>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering Dell Technologies World 2018. Brought to you by Dell EMC and its ecosystem partners. >> Welcome back, here on theCUBE, our live coverage continues here at Dell Technologies World 2018. We're at the Sands Exposition Center. Along with Keith Townsend, I'm John Walsh. Glad to have you here with us on day one of our three days of coverage here. We're now joined by David Shacochis, who is the Vice President of Product IT Solutions and New Market Development at CenturyLink, and Jim Aluotto. Did I get it right, Jim? >> Jim Aluotto. >> Aluotto. We practiced this many times. Who is the Director of Cloud Provider Business, Americas, at VMware. Gentlemen, in all seriousness, thank you both for being with us. >> Jim: Thank you. >> We certainly appreciate your time. So talking software-defined data centers. First off, let's step really high level here, and just talk about main attributes, qualities. How would you, if your elevator speech would be about what the SDDC would be, how would you describe it, and what are the features? >> Sure, well I'll jump in front of the company that sort of coined the term, and get my answer first, and then let Jim expound from there. Really, I think we can sort of sum up the software-defined data center in a lot of what we've learned in creating a Managed Private Cloud, based on what you would call a software-defined data center platform, in that it minimizes the number of moving parts. We've been doing Managed Private Cloud for as long as Managed Private Cloud has been a thing. And what that used to mean, five, six, years ago, was provision to the network, provision to security devices, maybe it's a converge device, maybe it isn't, maybe it's two different vendors. Sure, you've got vSphere in the middle of it all, but now you're talkin' of different storage tiers. If you want different flavors of storage, you're talkin' to multiple vendors back there. Piecing together a private cloud solution used to mean talkin' to a number of different technology stacks, a number of different API frameworks. And so software-defined data center, where the rubber hits the road, and sort of, from the cold face, means just a simplified view of being able to automate all that together, have it all orchestrated, and have it be one common stack. >> Jim: Nicely done. >> Okay, well, you go do the bookish version. >> Well really, in its most simplistic form, spinning up end-to-end complete automation across compute, network, and storage assets. And lately we've gone to market with VMware Cloud Foundation, that CenturyLink is now spinning up as the root of their service that they're going to market with. And so we've gone through an evolutionary process over the years, where we've proven to the world the advantages of virtualization, virtualize and compute. VMware, in its Act II, is now virtualizing the network. We're virtualizing storage now with VSAN taking off like wildfire. But now we're stitching it all together, in the form of a complete, end to end, automated and provisioned, encapsulated, virtualized data center. >> And that's the big efficiency here, right? It's one-stop shop, basically. You don't have to go out and as you said, look for a number of different avenues, or different pieces of this puzzle. >> So it does, it drives efficiencies in the data center, but it also drives efficiencies and opportunities around the way you operate it. And one of the things that we've been seeing, and it's sort of foundational to our managed services practice, is that the software-defined data center actually drives software-defined managed services. You have to change the way you do managed services to take advantage of all that capability. We have a service we call Cloud Application Manager, which is really our tool that we use to model applications, deploy managed tooling to that application for 24/7 monitoring and management, and uptime and stability support, and then do analytics on that application, to be able to show cost-savings opportunities, best-practice opportunities, in more of an aggregated, reported way. So Cloud Application Manager is a much more automated version of managed services. It's not ITIL from 10 years ago, right? It's not up/down, just base-level ticketing. You need to be able to change the way you do managed services, and you can only do that if you have a reliable underpinning platform. So less moving parts, a software-defined data center lets you change that, let's you change the way you deliver managed services. >> So the CenturyLink has incredible technical chops. There's always a point where you have to decide, build versus buy. CenturyLink, you can choose to build all of this. You can take parts from the open source community, build extremely custom solutions. Why VMware? When you guys have the technical ability to build it, make a differentiating offering, why start with VMware as the base? >> Yeah, I think you go back to what VMware's been in the market doing, and I even sort of talked past it a second ago. The vSphere's foundation is really solid, right? The device, the flexibility you have with the hardware layer, the flexibility you have at the real core or nucleus of your compute and memory virtualization stack is super important. And then really the idea of building out into the software-defined very common ownership stack, and why VMware was great to partner with, with regards to building out our next-gen Managed Private Cloud offering, is because they've wired everything to work together. And you said there are things you could go and try to build on your own? I think it's interesting. What we're starting to see is that, just to use somethin' like OpenStack, as an example, building a private cloud out of OpenStack is certainly possible, but there's no one company owning it all end to end. And if you're a service provider, it's up to you to go figure it all out. Or you can go and work with maybe one integrator partner, but they're making their own set of choices, and now you're basically locked in to that particular deployment model. So I think working with VMware, what we found is, first off, they've accelerated our time to market, and our time to value around a Managed Private Cloud offering. There's a lot of interoperability in there. There's a lot we're able to do around hybrid applications, because something you deploy to VMware inside VCF is very similar to something you deploy in your own home-grown environment, to one of the Managed Private Clouds that we've been running for five or six years, where there's just a very clean migration and upgrade path with that interoperability. >> And really it's all about the market opportunity that VMware brings to the table. Our cloud strategy is incredibly simplistic, but yet it has such a compelling business and value proposition, not only to our mutual customers that we're going to market in joint pursuit with, but also to our cloud providers, 500,000 plus enterprise customers using VMware. As we take them along the journey, building out their private clouds, that represents over 60 million workloads, with the inevitability of them moving out to the cloud. So what we've teed up is a cloud provider community with our most strategic partner, like CenturyLink, to increase the odds of that, capturing those workloads onto a VMware platform. The market opportunity that we bring to the table for somebody like CenturyLink is quite extensive, let alone all the benefits that the mutual customer gets. They get to protect their data center, their data and application assets, all the reliability, compatibility, security, that they would expect from their own VMware infrastructure, they would expect from a VMware cloud provider, like CenturyLink. >> Well David, let's talk about the interface into CenturyLink. One of the things that customers are startin' to realize is that they have to differentiate, based on just internal IP. So there's the API to everything, now. What's, if you could describe, well, maybe there is. What's the API to CenturyLink, as I'm consuming this software-defined data center that you guys provide? >> Okay, so sure, so that's actually a really exciting opportunity for us, and it's one that we've been sort of pivoting. If you sort of look at the history of CenturyLink, there was a, and this sort of goes back 10 years, but there was a huge spike of CenturyLink's entry into the business to business market. Acquiring quests, getting the business that basically announced their entrance into the B2B marketplace. Then there was a number of more technology oriented and virtualization management oriented acquisitions, because it recognized two things: one, we needed to be in IT solutions, in cloud, in data center, but also that the network was heading towards a highly virtualized, highly orchestrated, highly software-defined model. The network of the 21st century was not going to be about buying a ton of big iron and putting it into pops anymore, it was going to be increasingly around managing x86 virtualization. So that set off a period of time within CenturyLink where we were acquiring managed services companies, IT solution companies, virtualization companies, that were helping really to increase two things: our ability to virtualize and manage virtualization, and then, secondly, develop software in new ways, and become much more familiar at the application layer. We spent about five or six years with companies like SAVAS, and Tier3, and Cognilytics, really adding to the company in terms of brain power, and know how, and workload fluency. And then now we've just recently closed on the merger and acquisition with Level 3. So now we're very much on a network scale ascendency. The interface into CenturyLink is really taking a lot of those assets that we've built up, and moving them together into more of a platform topology, which is re-architecting the way that we work. We've bought cloud companies, and we invested in virtualization to help us reorganize exactly what you're talking about, which is the way of interfacing with CenturyLink, driving customer experience, being able to have a common user experience, whether you're interacting with it at a CLI, or via an API call, or with a tutorial that you're following via an online interface, and having a common look and feel across those services. So it's a journey. We're still on our way there, but we have the very beginnings of a lot of commonality that's starting to occur, whereby if you log in to our public cloud management service, Cloud Application Manager, or if you log in to our network interconnect service, Network Exchange and Cloud Connect Solutions, or if you log in to our public and private cloud offerings, very common look and feel across the piece, where it's one identity, one billing collection, but then we allow each of those individual services to go and innovate on their own. And that's the key thing. You can go drive common user experience. That's super, but if you're waiting on a portal team to go design your UI for you, you're slowing down. And so we're really bein' able to design a framework whereby there's one common UI, but it's more design patterns that every internal team picks up and works with, and then integrates into their release. >> And it's very important for VMware as well, as we develop our IP that's relevant for cloud provider use cases, is to open up those APIs to do just that, give you the opportunity to own that customer experience and differentiate yourself within the marketplace. >> I think we talked about this last time, too, where VMware's entree into the service provider world really taught them some lessons, and they started adding things to their product that make it easier to be a service provider. And some of the things, like with vCloud Director, and some of the ways that you can now work with that at an HTML5 layer, and sort of create your own version around it, almost interact with vCloud Director at an API level, allows us to factor it in to that mentality of design pattern, thinking in a common UI across all of our services. Right now we're working with a lot of those features on vCloud Director to enable our Managed Private Cloud service. >> So what if the conversation is being then able to show it's all about making it real? What have the real conversations been? >> Yeah, so the real conversations with our customers that we're starting to have are really, and just to tie it a little bit back to this idea of a software-defined data center, I think they're excited by the possibilities. They're certainly looking to really drive instrumentation at more places than they ever were able to drive instrumentation before. And there's the obvious industry examples of IoT, and sensors, and things like that, but even things like business process, and being able to theoretically just rework the way a particular system works, turn it into a micro service, or an application that they can factor in to their overall IT strategy, but then have that start to feed in to a broader data lake that they can then start making business analytical decisions from. That's one of the big patterns that we see, whether it's occurring with a lot of our customers that we work with in the built environment, but in working with the customers that work with CenturyLink, in some of the most deep and influential ways, are the ones that are out there sort of "in space". And I don't mean in space, I mean out there in a geographic spread, like retail solutions, and physical facilities, and things like that, where you have people coming to your location, and you're tryin' to gather all that data back into more of a centralizing motion. That's where we're having some of our most interesting conversations, with those retail brands, with bigger facilities that we want to be able to bring on net, and basically have them turn into data sources for their data lake, that they can then start moving forward and analyzing with some either professional services or tooling, to go and start looking for where those insights lie. >> So for me this is music. What I'm seeing, customers want to wane off of IT functions altogether. They want to invest their resources around their core business. >> John: Their business, right. >> Yeah, exactly. So what they're doin' is, they're relying on the subject matter experts now. The whole notion of being concerned about security, and reliability out in the cloud, that's long gone. They recognize that folks like CenturyLink can deliver at greater economies of scale, more secure, highly available. >> Yeah, and one of the things, one of the best ways we can facilitate those conversations is to share a little bit of our own journey. And it's not because we want to stare at our own product catalog, and walk through it page by page, but to share some of our own journey with the perspective of realizing a long time ago that in our managed security business, it was a big data problem. It's not an implementation and controls problem. And so we've been driving a whole lot more of our story, and some of our service strategy is, not only is it, we feel a lot of these are very valuable services in their own right, but they show off a pattern of: instrument it, drive it back to a data lake, and then take more of an analytical approach to it to add value, as opposed to just being very transactional. >> We talked about the journey. It's been a good one, right? And continued success with that. >> Indeed. >> Thanks for joining us here on theCUBE, and we appreciate the time. >> Okay. >> Good, thank you very much Dave and Jim. Back with more. You're watching theCUBE. We are live, here at Dell Technologies World 2018 in Las Vegas. (percussive music)