>> Live from Las Vegas it's theCUBE, covering AWS re:Invent 2018. Brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. >> Hey welcome back everyone, we're here live in Las Vegas, for AWS re:Invent 2018. Our sixth year covering, I'm John Furrier with Dave Vellante. Dave, it's been a wild ride, a lot going on, changing formations over the years, cloud is kickin' butt. >> Innovation, growth. >> Partnership with VMware's paying dividends. The ecosystem's evolving, startups are having opportunities. C-Chains is here. Tom Gillis, Senior Vice President and General Manager Networking and Security Business Unit at VMware is our next guest. Great to have you Tom, thanks for comin' on. >> Thanks gentlemen for havin' me. Yeah, it's good to be here. >> I'm glad you're on, because one of the things I'm always excited about is networking. If Stu Miniman were here, he'd be all over this conversation as well. It's hard, it's been part of the holy trinity of infrastructure, network, compute, storage, is never going away, but it's changing. There's new abstraction layers, there's new opportunities, you're now living and breathing and working on with VMWare, and they just, ways to make networking better. How's it going, what's the update, what's going on in networking, this Outpost deal is really interesting. You bring in worlds together, in a consistency-- >> You hit the nail on the head, right. We're bringing the worlds together. And I think, one of the things we're seeing, is that, in the enterprise, enterprise IT is looking at an increasingly heterogeneous data center environment. In in the next 12 months, you're going to have data center, where one rack is running EC2, and your data center, one rack is running vSphere, in your data center, another workload is running on Amazon, another one is running out of the Edge, so tying this all together creates some challenges, and this is a problem I think VMWare is uniquely suited to solve, networking is the fabric that connects all these disparate islands, and lets them talk to each other, lets them talk to each other in an orderly way, right? So, networking is about connectivity. It's also about policy enforcement, those are the two things we focus on with the intersects team at VMWare. >> And I'll say, as the landscape changes around how cloud impacts it, no perimeter, but networking still has to move packets from A to B, storage goes from now to then, so things are moving around. So networking is constant, straightforward and consistent, you got to move packets around. >> Yes, this is an important thing that I think people get confused on, is, when they understand, they look at the numbers that we're posting in networking, it's all software networking, right? We don't move packets from A to B. We do the policy administration. So, something has to move the packets from A to B. Cisco's switches, Arista's switches, there's a lot of really good networking hardware out there that's not going to go away any time soon. But I always say, use the right tool for the right job, so, a product like Cisco ACI is a fabric manager for a switch. And NSX is a policy layer, right. It's a software networking layer, and something we learned from the public cloud is that, you can automate network deployment using this software networking approach. How many networking people does it take to deploy a workload on AWS? >> Zero. >> Zero! You push a button and it goes. So we're giving you that same capability on-prem, within a stack, so it's automation that allows you to automatically spin up and deploy a network, and a policy to go with that network that makes sense. >> How does that impact the largest networking vendor on the planet, Cisco? How does that scenario, and how do you guys work together? Is it conflicting, is it together? >> As you pointed out, the electrons have to move from A to B and Cisco is really, really good at doing that, actually moving electrons, doing it cost effectively, efficiently, at scale, hard problem to do. So we work very closely with Cisco to make sure that, NSX and, you know, Cisco's products, are interoperable, that they work together, they solve different problems. The problem that we solve with NSX is the policy piece of it, web server can talk to app server, can talk to database. That's a very simple policy, but when you try to express that in IP addresses, that could be 5,000 firewall rules, and in NSX that's one rule, it's English language. So it's that simplicity of software networking, allows us to enforce policy, in a increasingly heterogeneous environment. >> Okay, so let's talk about Outpost a little bit. You're got two versions, if you will. You've got VMWare Cloud on AWS Outpost, and then your piece, which is the cloud foundation for EC2 on Outpost, so that's low-latency, it's consistent networking, talk about that piece of it, drill down, and some of the challenges that you had to solve. >> So, as you pointed out, we think Outpost is an industry-defining announcement, because it's really blurring the line between private and public cloud. And VMWare and Amazon have partnered very deeply to continue to make this just feel like one thing. And the piece of the puzzle that we bring to the table is infrastructure, so policy management, that connectivity, the web server talks to app server, who gets to talk to who, security policies, data management and protection policies, these are things that customers expect from us. It's very easy for us to deliver that in a VMWare, vSphere environment. I think you talked to my colleague Mark Lohmeyer, about VMC that's going to run on Outpost, that's a VMWare environment running on Amazon hardware. We also are introducing services that are going to provide VMWare capability in a native EC2 environment running on Outpost, that's what we call VMWare Cloud Foundation, or VCF for short. >> That's a particular instance of Outpost, there's also the Amazon version, how do you guys doing under the covers? Explain how it works from a VMWare standpoint on the premised piece? Talk about under the covers. >> As you pointed out, the trick is to get all these disparate hybrid, you know, clouds, these different kind of islands the capacity to talk to each other. And so we've worked very closely with Amazon team to take NSX networking, embed it into Outpost so it can talk seamlessly to enterprise networks of all shapes and sizes. That's a deep, important part of the relationship. And in addition to that, we're putting the VCF capability into EC2 to extend consistent policy enforcement, either in a vSphere environment, private thing that you're managing, the hybrid thing that maybe VMWare is managing, or that Amazon's managing, in any scenario we're going to give you one set of policy, one set of enforcement across all of this with VMWare Cloud Foundation, as well as the VMC on AWS. >> The software engineering and engineering in general for the data center, where there's hardware, software, the generations of developers have all had the same kind of language, just changes tone. Put a wrapper around it! Container, VMs, but now all the same principles. You want to make something smarter and better like an old mission critical work load, you put a wrapper around it, you kind of put software around it, and you can still run that and have new modern ways to add value to it, connector, whether it's a Micro service or an API, is a trend, the heterogeneous environment you just described, EC2 rack over here, isn't this kind of like a container for the data center? In a way? >> My view on this, and I think Amazon is really pioneering this front, the data center is becoming an appliance. When you think about it, like, every enterprise is buildin their own data center with their own pieces parts, that's nuts! It'd be like, every company building their own furniture. Yeah, you could do it, but like, really? Wouldn't you just rather buy this desk from a furniture maker? And so, Amazon has built an incredibly efficient, incredibly powerful, call it an appliance, this hardware infrastructure, that works, and it works at scale, and it's easy to use, and you can get it in two days, it ships with Amazon Prime, that is super compelling. And I think a huge amount of customers are going to look for that simplicity, that easy of use, what's necessary, you pointed this out, is an abstraction, software abstractions, that's what VMWare does. We create software abstractions to simplify the administration of all the bits and bytes, all the electrons that are flowing from A to B. We make that stuff easier to manage, with virtualization technology, that is an abstraction. >> Operational-wise, I think it is the very key point too. How do you get it to run? (chuckles) Operating the networks, operating the data center, operating systems that feed developers value and giving developers a programmable infrastructure, that's the vision of a software-defined data center. >> So, you talkin about, data centers as an appliance, I always thought Larry Ellison had it right. You develop all these appliances, like the iPhone, for enterprise, the problem was just Oracle, very narrow set of use-cases. I feel like, in a way, that I felt when the Warriors got K.D. Right? That's what Outpost to me, is like, it's almost like an unfair advantage-- >> Game over! >> It changing the game, here, so I, look, VMWare is a software company, you love anybody who will run your software on their hardware. >> But Even Duran is a great analogy. >> But you got to think, that the guys who been playing in this, you know, on-prem cloud market, are going to say, "Whoa, what do we do now? How do we respond," how do you think that affects some of your other partners? >> I think the magic of what Amazon is doing, is it's simplicity from A to Z, meaning, I have a work load, I need to deploy it, I push a button, two days later, this rack of hardware shows up at my data center, you plug it in, it talks to the cloud, it hooks itself, like, that's awesome, right? >> Patches itself, I don't have to worry about it. >> The thing they got to remember, is that data center is a means to an end, not an end in itself, right? What is a data center supposed to, it's powering software that powers the business, and companies are spending too much time building the machinery to power the software to power the business, and they want to focus on the software that's powering the business. >> Software is the world. >> Too much head count, involved in-- >> It's just a lot of work, a lot of energy, a lot of bandwidth, a lot of attention, a lot of arguing, a lot of debate. >> Move that head count into high-value activities. >> Exactly. >> That is really, I think, the key point. And again, it became its own cottage industry, for the wrong reason! >> Yeah, I feel like, working with Amazon, we can simplify how you build, deploy a data center. There's an unsung hero in this equation, that is Intel. Intel is just making these processors faster, stronger, and so, we see less and less need for highly-specialized general, specialized servers, we can go with a more generalized compute infrastructure that can cover a wider array of workloads, including networking. We're using Intel processors, and we're running 40 gigs of enterprise-grade networking-- >> I got to say Tom, that's a great to point out Intel, I was reading the news on my phone, just in between breaks here, the news articles, "Oh, Intel's new competition with ARM," what they don't understand is, this is a massively expanding addressable market. So it's not a winner-take-all, Intel doesn't have to get every deal. 'Cause there's specialism at the silicon-level now, to power these software abstractions. >> To your point too, a decade ago Paul Muret said, "We're going to run any workload, "any application, anywhere in the world, on VMWare," and a lot of people laughed. And said, "You're not going to move some of the SAP stuff, or Oracle stuff," it all went, I mean, except for very, very few. And that's to your point, it's a general purpose system now, that can pretty much do any mainstream commercial app. >> So with the power of an abstraction layer, now we can optimize, and I think we're still learning the details of what exactly Amazon's done to optimize, but we all know, it's powerful, right? And now, you can get that in Outpost. >> They've got some street cred! >> Yes, they've got some street cred, yes. >> Tom, great insight, thanks for coming on theCube. >> Gentlemen, thank you for having me, this is good-- >> Great stuff, Senior Vice President, Senior Executive at VMWare, breaking down the relationship with Amazon, it's like the Golden State Warriors getting Kevin Duran, they run the table, if they had Lebron, that'd be like, best analogy. We'll be back with more live coverage here at theCube cover of AWS Reinvented after this short break. 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