>> Live from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering VMworld 2018. Brought to you by VMware and it's ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back to Las Vegas. This is Lisa Martin with theCUBE. We are at Vmworld 2018, Day One. I'm with Justin Warren. Hey Justin. >> Hi Lisa, how you doin'? >> Good. This is VMware's 20th anniversary and we're very excited to welcome two new guests to theCUBE. We've got Scott Brindamour, the Senior Director of the U.S. architect team from CenturyLink. Hey Scott. >> Hello, how are ya? >> Good. And we've got Geoff Thompson, the Senior Director of VMware Cloud Provider Program. Welcome. >> Thank you very much and hello. >> The 20th anniversary of VMware. You've been with VMware a long time. >> Yes. >> Lot of momentum kicked off this show, not just this morning. You guys said you were in here yesterday. >> Yes. >> Just curious to get your perspective, Geoff, on the buzz and the opportunity that you're hearing, not just from your customers but from your partners as well. >> Oh yeah, yeah. I remember the first one I went to way, way back, even before I joined VMware, when I was at Hewlett Packard. Then, it was a little small event back in, I think it was Los Angeles. Now, here we are in 20 thousand something people in Vegas for the nth year running, so the buzz is amazing. This year, I think more than ever for us, because Cloud is just becoming more and more of a focal point and the discussion and topic area for everybody, so the buzz is incredible. Working with CenturyLink here and with Scott is just like an opportunity to dig deeper on all these relationships, find new opportunities to go all in on the strategy that you guys have really already adopted, look at Cloud Verified and take that to the next step. Yep, great so far and looking forward to more. >> So talk to us, Scott, about the partnership that CenturyLink has with VMware. VMware has a massive amount of partners. I saw a stat this morning on stage. What is it about CenturyLink's offering and VMware that's really better together for end users? >> Yeah, I think it's really in our approach and how we really listen to our customers and try to understand where they are in their journey and what they need and not just throw a widget at a customer, but really design a solution that meets their needs and VMware having a flexible architecture and a vision for the future enables us to not only plant the seed today, but where we're going; a lot of co-development with VMware, a lot of partnership with VMware, a lot of making sure our teams that operate the environment and my team on the front lines work with customers are trained and ready for the next technology. I think I've seen a remarkable change in VMware over the last several years in accelerating their road map and working with AWS and a lot of the other partners. It's refreshing. A lot of our business is private Cloud on VMware. We've been a big partner for a long time and the VMware Verified is something we hold dear and we look forward to the relationship ongoing. >> Yeah, that focus on Cloud came through loud and strong in the keynote today and you mentioned it here, the private Cloud, hybrid Cloud, multi Cloud. CenturyLink has a rich heritage in networking and networking is vital for managing Cloud. So tell us a bit more about how CenturyLink's networking skills helps customers to understand how they can manage this multi-Cloud universe they have to live in now. >> Sure and maybe I should even talk about, the viewers that don't know what CenturyLink is. I've been with the company for 15 years, a company called Savvis, but we've made a number of different acquisitions over the years to gain different technology areas, where there'd be ERP, where there'd be dev opps capabilities in the public Cloud, where there'd be Cloud management platforms, et cetera. Now, we see more data is being moved outside of the data center and more data is being originated outside the data center, so customers are really saying, what do I do with all this data? Where do I put my apps? I can't put it in my four walls. I want to move it to the Cloud. Not every customer is on the same path at the same rate and can accept the change. I think the biggest thing we do is helping customers manage pieces of that portfolio, but it's not just a take-over kind of an old ITO play. It's a co-sourcing kind of play, a co-management model where they may have some skills in one area but deficient in another. We can help them with AWS, for instance. We can help them with the new software-defined V-conformate foundation technologies that VMware is going to as well, and bring the network components as well, so that a workload that's running on premise can work and perform just as well off premise by providing that private network connectivity or public network connectivity to those end users as well. >> You mentioned that partnership idea. I'm keen to understand the partnership you can provide essentially as a service provider. Customers rely on service providers a lot to help them manage their own infrastructure, in conjunction with the vendors. So, tell us a bit more about how your partnership with VMware works for customers. >> Yeah, we work a lot with-- VMware at its roots was a software company, so lately, selling services and selling services to clients that are not just a software skew in a software package, so a lot of interaction with VMware client teams and doing strategic discussions with some of our key clients about how we can bring them to the next generation and buying a private Cloud as a service, instead of just selling them a VMware license and have the customer try and figure it out. So, how do we get a customer on the same path and working together to do a lot of that together with our clients, and really making sure we're a partnership and our sales teams are going out to customers together is a big part of6 that. >> Right. >> Yeah, I think from our side, CentralLink is a strategic global partner of ours, so that means several things. The most important thing is we get an opportunity to have more and more briefings together, go deeper on our global strategy as a combined unit so we can look at new technologies that are comin6g down the pike. You can assess them and decide if there's a customer opportunity there and if there is, we'll bring our Cloud practice team in. We'll look at how we take that opportunity and make it a go-to-market strategy together and then we'll go and do sell with. We'll go out into our field teams. We'll educate them on what the offering is and then VMware and CentralLink is co-selling that solution. >> Yeah, I think a lot of the VMware sellers, the public Cloud threat that they have and the move to the public Cloud, how does that still co-exist with customers? I still strongly see that there's a lot of legacy apps. We were talking earlier about only 20% of workloads have moved to the Cloud. There's still a lot of legacy apps that are on VMware that are their crown jewels that are running their companies. They just need to deliver that in a new model and that's where a partner like CentralLink can help, to move it out of their data centers, to move it into VMware on AWS and help a customer understand what are the right workloads to move there, do I need to replatform it, when is it ready, how do I migrate it and how not to disrupt their operations and then manage it, if the customer doesn't have the capabilities to do it off their own premise and skill sets. It's a totally different mindset managing it off your premise than inside your four walls. >> So when you're talking to a customer at the outset of an organization that has multiple Clouds maybe driven by application type, maybe driven by that on a combination of acquisitions. Where does that business conversation start? Are you starting at the C-suite level? Are you starting there to really help the business leaders understand how to extract the power of their data? Tell us a little bit about how do you help them with a multi-phased approach. >> Sure. We definitely talk to the C-suite, CIO, whoever is leading the strategy but it depends on the company. A lot of that's actually done in the line of business, the more innovative lines of business that are transferring their business that have done a first mover. You hear a lot about shadow IT, where the business is going around IT because IT can't move fast enough. CIOs who are transformative, we're typically working with them and we're trying to figure out where they are in their strategy. Are they an early adopter or are they a lagger, do they not have a strategy and then understand; do they want to take a lot of risk and move quickly. Do they want to do it slowly and not disrupt their business. Depending upon the culture and the risk nature of their organization and what is actually running on that infrastructure they're going to move, you got to make those decisions. We call it, in CentralLink terms, my team talks about what's called best execution venue. We're agnostic. We're obviously a big VMware partner, but we also do resale solutions on Azure and AWS as well, as we're a data center provider and we can put it in our four walls on old legacy dedicated server environments as well. Whatever the right venue for our customer is, which is typically going to be hybrid, some on public Cloud, some on private Cloud, some on premise, some off premise and even more moving out to the edge, that customers want to do workloads in smaller quantities in kind of a dynamic nature, spinning up and spinning down, that we work with the clients to figure out what's the right execution venue; cost factor, who's going to manage it, what's the best place to locate it, does it need to be secure, governed, is their data sovereignty or compliance regulations on it. Then, ultimately, how they're going to scale their business and what their vision is to automate as much as possible and standardize it. You heard it today this morning; it's all about automation. So, how can they automate and how can they reduce the labor that the individual persons on the keystrokes and automate the infrastructure and make it look the same. I think the software-defined data center model that VMware has is a step in the right direction and there's a big uptake on customers in that environment today. >> Yeah, we're hearing a lot today, I think Lisa, of people saying it's customer choice. The ability to automate things but in the way that I choose to do it and transforming at the speed I need to do it. It's coming up quite a lot. Maybe you could tell us a bit more from the VMware perspective about how you're enabling that customer choice and we heard a lot about the automation, so how does the automation work with partners in enabling customers to be able to transform their business. >> For us, it's about we give choice and flexibility so within our program, it's all about making sure that we give everything that we build for ourselves and our end user customers, giving that to our partners. So, in terms of Scott and CentralLink, we give them the tools to go and build the Cloud and then set up the automated operations for them to expose to their end user customers and then we also leverage VMware Cloud on AWS, so we made that available to the program as well. So, our partners have choice in flexibility and ease of operations and then they expose that to their customers as well, so it's win-win-win, I think there. >> Yeah, and the keynote this morning, it was SDDC, software-defined data center from VMware was talked about as a self-driving data center and that's ultimately what we see as well in partnership with VMware that a lot of customers understand the VMware tool sets. Extending that to a new platform that's software defined and enabling automation, that it can ultimately one day drive itself, so customers can automate the deployment of applications they're running on, something that can be spun up on AWS very quickly. Applications can be migrated over automatically with tools, managed and then no one responding to an alert that a VM or an application is down, it can autocorrect itself and it really could be automated in the future. We see that and certainly all the tools and capabilities that VMware puts in place that enable that is something that we subscribe, we use it ourselves and we have our customers use it as well. >> I'm curious what your take is, Scott, on the announcements that Andy Jassy made this morning on the stage with Pat Gelsinger. They announced VMware Cloud on AWS a year ago at this same event. There's been a lot of momentum. &They talked about the different M releases now going everywhere. From a partnership perspective, what does that mean to CentralLink and how do you think that will positively impact your business? >> Well, there's two sides of our business. We have a very large, obviously, networking business and we have a hosting and Cloud and data center business, so we see the two of them coming together. I talked about the data center dying and everything moving off; how do you network that all together, but we have a very large retail customer in the, let's say, fast food chicken business, I'll keep it at that level. We started off hosting a lot of their critical applications that run their stores and understand what's the best place to put stores and store operations. We also, from the networking side in acquiring Level three, they had a lot of the networking capabilities. They now want a single platform to run store operations from a network, from a virtual desktop, from an email, from an order fulfillment, supply chain management, all to be contained in a particular region that you can manage it locally without all the data going back. So, the ability to have a software-defined smaller component that can run it that can not only have the data center and the Cloud component as private, to keep the data safe and non-public, but also the network software-defined on one platform together with one provider that can manage the whole thing. Now you're distributing your data out, the network becomes more important, the performance of the network, the resilience of the network becomes more important too. That environment goes down, you don't sell any more chicken. That's the biggest thing that customers are seeing, is converging of those capabilities together and I think there's very few providers out there that can speak both those languages and provide both of those to clients today. >> Taking those benefits all the way out, for what the infrastructure enables from a cost in speed perspective, the Board of Directors at said chicken chain, what are they actually benefitting from? It might be this invisible software, but from a business perspective, how is this going to impact their business? Selling more chicken? >> Yeah, it's basically, they have a strategy to continue to be in more markets and the more markets they do, the time to set up and deploy infrastructure and have that ready, that's the biggest enabler. To have the store front, to have the store ready, then all the infrastructure that supports the store, especially now you have people, they can order chicken on their phones, loyalty, they can place their order ahead of time and pick it up, they don't have to go through drive-through any more, things of that nature. Everything becomes digitized and the I want it now generation that we live in today, that'll accelerate their ability to deliver services to the store and then react to the changes in the market as they happen. Everything is digital now. That's the biggest thing, is growth through stores, growth through being able to meet the demands of the stores as they change going forward, so very dynamic. >> Awesome. Scott, Geoff, thank you so much for joining us on theCUBE. You're now theCUBE alumni. We'll give you some stickers. >> Yeah, stickers. Great thank you. >> We appreciate you guys sharing what's new. >> Thanks for your time as well. It's such really good VMware. >> Thanks. >> Appreciate it. >> For Justin Warren, my co-host, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE from Vmworld Las Vegas 2018. Stick around, we'll be right back. (techno music)