld back when we called it vmworld I think we've gone from strength to strength one of the things that has really mattered to us is we've learned from AWS also and the process is this notion of working backwards so we're really really focused on customer feedback as we build the service offering now five years old pretty remarkable Journey uh you know in the first years we tried to get across all the regions you know that was a big Focus because there was so much demand for it in the second year we started going really on Enterprise great features we invented this pretty awesome feature called stretch clusters where you could stretch a vsphere cluster using vsan NSX across two azs in the same region pretty phenomenal for lines of availability that applications start started to get with that particular feature and we kept moving forward all kinds of integration with AWS direct connect Transit gateways with our own Advanced networking capabilities uh you know along the way Disaster Recovery we punched out you need two new Services just focused on that and then more recently we launched our outposts partnership we were up on the stage at reinvent again with Pat and Andy announcing AWS outposts and the VMware flavor of that VMware cloud and AWS outposts I think it's been significant growth in our federal sector as well the federal Empire certification more recently so all in all we're super excited we're five years old the customer momentum is really really strong we are scaling the service massively across all GEOS and industries that's great great update and I think one of the things that you mentioned was how the advantages you guys got from that relationship and this has kind of been the theme for AWS man since I can remember from day one Fred you guys do the heavy lifting as as it's always say for the customers here VMware comes on board takes advantage of the AWS and kind of just doesn't miss a beat continues to move their workloads that everyone's using you know vsphere and these are these are Big workloads on AWS what's the AWS perspective on this how do you see it yeah uh it's pretty fascinating to watch how fast customers can actually transform and move when you take the the skill set that they're familiar with and the advanced capabilities that they've been using on-prem and then overlay it on top of the AWS infrastructure that's that's evolving quickly and and building out new hardware and new instances we'll talk about uh but that combined experience between both of us on a jointly engineered solution uh to bring the best security and the best features that really matter for those workloads uh drive a lot of efficiency and speed for the for the customer so it's been well received and the partnership is stronger than ever from an engineering standpoint from a business standpoint and obviously it's been very interesting to look at just how we stay day one in terms of looking at new features and work and and responding to what customers want so pretty pretty excited about just seeing the transformation and the speed that which customers can move to uh BMC yeah that's a great value probably we've been talking about that in context to anyone building on top of the cloud they can have their own super cloud as we call it if you take advantage of all the capex and investment Amazon's made and AWS is made and and continues to make in performance I as and pass all great stuff I have to ask you guys both as you guys see this going to the next level what are some of the differentiations you see around the service compared to other options on the market what makes it different what's the combination you mentioned jointly engineered what are some of the key differentias of the service compared to others yeah I think one of the key things red talked about is this jointly engineered notion right from day one we were the earlier doctors of the AWS Nitro platform right the reinvention of ec2 back five years ago and so we've been you know having a very very strong engineering partnership at that level I think from uh we have a customer standpoint you get the full software-defined data center compute storage networking on ec2 bare metal across all regions you can scale that elastically up and down it's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency Global right on AWS ec2 Global regions now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service right and this was somewhat new to VMware this undifferentiated heavy lifting where customers are to provision rack stack Hardware configure the software on top and then upgrade the software and the security patches on top so we took away all of that pain as customers transition to VMware cloud and AWS in fact my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the lock for Jay debacle the industry was just going through that right favorite proof point from customers was before they could even race uh this issue to us we sent them a notification saying uh we already patched all of your systems no action from you the customers were super thrilled I mean these are large Banks many other customers around the world super thrill they had to take no action for a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing that's a great point you know the whole managed service piece brings up the security and you're kind of teasing at it but you know there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you're doing complex logic and as you grow your Solutions there's more bits you know Fred we were commenting before we came on cameras more bits than ever before and and at the physics layer too as well as the software so you never know when there's going to be a zero day vulnerability out there just it happens we saw one with Fortinet this week um this came out of the woodwork but moving fast on those patches is huge this brings up the whole support angle I wanted to ask you about how you guys are doing that as well because to me we see the value when we when we talk to customers on the cube about this you know it was a real real easy understanding of how what the cloud means to them with VMware now with the AWS but the question that comes up that we want to get more clarity on is how do you guys handle the support together well what's interesting about this is that it's it's done mutually we have dedicated support teams on both sides that work together pretty seamlessly to make sure that whether there's a issue at any layer including all the way up into the app layer as you think about some of the other workloads like sap we'll go end to end and make sure that we support the customer regardless of where the particular issue might be for them uh and on top of that we look at where where we're improving reliability in as a first order of principle between both companies so from an availability and reliability standpoint it's it's top of mind and no matter where the particular item might land we're going to go help the customer resolve that works really well on the VMware side let's spend the feedback there what's the what's some of the updates same scene yeah yeah I think uh look I mean VMware owns and operates the service will be a phenomenal back in relationship with AWS customers call VMware for the service for any issues and then we have a awesome relationship with AWS in the back end for support issues for any hardware issues capacity management that we jointly do right all the hard problems that customers don't have to worry about uh I think on the front end we also have a really good group of solution Architects across the companies that help to really explain the solution do complex things like Cloud migration which is much much easier with VMware on AWS we're presenting that easy button to the public cloud in many ways and so we have a whole technical audience across the two companies that are working with customers every single day you know you had mentioned a list here some of the Innovations the you mentioned the stretch clustering you know getting the GEOS working Advanced Network disaster recovery um you know fed fed ramp public sector certifications outposts all good you guys are checking the boxes every year you got a good good accomplishments list there on the VMware AWS side here in this relationship the question that I'm interested in is what's next what uh recent Innovations are you doing are you making investments in what's on the list this year what items will be next year how do you see the the new things the list of the cosmos people want to know what's next they don't want to see stagnant uh growth here they want to see more action you know as as uh Cloud kind of continues to scale and modern applications Cloud native you're seeing more and more containers more and more you know more CF CI CD pipelining with with modern apps putting more pressure on the system what's new what's the new Innovations absolutely and I think as a five-year-old service offering uh Innovation is top of mind for us every single day so just to call out a few recent innovations that we announced in San Francisco at VMware Explorer um first of all uh our new platform i4i dot metal it's isolate based it's pretty awesome it's the latest and greatest uh all the speeds and beats that you would expect from VMware and AWS at this point in our relationship we announced two different storage options this notion of working from customer feedback allowing customers even more price reductions really take off that storage and park it externally right and you know separate that from compute so two different storage offerings there one is with AWS FSX NetApp on tap which brings in our NetApp partnership as well into the equation and really get that NetApp based really excited about this offering as well and the second storage offering called VMware Cloud Flex story vmware's own managed storage offering beyond that we've done a lot of other Innovations as well I really wanted to talk about VMware Cloud Flex compute where previously customers could only scale by hosts you know host is 36 to 48 cores give or take but with VMware cloudflex compute we are now allowing this notion of a resource defined compute model where customers can just get exactly the vcpu memory and storage that maps to the applications however small they might be so this notion of granularity is really a big innovation that that we are launching in the market this year and then last but not least topper ransomware of course it's a Hot Topic in the industry we are seeing many many customers ask for this we are happy to announce a new ransomware recovery with our VMware Cloud VR solution a lot of innovation there and the way we are able to do machine learning and make sure the workloads that are covered from snapshots backups are actually safe to use so there's a lot of differentiation on that front as well a lot of networking Innovations with project North Star the ability to have layer 4 through layer seven uh you know new SAS services in that area as well keep in mind that the service already supports managed kubernetes for containers it's built in to the same clusters that have virtual machines and so this notion of a single service with a great TCO for VMS and containers is sort of at the heart of our option the networking side certainly is a hot area to keep innovating on every year it's the same same conversation get better faster networking more more options there the flex computes interesting if you don't mind me getting a quick clarification could you explain the address between resource defined versus Hardware defined because this is kind of what we had saw at explore coming out that notion of resource defined versus Hardware defined what's that what does that mean yeah I mean I think we've been super successful in this Hardware defined notion where we're scaling by the hardware unit uh that we present as software-defined data centers right so that's been super successful but we you know customers wanted more especially customers in different parts of the world wanted to start even smaller and grow even more incrementally right lower the cost even more and so this is the part where resource defined starts to be very very interesting as a way to think about you know here's my bag of resources exactly based on what the customer's requested it would be for fiber machines five containers its size exactly for that and then as utilization grows we elastically behind the scenes were able to grow it through policies so that's a whole different dimension it's a whole different service offering that adds value when customers are comfortable they can go from one to the other they can go back to that post-based model if they so choose to and there's a jump off point across these two different economic models it's kind of cloud flexibility right there I like the name Fred let's get into some of the uh examples of customers if you don't mind let's get into some of these we have some time I want to unpack a little bit of what's going on with the customer deployments one of the things we've heard again on the cube is from customers is they like the clarity of the relationship they love the cloud positioning of it and then what happens is they lift and shift the workloads and it's like feels great it's just like we're running VMware on AWS and then they start consuming higher level Services kind of that adoption Next Level happens um and because it's in the cloud so so can you guys take us through some recent examples of customer wins or deployments where they're using VMware Cloud on AWS on getting started and then how do they progress once they're there how does it evolve can you just walk us through a couple use cases sure um there's a well there's a couple one it's pretty interesting that you know like you said as there's more and more bids you need better and better hardware and networking and we're super excited about the I-4 uh and the capabilities there in terms of doubling and or tripling what we're doing around a lower variability on latency and just improving all the speeds but what customers are doing with it like the college in New Jersey they're accelerating their deployment on a on onboarding over like 7 400 students over a six to eight month period and they've really realized a ton of savings but what's interesting is where and how they can actually grow onto additional native Services too so connectivity to any other services is available as they start to move and migrate into this um the the options there obviously are tied to all the Innovation that we have across any Services whether it's containerized and with what they're doing with tanzu or with any other container and or services within AWS so so there's there's some pretty interesting scenarios where that data and or the processing which is moved quickly with full compliance whether it's in like health care or regulatory business is is allowed to then consume and use things for example with text extract or any other really cool service that has you know monthly and quarterly Innovations so there's things that you just can't could not do before that are coming out uh and saving customers money and building Innovative applications on top of their uh their current uh app base in in a rapid fashion so pretty excited about it there's a lot of examples I think I probably don't have time to go into too many here yeah but that's actually the best part is listening to customers and seeing how many net new services and new applications are they actually building on top of this platform now Ryan what's your perspective from the VMware psychics you know you guys have now a lot of head room to offer customers with Amazon's you know higher level services and or whatever's homegrown what is being rolled out because you now have a lot of hybrid too so so what's your what's your take on what what's happening and with customers I mean it's been phenomenal the customer adoption of this and you know Banks and many other highly sensitive verticals are running production grade applications tier one applications on the service over the last five years and so you know I have a couple of really good examples SNP Global is one of my favorite examples large Bank the merch with IHS Market big sort of conglomeration now both customers were using VMware cloud and AWS in different ways and with the uh with the use case one of their use cases was how do I just respond to these Global opportunities without having to invest in physical data centers and then how do I migrate and consolidate all my data centers across the globe of which there were many and so one specific example for this company was how they migrated thousand one thousand workloads to VMware cloud and AWS in just six weeks pretty phenomenal if you think about everything that goes into a cloud migration process people process technology and the beauty of the technology going from VMware point a to VMware point B the the lowest cost lowest risk approach to adopting we have our cloud in AWS so that's uh you know one of my favorite examples there are many other examples across other verticals that we continue to see the good thing is we're seeing rapid expansion across the globe we're constantly entering new markets uh with a limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap it's great to see I mean the data center migrations go from months many many months to weeks it's interesting to see some of those success stories so congratulations another one of the other uh interesting uh and fascinating uh uh benefits is the sustainability Improvement in terms of being green so the efficiency gains that we have both in current uh generation and New Generation processors and everything that we're doing to make sure that when a customer can be elastic they're also saving power which is really critical in a lot of regions worldwide at this point in time they're they're seeing those benefits if you're running really inefficiently in your own data center that is just a not a great use of power so the actual calculators and the benefits to these workloads is are pretty phenomenal just in being more green which I like we just all need to do our part there and and this is a big part of it here it's a huge it's a huge point about sustainability for everyone glad you called that out the other one I would say is supply chain issues another one you see that constrains I can't buy hardware and the third one is really obvious but no one really talks about it it's security right I mean um I remember interviewing Steven Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago this is like 2013 and um you know at that time people saying the Cloud's not secure and he's like listen it's more secure in the cloud than on premise and if you look at the security breaches it's all about the on-premise data center vulnerabilities not so much Hardware so there's a lot you gotta the the stay current on on the isolation there is hard so I think I think the security and supply chain threat is another one do you agree I I absolutely agree uh it's it's hard to manage supply chain nowadays we put a lot of effort into that and I think we have a great ability to forecast and make sure that we can lean in and have the resources that are available and run them run them more efficiently yeah and then like you said on the security Point Security is job one it is it is the only P1 and if you think of how we build our infrastructure from Nitro all the way up and how we respond and work with our partners and our customers there's nothing more important and Narayan your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things is really going to get better all right final question I really want to thank you for your time on this showcase it's really been a great conversation uh Fred you had made a comment earlier I want to kind of end with the kind of a curveball and put you guys on the spot we're talking about a modern a new modern shift it's another we're seeing another inflection point we've been documenting it it's almost like Cloud hitting another inflection point um with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer continue to put a lot of pressure and innovation in the infrastructure side so the question is for you guys each to answer is what's the same and what's different in today's market so it's kind of like we want more of the same here but also things have changed radically and better here what are the what's what's changed for better and where what's still the same kind of thing hanging around that people are focused on can you share your perspective I'll I'll tackle it um you know uh businesses are complex and they're often unique uh that that's the same uh what's changed is how fast you can innovate the ability to combine manage services and new Innovative services and build new applications is so much faster today leveraging world-class Hardware uh that you don't have to worry about that's elastic you could not do that even five ten years ago to the degree you can today especially with the Innovation so Innovation is accelerating uh at a rate that most people can't even comprehend and understand the the set of services that are available to them it's really fascinating to see what a one pizza team of of Engineers can go actually develop in a week it is phenomenal so super excited about this space and it's only going to continue to accelerate that that's my take there I am you got a lot of platform to compete on with Amazon I got a lot to build on the memory which then you're right on your side what's your what's your answer to that question I think we're seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers [Music] I think uh what we see is this whole notion of how do you go from desktop to production to the secure supply chain and how can we truly uh you know build on the agility that developers desire and build all the security and the pipelines to energize that motor production quickly and efficiently I think we are seeing uh you know we're at the very start of that sort of uh of Journey um of course we have invested in kubernetes means to an end but it's so much more Beyond that's happening in the industry and I think we're at the very very beginning of this Transformations Enterprise transformation that many of our customers are going through and we're inherently part of it yeah well gentlemen I really appreciate that we're seeing the same things more the same here on you know solving these complexities with abstractions whether it's you know higher level services with large-scale infrastructure um at your fingertips infrastructure is code infrastructure to be provisioned serverless all the good stuff happening Fred with AWS on your side and we're seeing customers resonate with this idea of being an operator again being a cloud operator and developer so the developer Ops is kind of devops is kind of changing too so all for the better thank you for spending the time we're seeing again that traction with the VMware customer base and it was getting getting along great together so thanks for sharing your perspectives they appreciate it thank you so much okay thank you John okay this is thecube and AWS VMware showcase accelerating business transformation VMware Cloud on AWS jointly engineered solution bringing Innovation to the VMware customer base going to the cloud and Beyond I'm John Furrier your host thanks for watching [Music]

>>Okay, welcome back to everyone. Cube's live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022. I'm John fur, host of the cube. Two sets three days of live coverage. Dave Ante's here. Lisa Martin, Dave Nicholson, all host of the cube 12 interviews today, just we're with Rocklin and rolling, getting down to the end of the show. As we wind down and look back and look at the future. We've got Steven Jones. Here's the general manager of the VMware cloud on AWS. He's with Amazon web service. Steven Jones. Welcome to the cube. >>Thanks John. >>Welcome back cube alumni. I've been on many times going back to 2015. Yeah. >>Pleasure to be here. Great >>To see you again. Thanks for coming on. Obviously 10 years at AWS, what a ride is that's been, come on. That's fantastic. Tell me it's been crazy. >>Wow. Learned a lot of stuff along the way, right? I mean, we, we, we knew that there was a lot of opportunity, right? Customers wanting the agility and flexibility of, of the cloud and, and we, we still think it's early days, right? I mean, you'll hear Andy say that animals say that, but it really is. Right. If you look at even just the amount of spend that's being spent on, on clouds, it's in the billions, right. And the amount of, of spend in it is still in the trillion. So there's, there's a long way to go and customers are pushing us hard. Obviously >>It's been interesting a lot going on with VM. We're obviously around with them, obviously changing the strategy with their, their third generation and their narrative. Obviously the Broadcom thing is going on around them. And 10 years at abs, we've been, we've been, this'll be our ninth year, no 10th year at reinvent coming up for us. So, but it's 10 years of everything at Amazon, 10 years of S three, 10 years of C two. So if you look at the, the marks of time, now, the history books are starting to be written about Amazon web services. You know, it's about 10 years of full throttle cube hyperscaler in action. I mean, I'm talking about real growth, like >>Hardcore, for sure. I'll give you just one anecdote. So when I first joined, I think we had maybe two EC two instances back in the day and the maximum amount of memory you could conversion into one of these machines was I think 128 gig of Ram fast forward to today. You literally can get a machine with 24 terabytes of Ram just in insane amounts. Right? My, my son who's a gamer tells me he's got 16 gig in his, in his PC. You need to, he thinks that's a lot. >>Yeah. >>That's >>Excited about that. That's not even on his graphics card. I mean, he's, I know it's coming next. The GPU, I mean, just all >>The it's like, right? >>I mean, all the hardware innovation that you guys have done, I mean, look at every it's changed. Everyone's changed their strategy to copy AWS nitro, Dave ante. And I talk about this all the time, especially with James Hamilton and the team over there, Peter DeSantos, these guys have, are constantly going at the atoms and innovating at the, at the level. I mean that, that's how hardcore it is over there right now. I mean, and the advances on the Silicon graviton performance wise is crazy. I mean, so what does that enabling? So given that's continuing, you guys are continuing to do great work there on the CapEx side, we think that's enabling another set of new net new applications because we're starting to see new things emerge. We saw snowflake come on, customer of AWS refactor, the data warehouse, they call it a data cloud. You're starting to see Goldman Sachs. You see capital one, you see enterprise customers building on top of AWS and building a cloud business without spending the CapEx >>Is exactly right. And Ziggy mentioned graviton. So graviton is one of our fastest growing compute families now. And you know, you mentioned a couple of ISVs and partners of ours who are leaning in heavily on porting their own software. Every event Adam announced that we're working with SAP to, to help them port their HANA cloud, which is a, a database of service offering HANA flagship to graviton as well. So it's, it's definitely changing. >>And I think, you know, one of the, and we're gonna circle back to VMware is kind of a point to this. This conversation is that, is that if you look at the trends, right, okay. VMware really tried hard to do cloud and they had a good shot at it V cloud air, but it just, they didn't have the momentum that you guys had at AWS. We saw a lot, lot of other stragglers try to do cloud. They fell off the road, OpenStack, HP, and the list goes on and on. I don't wanna get into that, but the point is, as you guys become more powerful and you're open, right? So you have open ecosystem, you have people now coming back, taking advantage and refactoring and picking up where they left off. VMware was the one of the first companies that actually said, you know what pat Gelsinger said? And I was there, let's clear up the positioning. Let's go all in with AWS. That's >>Right >>At that time, 2016. >>Yeah. This was new for us, for >>Sure. And then now that's set the standard. Now everybody else is kind of doing it. Where is the VMware cloud relationship right now? How is that going out? State's worked. >>It's working well very well. It's I mean, we're celebrating, I think we made the announcement what, five years ago at this conference. Yeah. 2016. So, I mean, it's, it's been a tremendous ride. The best part are the customers who were coming and adopting and proving to us that our vision back then was the right vision. And, and, and what's been different. I think about this relationship. And it was new for us was that we, we purposely went after a jointly engineered solution. This wasn't a, we've got a, a customer or a partner that's just going to run and build something on us. This is something where we both bring muscle and we actually build a, a joint offering together. Talk about, about the main difference. >>Yeah. And that, and that's been working, but now here at this show, if you look at, if you squint through the multi-cloud thing, which is like just, I think positioning for, you know, what could happen in, in a post broad Broadcom world, the cloud native has traction they're Tansu where, where customers were leaning in. So their enterprise customer is what I call the classic. It, you know, mainstream enterprise, which you guys have been doing a lot of business with. They're now thinking, okay, I'm gonna go on continu, accelerate on, in the public cloud, but I'm gonna have hybrid on premise as well. You guys have that solution. Now they're gonna need cloud native. And we were speculating that VMware is probably not gonna be able to get 'em all of it. And, and that there's a lot more cloud native options as customers want more cloud native. How do you see that piece on Amazon side? Because there's a lot of benefits between the VMware cloud on AWS and the services that you guys have natively in your cloud. So we see customers really taking advantage of the AWS goodness, as well as expanding the cloud side at VMware cloud on AWS. >>Yeah. There's probably two ways I would look at this. Right? So, so one is the combination of VMware cloud on AWS. And then both native services just generally brings more options to customers. And so typically what we're seeing now is customers are just able to move much faster, especially as it comes to data center, evacuations, migrating all their assets, right? So it used to be that, and still some customers they're like, I I've gotta think through my entire portfolio of applications and decide what to refactor. And the only way I can move it to cloud is to actually refactor it into some net new application, more and more. We're actually seeing customers. They've got their assets. A lot of them are still on premises in a VMware state, right. They can move those super quick and then modernize those. And so I think where you'll see VMware and AWS very aligned is on this, this idea of migrate. Now you need to get the benefits of TCO and, and the agility that comes with being in the cloud and then modernize. We took a step further, which is, and I think VMware would agree here too, but all of the, the myriad of services, I think it's 200 plus now AWS native services are for use right alongside any that a customer wants to run in VMware. And so we have examples of customers that are doing just, >>And that's, that's how you guys see the native and, and VMware cloud integrating in. Yeah, that's, that's important because this, I mean, if I always joke about, you know, we've been here 12 years listening in the hallways and stuff, you know, on the bus to the event last night, walking the parties and whatnot, listening in the streets, there's kind of two conversations that rise right to the top. And I wanna get your reaction to this Steven, because this seems to be representative of this demographic here at VMware conference, there's conversations around ransomware and storage and D dub and recovery. It's all, a lot of those happen. Yeah. Clearly a big crowd here that care about, you know, Veeam and NetApp and storage and like making sure stuff's secure and air gapped. And a lot of that kind of, I call nerdy conversations and then the other one is, okay, I gotta get the cloud story. >>Right. So there's kind of the operational security. And then there's like, okay, what's my path to true cloud. I need to get this moving. I need to have better applications. My company is the application now not it serves some sort of back office function. Yeah. It's like, my company is completely using technology as its business. So the app is the business. So that means everything's technology driven, not departmental siloed. So there's a, that's what I call the true cloud conversation. How do you, how do you see that evolving because VMware customers are now going there. And I won't say, I won't say they're behind, but they're certainly going there faster than ever before. >>I think, I think, I mean, it's an interesting con it's an interesting way to put it and I, I would completely agree. I think it's, it's very clear that I think a lot of customer companies are actually being disrupted. Right. And they have to move fast and reinvent themselves. You said the app is now becoming the company. Right. I mean, if, if you look at where not too many years back, there were, you know, big companies like Netflix that were born in the cloud. Right. Airbnb they're disruptors. >>There's, that's the >>App, right? That's the app. Yeah. So I, I would exactly agree. And, and that's who other companies are competing with. And so they have to move quickly. You talked about some, some technology that allows them to do that, right? So this week we announced the general availability of a NetApp on tap solution. It's been available on AWS for some time as a fully managed FSX storage solution. But now customers can actually leverage it with, with VMC. Now, why is that important? Well, there's tens of thousands of customers running VMware. On-premises still, there's thousands of them that are actually using NetApp filers, right? NetApp, NetApp filers, and the same enterprise features like replication. D do you were talking about and Snapp and clone. Those types of things can be done. Now within the V VMware state on AWS, what's even better is they can actually move faster. So consider replicating all this, you know, petabytes and petabytes of data that are in these S from on-premises into AWS, this, this NetApp service, and then connected connecting that up to the BMC option. So it just allows customers much, much. >>You guys, you guys have always been customer focus. Every time I sat down with the Andy jazzy and then last year with Adam, same thing we worked back from, I know it's kind of a canned answer on some of the questions from media, but, but they do really care. I've had those conversations. You guys do work backwards from the customer, actually have documents called working backwards. But one of the things that I observed, we talked about here yesterday on the cube was the observations of reinvent versus say, VM world. Now explore is VM world's ecosystem was very partner-centric in the sense of the partners needed to rely on VMware. And the customers came here for both more of the partners, not so much VMware in the sense there wasn't as much, many, many announcements can compare that to the past, say eight years of reinvent, where there's so much Amazon action going on the partners, I won't say take as a second, has a backseat to Amazon, but the, the attendees go there generally for what's going on with AWS, because there's always new stuff coming out. >>And it's, it's amazing. But this year it starts to see that there's an overlap or, or change between like the VMware ecosystem. And now Amazon there's, a lot of our interviews are like, they're on both ecosystems. They're at Amazon's show they're here. So you start to see what I call the naturalization of partners. You guys are continuing to grow, and you'll probably still have thousands of announcements at the event this year, as you always do, but the partners are much more part of the AWS equation, not just we're leasing all these new services and, and oh, for sure. Look at us, look at Amazon. We're growing. Cause you guys were building out and look, the growth has been great. But now as you guys get to this next level, the partners are integral to the ecosystem. How do you look at that? How has Amazon thinking about that? I know there's been some, some, a lot of active reorgs around AWS around solving this problem or no solve the problem, addressing the need and this next level of growth. What's your reaction to >>That? Well, I mean, it's, it's a, it's a good point. So I have to be honest with you, John. I, I, I spent eight of my 10 years so far at AWS within the partner organization. So partners are very near and dear to my heart. We've got tens of thousands of partners and you are you're right. You're starting to see some overlap now between the VMware partner ecosystem and what we've built now in AWS and partners are big >>By the way, you sell out every reinvent. So it's, you have a lot of partners. I'm not suggesting that you, that there's no partner network there, but >>Partners are critical. I mean, absolutely naturally we want a relationship with a customer, but in order to scale the way we need to do to meet the, the needs of customers, we need partners. Right. We, we can't, we can't interact with every single customer as much as we would like to. Right. And so partners have long built teams and expertise that, that caters to even niche workloads or opportunity areas. And, and we love partners >>For that. Yeah. I know you guys do. And also we'll point out just to kind of give props to you guys on the partner side, you don't, you keep that top of the stack open on Amazon. You've done some stuff for end to end where customers want all Amazon, but for the most part, you let competition come in, even on, so you guys are definitely partner friendly. I'm just observing more the maturization of partners within the reinvent ecosystem, cuz we're there every year. I mean, it's, I mean, first of all, they're all buzzing. I mean, it's not like there's no action. There's a lot of customers there it's sold out as big numbers, but it just seems that the partners are much more integrated into the value proposition of at a AWS because of the, the rising tide and, and now their enablement, cuz now they're part of the, of the value proposition. Even more than ever before >>They, they really are. And they, and they're building a lot of capabilities and services on us. And so their customers are our customers. And like you say, it's rising tide, right. We, we all do better together. >>Okay. So let's talk about the VMware cloud here. What's the update here in terms of the show, what's your, what's your main focus cuz a lot of people here are doing, doing sessions. What's been some of the con content that you guys are producing here. >>Yeah. So the best part obviously is a always the customer conversations to partner conversations. So a, a lot of, a lot of sessions there, we did keynote yesterday in Ryan and I, where we talked about a number of announcements that are, I think pretty material now to the offering a joint announcement with NetApp yesterday as well around the storage solution I was talking about. And then some, some really good technical deep dives on how the offering works. Customers are still interested in like how, how do I take what I've got on premises and easily move into AWS and technology like HSX H CX solution with VMware makes it really easy without having to re IP applications. I mean, you know, it is super difficult sometimes to, to move an application. If you've got figure out where all the firewall rules are and re iPing those, those things source. But yeah, it's, it's been fantastic. >>A lot of migrations to the cloud too. A lot of cloud action, new cloud action. You guys have probably seen an uptake on services right on the native side. >>Yes. Yes. For sure. So maybe I just outlined some of the, some of the assets we made this week. So absolutely >>Go ahead. >>We, we announced a new instance family as a, a major workhorse underneath the VMware cloud offering called I, I, you mentioned nitro earlier, this is on, based on our latest generation of nitro, which allows us to offer as you know, bare metal instances, which is, which is what VMware actually VMware was our first partnership and customer that I would say actually drove us to really get Nira done and out the door. And we've continued to iterate on that. And so this I four, I instance, it's based on the, the latest Intel isolate processor with more than double the Ram double the compute, a whopping 75 gigabytes per second network. So it's a real powerhouse. The cool thing is that with the, with the NetApp storage solution that we, we discussed, we're now disaggregating the need to provision, compute and storage at the same time. It used to be, if you wanted to add more storage to your VSAN array, that was on a V VMware cloud. Yeah. You'd add another note. You might not need more compute for memory. You'd have to add another note. And so now customers can simply start adding chunks of storage. And so this opens up customers. I had a customer come to me yesterday and said, there's no reason for us not to move. Now. We were waiting for something that like this, that allowed us to move our data heavy workloads yeah. Into VMware cloud. It's >>Like, it's like the, the alignment. You mentioned alignment earlier. You know, I would say that VMware customers are lined up now almost perfectly with the hybrid story that's that's seamless or somewhat seems it's never truly seamless. But if you look at like what Deepak's doing with Kubernetes and open source, you, you guys have that there talking that big here, you got vs a eight vSphere, eight out it's all cloud native. So that's lined up with what you guys are doing on your services and the horsepower. They have their stuff, you have yours that works better together. So it seems like it's more lined up than ever before. What's your take on that? Do you agree? And, and if so, what folks watching here that are VMware customers, what's, what's the motivation now to go faster? >>Look, it is, it is absolutely lined up. We are, as, as I mentioned earlier, we are jointly engineering and developing this thing together. And so that includes not just the nuts and bolts underneath, but kind of the vision of where it's going. And so we're, we're collectively bringing in customer feedback. >>What is that vision real quick? >>So that vision has to actually help an under help meet even the most demanding customer workloads. Okay. So you've got customer workloads that are still locked in on premises. And why is that? Well, it used to be, there was big for data and migration, right? And the speed. And so we continue to iterate this and that again is a joint thing. Instead of say, VMware, just building on AWS, it really is a, a tight partnership. >>Yeah. The lift and shift is a, an easy thing to do. And, and, and by the way, that could be a hassle too. But I hear most people say the reason holding us back on the workloads is it's just a lot of work, a hassle making it easier is what they want. And you guys are doing that. >>We are doing that. Absolutely. And by the way, we've got not just engineering teams, but we've got customer support teams on both sides working together. We also have flexible commercial options, right? If a customer wants to buy from AWS because they've negotiated some kind of deal with us, they can do that. They wanna buy from VMware for a similar reason. They could buy from VMware. So are >>They in the marketplace? >>They are in the market. There, there are some things in the marketplace. So you talked about Tansu, there's a Tansu offering in the marketplace. So yes. Customers can >>Contract. Yeah. Marketplaces. I'm telling you that's very disruptive. I'm Billy bullish on the market AIOS marketplace. I think that's gonna be a transformative way. People have what they procure and fully agree, deploy and how, and channel relationships are gonna shift. I think that's gonna be a disruptive enabler to the partner equation and, and we haven't even seen it yet. We're gonna be up there in September for their inaugural event. I think it's a small group, but we're gonna be documenting that. So even final question for you, what's next for you? What's on the agenda. You got reinvent right around the corner. Your P ones are done. Right? I know. Assuming all that, I turn that general joke. That's an internal Amazon joke. FYI. You've got your plan. What's next for the world. Obviously they're gonna go this, take this, explore global. No matter what happens with Broadcom, this is gonna be a growth wave with hybrid. What's next for you and your team with AWS and VMware's relationship? >>Yeah. So both of us are hyper focused on adding additional options, both from a, an instance compute perspective. You know, VMware announced some, some, some additional offerings that we've got. We've got a fully complete, like, so they're, they announce things like VMware flex compute V VMware flex storage. You mentioned earlier, there was a conversation around ransomware. There's a new ransomware based offering. So we're hyper focused on rounding out, continuing to round out the offering and giving customers even more choice >>Real quick. Jonathan made me think about the ransomware we were at reinforce Steven Schmidtz now the CSO. Now you got a CSO. AJ's the CSO. You got a whole focus, huge emphasis on security right now. I know you always have, but now it's much more public. It's PO more positive, I think, than some of the other events I've been to. It's been more Lum and doom. What's the security tie in here with VMware. Can you share a little bit real quick on the security piece update around this relationship? >>Yeah, you bet. So as you know, security for us is job zero. Like you don't have anything of security. And so what are the things that, that we're excited about specifically with VMware is, is the latest offering that, that we put together and it's called this, this ransomware offering. And it's, it's a little bit different than other ransomware. I mean, a lot of people have ransomware offerings today, just >>Air gap. >>Right, right, right. Exactly. No, that's easy. No, this one is different. So on the back end, so within VMC, there's this, this option where CU we can be to be taking iterative snapshots of a customer environment. Now, if an event were to occur, right. And a customer is like, I have to know if I'm compromised, we can actually spin up super easy. This is cloud. Remember? Yeah. We can spin up a, a copy of this environment, throw a switch, pick a snapshot with NSX. So VMware NSX firewall it off and then use some custom tooling from VMware to actually see if it's been compromised or not. And then iterate through that until you actually know you're clean. And that's different than just tools that do maybe a >>Little bit of scam. We had Tom gills on yesterday and, and one of the things Dave ante had to leave is taking the sun to college is last one in the house and B nester now, but Tom Gill was on. We were talking about how good their security story is ware. And they really weren't showboating it as much as they could have here. I thought they could have done a better job, but this is an example of kind of them really leaning in with you guys. That's the key part of the relationship. >>Yeah, it really is. And I think this is something is materially different than what you can get elsewhere. And it's exciting for, >>Okay. Now the, the real question I want to know is what's your plans for AWS reinvent the blockbuster end of the year, Amazon surf show that gets bigger and bigger. I know it's still hybrid now, but it's looking be hybrid, but people are back in person last year. You guys were the first event really come back and still had massive numbers. AWS summit, New York at 19,000. I heard last week in Chicago, big numbers. So we're expecting reinvent to be pretty large this year. What are you, what are you gonna do there? What's your role there? >>We are expecting, well, I'll be there. I cover multiple businesses. Obviously. We're, we're planning on some additional announcements, obviously in the VMware space as well. And one of the other businesses I run is around SAP. And you should look for some things there as well. Yeah. Really looking forward to reinvent, except for the fact that it's right after Thanksgiving. But I think it >>Always ruins my, I always get an article out. I like, why are you we're having, we're having Thanksgiving dinner. I gotta write this article. It's gotta get Adam, Adam. Leski exclusive. We, every year we do a, a CEO sit down with Andy was the CEO and then now Adam. But yeah, it's a great event to me. I think it sets the tone. And it's gonna be very interesting to see the big clouds are coming to the big cloud. You guys, and you guys are now called hyperscalers. Now, multiple words. It's interesting. You guys are providing the CapEx goodness for everybody else now. And that relationship seems to be the new, the new industry standard of you guys provide the enablement and then everyone you get paid, cuz it's a service. A whole nother level of cloud is emerging in the partner network, GSI other companies. Yeah. >>Yeah. I mean we're really scaling. I mean we continue to iterate and release regions at a fast clip. We just announced support for VMware in Hong Kong. Yeah. So now we're up to 21 regions for this service, >>The sovereign clouds right around the corner. Let's we'll talk about that soon. Steven. Thanks for coming. I know you gotta go. Thank you for your valuable time. Coming in. Put Steven Jones. Who's the general manager of the VMware cloud on AWS business. Four AWS here inside the cube day. Three of cube coverage. I'm John furrier. Thanks for watching. We'll be right back.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to the Cube's day one coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 live from San Francisco. I'm Lisa Martin, and I'm basically sitting with the cloud. I got a power panel here with me. You are not gonna wanna miss the segment, please. Welcome, nor Barage I probably did. I do. Okay on that. Great, thank you. VP and GM of cloud solutions at VMware. Thanks for joining us. Field brother tune is back our alumni VP solutions and alliances at NetApp bill. Great to see you in person. Thank you. And Steve Jones, GM SAP, and VMware cloud at Amazon. Welcome guys. Thank you. Pleasure. So we got VMware, NetApp and Amazon. I was telling Phil before we went live, I was snooping around on the NetApp website the other day. And I saw a tagline that said two is the company three is a cloud, but I get to sit with the cloud. This is fantastic. Nora, talk to us about the big news that came out just about 24 hours ago. These three powerhouse, we >>Were super excited. We are celebrating five years of VMware cloud this week. And with three powerhouses here, we're announcing the general availability of VMware cloud and AWS with NetApp on tap. We have AWS FSX. And so this solution is now generally available across all global regions. We are super excited with all our joint customers and partners to bring this to the market. >>So Steve, give us your perspective as AWS as the biggest hyperscaler. Talk about the importance of the partnership and the longstanding partnerships that you've had with both NetApp and VMware. >>Yeah, you bet. So first all, maybe I'll start with Ryan and VMware. So we've had a very long standing partnership with VMware for over five years now. One thing that we've heard consistently from customers is they, they want help in reducing the heavy lifting or the, the friction that typically comes with cloud adoption. And VMware's been right in the trenches with us and helping with that over the years with the VMware cloud on AWS offering. And, and now that we've got NetApp, right, the FSX on tap solution, a managed storage solution that is, is been known and trusted in the on-premises world. Now available since September on AWS, but now available for use with VMware cloud is just amazing for customers who are looking for that agility, >>Right? Phil talk about NetApp has done a phenomenal job in its own digital transformation journey. Talk about that as an enabler for what you announced yesterday and the, and the capabilities that NetApp is able to bring to its customers with VMware and with AWS. >>Yeah. You know, it started, it's interesting because we NetApp's always been a company that works very closely with our partners. VMware has been a huge partner of ours since gosh, 2005 probably, or sometime like that. I started working with Amazon back in about 20 13, 20 14, when we first took on tap and brought it to the Amazon platform in the marketplace ahead of what's. Now FSX ends like a dream to bring a fully managed ONAP onto the world's biggest cloud. So that work you you're really looking at about. I mean, it depends how you look at it, 15 years of work. And then as Ryan was saying that VMware was working in parallel with us on being a first party service on Amazon, we came together and, or Ryan and I came together and VMware and NetApp came together about probably about two years ago now with this vision of what we're announcing today and to have so to have GA of this combination for meaning global availability, anybody can try it today. It's just an amazing day. It's really a great day. >>Yeah. It's unbelievable how we have sort of partnered together and hard engineering problems to create a very simple outcome for customers and partners. One of the things, you know, VMware cloud is a very successful service offering with a lot of great consumption and different verticals. Things like cloud migration, you know, transforming your entire, you know, data center and moving to the cloud. Things like, you know, modernizing our apps, disaster recovery now ransomware this week. So really, really exciting uptake and innovation in that whole service. One thing customers always told us that they want more options for storage decouple from compute. And so that really helped customers to lower their total cost of ownership and get to, you know, get even more workloads into VMware cloud. And this partnership really creates that opportunity for us to provide customers with those options. >>Let me give you an example, just I was walking over here just before I walked over here. We were with a customer talking about exactly what Orion's talking about. We were modeling using a TCO calculator that we all put together as well on what we call data intensive workloads, which is in this case, it was a 500 gigabytes per VM. So not a huge amount of data per VM. The, the case study modeled out of 38% cost savings or reduction in total cost, which in the case was like 1.2 million per year of total cost down to 700 million. And just, you could do the, just depends on how many VMs you have and how big odes you have, but that's the kind of cost savings we're talking about. So the, this is a really easy value to talk about. You save a lot of money in it's exactly as nor Ryan said, because we can separate the compute and the storage. Yep. >>Yep. I was just gonna say the reason for that is it used to be with VMware cloud on AWS. If you wanted more storage for your workload, you would have to add another node. So with another node, you would get another compute node. You would get the compute, you'd get the memory and the storage, but now we've actually decoupled the ability to expand the storage footprint from the compute, allowing customers to really expand as their needs grow. And so it's, it's just a lot more flexibility. Yep. That customers had. Yeah. >>Flexibility is key. Every customer needs that they need to be agile. There's always a competitor waiting in the rear view mirror behind any business, waiting to take over. If, if they can't innovate fast enough, if they can't partner with the best of the best to deliver the infrastructure that's needed to enable those business outcomes, I wanna get your perspective, Steve, what are some of the outcomes that when you're talking to customers, you talked about fill the TCO. Those are huge numbers, very compelling. What are some of the other outcomes that customers can expect to achieve from this solution? >>That's a great question. I think customers want the flexibility. We talked about customers absolutely wanna be able to move fast. They're also very demanding customers who have had an experience with solutions like NetApp on tap on premises, right? So they've come to expect enterprise features like thin provisioning, snapshoting cloning, rapid cloning, right? And even replication of data given that customers now can leverage this type of functionality as well through the NetApp solution with VMC, they're getting all those enterprise class features from, from the storage in combination with what they already had with vs a and, and VMC. >>Steve earlier mentioned the word we used, we kind of took it from VMware or from Amazon was friction is so many workloads run in VMware VMs today to be able to just simply pick them up as is move them to Amazon makes cloud adoption. Just, I mean, frictionless is an extreme word, but it's really lowers the friction to cloud adoption. And as Steve said, then you've get all these enterprise features wherever you need to run. >>Just brings speed. >>I was just about to say, it's gotta be the speed. It has to be a huge factor here. Yep, >>Yep. Yeah. >>Sure. One of the things that we've seen with VMware cloud is operational consistency as, as a customer value because when customers are thinking about, you know, complex enterprise apps, moving that to the cloud, they need that operational consistency, which drives down their costs. They don't have to relearn new skills. They're used to VMware, they're used to NetApp. And so this partnership really fosters that operational consistency as a big customer value, and they can reuse those skills and really reapply them in this cloud model. The other thing is the cloud model here is super completely managed. If you think about that, right, customers have to do less VMware, AWS and NetApp is doing more for them. That's true in this model. >>So you're able to really deliver a lot of workforce efficiency, workforce productivity across the stack. >>Absolutely. >>And that's definitely true that it just, as it gets more complex, how do you manage it? Just continue, hear everybody talking about this, right. So when a completely managed service by VMware and Amazon is such a savings in com in management complexity, which then gets back to speed. How do I grow my plant faster? >>I mean, and really at the end of the day, customers are actually able to focus on what differentiate differentiates them, obviously versus the management of the underlying infrastructure and storage and all those, those things that are still critical, but exactly, but >>For, for the customer to be able to have to abstract the underlying underlying technology layer and focus on what differentiates them from the competition. That's like I said, right back here, right. That's especially if there's anything we've learned in the last couple of years, it's that it, that is critical for businesses across every industry, no industry exempt from this. >>None. One other thing, just an example of what you're talking about is we all work a lot on modernization techniques like using Kubernetes and container technologies. So with this, if you think about this, you, this solution, you can move an app as is modernize on the cloud. You can modernize, you can modernize and then move. You can, the flexibility that this enables like. So it's sort of like move to the cloud at your rate is a really big benefit. >>And we've seen so many customer examples of migrating modernize is how we like to summarize it, where customers are, you know, migrating, modernizing at their own pace. Yep. And the good, good thing about the platform and the service is that it is the home for all applications, virtual machines containers with Kubernetes backed by local storage, external storage options. The level of flexibility for all applications is really immense. And that drives down your TCO even more. >>What, from a target customer perspective, Noran, talk about that. Who, who is the target? Obviously I imagine VMware customers, it's NetApp customers, it's AWS, but is there, are there any targets kind of within that, that are really prime candidates for this solution? >>Yeah. A great question. First of all, the, the easy sort of overlap between all of us is our shared customer pool. And so VMware and NetApp have been partners for what, 20 years, something like that. And we have thousands of customers using our joint solutions in the data center. And so that's a very clear target for this solution, as they're considering use cases such as, you know, cloud migration, disaster recovery, virtual desktops, application modernization. So that's a very clear target and we see this day in and day out, obviously there are many other customers that would be interested in this solution, as well as they're considering, you know, AWS and we provide a whole range of consumption options for them. Right. And I think that's one of the, sort of the, the good things about our partnership, including with AWS, where customers can purchase this from VMware can purchase this from AWS and all of these different options, including from our partners really makes it very, very compelling. >>Talk a little bit about from each of your perspectives about the what's in it. For me as a partner of these companies, Steve, we'll start with you. >>I mean, what's in it for me is that it's what my customers have been asking for. And we, we have a long history, I think of providing managed services again, to remove that heavy lifting that customers often just don't want to have to do. Having seen the, the adoption of managed storage offerings, including the, the NetApp solution here and now being able to bring that into the VMware space where they're already using it in an on-premises world, and now they're moving those, those workloads being able to satisfy that need that a customer's asking for is awesome. >>We, every time we're at an AWS event, we are always talking about it's absolute customer obsession, and I know NetApp and VMware well, and know that that is a shared obsession across the three companies. >>Hey, Lisa, let me add one more thing. It's interesting, not everybody sees this, but it's really obvious that the NetApp on-prem installed base with VMware, which is tens of thousands of customers. This is an awesome solution. Not quite as obvious is that every on-prem VMware customer gets that TCO benefit. I mentioned that's not limited to the NetApp on-prem installed base. So we're really excited to be able to expose all the market that hasn't used our products on-prem to this cloud solution. And, and it's really clear customers are adopting the cloud, right? So we're, that's one of the reasons we're so excited about this is it opens up a huge new opportunity to work with new customers for us. Talk >>About those customer conversations, Phil, how, where are they happening at? What level are you talking with customers about migration to cloud? Has it changed in the last couple >>Of years? Oh yeah. You know, I've been working on this for years and a lot of the on-prem conversation, it's been a little bifurcated that on-prem is on-prem and cloud developers or cloud developers. And Amazon's done a huge amount to break that down. VMware getting in the game, a lot of it's networking complexities, those have gone down. A lot of people are cross connected and set up today, which that wasn't so true five years ago. So now it's a lot of conversations about, I hear carbon footprint reduction. I hear data all in around data center reduction. The cloud guys are super efficient operators of data center infrastructure. We were talking about different use cases like disaster recovery. It's it's everybody though. It's small companies, it's big companies. They're all sort of moving into this, it call it at least hybrid world. And that's why when I say we're get really excited about this, because it does get rid of a lot of friction for moving loads in those directions, at the rate, the customer wants to do it. >>And that one last really quick thing is I was using NetApp as an example, we have about 300 enterprise workloads. We wanna move to the cloud two, right? And so they're all running VMware, like most, most of the world. And so this solution is, looks really good to us and we're gonna do the exact, I was just out with our CIO. We're going, looking at those 300, which do we just lift and move? Which do we refactor? And how do we do that? In fact, that Ryan was out to dinner with us last night, talking about >>This it's more and more it's being driven top down. So in the early days, and I've been with Amazon for 10 years now. Yep. Early days, it was kind of developer oriented, often initiated projects. Now it's top level CIOs. Exactly. I >>Are two mandates today talking to customers. >>I think of reinvent as an it conference. Now in the way, some of these top down mandates are driven, but listen, I mean, we got great customer interest. We have been in preview for three to six months now, and we've seen a lot of customers were not able to drag their entire data center workloads because of different reasons of PCO data, intensive workloads, et cetera. And we've seen tremendous amounts of interest from them. And we're also seeing a lot of new customers in the pipeline that want to consider VMware cloud now that we have these great storage options. >>So there's a pretty healthy Tam I'm hearing. >>Absolutely. >>I think so. Yeah. It's interesting. Another, just both like WWT and Presidio, channel partners, big, huge channel partners. It takes no selling to explain. We, we just say, Hey, we're doing this. And they start building services. Presidio is here with us talking about a customer win that they got. So this is it. It's easy for people to see why this is a cool, a cool solution. >>The value prop is there >>Definitely >>There's no having appeal the onion to >>Find it. No, the money savings. It's just in what or Ryan said, a lot of people have seen the, the seen an obstacle of cost. Yeah. So the TCO benefit, I mentioned removes that obstacle. And then that opens the door to all the features Steve was talking about of the advanced storage features and things on the platform. >>So is there a customer that's been in beta on this solution that you can talk about in, in terms of what they were looking for, the challenges that you helped them erase and the outcomes they're achieving? >>Yeah, sure. I can. I can provide one example. A large financial customer was looking at this during the preview phase and you know, for, for, for reasons before that were already a customer, but they were not able to attract a lot of their other workloads from other business units. And with this solution, now the service is a much better candidate for those workloads and those business units that had not considered VMware cloud. So we're really excited to see new workloads coming from that particular customer, given this particular solution and the whole TCO math for them was very, very straightforward and simple. And this became a more attractive option for that particular customer. >>Is there a shadow it elimination factor here in this technology and who you're selling to? >>Not real, I, don't not intent. Wouldn't intentionally. I wouldn't say yeah, not intentionally. I, it was funny with the customers I was thinking is yes. The question, the customers that are in the preview are seeing the benefits that we're talking about. The, one of the reasons we started the project on our side a number of years ago was this very large cement company was looking for carbon CO2 reduction. Part of that was moving disaster recovery to the cloud. There was a lot of friction in the solution prior to this, the, the customers have done some of the things we're talking about, but there's a, it takes a lot of skill. And we were looking at working with that customer going, how could we simplify this? And that was from our point of NetApp's point of view, it, it drove us to VMware and to AWS saying, can't we pull some of the friction of this out. And I think that that's what we've seen in the, in the previews. And it's, that's what I meant. It's so exciting to go from having say, I know we have about 20 previews right now, going to the globe today is the, is the exciting news today. >>And is the solution here in booze that it can be demoed and folks can kind of get their hands on it. >>Yeah. Yeah. They can go to the VMware cloud booth at the expo and they can get their hands on their demo and they can take it for a test drive. >>Excellent. >>You can run TCO calculators and do your own math and see what you're gonna all this, the all that's integrated today. We >>Also have pilots where we can help walk customers through a scenario of their own. >>Yep. Excellent. Is there, is there a, a joint website that you guys have, we should drive folks to? >>Yeah, it's >>Actually talk about the press release. It's >>It's yours. So >>It's it's prominently on our website. Okay. VMware cloud. It is onc.vmware.com where we also have the other, you know, our corporate marketing websites that have this vmware.com is a great starting point. Yeah. And we feature the solution. Prominently customers can get started today and they can even participate in the hands on labs here and take the solution for a test drive. >>All right. Last question, nor Ryan, we'll start with you on this. Here we are. I love the theme of this event, the center of the multicloud universe. Does it not sound like a Marvel movie? I feel like there should be some, is there any superheroes running around? Cause I really feel like there should be, how is this solution an enabler of allowing customers to really extract the most of value from their multi-cloud world that they're living in? >>Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, our mission is to build, run, managed, secure applications in any cloud, right. And regu has been talking about this with the keynote this morning as well. You know, at least with NetApp, we share a very good joint vision of enabling customers to, you know, place applications with really good TCO across clouds. And so it's really good story I feel. And I think this is a really good step in that direction where customers have choice and flexibility in terms of where they put their applications in the TCO value that they get. >>Awesome. Guys, you gotta come back next with a customer would love to dig. Maybe at reinvent sounds, we can dig into more and to see a great story of how a customer came together and is really leveraging that the power that is sitting next to me here. Thank you all so much for joining me and having this great conversation. Congratulations on the announcement and it being GA. >>Thank you. Awesome. >>Thank you. Thanks Lisa. All right. Fun conversation. I told you power panel for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube, keep it right here for more live coverage of VMware Explorer, 2022 from downtown San Francisco. We'll be right back with our next guest.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome back to San Francisco. Lisa Martin and Dave Nicholson here. The cube is covering VMware Explorer, 2022 first year with the new name, there's about seven to 10,000 people here. So folks are excited to be back. I was in the keynote this morning. You probably were two David. It was standing room, only lots of excitement, lots of news. We're gonna be unpacking some news. Next. We have Brandon Jackson joining us S DDC architect at CDW and Keith normy is back one of our alumni head of worldwide partner solution sales at NetApp guys. Welcome back to the program. Hey, thank >>You, reunion week. >>So let's talk about what's going on, obviously, lots of news this morning, lots of momentum at VMware, lots of momentum at NetApp CDW. Keith, we'll start with you talk about what was announced yesterday, NetApp, VMware, AWS, and what's in it for customers and partners. >>Yeah, it's a new day. I talked about this in a blog that I wrote that, you know, for me, I started out with VMware and NetApp about 15 years ago when the ecosystem was still kind of emerging back in the ESX three days, for those that remember those days and, and NetApp had a really real dominant position because some of the things that they had delivered with VMware, and we're kind of at that same venture now where everyone needs to have as they talk about today. Multi-cloud, and, and there's been some things that people try to get through as they talk about cloud chaos today. It also is in the, some of the realms, the barriers that you don't often see. So releasing this new FSX capability with the metal data store within VMware cloud, and AWS is a real big opportunity. And it's not just a big opportunity for NetApp. It's a big opportunity for the people that actually deliver this for the customers, which is our partner. So for me, it's full circle. I started with a partner I come back around and I'm now in a great position to kind of work with our partners. And they're the real story here with us. Yeah. >>Brandon, talk about the value in this from CDWs perspective, what is the momentum that your you and the company are excited to carry forward? >>Yeah, this is super exciting. I've been close to the VMware cloud AWS story since its inception. So, you know, almost four years building that practice out at CDW and it's a great solution, but we spent all this time prior driving people to that HCI type of mentality where, Hey, you can just scale the portions that you need and that wasn't available in the cloud. And although it's a great solution, there's pain points there where it just can become cost prohibitive because customers see what they need. But that storage piece is a heavy component. And when that adds to what that cluster size needs to be, that's a real problem with this announcement, right? We can now use those supplemental data stores and be able to shrink that size. So it saves the customer massive amounts of money. I mean, we have like 25, 50% in savings while without sacrificing anything, they're getting the operational efficiency that they know and love from NetApp. They get that control and that experience that they've been using or want to use in VMware cloud. And they're just combining the two in a very cost friendly package. >>So I have one comment and that is finally >>Right. Absolutely. I, >>We used to refer to it as the devil's triangle of CPU, memory and storage. And if those are, if those are inextricably linked to one another, you want a little bit more storage. Okay. Here's your CPU and memory that you can pay for and power and cool that you don't need? No, no, no, no, no, no. I just need, I just need some storage over here. And in the VMware context, think of the affinity that VMware has had with NetApp forever. The irony being that EMC of course, owned VMware for a period of time, kind of owned their stock. Yeah. So you have this thing that is fundamentally built around VMFS that just fits perfectly into the filer methodology. Yeah. And now they're back together in the cloud. And, and the thing is if, if we were, if we were sitting here talking about this 5, 6, 7 years ago, an AWS person would've said we were all crazy. Yeah, yeah. AWS at the time would've said, nah, no, no, no, no. We're gonna figure that out. You, you, you, you guys are just gonna have to go away. It's >>Not lost on me that, you know, it was great seeing and hearing of NetApp in a day, one VMware keynote. >>It's amazing. >>That was great. And so we built off that because the, the, the great thing about kind of where this comes from is, you know, you built that whole HCI or converged infrastructure for simplicity and everyone is simplicity. And so this is just another evolution of the story. And as you do, so, you know, you've, you've freed up for all the workloads, all the scenarios, all the, all the operational situations that you've wanted to kind of get into. Now, if you can save anywhere from 25 to 50% of the costs of previous, you can unleash a whole nother set of workloads and do so by the way, with same consistent operational consistency from NetApp, in terms of the data that you have on-prem to cloud, or even if you don't have NetApp, on-prem, you know, we have the ways to get it to the cloud and VMware cloud and AWS, and, and, and basically give you that data simplicity for management. >>And, but again, it isn't just a NetApp part of this. There is, as everyone knows with cloud, a whole layer of infrastructure around the security networking, there's a ton of work that gets from the partner side to look at applications and workloads and understand sort of what's the composition of those, which ones are ready for the cloud. First, you know, seeing, you know, the AWS person with the SAP title, that's a big workload. Obviously that's making this journey to the cloud, along with all the rest of them. That's what the partners deliver. NetApp has done everything they can do to make that as frictionless as possible in the marketplace as a first party service, and now through VMware cloud. So we've done all we can do on, on that factor. Now it's the partners that could take it. And by the way, the reaction that we've seen kind of in some of, of the private previews are working, has been incredible. These guys bring really the true superhero muscle to what organizations are gonna need to have to take those workloads to VMware cloud and, and evolve it into this new cloud era that they're talking about at the keynote today. >>Yeah, don't get us wrong. We love vSphere eight and vs a, a and VSAN aid in particular, but there's a huge market need for this, for what you guys are delivering. >>Talk to us, Brandon, from your perspective about being able to, to part, to, to have the powerhouses of NetApp, VMware and AWS, and in terms of being able to meet your customers where they are and what they want. >>And I, that's huge, right? That the solution allows these things to come together in a seamless way, right? So we get the, the flexibility of cloud. We get the scalability of easy storage now, in a way we didn't have before, and we get the power that's VMware, right. And in that, in the virtualization platform, and that makes it easy for a customer to say, I need to be somewhere else. And maybe that's not, that's not a colo anymore. That's not a secondary data center. I want to be in the cloud, but I wanna do it on my terms. I wanna do it. So it works for me as a customer. This solution has that, right? And, and we come in as a partner and we look at, we kind of call it the full stack approach, where we really look at the entire, you know, ecosystem that we're talking. >>So from the application all the way down to the infrastructure and even below, and figure out how that's gonna work best for our customers and putting things together with the native cloud services, then with their VMware environment, living on VMware cloud, AWS, leveraging storage with a, you know, with the, the FSX in. So they can easily grow their storage and use all those operational efficiencies and the things that they love about NetApp already. And from a Dr. Use case, we can replicate from a NetApp to NetApp. And it's just, it makes it so easy to have that conversation with the customers and just, it clicks. And like, this is what I need. This is what I've been looking for. And all wrapped up in a really easy package. >>No wonder Dave's comment was finally right. >>Oh, absolutely. I mean, we've been, again, you know, we talked about the HCI, like that made sense. And three or four years ago, maybe even a little bit longer, right. That click, same thing was like, oh my gosh, this is the way infrastructure should work. And we're just having that same Nirvana moment that this is how easy cloud infrastructure can work and that I can have that storage without sacrificing the cost, throw more nodes into my cluster to be able to do so. >>Yeah. I I've just worked with so many customers who struggle to get to where they want to be BEC, and this is something that just feels like a nice worn in pair of shoes or jeans to folks who right now, you know, look, the majority of it spend is still on premises, right? So the typical deployment of VMware today is often VMware with NetApp appliances providing file storage. So this is something that I imagine will help accelerate some of your customers' moves. >>It absolutely will. And in fact, I have three customers off the hand that I know that I've been like, not wanting to say anything like let's talk next week. Right? There's this, there may be something we can talk about when, on, after Explorer waiting for the announcement, because we've been working with NetApp and, and doing some of the private preview stuff. Yeah. And our engineering teams, working with your engineering teams to build this out so that when the announcement came out yesterday, we can go back and say, okay, now let's have that conversation. Now let's talk about what this looks like, >>Where are you having customer conversation? So this is strictly an it conversation has this elevated up the stack, especially as we've seen the massive, I call it cloud migration adoption of the last couple of years. >>I, I I'll speak fairly from the partner level. It is an elevated conversation. So we're not only talking, at least I'm not only talking to it. Administrators, directors, C levels like this is a story that resonates because it's about business value, right? I have an initiative, I have a goal. And that goal is wrapped into that it solution. And typically has some sort of resource or financial cost to it. We want to hear that story. And so it resonates when we can talk about how you can achieve your goals, do it in a way with a specific solution that encompasses everything at a price point that you'll like, and then that can flow down to the directors and the it administrators. And we can start talking about, you know, turning the screws and the knobs. >>Yeah. And for us, it does start with a partner because the reality is that's who the that's, who the customers all engage. And the reality is there's not just one partner type there's many, you know, we, in fact, what the biggest thing that we've been really modernizing is how to address the different partner types. Cuz you obviously have the Accentures of the world that are the big GSIs, the big SI you have folks that are hosting providers, you have Equinox X in the middle of that. You've got partners that just do services that might be only influenced partners that are influencing the, the design. And so if you look up and down between, you know, VMware's partner ecosystem and NetApp's partner ecosystem overlap pretty well, but there's this factor with AWS about, you know, both born and the cloud partners and partners, you know, like CW that have really, you know, taken the step forward to be relevant in that phase going forward. >>And that's, what's exciting to us is to see that kind of come forward. So when something like a FSX end comes forward in this VMware cloud and AWS scenario, they can take and, and just have instant ignition with it. And for us, that's what it's about. Our job is really just to remove friction back what they do and get outta the way, help them win. And last week we were in Chicago at the AWS reinvent thing and seeing AWS with another partner in their whole briefing and how they came to life with the, with this whole anticipation for this week, you know, it's, it's all the partners are very excited for it. So we're just gonna fuel that. And you know, I often wonder we got the, the t-shirt that says, you know, two's company three is a cloud maybe should have been four because it takes the, the partner for the, the completion. >>We appreciate that for sure. >>It does. It sounds like there's tremendous momentum in the market, an appetite across all three companies, four, if you include CDW. So in terms of, of the selling motion, it sounds like you've got folks that are gonna be eating out of eating out of your pocket. Who've been waiting for this for quite a while. Yeah. >>I think you, the analogy used earlier, it's nice when the tires are already on the Ferrari, right. This thing could just go, yes. And we've got people that we're already talking to that this fits, we've got some great go to market strategies. As we start doing partner in sales enablement to make sure that our people behind the scenes are telling the story and the way that we want it to jointly so that all of us can, you know, come together and have that aligned common message to really, you know, make this win and make this pop >>One correction though is technically we sponsor Aston Martin. So it's not a fry. It's an Aston Martin. There >>You go. >>That's right. Quite taken, not a car guy. Can >>You, can you talk a little bit Brendan about the, the routes to market and the, the GTM that you guys are working on together, even at a high level? Yeah. >>At a high level, we've already had some meetings talking about how we can get this message out. The nice thing about this is it's not relegated to a single industry vertical. It's not a single type of customer. We see this across the board and, and certainly with any of our cloud infrastructure solutions, it seems very, even from a regional standpoint and an industry vertical standpoint. So really it's just about how to get our sellers, you know, that get that message to them. So we had meetings here this week. We've been talking to your teams, oh, for probably six weeks now on what's that gonna look like? You know, what type of events are we gonna hold? Do we wanna do some type of road show? Yeah. We've done that with FlexPod very successfully, a few years ago where our teams working with your teams and VMware, we all came out and, and showed this to the world and doing something similar with this to show how easy it is to add supplemental storage to VMC. And just get that out to the masses through events, maybe through sales webinars. I mean, we're still in this world where maybe it's more virtual than on person, but we're starting to shift back, but it's just about telling the message and, and showing, Hey, here's how you do it. Come talk to us. We can help you. And we want to help >>Talk about the messaging from a, a multi-cloud perspective. Here we are at VMware Explorer, the theme, the center of the multi-cloud universe, how is this solution from NetApp's perspective? And then CDWs, how does it an enabler of customers that so many are living in the multi-cloud world by default? >>Yeah. And I think the big subtlety there that, that maybe was MIS missed was the private cloud being just so their cloud. The reality of that is probably a little bit short of, you know, of what people kind of deal with with their on on-prem data centers, just because of some of the applications, data sets they're trying to work through for AI ML and analytics. But that's what the partner's great at is, is helping them kind of leap forward and actually realize the on-prem to become the private cloud and really operate in this multi-cloud scenario and, and get beyond this cloud chaos factor. So again, you know, the beautiful part about all this is that, you know, the, the, the never ending sort of options, the optionality that you have on security, on networking, on applications, data sets, locations, governance, these are all factors that the partner deals with way better than we could even think of. So for us, it's really about just trying to connect with them, get their feedback and actually design in from the partner to take something like this and make it something that works for them >>Back to your shirt. What does it say? Two's company, three's a cloud that's right. But if you want rain, you need a fourth. Yeah. Right. We're here in California. I don't care about clouds. We need it to rain. All >>Right. So >>It's all well and good that yeah. If you know, a couple of you get together and offer something up, but where the rubber meets the road, you know, the customer relationship, the strategic seat at the customer table, there, aren't more of those than there have been in the past. And, and, and ecosystems have obviously gotten more complicated. I can't help thinking back as I think back on the history of, of NetApp and VMware and CDW, there was a time when, when things were bad, you get rid of marketing. And then, and then after that, it was definitely alliances and partnerships cuz who the heck are those people right now? Everything is an ecosystem. Yeah. Everything is an ecosystem. So talk about how CW CDW has changed through its history in terms of where CDW has come from. >>Sure. And you >>Know, not everybody knows that CDW is involved in as sophisticated in area as you are. >>And, and that's true. I mean, sometimes it's tongue in cheek, but you know, we've fulfilled a lot of needs throughout the years and, and maybe at times just a fulfillment or a box pusher, but we're really so much more that, and we've been so much more than that for years. And through some of our acquisitions, you know, Sirius last year I G N w our international arm with Kway when it became CDW, K we have a, you know, a premier experience around consultative services. And that we talk about that full stack, right? Yeah. From the application to the cloud, to the infrastructure, to the security around it, to the networking, we can help out with all of that. And we've got experts and, and, you know, on the presales and postsales that, that's what they live for. It's their passion. And working with partners close in hand, that that's, we've had great relationships with, with NetApp. And again, I've been with CDW for over 12 years. And in all 12 of those years, I've been very close to NetApp in one way, shape or form, and to see how we work together to solve our customers' challenges. It's less about what we want to do. It's more about what we're doing to help the customer. And, and I've seen that day in and day out from our relationship and, you know, kind of our partnership. >>So say we're back here in six months, or maybe we're back here at reinvent, talking with you guys and a customer. What are some of the outcomes that at this stage you were expecting customers to be able to achieve, >>Be able to do more, put more out there, right. To not be limited by the construct of, I only have X amount of space. And so maybe the use case or the initiative is, is wrapped around that. Let's turn that around and say, that's, you're limitless, let's have move what you need. And you're not gonna have to worry so much about the cost, the way you did six months ago or seven months ago, or six months in a day ago that you can do more with it. And if we have an X amount in our bucket in, in July, we could do 200 VMs. You know, and now six months later, we've done 500 VMs because of those efficiency savings because of that cost savings and using supplemental storage. So I, I see that being a growth factor and being say, Hey, this was easy. We always knew this was a solution we liked, but now it's easy and bigger. >>Yeah. I think on our end, the spectrum, I'll just say what Phil Brons would say. I said previously, he was in the previous segment, which is, this could go pretty quick, folks that have wanted to do this now that they know this is something to do and that they can go at it. The part we already know, the partners are very much in like ready to go mode. They've been waiting for this day to just get the announcement out so they can get kind of get going. And it's funny because you know, when we've presented, we've kind of presented some of the tech behind what we're doing and then the ROI T C calculator last, and everyone's feedback is the same. They said you should just lead to the calculator. So then yeah, you can see exactly how much money you save. In fact, one of the jokes is there's not many times you've saved this much money in it before. And so it's, it's a big, wow. Factor, >>Big, wow. Factor, big differentiator, guys. Thank you so much for joining David, me talking about what NetApp, VMware, AWS are doing, how it's being delivered through CDW, the evolution of all these companies. We're excited to watch the solution. We better let you go because you probably have a ton of meeting. People are just chopping at the bit to get this. Yeah. >>It's, it's exciting times. I'm loving it being here and being able to talk about this finally, in a public setting. So this has been great. >>Awesome guys. Thank you again for your time. We appreciate it. Yep. For our guests and Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cube live from VMware Explorer, 2022. We'll be back after a short break, stick around.

[Music] welcome back to aws storage day 2022 i'm dave vellante and we're pleased to have back on thecube edname the gm of aws file storage ed how you doing good to see you i'm good dave good good to see you as well you know we've been tracking aws storage for a lot of years 16 years actually we we've seen the evolution of services of course we started with s3 and object and saw that expand the block and file and and now the pace is actually accelerating and we're seeing aws make more moves again today and block an object but what about file uh it's one format in the world and the day wouldn't really be complete without talking about file storage so what are you seeing from customers in terms of let's start with data growth how are they dealing with the challenges what are those challenges if you could address you know specifically some of the issues that they're having that would be great and then later we're going to get into the role that cloud file storage plays take it away well dave i'm definitely increasingly hearing customers talk about the challenges in managing ever-growing data sets and they're especially challenged in doing that on-premises when we look at the data that's stored on premises zettabytes of data the fastest growing data sets consist of unstructured data that are stored as files and many cups have tens of petabytes or hundreds of petabytes or even exabytes of file data and this data is typically growing 20 30 percent a year and in reality on-premises models really designed to handle this amount of data in this type of growth and i'm not just talking about keeping up with hardware purchases and hardware floor space but a big part of the challenge is labor and talent to keep up with the growth they're seeing companies managing storage on-prem they really need an unprecedented number of skilled resources to manage the storage and these skill sets are in really high demand and they're in short supply and then another big part of the challenge that customers tell me all the time is that that operating at scale dealing with these ever-growing data sets at scale is really hard and it's not just hard in terms of the the people you need and the skill sets that you need but operating at scale presents net new challenges so for example it becomes increasingly hard to know what data you have and what storage media your data stored on when you have a massive amount of data that's spanning hundreds of thousands or uh thousands of applications and users and it's growing super fast each year and at scale you start seeing edge technical issues get triggered more commonly impacting your availability or your resiliency or your security and you start seeing processes that used to work when you were a much smaller scale no longer work it's just scale is hard it's really hard and then finally companies are wanting to do more with their fast growing data sets to get insights from it and they look at the machine learning and the analytics and the processing services and the compute power that they have at their fingertips on the cloud and having that data be in silos on-prem can really limit how they get the most out of their data you know i've been covering glad you brought up the skills gap i've been covering that quite extensively with my colleagues at etr you know our survey partner so that's a really important topic and we're seeing it across the board i mean really acute in cyber security but for sure just generally in i.t and frankly ceos they don't want to invest in training people to manage storage i mean it wasn't that long ago that managing loans was a was a talent and that's of course nobody does that anymore but they'd executives would much rather apply skills to get value from data so my specific question is what can be done what is aws doing to address this problem well with the growth of data that that we're seeing it it's just it's really hard for a lot of it teams to keep up with just the infrastructure management part that's needed so things like deploying capacity and provisioning resources and patching and conducting compliance reviews and that stuff is just table stakes the asks on these teams to your point are growing to be much bigger than than those pieces so we're really seeing fast uptake of our amazon fsx service because it's such an easy path for helping customers with these scaling challenges fsx enables customers to launch and to run and to scale feature rich and highly performant network attached file systems on aws and it provides fully managed file storage which means that we handle all of the infrastructure so all of that provisioning and that patching and ensuring high availability and customers simply make api calls to do things like scale up their storage or change their performance level at any point or change a backup policy and a big part of why fsx has been so feeling able to customers is it really enables them to to choose the file system technology that powers their storage so we provide four of the most popular file system technologies we provide windows file server netapp ontap open zfs and luster so that storage and application admins can use what they're familiar with so they essentially get the full capabilities and even the management clis that they're used to and that they've built workflows and applications around on-premises but they get along with that of course the benefits of fully managed elastic cloud storage that can be spin up and spun spin down and scaled on demand and performance changed on demand etc and what storage and application admins are seeing is that fsx not only helps them keep up with their scale and growth but it gives them the bandwidth to do more of what they want to do supporting strategic decision making helping their end customers figure out how they can get more value from their data identifying opportunities to reduce cost and what we realize is that for for a number of storage and application admins the cloud is is a different environment from what they're used to and we're making it a priority to help educate and train folks on cloud storage earlier today we talked about aws storage digital badges and we announced a dedicated file badge that helps storage admins and professionals to learn and demonstrate their aws skills in our aws storage badges you can think of them as credentials that represent cloud computing learning that customers can add to their repertoire add to their resume as they're embarking on this cloud journey and we'll be talking more in depth on this later today especially around the file badge which i'm very excited about so a couple things there that i wanted to comment on i mean i was there for the netapp you know your announcement we've covered that quite extensively this is just shows that it's not a zero-sum game necessarily right it's a win-win-win for customers you've got your you know specific aws services you've got partner services you know customers want want choice and then the managed service model you know to me is a no-brainer for most customers we learned this in the hadoop years i mean it just got so complicated then you saw what happened with the managed services around you know data lakes and lake houses it's just really simplified things for customers i mean there's still some customers that want to do it yourself but a managed service for the file storage sounds like a really easy decision especially for those it teams that are overburdened as we were talking about before and i also like you know the education component is nice touch too you get the badge thing so that's kind of cool so i'm hearing that if the fully managed file storage service is a catalyst for cloud adoption so the question is which workloads should people choose to move into the cloud where's the low friction low risk sweet spot ed well that's one of the first questions that customers ask when they're about to embark on their cloud journey and i wish i could give a simple or a single answer but the answer is really it varies and it varies per customer and i'll give you an example for some customers the cloud journey begins with what we call extending on-premises workloads into the cloud so an example of that is compute bursting workloads where customers have data on premises and they have some compute on premises but they want to burst their processing of that data to the cloud because they really want to take advantage of the massive amount of compute that they get on aws and that's common with workloads like visual effects ringer chip design simulation genomics analysis and so that's an example of extending to the cloud really leveraging the cloud first for your workloads another example is disaster recovery and that's a really common example customers will use a cloud for their secondary or their failover site rather than maintaining their their second on-prem location and so that's a lot of customers start with some of those workloads by extending to the cloud and then there's there's a lot of other customers where they've made the decision to migrate most or all of their workloads and they're not they're skipping the whole extending step they aren't starting there they're instead focused on going all in as fast as possible because they really want to get to the full benefits of the cloud as fast as possible and for them the migration journey is really it's a matter of sequencing sequencing which specific workloads to move and when and what's interesting is we're increasingly seeing customers prioritizing their most important and their most mission-critical applications ahead of their other workloads in terms of timing and they're they're doing that to get their workloads to benefit from the added resilience they get from running on the cloud so really it really does uh depend dave yeah thank you i mean that's pretty pretty good description of the options there and i i just come something you know bursting obviously i love those examples you gave around genomics chip design visual effects rendering the dr piece is again very common sort of cloud you know historical you know sweet spots for cloud but then the point about mission critical is interesting because i hear a lot of customers especially with the digital transformation push wanting to change their operating model i mean on the one hand not changing things put it in the cloud the lift and shift you have to change things low friction but then once they get there they're like wow we can do a lot more with the cloud so that was really helpful those those examples now last year at storage day you released a new file service and then you followed that up at re-event with another file service introduction sometimes i can admit i get lost in the array of services so help us understand when a customer comes to aws with like an nfs or an smb workload how do you steer them to the right managed service you know the right horse for the right course yeah well i'll start by saying uh you know a big part of our focus has been in providing choice to customers and what customers tell us is that the spectrum of options that we provide to them really helps them in their cloud journey because there really isn't a one-size-fits-all file system for all workloads and so having these options actually really helps them to to be able to move pretty easily to the cloud um and so my answer to your question about uh where do we steer a customer when they have a file workload is um it really depends on what the customer is trying to do and uh in many cases where they're coming from so i'll walk you through a little bit of of of how we think about this with customers so for storage and application admins who are extending existing workloads to the cloud or migrating workloads to aws the easiest path generally is to move to an fsx file system that provides the same or really similar underlying file system engine that they use on premises so for example if you're running a netapp appliance on premises or a windows file server on premises choosing that option within fsx provides the least effort for a customer to lift their application and their data set and they'll get the full safe set of capabilities that they're used to they'll get the performance profiles that they're used to but of course they'll get all the benefits of the cloud that i was talking about earlier like spin up and spin down and fully managed and elastic capacity then we also provide open source file systems within the fsx family so if you're a customer and you're used to those or if you aren't really wedded to a particular file system technology these are really good options and they're built on top of aws's latest infrastructure innovations which really allows them to provide pretty significant price and performance benefits to customers so for example the file system file servers for these offerings are powered by aws's graviton family of processors and under the hood we use storage technology that's built on top of aws's scalable reliable datagram transport protocol which really optimizes for for speed on the cloud and so for those two open source file systems we have open zfs and that provides a really powerful highly performant nfs v3 and v4 and 4.1 and 4.2 file system built on a fast and resilient open source linux file system it has a pretty rich set of capabilities it has things like point-to-time snapshots and in-place data cloning and our customers are really using it because of these capabilities and because of its performance for a pretty broad set of enterprise i.t workloads and vertically focused workloads like within the financial services space and the healthcare life sciences space and then luster is a scale-out file system that's built on the world's most popular high-performance file system which is the luster open source file system and customers are using it for compute intensive workloads where they're throwing tons of compute at massive data sets and they need to drive tens or hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput it's really popular for things like machine learning training and high performance computing big data analytics video rendering and transcoding so really those scale out compute intensive workloads and then we have a very different type of customer very different persona and this is the individual that we call the aws builder and these are folks who are running cloud native workloads they leverage a broad spectrum of aws's compute and analytic services and they have really no history of on-prem examples are data scientists who require a file share for training sets research scientists who are performing analysis on lab data developers who are building containerized or serverless workloads and cloud practitioners who need a simple solution for storing assets for their cloud workflows and and these these folks are building and running a wide range of data focused workloads and they've grown up using services like lambda and building containerized workloads so most of these individuals generally are not storage experts and they look for storage that just works s3 and consumer file shares uh like dropbox are their reference point for how cloud storage works and they're indifferent to or unaware of bio protocols like smb or nfs and performing typical nas administrative tasks is just not it's not a natural experience for them it's not something they they do and we built amazon efs to meet the needs of that group it's fully elastic it's fully serverless spreads data across multiple availability zones by default it scales infinitely it works very much like s3 so for example you get the same durability and availability profile of s3 you get intelligent tiering of colder data just like you do on s3 so that service just clicks with cloud native practitioners it's it's intuitive and it just works there's mind-boggling the number of use cases you just went through and this is where it's so you know it's you know a lot of times people roll their eyes oh here's amazon talking about you know customer obsession again but if you don't stay close to your customers there's no way you could have predicted when you're building these services how they were going to be put to use the only way you can understand it is watch what customers do with it i loved the conversation about graviton we've written about that a lot i mean nitro we've written about that how it's you've completely rethought virtualization the security components in there the hpc luster piece and and the efs for data scientists so really helpful there thank you i'm going to change uh topics a little bit because there's been this theme that you've been banging on at storage day putting data to work and i tell you it's a bit of a passion of mine ed because frankly customers have been frustrated with the return on data initiatives it's been historically complicated very time consuming and expensive to really get value from data and often the business lines end up frustrated so let's talk more about that concept and i understand you have an announcement that fits with this scene can you tell us more about that absolutely today we're announcing a new service called amazon file cache and it's a service on aws that accelerates and simplifies hybrid workflows and specifically amazon file cache provides a high speed cache on aws that makes it easier to process file data regardless of where the data is stored and amazon file cache serves as a temporary high performance storage location and it's for data that's stored in on-premise file servers or in file systems or object stores in aws and what it does is it enables enterprises to make these dispersed data sets available to file based applications on aws with a unified view and at high speeds so think of sub millisecond latencies and and tens or hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput and so a really common use case it supports is if you have data stored on premises and you want to burst the processing workload to the cloud you can set up this cache on aws and it allows you to have the working set for your compute workload be cached near your aws compute so what you would do as a customer when you want to use this is you spin up this cache you link it to one or more on-prem nfs file servers and then you mount this cache to your compute instances on aws and when you do this all of your on-prem data will appear up automatically as folders and files on the cache and when your aws compute instances access a file for the first time the cache downloads the data that makes up that file in real time and that data then would reside on the cache as you work with it and when it's in the cache your application has access to that data at those sub millisecond latencies and at up to hundreds of gigabytes per second of throughput and all of this data movement is done automatically and in the background completely transparent to your application that's running on the compute instances and then when you're done with your workload with your data processing job you can export the changes and all the new data back to your on-premises file servers and then tear down the cache another common use case is if you have a compute intensive file-based application and you want to process a data set that's in one or more s3 buckets you can have this cache serve as a really high speed layer that your compute instances mount as a network file system you can also place this cache in front of a mix of on-prem file servers and s3 buckets and even fsx file systems that are on aws all of the data from these locations will appear within a single name space that clients that mount the cache have access to and those clients get all the performance benefits of the cache and also get a unified view of their data sets and and to your point about listening to customers and really paying attention to customers dave we built this service because customers asked us to a lot of customers asked us to actually it's a really helpful enable enabler for a pretty wide variety of cloud bursting workloads and hybrid workflows ranging from media rendering and transcoding to engineering design simulation to big data analytics and it really aligns with that theme of extend that we were talking about earlier you know i often joke that uh aws has the best people working on solving the speed of light problem so okay but so this idea of bursting as i said has been a great cloud use case from the early days and and bringing it to file storage is very sound and approach with file cache looks really practical um when is the service available how can i get started you know bursting to aws give us the details there yeah well stay tuned we we announced it today at storage day and it will be generally available later this year and once it becomes available you can create a cache via the the aws management console or through the sdks or the cli and then within minutes of creating the cache it'll be available to your linux instances and your instances will be able to access it using standard file system mount commands and the pricing model is going to be a pretty familiar one to cloud customers customers will only pay for the cash storage and the performance they need and they can spin a cash up and use it for the duration of their compute burst workload and then tear it down so i'm really excited that amazon file cache will make it easier for customers to leverage the agility and the performance and the cost efficiency of aws for processing data no matter where the data is stored yeah cool really interested to see how that gets adopted ed always great to catch up with you as i said the pace is mind-boggling it's accelerating in the cloud overall but storage specifically so by asking us can we take a little breather here can we just relax for a bit and chill out uh not as long as customers are asking us for more things so there's there's more to come for sure all right ed thanks again great to see you i really appreciate your time thanks dave great catching up okay and thanks for watching our coverage of aws storage day 2022 keep it right there for more in-depth conversations on thecube your leader in enterprise and emerging tech coverage [Music] you

(upbeat music) >> Hello, and welcome to "theCUBE" conversation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE," got a great security conversation, Ed Casper who's the founder and CEO of Cloud Storage Security, the great Cloud background, Cloud security, Cloud storage. Welcome to the "theCUBE Conversation," Ed. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you very much for having me. >> I got Lafomo on that background. You got the nice look there. Let's get into the storage blind spot conversation around Cloud Security. Obviously, reinforced has came up a ton, you heard a lot about encryption, automated reasoning but still ransomware was still hot. All these things are continuing to be issues on security but they're all brought on data and storage, right? So this is a big part of it. Tell us a little bit about how you guys came about the origination story. What is the company all about? >> Sure, so, we're a pandemic story. We started in February right before the pandemic really hit and we've survived and thrived because it is such a critical thing. If you look at the growth that's happening in storage right now, we saw this at reinforced. We saw even a recent AWS Storage Day. Their S3, in particular, houses over 200 trillion objects. If you look just 10 years ago, in 2012, Amazon touted how they were housing one trillion objects, so in a 10 year period, it's grown to 200 trillion and really most of that has happened in the last three or four years, so the pandemic and the shift in the ability and the technologies to process data better has really driven the need and driven the Cloud growth. >> I want to get into some of the issues around storage. Obviously, the trend on S3, look at what they've done. I mean, I saw my land at storage today. We've interviewed her. She's amazing. Just the EC2 and S3 the core pistons of AWS, obviously, the silicons getting better, the IaaS layers just getting so much more innovation. You got more performance abstraction layers at the past is emerging Cloud operations on premise now with hybrid is becoming a steady state and if you look at all the action, it's all this hyper-converged kind of conversations but it's not hyper-converged in a box, it's Cloud Storage, so there's a lot of activity around storage in the Cloud. Why is that? >> Well, because it's that companies are defined by their data and, if a company's data is growing, the company itself is growing. If it's not growing, they are stagnant and in trouble, and so, what's been happening now and you see it with the move to Cloud especially over the on-prem storage sources is people are starting to put more data to work and they're figuring out how to get the value out of it. Recent analysts made a statement that if the Fortune 1000 could just share and expose 10% more of their data, they'd have net revenue increases of 65 million. So it's just the ability to put that data to work and it's so much more capable in the Cloud than it has been on-prem to this point. >> It's interesting data portability is being discussed, data access, who gets access, do you move compute to the data? Do you move data around? And all these conversations are kind of around access and security. It's one of the big vulnerabilities around data whether it's an S3 bucket that's an manual configuration error, or if it's a tool that needs credentials. I mean, how do you manage all this stuff? This is really where a rethink kind of comes around so, can you share how you guys are surviving and thriving in that kind of crazy world that we're in? >> Yeah, absolutely. So, data has been the critical piece and moving to the Cloud has really been this notion of how do I protect my access into the Cloud? How do I protect who's got it? How do I think about the networking aspects? My east west traffic after I've blocked them from coming in but no one's thinking about the data itself and ultimately, you want to make that data very safe for the consumers of the data. They have an expectation and almost a demand that the data that they consume is safe and so, companies are starting to have to think about that. They haven't thought about it. It has been a blind spot, you mentioned that before. In regards to, I am protecting my management plane, we use posture management tools. We use automated services. If you're not automating, then you're struggling in the Cloud. But when it comes to the data, everyone thinks, "Oh, I've blocked access. I've used firewalls. I've used policies on the data," but they don't think about the data itself. It is that packet that you talked about that moves around to all the different consumers and the workflows and if you're not ensuring that that data is safe, then, you're in big trouble and we've seen it over and over again. >> I mean, it's definitely a hot category and it's changing a lot, so I love this conversation because it's a primary one, primary and secondary cover data cotton storage. It's kind of good joke there, but all kidding aside, it's a hard, you got data lineage tracing is a big issue right now. We're seeing companies come out there and kind of superability tangent there. The focus on this is huge. I'm curious, what was the origination story? What got you into the business? Was it like, were you having a problem with this? Did you see an opportunity? What was the focus when the company was founded? >> It's definitely to solve the problems that customers are facing. What's been very interesting is that they're out there needing this. They're needing to ensure their data is safe. As the whole story goes, they're putting it to work more, we're seeing this. I thought it was a really interesting series, one of your last series about data as code and you saw all the different technologies that are processing and managing that data and companies are leveraging today but still, once that data is ready and it's consumed by someone, it's causing real havoc if it's not either protected from being exposed or safe to use and consume and so that's been the biggest thing. So we saw a niche. We started with this notion of Cloud Storage being object storage, and there was nothing there protecting that. Amazon has the notion of access and that is how they protect the data today but not the packets themselves, not the underlying data and so, we created the solution to say, "Okay, we're going to ensure that that data is clean. We're also going to ensure that you have awareness of what that data is, the types of files you have out in the Cloud, wherever they may be, especially as they drift outside of the normal platforms that you're used to seeing that data in. >> It's interesting that people were storing data lakes. Oh yeah, just store a womp we might need and then became a data swamp. That's kind of like go back 67 years ago. That was the conversation. Now, the conversation is I need data. It's got to be clean. It's got to feed the machine learning. This is going to be a critical aspect of the business model for the developers who are building the apps, hence, the data has code reference which we've focused on but then you say, "Okay, great. Does this increase our surface area for potential hackers?" So there's all kinds of things that kind of open up, we start doing cool, innovative, things like that so, what are some of the areas that you see that your tech solves around some of the blind spots or with object store, the things that people are overlooking? What are some of the core things that you guys are seeing that you're solving? >> So, it's a couple of things, right now, the still the biggest thing you see in the news is configuration issues where people are losing their data or accidentally opening up to rights. That's the worst case scenario. Reads are a bad thing too but if you open up rights and we saw this with a major API vendor in the last couple of years they accidentally opened rights to their buckets. Hackers found it immediately and put malicious code into their APIs that were then downloaded and consumed by many, many of their customers so, it is happening out there. So the notion of ensuring configuration is good and proper, ensuring that data has not been augmented inappropriately and that it is safe for consumption is where we started and, we created a lightweight, highly scalable solution. At this point, we've scanned billions of files for customers and petabytes of data and we're seeing that it's such a critical piece to that to make sure that that data's safe. The big thing and you brought this up as well is the big thing is they're getting data from so many different sources now. It's not just data that they generate. You see one centralized company taking in from numerous sources, consolidating it, creating new value on top of it, and then releasing that and the question is, do you trust those sources or not? And even if you do, they may not be safe. >> We had an event around super Clouds is a topic we brought up to get bring the attention to the complexity of hybrid which is on premise, which is essentially Cloud operations. And the successful people that are doing things in the software side are essentially abstracting up the benefits of the infrastructures of service from HN AWS, right, which is great. Then they innovate on top so they have to abstract that storage is a key component of where we see the innovations going. How do you see your tech that kind of connecting with that trend that's coming which is everyone wants infrastructures code. I mean, that's not new. I mean, that's the goal and it's getting better every day but DevOps, the developers are driving the operations and security teams to like stay pace, so policy seeing a lot of policy seeing some cool things going on that's abstracting up from say storage and compute but then those are being put to use as well, so you've got this new wave coming around the corner. What's your reaction to that? What's your vision on that? How do you see that evolving? >> I think it's great, actually. I think that the biggest problem that you have to do as someone who is helping them with that process is make sure you don't slow it down. So, just like Cloud at scale, you must automate, you must provide different mechanisms to fit into workflows that allow them to do it just how they want to do it and don't slow them down. Don't hold them back and so, we've come up with different measures to provide and pretty much a fit for any workflow that any customer has come so far with. We do data this way. I want you to plug in right here. Can you do that? And so it's really about being able to plug in where you need to be, and don't slow 'em down. That's what we found so far. >> Oh yeah, I mean that exactly, you don't want to solve complexity with more complexity. That's the killer problem right now so take me through the use case. Can you just walk me through how you guys engage with customers? How they consume your service? How they deploy it? You got some deployment scenarios. Can you talk about how you guys fit in and what's different about what you guys do? >> Sure, so, we're what we're seeing is and I'll go back to this data coming from numerous sources. We see different agencies, different enterprises taking data in and maybe their solution is intelligence on top of data, so they're taking these data sets in whether it's topographical information or whether it's in investing type information. Then they process that and they scan it and they distribute it out to others. So, we see that happening as a big common piece through data ingestion pipelines, that's where these folks are getting most of their data. The other is where is the data itself, the document or the document set, the actual critical piece that gets moved around and we see that in pharmaceutical studies, we see it in mortgage industry and FinTech and healthcare and so, anywhere that, let's just take a very simple example, I have to apply for insurance. I'm going to upload my Social Security information. I'm going to upload a driver's license, whatever it happens to be. I want to one know which of my information is personally identifiable, so I want to be able to classify that data but because you're trusting or because you're taking data from untrusted sources, then you have to consider whether or not it's safe for you to use as your own folks and then also for the downstream users as well. >> It's interesting, in the security world, we hear zero trust and then we hear supply chain, software supply chains. We get to trust everybody, so you got kind of two things going on. You got the hardware kind of like all the infrastructure guys saying, "Don't trust anything 'cause we have a zero trust model," but as you start getting into the software side, it's like trust is critical like containers and Cloud native services, trust is critical. You guys are kind of on that balance where you're saying, "Hey, I want data to come in. We're going to look at it. We're going to make sure it's clean." That's the value here. Is that what I'm hearing you, you're taking it and you're saying, "Okay, we'll ingest it and during the ingestion process, we'll classify it. We'll do some things to it with our tech and put it in a position to be used properly." Is that right? >> That's exactly right. That's a great summary, but ultimately, if you're taking data in, you want to ensure it's safe for everyone else to use and there are a few ways to do it. Safety doesn't just mean whether it's clean or not. Is there malicious content or not? It means that you have complete coverage and control and awareness over all of your data and so, I know where it came from. I know whether it's clean and I know what kind of data is inside of it and we don't see, we see that the interesting aspects are we see that the cleanliness factor is so critical in the workflow, but we see the classification expand outside of that because if your data drifts outside of what your standard workflow was, that's when you have concerns, why is PII information over here? And that's what you have to stay on top of, just like AWS is control plane. You have to manage it all. You have to make sure you know what services have all of a sudden been exposed publicly or not, or maybe something's been taken over or not and you control that. You have to do that with your data as well. >> So how do you guys fit into the security posture? Say it a large company that might want to implement this right away. Sounds like it's right in line with what developers want and what people want. It's easy to implement from what I see. It's about 10, 15, 20 minutes to get up and running. It's not hard. It's not a heavy lift to get in. How do you guys fit in once you get operationalized when you're successful? >> It's a lightweight, highly scalable serverless solution, it's built on Fargate containers and it goes in very easily and then, we offer either native integrations through S3 directly, or we offer APIs and the APIs are what a lot of our customers who want inline realtime scanning leverage and we also are looking at offering the actual proxy aspects. So those folks who use the S3 APIs that our native AWS, puts and gets. We can actually leverage our put and get as an endpoint and when they retrieve the file or place the file in, we'll scan it on access as well, so, it's not just a one time data arrest. It can be a data in motion as you're retrieving the information as well >> We were talking with our friends the other day and we're talking about companies like Datadog. This is the model people want, they want to come in and developers are driving a lot of the usage and operational practice so I have to ask you, this fits kind of right in there but also, you also have the corporate governance policy police that want to make sure that things are covered so, how do you balance that? Because that's an important part of this as well. >> Yeah, we're really flexible for the different ways they want to consume and and interact with it. But then also, that is such a critical piece. So many of our customers, we probably have a 50/50 breakdown of those inside the US versus those outside the US and so, you have those in California with their information protection act. You have GDPR in Europe and you have Asia having their own policies as well and the way we solve for that is we scan close to the data and we scan in the customer's account, so we don't require them to lose chain of custody and send data outside of the accoun. That is so critical to that aspect. And then we don't ask them to transfer it outside of the region, so, that's another critical piece is data residency has to be involved as part of that compliance conversation. >> How much does Cloud enable you to do this that you couldn't really do before? I mean, this really shows the advantage of natively being in the Cloud to kind of take advantage of the IaaS to SAS components to solve these problems. Share your thoughts on how this is possible. What if there was no problem, what would you do? >> It really makes it a piece of cake. As silly as that sounds, when we deploy our solution, we provide a management console for them that runs inside their own accounts. So again, no metadata or anything has to come out of it and it's all push button click and because the Cloud makes it scalable because Cloud offers infrastructure as code, we can take advantage of that and then, when they say go protect data in the Ireland region, they push a button, we stand up a stack right there in the Ireland region and scan and protect their data right there. If they say we need to be in GovCloud and operate in GovCloud East, there you go, push the button and you can behave in GovCloud East as well. >> And with server lists and the region support and all the goodness really makes a really good opportunity to really manage these Cloud native services with the data interaction so, really good prospects. Final question for you. I mean, we love the story. I think it is going to be a really changing market in this area in a big way. I think the data storage relationship relative to higher level services will be huge as Cloud native continues to drive everything. What's the future? I mean, you guys see yourself as a all encompassing, all singing and dancing storage platform or a set of services that you're going to enable developers and drive that value. Where do you see this going? >> I think that it's a mix of both. Ultimately, you saw even on Storage Day the announcement of file cash and file cash creates a new common name space across different storage platforms and so, the notion of being able to use one area to access your data and have it come from different spots is fantastic. That's been in the on-prem world for a couple of years and it's finally making it to the Cloud. I see us following that trend in helping support. We're super laser-focused on Cloud Storage itself so, EBS volumes, we keep having customers come to us and say, "I don't want to run agents in my EC2 instances. I want you to snap and scan and I don't want to, I've got all this EFS and FSX out there that we want to scan," and so, we see that all of the Cloud Storage platforms, Amazon work docs, EFS, FSX, EBS, S3, we'll all come together and we'll provide a solution that's super simple, highly scalable that can meet all the storage needs so, that's our goal right now and where we're working towards. >> Well, Cloud Storage Security, you couldn't get a more a descriptive name of what you guys are working on and again, I've had many contacts with Andy Jassy when he was running AWS and he always loves to quote "The Innovator's Dilemma," one of his teachers at Harvard Business School and we were riffing on that the other day and I want to get your thoughts. It's not so much "The Innovator's Dilemma" anymore relative to Cloud 'cause that's kind of a done deal. It's "The Integrator's Dilemma," and so, it's the integrations are so huge now. If you don't integrate the right way, that's the new dilemma. What's your reaction to that? >> A 100% agreed. It's been super interesting. Our customers have come to us for a security solution and they don't expect us to be 'cause we don't want to be either. Our own engine vendor, we're not the ones creating the engines. We are integrating other engines in and so we can provide a multi engine scan that gives you higher efficacy. So this notion of offering simple integrations without slowing down the process, that's the key factor here is what we've been after so, we are about simplifying the Cloud experience to protecting your storage and it's been so funny because I thought customers might complain that we're not a name brand engine vendor, but they love the fact that we have multiple engines in place and we're bringing that to them this higher efficacy, multi engine scan. >> I mean the developer trends can change on a dime. You make it faster, smarter, higher velocity and more protected, that's a winning formula in the Cloud so Ed, congratulations and thanks for spending the time to riff on and talk about Cloud Storage Security and congratulations on the company's success. Thanks for coming on "theCUBE." >> My pleasure, thanks a lot, John. >> Okay. This conversation here in Palo Alto, California I'm John Furrier, host of "theCUBE." Thanks for watching.

>>Hey, everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner, showcase women in tech. I'm Lisa Martin from the cube. And today we're gonna be looking into the exciting evolution of women in the tech industry. I'm going to be joined by Danielle GShock, the ISP PSA director at AWS. And we have the privilege of speaking with some wicked smart women from Teradata NetApp. JFI a 10th revolution group, company and honeycomb.io. We're gonna look at some of the challenges and biases that women face in the tech industry, especially in leadership roles. We're also gonna be exploring how are these tech companies addressing diversity, equity and inclusion across their organizations? How can we get more young girls into stem earlier in their careers? So many questions. So let's go ahead and get started. This is the AWS partner showcase women in tech. Hey, everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode three. And I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two great guests here with me to talk about women in tech. Hillary Ashton joins us the chief product officer at Terry data. And Danielle Greshaw is back with us, the ISV PSA director at AWS ladies. It's great to have you on the program talking through such an important topic, Hillary, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us a little bit of an intro into you, your background, and a little bit about Teradata. >>Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Hillary Ashton. I head up the products organization. So that's our engineering product management office of the CTO team. Um, at Teradata I've been with Terra data for just about three years and really have spent the last several decades. If I can say that in the data and analytics space, um, I spent time, uh, really focused on the value of, of analytics at scale, and I'm super excited to be here at Teradata. I'm also a mom of two teenage boys. And so as we talk about women in tech, I think there's, um, uh, lots of different dimensions and angles of that. Um, at Teradata, we are partnered very deeply with AWS and happy to talk a little bit more about that, um, throughout this discussion as well. >>Excellent. A busy mom of two teen boys. My goodness. I don't know how you do it. Let's now look, Atter data's views of diversity, equity and inclusion. It's a, the, it's a topic that's important to everyone, but give us a snapshot into some of the initiatives that Terra data has there. >>Yeah, I have to say, I am super proud to be working at Teradata. We have gone through, uh, a series of transformations, but I think it starts with culture and we are deeply committed to diversity, equity and inclusion. It's really more than just a statement here. It's just how we live our lives. Um, and we use, uh, data to back that up. Um, in fact, we were named one of the world's most ethical companies for the 13th year in a row. Um, and all of our executive leadership team has taken an oath around D E and I that's available on LinkedIn as well. So, um, in fact, our leadership team reporting into the CEO is just about 50 50, um, men and women, which is the first time I've worked in a company where that has been the case. And I think as individuals, we can probably appreciate what a huge difference that makes in terms of not just being a representative, but truly being on a, on a diverse and equitable, uh, team. And I think it really, uh, improves the behaviors that we can bring, um, to our office. >>There's so much value in that. It's I impressive to see about a 50 50 at the leadership level. That's not something that we see very often. Tell me how you, Hillary, how did you get into tech? Were you an engineering person by computer science, or did you have more of a zigzaggy path to where you are now? >>I'm gonna pick door number two and say more zigzaggy. Um, I started off thinking, um, that I started off as a political science major or a government major. Um, and I was probably destined to go into, um, the law field, but actually took a summer course at Harvard. I did not go to Harvard, but I took a summer course there and learned a lot about multimedia and some programming. And that really set me on a trajectory of how, um, data and analytics can truly provide value and, and outcomes to our customers. Um, and I have been living that life ever since. Um, I graduated from college, so, um, I was very excited and privileged in my early career to, uh, work in a company where I found after my first year that I was managing, um, uh, kids, people who had graduated from Harvard business school and from MIT Sloan school. Um, and that was super crazy, cuz I did not go to either of those schools, but I sort of have always had a natural knack for how do you take technology and, and the really cool things that technology can do, but because I'm not a programmer by training, I'm really focused on the value that I'm able to help, um, organizations really extract value, um, from the technology that we can create, which I think is fantastic. >>I think there's so much value in having a zigzag path into tech. You bring Danielle, you and I have talked about this many times you bring such breadth and such a wide perspective. That really is such a value. Add to teams. Danielle, talk to us from AWS's perspective about what can be done to encourage more young women to get and under and underrepresented groups as well, to get into stem and stay. >>Yeah, and this is definitely a challenge as we're trying to grow our organization and kind of shift the numbers. And the reality is, especially with the more senior folks in our organization, unless you bring folks with a zigzag path, the likelihood is you won't be able to change the numbers that you have. Um, but for me, it's really been about, uh, looking at that, uh, the folks who are just graduating college, maybe in other roles where they are adjacent to technology and to try to spark their interest and show that yes, they can do it because oftentimes it's really about believing in themselves and, and realizing that we need folks with all sorts of different perspectives to kind of come in, to be able to help really, um, provide both products and services and solutions for all types of people inside of technology, which requires all sorts of perspectives. >>Yeah, the diverse perspectives. There's so much value and there's a lot of data that demonstrates how much value revenue impact organizations can make by having diversity, especially at the leadership level. Hillary, let's go back to you. We talked about your career path. You talked about some of the importance of the focus on de and I at Tarana, but what are, what do you think can be done to encourage, to sorry, to recruit more young women and under groups into tech, any, any carrot there that you think are really important that we need to be dangling more of? >>Yeah, absolutely. And I'll build on what Danielle just said. I think the, um, bringing in diverse understandings, um, of, of customer outcomes, I mean, I, the we've really moved from technology for technology's sake and I know AWS and entirety to have had a lot of conversations on how do we drive customer outcomes that are differentiated in the market and really being customer centric and technology is wonderful. You can do wonderful things with it. You can do not so wonderful things with it as well, but unless you're really focused on the outcomes and what customers are seeking, um, technology is not hugely valuable. And so I think bringing in people who understand, um, voice of customer who understand those outcomes, and those are not necessarily the, the, the folks who are PhD in mathematics or statistics, um, those can be people who understand a day in the life of a data scientist or a day in the life of a citizen data scientist. And so really working to bridge the high impact technology with the practical kind of usability, usefulness of data and analytics in our cases, I think is something that we need more of in tech and sort of demystifying tech and freeing technology so that everybody can use it and having a really wide range of people who understand not just the bits and bites and, and how to program, but also the value in outcomes that technology through data and analytics can drive. >>Yeah. You know, we often talk about the hard skills, but this, their soft skills are equally, if not more important that even just being curious, being willing to ask questions, being not afraid to be vulnerable, being able to show those sides of your personality. I think those are important for, for young women and underrepresented groups to understand that those are just as important as some of the harder technical skills that can be taught. >>That's right. >>What do you think about from a bias perspective, Hillary, what have you seen in the tech industry and how do you think we can leverage culture as you talked about to help dial down some of the biases that are going on? >>Yeah. I mean, I think first of all, and, and there's some interesting data out there that says that 90% of the population, which includes a lot of women have some inherent bias in their day, day behaviors when it comes to to women in particular. But I'm sure that that is true across all kinds of, of, um, diverse and underrepresented folks in, in the world. And so I think acknowledging that we have bias and actually really learning how, what that can look like, how that can show up. We might be sitting here and thinking, oh, of course I don't have any bias. And then you realize that, um, as you, as you learn more about, um, different types of bias, that actually you do need to kind of, um, account for that and change behaviors. And so I think learning is sort of a fundamental, um, uh, grounding for all of us to really know what bias looks like, know how it shows up in each of us. >>Um, if we're leaders know how it shows up in our teams and make sure that we are constantly getting better, we're, we're not gonna be perfect anytime soon. But I think being on a path to improvement to overcoming bias, um, is really, is really critical. And part of that is really starting the dialogue, having the conversations, holding ourselves and each other accountable, um, when things aren't going in, in a, in a Coptic way and being able to talk openly about that, that felt, um, like maybe there was some bias in that interaction and how do we, um, how do we make good on that? How do we change our, our behavior? Fundamentally of course, data and analytics can have some bias in it as well. And so I think as we look at the, the technology aspect of bias, um, looking at at ethical AI, I think is a, a really important, uh, additional area. And I'm sure we could spend another 20 minutes talking about that, but I, I would be remiss if I didn't talk more about sort of the bias, um, and the over the opportunity to overcome bias in data and analytics as well. >>Yeah. The opportunity to overcome it is definitely there you bring up a couple of really good points, Hillary. It, it starts with awareness. We need to be aware that there are inherent biases in data in thought. And also to your other point, hold people accountable ourselves, our teammates, that's critical to being able to, to dial that back down, Daniel, I wanna get your perspective on, on your view of women in leadership roles. Do you think that we have good representation or we still have work to do in there? >>I definitely think in both technical and product roles, we definitely have some work to do. And, you know, when I think about, um, our partnership with Teradata, part of the reason why it's so important is, you know, Teradata solution is really the brains of a lot of companies. Um, you know, the what, how, what they differentiate on how they figure out insights into their business. And it's, it's all about the product itself and the data and the same is true at AWS. And, you know, we really could do some work to have some more women in these technical roles, as well as in the product, shaping the products. Uh, just for all the reasons that we just kind of talked about over the last 10 minutes, um, in order to, you know, move bias out of our, um, out of our solutions and also to just build better products and have, uh, better, you know, outcomes for customers. So I think there's a bit of work to do still. >>I agree. There's definitely a bit of work to do, and it's all about delivering those better outcomes for customers at the end of the day, we need to figure out what the right ways are of doing that and working together in a community. Um, we've had obviously a lot had changed in the last couple of years, Hillary, what's your, what have you seen in terms of the impact that the pandemic has had on this status of women in tech? Has it been a pro is silver lining the opposite? What are you seeing? >>Yeah, I mean, certainly there's data out there that tells us factually that it has been, um, very difficult for women during COVID 19. Um, women have, uh, dropped out of the workforce for a wide range of, of reasons. Um, and, and that I think is going to set us back all of us, the, the Royal us or the Royal we back, um, years and years. Um, and, and it's very unfortunate because I think we we're at a time when we're making great progress and now to see COVID, um, setting us back in, in such a powerful way. I think there's work to be done to understand how do we bring people back into the workforce. Um, how do we do that? Understanding work life balance, better understanding virtual and remote, working better. I think in the technology sector, um, we've really embraced, um, hybrid virtual work and are, are empowering people to bring their whole selves to work. >>And I think if anything, these, these zoom calls have, um, both for the men and the women on my team. In fact, I would say much more. So for the men on my team, I'm seeing, I was seeing more kids in the background, more kind of split childcare duties, more ability to start talking about, um, other responsibilities that maybe they had, uh, especially in the early days of COVID where maybe daycares were shut down. And, um, you had, you know, maybe a parent was sick. And so we saw quite a lot of, um, people bringing their whole selves to the office, which I think was, was really wonderful. Um, uh, even our CEO saw some of that. And I think, um, that that really changes the dialogue, right? It changes it to maybe scheduling meetings at a time when, um, people can do it after daycare drop off. >>Um, and really allowing that both for men and for women makes it better for, for women overall. So I would like to think that this hybrid working, um, environment and that this, um, uh, whole view into somebody's life that COVID has really provided for probably for white collar workers, if I'm being honest for, um, people who are in a, at a better point of privilege, they don't necessarily have to go into the office every day. I would like to think that tech can lead the way in, um, you know, coming out of the, the old COVID. I don't know if we have a new COVID coming, but the old COVID and really leading the way for women and for people, um, to transform how we do work, um, leveraging data and analytics, but also, um, overcoming some of the, the disparities that exist for women in particular in the workforce. >>Yeah, I think there's, there's like we say, there's a lot of opportunity there and I like your point of hopefully tech can be that guiding light that shows us this can be done. We're all humans at the end of the day. And ultimately if we're able to have some sort of work life balance, everything benefits, our work or more productive, higher performing teams impacts customers, right? There's so much value that can be gleaned from, from that hybrid model and embracing for humans. We need to be able to, to work when we can, we've learned that you don't have to be, you know, in an office 24, 7 commuting, crazy hours flying all around the world. We can get a lot of things done in a ways that fit people's lives rather than taking command over it. Wanna get your advice, Hillary, if you were to talk to your younger self, what would be some of the key pieces of advice you would say? And Danielle and I have talked about this before, and sometimes we, we would both agree on like, ask more questions. Don't be afraid to raise your hand, but what advice would you give your younger self and that younger generation in terms of being inspired to get into tech >>Oh, inspired and being in tech? You know, I think looking at technology as, in some ways, I feel like we do a disservice to, um, inclusion when we talk about stem, cuz I think stem can be kind of daunting. It can be a little scary for people for younger people. When I, when I go and talk to folks at schools, I think stem is like, oh, all the super smart kids are over there. They're all like maybe they're all men. And so, um, it's, it's a little, uh, intimidating. Um, and stem is actually, you know, especially for, um, people joining the workforce today. It's actually how you've been living your life since you were born. I mean, you know, stem inside and out because you walk around with a phone and you know how to get your internet working and like that is technology right. >>Fundamentally. And so demystifying stem as something that is around how we, um, actually make our, our lives useful and, and, and how we can change outcomes. Um, through technology I think is maybe a different lens to put on it. So, and there's absolutely for, for hard sciences, there's absolutely a, a great place in the world for folks who wanna pursue that and men and women can do that. So I, I don't want to be, um, uh, setting the wrong expectations, but I, I think stem is, is very holistic in, um, in the change that's happening globally for us today across economies, across global warming, across all kinds of impactful issues. And so I think everybody who's interested in, in some of that world change can participate in stem. It just may be through a different, through a different lens than how we classically talk about stem. >>So I think there's great opportunity to demystify stem. I think also, um, what I would tell my younger self is choose your bosses wisely. And that sounds really funny. That sounds like inside out almost, but I think choose the person that you're gonna work for in your first five to seven years. And it might be more than one person, but be, be selective, maybe be a little less selective about the exact company or the exact title. I think picking somebody that, you know, we talk about mentors and we talk about sponsors and those are important. Um, but the person you're gonna spend in your early career, a lot of your day with a lot, who's gonna influence a lot of the outcomes for you. That is the person that you, I think want to be more selective about, um, because that person can set you up for success and give you opportunities and set you on course to be, um, a standout or that person can hold you back. >>And that person can put you in the corner and not invite you to the meetings and not give you those opportunities. And so we're in an economy today where you actually can, um, be a little bit picky about who you go and work for. And I would encourage my younger self. I actually, I just lucked out actually, but I think that, um, my first boss really set me, um, up for success, gave me a lot of feedback and coaching. Um, and some of it was really hard to hear, but it really set me up for, for, um, the, the path that I've been on ever since. So it, that would be my advice. >>I love that advice. I it's brilliant. I didn't think it choose your bosses wisely. Isn't something that we primarily think about. I think a lot of people think about the big name companies that they wanna go after and put on a resume, but you bring up a great point. And Danielle and I have talked about this with other guests about mentors and sponsors. I think that is brilliant advice and also more work to do to demystify stem. But luckily we have great family leaders like the two of you helping us to do that. Ladies, I wanna thank you so much for joining me on the program today and talking through what you're seeing in de and I, what your companies are doing and the opportunities that we have to move the needle. Appreciate your time. >>Thank you so much. Great to see you, Danielle. Thank you Lisa, to see you. >>My pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three. Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase. This is season one, episode three, with a focus on women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two guests here with me, Sue Peretti, the EVP of global AWS strategic alliances at Jefferson Frank, a 10th revolution group company, and Danielle brushoff. One of our cube alumni joins us ISV PSA director, ladies. It's great to have you on the program talking about a, a topic that is near and dear to my heart at women in tech. >>Thank you, Lisa. >>So let's go ahead and start with you. Give the audience an understanding of Jefferson Frank, what does the company do and about the partnership with AWS? >>Sure. Um, so let's just start, uh, Jefferson Frank is a 10th revolution group company. And if you look at it, it's really talent as a service. So Jefferson Frank provides talent solutions all over the world for AWS clients, partners and users, et cetera. And we have a sister company called revelent, which is a talent creation company within the AWS ecosystem. So we create talent and put it out in the ecosystem. Usually underrepresented groups over half of them are women. And then we also have, uh, a company called rubra, which is a delivery model around AWS technology. So all three companies fall under the 10th revolution group organization. >>Got it. Danielle, talk to me a little bit about from AWS's perspective and the focus on hiring more women in technology and about the partnership. >>Yes. I mean, this has definitely been a focus ever since I joined eight years ago, but also just especially in the last few years we've grown exponentially and our customer base has changed. You know, we wanna have, uh, an organization interacting with them that reflects our customers, right. And, uh, we know that we need to keep pace with that even with our growth. And so we've very much focused on early career talent, um, bringing more women and underrepresented minorities into the organization, sponsoring those folks, promoting them, uh, giving them paths to growth, to grow inside of the organization. I'm an example of that. Of course I benefit benefited from it, but also I try to bring that into my organization as well. And it's super important. >>Tell me a little bit about how you benefited from that, Danielle. >>Um, I just think that, um, you know, I I've been able to get, you know, a seat at the table. I think that, um, I feel as though I have folks supporting me, uh, very deeply and wanna see me succeed. And also they put me forth as, um, you know, a, represent a representative, uh, to bring more women into the organization as well. And I think, um, they give me a platform, uh, in order to do that, um, like this, um, but also many other, uh, spots as well. Um, and I'm happy to do it because I feel that, you know, if you always wanna feel that you're making a difference in your job, and that is definitely a place where I get that time and space in order to be that representative to, um, bring more, more women into benefiting from having careers in technology, which there's a lot of value there, >>A lot of value. Absolutely. So back over to you, what are some of the trends that you are seeing from a gender diversity perspective in tech? We know the, the numbers of women in technical positions, uh, right. There's so much data out there that shows when girls start dropping up, but what are some of the trends that you are seeing? >>So it's, that's a really interesting question. And, and Lisa, I had a whole bunch of data points that I wanted to share with you, but just two weeks ago, uh, I was in San Francisco with AWS at the, at the summit. And we were talking about this. We were talking about how we can collectively together attract more women, not only to, uh, AWS, not only to technology, but to the AWS ecosystem in particular. And it was fascinating because I was talking about, uh, the challenges that women have and how hard to believe, but about 5% of women who were in the ecosystem have left in the past few years, which was really, really, uh, something that shocked everyone when we, when we were talking about it, because all of the things that we've been asking for, for instance, uh, working from home, um, better pay, uh, more flexibility, uh, better maternity leave seems like those things are happening. >>So we're getting what we want, but people are leaving. And it seemed like the feedback that we got was that a lot of women still felt very underrepresented. The number one thing was that they, they couldn't be, you can't be what you can't see. So because they, we feel collectively women, uh, people who identify as women just don't see enough women in leadership, they don't see enough mentors. Um, I think I've had great mentors, but, but just not enough. I'm lucky enough to have a pres a president of our company, the president of our company, Zoe Morris is a woman and she does lead by example. So I'm very lucky for that. And Jefferson, Frank really quickly, we put out a hiring a salary and hiring guide a career and hiring guide every year and the data points. And that's about 65 pages long. No one else does it. Uh, it gives an abundance of information around, uh, everything about the AWS ecosystem that a hiring manager might need to know. But there is what, what I thought was really unbelievable was that only 7% of the people that responded to it were women. So my goal, uh, being that we have such a very big global platform is to get more women to respond to that survey so we can get as much information and take action. So >>Absolutely 7%. So a long way to go there. Danielle, talk to me about AWS's focus on women in tech. I was watching, um, Sue, I saw that you shared on LinkedIn, the Ted talk that the CEO and founder of girls and co did. And one of the things that she said was that there was a, a survey that HP did some years back that showed that, um, 60%, that, that men will apply for jobs if they only meet 60% of the list of requirements. Whereas with females, it's far, far less, we've all been in that imposter syndrome, um, conundrum before. But Danielle, talk to us about AWS, a specific focus here to get these numbers up. >>I think it speaks to what Susan was talking about, how, you know, I think we're approaching it top and bottom, right? We're looking out at what are the, who are the women who are currently in technical positions and how can we make AWS an attractive place for them to work? And that's all a lot of the changes that we've had around maternity leave and, and those types of things, but then also, um, more flexible working, uh, can, you know, uh, arrangements, but then also, um, early, how can we actually impact early, um, career women and actually women who are still in school. Um, and our training and certification team is doing amazing things to get, um, more girls exposed to AWS, to technology, um, and make it a less intimidating place and have them look at employees from AWS and say like, oh, I can see myself in those people. >>Um, and kind of actually growing the viable pool of candidates. I think, you know, we're, we're limited with the viable pool of candidates, um, when you're talking about mid to late career. Um, but how can we, you know, help retrain women who are coming back into the workplace after, you know, having a child and how can we help with military women who want to, uh, or underrepresented minorities who wanna move into AWS, we have a great military program, but then also just that early high school, uh, career, you know, getting them in, in that trajectory. >>Sue, is that something that Jefferson Frank is also able to help with is, you know, getting those younger girls before they start to feel there's something wrong with me. I don't get this. Talk to us about how Jefferson Frank can help really drive up that in those younger girls. >>Uh, let me tell you one other thing to refer back to that summit that we did, uh, we had breakout sessions and that was one of the topics. What can cuz that's the goal, right? To make sure that, that there are ways to attract them. That's the goal? So some of the things that we talked about was mentoring programs, uh, from a very young age, some people said high school, but then we said even earlier, goes back to you. Can't be what you can't see. So, uh, getting mentoring programs, uh, established, uh, we also talked about some of the great ideas was being careful of how we speak to women using the right language to attract them. And some, there was a teachable moment for, for me there actually, it was really wonderful because, um, an African American woman said to me, Sue and I, I was talking about how you can't be what you can't see. >>And what she said was Sue, it's really different. Um, for me as an African American woman, uh, or she identified, uh, as nonbinary, but she was relating to African American women. She said, your white woman, your journey was very different than my journey. And I thought, this is how we're going to learn. I wasn't offended by her calling me out at all. It was a teachable moment. And I thought I understood that, but those are the things that we need to educate people on those, those moments where we think we're, we're saying and doing the right thing, but we really need to get that bias out there. So here at Jefferson, Frank, we're, we're trying really hard to get that careers and hiring guide out there. It's on our website to get more women, uh, to talk to it, but to make suggestions in partnership with AWS around how we can do this mentoring, we have a mentor me program. We go around the country and do things like this. We, we try to get the education out there in partnership with AWS. Uh, we have a, a women's group, a women's leadership group, uh, so much that, that we do, and we try to do it in partnership with AWS. >>Danielle, can you comment on the impact that AWS has made so far, um, regarding some of the trends and, and gender diversity that Sue was talking about? What's the impact that's been made so far with this partnership? >>Well, I mean, I think just being able to get more of the data and have awareness of leaders, uh, on how <laugh>, you know, it used to be a, a couple years back, I would feel like sometimes the, um, uh, solving to bring more women into the organization was kind of something that folks thought, oh, this is Danielle is gonna solve this. You know? And I think a lot of folks now realize, oh, this is something that we all need to solve for. And a lot of my colleagues who maybe a couple years ago, didn't have any awareness or didn't even have the tools to do what they needed to do in order to improve the statistics on their, or in their organizations. Now actually have those tools and are able to kind of work with, um, work with companies like Susan's work with Jefferson Frank in order to actually get the data and actually make good decisions and feel as though, you know, they, they often, these are not lived experiences for these folks, so they don't know what they don't know. And by providing data and providing awareness and providing tooling and then setting goals, I think all of those things have really turned, uh, things around in a very positive way. >>And so you bring up a great point about from a diversity perspective, what is Jefferson Frank doing to, to get those data points up, to get more women of, of all well, really underrepresented minorities to, to be able to provide that feedback so that you can, can have the data and gleamy insights from it to help companies like AWS on their strategic objectives. >>Right? So as I, when I go back to that higher that, uh, careers in hiring guide, that is my focus today, really because the more data that we have, I mean, the, and the data takes, uh, you know, we need people to participate in order to, to accurately, uh, get a hold of that data. So that's why we're asking, uh, we're taking the initiative to really expand our focus. We are a global organization with a very, very massive database all over the world, but if people don't take action, then we can't get the right. The, the, the data will not be as accurate as we'd like it to be. Therefore take better action. So what we're doing is we're asking people all over the, all over the world to participate on our website, Jefferson frank.com, the se the high, uh, in the survey. So we can learn as much as we can. >>7% is such a, you know, Danielle and I we're, we've got to partner on this just to sort of get that message out there, get more data so we can execute, uh, some of the other things that we're doing. We're, we're partnering in. As I mentioned, more of these events, uh, we're, we're doing around the summits, we're gonna be having more ed and I events and collecting more information from women. Um, like I said, internally, we do practice what we preach and we have our own programs that are, that are out there that are within our own company where the women who are talking to candidates and clients every single day are trying to get that message out there. So if I'm speaking to a client or one of our internal people are speaking to a client or a candidate, they're telling them, listen, you know, we really are trying to get these numbers up. >>We wanna attract as many people as we can. Would you mind going to this, uh, hiring guide and offering your own information? So we've gotta get that 7% up. We've gotta keep talking. We've gotta keep, uh, getting programs out there. One other thing I wanted to Danielle's point, she mentioned, uh, women in leadership, the number that we gathered was only 9% of women in leadership within the AWS ecosystem. We've gotta get that number up, uh, as well because, um, you know, I know for me, when I see people like Danielle or, or her peers, it inspires me. And I feel like, you know, I just wanna give back, make sure I send the elevator back to the first floor and bring more women in to this amazing ecosystem. >>Absolutely. That's not that metaphor I do too, but we, but to your point to get that those numbers up, not just at AWS, but everywhere else we need, it's a help me help use situation. So ladies underrepresented minorities, if you're watching go to the Jefferson Frank website, take the survey, help provide the data so that the woman here that are doing this amazing work, have it to help make decisions and have more of females and leadership roles or underrepresented minorities. So we can be what we can see. Ladies, thank you so much for joining me today and sharing what you guys are doing together to partner on this important. Cause >>Thank you for having me, Leah, Lisa, >>Thank you. My pleasure for my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the cubes coverage of the AWS partner showcase. Thanks for your time. Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. We've got two female rock stars here with me next. Stephanie Curry joins us the worldwide head of sales and go to market strategy for AWS at NetApp and Danielle GShock is back one of our QM ISV PSA director at AWS. Looking forward to a great conversation, ladies, about a great topic, Stephanie, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us an overview of your story, how you got into tech and what inspired you. >>Thanks so much, Lisa and Danielle. It's great to be on this show with you. Um, thank you for that. Uh, my name's Stephanie cur, as Lisa mentioned, I'm the worldwide head of sales for, uh, AWS at NetApp and run a global team of sales people that sell all things AWS, um, going back 25 years now, uh, when I first started my career in tech, it was kind of by accident. Um, I come from a different background. I have a business background and a technical background from school, um, but had been in a different career and I had an opportunity to try something new. Um, I had an ally really that reached out to me and said, Hey, you'd be great for this role. And I thought, I'd take a chance. I was curious. Um, and, uh, it, it turned out to be a 25 year career, um, that I'm really, really excited about and, and, um, really thankful for that person, for introducing me to the, to the industry >>25 years in counting. I'm sure Danielle, we've talked about your background before. So what I wanna focus on with you is the importance of diversity for high performance. I know what a machine AWS is, and Stephanie'll come back to you with the same question, but talk about that, Danielle, from your perspective, that importance, um, for diversity to drive the performance. >>Yeah. Yeah. I truly believe that, you know, in order to have high performing teams, that you have to have people from all different types of backgrounds and experiences. And we do find that oftentimes being, you know, field facing, if we're not reflecting our customers and connecting with them deeply, um, on, on the levels that they're at, we, we end up missing them. And so for us, it's very important to bring people of lots of different technical backgrounds experiences. And of course, both men, women, and underrepresented minorities and put that forth to our customers, um, in order to make that connection and to end up with better outcomes. So >>Definitely it's all about outcomes, Stephanie, your perspective and NetApp's perspective on diversity for creating highly performant teams and organizations. >>I really aligned with Danielle on the comment she made. And in addition to that, you know, just from building teams in my, um, career know, we've had three times as many women on my team since we started a year ago and our results are really showing in that as well. Um, we find the teams are stronger, they're more collaborative and to Danielle's point really reflective, not only our partners, but our customers themselves. So this really creates connections, which are really, really important to scale our businesses and, and really, uh, meet the customer where they're at as well. So huge proponent of that ourselves, and really finding that we have to be intentional in our hiring and intentional in how we attract diversity to our teams. >>So Stephanie let's stay with you. So a three X increase in women on the team in a year, especially the kind of last year that we've had is really incredible. I, I like your, I, your thoughts on there needs to be a, there needs to be focus and, and thought in how teams are hired. Let's talk about attracting and retaining those women now, especially in sales roles, we all know the number, the percentages of women in technical roles, but what are some of the things that, that you do Stephanie, that NetApp does to attract and retain women in those sales roles? >>The, the attracting part's really interesting. And we find that, you know, you, you read the stats and I'd say in my experience, they're also true in the fact that, um, a lot of women would look at a job description and say, I can't do a hundred percent of that, that, so I'm not even going to apply with the women that we've attracted to our team. We've actually intentionally reached out and targeted those people in a good way, um, to say, Hey, we think you've got what it takes. Some of the feedback I've got from those women are, gosh, I didn't think I could ever get this role. I didn't think I had the skills to do that. And they've been hired and they are doing a phenomenal job. In addition to that, I think a lot of the feedback I've got from these hires are, Hey, it's an aggressive sales is aggressive. Sales is competitive. It's not an environment that I think I can be successful in. And what we're showing them is bring those softer skills around collaboration, around connection, around building teams. And they do, they do bring a lot of that to the team. Then they see others like them there and they know they can be successful cuz they see others like them on the team, >>The whole concept of we can't be what we can't see, but we can be what we can't see is so important. You said a couple things, Stephanie, that really stuck with me. And one of them was an interview on the Cub I was doing, I think a couple weeks ago, um, about women in tech. And the stat that we talked about was that women will apply will not apply for a job unless they meet 100% of the skills and the requirements that it's listed, but men will, if they only meet 60. And I, that just shocked me that I thought, you know, I, I can understand that imposter syndrome is real. It's a huge challenge, but the softer skills, as you mentioned, especially in the last two years, plus the ability to communicate, the ability to collaborate are incredibly important to, to drive that performance of any team of any business. >>Absolutely. >>Danielle, talk to me about your perspective and AWS as well for attracting and retaining talent. And, and, and particularly in some of those challenging roles like sales that as Stephanie said, can be known as aggressive. >>Yeah, for sure. I mean, my team is focused on the technical aspect of the field and we definitely have an uphill battle for sure. Um, two things we are focused on first and foremost is looking at early career women and that how we, how can we bring them into this role, whether in they're in support functions, uh, cl like answering the phone for support calls, et cetera, and how, how can we bring them into this organization, which is a bit more strategic, more proactive. Um, and then the other thing that as far as retention goes, you know, sometimes there will be women who they're on a team and there are no other women on that team. And, and for me, it's about building community inside of AWS and being part of, you know, we have women on solution architecture organizations. We have, uh, you know, I just personally connect people as well and to like, oh, you should meet this person. Oh, you should talk to that person. Because again, sometimes they can't see someone on their team like them and they just need to feel anchored, especially as we've all been, you know, kind of stuck at home, um, during the pandemic, just being able to make those connections with women like them has been super important and just being a, a long tenured Amazonian. Um, that's definitely one thing I'm able to, to bring to the table as well. >>That's so important and impactful and spreads across organizations in a good way. Daniel let's stick with you. Let's talk about some of the allies that you've had sponsors, mentors that have really made a difference. And I said that in past tense, but I also mean in present tense, who are some of those folks now that really inspire you? >>Yeah. I mean, I definitely would say that one of my mentors and someone who, uh, ha has been a sponsor of my career has, uh, Matt YK, who is one of our control tower GMs. He has really sponsored my career and definitely been a supporter of mine and pushed me in positive ways, which has been super helpful. And then other of my business partners, you know, Sabina Joseph, who's a cube alum as well. She definitely has been, was a fabulous partner to work with. Um, and you know, between the two of us for a period of time, we definitely felt like we could, you know, conquer the world. It's very great to go in with a, with another strong woman, um, you know, and, and get things done, um, inside of an organization like AWS. >>Absolutely. And S I've, I've agreed here several times. So Stephanie, same question for you. You talked a little bit about your kind of, one of your, uh, original early allies in the tech industry, but talk to me about allies sponsors, mentors who have, and continue to make a difference in your life. >>Yeah. And, you know, I think it's a great differentiation as well, right? Because I think that mentors teach us sponsors show us the way and allies make room for us at the table. And that is really, really key difference. I think also as women leaders, we need to make room for others at the table too, and not forget those softer skills that we bring to the table. Some of the things that Danielle mentioned as well about making those connections for others, right. And making room for them at the table. Um, some of my allies, a lot of them are men. Brian ABI was my first mentor. Uh, he actually is in the distribution, was in distribution, uh, with advent tech data no longer there. Um, Corey Hutchinson, who's now at Hashi Corp. He's also another ally of mine and remains an ally of mine, even though we're not at the same company any longer. Um, so a lot of these people transcend careers and transcend, um, um, different positions that I've held as well and make room for us. And I think that's just really critical when we're looking for allies and when allies are looking for us, >>I love how you described allies, mentors and sponsors Stephanie. And the difference. I didn't understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor until a couple of years ago. Do you talk with some of those younger females on your team so that when they come into the organization and maybe they're fresh outta college, or maybe they've transitioned into tech so that they can also learn from you and understand the importance and the difference between the allies and the sponsors and the mentors? >>Absolutely. And I think that's really interesting because I do take, uh, an extra, uh, approach an extra time to really reach out to the women that have joined the team. One. I wanna make sure they stay right. I don't want them feeling, Hey, I'm alone here and I need to, I need to go do something else. Um, and they are located around the world, on my team. They're also different age groups, so early in career, as well as more senior people and really reaching out, making sure they know that I'm there. But also as Danielle had mentioned, connecting them to other people in the community that they can reach out to for those same opportunities and making room for them >>Make room at the table. It's so important. And it can, you never know what a massive difference and impact you can make on someone's life. And I, and I bet there's probably a lot of mentors and sponsors and allies of mine that would be surprised to know, uh, the massive influence they've had Daniel back over. Let's talk about some of the techniques that you employ, that AWS employees to make the work environment, a great place for women to really thrive and, and be retained as Stephanie was saying. Of course that's so important. >>Yeah. I mean, definitely I think that the community building, as well as we have a bit more programmatic mentorship, um, we're trying to get to the point of having a more programmatic sponsorship as well. Um, but I think just making sure that, um, you know, both everything from, uh, recruit to onboard to ever boarding that, uh, they they're the women who come into the organization, whether it's they're coming in on the software engineering side or the field side or the sales side that they feel as that they have someone, uh, working with them to help them drive their career. Those are the key things that were, I think from an organizational perspective are happening across the board. Um, for me personally, when I run my organization, I'm really trying to make sure that people feel that they can come to me at any time open door policy, make sure that they're surfacing any times in which they are feeling excluded or anything like that, any challenges, whether it be with a customer, a partner or with a colleague. Um, and then also of course, just making sure that I'm being a good sponsor, uh, to, to people on my team. Um, that is key. You can talk about it, but you have to start with yourself as well. >>That's a great point. You you've got to, to start with yourself and really reflect on that. Mm-hmm <affirmative> and look, am I, am I embodying what it is that I need? And not that I know they need that focused, thoughtful intention on that is so importants, let's talk about some of the techniques that you use that NetApp uses to make the work environment a great place for those women are marginalized, um, communities to really thrive. >>Yeah. And I appreciate it and much like Danielle, uh, and much like AWS, we have some of those more structured programs, right around sponsorship and around mentorship. Um, probably some growth there, opportunities for allies, because I think that's more of a newer concept in really an informal structure around the allies, but something that we're growing into at NetApp, um, on my team personally, I think, um, leading by example's really key. And unfortunately, a lot of the, um, life stuffs still lands on the women, whether we like it or not. Uh, I have a very, uh, active husband in our household, but I still carry when it push comes to shove it's on me. Um, and I wanna make sure that my team knows it's okay to take some time and do the things you need to do with your family. Um, I'm I show up as myself authentically and I encourage them to do the same. >>So it's okay to say, Hey, I need to take a personal day. I need to focus on some stuff that's happening in my personal life this week now, obviously to make sure your job's covered, but just allowing some of that softer vulnerability to come into the team as well, so that others, um, men and women can feel they can do the same thing. And that it's okay to say, I need to balance my life and I need to do some other things alongside. Um, so it's the formal programs, making sure people have awareness on them. Um, I think it's also softly calling people out on biases and saying, Hey, I'm not sure if you know, this landed that way, but I just wanted to make you aware. And usually the feedback is, oh my gosh, I didn't know. And could you coach me on something that I could do better next time? So all of this is driven through our NetApp formal programs, but then it's also how you manifest it on the teams that we're leading. >>Absolutely. And sometimes having that mirror to reflect into can be really eye-opening and, and allow you to, to see things in a completely different light, which is great. Um, you both talked about, um, kind of being what you, uh, can see, and, and I know both companies are upset customer obsessed in a good way. Talk to me a little bit, Danielle, go back over to you about the AWS NetApp partnership. Um, some of that maybe alignment on, on performance on obviously you guys are very well aligned, uh, in terms of that, but also it sounds like you're quite aligned on diversity and inclusion. >>Well, we definitely do. We have the best partnerships with companies in which we have these value alignments. So I think that is a positive thing, of course, but just from a, from a partnership perspective, you know, from my five now plus years of being a part of the APN, this is, you know, one of the most significant years with our launch of FSX for NetApp. Um, with that, uh, key key service, which we're making available natively on AWS. I, I can't think of a better Testament to the, to the, um, partnership than that. And that's doing incredibly well and it really resonates with our customers. And of course it started with customers and their need for NetApp. Uh, so, you know, that is a reflection, I think, of the success that we're having together. >>And Stephanie talk to, uh, about the partnership from your perspective, NetApp, AWS, what you guys are doing together, cultural alignment, but also your alignment on really bringing diversity into drive performance. >>Yeah, I think it's a, a great question. And I have to say it's just been a phenomenal year. Our relationship has, uh, started before our first party service with FSX N but definitely just, um, uh, the trajectory, um, between the two companies since the announcement about nine months ago has just taken off to a, a new level. Um, we feel like an extended part of the family. We worked together seamlessly. A lot of the people in my team often say we feel like Amazonians. Um, and we're really part of this transformation at NetApp from being that storage hardware company into being an ISV and a cloud company. And we could not do this without the partnership with AWS and without the, uh, first party service of Fs XM that we've recently released. Um, I think that those joint values that Danielle referred to are critical to our success, um, starting with customer obsession and always making sure that we are doing the right thing for the customer. >>We coach our team teams all the time on if you are doing the right thing for the customers, you cannot do anything wrong. Just always put the customer at the, in the center of your decisions. And I think that there is, um, a lot of best practice sharing and collaboration as we go through this change. And I think a lot of it is led by the diverse backgrounds that are on the team, um, female, male, um, race and so forth, and just to really, uh, have different perspectives and different experiences about how we approach this change. Um, so we definitely feel like a part of the family. Uh, we are absolutely loving, uh, working with the AWS team and our team knows that we are the right place, the right time with the right people. >>I love that last question for each of you. And I wanna stick with you Stephanie advice to your younger self, think back five years. What advice would you seen what you've accomplished and maybe the thet route that you've taken along the way, what would you advise your youngest Stephanie self. >>Uh, I would say keep being curious, right? Keep being curious, keep asking questions. And sometimes when you get a no, it's not a bad thing, it just means not right now and find out why and, and try to get feedback as to why maybe that wasn't the right opportunity for you. But, you know, just go for what you want. Continue to be curious, continue to ask questions and find a support network of people around you that wanna help you because they are there and they, they wanna see you be successful too. So never be shy about that stuff. >><laugh> absolutely. And I always say failure does not have to be an, a bad F word. A no can be the beginning of something. Amazing. Danielle, same question for you. Thinking back to when you first started in your career, what advice would you give your younger self? >>Yeah, I think the advice I'd give my younger self would be, don't be afraid to put yourself out there. Um, it's certainly, you know, coming from an engineering background, maybe you wanna stay behind the scenes, not, not do a presentation, not do a public speaking event, those types of things, but back to what the community really needs, this thing. Um, you know, I genuinely now, uh, took me a while to realize it, but I realized I needed to put myself out there in order to, um, you know, allow younger women to see what they could be. So that would be the advice I would give. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there. >>Absolutely. That advice that you both gave are, is so fantastic, so important and so applicable to everybody. Um, don't be afraid to put yourself out there, ask questions. Don't be afraid of a, no, that it's all gonna happen at some point or many points along the way. That can also be good. So thank you ladies. You inspired me. I appreciate you sharing what AWS and NetApp are doing together to strengthen diversity, to strengthen performance and the advice that you both shared for your younger selves was brilliant. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you >>For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase. See you next time. Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. I've got two female rock stars joining me. Next Vero Reynolds is here engineering manager, telemetry at honeycomb, and one of our cube alumni, Danielle Ock ISV PSA director at AWS. Join us as well. Ladies. It's great to have you talking about a very important topic today. >>Thanks for having us. >>Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it. >>Of course, Vera, let's go ahead and start with you. Tell me about your background and tech. You're coming up on your 10th anniversary. Happy anniversary. >>Thank you. That's right. I can't believe it's been 10 years. Um, but yeah, I started in tech in 2012. Um, I was an engineer for most of that time. Uh, and just recently as a March, switched to engineering management here at honeycomb and, um, you know, throughout my career, I was very much interested in all the things, right. And it was a big FOMO as far as trying a few different, um, companies and products. And I've done things from web development to mobile to platforms. Um, it would be apt to call me a generalist. Um, and in the more recent years I was sort of gravitating more towards developer tool space. And for me that, uh, came in the form of cloud Foundry circle CI and now honeycomb. Um, I actually had my eye on honeycomb for a while before joining, I came across a blog post by charity majors. >>Who's one of our founders and she was actually talking about management and how to pursue that and whether or not it's right, uh, for your career. And so I was like, who is this person? I really like her, uh, found the company. They were pretty small at the time. So I was sort of keeping my eye on them. And then when the time came around for me to look again, I did a little bit more digging, uh, found a lot of talks about the product. And on the one hand they really spoke to me as the solution. They talked about developers owning their coding production and answering questions about what is happening, what are your users seeing? And I felt that pain, I got what they were trying to do. And also on the other hand, every talk I saw at the time was from, uh, an amazing woman <laugh>, which I haven't seen before. Uh, so I came across charity majors again, Christine Y our other founder, and then Liz Jones, who's our principal developer advocate. And that really sealed the deal for me as far as wanting to work here. >>Yeah. Honeycomb is interesting. This is a female founded company. You're two leaders. You mentioned that you like the technology, but you were also attracted because you saw females in the leadership position. Talk to me a little bit about what that's like working for a female led organization at honeycomb. >>Yeah. You know, historically, um, we have tried not to over index on that because there was this, uh, maybe fear awareness of, um, it taking away from our legitimacy as an engineering organization, from our success as a company. Um, but I'm seeing that, uh, rhetoric shift recently because we believe that with great responsibility, uh, with great power comes great responsibility, and we're trying to be more intentional as far as using that attribute of our company. Um, so I would say that for me, it was, um, a choice between a few offers, right. And that was a selling point for sure, because again, I've never experienced it and I've really seen how much they walk that walk. Um, even me being here and me moving into management, I think were both, um, ways in which they really put a lot of trust and support in me. And so, um, I it's been a great ride. >>Excellent. Sounds like it. Before we bring Danielle in to talk about the partnership. I do wanna have you there talk to the audience a little bit about honeycomb, what technology it's delivering and what are its differentiators. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, so honeycomb is an observability tool, uh, that enables engineers to answer questions about the code that runs in production. And, um, we work with a number of various customers. Some of them are Vanguards, slack. Hello, fresh, just to name a couple, if you're not familiar with observability tooling, it's akin to traditional application performance monitoring, but we believe that observability is succeeding APM because, uh, APM tools were built at the time of monoliths and they just weren't designed to help us answer questions about complex distributed systems that we work with today, where things can go wrong anywhere in that chain. And you can't predict what you're gonna need to ask ahead of time. So some of the ways that we are different is our ability to store and query really rich data, which we believe is the key to understanding those complex systems. >>What I mean by rich data is, um, something that has a lot of attributes. So for example, when an error happens, knowing who it happened to, which user ID, which, um, I don't know, region, they were in, um, what, what, what they were doing at the time and what was happening at the rest of your system. And our ingest engine is really fast. You can do it in as little as three seconds and we call data like this. I said, kind of rich data, contextual data. We refer it as having high ality and high dimensionality, which are big words. But at the end of the day, what that means is we can store and we can query the data. We can do it really fast. And to give you an example of how that looks for our customers, let's say you have a developer team who are using comb to understand and observe their system. >>And they get a report that a user is experiencing a slowdown or something's wrong. They can go into comb and figure out that this only happens to users who are using a particular language pack with their app. And they operated their app last week, that it only happens when they are trying to upload a file. And so it's this level of granularity and being able to zoom in and out, um, under your data that allows you to understand what's happening, especially when you have an incident going on, right. Or your really important high profile customer is telling you that something's wrong. And we can do that. Even if everything else in your other tools looks fine, right? All of your dashboards are okay. You're not actually getting paged on it, but your customers are telling you that something's wrong. Uh, and we believe that's where we shine in helping you there. >>Excellent. It sounds like that's where you really shine that real time visibility is so critical these days. Danielle, Danielle, wanna bring you into the conversation. Talk to us a little bit about the honeycomb partnership from the AWS lens. >>Yeah. So excuse me, observability is obviously a very important, uh, segment in the cloud space, very important to AWS, um, because a lot of all of our customers, uh, as they build their systems distributed, they need to be able to see where, where things are happening in the complex systems that they're building. And so honeycomb is a, is an advanced technology partner. Um, they've been working with us for quite some time and they have a, uh, their solution is listed on the marketplace. Um, definitely something that we see a lot of demand with our customers and they have many integrations, uh, which, you know, we've seen is key to success. Um, being able to work seamlessly with the rest of the services inside of the AWS platform. And I know that they've done some, some great things with people who are trying to develop games on top of AWS, uh, things in that area as well. And so, uh, very important partner in the observa observability market that we have >>Back to you, let's kind of unpack the partnership, the significance that honeycomb ha is getting from being partners with an organization as potent and pivotal as AWS. >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, I know this predates me to some extent, but I know for a long time, AWS and honeycomb has really pushed the envelope together. And, um, I think it's a beneficial relationship for both ends. There's kind of two ways of looking at it. On the one side, there is our own infrastructure. So honeycomb runs on AWS and actually one of our critical workloads that supports that fast query engine that I mentioned uses Lambda. And it does so in a pretty Orthodox way. So we've had a longstanding conversation with the AWS team as far as drawing outside those lines and kind of figuring out how to use this technology in a way that works for us and hopefully will work for other customers of theirs as well. Um, that also allows us to ask for early access for certain features when they become available. >>And then that way we can be sort of the Guinea pigs and try things out, um, in a way that migrates our system and optimizes our own performance, but also allows again, other customers of AWS to follow in that path. And then the other side of that partnership is really supporting our customers who are both honeycomb users and AWS users, because it's, as you imagine, quite a big overlap, and there are certain ways in which we can allow our customers to more easily get their data from AWS to honeycomb. So for example, last year we built a tool, um, based on the new Lambda extension capability that allowed our users who run their applications in Lambdas to get that telemetry data out of their applications and into honeycomb. And it man was win, win. >>Excellent. So I'm hearing a lot of synergies from a technology perspective, you're sticking with you, and then Danielle will bring you in, let's talk about how honeycomb supports D and I across its organization. And how is that synergistic with AWS's approach? Yeah, >>Yeah, absolutely. So I sort of alluded to that hesitancy to over index on the women led aspect of ourselves. Um, but again, a lot of things are shifting, we're growing a lot. And so we are recognizing that we need to be more intentional with our DEI initiatives, and we also notice that we can do better and we should do better. And to that, and we're doing a few things differently, um, that are pretty recent initiatives. We are partnering with organizations that help us target specific communities that are underrepresented in tech. Um, some examples would be after tech hu Latinas in tech among, um, a number of others. And another initiative is DEI head start. That's something that is an internal, um, practice that we started that includes reaching out to underrepresented applicants before any new job for honeycomb becomes live. So before we posted to LinkedIn, before it's even live on our job speech, and the idea there is to kind of balance our pipeline of applicants, which the hope is will lead to more diverse hires in the long term. >>That's a great focus there. Danielle, I know we've talked about this before, but for the audience, in terms of the context of the honeycomb partnership, the focus at AWS for D E and I is really significant, unpack that a little bit for us. >>Well, let me just bring it back to just how we think about it, um, with the companies that we work with, but also in, in terms of, you know, what we want to be able to do, excuse me, it's very important for us to, you know, build products that reflect, uh, the customers that we have. And I think, you know, working with, uh, a company like honeycomb that is looking to differentiate in a space, um, by, by bringing in, you know, the experiences of many different types of people I genuinely believe. And I'm sure Vera also believes that by having those diverse perspectives, that we're able to then build better products for our customers. Um, and you know, it's one of, one of our leadership principles, uh, is, is rooted in this. I write a lot, it asks for us to seek out diverse perspectives. Uh, and you can't really do that if everybody kind of looks the same and thinks the same and has the same background. So I think that is where our de and I, um, you know, I thought process is rooted and, you know, companies like honeycomb that give customers choice and differentiate and help them, um, to do what they need to do in their unique, um, environments is super important. So >>The, the importance of thought diversity cannot be underscored enough. It's something that is, can be pivotal to organizations. And it's very nice to hear that that's so fundamental to both companies, Barry, I wanna go back to you for a second. You, I think you mentioned this, the DEI head start program, that's an internal program at honeycomb. Can you shed a little bit of light on that? >>Yeah, that's right. And I actually am in the process of hiring a first engineer for my team. So I'm learning a lot of these things firsthand, um, and how it works is we try to make sure to pre-load our pipeline of applicants for any new job opening we have with diverse candidates to the best of our abilities, and that can involve partnering with the organizations that I mentioned or reaching out to our internal network, um, and make sure that we give those applicants a head start, so to speak. >>Excellent. I like that. Danielle, before we close, I wanna get a little bit of, of your background. We've got various background in tag, she's celebrating her 10th anniversary. Give me a, a short kind of description of the journey that you've navigated through being a female in technology. >>Yeah, thanks so much. I really appreciate, uh, being able to share this. So I started as a software engineer, uh, back actually in the late nineties, uh, during the, the first.com bubble and, uh, have, have spent quite a long time actually as an individual contributor, um, probably working in software engineering teams up through 2014 at a minimum until I joined AWS, uh, as a customer facing solutions architect. Um, I do think spending a lot of time, hands on definitely helped me with some of the imposter syndrome, um, issues that folks suffer from not to say I don't at all, but it, it certainly helped with that. And I've been leading teams at AWS since 2015. Um, so it's really been a great ride. Um, and like I said, I'm very happy to see all of our engineering teams change, uh, as far as their composition. And I'm, I'm grateful to be part of it. >>It's pretty great to be able to witness that composition change for the better last question for each of you. And we're almost out of time and Danielle, I'm gonna stick with you. What's your advice, your recommendations for women who either are thinking about getting into tech or those who may be in tech, maybe they're in individual positions and they're not sure if they should apply for that senior leadership position. What do you advise them to do? >>I mean, definitely for the individual contributors, tech tech is a great career, uh, direction, um, and you will always be able to find women like you, you have to maybe just work a little bit harder, uh, to join, have community, uh, in that. But then as a leader, um, representation is very important and we can bring more women into tech by having more leaders. So that's my, you just have to take the lead, >>Take the lead, love that there. Same question for you. What's your advice and recommendations for those maybe future female leaders in tech? >>Yeah, absolutely. Um, Danielle mentioned imposter syndrome and I think we all struggle with it from time to time, no matter how many years it's been. And I think for me, for me, the advice would be if you're starting out, don't be afraid to ask, uh, questions and don't be afraid to kind of show a little bit of ignorance because we've all been there. And I think it's on all of us to remember what it's like to not know how things work. And on the flip side of that, if you are a more senior IC or, uh, in a leadership role, also being able to model just saying, I don't know how this works and going and figuring out answers together because that was a really powerful shift for me early in my career is just to feel like I can say that I don't know something. >>I totally agree. I've been in that same situation where just ask the question because you I'm guaranteed, there's a million outta people in the room that probably has the, have the same question and because of imposter syndrome, don't wanna admit, I don't understand that. Can we back up, but I agree with you. I think that is, um, one of the best things. Raise your hand, ask a question, ladies. Thank you so much for joining me talking about honeycomb and AWS, what you're doing together from a technology perspective and the focus efforts that each company has on D E and I, we appreciate your insights. Thank you so much for having us great talking to you. My pleasure, likewise for my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase women in check. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase I'm Lisa Martin, your host. This is season one, episode three, and this is a great episode that focuses on women in tech. I'm pleased to be joined by Danielle Shaw, the ISV PSA director at AWS, and the sponsor of this fantastic program. Danielle, it's great to see you and talk about such an important topic. >>Yes. And I will tell you, all of these interviews have just been a blast for me to do. And I feel like there has been a lot of gold that we can glean from all of the, um, stories that we heard on these interviews and good advice that I myself would not have necessarily thought of. So >>I agree. And we're gonna get to set, cuz advice is one of the, the main things that our audience is gonna hear. We have Hillary Ashton, you'll see from TETA there, Reynolds joins us from honeycomb, Stephanie Curry from NetApp and Sue Paris from Jefferson Frank. And the topics that we dig into are first and foremost, diversity equity and inclusion. That is a topic that is incredibly important to every organization. And some of the things Danielle that our audiences shared were really interesting to me. One of the things that I saw from a thematic perspective over and over was that like D Reynolds was talking about the importance of companies and hiring managers and how they need to be intentional with de and I initiatives. And that intention was a, a, a common thing that we heard. I'm curious what your thoughts are about that, that we heard about being intentional working intentionally to deliver a more holistic pool of candidates where de I is concerned. What are your, what were some of the things that stuck out to you? >>Absolutely. I think each one of us is working inside of organizations where in the last, you know, five to 10 years, there's been a, you know, a strong push in this direction, mostly because we've really seen, um, first and foremost, by being intentional, that you can change the, uh, the way your organization looks. Um, but also just that, you know, without being intentional, um, there was just a lot of, you know, outcomes and situations that maybe weren't great for, um, you know, a healthy, um, and productive environment, uh, working environment. And so, you know, a lot of these companies have made a big investments and put forth big initiatives that I think all of us are involved in. And so we're really excited to get out here and talk about it and talk about, especially as these are all partnerships that we have, how, you know, these align with our values. So >>Yeah, that, that value alignment mm-hmm <affirmative> that you bring up is another thing that we heard consistently with each of the partners, there's a cultural alignment, there's a customer obsession alignment that they have with AWS. There's a D E and I alignment that they have. And I, I think everybody also kind of agreed Stephanie Curry talked about, you know, it's really important, um, for diversity on it, on, on impacting performance, highly performant teams are teams that are more diverse. I think we heard that kind of echoed throughout the women that we talked to in >>This. Absolutely. And I absolutely, and I definitely even feel that, uh, with their studies out there that tell you that you make better products, if you have all of the right input and you're getting all many different perspectives, but not just that, but I can, I can personally see it in the performing teams, not just my team, but also, you know, the teams that I work alongside. Um, arguably some of the other business folks have done a really great job of bringing more women into their organization, bringing more underrepresented minorities. Tech is a little bit behind, but we're trying really hard to bring that forward as well to in technical roles. Um, but you can just see the difference in the outcomes. Uh, at least I personally can just in the adjacent teams of mine. >>That's awesome. We talked also quite a bit during this episode about attracting women and underrepresented, um, groups and retaining them. That retention piece is really key. What were some of the things that stuck out to you that, um, you know, some of the guests talked about in terms of retention? >>Yeah. I think especially, uh, speaking with Hillary and hearing how, uh, Teradata is thinking about different ways to make hybrid work work for everybody. I think that is definitely when I talk to women interested in joining AWS, oftentimes that might be one of the first, uh, concerns that they have. Like, am I going to be able to, you know, go pick my kid up at four o'clock at the bus, or am I going to be able to, you know, be at my kids' conf you know, conference or even just, you know, have enough work life balance that I can, um, you know, do the things that I wanna do outside of work, uh, beyond children and family. So these are all very important, um, and questions that especially women come and ask, but also, um, you know, it kind of is a, is a bellwether for, is this gonna be a company that allows me to bring my whole self to work? And then I'm also gonna be able to have that balance that I need need. So I think that was something that is, uh, changing a lot. And many people are thinking about work a lot differently. >>Absolutely. The pandemic not only changed how we think about work, you know, initially it was, do I work from home or do I live at work? And that was legitimately a challenge that all of us faced for a long time period, but we're seeing the hybrid model. We're seeing more companies be open to embracing that and allowing people to have more of that balance, which at the end of the day, it's so much better for product development for the customers, as you talked about there's, it's a win-win. >>Absolutely. And, you know, definitely the first few months of it was very hard to find that separation to be able to put up boundaries. Um, but I think at least I personally have been able to find the way to do it. And I hope that, you know, everyone is getting that space to be able to put those boundaries up to effectively have a harmonious, you know, work life where you can still be at home most of the time, but also, um, you know, have that cutoff point of the day or at least have that separate space that you can feel that you're able to separate the two. >>Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of that from a work life balance perspective leads into one of the next topics that we covered in detail with, and that's mentors and sponsors the differences between them recommendations from, uh, the women on the panel about how to combat imposter syndrome, but also how to leverage mentors and sponsors throughout your career. One of the things that, that Hillary said that I thought was fantastic, advice were mentors and sponsors are concerned is, is be selective in picking your bosses. We often see people, especially younger folks, not necessarily younger folks. I shouldn't say that that are attracted to a company it's brand maybe, and think more about that than they do the boss or bosses that can help guide them along the way. But I thought that was really poignant advice that Hillary provided something that I'm gonna take into consideration myself. >>Yeah. And I honestly hadn't thought about that, but as I reflect through my own career, I can see how I've had particular managers who have had a major impact on helping me, um, with my career. But, you know, if you don't have the ability to do that, or maybe that's not a luxury that you have, I think even if you're able to, you know, find a mentor for a period of time or, um, you know, just, just enable for you to be able to get from say a point a to point B just for a temporary period. Um, just so you can grow into your next role, have a, have a particular outcome that you wanna drive, have a particular goal in mind find that person who's been there and done that and can really help you get through. If you don't have the luxury of picking your manager mentor, who can help you get to the next step. >>Exactly. That, that I thought that advice was brilliant and something that I hadn't really considered either. We also talked with several of the women about imposter syndrome. You know, that's something that everybody, I think, regardless of gender of your background, everybody feels that at some point. So I think one of the nice things that we do in this episode is sort of identify, yes, imposter syndrome is real. This is, this is how it happened to me. This is I navigated around or got over it. I think there's some great advice there for the audience to glean as well about how to dial down the imposter syndrome that they might be feeling. >>Absolutely. And I think the key there is just acknowledging it. Um, but also just hearing all the different techniques on, on how folks have dealt with it because everybody does, um, you know, even some of the smartest, most confident men I've, I've met in, uh, industry still talk to me about how they have it and I'm shocked by it oftentimes, but, um, it is very common and hopefully we, we talk about some good techniques to, to deal with that. >>I think we do, you know, one of the things that when we were asking the, our audience, our guests about advice, what would they tell their younger selves? What would they tell young women or underrepresented groups in terms of becoming interested in stem and in tech and everybody sort of agreed on me, don't be afraid to raise your hand and ask questions. Um, show vulnerabilities, not just as the employee, but even from a leadership perspective, show that as a leader, I, I don't have all the answers. There are questions that I have. I think that goes a long way to reducing the imposter syndrome that most of us have faced at some point in our lives. And that's just, don't be afraid to ask questions. You never know, oh, how can people have the same question sitting in the room? >>Well, and also, you know, for folks who've been in industry for 20, 25 years, I think we can just say that, you know, it's a, it's a marathon, it's not a sprint and you're always going to, um, have new things to learn and you can spend, you know, back to, we talked about the zing and zagging through careers, um, where, you know, we'll have different experiences. Um, all of that kind of comes through just, you know, being curious and wanting to continue to learn. So yes, asking questions and being vulnerable and being able to say, I don't know all the answers, but I wanna learn is a key thing, uh, especially culturally at AWS, but I'm sure with all of these companies as well, >>Definitely I think it sounded like it was really ingrained in their culture. And another thing too, that we also talked about is the word, no, doesn't always mean a dead end. It can often mean not right now or may, maybe this isn't the right opportunity at this time. I think that's another important thing that the audience is gonna learn is that, you know, failure is not necessarily a bad F word. If you turn it into opportunity, no isn't necessarily the end of the road. It can be an opener to a different door. And I, I thought that was a really positive message that our guests, um, had to share with the, the audience. >>Yeah, totally. I can, I can say I had a, a mentor of mine, um, a very, uh, strong woman who told me, you know, your career is going to have lots of ebbs and flows and that's natural. And you know that when you say that, not right now, um, that's a perfect example of maybe there's an ebb where it might not be the right time for you now, but something to consider in the future. But also don't be afraid to say yes, when you can. <laugh> >>Exactly. Danielle, it's been a pleasure filming this episode with you and the great female leaders that we have on. I'm excited for the audience to be able to learn from Hillary Vera, Stephanie Sue, and you so much valuable content in here. We hope you enjoy this partner showcase season one, episode three, Danielle, thanks so much for helping >>Us with it's been a blast. I really appreciate it >>All audience. We wanna enjoy this. Enjoy the episode.

>>Hey everyone. Welcome to the AWS partner showcase season one, episode three women in tech. I'm your host. Lisa Martin. We've got two female rock stars here with me next. Stephanie Curry joins us the worldwide head of sales and go to market strategy for AWS at NetApp and Danielle GShock is back one of our QM ISV PSA director at AWS. Looking forward to a great conversation, ladies, about a great topic, Stephanie, let's go ahead and start with you. Give us an overview of your story, how you got into tech and what inspired you. >>Thanks so much, Lisa and Danielle. It's great to be on this show with you. Thank you for that. My name's Stephanie curs. Lisa mentioned I'm the worldwide head of sales for AWS at NetApp and run a global team of sales people that sell all things AWS going back 25 years now, when I first started my career in tech, it was kind of by accident. I'd come from a different background. I have a business background and a technical background from school, but had been in a different career. And I had an opportunity to try something new. I had an ally really that reached out to me and said, Hey, you'd be great for this role. And I thought, I'd take a chance. I was curious. And it, it turned out to be a 25 year career that I'm really, really excited about and, and really thankful for that person for introducing me to the, to the industry >>25 years in counting. I'm sure Danielle, we've talked about your background before. So what I wanna focus on with you is the importance of diversity for high performance. I know what a machine AWS is, and Stephanie, I'll come back to you with the same question, but talk about that, Danielle, from your perspective, that importance for diversity to drive the performance. >>Yeah. I truly believe that, you know, in order to have high performing teams, that you have to have people from all different types of backgrounds and experiences. And we do find that oftentimes being, you know, field facing, if we're not reflecting our customers and connecting with them deeply on, on the levels that they're at, we, we end up missing them. And so for us, it's very important to bring people of lots of different technical backgrounds experiences. And of course, both men, women, and underrepresented minorities, and put that forth to our customers in order to make that connection and to end up with better outcomes. So >>Definitely it's all about outcomes, Stephanie, your perspective and NetApp's perspective on diversity for creating highly performing teams and organizations. >>I really aligned with Danielle on the comment she made. And in addition to that, you know, just from building teams in my career note, we've had three times as many women on my team since we started a year ago and our results are really showing in that as well. We find the teams are stronger, they're more collaborative and to Danielle's point really not only our partners, but our customers themselves. So this really creates connections, which are really, really important to scale our businesses and, and really meet the customer where they're at as well. So huge proponent of that ourselves, and really finding that we have to be intentional in our hiring and intentional in how we attract diversity to our teams. >>So Stephanie let's stay with you. So a three X increase in women on the team in a year, especially the kind of last year that we've had is really incredible. I, I like your, I, your thoughts on there needs to be a, there needs to be focus and, and thought in how teams are hired. Let's talk about attracting and retaining those women now, especially in sales roles, we all know the number, the percentages of women in technical roles, but what are some of the things that, that you do Stephanie, that NetApp does to attract and retain women in those sales roles? >>The, the attracting part's really interesting. And we find that, you know, you, you read the stats and I'd say in my experience, they're also true in the fact that a lot of women would look at a job description and say, I can't do a hundred percent of that. So I'm not even going to apply with the women that we've attracted to our team. We've actually intentionally reached out and targeted those people in a good way to say, Hey, we think you've got what it takes. Some of the feedback I've got from those women are, gosh, I didn't think I could ever get this role. I didn't think I had the skills to do that. And they've been hired and they are doing a phenomenal job. In addition to that, I think a lot of the feedback I've got from these hires are, Hey, it's an aggressive sales is aggressive. Sales is competitive. It's not an environment that I think I can be successful in. And what we show them is bring those softer skills around collaboration, around connection, around building teams. And they do, they do bring a lot of that to the team. Then they see others like them there and they know they can be successful cuz they see others like them on the team. >>The whole concept of we can't be what we can't see, but we can be what we can see is so important. You said a couple things, Stephanie, that really stuck with me. And one of 'em was an, an interview on the cube I was doing, I think a couple weeks ago about women in tech. And the stat that we talked about was that women will apply will not apply for a job unless they meet 100% of the skills and the requirements that it's listed, but men will, if they only meet 60. And I, that just shocked me that I thought, you know, I, I can understand that imposter syndrome is real. It's a huge challenge, but the softer skills, as you mentioned, especially in the last two years, plus the ability to communicate, the ability to collaborate are incredibly important to, to drive that performance of, of any team of any business. >>Absolutely. >>Danielle, talk to me about your perspective in AWS as well for attracting and retaining talent and, and, and particularly in some of those challenging roles like sales that as Stephanie said, can be known as aggressive. >>Yeah, for sure. I mean, my team is focused on the technical aspect of the field and we definitely have an uphill battle for sure. Two things we are focused on first and foremost is looking at early career women and that how we, how can we bring them into this role, whether in they're in support functions, cl like answering the phone for support calls, et cetera, and how, how can we bring them into this organization, which is a bit more strategic, more proactive. And then the other thing that as far as retention goes, you know, sometimes there will be women who they're on a team and there are no other women on that team. And, and for me, it's about building community inside of AWS and being part of, you know, we have women at solution architecture organizations. We have, you know, I just personally connect people as well and feel like, oh, you should meet this person. Oh, you should talk to that person. Because again, sometimes they can't see someone on their team like them and they just need to feel anchored, especially as we've all been, you know, kind of stuck at home during the pandemic, just being able to make those connections with women like them has been super important and just being a long tenure Amazonian, that's definitely one thing I'm able to, to bring to the table as well. >>That's so important and impactful and spreads across organizations in a good way. Daniel let's stick with you. Let's talk about some of the allies that you've had sponsors, mentors that have really made a difference. And I said that in past tense, but I also mean in present tense, who are some of those folks now that really inspire you? >>Yeah. I mean, I definitely would say that one of my mentors and someone who ha has been a sponsor of my career has Matt ion, who is one of our control tower GMs. He has really sponsored my career and definitely been a supporter of mine and pushed me in positive ways, which has been super helpful. And then other of my business partners, you know, Sabina Joseph who's cube alum as well. She definitely has been, was a fabulous partner to work with. And, you know, between the two of us for a period of time, we definitely felt like we could, you know, conquer the world. It's very great to go in with a, with another strong woman, you know, and, and get things done inside of an organization like AWS. >>Absolutely. And know S I've had, I've been agreed here several times. So Stephanie, same question for you. You talked a little bit about your kind of, one of your original early allies in the tech industry, but talk to me about allies sponsors, mentors who have, and continue to make a difference in your life. >>Yeah. And, you know, I think it's a great differentiation as well, right? Because I think that mentors teach us sponsors show us the way and allies make room for us at the table. And that is really key difference. I thinks also as women leaders, we need to make room for others at the table too, and not forget those softer skills that we bring to the table. Some of the things that Danielle mentioned as well about making those connections for others, right. And making room for them at the table. Some of my allies, a lot of them are men. Brian ABI was my first mentor. He actually is in the distribution, was in distribution with advent tech data no longer there, Cory Hutchinson, who's now at Hashi Corp. He's also another ally of mine and remains an ally of mine, even though we're not at the same company any longer. So a lot of these people transcend careers and transcend different positions that I've held as well and make room for us. And I think that's just really critical when we're looking for allies. And when allies are looking for us, >>I love how you described allies, mentors and sponsors Stephanie. And the difference, I didn't understand the difference between a mentor and a sponsor until a couple of years ago. Do you talk with some of those younger females on your team so that when they come into the organization and maybe they're fresh outta college, or maybe they've transitioned into tech so that they can also learn from you and understand the importance and the difference between the allies and the sponsors and the mentors? >>Absolutely. And I think that's really interesting because I do take an extra approach and extra time to really reach out to the women that have joined the team. One, I wanna make sure they stay right. I don't want them feeling, Hey, I'm alone here and I need to, I need to go do something else. And they are located around the world, on my team. They're also different age groups. So early in career, as well as more senior people and really reaching out, making sure they know that I'm there. But also as Danielle had mentioned, connecting them to other people in the community that they can reach out to for those same opportunities and making room for them >>Make room at the table. It's so important. And it can, you never know what a massive difference and impact you can make on someone's life. And I, and I bet there's probably a lot of mentors and sponsors and allies of mine that would be surprised to know the massive influence they've had Danielle back. Let's talk about some of the techniques that you employ that AWS employs to make the work environment, a great place for women to really thrive and, and be retained as Stephanie was saying. Of course that's so important. >>Yeah. I mean, definitely I think that the community building, as well as we have a bit more programmatic mentorship, we're trying to get to the point of having a more programmatic sponsorship as well. But I think just making sure that, you know, both E everything from recruit to onboard to ever boarding that they they're the women who come into the organization, whether it's they're coming in on the software engineering side or the field side or the sales side that they feel as though they have someone working with them to help them drive their career. Those are the key things that were, I think from an organizational perspective are happening across the board. For me personally, when I run my organization, I'm really trying to make sure that people feel that they can to me at any time open door policy, make sure that they're surfacing any times in which they are feeling excluded or anything like that, any challenges, whether it be with a customer, a partner, or with a colleague. And then also of course, just making sure that I'm being a good sponsor to, to people on my team. That is key. You can talk about it, but you have to start with yourself as well. >>That's a great point. You you've got to, to start with yourself and really reflect on that and, and look, am I, am I embodying what it is that I need? And not that I know they need that focused, thoughtful intention on that is so importants, let's talk about some of the techniques that you use that NetApp uses to make the work environment, a great place for those women are marginalized communities to really thrive. >>Yeah. And I appreciate it. And it much like Danielle and much like AWS, we have some of those more structured programs, right around sponsorship and around mentorship, probably some growth there, opportunities for allies, because I think that's more of a newer concept in really an informal structure around the allies, but something that we're growing into at NetApp on my team personally, I think leading by example is really key. And unfortunately, a lot of the life stuff still lands on the women, whether we like it or not, I have a very active husband in our household, but I still carry when it push comes to shove it's on me. And I wanna make sure that my team knows it's okay to take some time and do the things you need to do with your family. I'm I show up as myself authentically and I encourage them to do the same. >>So it's okay to say, Hey, I need to take a personal day. I need to focus on some stuff that's happening in my personal life this week. Now obviously make sure your job' covered, but just allowing some of that softer vulnerability to come into the team as well, so that others, men and women can feel they can do the same thing. And that it's okay to say, I need to balance my life and I need to do some other things alongside. So it's the formal programs, making sure people have awareness on them. I think it's also softly calling people out on biases and saying, Hey, I'm not sure if you know, this landed that way, but I just wanted to make you aware. And usually the feedback is, oh my gosh, I didn't know. And could you coach me on something that I could do better next time? So all of this is driven through our NetApp formal programs, but then it's also how you manifest it on the teams that we're leading. >>Absolutely. And sometimes having that mirror to reflect into can be really eye-opening and, and allow you to, to see things in a completely different light, which is great. You both talked about kind of being what you can see. And, and I know both companies are obsess customer obsessed in a good way. Talk to me a little bit, Danielle, go back over to you about the AWS NetApp partnership. Some of the maybe alignment on, on performance on obviously you guys are very well aligned in terms of that, but also it sounds like you're quite aligned on diversity and inclusion. >>Well, we definitely do. We have the best partnerships with companies in which we have these value alignments. So I think that is a positive thing, of course, but just from a, from a partnership perspective, you know, from my five now plus years of being a part of the APN, this is, you know, one of the most significant years with our launch of FSX for NetApp, with that key key service, which we're making available natively on AWS. I, I can't think of a better Testament to the, to the partnership than that. And that's doing incredibly well and it really resonates with our customers. And of course it started with customers and their need for NetApp. So, you know, that is a reflection, I think, of the success that we're having together. >>And Stephanie talk to about the partnership from your perspective, NetApp, AWS, what you guys are doing together, cultural alignment, but also your alignment on really bringing diversity into drive performance. >>Yeah, I think it's a, a great question. And I have to say it's just been a phenomenal year. Our relationship has started before our first party service with FSX N but definitely just the trajectory between the two companies since the announcement about nine months ago has just taken off to a, a new level. We feel like an extended part of the family. We worked together seamlessly. A lot of the people on my team often say we feel like Amazonians, and we're really part of this transformation at NetApp from being that storage hardware company, into being an ISV and a cloud company. And we could not do this without the partnership with AWS and without the first party service of Fs XM that we've recently released. I think that those joint values that Danielle referred to are critical to our success, starting with customer obsession and always making sure that we are doing the right thing for the customer. >>We coach our team teams all the time on if you are doing the right thing for the customers, you cannot do anything wrong. Just always put the customer at the dis in the center of your decisions. And I think that there is a lot of best practice sharing and collaboration as we go through this change. And I think a lot of it is led by the diverse backgrounds that are on the team, female, male race, and so forth, and just to really have different perspectives and different experiences about how we approach this change. So we definitely feel like we're part of the family. We are absolutely loving working with the AWS team and our team knows that we are the right place, the right time with the right people. >>I love that last question for each of you. And I wanna stick with you Stephanie advice to your younger self, think back 25 years. What advice would you seen what you've accomplished and maybe the, the turns and, and serendipitous route that you've taken along the way, what would you advise your younger Stephanie self? >>I would say keep being curious, right? Keep being curious, keep asking questions. And sometimes when you get a no, it's not a bad thing, it just means not right now and find out why and, and try to get feedback as to why maybe that wasn't the right opportunity for you, but, you know, just go for what you want. Continue to be curious, continue to ask questions and find a support network of people around you that wanna help you because they are there and they are, they wanna see you be successful too. So never be shy about that stuff. >>Absolutely. And I always say failure does not have to be a bad F word. A no can be the beginning of something. Amazing. Danielle, same question for you. Thinking back to when you first started in your career, what advice would you give your younger self? >>Yeah, I think the advice I'd give my younger self would be, don't be afraid to put yourself out there. It's certainly, you know, coming from an engineering background, maybe you wanna stay behind the scenes, not, not do a presentation, not do a public speaking event, those types of things, but back to what the community really needs. This thing, you know, I genuinely now took me a while to realize it, but I realized I needed to put myself out there in order to, you know, allow younger women to see what they could be. So that would be the advice I would give. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there. >>Absolutely. That advice that you both gave are, is so fantastic, so important and so applicable to everybody. Don't be afraid to put yourself out there, ask questions. Don't be afraid of a, no, that it's all gonna happen at some point or many points along the way. That can also be good. So thank you ladies. You inspired me. I appreciate you sharing what AWS and NetApp are doing together to strengthen diversity, to strengthen performance and the advice that you both shared for your younger was brilliant. Thank you. >>Thank you. >>Thank you >>For my guests. I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the AWS partner showcase. See you next time.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to re:Invent 2021. You're watching theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante. We're really excited to have Anthony Lye here. He's the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Public Cloud at NetApp. And Jonsi Stefansson as the CTO and VP of cloud at NetApp. Guys, good to see you. >> Same to you. >> Likewise. >> It's great to be back. >> You know, Anthony. Well so, we saw each other virtually at the AWS Storage Day, the big announcement, we're going to talk about that. But I go back and I said this to you several years ago, we were sitting, you know, some after party and you said "We are going to transform NetApp. We are going all in on cloud." We've seen NetApp transform many, many times. This is probably the biggest in history. >> No, I think you're absolutely right. I think, you know, I can't believe it, but you know, it will be five years for me in February. And in those five years, I think we really have done things that nobody expected. And I think we've proven to our existing customers, to our competitors, and now with Amazon, to a whole new set of customers that our intellectual property that we build and the acquisitions that we've done have made a lot of sense. I think we've demonstrated this wonderful concept of symmetry. Customers now understand and believe that a dollar invested in an App, wherever it is on premise or in the cloud is a dollar that moves wherever they want it to move and progresses as their own businesses progress. >> So Jonsi, for the latest announcement that you guys made to integrate ONTAP into the AWS cloud, you had to do some deeper integration, right? It wasn't just wrap your stack and Kubernetes and shove it into the cloud. But can you just talk about what you had to do? What the collaboration was like? >> The collaboration with AWS has been fantastic. It literally took two and a half years, you know, from the point where we decided to agree on the design principles, how we were actually going to deliver this as a service, the integration into every single aspect of AWS, you know, whether it's the console, the FSx, API, the integrations, to all the additional services that AWS has, like RDS, like Aurora, like the SageMaker, like EKS and ECS. And I mean, we are just getting started with the integration points and the collaboration and the teamwork. I would call it teamwork more than a collaboration. The teamwork with all these teams and maybe especially at name who was the leader of the storage sort of a unit in AWS has been fantastic. >> Dave: Yeah. Well so, this is the 10th re:Invent. This is the 9th year we've been here. We've seen a dramatically different cloud than 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and a different storage business. I'm not even sure. I mean, I don't know. I didn't even think about it as the old storage business anymore. Essentially, you're building a cloud on top of clouds. A super cloud if you will. >> Anthony: Yeah, I mean. I think, look, the strategy was, as I said, very, very simple to us, which was, you know, fundamentally companies, you know, run their applications on the basic primitives of compute storage and networking. And the gold standard for file was always ONTAP. And I think what we did, which I think was unique was we didn't just, as you said, throw it onto a cloud, stick it in a virtual machine and tell you, the customer "There. It's ONTAP just as you remember it." We reimagined it. And we architected it to be a cloud service. So it's elastic, it goes up and down. You can change the performance at runtime. And what we really did with Amazon was we wanted to make it a fully managed service. We didn't want people to think about versioning and patching. We wanted to remove all of that and we wanted people to take as much or as little as they needed. And we, and Amazon, we chose that we should own the responsibility for the availability of the service. And we should maintain the service ourselves so that customers of ONTAP can benefit from the solution. But in many ways, customers who've never been ONTAP customers can now take advantage of an enterprise grade file system and all the great things that it does without having to understand how it works. >> And explain why that's important for customers because people, they go, "Wow, you got S3." but it's very simple. Get, put, right? You don't have the full stack of a mature ONTAP. Please explain what that means to customers a little bit. >> You know, file systems are very important things. You know, we basically use them in our work environments every single day, you know. Within your sort of, you know, your Mac book, you have a home directory and sub-directories and files, very elegantly layout applications and layout infrastructures in ways that object repositories cannot. You know, aside from block and file. Sorry, from file and object, you of course, have block storage. And so, file plays a very important role. IDC has file growing at almost twice the pace of object now on the public cloud systems and, you know, file has about 13% of the overall storage market and it's growing. And I don't see any reason why file won't be as big on the Amazon cloud as the S3 has been. >> Dave: So you guys, go ahead, please. >> Yeah. I mean, you also have to take into account that the S3 object storage offerings of AWS is an integrated PaaS in our solution. So that's how we are actually doing automatic tiering. So you actually reap the best of both worlds, where you get the cost management of putting it in object storage, but you get the performance and the data management capabilities that is pretty unprecedented. You know, we are the first store that's offering that can actually do cross-region replication seamlessly by retaining deduplication and compression. But we also play a lot with, you know, block and object storage. So when Anthony was talking about how we've actually delivered this as a service, and this is sort of from our design principles, we are basically delivering this as a software, as a service, because more than an infrastructure as a service, because the stock that we are actually deploying, or the secret sauce of ONTAP, it's a very vast software stack that we are delivering, on top of AWS infrastructure. So I would always call it or categorize it a little bit more than software as a service, rather than infrastructure as a service. >> But it's even more than that, if I'm right, because it's cloud pricing, right? >> Jonsi: Yes. >> So it's not, you're not preying. I mean, when I buy Salesforce, I got to sign up for three-year deal. That's not a consumption-based model. >> Yeah. >> Oh, I think Amazon, you know what Amazon did uniquely and brilliantly was, it retailed technology and it's what makes Amazon so good, is that they choose to sort of simplify things. And when they find benefits as a retailer, they pass them on to the customer and, you know, there's this sort of pay-as-you-go business model, it's really good for the customer. It makes us work harder because, you know, you have to retain your customer sort of every 10 minutes. And that's something that, you know, as you said, with enterprise software and even some of the early SaaS vendors, that's not how it works. And so Amazon has forced us all to be very, very attentive to our customers. >> Dave: And I'd love to talk about what that means for the on-prem business, but if we have time. But you guys won Design Partner of the Year, what's that all about? First of all, congratulations. >> Anthony: Thank you. There's a lot of ISV design partners. You guys came out number one so congratulations on that. What's that all about? Explain what that entailed and how you got that. >> Yeah, I'll say a few words. Maybe Jonsi can add. I mean, the first thing of course is, you know, I S V stands for Independent Software Vendor. So, you know, it's always great because most people would say, "Well, NetApp is on-premise storage hardware." >> Dave: Of course, yeah. >> Which really, we've not really ever been an increasingly with demonstrating that we are a software company and we operate at cloud speed. You know, I can't really take the credit. I would give it to Jonsi and the engineering team. Maybe Jonsi, you can explain, you know, what moral about the award and why I think we were selected. >> So, I mean, I think it says a lot that this is the first time AWS has ever allowed a third party company to be this integrated into their console, into a support ability systems. You know, we make fun of this, me and Anthony all the time, because when we started this, down this path, everybody at NetApp said, "Guys, you're wasting your time." This is why AWS has the marketplace, but we didn't want to go. We already had the marketplace and we wanted to be able to connect to all these associated services and do it in the manner that, you know, this was a true collaboration of engineering teams for a long time to actually deliver the service on both sides so the credit, of course, will always go to the engineers on both sides, even though I designed it, I didn't code it. So, I think that, that alone, being the first to do it in AWS ever. I think we deserve that award. >> So just for our audience, to be clear, we're talking about FSx, ONTAP in the cloud, in the AWS cloud and kind of dance around that. But so that was announced, I guess, in September? >> Anthony: Yes. >> Right? >> Anthony: September, 2nd. >> What's the uptake been like? What's the reaction? >> Unbelievable. >> I'll bet. (laughing) >> No, no, I mean. >> No, I believe it. >> Better than we ever dreamed of. >> Yeah. >> The number of customers, I'm sure I'm not allowed to say the number of customers, but we asked and the fact that, you know, 60% of those customers have never been NetApp customers before, but they see the value in the data management capabilities that we are bringing to the market. >> Dave: So it exceeded expectations and your expectations were probably pretty enthusiastic. >> They were high. >> Yeah. >> I mean, Amazon is on the record. I was with Ed earlier on today, recording a piece and Ed, you know, was very clear that it's one of the fastest growing services now on AWS. You know, it turns out that, you know, the customer base, I think recognizes the, not just the need for a file system, but the uniqueness and capabilities that ONTAP provides, you know, to those customers in how they manage their business and transformations. And so, you know, to be sort of behind the console, to be sort of behind the Amazon CLI and the Amazon API, you see the world very, very differently, you know. I think the Amazon marketplace is a fantastic capability, but I'll tell you, you know, being a core part of the AWS service itself that they sell, that they support, that they bill for. It's a nice place to be. >> So, SaaS company. You're talking to the language of application development, Kubernetes, right? What do you think this means for the future of NetApp specifically, but also generally the on-prem storage business and the storage business in general? >> Well, we just announced our second quarter earnings today and what's happening is our cloud business is growing like crazy. We generated $388 million of ARR and the growth rates are, you know, astronomically high. That is increasingly helping our on-premise business to grow. You know, the nice thing about being in primarily, in the storage and data business is people aren't deleting many things. And the rate at which they're generating information is just accelerating. So, actually the confidence that we give the customer by demonstrating a sort of a cloud first, a sort of principles of all the cloud is actually giving customers to buy more on premise. So, we really don't mind. We are, our job much like Amazon's, is to have this customer obsession and you can't really go wrong, if you just keep asking them what they want. >> Yeah, if you can do so profitably, you're going to be reinvest in your business. Guys, we've got to go. >> Yeah. >> Love to have you back. >> Thank you. >> And you been quite a transformation. You said you're going to do it. You're doing it. So, well done to you. Five years in the making. Okay. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in high-tech coverage. Keep it right there. We'll be right back from AWS re:Invent 21. (upbeat music)

>>Hi, buddy. Welcome back to the keeps coverage of AWS 2021. Re-invent you're watching the cube and I'm really excited. We're going to go outside the storage box. I like to say with my lawn Thompson Bukovac, who's the vice-president of block and object storage and Wayne Duso was a VP of storage edge and data governance guys. Great to see you again, we saw you at storage day, the 15 year anniversary of AWS, of course, the first product service ever. So awesome to be here. Isn't it. Wow. >>So much energy in the room. It's so great to see customers learning from each other, learning from AWS, learning from the things that you're observing as well. >>A lot of companies decided not to do physical events. I think you guys are on the right side of history. We're going to show you, you weren't exactly positive. How many people are going to show up. Everybody showed. I mean, it's packed house here, so >>Number 10. Yeah. >>All right. So let's get right into it. Uh, news of the week. >>So much to say, when you want to kick this off, >>We had a, we had a great set of announcements that Milan, uh, talked about yesterday, uh, in her talk and, and a couple of them in the file space, specifically a new, uh, member of the FSX family. And if you remember that the FSA, Amazon FSX is, uh, for customers who want to run fully managed versions of third party and open source file systems on AWS. And so yesterday we announced a new member it's FSX for open ZFS. >>Okay, cool. And there's more, >>Well, there's more, I mean, one of the great things about the new match file service world and CFS is it's powered by gravity. >>It is taught by Gravatar and all of the capabilities that AWS brings in terms of networking, storage, and compute, uh, to our customers. >>So this is really important. I want the audience to understand this. So I I've talked on the cube about how a large proportion let's call it. 30% of the CPU cycles are kind of wasted really on things like offloads, and we could be much more efficient, so graviton much more efficient, lower power and better price performance, lower cost. Amazon is now on a new curve, uh, cycles are faster for processors, and you can take advantage of that in storage it's storage users, compute >>That's right? In fact, you have that big launch as well for luster, with gravity. >>We did in fact, uh, so with, with, uh, Yasmin of open CFS, we also announced the next gen Lustre offering. And both of these offerings, uh, provide a five X improvement in performance. For example, now with luster, uh, customers can drive up to one terabyte per second of throughput, which is simply amazing. And with open CFS, right out of, right out of the box at GA a million IOPS at sub-millisecond latencies taking advantage of gravitas, taking advantage of our storage and networking capabilities. >>Well, I guess it's for HPC workloads, but what's the difference between these days HPC, big data, data intensive, a lot of AI stuff, >>All right. You to just, there's a lot of intersection between all of those different types of workloads they have, as you said, and you know, it all, it all depends on it all matters. And this is the reason why having the suite of capabilities that the, if you would, the members of the family is so important to our guests. >>We've talked a lot about, it's really can't think about traditional storage as a traditional storage anymore. And certainly your world's not a box. It's really a data platform, but maybe you could give us your point of view on that. >>Yeah, I think, you know, if, if we look, if we take a step back and we think about how does AWS do storage? Uh, we think along multiple dimensions, we have the dimension that Wayne's talking about, where you bring together the power of compute and storage for these managed file services that are so popular. You and I talked about, um, NetApp ONTAP. Uh, we went into some detail on that with you as well, and that's been enormously popular. And so that whole dimension of these managed file services is all about where is the customer today and how can we help them get to the cloud? But then you think about the other things that we're also imagining, and we're, re-imagining how customers want to grow those applications and scale them. And so a great example here at reinvent is let's just take the concept of archive. >>So many people, when they think about archive, they think about taking that piece of data and putting it away on tape, putting it away in a closet somewhere, never pulling it out. We don't think about archive like that archive just happens to be data that you just aren't using at the moment, but when you need it, you need it right away. And that's why we built a new storage class that we launched just yesterday, Dave, and it's called glacier instead of retrieval, it has retrieval and milliseconds, just like an Esri storage class has the same pricing of four tenths of a cent as glacier archive. >>So what's interesting at the analyst event today, Adam got a question about, and somebody was poking at him, you know, analysts can be snarky sometimes about, you know, price, declines and so forth. And he said, you know, one of the, one of the things that's not always shown up and we don't always get credit for lowering prices, but we might lower costs. And there's the archive and deep archive is an example of that. Maybe you could explain that point of view. >>Yeah. The way we look at it is that our customers, when they talk to us about the cost of storage, they talked to us about the total cost of the storage, and it's not just storing the data, it's retrieving it and using it. And so we have done an amazing amount across all the portfolio around reducing costs. We have glacier answer retrieval, which is 68% cheaper than standard infrequent access. That's a big cost reduction. We have EBS snapshots archive, which we introduced yesterday, 75% cheaper to archive a snapshot. And these are the types of that just transform the total cost. And in some cases we just eliminate costs. And so the glacier storage class, all bulk retrievals of data from the glacier storage class five to 12 hours, it's now free of charge. If you don't even have to think about, we didn't even reduce it. We just eliminated the cost of that data retrieval >>And additive to what Milan said around, uh, archiving. If you look at what we've done throughout the entire year, you know, a interesting statistic that was brought up yesterday is over the course of 2021, between our respective teams, we've launched over 105 capabilities for our customers throughout this year. And in some of them, for instance, on the file side for EFS, we launched one zone which reduced, uh, customer costs by 47%. Uh, you can now achieve on EFS, uh, cost of roughly 4.30 cents per gigabyte month on, uh, FSX, we've reduced costs up to 92%, uh, on Lustre and FSX for windows and with the introduction of ONTAP and open CFS, we continue those forward, including customers ability to compress and Dedoose against those costs. So they ended up seeing a considerable savings, even over what our standard low prices are. >>100 plus, what can I call them releases? And how can you categorize those? Are they features of eight? Do they fall into, >>Because they range for major services, like what we've launched with open ZFS to major features and really 95 of those were launched before re-invent. And so really what you have between the different teams that work in storage is you have this relentless drive to improve all the storage platforms. And we do it all across the course of the year, all across the course of the year. And in some cases, the benefit shows up at no cost at all to a customer. >>Uh, how, how did this, it seems like you're on an accelerated pace, a S3 EBS, and then like hundreds of services. I guess the question is how come it took so long and how is it accelerating now? Is it just like, there was so much focus on compute before you had to get that in place, or, but now it's just rapidly accessing, >>I I'll tell you, Dave, we took the time to count this year. And so we came to you with this number of 106, uh, that acceleration has been in place for many years. We just didn't take the time to couch. Correct. So this has been happening for years and years. Wayne and I have been with AWS for, for a long time now for 10 plus years. And really that velocity that we're talking about right now that has been happening every single year, which is where you have storage today. And I got to tell you, innovation is in our DNA and we are not going to stop now >>So 10 years. Okay. So it was really, the first five years was kind of slow. And then >>I think that's true at all. I don't think that try, you know, if you, if you look at, uh, the services that we have, we have the most complete portfolio of any cloud provider when it comes to storage and data. And so over the years, we've added to the foundation, which is S3 and the foundation, which is EBS. We've come out with a number of storage services in the, in the file space. Now you have an entire suite of persistent data stores within AWS and the teams behind those that are able to accelerate that pace. Just to give you an example, when I joined 10 years ago, AWS launched within that year, roughly a hundred and twenty, a hundred and twenty eight services or features our teams together this year have launched almost that many, just in those in, just in this space. So AWS continues to accelerate the storage teams continue to accelerate. And as my line said, we just started counting >>The thing. And if you think about those first five years, that was laying the baseline to launch us three, to launch EBS, to get that foundation in place, get lifecycle policies in place. But really, I think you're just going to see an even faster acceleration that number's going up. >>No, I that's what I'm saying. It does appear that way. And you had to build a team and put teams in place. And so that's, you know, part of the equation. But again, I come back to, it's not even, I don't even think of it as storage anymore. It's it's data. People are data lake is here to stay. You might not like the term. We always use the joke about a data ocean, but data lake is here to say 200,000 data lakes. Now we heard Adam talk about, uh, this morning. I think it was Adam. No, it was Swami. Do you want a thousand data lakes in your customer base now? And people are adding value to that data in new ways, injecting machine intelligence, you know, SageMaker is a big piece of that. Tying it in. I know a lot of customers are using glue as catalogs and which I'm like, wow, is glue a catalog or, I mean, it's just so flexible. So what are you seeing customers do with that base of data now and driving new business value? Because I've said last decade plus has been about it transformation. And now we're seeing business transformation. Maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >>Well, the base of every data lake is going to be as three yesterday has over 200 trillion objects. Now, Dave, and if you think about that, if you took every person on the planet, each of those people would have 26,000 S3 objects. It's gotten that big. And you know, if you think about the base of data with 200 trillion plus objects, really the opportunity for innovation is limitless. And you know, a great example for that is it's not just business value. It's really the new customer experiences that our customers are inventing the NFL. Uh, they, you know, they have that application called digital athlete where, you know, they started off with 10,000 labeled images or up to 20,000 labeled images now. And they're all using it to drive machine learning models that help predict and support the players on the field when they start to see things unfold that might cause injury. That is a brand new experience. And it's only possible with vast amounts of data >>Additive to when my line said, we're, we're in you talk about business transformation. We are in the age of data and we represent storage services. But what we really represent is what our customers hold one of their most valuable assets, which is their data. And that set of data is only growing. And the ability to use that data, to leverage that data for value, whether it's ML training, whether it's analytics, that's only accelerated, this is the feedback we get from our customers. This is where these features and new capabilities come from. So that's, what's really accelerating our pace >>Guys. I wish we had more time. I'd have to have you back because we're on a tight clock here, but, um, so great to see you both especially live. I hope we get to do more of this in 2022. I'm an optimist. Okay. And keep it right there, everybody. This is Dave Volante for the cube you're leader in live tech coverage, right back.

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to re:Invent 2021. You're watching theCUBE. My name is Dave Vellante. We're really excited to have Anthony Lye here. He's the Executive Vice President and General Manager of Public Cloud at NetApp. And Jonsi Stefansson as the CTO and VP of cloud at NetApp. Guys, good to see you. >> Same to you. >> Likewise. >> It's great to be back. >> You know, Anthony. Well so, we saw each other virtually at the AWS Storage Day, the big announcement, we're going to talk about that. But I go back and I said this to you several years ago, we were sitting, you know, some after party and you said "We are going to transform NetApp. We are going all in on cloud." We've seen NetApp transform many, many times. This is probably the biggest in history. >> No, I think you're absolutely right. I think, you know, I can't believe it, but you know, it will be five years for me in February. And in those five years, I think we really have done things that nobody expected. And I think we've proven to our existing customers, to our competitors, and now with Amazon, to a whole new set of customers that our intellectual property that we build and the acquisitions that we've done have made a lot of sense. I think we've demonstrated this wonderful concept of symmetry. Customers now understand and believe that a dollar invested in an App, wherever it is on premise or in the cloud is a dollar that moves wherever they want it to move and progresses as their own businesses progress. >> So Jonsi, for the latest announcement that you guys made to integrate ONTAP into the AWS cloud, you had to do some deeper integration, right? It wasn't just wrap your stack and Kubernetes and shove it into the cloud. But can you just talk about what you had to do? What the collaboration was like? >> The collaboration with AWS has been fantastic. It literally took two and a half years, you know, from the point where we decided to agree on the design principles, how we were actually going to deliver this as a service, the integration into every single aspect of AWS, you know, whether it's the console, the FSx, API, the integrations, to all the additional services that AWS has, like RDS, like Aurora, like the SageMaker, like EKS and ECS. And I mean, we are just getting started with the integration points and the collaboration and the teamwork. I would call it teamwork more than a collaboration. The teamwork with all these teams and maybe especially at name who was the leader of the storage sort of a unit in AWS has been fantastic. >> Dave: Yeah. Well so, this is the 10th re:Invent. This is the 9th year we've been here. We've seen a dramatically different cloud than 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and a different storage business. I'm not even sure. I mean, I don't know. I didn't even think about it as the old storage business anymore. Essentially, you're building a cloud on top of clouds. A super cloud if you will. >> Anthony: Yeah, I mean. I think, look, the strategy was, as I said, very, very simple to us, which was, you know, fundamentally companies, you know, run their applications on the basic primitives of compute storage and networking. And the gold standard for file was always ONTAP. And I think what we did, which I think was unique was we didn't just, as you said, throw it onto a cloud, stick it in a virtual machine and tell you, the customer "There. It's ONTAP just as you remember it." We reimagined it. And we architected it to be a cloud service. So it's elastic, it goes up and down. You can change the performance at runtime. And what we really did with Amazon was we wanted to make it a fully managed service. We didn't want people to think about versioning and patching. We wanted to remove all of that and we wanted people to take as much or as little as they needed. And we, and Amazon, we chose that we should own the responsibility for the availability of the service. And we should maintain the service ourselves so that customers of ONTAP can benefit from the solution. But in many ways, customers who've never been ONTAP customers can now take advantage of an enterprise grade file system and all the great things that it does without having to understand how it works. >> And explain why that's important for customers because people, they go, "Wow, you got S3." but it's very simple. Get, put, right? You don't have the full stack of a mature ONTAP. Please explain what that means to customers a little bit. >> You know, file systems are very important things. You know, we basically use them in our work environments every single day, you know. Within your sort of, you know, your Mac book, you have a home directory and sub-directories and files, very elegantly layout applications and layout infrastructures in ways that object repositories cannot. You know, aside from block and file. Sorry, from file and object, you of course, have block storage. And so, file plays a very important role. IDC has file growing at almost twice the pace of object now on the public cloud systems and, you know, file has about 13% of the overall storage market and it's growing. And I don't see any reason why file won't be as big on the Amazon cloud as the S3 has been. >> Dave: So you guys, go ahead, please. >> Yeah. I mean, you also have to take into account that the S3 object storage offerings of AWS is an integrated PaaS in our solution. So that's how we are actually doing automatic tiering. So you actually reap the best of both worlds, where you get the cost management of putting it in object storage, but you get the performance and the data management capabilities that is pretty unprecedented. You know, we are the first store that's offering that can actually do cross-region replication seamlessly by retaining deduplication and compression. But we also play a lot with, you know, block and object storage. So when Anthony was talking about how we've actually delivered this as a service, and this is sort of from our design principles, we are basically delivering this as a software, as a service, because more than an infrastructure as a service, because the stock that we are actually deploying, or the secret sauce of ONTAP, it's a very vast software stack that we are delivering, on top of AWS infrastructure. So I would always call it or categorize it a little bit more than software as a service, rather than infrastructure as a service. >> But it's even more than that, if I'm right, because it's cloud pricing, right? >> Jonsi: Yes. >> So it's not, you're not preying. I mean, when I buy Salesforce, I got to sign up for three-year deal. That's not a consumption-based model. >> Yeah. >> Oh, I think Amazon, you know what Amazon did uniquely and brilliantly was, it retailed technology and it's what makes Amazon so good, is that they choose to sort of simplify things. And when they find benefits as a retailer, they pass them on to the customer and, you know, there's this sort of pay-as-you-go business model, it's really good for the customer. It makes us work harder because, you know, you have to retain your customer sort of every 10 minutes. And that's something that, you know, as you said, with enterprise software and even some of the early SaaS vendors, that's not how it works. And so Amazon has forced us all to be very, very attentive to our customers. >> Dave: And I'd love to talk about what that means for the on-prem business, but if we have time. But you guys won Design Partner of the Year, what's that all about? First of all, congratulations. >> Anthony: Thank you. There's a lot of ISV design partners. You guys came out number one so congratulations on that. What's that all about? Explain what that entailed and how you got that. >> Yeah, I'll say a few words. Maybe Jonsi can add. I mean, the first thing of course is, you know, I S V stands for Independent Software Vendor. So, you know, it's always great because most people would say, "Well, NetApp is on-premise storage hardware." >> Dave: Of course, yeah. >> Which really, we've not really ever been an increasingly with demonstrating that we are a software company and we operate at cloud speed. You know, I can't really take the credit. I would give it to Jonsi and the engineering team. Maybe Jonsi, you can explain, you know, what moral about the award and why I think we were selected. >> So, I mean, I think it says a lot that this is the first time AWS has ever allowed a third party company to be this integrated into their console, into a support ability systems. You know, we make fun of this, me and Anthony all the time, because when we started this, down this path, everybody at NetApp said, "Guys, you're wasting your time." This is why AWS has the marketplace, but we didn't want to go. We already had the marketplace and we wanted to be able to connect to all these associated services and do within the manner that, you know, this was a true collaboration of engineering teams for a long time to actually deliver the service on both sides so the credit, of course, will always go to the engineers on both sides, even though I designed it, I didn't coat it. So, I think that, that alone, being the first to do it in AWS ever. I think we deserve that award. >> So just for our audience, to be clear, we're talking about FSx, ONTAP in the cloud, in the AWS cloud and kind of dance around that. But so that was announced, I guess, in September? >> Anthony: Yes. >> Right? >> Anthony: September, 2nd. >> What's the uptake been like? What's the reaction? >> Unbelievable. >> I'll bet. (laughing) >> No, no, I mean. >> No, I believe it. >> Better than we ever dreamed of. >> Yeah. >> The number of customers, I'm sure I'm not allowed to say the number of customers, but we asked and the fact that, you know, 60% of those customers have never been NetApp customers before, but they see the value in the data management capabilities that we are bringing to the market. >> Dave: So it exceeded expectations and your expectations were probably pretty enthusiastic. >> They were high. >> Yeah. >> I mean, Amazon is on the record. I was with Ed earlier on today, recording a piece and Ed, you know, was very clear that it's one of the fastest growing services now on AWS. You know, it turns out that, you know, the customer base, I think recognizes the, not just the need for a file system, but the uniqueness and capabilities that ONTAP provides, you know, to those customers in how they manage their business and transformations. And so, you know, to be sort of behind the console, to be sort of behind the Amazon CLI and the Amazon API, you see the world very, very differently, you know. I think the Amazon marketplace is a fantastic capability, but I'll tell you, you know, being a core part of the AWS service itself that they sell, that they support, that they bill for. It's a nice place to be. >> So, SaaS company. You're talking to the language of application development, Kubernetes, right? What do you think this means for the future of NetApp specifically, but also generally the on-prem storage business and the storage business in general? >> Well, we just announced our second quarter earnings today and what's happening is our cloud business is growing like crazy. We generated $388 million of ARR and the growth rates are, you know, astronomically high. That is increasingly helping our on-premise business to grow. You know, the nice thing about being in primarily, in the storage and data business is people aren't deleting many things. And the rate at which they're generating information is just accelerating. So, actually the confidence that we give the customer by demonstrating a sort of a cloud first, a sort of principles of all the cloud is actually giving customers to buy more on premise. So, we really don't mind. We are, our job much like Amazon's, is to have this customer obsession and you can't really go wrong, if you just keep asking them what they want. >> Yeah, if you can do so profitably, you're going to be reinvest in your business. Guys, we've got to go. >> Yeah. >> Love to have you back. >> Thank you. >> And you been quite a transformation. You said you're going to do it. You're doing it. So, well done to you. Five years in the making. Okay. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE, the leader in high-tech coverage. Keep it right there. We'll be right back from AWS re:Invent 21. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Welcome back to theCUBE's continuous coverage of AWS storage day. My name is Dave Vellante and we're here from Seattle. And we're going to look at the really hard workloads, those business and mission critical workloads, the most sensitive data. They're harder to move to the cloud. They're hardened. They have a lot of technical debt. And the blocker in some cases has been storage. Ashish Palekar is here. He's the general manager of EBS snapshots, and he's joined by Cami Tavares who's a senior manager of product management for Amazon EBS. Folks, good to see you. >> Ashish: Good to see you again Dave. >> Dave: Okay, nice to see you again Ashish So first of all, let's start with EBS. People might not be familiar. Everybody knows about S3 is famous, but how are customers using EBS? What do we need to know? >> Yeah, it's super important to get the basics, right? Right, yeah. We have a pretty broad storage portfolio. You talked about S3 and S3 glacier, which are an object and object and archival storage. We have EFS and FSX that cover the file site, and then you have a whole host of data transfer services. Now, when we think about block, we think of a really four things. We think about EBS, which is the system storage for EC2 volumes. When we think about snapshots, which is backups for EBS volumes. Then we think about instant storage, which is really a storage that's directly attached to an instance and manages and then its life cycle is similar to that of an instance. Last but not the least, data services. So things like our elastic volumes capability of fast snapshot restore. So the answer to your question really is EBS is persistent storage for EC2 volumes. So if you've used EC2 instances, you'll likely use EBS volumes. They service boot volumes and they service data volumes, and really cover a wide gamut of workloads from relational databases, no SQL databases, file streaming, media and coding. It really covers the gamut of workloads. >> Dave: So when I heard SAN in the cloud, I laughed out loud. I said, oh, because I could think about a box, a bunch of switches and this complicated network, and then you're turning it into an API. I was like, okay. So you've made some announcements that support SAN in the cloud. What, what can you tell us about? >> Ashish: Yeah, So SANs and for customers and storage, those are storage area networks, really our external arrays that customers buy and connect their performance critical and mission critical workloads. With block storage and with EBS, we got a bunch of customers that came to us and said, I'm thinking about moving those kinds of workloads to the cloud. What do you have? And really what they're looking for and what they were looking for is performance availability and durability characteristics that they would get from their traditional SANs on premises. And so that's what the team embarked on and what we launched at reinvent and then at GEd in July is IO2 block express. And what IO2 block express does is it's a complete ground app, really the invention of our storage product offering and gives customers the same availability, durability, and performance characteristics that can, we'll go into little later about that they're used to in their on premises. The other thing that we realized is that it's not just enough to have a volume. You need an instance that can drive that kind of throughput and IOPS. And so coupled with our trends in EC2 we launched our R5b that now triples the amount of IOPS and throughput that you can get from a single instance to EBS storage. So when you couple the sub millisecond latency, the capacity and the performance that you get from IO2 block express with R5b, what we hear from customers is that gives them enough of the performance availability characteristics and durability characteristics to move their workloads from on premises, into the cloud, for the mission critical and business critical apps. >> Dave: Thank you for that. So Cami when I, if I think about how the prevailing way in which storage works, I drop off a box at the loading dock and then I really don't know what happens. There may be a service organization that's maybe more intimate with the customer, but I don't really see the innovations and the use cases that are applied clouds, different. You know, you live it every day. So you guys always talk about customer inspired innovation. So what are you seeing in terms of how people are using this capability and what innovations they're driving? >> Cami: Yeah, so I think when we look at the EBS portfolio and this, the evolution over the years, you can really see that it was driven by customer need and we have different volume types and they have very specific performance characteristics, and they're built to meet these unique needs of customer workloads. So I'll tell you a little bit about some of our specific volume types to kind of illustrate this evolution over the years. So starting with our general purpose volumes, we have many customers that are using these volumes today. They really are looking for high performance at a low cost, and you have all kinds of transactional workloads and low-latency interactive applications and boot volumes, as Ashish mentioned. And they tell us, the customer is using these general purpose volumes, they tell us that they really like this balanced cost and performance. And customers also told us, listen, I have these more demanding applications that need higher performance. I need more IOPS, more throughput. And so looking at that customer need, we were really talking about these IO intensive applications like SAP HANA and Oracle and databases that require just higher durability. And so we looked at that customer feedback and we launched our provisioned IOPS IO2 volume. And with that volume, you get five nines of durability and four times the IOPS that you would get with general purpose volumes. So it's a really compelling offering. Again, customers came to us and said, this is great. I need more performance, I need more IOPS, more throughput, more storage than I can get with a single IO2 volume. And so these were talking about, you mentioned mission critical applications, SAP HANA, Oracle, and what we saw customers doing often is they were striping together multiple IO2 volumes to get the maximum performance, but very quickly with the most demanding applications, it got to a point where we have more IO2 volumes that you want to manage. And so we took that feedback to heart and we completely reinvented the underlying EBS hardware and the software and networking stacks. And we'll launched block express. With block express, you can get four times the IOPS throughput and storage that you would get with a single io2 volume. So it's a really compelling offering for customers. >> Dave: If I had to go back and ask you, what was the catalyst, what was the sort of business climate that really drove the decision here. Was that people were just sort of fed up with you know, I'll use the phrase, the undifferentiated, heavy lifting around SAN, what was it, was it COVID driven? What was the climate? >> You know, it's important to recognize when we are talking about business climate today, every business is a data business and block storage is really a foundational part of that. And so with SAN in the cloud specifically, we have seen enterprises for several years, buying these traditional hardware arrays for on premises SANs. And it's a very expensive investment. Just this year alone, they're spending over $22 billion on SANs. And with this old model on premises SANs, you would probably spend a lot of time doing this upfront capacity planning, trying to figure out how much storage you might need. And in the end, you'd probably end up overbuying for peak demand because you really don't want to get stuck, not having what you need to scale your business. And so now with block express, you don't have to do that anymore. You pay for what you need today, and then you can increase your storage as your business needs change. So that's cost and cost is a very important factor. But really when we're talking to customers and enterprises that are looking for SAN in the cloud, the number one reason that they want to move to the cloud with their SANs and these mission, critical workloads is agility and speed. And it's really transformational for businesses to be able to change the customer experience for their customers and innovate at a much faster pace. And so with the block express product, you get to do that much faster. You can go from an idea to an implementation orders of magnitude faster. Whereas before if you had these workloads on premises, it would take you several weeks just to get the hardware. And then you have to build all this surrounding infrastructure to get it up and running. Now, you don't have to do that anymore. You get your storage in minutes, and if you change your mind, if your business needs change, if your workloads change, you can modify your EBS volume types without interrupting your workload. >> Dave: Thank you for that. So Cami kind of addressed some of this, but I know store admins say, don't touch my SAN, I'm not moving it. This is a big decision for a lot of people. So kind of a two-part question, you know, why now, what do people need to know? And give us the north star close it out with, with where you see the future. >> Ashish: Yeah, so let's, I'll kick things off and then Cami, do jump in. So first of the volume is one part of the story, right? And with IO2 block express, I think we've given customers an extremely compelling offering to go build their mission critical and business critical applications on. We talked about the instance type R5b in terms of giving that instance level performance, but all this is on the foundation of AWS in terms of availability zones and regions. So you think about the constructs and we talk them in terms of building blocks, but our building blocks are really availability zones and regions. And that gives you that core availability infrastructure that you need to build your mission critical and business critical applications. You then take layer on top of that our regional footprint, right. And now you can spin up those workloads globally, if you need to. And then last but not the least, once you're in AWS, you have access to other services. Be it AI, be it ML, be it our relational database services that you can start to think about undifferentiated, heavy lifting. So really you get the smorgasbord really from the availability footprint to global footprint and all the way up to sort of our service stack that you get access to. >> Dave: So that's really thinking out of the box. We're out of time. Cami we'll give you the last word. >> Cami: I just want to say, if you want to learn more about EBS, there's a deep dive session with our principal engineer, Marc Olson later today. So definitely join that. >> Dave: Folks, thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. (in chorus )Thank you. >> Thank you for watching. Keep it right there for more great content from AWS storage day from Seattle.

(Upbeat intro music) >> Thanks guys. Hi everybody. Welcome back to The Spheres. My name is Dave Vellante and you're watching theCubes continuous coverage of AWS storage day. I'm really excited to bring on Wayne Duso. Wayne is the vice-president of AWS Storage Edge and Data Governance Services. Wayne, two Boston boys got to come to Seattle to see each other. You know. Good to see you, man. >> Good to see you too. >> I mean, I'm not really from Boston. The guys from East Boston give me crap for saying that. [Wayne laughs] That my city, right? You're a city too. >> It's my city as well I'm from Charlestown so right across the ocean. >> Charlestown is actually legit Boston, you know I grew up in a town outside, but that's my city. So all the sports fan. So, hey great keynote today. We're going to unpack the keynote and, and really try to dig into it a little bit. You know, last 18 months has been a pretty bizarre, you know, who could have predicted this. We were just talking to my line about, you know, some of the permanent changes and, and even now it's like day to day, you're trying to figure out, okay, you know, what's next, you know, our business, your business. But, but clearly this has been an interesting time to say the least and the tailwind for the Cloud, but let's face it. How are customers responding? How are they changing their strategies as a result? >> Yeah. Well, first off, let me say it's good to see you. It's been years since we've been in chairs across from one another. >> Yeah. A couple of years ago in Boston, >> A couple of years ago in Boston. I'm glad to see you're doing well. >> Yeah. Thanks. You too. >> You look great. (Wayne Laughs) >> We get the Sox going. >> We'll be all set. >> Mm Dave you know, the last 18 months have been challenging. There's been a lot of change, but it's also been inspiring. What we've seen is our customers engaging the agility of the Cloud and appreciating the cost benefits of the Cloud. You know, during this time we've had to be there for our partners, our clients, our customers, and our people, whether it's work from home, whether it's expanding your capability, because it's surging say a company like zoom, where they're surging and they need more capability. Our cloud capabilities have allowed them to function, grow and thrive. In these challenging times. It's really a privilege that we have the services and we have the capability to enable people to behave and, execute and operate as normally as you possibly can in something that's never happened before in our lifetimes. It's unprecedented. It's a privilege. >> Yeah. I mean, I agree. You think about it. There's a lot of negative narrative, in the press about, about big tech and, and, and, you know, the reality is, is big tech has, has stood and small tech has stepped up big time and we were really think about it, Wayne, where would we be without, without tech? And I know it sounds bizarre, but we're kind of lucky. This pandemic actually occurred when it did, because had it occurred, you know, 10 years ago it would have been a lot tougher. I mean, who knows the state of vaccines, but certainly from a tech standpoint, the Cloud has been a savior. You've mentioned Zoom. I mean, you know, we, productivity continues. So that's been, been pretty key. I want to ask you, in you keynote, you talked about two paths to, to move to the Cloud, you know, Vector one was go and kind of lift and shift if I got it right. And then vector two was modernized first and then go, first of all, did I get that right? And >> Super close and >> So help me course correct. And what are those, what are those two paths mean for customers? How should we think about that? >> Yeah. So we want to make sure that customers can appreciate the value of the Cloud as quickly as they need to. And so there's, there's two paths and with not launches and, we'll talk about them in a minute, like our FSX for NetApp ONTAP, it allows customers to quickly move from like to like, so they can move from on-prem and what they're using in terms of the storage services, the processes they use to administer the data and manage the data straight onto AWS, without any conversion, without any change to their application. So I don't change to anything. So storage administrators can be really confident that they can move. Application Administrators know it will work as well, if not better with the Cloud. So moving onto AWS quickly to value that's one path. Now, once they move on to AWS, some customers will choose to modernize. So they will, they will modernize by containerizing their applications, or they will modernize by moving to server-less using Lambda, right? So that gives them the opportunity at the pace they want as quickly or as cautiously as they need to modernize their application, because they're already executing, they're already operating already getting value. Now within that context, then they can continue that modernization process by integrating with even more capabilities, whether it's ML capabilities or IOT capabilities, depending on their needs. So it's really about speed agility, the ability to innovate, and then the ability to get that flywheel going with cost optimization, feed those savings back into betterment for their customers. >> So how did the launches that you guys have made today and even, even previously, do they map into those two paths? >> Yeah, they do very well. >> How so? Help us understand that. >> So if we look, let's just run down through some of the launches today, >> Great. >> And we can, we can map those two, those two paths. So like we talked about FSX for NetApp ONTAP, or we just like to say FSX for ONTAP because it's so much easier to say. [Dave laughs] >> So FSX for ONTAP is a clear case of move. >> Right >> EBS io2 Block Express for Sand, a clear case of move. It allows customers to quickly move their sand workloads to AWS, with the launch of EBS direct API, supporting 64 terabyte volumes. Now you can snapshot your 64 terabyte volumes on-prem to already be in AWS, and you can restore them to an EBS io2 Block Express volume, allowing you to quickly move an ERP application or an Oracle application. Some enterprise application that requires the speed, the durability and the capability of VBS super quickly. So that's, those are good examples of, of that. In terms of the modernization path, our launch of AWS transfer managed workflows is a good example of that. Manage workflows have been around forever. >> Dave: Yeah. >> And, and customers rely on those workflows to run their business, but they really want to be able to take advantage of cloud capabilities. They want to be able to, for instance, apply ML to those workflows because it really kind of makes sense that their workloads are people related. You can apply artificial intelligence to them, >> Right >> This is an example of a service that allows them to modify those workflows, to modernize them and to build additional value into them. >> Well. I like that example. I got a couple of followup questions, if I may. Sticking on the machine learning and machine intelligence for a minute. That to me is a big one because when I was talking to my line about this is this, it's not just you sticking storage in a bucket anymore, right? You're invoking other services: machine intelligence, machine learning, might be database services, whatever it is, you know, streaming services. And it's a service, you know, there it is. It's not a real complicated integration. So that to me is big. I want to ask you about the block side of things >> Wayne: Sure >> You built in your day, a lot of boxes. >> Wayne: I've built a lot of boxes. >> And you know, the Sand space really well. >> Yeah. >> And you know, a lot of people probably more than I do storage admins that say you're not touching my Sand, right? And they just build a brick wall around it. Okay. And now eventually it ages out. And I think, you know, that whole cumbersome model it's understood, but nonetheless, their workloads and our apps are running on that. How do you see that movement from those and they're the toughest ones to move. The Oracle, the SAP they're really, you know, mission critical Microsoft apps, the database apps, hardcore stuff. How do you see that moving into the Cloud? Give us a sense as to what customers are telling you. >> Storage administrators have a hard job >> Dave: Yeah >> And trying to navigate how they move from on-prem to in Cloud is challenging. So we listened to the storage administrators, even when they tell us, No. we want to understand why no. And when you look at EBS io2 Block Express, this is in part our initial response to moving their saying into the Cloud super easily. Right? Because what do they need? They need performance. They need their ability. They need availability. They need the services to be able to snap and to be able to replicate their Capa- their storage. They need to know that they can move their applications without having to redo all they know to re-plan all they work on each and every day. They want to be able to move quickly and confidently. EBS io2 Block Express is the beginning of that. They can move confidently to sand in the Cloud using EBS. >> Well, so why do they say 'no'? Is it just like the inherent fear? Like a lawyer would say, don't do that, you know, don't or is it just, is it, is it a technical issue? Is it a cultural issue? And what are you seeing there? >> It's a cultural issue. It's a mindset issue, but it's a responsibility. I mean, these folks are responsible for the, one of the most important assets that you have. Most important asset for any company is people. Second most important asset is data. These folks are responsible for a very important asset. And if they don't get it right, if they don't get security, right. They don't get performance right. They don't get durability right. They don't get availability right. It's on them. So it's on us to make sure they're okay. >> Do you see it similar to the security discussion? Because early on, I was just talking to Sandy Carter about this and we were saying, you remember the CIA deal? Right? So I remember talking to the financial services people said, we'll never put any data in the Cloud. Okay they got to be one of your biggest industries, if not your biggest, you know customer base today. But there was fear and, and the CIA deal changed that. They're like, wow CIA is going to the Cloud They're really security conscious. And that was an example of maybe public sector informing commercial. Do you see it as similar? I mean there's obviously differences, but is it a sort of similar dynamic? >> I do. I do. You know, all of these ilities right. Whether it's, you know, durability, availability, security, we'll put ility at the end of that somehow. All of these are not jargon words. They mean something to each persona, to each customer. So we have to make sure that we address each of them. So like security. And we've been addressing the security concern since the beginning of AWS, because security is job number one. And operational excellence job number two. So, a lot of things we're talking about here is operational excellence, durability, availability, likeness are all operational concerns. And we have to make sure we deliver against those for our customers. >> I get it. I mean, the storage admins job is thankless, but the same time, you know, if your main expertise is managing LUNs, your growth path is limited. So they, they want to transform. They want to modernize their own careers. >> I love that. >> It's true. Right? I mean it's- >> Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, if you're a storage administrator today, understanding the storage portfolio that AWS delivers will allow you, and it will enable you empower you to be a cloud storage administrator. So you have no worry because you're, let's take FSX for ONTAP. You will take the skills that you've developed and honed over years and directly apply them to the workloads that you will bring to the Cloud. Using the same CLIs, The same APIs, the same consoles, the same capabilities. >> Plus you mentioned you guys announced, you talked about AWS backup services today, announced some stuff there. I see security governance, backup, identity access management, and governance. These are all adjacency. So if you're a, if you're a cloud storage administrator, you now are going to expand your scope of operations. You, you know, you're not going to be a security, Wiz overnight by any means, but you're now part of that, that rubric. And you're going to participate in that opportunity and learn some things and advance your career. I want to ask you, before we run out of time, you talked about agility and cost optimization, and it's kind of the yin and the yang of Cloud, if you will. But how are these seemingly conflicting forces in sync in your view. >> Like many things in life, right? [Wayne Laughs] >> We're going to get a little spiritually. >> We might get a little philosophical here. [Dave Laughs] >> You know, cloud announced, we've talked about two paths and in part of the two paths is enabling you to move quickly and be agile in how you move to the Cloud. Once you are on the Cloud, we have the ability through all of the service integrations that we have. In your ability to see exactly what's happening at every moment, to then cost optimize, to modernize, to cost optimize, to improve on the applications and workloads and data sets that you've brought. So this becomes a flywheel cost optimization allows you to reinvest, reinvest, be more agile, more innovative, which again, returns a value to your business and value to your customers. It's a flywheel effect. >> Yeah. It's kind of that gain sharing. Right? >> It is. >> And, you know, it's harder to do that in a, in an on-prem world, which everything is kind of, okay, it's working. Now boom, make it static. Oh, I want to bring in this capability or this, you know, AI. And then there's an integration challenge >> That's true. >> Going on. Not, not that there's, you know, there's differences in, APIs. But that's, to me is the opportunity to build on top of it. I just, again, talking to my line, I remember Andy Jassy saying, Hey, we purposefully have created our services at a really atomic level so that we can get down to the primitives and change as the market changes. To me, that's an opportunity for builders to create abstraction layers on top of that, you know, you've kind of, Amazon has kind of resisted that over the years, but, but almost on purpose. There's some of that now going on specialization and maybe certain industry solutions, but in general, your philosophy is to maintain that agility at the really granular level. >> It is, you know, we go back a long way. And as you said, I've built a lot of boxes and I'm proud of a lot of the boxes I've built, but a box is still a box, right? You have constraints. And when you innovate and build on the Cloud, when you move to the Cloud, you do not have those constraints, right? You have the agility, you can stand up a file system in three seconds, you can grow it and shrink it whenever you want. And you can delete it, get rid of it whenever you want back it up and then delete it. You don't have to worry about your infrastructure. You don't have to worry about is it going to be there in three months? It will be there in three seconds. So the agility of each of these services, the unique elements of all of these services allow you to capitalize on their value, use what you need and stop using it when you don't, and you don't have the same capabilities when you use more traditional products. >> So when you're designing a box, how is your mindset different than when you're designing a service? >> Well. You have physical constraints. You have to worry about the physical resources on that device for the life of that device, which is years. Think about what changes in three or five years. Think about the last two years alone and what's changed. Can you imagine having been constrained by only having boxes available to you during this last two years versus having the Cloud and being able to expand or contract based on your business needs, that would be really tough, right? And it has been tough. And that's why we've seen customers for every industry accelerate their use of the Cloud during these last two years. >> So I get that. So what's your mindset when you're building storage services and data services. >> So. Each of the surfaces that we have in object block file, movement services, data services, each of them provides very specific customer value and each are deeply integrated with the rest of AWS, so that when you need object services, you start using them. The integrations come along with you. When, if you're using traditional block, we talked about EBS io2 Block Express. When you're using file, just the example alone today with ONTAP, you know, you get to use what you need when you need it, and the way that you're used to using it without any concerns. >> (Dave mumbles) So your mindset is how do I exploit all these other services? You're like the chef and these are ingredients that you can tap and give a path to your customers to explore it over time. >> Yeah. Traditionally, for instance, if you were to have a filer, you would run multiple applications on that filer you're worried about. Cause you should, as a storage administrator, will each of those applications have the right amount of resources to run at peak. When you're on the Cloud, each of those applications will just spin up in seconds, their own file system. And those file systems can grow and shrink at whatever, however they need to do so. And you don't have to worry about one application interfering with the other application. It's not your concern anymore. And it's not really that fun to do. Anyway. It's kind of the hard work that nobody really you know, really wants to reward you for. So you can take your time and apply it to more business generate, you know, value for your business. >> That's great. Thank you for that. Okay. I'll I'll give you the last word. Give us the bumper sticker on AWS Storage day. Exciting day. The third AWS storage day. You guys keep getting bigger, raising the bar. >> And we're happy to keep doing it with you. >> Awesome. >> So thank you for flying out from Boston to see me. >> Pleasure, >> As they say. >> So, you know, this is a great opportunity for us to talk to customers, to thank them. It's a privilege to build what we build for customers. You know, our customers are leaders in their organizations and their businesses for their customers. And what we want to do is help them continue to be leaders and help them to continue to build and deliver we're here for them. >> Wayne. It's great to see you again. Thanks so much. >> Thanks. >> Maybe see you back at home. >> All right. Go Sox. All right. Yeah, go Sox. [Wayne Laughs] All right. Thank you for watching everybody. Back to Jenna Canal and Darko in the studio. Its Dave Volante. You're watching theCube. [Outro Music]