(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)

>> Voiceover: From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, connecting with thought leaders all around the world, this is a CUBE conversation. >> Hi, I'm Stu Miniman, and welcome to this announcement with VMware cloud on AWS update. Happy to welcome back to the program, Matt Morgan. He is the Vice President of global marketing with VMware cloud services. And welcome into the program Fred Wurden, he's the general manager of EC2 enterprise at Amazon Web Services. Thank you so much both for joining us. >> Good to see you Stu. >> Same, thanks Stu. >> Matt, and Fred, the VMware AWS partnership is one that has gotten a lot of attention. I know any time back in the day when we used to go to physical trade shows, I could know when there was a session talking about this because it was usually full and overflowing. When I've written about this topic or doing videos about it it definitely gets quite a lot of attention. So it's been over three years since the partnership was announced but still, when I talk to people, they don't necessarily really understand the depth of the integration and the work that gets done on both sides even though you get clear messages from both Andy Jassy and Pat Gelsinger about how important this is. Matt, maybe start with you and Fred would love your commentary as to this three year partnership and where we are today here in 2020. >> Absolutely, since the initial announcement of the VMware AWS relationships, we have actually built a very special cloud service. And today, we're actually deepening our partnership. In fact, today, VMware goes to market saying that AWS and only AWS is our preferred public cloud partner for all vSphere based workloads. VMware cloud on AWS is a jointly engineered service. Meaning, our product teams our r&d teams are all working together to deliver VMware enterprise class Software Defined data center solution to the AWS cloud. VMware Cloud foundation is the core technology that's behind our service. And it gives us the capability to deliver that same level of infrastructure familiarity and consistency that our customers use today, across every data center location, the edge and of course inside the public cloud. VMware cloud on AWS attracts an enormous amount of interest from customers. And these customers are in every vertical, whether you're speaking of healthcare, media and entertainment, transportation, financial services, manufacturing, energy, government, education, professional services, and of course technology. And together with AWS, we're bringing together services that are being used across the whole portfolio of cloud optionality. This includes cloud migration from whether you're talking about a single app or complete data center, disaster recovery, whether you're talking about replacing a legacy system or building new disaster recovery in the cloud. Data center extension building that hybrid cloud. And of course, modernizing applications which we classify under the term application modernization. >> Great, and Fred from the Amazon side. >> Yeah, the partnership is been fantastic over three years. And I can't express enough how hard it is to actually deliver a simple solution that customers are asking for from all levels of both organizations. And to do that it takes both AWS and VMware to deliver a solution that allows companies to leverage what they know today and extend that into the cloud. And leverage all of the benefits that we're going to go over and a rapid delivery of new features which they haven't had before ever. So it's fantastic a partnership. I love what we've been doing at all levels. And I say it's going to continue. The scale at which we're growing is fantastic. And with that, I'm happy to go over some of the announcements and why we're doing what we're doing which is all based on listening and what our customers want. >> Excellent. Well, Fred, hey, we're glad first of all, that it did not get called VMC on AWS SS. Because we have enough acronyms already in tech. Matt, VMware and AWS, of course, clear leadership in the marketplace. With three years, bring us inside as to you talked about all the verticals that were used, but where's the proof on the adoption of this technology? Love to hear a little bit about that. >> Yeah, absolutely. So we have customer examples across the verticals we spoke of, but it's the customer stories that are the real value demonstrator. Let's pick up a couple of those. IHS market, they were able to move 1000 plus workloads to the public cloud. And that story is kind of common in the world. But what's unique about this particular story is IHS market moved them in just six weeks. If you look at the cloud migration strategy in general, for someone to move that fast with that many workloads, it's unheard of. VMware empowers that because the operating setup that organizations have standardized in their data center is identical in the public cloud. So organizations can move workloads we see them move hundreds of workloads in a week from their data center up to the public cloud. In addition to that, we have customer examples like the Pennsylvania Lumberman's Mutual Insurance Company. They were able to demonstrate 20% cost savings by moving their disaster recovery systems to VMware cloud on AWS. And that was initial savings right off the rip. Other customers like William Hill, George St. PA, Stage Coast, PHS Mortgage, they're all demonstrating the significant value adds when people move over to the public cloud, but leverage that VMware cloud solution. >> And Fred obviously, AWS also plays across these environments. We would like to hear your side too. >> Yeah, a couple examples like S&P global ratings, they spin up a new application environment in a few hours instead of months. Let alone taking all the burden off of their supply chain and management of that. Like Matt said in terms of seeing cost savings. So agility and speed allows them to really focus on their applications and start to modernize and innovate in areas that really differentiate them. They've had 100% uptime for regulatory applications and a 50% improved disaster recovery time. Other customers have built out a disaster recovery plan and then actually spun to VMware cloud on AWS as their primary because they had better performance. So it's the whole range of options in terms of better performance, better TCL and economics and mostly agility on what they can do going forward with applications that may already be built on AWS as well with native services. >> Matt, you touched on some great customer examples, maybe maybe give us some, broad themes as to what are the key drivers as to why customers are adopting VMware cloud on AWS? >> Yeah, absolutely. As with any infrastructure conversation, total cost of ownership is a big piece of the equation. Organizations want to look at their footprint today. They want to look at their footprint next year, and then of course, many years out. So when you look at the public cloud, cloud economics are a big driver. VMware, of course adopts the whole concept of cloud economics whole full horse. Meaning that we give you the capability to recognize the advantages of an apex object model, the ability to have on demand services, the ability to have a managed IaaS, all of that is part and parcel to our service. But on top of that, there's unique capabilities that VMware cloud on AWS delivers that deliver unique economic value. The first is this concept of zero refactoring. Our customers tell us that this alone allows them to eliminate what they call is rework, sometimes called the rework tax. Which prevents organizations from moving applications to the cloud without reworking them, without working their data layer, re architecting how they run, they can move them because the operating layer is consistent. Another area of value that's unique to VMware cloud on AWS is the leverage of existing skill sets. Today's operators are trained on vCenter. They're trained on all the supporting infrastructure around VMware. All of that applies with VMware cloud on AWS. So the ability to translate those skills into a cloud skill set right off the bat is of enormous value. Of course flexibilities another big one, as organizations embrace what it being seen as composite applications, which are applications that span the data center, the public cloud out to the edge. The ability to move logic as needed to be able to have portability is something we deliver. Again, that's an economic value that we are able to provide. Now this has been quantified by third parties. There's been several major third parties, including Forrester, including IDC, that have published value added statements around the total economic impact of VMware cloud on AWS. In fact, just last year, there was a study that was commissioned by Forrester that demonstrated a 59% reoccurring savings in terms of infrastructure and operating savings, compared to an on premise implementation. When you look at migration that accelerates to 69% 'cause organizations can save almost 70% of moving applications by eliminating rework and refactoring. That's an IDC statistic. >> All right Matt. Maybe it would make sense to talk about just overall adoption of the solution. I believe you've got some stats you can share. >> So yeah, if you look at the adoption, we have delivered enormous growth over the last year of the service. Total number of hosts year over year are up 2.5x. Total number of running VMs year over year is actually larger at 3.5x. Which indicates that customers are not just adopting, but they're accelerating their adoption. We now have 21,000 plus number of hands on labs that have been consumed since July of 2019, a year ago. And there are now 300 plus validated technology partner solutions available. And on top of that, 530 channel partners with VMware cloud service competency are now registered and available to assist. These are tremendous statistics for 12 short months. >> Well, congratulations on to both VMware and AWS on that progress. Maybe talk a little bit about trends. Just briefly, if I look over the last three months we've talked about AWS and VMware customers. Obviously, with the global pandemic, there's been certain things that they've needed to rapidly do things like, VDI, end user computing, remote contact centers are something that they need to rapidly expand on. But, is there anything different or general trends that that you would both like to share? Matt, we'll once again, start with you and then Fred get your take on it. >> Yeah, there's a regional school district in the US that in light of COVID, needed to spin up 10,000 plus people working remotely. And by leveraging VMware cloud on AWS, they were able to conduct virtual classrooms in very short order by leveraging this broad scale infrastructure powered by VMware cloud on AWS. Over time, that provided flexibility and agility, but it also reduced their costs. They've been able to eliminate hardware replacement plans that were going to cost significant amount of money. In fact, they're showing and telling us that they're able to save 75% of those forecasted costs. But everything is really about business continuity today. Today's unfortunate economic environment where we're working through this pandemic, this global pandemic, IT organizations and businesses, they're embracing a tried and true understanding of what it means to move to the cloud. But they're embracing it in a more aggressive way because the supply chain has been disrupted. If you think about a traditional supply chain, where organizations have to receive machines, set up those machines, have them wired in have certain people on site to get those machines configured, move application. That's a lot of steps in the process, many of which have been totally disrupted during the pandemic. The idea of VMware cloud on AWS is that you replace an analog supply chain with a digital supply chain. We can now help organizations get new equipment, new capacity, new resources up and running instantly. They don't have to worry about all the steps that were previously required that have been disrupted in a pandemic. The cloud provides that operating environment that maps one for one to the realities of today's world. And they're also able to understand that looking forward, that that setup enables them to be more future ready. Ready for whatever comes next to deliver what the business needs. >> Yeah, there's a number of reasons that you just touched on Matt, that are examples that we can bring out on that elasticity. For example, Penny Mac, anytime there are changes in the market, for example, on either both for VDI or just on processing of loans. When the pandemic hit, a lot of people actually paused on both looking and or changing their patterns. And this solution has been fantastic for either scaling up or scaling down both ways. And they can do it very quickly. They can do it within a number of a variety of means whether it's a single VM, or it's moving an entire migration into VMware cloud on AWS. So great results there. The case studies speak for themselves. There's a lot of examples that we have up on both of our sites. We'd really be good to take a look at those in detail if you're interested, it's fun to see. Helps a lot of people out. >> If I could follow up with you on something here. I want to talk about I go to the cloud, often that movement is step one, how do I take advantage of modernization, whether that be for my application standpoint, or leveraging new services? I wonder you can give me the AWS side there? And, Matt would love to hear how VMware is helping customers along this journey too. >> Well, the first is we want to meet people they're at with their knowledge set and their skill set. And this is a fantastic part. Customers can move quickly with the domain knowledge that they've go. We can assist in translating and making sure that the environment and the STDC is set up in a way that is tailored to what their needs are. Whether it's an extension, or if it's a complete migration of step one. But step two really is once they're leveraging VMware cloud on AWS is they have a lot of needs in terms of their CICD, their development tools, or samples and applications around automation. And we can take and help them with that. That content is already posted on our developer tool site and our developer center for this solution. It really assists them in learning about how to leverage the elasticity and the security and the networking capabilities that allow them to go in and then use all the rest of the rich AWS services as well. So, if you look at some of the things that are coming out for example, VMware Transit Connect. Which allows, a layer three solution to be built on top of our AWS transit gateway so that we can interconnect multiple VPCs in an environment that may be running either software as a solution on AWS or a native application that was built with managed services, completely in sync and in harmony, with VMware cloud on AWS. So that's what's happening at a rapid pace. It allows people to bite off the chunks that they want to modernize and reuse tools that are either familiar with them, and or automation improvements that we've got between code tools across the board. So it's great to see the work that they're doing >> Great, and Matt on the modernization piece. >> Yeah, so our surveys tell us that customers want to modernize their existing applications. But those same customers don't want to start over. So this is an important value proposition that we deliver in partnership with AWS. Organizations can take a business process application, they can migrate it to the cloud, they can extend and reach that application with AWS services. They can extend and reach that applications with additional machine learning capabilities, they can extend it with containerized extensions. They can support a broader modern agenda without having to start over. And I think that that is a value proposition that resonates with everyone, because people often need must leverage what they already have built with what the baseline is for the business itself. In addition to this, composite applications are now becoming the norm. With data and processing being more CO located, end to end Applications often consist of processing and data for certain tasks to be either pushed out to the edge or remain on premises in the data center in addition to the cloud. That value proposition of VMware delivering a hybrid cloud with consistent infrastructure and operations enables those composite applications to be built and deployed in a highly efficient way, which is a big piece to the modernization story. In addition to this with tons of Kubernetes grid as a customer managed option, organizations can run those containerized components right on top of our service, all of which integrates very cleanly with a whole library of services that AWS offers. End to end, you have all the optionality you need plus the speed of migration and capabilities once you get up to the public cloud. >> All right, let's get into the new pieces of the partnership here. Matt, first of all, when I think about VMware cloud on AWS, the customers that I've mostly spoken to over the last couple of years have tended to be some of the larger enterprises. I've heard you're alluding towards some capabilities to the small and medium business. I know I'm looking forward to talking to PLM insurance, one of the companies that are leveraging this solution as part of this announcement. What's new and the impact that this will have on the addressable market that VMware cloud can hit for AWS? >> Yeah, so with this announcement, VMware cloud on AWS, we're extending it to offer three new capabilities. Three new announcements of capabilities. The first one is all about what you just spoke of. Which is about extending the VMware cloud on AWS value proposition to more customers. So currently, customers can spin up production clusters with three hosts are, of course much more than that. But three hosts was kind of the entry level for a production cluster. What we're announcing is the ability to create production clusters with all the capable abilities that go into what we define as a production cluster with just two hosts. That means customers will be able to deploy production environments with two hosts in a cluster, dramatically reducing their costs. In fact, the traditional costs will come down by 33%. So this is all about providing the full capabilities of VMware cloud on AWS, but to be able to do it at a smaller investment envelope. So in addition to this, we're rolling out enhancements to VMware cloud director offering it as a service. VMware cloud director now will deliver multi tenancy to VMware cloud on AWS specifically designed for MSPs. As you know VMware partner ecosystem is filled with managed service providers. We have a mean enormous collection of these that add value on top of VMware cloud on AWS. Here by using VMware vcloud director service, they can deliver multi tenancy to their customers. And this is designed specifically to serve the needs of small to medium sized enterprises. These capabilities enable MSPs to serve those needs and it will be available initially in North America. And this will give them the opportunity to say, hey, if you want to get started on VMware cloud on AWS, we can give you bite sized pools designed specifically for what you need. And this is a very asset light pay as you grow model, which aligns specifically to that market. >> It's fascinating to watch Matt, I think, not that many years ago, if I had attended VMworld and talked to the MSPs. And they talk how deeply they appreciate the VMware partnership and that cloud company was the enemy. And, today AWS and VMware partnering with them, helping to make sure that in this hybrid world that they play a role to help get to the enterprise. Fred, anytime we go to reinvent, new announcements usually come to a huge fanfare, even something like a new bare metal instance. Last year it was the I3en metal instance. People get pretty excited. Help us understand you know what this really means, what advantages it has? Are there any limitations? What should we know about the capabilities AWS has now available to the VMware cloud? >> Well, first off, thanks Stu, I3en is really exciting that we're launching. It will meet the need of storage intensive workloads. And it'll do it far better than what we've had before. It takes advantage of all the learnings and the investments that we put into instances across the board for AWS such as Nitro. If you have, high random IO access, such as needed for relational database or workloads that have additional security that we have baked in, it's going to meet those needs. Compared to I3 metal, it has more memory, more usable, high performance storage and additional security. The example of a yield compared to I3 is about a 22% performance improvement and value. We're delivering four times the raw storage for about 2.2 times the cost. So in essence, you're getting raw storage at half the cost of an I3. So customers are excited. it's one of many instances that we will launch in the future for VMware cloud on AWS. And that's one of the advantages, is people can instantly take advantage of these innovations that we have. Just like we've done across all of the other instance families to meet workloads that customers are talking to us about that they want to run on this platform. >> Excellent, well, we really look forward. I know we're going to have a deep dive with Colbert to go into a little bit under the hood. And as I mentioned, got one of your joint customers PLM Insurance to understand their use case and how they're doing it. Matt and Fred, if you could just give us final takeaway, VMware cloud on AWS, Matt, and then Fred. >> Well, first off, thank you Stu for this opportunity to speak. I always enjoy spending time with you and certainly with Fred. We're just super excited and thrilled about our partnership. VMware couldn't be happier with our partnership with AWS from engineering to marketing, customer experience. Our teams are working together hand in glove to ensure success for our customers. VMware cloud on AWS is a truly unique service. Customers can continue business operations with minimal disruption in case of any uncertain event, they can migrate their workloads fast in a very cost effective manner with minimal risk. And we're really all about helping large enterprises as well as small and medium businesses accelerate their cloud migration and modernization journey. In fact, if you look across the board, we have seen enormous uptake. And now with these new offerings that we talked about, especially the two hosts production cluster, and VMware cloud Director service, we believe we're going to be more attractive to more organizations of various sizes. We're excited about the road ahead. >> And Fred. >> Customers are excited about this road, I would add. One, thank you guys for having us on. It's great to tell this story. The feedback has been phenomenal . The growth in the adoption and what we're seeing in terms of the use cases across the board is much stronger than we could have imagined. So it's really great to see this work that is hard to do to really merge the best of VMware and the best of AWS in a true deep partnership. And that takes work at all layers, whether it's a commerce system integration, or if it's the instance engineering and roadmap work across the board or networking. And customer support across the board for solutions that run on this platform. Both of us are joined to make sure customers are satisfied regardless of what it takes. That's something that no one else has. And it is unique. And it's a long term commitment that we have with each other to do the right thing for the solution. 'Cause we can't do it individually. This is something that truly only a joint partnership as strong as this is, and has gotten stronger can deliver. So we're super excited about it. I think you're going to continue to see the pace of innovation on what we're delivering increase. And so, with that, it's been great to work with VMware on this. It's really fun. >> Well, thank you, Fred. Thank you, Matt. Yeah, congratulation to your team. And of course, love hearing the customer stories and feedback. >> Thank you Stu. >> All right. Be sure to check out the other interviews as part of this announcement and check out theCUBE.net of course, we're covering VMware and AWS deeply including their shows whether they are in person or virtual. I'm Stu Miniman and thank you for watching theCUBE.