(bright upbeat music) >> Well, hello everybody. John Walls is here on "the CUBE". Great to have you with us as we continue our series here at the AWS Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And today we're talking about public service and not just a little slice of public service but probably the largest public sector offering in the UK and for with us or with us. Now to talk about that is Lianne Anderton, who is in with the Intelligent Automation Garage Delivery Lead at the UK Department of Work and Pension. Lianne, good to see you today. Thanks for joining us here on "the CUBE". >> Hi, thanks for having me. >> And also with this us is Amar Narayan, who is a Manager Director at Accenture the AWS Business Group for the Lead in Health and Public Sector, also UK and Ireland. And Amar, I think, you and Lianne, are in the same location, Newcastle, I believe in the UK, is that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. Yep, yeah, we're, here in the northeast of UK. >> Well, thank you for being with us. I appreciate the time. Lianne, let's talk about what you do, the Department of Work and Pension, the famous DWP in England. You have influence or certainly touchpoints with a huge amount of the British population. In what respects, what are you doing for the working class in England and what does technology have to do with all that? >> Sure, so for the Department for Work and Pensions I think the pensions bit is fairly self explanatory so anybody who is over state pension age within the UK. for the work part of that we also deal with people of working age. So, these are people who are either in employment and need additional help through various benefits we offer in the UK. Those people who are out of work. And we also deal with health related benefits as well. And we are currently serving over 20 million claimants every year at this moment in time. So, we're aware of a huge part of the UK government. >> All right, so say that number again. How many? >> 20 million claimants every year. >> Million with an M, right? >> Yeah. >> So, and that's individuals. And so how many transactions, if you will, how many do you think you process in a month? How, much traffic basically, are you seeing? >> An extraordinary amount? I'm not even, I don't think I even know that number. (Lianne laughing) >> Mind blowing, right? So, it's- >> A huge, huge amount. >> Mind blowing. >> Yeah, so, basically the we kind of keep the country going. So, you know, if the department for Work and Pensions kind of didn't exist anymore then actually it would cause an infinite number of problems in society. We, kind of help and support the people who need that. And, yeah, so we play a really vital role in kind of you know, social care and kind of public service. >> So, what was your journey to Accenture then? What, eventually led you to them? What problem were you having and how have you collaborated to solve that? >> So, in terms of how we work with Accenture. So, we had in around 2017 DWP was looking at a projected number of transactions growing by about 210 million which was, you know, an extraordinary amount. And, you know, I think as we've kind of covered everything that we do is on a massive scale. So, we as DWP as an organization we had absolutely no idea how we were going to be able to handle such a massive increase in the transactions. And actually, you know, after kind of various kind of paths and ideas of how we were going to do that, automation, was actually the answer. But the problem that we have with that is that we have, like many governments around the world, we have really older legacy systems. So, each of these benefits that we deal with are on legacy systems. So, whatever we were going to develop had to, you know, connect to all of these, it had to ingest and then process all of these pieces of data some of which, you know, given the fact that a lot of these systems have a lot of manual input you have data issues there that you have to solve and whatever we did, you know, as we've talked about in terms of volumes has to scale instantly as well. So, it has to be able to scale up and down to meet demand and, you know, and that down scaling is also equally as important. So yeah, you've got to be able to scale up to meet the volumes but also you've got to be able to downscale when when it's not needed. But we had nothing that was like that kind of helped us to meet that demand. So, we built our own automation platform, The Intelligent Automation Garage and we did that with Accenture. >> So Amar, I'd like you to chime in here then. So, you're looking at this client who has this massive footprint and obviously vital services, right? So, that's paramount that you have to keep that in mind and the legacy systems that Lianne was just talking about. So, now you're trying to get 'em in the next gen but also respecting that they have a serious investment already in a lot of technology. How do you approach that kind of problem solving, those dynamics and how in this case did you get them to automation as the solution? >> Sure, so I think I think one of the interesting things, yeah as Lianne has sort of described it, right? It's effectively like, you know the department has to have be running all of the time, right? They can't, you know, they can't effectively stop and then do a bunch of IT transformation, you know it's effectively like, you know, changing the wheels of a jumbo jet whilst it's taking off, right? And you've got to do all of that all in one go. But what I think we really, really liked about the situation that we were in and the client relationship we had was that we knew we had to it wasn't just a technology play, we couldn't just go, "All right, let's just put some new technology in." What we also needed to do was really sort of create a culture, an innovation culture, and go, "Well how do we think about the problems that we currently have and how do we think about solving them differently and in collaboration, right?" So, not just the, "Let's just outsource a bunch of technology for to, you know, to Accenture and build a bunch of stuff." So, we very carefully thought about, well actually, the unique situation that they're in the demands that the citizens have on the services that the department provide. And as Lianne mentioned, that technology didn't exist. So, we fundamentally looked at this in a different way. So, we worked really closely with the department. We said, Look, actually what we ultimately need is the equivalent of a virtual workforce. Something where if you already, you know all of a sudden had a hundred thousand pension claims that needed to be processed in a week that you could click your fingers and, you know in a physical world you'd have another building all of your kits, a whole bunch of trained staff that would be able to process that work. And if in the following week you didn't need that you no longer needed that building that stuff or the machinery. And we wanted to replicate that in the virtual world. So, we started designing a platform we utilized and focused on using AWS because it had the scalability. And we thought about, how were we going to connect something as new as AWS to all of these legacy systems. How are we going to make that work in the modern world? How are we going to integrate it? How we going to make sure it's secure? And frankly, we're really honest with the client we said, "Look, this hasn't been done before. Like, nowhere in Accenture has done it. No one's done it in the industry. We've got some smart people, I think we can do it." And, we've prototyped and we've built and we were able to prove that we can do that. And that in itself just created an environment of solving tricky problems and being innovative but most importantly not doing sort of proof of concepts that didn't go anywhere but building something that actually scaled. And I think that was really the real the start of what was has been the Garage. >> So, And Lianne, you mentioned this and you just referred to it Amar, about The Garage, right? The Intelligent Automation Garage. What exactly is it? I mean, we talked about it, what the needs are all this and that, but Lianne, I'll let you jump in first and Amar, certainly compliment her remarks, but what is the IAG, what's the... >> So, you know, I think exactly what kind of Amar, has said from a from a kind of a development point of view I think it started off, you know, really, really small. And the idea is that this is DWP, intelligent automation center of excellence. So, you know, it's aims are that, you know, it makes sure that it scopes out kind of the problems that DWP are are facing properly. So, we really understand what the crux of the problem is. In large organizations It's very easy, I think to think you understand what the problem is where actually, you know, it is really about kind of delving into what that is. And actually we have a dedicated design team that really kind of get under the bonnet of what these issues really are. It then kind of architects what the solutions need to look like using as Amar said, all the exciting new technology that we kind of have available to us. That kind of sensible solution as to what that should look like. We then build that sensible solution and we then, you know as part of that, we make sure that it scales to demand. So, something that might start out with, I dunno, you know a few hundred claimants or kind of cases going through it can quite often, you know, once that's that's been successful scale really, really quickly because as you know, we have 20 million claimants that come through us every year. So, these types of things can grow and expand but also a really key function of what we do is that we have a fully supported in-house service as well. So, all of those automations that we build are then maintained and you know, so any changes that kind of needed to be need to be made to them, we have all that and we have that control and we have our kind of arms wrapped around all of those. But also what that allows us to do is it allows us to be very kind of self-sufficient in making sure that we are as sufficient, sorry, as efficient as possible. And what I mean by that is looking at, you know as new technologies come around and they can allow us to do things more effectively. So, it allows us to kind of almost do that that kind of continuous improvement ourselves. So, that's a huge part of what we do as well. And you know, I think from a size point of view I said this started off really small as in the idea was this was a kind of center of excellence but actually as automation, I think as Amar alluded to is kind of really started to embed in DWP culture what we've started to kind of see is the a massive expansion in the types of of work that people want us to do and the volume of work that we are doing. So, I think we're currently running at around around a hundred people at the moment and I think, you know we started off with a scrum, a couple of scrum teams under Amar, so yeah, it's really grown. But you know, I think this is here to stay within DWP. >> Yeah, well when we talk about automation, you know virtual and robotics and all this I like to kind of keep the human element in mind here too. And Amar, maybe you can touch on that in certain terms of the human factors in this equation. 'Cause people think about, you know, robots it means different things to different people. In your mind, how does automation intersect with the human element here and in terms of the kinds of things Lianne wants to do down the road, you know, is a road for people basically? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. I think fundamentally what the department does is support people and therefore the solutions that we designed and built had to factor that in mind right? We were trying to best support and provide the best service we possibly can. And not only do we need to support the citizens that it supports. The department itself is a big organization, right? We're up to, we're talking between sort of 70 and 80,000 employees. So, how do we embed automation but also make the lives of the, of the DWP agents better as well? And that's what we thought about. So we said, "Well look, we think we can design solutions that do both." So, a lot of our automations go through a design process and we work closely with our operations team and we go, well actually, you know in processing and benefit, there are some aspects of that processing that benefit that are copy and paste, right? It doesn't require much thought around it, but it just requires capturing data and there's elements of that solution or that process that requires actual thought and understanding and really empathy around going, "Well how do I best support this citizen?" And what we tended to do is we took all of the things that were sort of laborious and took a lot of time and would slow down the overall process and we automated those and then we really focused on making sure that the elements that required the human, the human input was made as user friendly and centric as we possibly could. So, if there's a really complex case that needs to be processed, we were able to present the information in a really digestible and understandable way for the agents so that they could make a informed and sensible decision based around a citizen. And what that enabled us to do is essentially meet the demands of the volumes and the peaks that came in but also maintain the quality and if not improve, you know the accuracy of the claims processing that we had. >> So, how do you know, and maybe Lianne, you can address this. How do you know that it's successful on both sides of that equation? And, 'cause Amar raised a very good point. You have 70 to 80,000 employees that you're trying to make their work life much more efficient, much simpler and hopefully make them better at their jobs at the end of the day. But you're also taking care of 20 million clients on the, your side too. So, how do you, what's your measurement for success and what kind of like raw feedback do you get that says, "Okay, this has worked for both of our client bases, both our citizens and our employees?" >> Yeah, so we can look at this both from a a quantitative and a qualitative point of view as well. So, I think from a let take the kind figures first. So we are really hot on making sure that whatever automations we put in place we are there to measure how that automation is working what it's kind of doing and the impact that it's having from an operational point of view. So I think, you know, I think the proof of the fact that the Intelligent Automation Garage is working is that, you know, in the, in its lifetime, we've processed over 20 million items and cases so far. We have 65 scaled and transitioned automations and we've saved over 2 million operational hours. I was going to say that again that's 2 million operational hours. And what that allows us to do as an organization those 2 million hours have allowed us to rather than people as Amar, said, cutting and pasting and doing work that that is essentially very time consuming and repetitive. That 2 million hours we've been able to use on actual decision making. So, the stuff that you need as sentient human being to make judgment calls on and you know and kind of make those decisions that's what it's allowed us as an organization to do. And then I think from a quality point of view I think the feedback that we have from our operational teams is, you know is equally as as great. So, we have that kind of feedback from, you know all the way up from to the director level about, you know how it's kind of like I said that freeing up that time but actually making the operational, you know they don't have an easy job and it's making that an awful lot easier on a day to day basis. It has a real day to day impact. But also, you know, there are other things that kind of the knock on effects in terms of accuracy. So for example, robot will do is exactly as it's told it doesn't make any mistakes, it doesn't have sick days, you know, it does what it says on the tin and actually that kind of impact. So, it's not necessarily, you know, counting your numbers it's the fact that then doesn't generate a call from a customer that kind of says, "Well you, I think you've got this wrong." So, it's all that kind of, these kind of ripple effects that go out. I think is how we measure the fact that A, the garage is working and b, it's delivering the value that we needed to deliver. >> Robots, probably ask better questions too so yeah... (Lianne laughing) So, real quick, just real quick before you head out. So, the big challenge next, eureka, this works, right? Amar, you put together this fantastic system it's in great practice at the DWP, now what do we do? So, it's just in 30 seconds, Amar, maybe if you can look at, be the headlights down the road here for DWP and say, "This is where I think we can jump to next." >> Yeah, so I think, what we've been able to prove as I say is that is scaled innovation and having the return and the value that it creates is here to stay, right? So, I think the next things for us are a continuous expand the stuff that we're doing. Keeping hold of that culture, right? That culture of constantly solving difficult problems and being able to innovate and scale them. So, we are now doing a lot more automations across the department, you know, across different benefits across the digital agenda. I think we're also now becoming almost a bit of the fabric of enabling some of the digital transformation that big organizations look at, right? So moving to a world where you can have a venture driven architectures and being able to sort of scale that. I also think the natural sort of expansion of the team and the type of work that we're going to do is probably also going to expand into sort of the analytics side of it and understanding and seeing how we can take the data from the cases that we're processing to overall have a smoother journey across for our citizens. But it's looking, you know, the future's looking bright. I think we've got a number of different backlogs of items to work on. >> Well, you've got a great story to tell and thank you for sharing it with us here on "the CUBE", talking about DWP, the Department of Work and Pensions in the UK and the great work that Accenture's doing to make 20 million lives plus, a lot simpler for our friends in England. You've been watching ""the CUBE"" the AWS Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. (bright upbeat music)

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

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

(upbeat music) >> For years on the queue, we've talked about the benefits of the cloud going beyond IT cost savings. Sure. You can move your workloads into the cloud and minimize the so-called undifferentiated heavy lifting of IT equipment and deployment and management. And of course increased agility is often the number one benefit customers site from the cloud. But increasingly, the value of the cloud is being seen as applying that agility to change an organization's operating model. This drives business value that can be orders of magnitude greater than savings on tech labor costs. And one of the more interesting examples we found, is using the cloud, data and software technology to find, and flexibly source distributed energy resources so that clean energy, can be delivered efficiently. Hello, and welcome to the startup showcase on the cube brought to you by AWS. We're very excited to have two exacts on from AutoGrid. Wait until you hear about the innovations that they're driving and the problems that they're solving around, some of the world's most pressing problems. Amit Narayan is here. He's the CEO of auto-graded Rajeev Singh is the chief technology officer gentlemen, welcome to the program. >> Thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> You're very welcome. >> Okay, so heard my summary Amit. Maybe you could add some color about AutoGrid. What's your story? >> Yeah, I mean, undoubtedly climate change is one of the defining challenges of our time, and we're already seeing extreme weather events whether these are wildfires in California, are extreme cold events in Texas, last two weeks. As we tackle the climate change through renewables, this whole volatility challenge that we are seeing is only going to become even more pressing. So we at AutoGrid provide software that creates, a virtualization layer, just like you doing in the cloud world, with hardware around all kinds of energy assets, whether these are your EVs in the homes, our batteries are distributed solar panels. And then we apply intelligence from software, to coordinate and orchestrate all of these assets. So you can think of us as a autopilot for the grid, and our technology is called virtual power plants. Which allows us to harness, the power from all these distributed energy resources. >> Yeah. I was going to say you're essentially creating, a virtual power plant. That's amazing of aggregating these distributed resources. I mean, it sounds very logical but it also sounds non-trivial, its a transformative idea. What exactly is a virtual power plant? I mean, how does that all work? >> Yeah. Well, I mean, if you think about how the grid was designed by Edison and Tesla, they really never envisioned a world where you will have a two way flow of power, not just from generator to the consumers, but potentially from the consumers back to the generators. And certainly they didn't really design the grid to incorporate this amount of renewables, which can be intermittent and volatile. So as we are now transitioning to this new energy world, we have to rethink the entire grid architecture, and reinvent how this control system works. But fortunately for us, unlike Edison and Tesla we have some really powerful tools at our disposal namely the internet and the cloud, and these tools do allow us to rethink how we connect all these different assets and we optimize them. And in a way, we are now rebuilding the grid outside in where if you have a battery in your home, not only can it power your own home when power is out, it can actually provide power back to the grid or to your neighbors. And so with this onslaught of DES, we think that we are living in the most exciting times, since Edison and Tesla in terms of how we are going to transition to a sustainable grid. And we think that our software, can play a foundational role in accelerating that transition. >> Lets stick here the bi-directional flow. It's so simple, but genius. Rajeev, maybe you could talk about the tech behind AutoGrid. I mean the secret sauce, lies I think in that whole flexibility management system but there's data involved, probably a fair amount of computer science. Maybe you could explain it more detail. >> Yeah. just as Amit mentioned now, when we started AutoGrid, we had the luxury of, cloud computing a massive scale, at that massive scale and AutoGrid, what we've been able to do is pull together a cloud native computing. They lost the city, the scale, with cutting edge AI and machine learning, as well as all of the dispatch, and command and control technologies, that are all in one platform. And all of them have to come together, to be able to manage and orchestrate, these a massively distributed energy resources. I mean, these could be small, you know batteries or solar panels, et cetera. So gone are the days of large generators that could be managed with smaller compute now because the sheer number of DER's, you need a new paradigm to be able to manage this. And this is really what is under the hood, that constitutes our virtual power plant. >> Rajeev Can you talk a little bit more about your scale model? I mean, how are you able to do this effectively without imploding, or hitting walls? >> Yeah, so obviously, we've been on AWS for about ten years now. And even prior to that, we had the previous company loaded with AWS. So that kind of gave us a glimpse off the sheer scale of compute, that is available to us on tap, if required. So that was quite comforting, because when we did back one of the calculations on the amount of data, that's coming in through IOT industrial IOT from all the distributed energy resources, the amount of processing required for real-time computing as well as, the sheer variety of the other, we have to tackle in in various geographies around the world. AWS made it happen just because having regions, across the globe, we done in, I believe six or seven different AWS regions. We cover a four continents, twelve plus countries. So just because cloud computing was there, we were able to ramp up the solution, very quickly. Now, one thing we are a big believers in is that you only learn by doing, and the only way to learn, is to run production systems. And when we started, of course we didn't do everything right. But we quickly learned we adapted, we scaled, and we kept on scaling. And this is where we are right now. >> Interesting. That's like Andy Jassy says there's no compression algorithm for experience. We know it well. One more for Rajeev, and I want to come back. With AutoGrid tapping, all these energy sources, you got a pretty major threat surface. How are you dealing with security? >> Yeah, we don't talk a lot about our security posture for obvious reasons. Some of the underlying principles are in reducing the blast radius. It should be quite familiar to people who work in security. The use of wide variety of best of the breed security tools, including, and or the past few years. In fact, past five, six years, AWS itself has rolled out a number of security managed services, which are included. But on top of that views, other solutions as well. And it's all designed in layers, with proper segregation, and we have variety of security certifications. One of the most, the one that we're proud of is we are one of the few if not the only NERC solution SAS solution in this domain on AWS. And it's just a culmination of using security by layers. And reducing the blast radius. >> Yeah. Makes sense. And let's turn to some customer use cases. What are some of the main problems, that your customers come to you to solve? How are you approaching them? Maybe you could address that and add some color. >> Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as Rajeev mentioned. There is a lot of deep tech in the platform, and the optimization complexity, grows exponentially with the number of assets. And as you go from a gigawatt scale power plant and you want to get the same power from Tesla power walls. let's say, for every generator you're replacing it with more than two hundred thousand mini generators. And if the complexity grows exponentially. it's far beyond what the current algorithms can handle. So a lot of customers come to us solve their technical challenges. But even beyond that, the whole complexity of transacting, with small generators is very high, and that our business model issues that we help our customers solve. So the whole energy industry, has been designed to have transactions, between very large generators and utilities, but very few of these transactions. And now when you are talking about DER's, you're having millions of transactions with very small entities and maybe even homeowners, back to the utilities. So neither the utilities, have the capability today, to have these transactions, nor the asset owners, and operators, have the capability to go back and have the transactions of the utilities. So we sort of act as an intermediary, and we provide a one-stop shop, for fleet owners and operators. And we say that if you work with us, we will help you monetize your assets, and get more value from these assets, by interfacing with utilities by interfacing with energy markets which can get very complex. >> I love this. I mean, everybody's winning here. Rajeev. I want to come back to the to the cloud a little bit. You talked about, you've been able to AWS for ten years and then even before that, you've got deep experience. I mean. I can't imagine, how you would do this without the cloud. I mean, maybe it could be a really heavy complicated list lift. I mean, you've seen the AWS cloud evolve over time. It's gone way beyond, of course, compute and storage brought in a lot of machine learning capabilities on and on. And I mean, how are you leveraging that evolution? Those zillion features that AWS puts out every year at reinvent. I mean, maybe you could talk about that a little bit. >> Yeah. So of course, when we started, we used it as an infrastructure provider, you know provided us compute networking, security firewalls, et cetera, just on tap. There's very good. Got us started. Then we started leveraging a lot more managed services, that AWS offered, that allowed us to run. For example, variety of databases right to data stores, in a managed fashion, with a very small startup. You're always, running lean. So that helped us with a small team, of system engineers and engineers, back from engineers to be able to put together and run these systems around the globe, just because enablers was responsible, for managing the services. We always keep an eye on. And one thing we love about AWS is the amount of innovation, that they quickly put into production. So, we're always keeping an eye on, what's coming out. And over the years, it has been quite nice to us in some ways, we directly talk to the solution architects, they tell us what's coming, what should be used, what we should not use in what's in production ready What's not. So that level of kind of deep engagement, really helps us. Kind of keep abreast of the innovations that are constantly being rolled out on AWS. And we keep kind of incorporating those into our platform and making it more and more capable. The one thing I also would like to say, is that to be able to aggregate capacity, from all these DER's, it has to be done in a cost effective fashion. So, this is where AWS helps us with running, last a city at the service level. All the microservices can scale independently. So we don't have to have this massive monolith, and across the globe, we don't need to have, fifty of those to be running. And that's going to add up to a massive cost. So we are able to scale, just the portions of the infrastructure just in time when we need it. And that also helps us greatly, in having a cost effective solution, for our customers. >> That's actually great. That's great. So that granularity is important, for you to have fine grain control of your costs. A lot of people sometimes question that granularity that AWS provides, because it does add a level of complexity, but you guys can deal with complexity. You know, one of the things that we haven't talked about I wonder if we could touch, on it is data. I mean, this is the data flow. I'm imagining the data flow, and the metadata and the decisions that you have to make are are quite complex. Can you address that a little bit? I mean, you guys got to be pretty, sharp data walks. >> Yeah. So the people that we have at the company, including myself have come from a billing lodge, high performance and high large enterprise systems, previously from airlines, Ford motor company or pharmaceuticals. In any system, where we are making a lot of decisions. The first thing you have to do is data integration. And again this is something that you just learn by doing and having done it across the globe with a variety of the DER, systems UVS, you name it. We have to pretty much done one of everything, and of course, and be very quickly abstract and learn, if you do something twice, we abstract it and make it into a library. So that the next time around it's just a simple turn-on switch. So it's no secret sauce there you just learn by doing and you kind of constantly abstract and you expand the solution. >> That's great. let's close. The other thing. We really haven't talked much about your company. Maybe you could, add some. whatever you want to to share, metrics. I mean you must be growing, head count, or whatever you're comfortable sharing. If you could just give us, a little glimpse of of the company. >> Yeah, absolutely. We have been around for close to ten years now. We are based in Silicon Valley. We have multiple locations. Our second primary location is in India. Today We are operating in over twelve countries. We have close to five thousand megawatts of distributed energy acids, that we actively control manage. This includes, everything from a thermostat in the home, to very large scale, wind and solar farms, as well as large scale batteries. EVs as a new emerging category. And, we work with a variety of partners. AWS has been one of our founding partners, on day one, you talked about data. We were the first ones to realize how much data we were going to get from all of these assets. And the current systems will not scale. So we made the decision on day one to be on cloud. And that was foundational year. I just want to say that over the last year or so, we have I think collectively as a society realized how individual actions, impact the overall society. And I think we are really at a great inflection point right now, where if we can harness this newly developed consciousness and awareness to accelerate, our transition to new energy, away from fossil fuel, we can really solve what I think is the biggest challenge that we face as a society going forward. >> Yeah. Micro actions that actually have a huge impact. And so I guess, that's kind of of where you see this heading in the future both the general market, your business. I mean presumably, you've been around a while, maybe you'd welcome competition to really solve this problem. Right? >> I think we are in the same fight. We are all working towards the same goal, of having a clean cheap reliable energy. And we would welcome as much support as we get to build momentum for this absolutely >> Its like the Pharma companies cheering each other on for the, for the vaccine. Again, guys super interesting business solving real problems really thanks gentlemen for coming on the program and we wish you well in the years ahead. >> Thank you for having us. >> It's really been our pleasure. Thank you for watching the AWS startup showcase on the cube. I'm Dave Volante.

(bright upbeat music) >> Well, hello everybody. John Walls is here on "the CUBE". Great to have you with us as we continue our series here at the AWS Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. And today we're talking about public service and not just a little slice of public service but probably the largest public sector offering in the UK and for with us or with us. Now to talk about that is Lianne Anderton, who is in with the Intelligent Automation Garage Delivery Lead at the UK Department of Work and Pension. Lianne, good to see you today. Thanks for joining us here on "the CUBE". >> Hi, thanks for having me. >> And also with this us is Amar Narayan, who is a Manager Director at Accenture the AWS Business Group for the Lead in Health and Public Sector, also UK and Ireland. And Amar, I think, you and Lianne, are in the same location, Newcastle, I believe in the UK, is that right? >> Yeah, absolutely. Yep, yeah, we're, here in the northeast of UK. >> Well, thank you for being with us. I appreciate the time. Lianne, let's talk about what you do, the Department of Work and Pension, the famous DWP in England. You have influence or certainly touchpoints with a huge amount of the British population. In what respects, what are you doing for the working class in England and what does technology have to do with all that? >> Sure, so for the Department for Work and Pensions I think the pensions bit is fairly self explanatory so anybody who is over state pension age within the UK. for the work part of that we also deal with people of working age. So, these are people who are either in employment and need additional help through various benefits we offer in the UK. Those people who are out of work. And we also deal with health related benefits as well. And we are currently serving over 20 million claimants every year at this moment in time. So, we're aware of a huge part of the UK government. >> All right, so say that number again. How many? >> 20 million claimants every year. >> Million with an M, right? >> Yeah. >> So, and that's individuals. And so how many transactions, if you will, how many do you think you process in a month? How, much traffic basically, are you seeing? >> An extraordinary amount? I'm not even, I don't think I even know that number. (Lianne laughing) >> Mind blowing, right? So, it's- >> A huge, huge amount. >> Mind blowing. >> Yeah, so, basically the we kind of keep the country going. So, you know, if the department for Work and Pensions kind of didn't exist anymore then actually it would cause an infinite number of problems in society. We, kind of help and support the people who need that. And, yeah, so we play a really vital role in kind of you know, social care and kind of public service. >> So, what was your journey to Accenture then? What, eventually led you to them? What problem were you having and how have you collaborated to solve that? >> So, in terms of how we work with Accenture. So, we had in around 2017 DWP was looking at a projected number of transactions growing by about 210 million which was, you know, an extraordinary amount. And, you know, I think as we've kind of covered everything that we do is on a massive scale. So, we as DWP as an organization we had absolutely no idea how we were going to be able to handle such a massive increase in the transactions. And actually, you know, after kind of various kind of paths and ideas of how we were going to do that, automation, was actually the answer. But the problem that we have with that is that we have, like many governments around the world, we have really older legacy systems. So, each of these benefits that we deal with are on legacy systems. So, whatever we were going to develop had to, you know, connect to all of these, it had to ingest and then process all of these pieces of data some of which, you know, given the fact that a lot of these systems have a lot of manual input you have data issues there that you have to solve and whatever we did, you know, as we've talked about in terms of volumes has to scale instantly as well. So, it has to be able to scale up and down to meet demand and, you know, and that down scaling is also equally as important. So yeah, you've got to be able to scale up to meet the volumes but also you've got to be able to downscale when when it's not needed. But we had nothing that was like that kind of helped us to meet that demand. So, we built our own automation platform, The Intelligent Automation Garage and we did that with Accenture. >> So Amar, I'd like you to chime in here then. So, you're looking at this client who has this massive footprint and obviously vital services, right? So, that's paramount that you have to keep that in mind and the legacy systems that Lianne was just talking about. So, now you're trying to get 'em in the next gen but also respecting that they have a serious investment already in a lot of technology. How do you approach that kind of problem solving, those dynamics and how in this case did you get them to automation as the solution? >> Sure, so I think I think one of the interesting things, yeah as Lianne has sort of described it, right? It's effectively like, you know the department has to have be running all of the time, right? They can't, you know, they can't effectively stop and then do a bunch of IT transformation, you know it's effectively like, you know, changing the wheels of a jumbo jet whilst it's taking off, right? And you've got to do all of that all in one go. But what I think we really, really liked about the situation that we were in and the client relationship we had was that we knew we had to it wasn't just a technology play, we couldn't just go, "All right, let's just put some new technology in." What we also needed to do was really sort of create a culture, an innovation culture, and go, "Well how do we think about the problems that we currently have and how do we think about solving them differently and in collaboration, right?" So, not just the, "Let's just outsource a bunch of technology for to, you know, to Accenture and build a bunch of stuff." So, we very carefully thought about, well actually, the unique situation that they're in the demands that the citizens have on the services that the department provide. And as Lianne mentioned, that technology didn't exist. So, we fundamentally looked at this in a different way. So, we worked really closely with the department. We said, Look, actually what we ultimately need is the equivalent of a virtual workforce. Something where if you already, you know all of a sudden had a hundred thousand pension claims that needed to be processed in a week that you could click your fingers and, you know in a physical world you'd have another building all of your kits, a whole bunch of trained staff that would be able to process that work. And if in the following week you didn't need that you no longer needed that building that stuff or the machinery. And we wanted to replicate that in the virtual world. So, we started designing a platform we utilized and focused on using AWS because it had the scalability. And we thought about, how were we going to connect something as new as AWS to all of these legacy systems. How are we going to make that work in the modern world? How are we going to integrate it? How we going to make sure it's secure? And frankly, we're really honest with the client we said, "Look, this hasn't been done before. Like, nowhere in Accenture has done it. No one's done it in the industry. We've got some smart people, I think we can do it." And, we've prototyped and we've built and we were able to prove that we can do that. And that in itself just created an environment of solving tricky problems and being innovative but most importantly not doing sort of proof of concepts that didn't go anywhere but building something that actually scaled. And I think that was really the real the start of what was has been the Garage. >> So, And Lianne, you mentioned this and you just referred to it Amar, about The Garage, right? The Intelligent Automation Garage. What exactly is it? I mean, we talked about it, what the needs are all this and that, but Lianne, I'll let you jump in first and Amar, certainly compliment her remarks, but what is the IAG, what's the... >> So, you know, I think exactly what kind of Amar, has said from a from a kind of a development point of view I think it started off, you know, really, really small. And the idea is that this is DWP, intelligent automation center of excellence. So, you know, it's aims are that, you know, it makes sure that it scopes out kind of the problems that DWP are are facing properly. So, we really understand what the crux of the problem is. In large organizations It's very easy, I think to think you understand what the problem is where actually, you know, it is really about kind of delving into what that is. And actually we have a dedicated design team that really kind of get under the bonnet of what these issues really are. It then kind of architects what the solutions need to look like using as Amar said, all the exciting new technology that we kind of have available to us. That kind of sensible solution as to what that should look like. We then build that sensible solution and we then, you know as part of that, we make sure that it scales to demand. So, something that might start out with, I dunno, you know a few hundred claimants or kind of cases going through it can quite often, you know, once that's that's been successful scale really, really quickly because as you know, we have 20 million claimants that come through us every year. So, these types of things can grow and expand but also a really key function of what we do is that we have a fully supported in-house service as well. So, all of those automations that we build are then maintained and you know, so any changes that kind of needed to be need to be made to them, we have all that and we have that control and we have our kind of arms wrapped around all of those. But also what that allows us to do is it allows us to be very kind of self-sufficient in making sure that we are as sufficient, sorry, as efficient as possible. And what I mean by that is looking at, you know as new technologies come around and they can allow us to do things more effectively. So, it allows us to kind of almost do that that kind of continuous improvement ourselves. So, that's a huge part of what we do as well. And you know, I think from a size point of view I said this started off really small as in the idea was this was a kind of center of excellence but actually as automation, I think as Amar alluded to is kind of really started to embed in DWP culture what we've started to kind of see is the a massive expansion in the types of of work that people want us to do and the volume of work that we are doing. So, I think we're currently running at around around a hundred people at the moment and I think, you know we started off with a scrum, a couple of scrum teams under Amar, so yeah, it's really grown. But you know, I think this is here to stay within DWP. >> Yeah, well when we talk about automation, you know virtual and robotics and all this I like to kind of keep the human element in mind here too. And Amar, maybe you can touch on that in certain terms of the human factors in this equation. 'Cause people think about, you know, robots it means different things to different people. In your mind, how does automation intersect with the human element here and in terms of the kinds of things Lianne wants to do down the road, you know, is a road for people basically? >> Oh yeah, absolutely. I think fundamentally what the department does is support people and therefore the solutions that we designed and built had to factor that in mind right? We were trying to best support and provide the best service we possibly can. And not only do we need to support the citizens that it supports. The department itself is a big organization, right? We're up to, we're talking between sort of 70 and 80,000 employees. So, how do we embed automation but also make the lives of the, of the DWP agents better as well? And that's what we thought about. So we said, "Well look, we think we can design solutions that do both." So, a lot of our automations go through a design process and we work closely with our operations team and we go, well actually, you know in processing and benefit, there are some aspects of that processing that benefit that are copy and paste, right? It doesn't require much thought around it, but it just requires capturing data and there's elements of that solution or that process that requires actual thought and understanding and really empathy around going, "Well how do I best support this citizen?" And what we tended to do is we took all of the things that were sort of laborious and took a lot of time and would slow down the overall process and we automated those and then we really focused on making sure that the elements that required the human, the human input was made as user friendly and centric as we possibly could. So, if there's a really complex case that needs to be processed, we were able to present the information in a really digestible and understandable way for the agents so that they could make a informed and sensible decision based around a citizen. And what that enabled us to do is essentially meet the demands of the volumes and the peaks that came in but also maintain the quality and if not improve, you know the accuracy of the claims processing that we had. >> So, how do you know, and maybe Lianne, you can address this. How do you know that it's successful on both sides of that equation? And, 'cause Amar raised a very good point. You have 70 to 80,000 employees that you're trying to make their work life much more efficient, much simpler and hopefully make them better at their jobs at the end of the day. But you're also taking care of 20 million clients on the, your side too. So, how do you, what's your measurement for success and what kind of like raw feedback do you get that says, "Okay, this has worked for both of our client bases, both our citizens and our employees?" >> Yeah, so we can look at this both from a a quantitative and a qualitative point of view as well. So, I think from a let take the kind figures first. So we are really hot on making sure that whatever automations we put in place we are there to measure how that automation is working what it's kind of doing and the impact that it's having from an operational point of view. So I think, you know, I think the proof of the fact that the Intelligent Automation Garage is working is that, you know, in the, in its lifetime, we've processed over 20 million items and cases so far. We have 65 scaled and transitioned automations and we've saved over 2 million operational hours. I was going to say that again that's 2 million operational hours. And what that allows us to do as an organization those 2 million hours have allowed us to rather than people as Amar, said, cutting and pasting and doing work that that is essentially very time consuming and repetitive. That 2 million hours we've been able to use on actual decision making. So, the stuff that you need as sentient human being to make judgment calls on and you know and kind of make those decisions that's what it's allowed us as an organization to do. And then I think from a quality point of view I think the feedback that we have from our operational teams is, you know is equally as as great. So, we have that kind of feedback from, you know all the way up from to the director level about, you know how it's kind of like I said that freeing up that time but actually making the operational, you know they don't have an easy job and it's making that an awful lot easier on a day to day basis. It has a real day to day impact. But also, you know, there are other things that kind of the knock on effects in terms of accuracy. So for example, robot will do is exactly as it's told it doesn't make any mistakes, it doesn't have sick days, you know, it does what it says on the tin and actually that kind of impact. So, it's not necessarily, you know, counting your numbers it's the fact that then doesn't generate a call from a customer that kind of says, "Well you, I think you've got this wrong." So, it's all that kind of, these kind of ripple effects that go out. I think is how we measure the fact that A, the garage is working and b, it's delivering the value that we needed to deliver. >> Robots, probably ask better questions too so yeah... (Lianne laughing) So, real quick, just real quick before you head out. So, the big challenge next, eureka, this works, right? Amar, you put together this fantastic system it's in great practice at the DWP, now what do we do? So, it's just in 30 seconds, Amar, maybe if you can look at, be the headlights down the road here for DWP and say, "This is where I think we can jump to next." >> Yeah, so I think, what we've been able to prove as I say is that is scaled innovation and having the return and the value that it creates is here to stay, right? So, I think the next things for us are a continuous expand the stuff that we're doing. Keeping hold of that culture, right? That culture of constantly solving difficult problems and being able to innovate and scale them. So, we are now doing a lot more automations across the department, you know, across different benefits across the digital agenda. I think we're also now becoming almost a bit of the fabric of enabling some of the digital transformation that big organizations look at, right? So moving to a world where you can have a venture driven architectures and being able to sort of scale that. I also think the natural sort of expansion of the team and the type of work that we're going to do is probably also going to expand into sort of the analytics side of it and understanding and seeing how we can take the data from the cases that we're processing to overall have a smoother journey across for our citizens. But it's looking, you know, the future's looking bright. I think we've got a number of different backlogs of items to work on. >> Well, you've got a great story to tell and thank you for sharing it with us here on "the CUBE", talking about DWP, the Department of Work and Pensions in the UK and the great work that Accenture's doing to make 20 million lives plus, a lot simpler for our friends in England. You've been watching ""the CUBE"" the AWS Executive Summit sponsored by Accenture. (bright upbeat music)

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