(light airy music) >> Hello, everyone, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase, AI and machine learning. "Top Startups Building Generative AI on AWS." This is season three, episode one of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem, talking about AI machine learning. We have three great guests Bratin Saha, VP, Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Services at Amazon Web Services. Tom Mason, the CTO of Stability AI, and Aidan Gomez, CEO and co-founder of Cohere. Two practitioners doing startups and AWS. Gentlemen, thank you for opening up this session, this episode. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> Thank you. >> So the topic is hype versus reality. So I think we're all on the reality is great, hype is great, but the reality's here. I want to get into it. Generative AI's got all the momentum, it's going mainstream, it's kind of come out of the behind the ropes, it's now mainstream. We saw the success of ChatGPT, opens up everyone's eyes, but there's so much more going on. Let's jump in and get your early perspectives on what should people be talking about right now? What are you guys working on? We'll start with AWS. What's the big focus right now for you guys as you come into this market that's highly active, highly hyped up, but people see value right out of the gate? >> You know, we have been working on generative AI for some time. In fact, last year we released Code Whisperer, which is about using generative AI for software development and a number of customers are using it and getting real value out of it. So generative AI is now something that's mainstream that can be used by enterprise users. And we have also been partnering with a number of other companies. So, you know, stability.ai, we've been partnering with them a lot. We want to be partnering with other companies as well. In seeing how we do three things, you know, first is providing the most efficient infrastructure for generative AI. And that is where, you know, things like Trainium, things like Inferentia, things like SageMaker come in. And then next is the set of models and then the third is the kind of applications like Code Whisperer and so on. So, you know, it's early days yet, but clearly there's a lot of amazing capabilities that will come out and something that, you know, our customers are starting to pay a lot of attention to. >> Tom, talk about your company and what your focus is and why the Amazon Web Services relationship's important for you? >> So yeah, we're primarily committed to making incredible open source foundation models and obviously stable effusions been our kind of first big model there, which we trained all on AWS. We've been working with them over the last year and a half to develop, obviously a big cluster, and bring all that compute to training these models at scale, which has been a really successful partnership. And we're excited to take it further this year as we develop commercial strategy of the business and build out, you know, the ability for enterprise customers to come and get all the value from these models that we think they can get. So we're really excited about the future. We got hugely exciting pipeline for this year with new modalities and video models and wonderful things and trying to solve images for once and for all and get the kind of general value and value proposition correct for customers. So it's a really exciting time and very honored to be part of it. >> It's great to see some of your customers doing so well out there. Congratulations to your team. Appreciate that. Aidan, let's get into what you guys do. What does Cohere do? What are you excited about right now? >> Yeah, so Cohere builds large language models, which are the backbone of applications like ChatGPT and GPT-3. We're extremely focused on solving the issues with adoption for enterprise. So it's great that you can make a super flashy demo for consumers, but it takes a lot to actually get it into billion user products and large global enterprises. So about six months ago, we released our command models, which are some of the best that exist for large language models. And in December, we released our multilingual text understanding models and that's on over a hundred different languages and it's trained on, you know, authentic data directly from native speakers. And so we're super excited to continue pushing this into enterprise and solving those barriers for adoption, making this transformation a reality. >> Just real quick, while I got you there on the new products coming out. Where are we in the progress? People see some of the new stuff out there right now. There's so much more headroom. Can you just scope out in your mind what that looks like? Like from a headroom standpoint? Okay, we see ChatGPT. "Oh yeah, it writes my papers for me, does some homework for me." I mean okay, yawn, maybe people say that, (Aidan chuckles) people excited or people are blown away. I mean, it's helped theCUBE out, it helps me, you know, feed up a little bit from my write-ups but it's not always perfect. >> Yeah, at the moment it's like a writing assistant, right? And it's still super early in the technologies trajectory. I think it's fascinating and it's interesting but its impact is still really limited. I think in the next year, like within the next eight months, we're going to see some major changes. You've already seen the very first hints of that with stuff like Bing Chat, where you augment these dialogue models with an external knowledge base. So now the models can be kept up to date to the millisecond, right? Because they can search the web and they can see events that happened a millisecond ago. But that's still limited in the sense that when you ask the question, what can these models actually do? Well they can just write text back at you. That's the extent of what they can do. And so the real project, the real effort, that I think we're all working towards is actually taking action. So what happens when you give these models the ability to use tools, to use APIs? What can they do when they can actually affect change out in the real world, beyond just streaming text back at the user? I think that's the really exciting piece. >> Okay, so I wanted to tee that up early in the segment 'cause I want to get into the customer applications. We're seeing early adopters come in, using the technology because they have a lot of data, they have a lot of large language model opportunities and then there's a big fast follower wave coming behind it. I call that the people who are going to jump in the pool early and get into it. They might not be advanced. Can you guys share what customer applications are being used with large language and vision models today and how they're using it to transform on the early adopter side, and how is that a tell sign of what's to come? >> You know, one of the things we have been seeing both with the text models that Aidan talked about as well as the vision models that stability.ai does, Tom, is customers are really using it to change the way you interact with information. You know, one example of a customer that we have, is someone who's kind of using that to query customer conversations and ask questions like, you know, "What was the customer issue? How did we solve it?" And trying to get those kinds of insights that was previously much harder to do. And then of course software is a big area. You know, generating software, making that, you know, just deploying it in production. Those have been really big areas that we have seen customers start to do. You know, looking at documentation, like instead of you know, searching for stuff and so on, you know, you just have an interactive way, in which you can just look at the documentation for a product. You know, all of this goes to where we need to take the technology. One of which is, you know, the models have to be there but they have to work reliably in a production setting at scale, with privacy, with security, and you know, making sure all of this is happening, is going to be really key. That is what, you know, we at AWS are looking to do, which is work with partners like stability and others and in the open source and really take all of these and make them available at scale to customers, where they work reliably. >> Tom, Aidan, what's your thoughts on this? Where are customers landing on this first use cases or set of low-hanging fruit use cases or applications? >> Yeah, so I think like the first group of adopters that really found product market fit were the copywriting companies. So one great example of that is HyperWrite. Another one is Jasper. And so for Cohere, that's the tip of the iceberg, like there's a very long tail of usage from a bunch of different applications. HyperWrite is one of our customers, they help beat writer's block by drafting blog posts, emails, and marketing copy. We also have a global audio streaming platform, which is using us the power of search engine that can comb through podcast transcripts, in a bunch of different languages. Then a global apparel brand, which is using us to transform how they interact with their customers through a virtual assistant, two dozen global news outlets who are using us for news summarization. So really like, these large language models, they can be deployed all over the place into every single industry sector, language is everywhere. It's hard to think of any company on Earth that doesn't use language. So it's, very, very- >> We're doing it right now. We got the language coming in. >> Exactly. >> We'll transcribe this puppy. All right. Tom, on your side, what do you see the- >> Yeah, we're seeing some amazing applications of it and you know, I guess that's partly been, because of the growth in the open source community and some of these applications have come from there that are then triggering this secondary wave of innovation, which is coming a lot from, you know, controllability and explainability of the model. But we've got companies like, you know, Jasper, which Aidan mentioned, who are using stable diffusion for image generation in block creation, content creation. We've got Lensa, you know, which exploded, and is built on top of stable diffusion for fine tuning so people can bring themselves and their pets and you know, everything into the models. So we've now got fine tuned stable diffusion at scale, which is democratized, you know, that process, which is really fun to see your Lensa, you know, exploded. You know, I think it was the largest growing app in the App Store at one point. And lots of other examples like NightCafe and Lexica and Playground. So seeing lots of cool applications. >> So much applications, we'll probably be a customer for all you guys. We'll definitely talk after. But the challenges are there for people adopting, they want to get into what you guys see as the challenges that turn into opportunities. How do you see the customers adopting generative AI applications? For example, we have massive amounts of transcripts, timed up to all the videos. I don't even know what to do. Do I just, do I code my API there. So, everyone has this problem, every vertical has these use cases. What are the challenges for people getting into this and adopting these applications? Is it figuring out what to do first? Or is it a technical setup? Do they stand up stuff, they just go to Amazon? What do you guys see as the challenges? >> I think, you know, the first thing is coming up with where you think you're going to reimagine your customer experience by using generative AI. You know, we talked about Ada, and Tom talked about a number of these ones and you know, you pick up one or two of these, to get that robust. And then once you have them, you know, we have models and we'll have more models on AWS, these large language models that Aidan was talking about. Then you go in and start using these models and testing them out and seeing whether they fit in use case or not. In many situations, like you said, John, our customers want to say, "You know, I know you've trained these models on a lot of publicly available data, but I want to be able to customize it for my use cases. Because, you know, there's some knowledge that I have created and I want to be able to use that." And then in many cases, and I think Aidan mentioned this. You know, you need these models to be up to date. Like you can't have it staying. And in those cases, you augmented with a knowledge base, you know you have to make sure that these models are not hallucinating. And so you need to be able to do the right kind of responsible AI checks. So, you know, you start with a particular use case, and there are a lot of them. Then, you know, you can come to AWS, and then look at one of the many models we have and you know, we are going to have more models for other modalities as well. And then, you know, play around with the models. We have a playground kind of thing where you can test these models on some data and then you can probably, you will probably want to bring your own data, customize it to your own needs, do some of the testing to make sure that the model is giving the right output and then just deploy it. And you know, we have a lot of tools. >> Yeah. >> To make this easy for our customers. >> How should people think about large language models? Because do they think about it as something that they tap into with their IP or their data? Or is it a large language model that they apply into their system? Is the interface that way? What's the interaction look like? >> In many situations, you can use these models out of the box. But in typical, in most of the other situations, you will want to customize it with your own data or with your own expectations. So the typical use case would be, you know, these are models are exposed through APIs. So the typical use case would be, you know you're using these APIs a little bit for testing and getting familiar and then there will be an API that will allow you to train this model further on your data. So you use that AI, you know, make sure you augmented the knowledge base. So then you use those APIs to customize the model and then just deploy it in an application. You know, like Tom was mentioning, a number of companies that are using these models. So once you have it, then you know, you again, use an endpoint API and use it in an application. >> All right, I love the example. I want to ask Tom and Aidan, because like most my experience with Amazon Web Service in 2007, I would stand up in EC2, put my code on there, play around, if it didn't work out, I'd shut it down. Is that a similar dynamic we're going to see with the machine learning where developers just kind of log in and stand up infrastructure and play around and then have a cloud-like experience? >> So I can go first. So I mean, we obviously, with AWS working really closely with the SageMaker team, do fantastic platform there for ML training and inference. And you know, going back to your point earlier, you know, where the data is, is hugely important for companies. Many companies bringing their models to their data in AWS on-premise for them is hugely important. Having the models to be, you know, open sources, makes them explainable and transparent to the adopters of those models. So, you know, we are really excited to work with the SageMaker team over the coming year to bring companies to that platform and make the most of our models. >> Aidan, what's your take on developers? Do they just need to have a team in place, if we want to interface with you guys? Let's say, can they start learning? What do they got to do to set up? >> Yeah, so I think for Cohere, our product makes it much, much easier to people, for people to get started and start building, it solves a lot of the productionization problems. But of course with SageMaker, like Tom was saying, I think that lowers a barrier even further because it solves problems like data privacy. So I want to underline what Bratin was saying earlier around when you're fine tuning or when you're using these models, you don't want your data being incorporated into someone else's model. You don't want it being used for training elsewhere. And so the ability to solve for enterprises, that data privacy and that security guarantee has been hugely important for Cohere, and that's very easy to do through SageMaker. >> Yeah. >> But the barriers for using this technology are coming down super quickly. And so for developers, it's just becoming completely intuitive. I love this, there's this quote from Andrej Karpathy. He was saying like, "It really wasn't on my 2022 list of things to happen that English would become, you know, the most popular programming language." And so the barrier is coming down- >> Yeah. >> Super quickly and it's exciting to see. >> It's going to be awesome for all the companies here, and then we'll do more, we're probably going to see explosion of startups, already seeing that, the maps, ecosystem maps, the landscape maps are happening. So this is happening and I'm convinced it's not yesterday's chat bot, it's not yesterday's AI Ops. It's a whole another ballgame. So I have to ask you guys for the final question before we kick off the company's showcasing here. How do you guys gauge success of generative AI applications? Is there a lens to look through and say, okay, how do I see success? It could be just getting a win or is it a bigger picture? Bratin we'll start with you. How do you gauge success for generative AI? >> You know, ultimately it's about bringing business value to our customers. And making sure that those customers are able to reimagine their experiences by using generative AI. Now the way to get their ease, of course to deploy those models in a safe, effective manner, and ensuring that all of the robustness and the security guarantees and the privacy guarantees are all there. And we want to make sure that this transitions from something that's great demos to actual at scale products, which means making them work reliably all of the time not just some of the time. >> Tom, what's your gauge for success? >> Look, I think this, we're seeing a completely new form of ways to interact with data, to make data intelligent, and directly to bring in new revenue streams into business. So if businesses can use our models to leverage that and generate completely new revenue streams and ultimately bring incredible new value to their customers, then that's fantastic. And we hope we can power that revolution. >> Aidan, what's your take? >> Yeah, reiterating Bratin and Tom's point, I think that value in the enterprise and value in market is like a huge, you know, it's the goal that we're striving towards. I also think that, you know, the value to consumers and actual users and the transformation of the surface area of technology to create experiences like ChatGPT that are magical and it's the first time in human history we've been able to talk to something compelling that's not a human. I think that in itself is just extraordinary and so exciting to see. >> It really brings up a whole another category of markets. B2B, B2C, it's B2D, business to developer. Because I think this is kind of the big trend the consumers have to win. The developers coding the apps, it's a whole another sea change. Reminds me everyone use the "Moneyball" movie as example during the big data wave. Then you know, the value of data. There's a scene in "Moneyball" at the end, where Billy Beane's getting the offer from the Red Sox, then the owner says to the Red Sox, "If every team's not rebuilding their teams based upon your model, there'll be dinosaurs." I think that's the same with AI here. Every company will have to need to think about their business model and how they operate with AI. So it'll be a great run. >> Completely Agree >> It'll be a great run. >> Yeah. >> Aidan, Tom, thank you so much for sharing about your experiences at your companies and congratulations on your success and it's just the beginning. And Bratin, thanks for coming on representing AWS. And thank you, appreciate for what you do. Thank you. >> Thank you, John. Thank you, Aidan. >> Thank you John. >> Thanks so much. >> Okay, let's kick off season three, episode one. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching. (light airy music)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

>> Narrator: theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies. Creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Welcome back to Barcelona, Spain, everyone. It's theCUBE live at MWC '23, day three of four days of CUBE coverage. It's like a cannon of CUBE content coming right at you. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Nicholson. We've got Dell and VMware here. Going to be talking about the ecosystem partnerships and what they're doing to further organizations in the telco industry. Please welcome Jared Woodrey, Director of Partner Engineering Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab, OTEL. Odded Solomon is here as well, Director of Product Management, VMware Service Provider and Edge Business Unit at VMware. Guys, great to have you on the program. >> Thank you for having me. >> Welcome to theCUBE. So Jared, first question for you. Talk about OTEL. I know there's a big announcement this week, but give the audience context and understanding of what OTEL is and how it works. >> Sure. So the Open Telecom Ecosystem Lab is physically located at Round Rock, Texas, it's the heart and soul of it. But this week we also just announced opening up the Cork, Ireland extension of OTEL. The reason for our existence is to to try and make it as easy as possible for both partners and customers to come together and to re-aggregate this disaggregated ecosystem. So that comes with a number of automation tools and basically just giving a known good testing environment so that tests that happen in our lab are as close to real world as they possibly can be and make it as transparent and open as possible for both partners like VMware as well as customers. >> Odded, talk about what you're doing with Dell and OTEL and give us a customer example of maybe one that you're working with or even even mentioning it by a high level descriptor if you have to. >> Yeah. So we provide a telco cloud platform, which is essentially a vertical in VMware. The telco cloud platform is serving network function vendors, such as Ericsson, Nokia, Mavenir, and so on. What we do with Dell as part of this partnership is essentially complementing the platform with some additional functionality that is not coming out of the box. We used to have a data protection in the past, but this is no longer our main business focus. So we do provide APIs that we can expose and work together with Dell PPDM solution so customer can benefit from this and leverage the partnership and have overall solution that is not coming out of the box from VMware. >> I'm curious, from a VMware perspective. VMware is associated often with the V in VMware, virtualization, and we've seen a transition over time between sort of flavors of virtualization and what is the mix currently today in the telecom space between environments that are leveraging what we would think of as more traditional virtualization with full blown Linux, Windows operating systems in a VM versus the world of containerized microservices? What does that mix look like today? Where do you see it going? >> Yeah, so the VMware telco cloud platform exists for about eight years. And the V started around that time. You might heard about open stack in addition to VMware. So this has definitely helped the network equipment providers with virtualizing their network functions. Those are typically VNF, virtualized network functions, inside the VMs. Essentially we have 4G applications, so core applications, EPC, we have IMS. Those are typically, I would say maybe 80 or 90% of the ecosystem right now. 5G is associated with cloud native network functions. So 5G is getting started now, getting deployed. There is an exponential growth on the core side. Now, when we expand towards the edge of the network we see more potential growth. This is 5G ran, we see the vRAN, we see the open RAN, we see early POCs, we see field trials that are starting. We obviously has production customer now. You just spoke to one. So this is really starting, cloud native is really starting I would say about 10 to 20% of the network functions these days are cloud native. >> Jared, question for you. You mentioned data protection, a huge topic there obviously from a security perspective. Data protection used to be the responsibility of the CSPs. You guys are changing that. Can you talk a little bit about how you're doing that and what Dell's play there is? >> Yeah, so PowerProtect Data Management is a product, but it's produced by Dell. So what this does is it enables data protection over virtual cloud as well as the physical infrastructure of specifically in this case of a telecoms ecosystem. So what this does is enables an ability to rapidly redeploy and back up existing configurations all the way up to the TCP and TCA that pulls the basis of our work here with VMware. >> So you've offloaded that responsibility from the CSPs. You freed them from that. >> So the work that we did, honestly was to make sure that we have a very clear and concise and accurate procedures for how to conduct this as well. And to put this through a realistic and real world as if it was in a telecoms own production network, what did that would actually look like, and what it would take to bring it back up as well. So our responsibility is to make sure that when we when we provide these products to the customers that not only do they work exactly as their intended to, but there is also documentation to help support them and to enable them to have their exact specifications met by as well. >> Got it. So talk about a little bit about OTEL expansion into Cork. What you guys are doing together to enable CSPs here in EMEA? >> Yeah, so the reason why we opened up a facility in Cork Island was to give, for an EMEA audience, for an EMEA CSPs and ability to look and feel and touch some of the products that we're working on. It also just facilitates and ease especially for European-based partners to have a chance to very easily come to a lab environment. The difference though, honestly, is the between Round Rock, Texas and Cork Island is that it's virtually an extension of the same thing. Like the physical locations can make it easier to provide access and obviously to showcase the products that we've developed with partners. But the reality is that it's more than just the physical location. It's more about the ability and ease by which customers and partners can access the labs. >> So we should be expecting a lot of Tito's vodka to be consumed in Cork at some point. Might change the national beverage. >> We do need to have some international exchange. >> Yeah, no, that's good to know. Odded, on the VMware side of things. There's a large group of folks who have VMware skillsets. >> Odded: Correct. >> The telecom industry is moving into this world of the kind of agility that those folks are familiar with. How do people come out of the traditional VMware virtualization world and move into that world of cloud native applications and serve the telecom space? What would your recommendation be? If you were speaking at a VMUG, a VMware Users Group meeting with all of your telecom background, what would you share with them that's critical to understand about how telecom is different, or how telecom's spot in its evolution might be different than the traditional IT space? >> So we're talking about the people with the knowledge and the background of. >> Yeah, I'm a V expert, let's say. And I'm looking into the future and I hear that there are 80,000 people in Barcelona at this event, and I hear that Dell is building optimized infrastructure specifically for telecom, and that VMware is involved. And I'm an expert in VMware and I want to be involved. What do I need to do? I know it's a little bit outside of the box question, but especially against the backdrop of economic headwinds globally, there are a lot of people facing transitions. What are your thoughts there? >> So, first of all, we understand the telco requirements, we understand the telco needs, and we make sure that what we learn from the customers, what we learn from the partners is being built into the VMware products. And simplicity is number one thing that is important for us. We want the customer experience, we want the user experience to be the same as they know even though we are transitioning into cloud native networks that require more frequent upgrades and they have more complexity to be honest. And what we do in our vertical inside VMware we are focusing on automation, telco cloud automation, telco cloud service assurance. Think of it as a wrapper around the SDDC stack that we have from VMware that really simplifies the operations for the telcos because it's really a challenge about skillset. You need to be a DevOps, SRE in order to operate these networks. And things are becoming really complex. We simplify it for them with the same VMware experience. We have a very good ability to do that. We sell products in VMware. Unlike our competition that is mostly selling professional services and support, we try to focus more on the products and delivering the value. Of course, we have services offering because telcos requires some customizations, but we do focus on automation simplicity throughout our staff. >> So just follow up. So in other words the investment in education in this VMware ecosystem absolutely can be extended and applied into the telecom world. I think it's an important thing. >> I was going to add to that. Our engagement in OTEL was also something that we created a solutions brief whether we released from Mobile World Congress this week. But in conjunction with that, we also have a white paper coming out that has a much more expansive explanation and documentation of what it was that we accomplished in the work that we've done together. And that's not something that is going to be a one-off thing. This is something that will stay evergreen that we'll continue to expand both the testing scope as well as the documentation for what this solution looks like and how it can be used as well as documentation on for the V experts for how they can then leverage and realize the the potential for what we're creating together. >> Jared, does Dell look at OTEL as having the potential to facilitate the continued evolution of the actual telco industry? And if so, how? >> Well, I mean, it would be a horrible answer if I were to say no to that. >> Right. >> I think, I honestly believe that one of the most difficult things about this idea of having desired ecosystem is not just trying to put it back together, but then also how to give yourself choice. So each time that you build one of those solution sets like that exists as an island out of all the other possibilities that comes with it. And OTEL seeks to not just be able to facilitate building that first solution set. Like that's what solutions engineering can do. And that's generally done relatively protected and internally. The Open Telecom Ecosystem seeks to build that then to also provide the ability to very easily change specific components of that whether that's a hardware component, a NIC, whether a security pass just came out or a change in either TCP or TCA or we talked a little bit about for this specific engagement that it was done on TCP 2.5. >> Odded: Correct. >> Obviously there's already a 2.7 and 3.0 is coming out. It's not like we're going to sit around and write our coattails of what 2.7 has happened. So this isn't intended to be a one and done thing. So when we talk about trying to make that easier and simpler and de-risk all of the risk that comes from trying to put all these things together, it's not just the the one single solution that you built in the lab. It's what's the next one? And how do I optimize this? And I have specific requirements as a CSP, how can I take something you built that doesn't quite match it, but how do I make that adjustment? So that's what we see to do and make it as easy and as painless as possible. >> What's the engagement model with CSPs? Is it led by Dell only, VMware partner? How does that work? >> Yeah, I can take that. So that depends on the customer, but typically customers they want to choose the cloud vendor. So they come to VMware, we want VMware. Typically, they come from the IT side. They said, "Oh, we want to manage the network side of the house the same way as we manage the IT. We don't want to have special skill sets, special teams." So they move from the IT to the network side and they want VMware there. And then obviously they have an RSP process and they have hardware choices. They can go with Dell, they can go with others. We leverage vSphere, other compatibility. So we can be flexible with the customer choice. And then depending on which customer, how large they are, they select the network equipment provider that the runs on top. We position our platform as multi-vendor. So many of them choose multiple network functions providers. So we work with Dell. So assuming that the customer is choosing Dell. We work very closely with them, offering the best solution for the customer. We work with them sometimes to even design the boxes to make sure that it fits their use cases and to make sure that it works properly. So we have a partnership validation certification end-to-end from the applications all the way down to the hardware. >> It's a fascinating place in history to be right now with 5G. Something that a lot of consumers sort of assume. It's like, "Oh, hey, yeah, we're already there. What's the 6G thing going to look like?" Well, wait a minute, we're just at the beginning stages. And so you talk about disaggregation, re-aggregation, or reintegration, the importance of that. Folks like Dell have experience in that space. Folks at VMware have a lot of experience in the virtualization space, but I heard that VMware is being acquired by Broadcom, if it all goes through, of course. You don't need to comment on it. But you mentioned something, SDDC, software-defined data center. That stack is sometimes misunderstood by the public at large and maybe the folks in the EU, I will editorialize for a moment here. It is eliminating capture in a way by larger hyperscale cloud providers. It absolutely introduces more competition into the market space. So it's interesting to hear Broadcom acknowledging that this is part of the future of VMware, no matter what else happens. These capabilities that spill into the telecom space are something that they say they're going to embrace and extend. I think that's important for anyone who's evaluating this if they're concern. Well, wait a minute. Yeah, when I reintegrate, do I want VMware as part of this mix? Is that an unknown? It's pretty clear that that's something that is part of the future of VMware moving forward. That's my personal opinion based on analysis. But you brought up SDDC, so I wanted to mention that. Again, I'm not going to ask you to get into trouble on that at all. What should we be, from a broad perspective, are there any services, outcomes that are going to come out of all of this work? The agility that's being built by you folks and folks in the open world. Are there any specific things that you personally are excited about? Or when we think about consumer devices, getting data, what are the other kinds of things that this facilitates? Anything cool, either one of you. >> So specific use cases? >> Yeah, anything. It's got to be cool though. If it's not cool we're going to ask you to leave. >> All right. I'll take that challenge. (laughs) I think one of the things that is interesting for something like OTEL as an exist, as being an Open Telecom Ecosystem, there are going to be some CSPs that it's very difficult for them to have this optionality existing for themselves. Especially when you start talking about tailoring it for specific CSPs and their needs. One of the things that becomes much more available to some of the smaller CSPs is the ability to leverage OTEL and basically act as one of their pre-production labs. So this would be something that would be very specific to a customer and we would obviously make sure that it's completely isolated but the intention there would be that it would open up the ability for what would normally take a much longer time period for them to receive some of the benefits of some of the changes that are happening within the industry. But they would have immediate benefit by leveraging specifically looking OTEL to provide them some of their solutions. And I know that you were also looking for specific use cases out of it, but like that's a huge deal for a lot of CSPs around the world that don't have the ability to lay out all the different permutations that they are most interested in and start to put each one of those through a test cycle. A specific use cases for what this looks like is honestly the most exciting that I've seen for right now is on the private 5G networks. Specifically within mining industry, we have a, sorry for the audience, but we have a demo at our booth that starts to lay out exactly how it was deployed and kind of the AB of what this looked like before the world of private 5G for this mining company and what it looks like afterwards. And the ability for both safety, as well as operational costs, as well as their ability to obviously do their job better is night and day. It completely opened up a very analog system and opened up to a very digitalized system. And I would be remiss, I didn't also mention OpenBrew, which is also an example in our booth. >> We saw it last night in action. >> We saw it. >> I hope you did. So OpenBrew is small brewery in Northeast America and we basically took a very manual process of checking temperature and pressure on multiple different tanks along the entire brewing process and digitized everything for them. All of that was enabled by a private 5G deployment that's built on Dell hardware. >> You asked for cool. I think we got it. >> Yeah, it's cool. >> Jared: I think beer. >> Cool brew, yes. >> Root beer, I think is trump card there. >> At least for folks from North America, we like our brew cool. >> Exactly. Guys, thank you so much for joining Dave and me talking about what Dell, OTEL, and VMware are doing together, what you're enabling CSPs to do and achieve. We appreciate your time and your insights. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you. >> All right, our pleasure. For our guests and for Dave Nicholson, I'm Lisa Martin. You watching theCUBE live from MWC '23. Day three of our coverage continues right after a short break. (upbeat music)

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

>> theCUBE's live coverage is made possible by funding from Dell Technologies, creating technologies that drive human progress. (upbeat music) >> Hey everyone, guys and gals, good to see you. It's theCUBE live in Barcelona at MWC23. Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante on day one of four days of wall to wall CUBE coverage. Dave, today is ecosystem day. We've had some great conversations about why the open ecosystem is so important and some of the key players in it. >> Well and I'm in search of disruptors, so I'm looking for, okay, who are the network operators that are going to actually lean into the future and drive it and challenge the existing incumbents. We'll talk about that today. >> And we're going to be talking about that next. We've got one of our alumni back with us. Satish Iyer is here, the Vice President of Emerging Services at Dell. Great to have you back on the program. >> Thank you. >> Richard Leitao is with us as well, the Vice President of National Development at DISH Network. Welcome. >> Pleasure to be here. >> So, lots of, this is day one, the theme is velocity. I feel like the day has gone by so quickly. But Dell and DISH have partnered together on a multi-year initiative to build your nationwide cloud-native 5G network that's going to cover a lot of the US. Talk a little bit about that partnership, we'll get both of your perspectives. Richard, we'll start with you. >> Sure. So thank you again for having me. So DISH had the opportunity of, of going through this experience, of innovating once more. For the ones that know DISH, DISH is a company that was founded in 1980 by an innovator, a disruptor. Of course, in the course of the next 40 years, we had the opportunities of even disrupting ourselves. We launched our first satellite TV service. We then launched the first streaming, video streaming platform, disrupting our own satellite business. And since 2008, we have been acquiring Spectrum and, you know, Spectrum, the most valuable asset of a wireless operator. We felt that this was the right opportunity, having 5G , having O-RAN, and we decided to go full in in a greenfield project building national network, 5G O-RAN cloud-based network, one of a kind network in in the US and, and most of all, using O-RAN, it's very important to us, what, what it can bring and it can bring to DISH but to the entire ecosystem of, of this sector in the US. >> Satish, talk a little bit about the partnership from Dell's perspective and some of the unique advantages that Dell is delivering to DISH. >> Oh absolutely. Again, like Richard was saying, I mean the telecom network is being desegregated as we speak. You know, companies like DISH and everybody else is looking at what are the best-in-class technologies we can bring to the table. I would like to say that, you know, the cloud is coming to the telco world, right? A lot of us have seen the tremendous transformation in the cloud world in the last few years. Now, you know, DISH is a big enterprise company. As you know, you know, we are pretty strong within the cloud space and enterprise space. So what we try to work with DISH is Dell, is to bring to DISH is, you know, that notion of cloud scale and the cloud ecosystem into telecom, right? By means best-in-class infrastructure products, best-in-class software products, to allow somebody like DISH to innovate and incre, you know, basically expand and build their O-RAN network. So it's absolutely important for us as we build and get into the telecom space to work with somebody like DISH who's also disrupting as a carrier in that space. >> So it's early days for Open RAN but you've decided, "okay, we're all in". >> Yeah. >> Right? So (chuckling) you burn the bridge, as they say, "go for it". (Lisa chuckles) So when you talk to most people, they say, "okay, it's, it's, it's, it's immature." It's got to be able to get to the levels of, of the, the the hardened stack reliability. But of course it brings the advantage of flexibility and speed. Are you optimizing for one or the other right now? How are you dealing with that balance? >> Well, it, it's, it's not mature in the sense that most of operators that think about it, they have a legacy network. And in order to go full in on the O-RAN side, they need to scrap a lot of things that they have and honestly, they don't want, and it doesn't make sense. So being a greenfield operator, give us that advantage. Give us the advantage and, and desegregation, it's all about chip sets, boxes and software and the chip sets part and what I like the most in desegregation is the time of innovation. The time that we can use new chip sets coming into the market, the size of the boxes that we are using. Obviously our footprint onsite is much smaller than traditional carriers or proprietary systems. So all of that Dell has been critical in supporting us. Supporting us having the best chip sets, having the smallest footprint and, you know, the software, the cycle of innovation is much faster than in proprietary systems. So ma-, it's maturing. I'm glad to say that probably two years ago here O-RAN was more like a, a pilot type of technology. It is not, we are live, we are live for more than 30 million customers in the US and, you know, the performance levels are very similar to traditional networks. >> So you don't just buy a nationwide cloud-native 5G network out of the box, you got to- >> No, you don't. >> You got to build it. So I'm curious as to what Dell's role is in that, in that build out. >> Right? >> How and how, I'm really curious how to, how you would grade Dell but we'll get there. >> Yeah, I mean, look, yes, you don't. So I think the, the, the first and foremost is again, as, as we, Dell, comes into the telco space, one of the things we have to look at is to understand what makes Dell better in the enterprise space, right? It is the best-in-class infrastructure. It is the software ties together. As you talk about desegregated networks, it's important to understand lot of these piece parts have to still be touched together, right? So I think the integration and integration aspects becomes really key which is really Dell is very good at. So one of the things we are working really closely with DISH Tech, you know Richard was alluding to, is bringing all, not just bringing all the software and hardware assets together, but how do you continuously innovate and keep fixing things faster, right? So in the old days, traditional ways, you have a software stack, it takes you 18 months, 20 months to actually get an upgrade done. Here we have continuously CI/CD pipelines where if you want to a change done within, within a week's or within a few days, where we can actually go and test and make sure these things work. So I think a lot of the best enterprise software practices, cloud practices, combined with whatever needs for telco, actually is what makes it very unique. >> I, I saw that this started out as an FCC compliance initiative that turned into a partnership, obviously a very successful one. Richard, talk about what DISH saw in Dell that really made it the right choice, knowing you have choices, you have options. >> You know, we saw the capability to execute, but we also saw the capability to innovate. From an execution level, at the end of the day, like we were talking, we started the project in the middle of COVID, and we had the first mandate to cover 20% of the US population by June, 2022. And now we have a second one, 70% of US population by June 2023. At the beginning of the project, it was all about availability of materials, logistics, how to distribute, how to transport material. So Dell has a world-class supply chain, we felt that working with Dell through all these challenges made things easier. So from an execution perspective, whenever you need to build a network and you, you are building thousands of sites, you need to have materials, you need to distribute them and you need to install them. Dell helped us across the board. Our expectations obviously will change. We have a network, we want to cooperate with Dell in many other areas. We want to, you know, leverage on Dell ability to reach the enterprise market, to have private 5G offers. So hopefully this collaboration will endure in time and, and, you know, will change and evolve in time. >> And it's a big bet. I mean, it's not like a single, it's not like a little transaction that you guys are doing. I feel like, you know Michael Dell and Eric Carlson had dinner and they said, "okay, we're going to, we're going to partner up and this is going to be a multi-decade partnership. You had to be transparent, "Hey, we're new at this, even though we're really good at enterprise tech and so you're going to, obviously if you take a chance on us, here's what we promise you." >> Absolutely. >> And vice versa, you guys had to say, "all right, hey, we're willing to roll the dice because we're trying to change the world." So what was that dynamic like? I mean, how did, I'm curious as to this has to be a lot of different levels, engineering, senior management, board level discussions. >> You know, we felt a huge buy-in from Dell on the Open RAN concept. >> Right. >> Yeah, okay. >> And, you know, edge computing and, and the ability to get us the best product and evolve the best product, Intel is is critical in all these offerings. Intel has a great relationship with Dell. Dell helped us. Dell sponsored the DISH program and some of these suppliers, So it was definitely good to have their support and the buy-in on the O-RAN concept. We felt it from day one and we felt secure on that. >> Yeah, I mean, I, to add to that, I mean, you know DISH was very instrumental in driving, dictating and executing to our roadmap, right? They're one of the key, I mean, since they are out there and they're really turning in a way, it's important that a customer who's actually at the out front of innovation, helps us drive our own roadmap. So to Richard's point, a lot of our product roadmaps, in terms of what have you built and all that, was based on what DISH thinks as going to be market-based requirements. They also helped us a lot in the integration aspects. Like I said, one of the things about open desegregation of these networks is there is a lot of integration because, you know, there is, it's not a one, one monolithic pipe smokestack anymore. You are picking up best-in-class pieces, bits and pieces and tying it together. And it's important to understand when you tie it together things will go wrong, right? So there is a lot of learnings from an integration standpoint. Supportability, deployment, one of the things Richard talked about was supply chain, you know. Other Dell's ability to, lot of these deployments, a lot of these configs in the factory, right, in the second part. So especially a lot of these partnerships started during COVID time and as you all know, you know what we went through two years ago. So we had to make sure that lot of these things are done in one place and a factory, and not done in the field because we couldn't do a lot of these things. So there's a lot of, lot of experimentation, lot of, lot, lot of innovation on that. >> So it's 2030, what's this look like? What's the vision if we can work backwards from there? Well, a, a great network coverage to the entire country, bringing new services to enterprises, to verticals, bringing value add to customers and, you know, technology cycles, they are lasting much less than they were. I cannot even say what will happen in three years. 2030, I mean, I know, I know somebody has a vision for 2030. That's another thing. (everyone laughs) >> A lot of it is "build it and they will come", right? >> Yeah. >> I mean it really is right? You put that network in place and then innovation happens on top. That's the best thing. >> Yeah. And look and and I think the biggest people think about Open RAN in terms of cost, which, you know, you, you have some things in cost that you appreciate in Open RAN. The footprint, the the possibility to diversify suppliers and and have more competition. But for me, Open RAN is about innovation and cycles of innovation. I used to work for Nokia, I used to work for Alcatel. I knew from the generation of an idea to an execution and having a feature delivered to a certain customer, it, it took months. We want innovation to take weeks. We are innovating at the speed, speed of the cloud. We are cooperating with new players, players on the cloud and, and we expect things to happen much faster than they traditionally happen on the telecom sector. >> Move fast and break things. >> Well, we also expect that speed- >> Break and fix. (everyone laughs) >> Yeah, thank you for that. >> But speaking of speed, your customers expect that, right? They expect the service to be up 24/7. They expect to be able to access whatever content they want, whenever they want from wherever they are. So comment, Richard, in our last few minutes here of, of how the, the Dell partnership is helping DISH to really deliver the excellent customer experience that your customers just expect that you're going to deliver. >> Well by setting up the system, number one, we are leveraging on a number of services. And I mentioned the supply chain, but in reality Dell made much more than that for our 20% milestone and is supporting our 70% milestone by installing, testing, verifying most of our data center equipment. We found that this offering from Dell was really addressing some of our needs because, you know, we, we believe they know a lot in this area and they, they can provide the best advice and the best speed to market in, in terms of having this equipment. Because we are working on a time clock, we need to have this done as soon as possible. You know for the future, I hope that they can help us in driving more services. I hope they can bring all the infrastructure that we need to offer to our customers. And, you know, we keep committed to O-RAN. O-RAN is really important. We are not compromising that. And I think the future is bright for both of us. >> Yeah, and Dell learns from the experience. >> Exactly. >> Absolutely. >> There's got to be a catalyst for expanding your roadmap and vision in telecom. >> Yeah, I mean, like you said, I mean, you asked a 2030 question and I think that, you know, know six, seven years from now I think people should look at what DISH and Dell and say they were the trailblazers of make, bringing Open RAN to the market and making 5G a reality. I mean, you talk about 5G, but every 5G is on a different stages. I do think that this combination, this partnership has the best chance to be the first ones to actually have a truly Open RAN network to be successful in commercial. >> Awesome guys. Trailblazers, Dell and DISH. Well, we look forward to watching this story unfold. Thank you- >> Thank you. >> for joining Dave and me on the program today talking about what you're doing together. We appreciate it. >> Thanks for having us. >> Our pleasure. >> Thank you, bye. >> For our guests and for Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Barcelona at MWC23. We'll be back after a short break, so we'll see you soon.

(soothing music) >> Hey everyone, welcome to this event, "Build Your Cloud Center of Excellence." I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In the next 15 minutes or so my guest and I are going to be talking about redefining cloud operations, an application modernization for customers, and specifically how partners are helping to speed up that process. As you saw on our first two segments, we talked about problems enterprises are facing with cloud operations. We talked about redefining cloud operations as well to solve these problems. This segment is going to be focusing on how Hitachi Vantara's partners are really helping to speed up that process. We've got Johnson Controls here to talk about their partnership with Hitachi Vantara. Please welcome both of my guests, Prem Balasubramanian is with us, SVP and CTO Digital Solutions at Hitachi Vantara. And Suresh Mothikuru, SVP Customer Success Platform Engineering and Reliability Engineering from Johnson Controls. Gentlemen, welcome to the program, great to have you. >> Thank. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> First question is to both of you and Suresh, we'll start with you. We want to understand, you know, the cloud operations landscape is increasingly complex. We've talked a lot about that in this program. Talk to us, Suresh, about some of the biggest challenges and pin points that you faced with respect to that. >> Thank you. I think it's a great question. I mean, cloud has evolved a lot in the last 10 years. You know, when we were talking about a single cloud whether it's Azure or AWS and GCP, and that was complex enough. Now we are talking about multi-cloud and hybrid and you look at Johnson Controls, we have Azure we have AWS, we have GCP, we have Alibaba and we also support on-prem. So the architecture has become very, very complex and the complexity has grown so much that we are now thinking about whether we should be cloud native or cloud agnostic. So I think, I mean, sometimes it's hard to even explain the complexity because people think, oh, "When you go to cloud, everything is simplified." Cloud does give you a lot of simplicity, but it also really brings a lot more complexity along with it. So, and then next one is pretty important is, you know, generally when you look at cloud services, you have plenty of services that are offered within a cloud, 100, 150 services, 200 services. Even within those companies, you take AWS they might not know, an individual resource might not know about all the services we see. That's a big challenge for us as a customer to really understand each of the service that is provided in these, you know, clouds, well, doesn't matter which one that is. And the third one is pretty big, at least at the CTO the CIO, and the senior leadership level, is cost. Cost is a major factor because cloud, you know, will eat you up if you cannot manage it. If you don't have a good cloud governance process it because every minute you are in it, it's burning cash. So I think if you ask me, these are the three major things that I am facing day to day and that's where I use my partners, which I'll touch base down the line. >> Perfect, we'll talk about that. So Prem, I imagine that these problems are not unique to Johnson Controls or JCI, as you may hear us refer to it. Talk to me Prem about some of the other challenges that you're seeing within the customer landscape. >> So, yeah, I agree, Lisa, these are not very specific to JCI, but there are specific issues in JCI, right? So the way we think about these are, there is a common issue when people go to the cloud and there are very specific and unique issues for businesses, right? So JCI, and we will talk about this in the episode as we move forward. I think Suresh and his team have done some phenomenal step around how to manage this complexity. But there are customers who have a lesser complex cloud which is, they don't go to Alibaba, they don't have footprint in all three clouds. So their multi-cloud footprint could be a bit more manageable, but still struggle with a lot of the same problems around cost, around security, around talent. Talent is a big thing, right? And in Suresh's case I think it's slightly more exasperated because every cloud provider Be it AWS, JCP, or Azure brings in hundreds of services and there is nobody, including many of us, right? We learn every day, nowadays, right? It's not that there is one service integrator who knows all, while technically people can claim as a part of sales. But in reality all of us are continuing to learn in this landscape. And if you put all of this equation together with multiple clouds the complexity just starts to exponentially grow. And that's exactly what I think JCI is experiencing and Suresh's team has been experiencing, and we've been working together. But the common problems are around security talent and cost management of this, right? Those are my three things. And one last thing that I would love to say before we move away from this question is, if you think about cloud operations as a concept that's evolving over the last few years, and I have touched upon this in the previous episode as well, Lisa, right? If you take architectures, we've gone into microservices, we've gone into all these server-less architectures all the fancy things that we want. That helps us go to market faster, be more competent to as a business. But that's not simplified stuff, right? That's complicated stuff. It's a lot more distributed. Second, again, we've advanced and created more modern infrastructure because all of what we are talking is platform as a service, services on the cloud that we are consuming, right? In the same case with development we've moved into a DevOps model. We kind of click a button put some code in a repository, the code starts to run in production within a minute, everything else is automated. But then when we get to operations we are still stuck in a very old way of looking at cloud as an infrastructure, right? So you've got an infra team, you've got an app team, you've got an incident management team, you've got a soft knock, everything. But again, so Suresh can talk about this more because they are making significant strides in thinking about this as a single workload, and how do I apply engineering to go manage this? Because a lot of it is codified, right? So automation. Anyway, so that's kind of where the complexity is and how we are thinking, including JCI as a partner thinking about taming that complexity as we move forward. >> Suresh, let's talk about that taming the complexity. You guys have both done a great job of articulating the ostensible challenges that are there with cloud, especially multi-cloud environments that you're living in. But Suresh, talk about the partnership with Hitachi Vantara. How is it helping to dial down some of those inherent complexities? >> I mean, I always, you know, I think I've said this to Prem multiple times. I treat my partners as my internal, you know, employees. I look at Prem as my coworker or my peers. So the reason for that is I want Prem to have the same vested interest as a partner in my success or JCI success and vice versa, isn't it? I think that's how we operate and that's how we have been operating. And I think I would like to thank Prem and Hitachi Vantara for that really been an amazing partnership. And as he was saying, we have taken a completely holistic approach to how we want to really be in the market and play in the market to our customers. So if you look at my jacket it talks about OpenBlue platform. This is what JCI is building, that we are building this OpenBlue digital platform. And within that, my team, along with Prem's or Hitachi's, we have built what we call as Polaris. It's a technical platform where our apps can run. And this platform is automated end-to-end from a platform engineering standpoint. We stood up a platform engineering organization, a reliability engineering organization, as well as a support organization where Hitachi played a role. As I said previously, you know, for me to scale I'm not going to really have the talent and the knowledge of every function that I'm looking at. And Hitachi, not only they brought the talent but they also brought what he was talking about, Harc. You know, they have set up a lot and now we can leverage it. And they also came up with some really interesting concepts. I went and met them in India. They came up with this concept called IPL. Okay, what is that? They really challenged all their employees that's working for GCI to come up with innovative ideas to solve problems proactively, which is self-healing. You know, how you do that? So I think partners, you know, if they become really vested in your interests, they can do wonders for you. And I think in this case Hitachi is really working very well for us and in many aspects. And I'm leveraging them... You started with support, now I'm leveraging them in the automation, the platform engineering, as well as in the reliability engineering and then in even in the engineering spaces. And that like, they are my end-to-end partner right now? >> So you're really taking that holistic approach that you talked about and it sounds like it's a very collaborative two-way street partnership. Prem, I want to go back to, Suresh mentioned Harc. Talk a little bit about what Harc is and then how partners fit into Hitachi's Harc strategy. >> Great, so let me spend like a few seconds on what Harc is. Lisa, again, I know we've been using the term. Harc stands for Hitachi application reliability sectors. Now the reason we thought about Harc was, like I said in the beginning of this segment, there is an illusion from an architecture standpoint to be more modern, microservices, server-less, reactive architecture, so on and so forth. There is an illusion in your development methodology from Waterfall to agile, to DevOps to lean, agile to path program, whatever, right? Extreme program, so on and so forth. There is an evolution in the space of infrastructure from a point where you were buying these huge humongous servers and putting it in your data center to a point where people don't even see servers anymore, right? You buy it, by a click of a button you don't know the size of it. All you know is a, it's (indistinct) whatever that name means. Let's go provision it on the fly, get go, get your work done, right? When all of this is advanced when you think about operations people have been solving the problem the way they've been solving it 20 years back, right? That's the issue. And Harc was conceived exactly to fix that particular problem, to think about a modern way of operating a modern workload, right? That's exactly what Harc. So it brings together finest engineering talent. So the teams are trained in specific ways of working. We've invested and implemented some of the IP, we work with the best of the breed partner ecosystem, and I'll talk about that in a minute. And we've got these facilities in Dallas and I am talking from my office in Dallas, which is a Harc facility in the US from where we deliver for our customers. And then back in Hyderabad, we've got one more that we opened and these are facilities from where we deliver Harc services for our customers as well, right? And then we are expanding it in Japan and Portugal as we move into 23. That's kind of the plan that we are thinking through. However, that's what Harc is, Lisa, right? That's our solution to this cloud complexity problem. Right? >> Got it, and it sounds like it's going quite global, which is fantastic. So Suresh, I want to have you expand a bit on the partnership, the partner ecosystem and the role that it plays. You talked about it a little bit but what role does the partner ecosystem play in really helping JCI to dial down some of those challenges and the inherent complexities that we talked about? >> Yeah, sure. I think partners play a major role and JCI is very, very good at it. I mean, I've joined JCI 18 months ago, JCI leverages partners pretty extensively. As I said, I leverage Hitachi for my, you know, A group and the (indistinct) space and the cloud operations space, and they're my primary partner. But at the same time, we leverage many other partners. Well, you know, Accenture, SCL, and even on the tooling side we use Datadog and (indistinct). All these guys are major partners of our because the way we like to pick partners is based on our vision and where we want to go. And pick the right partner who's going to really, you know make you successful by investing their resources in you. And what I mean by that is when you have a partner, partner knows exactly what kind of skillset is needed for this customer, for them to really be successful. As I said earlier, we cannot really get all the skillset that we need, we rely on the partners and partners bring the the right skillset, they can scale. I can tell Prem tomorrow, "Hey, I need two parts by next week", and I guarantee it he's going to bring two parts to me. So they let you scale, they let you move fast. And I'm a big believer, in today's day and age, to get things done fast and be more agile. I'm not worried about failure, but for me moving fast is very, very important. And partners really do a very good job bringing that. But I think then they also really make you think, isn't it? Because one thing I like about partners they make you innovate whether they know it or not but they do because, you know, they will come and ask you questions about, "Hey, tell me why you are doing this. Can I review your architecture?" You know, and then they will try to really say I don't think this is going to work. Because they work with so many different clients, not JCI, they bring all that expertise and that's what I look from them, you know, just not, you know, do a T&M job for me. I ask you to do this go... They just bring more than that. That's how I pick my partners. And that's how, you know, Hitachi's Vantara is definitely one of a good partner from that sense because they bring a lot more innovation to the table and I appreciate about that. >> It sounds like, it sounds like a flywheel of innovation. >> Yeah. >> I love that. Last question for both of you, which we're almost out of time here, Prem, I want to go back to you. So I'm a partner, I'm planning on redefining CloudOps at my company. What are the two things you want me to remember from Hitachi Vantara's perspective? >> So before I get to that question, Lisa, the partners that we work with are slightly different from from the partners that, again, there are some similar partners. There are some different partners, right? For example, we pick and choose especially in the Harc space, we pick and choose partners that are more future focused, right? We don't care if they are huge companies or small companies. We go after companies that are future focused that are really, really nimble and can change for our customers need because it's not our need, right? When I pick partners for Harc my ultimate endeavor is to ensure, in this case because we've got (indistinct) GCI on, we are able to operate (indistinct) with the level of satisfaction above and beyond that they're expecting from us. And whatever I don't have I need to get from my partners so that I bring this solution to Suresh. As opposed to bringing a whole lot of people and making them stand in front of Suresh. So that's how I think about partners. What do I want them to do from, and we've always done this so we do workshops with our partners. We just don't go by tools. When we say we are partnering with X, Y, Z, we do workshops with them and we say, this is how we are thinking. Either you build it in your roadmap that helps us leverage you, continue to leverage you. And we do have minimal investments where we fix gaps. We're building some utilities for us to deliver the best service to our customers. And our intention is not to build a product to compete with our partner. Our intention is to just fill the wide space until they go build it into their product suite that we can then leverage it for our customers. So always think about end customers and how can we make it easy for them? Because for all the tool vendors out there seeing this and wanting to partner with Hitachi the biggest thing is tools sprawl, especially on the cloud is very real. For every problem on the cloud. I have a billion tools that are being thrown at me as Suresh if I'm putting my installation and it's not easy at all. It's so confusing. >> Yeah. >> So that's what we want. We want people to simplify that landscape for our end customers, and we are looking at partners that are thinking through the simplification not just making money. >> That makes perfect sense. There really is a very strong symbiosis it sounds like, in the partner ecosystem. And there's a lot of enablement that goes on back and forth it sounds like as well, which is really, to your point it's all about the end customers and what they're expecting. Suresh, last question for you is which is the same one, if I'm a partner what are the things that you want me to consider as I'm planning to redefine CloudOps at my company? >> I'll keep it simple. In my view, I mean, we've touched upon it in multiple facets in this interview about that, the three things. First and foremost, reliability. You know, in today's day and age my products has to be reliable, available and, you know, make sure that the customer's happy with what they're really dealing with, number one. Number two, my product has to be secure. Security is super, super important, okay? And number three, I need to really make sure my customers are getting the value so I keep my cost low. So these three is what I would focus and what I expect from my partners. >> Great advice, guys. Thank you so much for talking through this with me and really showing the audience how strong the partnership is between Hitachi Vantara and JCI. What you're doing together, we'll have to talk to you again to see where things go but we really appreciate your insights and your perspectives. Thank you. >> Thank you, Lisa. >> Thanks Lisa, thanks for having us. >> My pleasure. For my guests, I'm Lisa Martin. Thank you so much for watching. (soothing music)

(light music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome to this Cube Conversation. I'm really pleased to announce a collaboration with Rob Strechay. He's a guest cube analyst, and we'll be working together to extract the signal from the noise. Rob is a long-time product pro, working at a number of firms including AWS, HP, HPE, NetApp, Snowplow. I did a stint as an analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. Rob, good to see you. Thanks for coming into our Marlboro Studios. >> Well, thank you for having me. It's always great to be here. >> I'm really excited about working with you. We've known each other for a long time. You've been in the Cube a bunch. You know, you're in between gigs, and I think we can have a lot of fun together. Covering events, covering trends. So. let's get into it. What's happening out there? We're sort of exited the isolation economy. Things were booming. Now, everybody's tapping the brakes. From your standpoint, what are you seeing out there? >> Yeah. I'm seeing that people are really looking how to get more out of their data. How they're bringing things together, how they're looking at the costs of Cloud, and understanding how are they building out their SaaS applications. And understanding that when they go in and actually start to use Cloud, it's not only just using the base services anymore. They're looking at, how do I use these platforms as a service? Some are easier than others, and they're trying to understand, how do I get more value out of that relationship with the Cloud? They're also consolidating the number of Clouds that they have, I would say to try to better optimize their spend, and getting better pricing for that matter. >> Are you seeing people unhook Clouds, or just reduce maybe certain Cloud activities and going maybe instead of 60/40 going 90/10? >> Correct. It's more like the 90/10 type of rule where they're starting to say, Hey I'm not going to get rid of Azure or AWS or Google. I'm going to move a portion of this over that I was using on this one service. Maybe I got a great two-year contract to start with on this platform as a service or a database as a service. I'm going to unhook from that and maybe go with an independent. Maybe with something like a Snowflake or a Databricks on top of another Cloud, so that I can consolidate down. But it also gives them more flexibility as well. >> In our last breaking analysis, Rob, we identified six factors that were reducing Cloud consumption. There were factors and customer tactics. And I want to get your take on this. So, some of the factors really, you got fewer mortgage originations. FinTech, obviously big Cloud user. Crypto, not as much activity there. Lower ad spending means less Cloud. And then one of 'em, which you kind of disagreed with was less, less analytics, you know, fewer... Less frequency of calculations. I'll come back to that. But then optimizing compute using Graviton or AMD instances moving to cheaper storage tiers. That of course makes sense. And then optimize pricing plans. Maybe going from On Demand, you know, to, you know, instead of pay by the drink, buy in volume. Okay. So, first of all, do those make sense to you with the exception? We'll come back and talk about the analytics piece. Is that what you're seeing from customers? >> Yeah, I think so. I think that was pretty much dead on with what I'm seeing from customers and the ones that I go out and talk to. A lot of times they're trying to really monetize their, you know, understand how their business utilizes these Clouds. And, where their spend is going in those Clouds. Can they use, you know, lower tiers of storage? Do they really need the best processors? Do they need to be using Intel or can they get away with AMD or Graviton 2 or 3? Or do they need to move in? And, I think when you look at all of these Clouds, they always have pricing curves that are arcs from the newest to the oldest stuff. And you can play games with that. And understanding how you can actually lower your costs by looking at maybe some of the older generation. Maybe your application was written 10 years ago. You don't necessarily have to be on the best, newest processor for that application per se. >> So last, I want to come back to this whole analytics piece. Last June, I think it was June, Dev Ittycheria, who's the-- I call him Dev. Spelled Dev, pronounced Dave. (chuckles softly) Same pronunciation, different spelling. Dev Ittycheria, CEO of Mongo, on the earnings call. He was getting, you know, hit. Things were starting to get a little less visible in terms of, you know, the outlook. And people were pushing him like... Because you're in the Cloud, is it easier to dial down? And he said, because we're the document database, we support transaction applications. We're less discretionary than say, analytics. Well on the Snowflake earnings call, that same month or the month after, they were all over Slootman and Scarpelli. Oh, the Mongo CEO said that they're less discretionary than analytics. And Snowflake was an interesting comment. They basically said, look, we're the Cloud. You can dial it up, you can dial it down, but the area under the curve over a period of time is going to be the same, because they get their customers to commit. What do you say? You disagreed with the notion that people are running their calculations less frequently. Is that because they're trying to do a better job of targeting customers in near real time? What are you seeing out there? >> Yeah, I think they're moving away from using people and more expensive marketing. Or, they're trying to figure out what's my Google ad spend, what's my Meta ad spend? And what they're trying to do is optimize that spend. So, what is the return on advertising, or the ROAS as they would say. And what they're looking to do is understand, okay, I have to collect these analytics that better understand where are these people coming from? How do they get to my site, to my store, to my whatever? And when they're using it, how do they they better move through that? What you're also seeing is that analytics is not only just for kind of the retail or financial services or things like that, but then they're also, you know, using that to make offers in those categories. When you move back to more, you know, take other companies that are building products and SaaS delivered products. They may actually go and use this analytics for making the product better. And one of the big reasons for that is maybe they're dialing back how many product managers they have. And they're looking to be more data driven about how they actually go and build the product out or enhance the product. So maybe they're, you know, an online video service and they want to understand why people are either using or not using the whiteboard inside the product. And they're collecting a lot of that product analytics in a big way so that they can go through that. And they're doing it in a constant manner. This first party type tracking within applications is growing rapidly by customers. >> So, let's talk about who wins in that. So, obviously the Cloud guys, AWS, Google and Azure. I want to come back and unpack that a little bit. Databricks and Snowflake, we reported on our last breaking analysis, it kind of on a collision course. You know, a couple years ago we were thinking, okay, AWS, Snowflake and Databricks, like perfect sandwich. And then of course they started to become more competitive. My sense is they still, you know, compliment each other in the field, right? But, you know, publicly, they've got bigger aspirations, they get big TAMs that they're going after. But it's interesting, the data shows that-- So, Snowflake was off the charts in terms of spending momentum and our EPR surveys. Our partner down in New York, they kind of came into line. They're both growing in terms of market presence. Databricks couldn't get to IPO. So, we don't have as much, you know, visibility on their financials. You know, Snowflake obviously highly transparent cause they're a public company. And then you got AWS, Google and Azure. And it seems like AWS appears to be more partner friendly. Microsoft, you know, depends on what market you're in. And Google wants to sell BigQuery. >> Yeah. >> So, what are you seeing in the public Cloud from a data platform perspective? >> Yeah. I think that was pretty astute in what you were talking about there, because I think of the three, Google is definitely I think a little bit behind in how they go to market with their partners. Azure's done a fantastic job of partnering with these companies to understand and even though they may have Synapse as their go-to and where they want people to go to do AI and ML. What they're looking at is, Hey, we're going to also be friendly with Snowflake. We're also going to be friendly with a Databricks. And I think that, Amazon has always been there because that's where the market has been for these developers. So, many, like Databricks' and the Snowflake's have gone there first because, you know, Databricks' case, they built out on top of S3 first. And going and using somebody's object layer other than AWS, was not as simple as you would think it would be. Moving between those. >> So, one of the financial meetups I said meetup, but the... It was either the CEO or the CFO. It was either Slootman or Scarpelli talking at, I don't know, Merrill Lynch or one of the other financial conferences said, I think it was probably their Q3 call. Snowflake said 80% of our business goes through Amazon. And he said to this audience, the next day we got a call from Microsoft. Hey, we got to do more. And, we know just from reading the financial statements that Snowflake is getting concessions from Amazon, they're buying in volume, they're renegotiating their contracts. Amazon gets it. You know, lower the price, people buy more. Long term, we're all going to make more money. Microsoft obviously wants to get into that game with Snowflake. They understand the momentum. They said Google, not so much. And I've had customers tell me that they wanted to use Google's AI with Snowflake, but they can't, they got to go to to BigQuery. So, honestly, I haven't like vetted that so. But, I think it's true. But nonetheless, it seems like Google's a little less friendly with the data platform providers. What do you think? >> Yeah, I would say so. I think this is a place that Google looks and wants to own. Is that now, are they doing the right things long term? I mean again, you know, you look at Google Analytics being you know, basically outlawed in five countries in the EU because of GDPR concerns, and compliance and governance of data. And I think people are looking at Google and BigQuery in general and saying, is it the best place for me to go? Is it going to be in the right places where I need it? Still, it's still one of the largest used databases out there just because it underpins a number of the Google services. So you almost get, like you were saying, forced into BigQuery sometimes, if you want to use the tech on top. >> You do strategy. >> Yeah. >> Right? You do strategy, you do messaging. Is it the right call by Google? I mean, it's not a-- I criticize Google sometimes. But, I'm not sure it's the wrong call to say, Hey, this is our ace in the hole. >> Yeah. >> We got to get people into BigQuery. Cause, first of all, BigQuery is a solid product. I mean it's Cloud native and it's, you know, by all, it gets high marks. So, why give the competition an advantage? Let's try to force people essentially into what is we think a great product and it is a great product. The flip side of that is, they're giving up some potential partner TAM and not treating the ecosystem as well as one of their major competitors. What do you do if you're in that position? >> Yeah, I think that that's a fantastic question. And the question I pose back to the companies I've worked with and worked for is, are you really looking to have vendor lock-in as your key differentiator to your service? And I think when you start to look at these companies that are moving away from BigQuery, moving to even, Databricks on top of GCS in Google, they're looking to say, okay, I can go there if I have to evacuate from GCP and go to another Cloud, I can stay on Databricks as a platform, for instance. So I think it's, people are looking at what platform as a service, database as a service they go and use. Because from a strategic perspective, they don't want that vendor locking. >> That's where Supercloud becomes interesting, right? Because, if I can run on Snowflake or Databricks, you know, across Clouds. Even Oracle, you know, they're getting into business with Microsoft. Let's talk about some of the Cloud players. So, the big three have reported. >> Right. >> We saw AWSs Cloud growth decelerated down to 20%, which is I think the lowest growth rate since they started to disclose public numbers. And they said they exited, sorry, they said January they grew at 15%. >> Yeah. >> Year on year. Now, they had some pretty tough compares. But nonetheless, 15%, wow. Azure, kind of mid thirties, and then Google, we had kind of low thirties. But, well behind in terms of size. And Google's losing probably almost $3 billion annually. But, that's not necessarily a bad thing by advocating and investing. What's happening with the Cloud? Is AWS just running into the law, large numbers? Do you think we can actually see a re-acceleration like we have in the past with AWS Cloud? Azure, we predicted is going to be 75% of AWS IAS revenues. You know, we try to estimate IAS. >> Yeah. >> Even though they don't share that with us. That's a huge milestone. You'd think-- There's some people who have, I think, Bob Evans predicted a while ago that Microsoft would surpass AWS in terms of size. You know, what do you think? >> Yeah, I think that Azure's going to keep to-- Keep growing at a pretty good clip. I think that for Azure, they still have really great account control, even though people like to hate Microsoft. The Microsoft sellers that are out there making those companies successful day after day have really done a good job of being in those accounts and helping people. I was recently over in the UK. And the UK market between AWS and Azure is pretty amazing, how much Azure there is. And it's growing within Europe in general. In the states, it's, you know, I think it's growing well. I think it's still growing, probably not as fast as it is outside the U.S. But, you go down to someplace like Australia, it's also Azure. You hear about Azure all the time. >> Why? Is that just because of the Microsoft's software state? It's just so convenient. >> I think it has to do with, you know, and you can go with the reasoning they don't break out, you know, Office 365 and all of that out of their numbers is because they have-- They're in all of these accounts because the office suite is so pervasive in there. So, they always have reasons to go back in and, oh by the way, you're on these old SQL licenses. Let us move you up here and we'll be able to-- We'll support you on the old version, you know, with security and all of these things. And be able to move you forward. So, they have a lot of, I guess you could say, levers to stay in those accounts and be interesting. At least as part of the Cloud estate. I think Amazon, you know, is hitting, you know, the large number. Laws of large numbers. But I think that they're also going through, and I think this was seen in the layoffs that they were making, that they're looking to understand and have profitability in more of those services that they have. You know, over 350 odd services that they have. And you know, as somebody who went there and helped to start yet a new one, while I was there. And finally, it went to beta back in September, you start to look at the fact that, that number of services, people, their own sellers don't even know all of their services. It's impossible to comprehend and sell that many things. So, I think what they're going through is really looking to rationalize a lot of what they're doing from a services perspective going forward. They're looking to focus on more profitable services and bringing those in. Because right now it's built like a layer cake where you have, you know, S3 EBS and EC2 on the bottom of the layer cake. And then maybe you have, you're using IAM, the authorization and authentication in there and you have all these different services. And then they call it EMR on top. And so, EMR has to pay for that entire layer cake just to go and compete against somebody like Mongo or something like that. So, you start to unwind the costs of that. Whereas Azure, went and they build basically ground up services for the most part. And Google kind of falls somewhere in between in how they build their-- They're a sort of layer cake type effect, but not as many layers I guess you could say. >> I feel like, you know, Amazon's trying to be a platform for the ecosystem. Yes, they have their own products and they're going to sell. And that's going to drive their profitability cause they don't have to split the pie. But, they're taking a piece of-- They're spinning the meter, as Ziyas Caravalo likes to say on every time Snowflake or Databricks or Mongo or Atlas is, you know, running on their system. They take a piece of the action. Now, Microsoft does that as well. But, you look at Microsoft and security, head-to-head competitors, for example, with a CrowdStrike or an Okta in identity. Whereas, it seems like at least for now, AWS is a more friendly place for the ecosystem. At the same time, you do a lot of business in Microsoft. >> Yeah. And I think that a lot of companies have always feared that Amazon would just throw, you know, bodies at it. And I think that people have come to the realization that a two pizza team, as Amazon would call it, is eight people. I think that's, you know, two slices per person. I'm a little bit fat, so I don't know if that's enough. But, you start to look at it and go, okay, if they're going to start out with eight engineers, if I'm a startup and they're part of my ecosystem, do I really fear them or should I really embrace them and try to partner closer with them? And I think the smart people and the smart companies are partnering with them because they're realizing, Amazon, unless they can see it to, you know, a hundred million, $500 million market, they're not going to throw eight to 16 people at a problem. I think when, you know, you could say, you could look at the elastic with OpenSearch and what they did there. And the licensing terms and the battle they went through. But they knew that Elastic had a huge market. Also, you had a number of ecosystem companies building on top of now OpenSearch, that are now domain on top of Amazon as well. So, I think Amazon's being pretty strategic in how they're doing it. I think some of the-- It'll be interesting. I think this year is a payout year for the cuts that they're making to some of the services internally to kind of, you know, how do we take the fat off some of those services that-- You know, you look at Alexa. I don't know how much revenue Alexa really generates for them. But it's a means to an end for a number of different other services and partners. >> What do you make of this ChatGPT? I mean, Microsoft obviously is playing that card. You want to, you want ChatGPT in the Cloud, come to Azure. Seems like AWS has to respond. And we know Google is, you know, sharpening its knives to come up with its response. >> Yeah, I mean Google just went and talked about Bard for the first time this week and they're in private preview or I guess they call it beta, but. Right at the moment to select, select AI users, which I have no idea what that means. But that's a very interesting way that they're marketing it out there. But, I think that Amazon will have to respond. I think they'll be more measured than say, what Google's doing with Bard and just throwing it out there to, hey, we're going into beta now. I think they'll look at it and see where do we go and how do we actually integrate this in? Because they do have a lot of components of AI and ML underneath the hood that other services use. And I think that, you know, they've learned from that. And I think that they've already done a good job. Especially for media and entertainment when you start to look at some of the ways that they use it for helping do graphics and helping to do drones. I think part of their buy of iRobot was the fact that iRobot was a big user of RoboMaker, which is using different models to train those robots to go around objects and things like that, so. >> Quick touch on Kubernetes, the whole DevOps World we just covered. The Cloud Native Foundation Security, CNCF. The security conference up in Seattle last week. First time they spun that out kind of like reinforced, you know, AWS spins out, reinforced from reinvent. Amsterdam's coming up soon, the CubeCon. What should we expect? What's hot in Cubeland? >> Yeah, I think, you know, Kubes, you're going to be looking at how OpenShift keeps growing and I think to that respect you get to see the momentum with people like Red Hat. You see others coming up and realizing how OpenShift has gone to market as being, like you were saying, partnering with those Clouds and really making it simple. I think the simplicity and the manageability of Kubernetes is going to be at the forefront. I think a lot of the investment is still going into, how do I bring observability and DevOps and AIOps and MLOps all together. And I think that's going to be a big place where people are going to be looking to see what comes out of CubeCon in Amsterdam. I think it's that manageability ease of use. >> Well Rob, I look forward to working with you on behalf of the whole Cube team. We're going to do more of these and go out to some shows extract the signal from the noise. Really appreciate you coming into our studio. >> Well, thank you for having me on. Really appreciate it. >> You're really welcome. All right, keep it right there, or thanks for watching. This is Dave Vellante for the Cube. And we'll see you next time. (light music)

>>Hello everyone. Welcome to the Super Cloud Event preview. I'm John Forry, host of the Cube, and with Dave Valante, host of the popular Super cloud events. This is Super Cloud two preview. I'm joined by industry leader and Cube alumni, Victoria Vigo, vice president of klos Cross Cloud Services at VMware. Vittorio. Great to see you. We're here for the preview of Super Cloud two on January 17th, virtual event, live stage performance, but streamed out to the audience virtually. We're gonna do a preview. Thanks for coming in. >>My pleasure. Always glad to be here. >>It's holiday time. We had the first super cloud on in August prior to VMware, explore North America prior to VMware, explore Europe prior to reinvent. We've been through that, but right now, super Cloud has got momentum. Super Cloud two has got some success. Before we dig into it, let's take a step back and set the table. What is Super Cloud and why is important? Why are people buzzing about it? Why is it a thing? >>Look, we have been in the cloud now for like 10, 15 years and the cloud is going strong and I, I would say that going cloud first was deliberate and strategic in most cases. In some cases the, the developer was going for the path of risk resistance, but in any sizable company, this caused the companies to end up in a multi-cloud world where 85% of the companies out there use two or multiple clouds. And with that comes what we call cloud chaos, because each cloud brings their own management tools, development tools, security. And so that increase the complexity and cost. And so we believe that it's time to usher a new era in cloud computing, which we, you call the super cloud. We call it cross cloud services, which allows our customers to have a single way to build, manage, secure, and access any application across any cloud. Lowering the cost and simplifying the environment. Since >>Dave Ante and I introduced and rift on the concept of Supercloud, as we talked about at reinvent last year, a lot has happened. Supercloud one, it was in August, but prior to that, great momentum in the industry. Great conversation. People are loving it, they're hating it, which means it's got some traction. Berkeley has come on board as with a position paper. They're kind of endorsing it. They call it something different. You call it cross cloud services, whatever it is. It's kind of the same theme we're seeing. And so the industry has recognized something is happening that's different than what Cloud one was or the first generation of cloud. Now we have something different. This Super Cloud two in January. This event has traction with practitioners, customers, big name brands, Sachs, fifth Avenue, Warner, media Financial, mercury Financial, other big names are here. They're leaning in. They're excited. Why the traction in the customer's industry converts over to, to the customer traction. Why is it happening? You, you get a lot of data. >>Well, in, in Super Cloud one, it was a vendor fest, right? But these vendors are smart people that get their vision from where, from the customers. This, this stuff doesn't happen in a vacuum. We all talk to customers and we tend to lean on the early adopters and the early adopters of the cloud are the ones that are telling us, we now are in a place where the complexity is too much. The cost is ballooning. We're going towards slow down potentially in the economy. We need to get better economics out of, of our cloud. And so every single customers I talked to today, or any sizable company as this problem, the developers have gone off, built all these applications, and now the business is coming to the operators and asking, where are my applications? Are they performing? What is the security posture? And how do we do compliance? And so now they're realizing we need to do something about this or it is gonna be unmanageable. >>I wanna go to a clip I pulled out from the, our video data lake and the cube. If we can go to that clip, it's Chuck Whitten Dell at a keynote. He was talking about what he calls multi-cloud by default, not by design. This is a state of the, of the industry. If we're gonna roll that clip, and I wanna get your reaction to that. >>Well, look, customers have woken up with multiple clouds, you know, multiple public clouds. On-premise clouds increasingly as the edge becomes much more a reality for customers clouds at the edge. And so that's what we mean by multi-cloud by default. It's not yet been designed strategically. I think our argument yesterday was it can be, and it should be, it is a very logical place for architecture to land because ultimately customers want the innovation across all of the hyperscale public clouds. They will see workloads and use cases where they wanna maintain an on-premise cloud. On-premise clouds are not going away. I mentioned edge Cloud, so it should be strategic. It's just not today. It doesn't work particularly well today. So when we say multi-cloud, by default we mean that's the state of the world. Today, our goal is to bring multi-cloud by design, as you heard. Yeah, I >>Mean, I, okay, Vittorio, that's, that's the head of Dell Technologies president. He obvious he runs it. Michael Dell's still around, but you know, he's the leader. This is a interesting observation. You know, he's not a customer. We have some customer equips we'll go to as well, but by default it kind of happened not by design. So we're now kind of in a zoom out issue where, okay, I got this environment just landed on me. What, what is the, what's your reaction to that clip of how multi-cloud has become present in, in everyone's on everyone's plate right now to deal with? Yeah, >>I it is, it is multi-cloud by default, I would call it by accident. We, we really got there by accident. I think now it's time to make it a strategic asset because look, we're using multiple cloud for a reason, because all these hyperscaler bring tremendous innovation that we want to leverage. But I strongly believe that in it, especially history repeat itself, right? And so if you look at the history of it, as was always when a new level of obstruction that simplify things, that we got the next level of innovation at the lower cost, you know, from going from c plus plus to Visual basic, going from integrating application at the bits of by layer to SOA and then web services. It's, it's only when we simplify the environment that we can go faster and lower cost. And the multi-cloud is ready for that level of obstruction today. >>You know, you've made some good points. You know, developers went crazy building great apps. Now they got, they gotta roll it out and operationalize it globally. A lot of compliance issues going on. The costs are going up. We got an economic challenge, but also agility with the cloud. So using cloud and or hybrid, you can get better agility. And also moving to the cloud, it's kind of still slow. Okay, so I get that at reinvent this year and at VMware explorer we were observing and we reported that you're seeing a transition to a new kind of ecosystem partner. Ones that aren't just ISVs anymore. You have ISVs, independent software vendors, but you got the emergence of bigger players that just, they got platforms, they have their own ecosystems. So you're seeing ecosystems on top of ecosystems where, you know, MongoDB CEO and the Databricks CEO both told me, we're not an isv, we're a platform built on a cloud. So this new kind of super cloudlike thing is going on. Why should someone pay attention to the super cloud movement? We're on two, we're gonna continue to do these out in the open. Anyone can participate. Why should people pay attention to this? Why should they come to the event? Why is this important? Is this truly an inflection point? And if they do pay attention, what should they pay attention to? >>I would pay attention to two things. If you are customers that are now starting to realize that you have a multi-cloud problem and the costs are getting outta control, look at what the leading vendors are saying, connect the dots with the early adopters and some of the customers that we are gonna have at Super Cloud two, and use those learning to not fall into the same trap. So I, I'll give you an example. I was talking to a Fortune 50 in Europe in my latest trip, and this is an a CIO that is telling me >>We build all these applications and now for compliance reason, the business is coming to me, I don't even know where they are, right? And so what I was telling him, so look, there are other customers that are already there. What did they do? They built a platform engineering team. What is the platform? Engineering team is a, is an operation team that understands how developers build modern applications and lays down the foundation across multiple clouds. So the developers can be developers and do their thing, which is writing code. But now you as a cio, as a, as a, as a governing body, as a security team can have the guardrail. So do you know that these applications are performing at a lower cost and are secure and compliant? >>Patura, you know, it's really encouraging and, and love to get your thoughts on this is one is the general consensus of industry leaders. I talked to like yourself in the round is the old way was soft complexity with more complexity. The cloud demand simplicity, you mentioned abstraction layer. This is our next inflection point. It's gotta be simpler and it's gotta be easy and it's gotta be performant. That's the table stakes of the cloud. What's your thoughts on this next wave of simplicity versus complexity? Because again, abstraction layers take away complexity, they should make it simpler. What's your thoughts? >>Yeah, so I'll give you few examples. One, on the development side and runtime. You, you one would think that Kubernetes will solve all the problems you have Kubernetes everywhere, just look at, but every cloud has a different distribution of Kubernetes, right? So for example, at VMware with tansu, we create a single place that allows you to deploy that any Kubernetes environment. But now you have one place to set your policies. We take care of the differences between this, this system. The second area is management, right? So once you have all everything deployed, how do you get a single object model that tells you where your stuff is and how it's performing, and then apply policies to it as well. So these are two areas and security and so on and so forth. So the idea is that figure out what you can abstract and make common across cloud. Make that simple and put it in one place while always allowing the developers to go underneath and use the differentiated features for innovation. >>Yeah, one of the areas I'm excited, I want to get your thoughts of too is, we haven't talked about this in the past, but it, I'll throw it out there. I think the, the new AI coming out chat, G P T and other things like lens, you see it and see new kinds of AI coming that's gonna be right in the heavy lifting opportunity to make things easier with AI and automation. I think AI will be a big factor in super cloud and, and cross cloud. What's your thoughts? >>Well, the one way to look at AI is, is one of the main, main services that you would want out of a multi-cloud, right? You want eventually, right now Google seems to have an edge, but you know, the competition creates, you know, innovation. So later on you wanna use something from Azure or from or from Oracle or something that, so you want at some point that is gonna be prone every single service in in the cloud is gonna be prone to obstruction and simplification. And I, I'm just excited about to see >>What book, I can't wait for the chat services to write code automatically for us. Well, >>They >>Do, they do. They're doing it now. They do. >>Oh, the other day, somebody, you know that I do this song par this for. So for fun sometimes. And somebody the other day said, ask the AI to write a parody song for multi-cloud. And so I have the lyrics stay >>Tuned. I should do that from my blog post. Hey, write a blog post on this January 17th, Victoria, thanks for coming in, sharing the preview bottom line. Why should people come? Why is it important? What's your final kind of takeaway? Billboard message >>History is repeat itself. It goes to three major inflection points, right? We had the inflection point with the cloud and the people that got left behind, they were not as competitive as the people that got on top o of this wave. The new wave is the super cloud, what we call cross cloud services. So if you are a customer that is experiencing this problem today, tune in to to hear from other customers in, in your same space. If you are behind, tune in to avoid the, the, the, the mistakes and the, the shortfalls of this new wave. And so that you can use multi-cloud to accelerate your business and kick butt in the future. >>All right. Kicking kick your names and kicking butt. Okay, we're here on J January 17th. Super Cloud two. Momentum continues. We'll be super cloud three. There'll be super cloud floor. More and more open conversations. Join the community, join the conversation. It's open. We want more voices. We want more, more industry. We want more customers. It's happening. A lot of momentum. Victoria, thank you for your time. Thank you. Okay. I'm John Farer, host of the Cube. Thanks for watching.

the cube presents ignite 22. brought to you by Palo Alto Networks hey guys and girls welcome back to Las Vegas it's thecube we are live at Palo Alto networks ignite 22. this is day one of two days of cube coverage Lisa Martin here with Dave vellante Dave we've had great conversations today talking with Executives the partner ecosystem is evolving it's growing at Palo Alto networks going to be digging into that next well we heard a lot of talk about you know Palo Alto you know the goal 100 billion dollar you know market cap company and to me a way and I think a critical way in which you get there is partner with the ecosystem because you can't do it alone the power of many versus the resources of one agree completely agree we've got Carl Sutherland with us SVP of North America ecosystem sales at Palo Alto networks welcome to the cube thanks so much for having me it's great being here so here we are the first full day of the conference actually started yesterday with the partner Summit give the audience a flavor of the partner Summit who was there what was talked about what's the current voice of the partner these days yeah great questions so we had a 150 Partners from around the globe representing all of our different routes to Market and for us our partner Community is expanding we work with system integrators we work with gsis we work with service providers Distributors traditional value-added resellers so it was a whole host of partners that were there it was a c-level audience and we really talked about the direction of where we're going as a company how they can continue to invest with us and have greater success long term and so from a voice of the partner standpoint what they're here to do is share with us where they want to engage more how we can enable them to be successful you talked about the Power of One Versus a community we're really looking at a segment of the marketplace right now for us to scale and hit our aspirational goals we can't do it with Palo Alto Network employees we have an employee base of 12 000 people if you take our ecosystem it's over a hundred thousand employees so if we can get them aligned and selling and motivated it's going to be a good day for all of us what so what are they telling you where do they want to spend their time where do they want to add value where are they winning yeah that's a great question so there's a transformation that's going on right now in the partner Community what's happening is a lot of Partners going that are transitioning from what would be traditional transactional Partners or resale Partners to being services-led and the Market's driving them there and what I mean by that is that customers are in a desperate dire State needing assistance figuring out and solving these very complex security problems so if there is a subset of Partners out there that have the skill set and capabilities that can come in from a consultative standpoint help them to develop the structure through deployment a full-blown management and do life cycle management that's a tremendous value I mean the numbers you hear thrown around in the industry right now is up to seven million uh security I.T jobs right now that are out there the open head count is tremendous people can't hire people fast enough all of us in the industry are going through and trying to find early in career or college graduates so we can train quickly or cross-train from other segments to get them into cyber security so if our part of the community can continue to get skilled and expand it's only going to help and the cloud is obviously where does the cloud fit in Carl because you know a lot of the partners when the clouds really start on the Steep part of the s-curve are like we have an opportunity here and by the way if we don't transition our business we could get commoditized yes so that you know that but you were talking about the transactional we can help people move to the cloud and a big part of that has got to be we can secure them in the cloud because it's a more in a lot of ways you know Cloud security is great but in a lot of ways it adds complexity what are you hearing from the party yeah so we are fortunate at Palo Alto networks when you look across the three loud largest cloud service provider from a Google AWS and Microsoft Azure we're either their number one isv or absolutely their number one security ISP so we've got a great uh relationships with them now our partners are coming along and saying how do we transact how do we add value a lot of times that value to your question is wrapping services around it to make sure it's a successful deployment because exactly what you stated the complexity is an all-time high so how do we make sure that we can solve a complex problem in a short term while increasing their security posture and that's really the goal and so where there there's sometimes complexity and mystery there's opportunity and partners can be profitable in doing that I wrote a piece once chaos is cash I have a security you know the criminals and vendors as well yes yes where there is is challenge and complexity there is great opportunity yeah talk about some of the partner program Evolution and some of the things that were announced with respect to the next wave program just yesterday yeah so at next wave um the program's been around for 12 years we constantly are looking to make enhancements and how we make those enhancements are by going out and speaking with these partners and listening to what they need so I have the honor to get to represent what their needs are and how we bring it to market for them so a couple interesting announcements that we made yesterday first of all we announced a new structural format for the program which is really going to allow our different route to markets to have a program that's fit for them because in the past when we were just traditionally a firewall company when the ecosystem just meant resale it was an easy model to have it's complex right now sometimes it's resale sometimes it's influence sometimes its services only we really need to be flexible and credible so we announced a Services only path so if you are a consulting company if you are a insurance company and you want to bring opportunities and leads to Palo Alto Network and you want to provide the services if you're not interested in the transaction you don't want to get involved in that we now have a pathway for you to support you to enable you and Kennedy to give you recognition within Palo Alto networks from an alignment standpoint so we're super excited about that uh as I know you guys speak quite a bit about the managed Services industry so it's a red hot area within Palo Alto networks one of the needs out there was that all not all managed Service Partners are created equally and so some have fantastic capabilities some have gaps we were calling it a P2P part of the partner program within managed services so our two managed Services Partners can actually work together to solve the problem that the end user has and give them a better outcome and fill each other's gaps so candidly it's been going on for a while the partnering but we've never really recognized it so we really built a program around it and now are sponsoring and supporting it versus people doing it on a sidebar so those guys were here in force yesterday yes sir right and and so obviously a lot of energy I'm sure do you see a day where they're here in force on the show floor yeah and and how do you see that evolving so they are here enforcement just right here you see a few of them I'm looking at AWS who's our you know we are their largest isv I'm looking at CDW we had them on the floor is our if not largest second largest partner globally right now and continuing to grow at a rate well they will probably be our first billion dollar partner to think about the size and scale of that relationship and where we've come from um their name CDW don't they never really thought of CDW right as a as a security firm wow what a transformation but please carry on and think about that let's talk about CDW saying think about reach that CDW has it's a 23 billion dollar organization and in a way an inside out sales model meaning there's a tremendous reach they have from their inside sales team and the relationships that they have traditionally historically they were procurement relationships in a way and I said this to the CDW team they were the easy button in the past now what they're doing is they made Seven Acquisitions over the last two years all of them Services oriented so now they're coming in as a consultative Viewpoint and solving a lot of complex problems and I see Google Cloud right here another great partner for us that we continue to invest in we have a great amount of integration and Technology integration with them and so and those are the three that I'm seeing just looking over my left shoulder right if I turn around I'll probably name five more so the majority of this room are the partners that fall within our ecosystem today fantastic so okay so what's your vision for where you want to take this ecosystem because as I said at the top I mean ecosystems are sort of the Hallmark of a I guess you're not a cloud company see I think you of you as a cloud company and so okay good so and I know you don't own your own public cloud and you know your history is you had your own data centers but yeah but you're the security Cloud yeah and so a security Cloud any Cloud needs a great ecosystem so what's your vision for the ecosystem let's go you know five plus years out sure you we start with the end in mind and what I mean by that is we always start with the end user what's the end user's needs the end user today needs flexibility with how they consume the technology they need help in how they support and deploy the technology they need guidance in how they plan out for their future and what their growth is so what we're doing is building a very diverse set of Partners in our ecosystem that all have special skills that they bring to the table so when nikesh sits up here and talks about being a 10 billion or a 20 billion or a 50 billion dollar company we absolutely cannot do it without our ecosystem and without having a very diverse ecosystem that all has different skills that can help us scale because again Palo Alto does not want to be a services company right let's work with the people who are the best at that when we think about the deloittees and accentures and the value they have within the end user base and our joint customer base what a fantastic time to to partner together and solve those boardroom challenges and that's where I really see the vision is that at the boardroom we're building out a plan that's three to five years that's going to continue to increase their security posture because we're not thinking if we're not forward thinking like that will be left behind because the Bad actors are thinking about how they find the different areas to penetrate they're getting so sophisticated the badocracy adversaries they are well funded they're motivated Grant the ransomware attack numbers in terms of the Velocity the complexity yes no longer are we going to get if it's when yeah uh big challenge for organizations Acro across I mean really across an organization regardless of Industry are you guys having any conversations with boards in the partner organization to help align the board with the executive level and really not just have security as a board level initiative but actually being able to execute a strategy yeah and you you nailed it it's not an initiative the initiative to me means there's a beginning and an end right a strategy means there's going to be a comprehensive approach how you continue to improve and we are very fortunate that a lot of our largest Partners around the globe have that position within the boards where they are the trusted advisor so what we're doing now is enabling them and giving them the skills so they can have a more comprehensive conversation around our platform approach around the challenges you know BJ I knew who was with you earlier today likes to say that the average customer he goes and sees has 50 to 70 disparate Technologies within their environment how do you manage that how do you maintain it how do you do renewals oh and by the way most likely the people who actually initially procured that aren't with you anymore they're in a different company so the need for a platform approach is there more so than ever but the decision for the platform quite often has to come from the most senior levels within the organization because again I'm going to go back to your what was your chaos line that you said chaos is Cash chaos is Cash well also chaos is job security so if you're at at the lower level within an organization that chaos and that magic gives you a little job security but that's a short term long term you really need to think about how you're protecting the environment holistically so it is a boardroom decision down that we need to have and you know that chaos the the motivation for that piece that I wrote was from the criminals standpoint right and then I was like okay but there's great opportunities for the technology industry but but I think that you know where we're headed I wonder if I get your thoughts on thoughts on this Carlos we always talk about the Board Room I think we're going now Beyond it here I am you know I'm hypersensitive about my security I got password managers two-factor authentication I don't want SMS based two-factor authentication I want my own authenticator and that's still not enough yeah I got air gaps yeah you know for my crypto you know and I'm super paranoid my point is I think the the individuals are getting much more Savvy about security why because we've all been hacked you know it's like when you lost your data in the because you weren't backed up you know that never happens anymore it's in the cloud or you know some people have multiple backups so it's it's becoming a cultural Trend beyond the board and it's because of the board lord said hey this is really important and so I think it's not only top down I think you're going to see bottom up and middle out and the exciting part for Palo Alto networks is and maybe for you as well is there any more exciting environment to talk about that's rapidly changing and constantly changing you could come back next week and our conversation is going to change as far as what we're doing we constantly need to be thinking three steps ahead of where we're going to move and be flexible and dynamic enough to change and that's what's going to keep us ahead of the economy yeah there's no segment as Dynamic I mean data is dynamic but not as fast changing as cyber I mean because of the adversary as you mentioned I mean so smart so now now they have open adversary ecosystems I mean the adversaries are building ecosystems right absolutely insane I've got peers that are bad guys yeah right right chaos is Cash what's your favorite partner story that you think really demonstrates the value of the ecosystem that Palo Alto networks has built yeah so without sharing names I'll talk about a large U.S national partner that was very uh that was founded on a networking business and partnered with a very large networking company and built that business and was successful doing that they wanted to Pivot into the security space and very early on they made a commitment to Paulo and Ulta networks to say we're going to learn we're going to invest we're going to align with your sales force and we're going to work together and right now they are our largest partner globally and they grew 70 year over year wow so think about that this is not on a small base we're talking about a half a billion dollars in Revenue growing at 70 year over year because to your point earlier it wasn't an initiative it was a strategy and they're executing on the strategy so I tell a lot of we call War Stories like that to other partners that are looking to invest from different markets it could be a large service provider that's you know trying to transform themselves into a security player and talk about the potential of what it could be in for their Marketplace and by the way I say publicly quite often Palo Alto networks will be your most profitable relationship that you have because of the total addressable Market that we're going after because of the solutions that we bring to Market and because of the opportunity within the end users right now and we're excited I want to come back to the mssp in that in its context so we've seen the rise of the mssp and particularly you know we were talking earlier I think it was with Wendy that uh no it was with CDW like 50 of the organizations in North America don't even have a sock yeah right so they need a service provider to come out so you said we you don't want to be in the services business right you're a product company right and that's from a financial standpoint that's phenomenal you're roughly 50 billion dollar market cap company let's let's call it six billion in Revenue so that's a nice Revenue multiple 8X you know and and and the Market's down so you're a 10x Revenue multiple company typically services companies are a 1x or a 2X are you seeing a change there where technology is giving these service providers operating leverage where they're able to scale whether it's because of the cloud because of the Partnerships the Eco would you call it before the the peer-to-peer ecosystem yes like the Gap fillers yes are you do you see the economics of services changing yeah from a baseline economic standpoint not looking at the valuations but let's look at it from a an opportunity to be profitable with Palo Alto networks we know if you are just doing the transaction you have a certain range of margin that you're going to make in the opportunity we know if you wrap services around it you're going to get 3x to 4X that margin we know that if it's managed services and there's life cycle management you're talking 5x to 8X that initial transaction and by the way it's recurring revenue for them so when you think about it if you just do a transaction you're only recurring revenue is a renewal that's predictable but it's not extremely profitable now we're saying the operating leverage you get is if you wrap that services and you're going to have an increased opportunity for a greater margin and it's sticky it's hard to replace a partner who's adding value to your team and A lot of times you walk in the end user you can't tell who the partner is and who the end user is because they are one team that's value yes and that's going to drive ebit yep for your partners and that's going to drive valuation you know you know I want to come back to valuation not that I'm not you can do that okay but because I was I predicted I do my prediction post every year and I predicted last year that we're going to see you know a Spate of MSS mssps I predicted you're going to see someone go public nobody's going public these days but I still think it's a great business yeah that's an untapped opportunity it's not an 8X or it's not a software marginal economics or but it's really sticky super high value yeah and I think it has you know long-term potential yeah to your point if you want to talk valuations for a second let's look at what's happened to the marketplace over the last 12 to 18 months the large majority of the non-public partners that we work with have taken on Capital from private Equity the private Equity that has come in has challenged them to go through a transformation that transformation is you we need you to be Services LED and that service is value because they believe there's going to is going to be a great greater evaluation from that end and they'll be able to scale and grow and stay ahead of the market doing that so when we have conversations when I have conversations yes I'm talking about the technology and the direction of the company but I'm also in there as a consultant saying where's the direction of your company and how do we have this great platform and how do we build it into your business and you wrap services around it and those are the conversations that CEOs want to have when I'm sitting down with our partner CEOs I bet they don't want to talk about our product being better than someone else's product they want to talk about the direction and health of their business yeah it's their business that's a business discussion business decision and they're thinking about okay what's my five-year strategic plan because they got to make bets yeah they're going to bet on a platform that they can add value to that creates that flywheel effect and they get a bet on your ecosystem as well correct oh correct absolutely good to be the leader it's good to be a leader and you know I'm sure as you've heard a few times we believe that economic headwinds are going to favor the market leaders and economic headwinds are going to favor the platform approach so we're going in more aggressive with our partner Community than ever before and there's just so much energy and excitement I feel like I keep on using that term over and over again but that's really what we walk away with last question for you is we have about 30 seconds left a lot of momentum in the partner ecosystem as you've described eloquently what's next what's next what's next yeah so when I I rolled out the strategy for what's next and what it is is a foundational platform that is going to allow flexibility for the partners and for them to decide where they want to invest and it can be in new areas it can be I went online closer with the cloud service providers it could be I want to build a managed Services business can you help us do this it could be I want to go through and I want to drive greater penetration into geographical areas we haven't been before so again we're almost acting as a consultant looking at what they're going from the direction and building a program and a platform where we can grow and work with them it's exciting it's fun it's great highly collaborative highly collaborative highly collaborative thank you for joining us on the program on the partner program the ecosystem Better Together what you guys are doing and ultimately how it benefits the end user customer we really appreciate your insights excellent thank you thank you so much appreciate it all right our pleasure for our guests and Dave vellante I'm Lisa Martin you're watching the cube the leader in live Enterprise and emerging Tech coverage [Music]

foreign welcome back to re invent 2022 we're wrapping up four days well one evening and three solid days wall-to-wall of cube coverage I'm Dave vellante John furrier's birthday is today he's on a plane to London to go see his nephew get married his his great Sister Janet awesome family the furriers uh spanning the globe and uh and John I know you wanted to be here you're watching in Newark or you were waiting to uh to get in the plane so all the best to you happy birthday one year the Amazon PR people brought a cake out to celebrate John's birthday because he's always here at AWS re invented his birthday so I'm really pleased to have two really special guests uh former Cube host Cube Alum great wikibon contributor Stu miniman now with red hat still good to see you again great to be here Dave yeah I was here for that cake uh the twitterverse uh was uh really helping to celebrate John's birthday today and uh you know always great to be here with you and then with this you know Awesome event this week and friend of the cube of many time Cube often Cube contributor as here's a cube analyst this week as his own consultancy sarbj johal great to see you thanks for coming on good to see you Dave uh great to see you stu I'm always happy to participate in these discussions and um I enjoy the discussion every time so this is kind of cool because you know usually the last day is a getaway day and this is a getaway day but this place is still packed I mean it's I mean yeah it's definitely lighter you can at least walk and not get slammed but I subjit I'm going to start with you I I wanted to have you as the the tail end here because cause you participated in the analyst sessions you've been watching this event from from the first moment and now you've got four days of the Kool-Aid injection but you're also talking to customers developers Partners the ecosystem where do you want to go what's your big takeaways I think big takeaways that Amazon sort of innovation machine is chugging along they are I was listening to some of the accessions and when I was back to my room at nine so they're filling the holes in some areas but in some areas they're moving forward there's a lot to fix still it doesn't seem like that it seems like we are done with the cloud or The Innovation is done now we are building at the millisecond level so where do you go next there's a lot of room to grow on the storage side on the network side uh the improvements we need and and also making sure that the software which is you know which fits the hardware like there's a specialized software um sorry specialized hardware for certain software you know so there was a lot of talk around that and I attended some of those sessions where I asked the questions around like we have a specialized database for each kind of workload specialized processes processors for each kind of workload yeah the graviton section and actually the the one interesting before I forget that the arbitration was I asked that like why there are so many so many databases and IRS for the egress costs and all that stuff can you are you guys thinking about reducing that you know um the answer was no egress cost is not a big big sort of uh um show stopper for many of the customers but but the from all that sort of little discussion with with the folks sitting who build these products over there was that the plethora of choice is given to the customers to to make them feel that there's no vendor lock-in so if you are using some open source you know um soft software it can be on the you know platform side or can be database side you have database site you have that option at AWS so this is a lot there because I always thought that that AWS is the mother of all lock-ins but it's got an ecosystem and we're going to talk about exactly we'll talk about Stu what's working within AWS when you talk to customers and where are the challenges yeah I I got a comment on open source Dave of course there because I mean look we criticized to Amazon for years about their lack of contribution they've gotten better they're doing more in open source but is Amazon the mother of all lock-ins many times absolutely there's certain people inside Amazon I'm saying you know many of us talk Cloud native they're like well let's do Amazon native which means you're like full stack is things from Amazon and do things the way that we want to do things and you know I talk to a lot of customers they use more than one Cloud Dave and therefore certain things absolutely I want to Leverage The Innovation that Amazon has brought I do think we're past building all the main building blocks in many ways we are like in day two yes Amazon is fanatically customer focused and will always stay that way but you know there wasn't anything that jumped out at me last year or this year that was like Wow new category whole new way of thinking about something we're in a vocals last year Dave said you know we have over 200 services and if we listen to you the customer we'd have over two thousand his session this week actually got some great buzz from my friends in the serverless ecosystem they love some of the things tying together we're using data the next flywheel that we're going to see for the next 10 years Amazon's at the center of the cloud ecosystem in the IT world so you know there's a lot of good things here and to your point Dave the ecosystem one of the things I always look at is you know was there a booth that they're all going to be crying in their beer after Amazon made an announcement there was not a tech vendor that I saw this week that was like oh gosh there was an announcement and all of a sudden our business is gone where I did hear some rumbling is Amazon might be the next GSI to really move forward and we've seen all the gsis pushing really deep into supporting Cloud bringing workloads to the cloud and there's a little bit of rumbling as to that balance between what Amazon will do and their uh their go to market so a couple things so I think I think we all agree that a lot of the the announcements here today were taping seams right I call it and as it relates to the mother of all lock-in the reason why I say that it's it's obviously very much a pejorative compare Oracle company you know really well with Amazon's lock-in for Amazon's lock-in is about bringing this ecosystem together so that you actually have Choice Within the the house so you don't have to leave you know there's a there's a lot to eat at the table yeah you look at oracle's ecosystem it's like yeah you know oracle is oracle's ecosystem so so that is how I think they do lock in customers by incenting them not to leave because there's so much Choice Dave I agree with you a thousand I mean I'm here I'm a I'm a good partner of AWS and all of the partners here want to be successful with Amazon and Amazon is open to that it's not our way or get out which Oracle tries how much do you extract from the overall I.T budget you know are you a YouTube where you give the people that help you create a large sum of the money YouTube hasn't been all that profitable Amazon I think is doing a good balance of the ecosystem makes money you know we used to talk Dave about you know how much dollars does VMware make versus there um I think you know Amazon is a much bigger you know VMware 2.0 we used to think talk about all the time that VMware for every dollar spent on VMware licenses 15 or or 12 or 20 were spent in the ecosystem I would think the ratio is even higher here sarbji and an Oracle I would say it's I don't know yeah actually 1 to 0.5 maybe I don't know but I want to pick on your discussion about the the ecosystem the the partner ecosystem is so it's it's robust strong because it's wider I was I was not saying that there's no lock-in with with Amazon right AWS there's lock-in there's lock-in with everything there's lock-in with open source as well but but the point is that they're they're the the circle is so big you don't feel like locked in but they're playing smart as well they're bringing in the software the the platforms from the open source they're picking up those packages and saying we'll bring it in and cater that to you through AWS make it better perform better and also throw in their custom chips on top of that hey this MySQL runs better here so like what do you do I said oh Oracle because it's oracle's product if you will right so they are I think think they're filing or not slenders from their go to market strategy from their engineering and they listen to they're listening to customers like very closely and that has sort of side effects as well listening to customers creates a sprawl of services they have so many services and I criticized them last year for calling everything a new service I said don't call it a new service it's a feature of a existing service sure a lot of features a lot of features this is egress our egress costs a real problem or is it just the the on-prem guys picking at the the scab I mean what do you hear from customers so I mean Dave you know I I look at what Corey Quinn talks about all the time and Amazon charges on that are more expensive than any other Cloud the cloud providers and partly because Amazon is you know probably not a word they'd use they are dominant when it comes to the infrastructure space and therefore they do want to make it a little bit harder to do that they can get away with it um because um yeah you know we've seen some of the cloud providers have special Partnerships where you can actually you know leave and you're not going to be charged and Amazon they've been a little bit more flexible but absolutely I've heard customers say that they wish some good tunning and tongue-in-cheek stuff what else you got we lay it on us so do our players okay this year I think the focus was on the upside it's shifting gradually this was more focused on offside there were less talk of of developers from the main stage from from all sort of quadrants if you will from all Keynotes right so even Werner this morning he had a little bit for he was talking about he he was talking he he's job is to Rally up the builders right yeah so he talks about the go build right AWS pipes I thought was kind of cool then I said like I'm making glue easier I thought that was good you know I know some folks don't use that I I couldn't attend the whole session but but I heard in between right so it is really adopt or die you know I am Cloud Pro for last you know 10 years and I think it's the best model for a technology consumption right um because of economies of scale but more importantly because of division of labor because of specialization because you can't afford to hire the best security people the best you know the arm chip designers uh you can't you know there's one actually I came up with a bumper sticker you guys talked about bumper sticker I came up with that like last couple of weeks The Innovation favorite scale they have scale they have Innovation so that's where the Innovation is and it's it's not there again they actually say the market sets the price Market you as a customer don't set the price the vendor doesn't set the price Market sets the price so if somebody's complaining about their margins or egress and all that I think that's BS um yeah I I have a few more notes on the the partner if you you concur yeah Dave you know with just coming back to some of this commentary about like can Amazon actually enable something we used to call like Community clouds uh your companies like you know Goldman and NASDAQ and the like where Industries will actually be able to share data uh and you know expand the usage and you know Amazon's going to help drive that API economy forward some so it's good to see those things because you know we all know you know all of us are smarter than just any uh single company together so again some of that's open source but some of that is you know I think Amazon is is you know allowing Innovation to thrive I think the word you're looking for is super cloud there well yeah I mean it it's uh Dave if you want to go there with the super cloud because you know there's a metaphor for exactly what you described NASDAQ Goldman Sachs we you know and and you know a number of other companies that are few weeks at the Berkeley Sky Computing paper yeah you know that's a former supercloud Dave Linthicum calls it metacloud I'm not really careful I mean you know I go back to the the challenge we've been you know working at for a decade is the distributed architecture you know if you talk about AI architectures you know what lives in the cloud what lives at the edge where do we train things where do we do inferences um locations should matter a lot less Amazon you know I I didn't hear a lot about it this show but when they came out with like local zones and oh my gosh out you know all the things that Amazon is building to push out to the edge and also enabling that technology and software and the partner ecosystem helps expand that and Pull It in it's no longer you know Dave it was Hotel California all of the data eventually is going to end up in the public cloud and lock it in it's like I don't think that's going to be the case we know that there will be so much data out at the edge Amazon absolutely is super important um there some of those examples we're giving it's not necessarily multi-cloud but there's collaboration happening like in the healthcare world you know universities and hospitals can all share what they're doing uh regardless of you know where they live well Stephen Armstrong in the analyst session did say that you know we're going to talk about multi-cloud we're not going to lead with it necessarily but we are going to actually talk about it and that's different to your points too than in the fullness of time all the data will be in the cloud that's a new narrative but go ahead yeah actually Amazon is a leader in the cloud so if they push the cloud even if they don't say AWS or Amazon with it they benefit from it right and and the narrative is that way there's the proof is there right so again Innovation favorite scale there are chips which are being made for high scale their software being tweaked for high scale you as a Bank of America or for the Chrysler as a typical Enterprise you cannot afford to do those things in-house what cloud providers can I'm not saying just AWS Google cloud is there Azure guys are there and few others who are behind them and and you guys are there as well so IBM has IBM by the way congratulations to your red hat I know but IBM won the award um right you know very good partner and yeah but yeah people are dragging their feet people usually do on the change and they are in denial denial they they drag their feet and they came in IBM director feed the cave Den Dell drag their feed the cave in yeah you mean by Dragon vs cloud deniers cloud deniers right so server Huggers I call them but they they actually are sitting in Amazon Cloud Marketplace everybody is buying stuff from there the marketplace is the new model OKAY Amazon created the marketplace for b2c they are leading the marketplace of B2B as well on the technology side and other people are copying it so there are multiple marketplaces now so now actually it's like if you're in in a mobile app development there are two main platforms Android and Apple you first write the application for Apple right then for Android hex same here as a technology provider as and I I and and I actually you put your stuff to AWS first then you go anywhere else yeah they are later yeah the Enterprise app store is what we've wanted for a long time the question is is Amazon alone the Enterprise app store or are they partner of a of a larger portfolio because there's a lot of SAS companies out there uh that that play into yeah what we need well and this is what you're talking about the future but I just want to make a point about the past you talking about dragging their feet because the Cube's been following this and Stu you remember this in 2013 IBM actually you know got in a big fight with with Amazon over the CIA deal you know and it all became public judge wheeler eviscerated you know IBM and it ended up IBM ended up buying you know soft layer and then we know what happened there and it Joe Tucci thought the cloud was Mosey right so it's just amazing to see we have booksellers you know VMware called them books I wasn't not all of them are like talking about how great Partnerships they are it's amazing like you said sub GC and IBM uh with the the GSI you know Partnership of the year but what you guys were just talking about was the future and that's what I wanted to get to is because you know Amazon's been leading the way I I was listening to Werner this morning and that just reminded me of back in the days when we used to listen to IBM educate us give us a master class on system design and decoupled systems and and IO and everything else now Amazon is you know the master educator and it got me thinking how long will that last you know will they go the way of you know the other you know incumbents will they be disrupted or will they you know keep innovating maybe it's going to take 10 or 20 years I don't know yeah I mean Dave you actually you did some research I believe it was a year or so ago yeah but what will stop Amazon and the one thing that worries me a little bit um is the two Pizza teams when you have over 202 Pizza teams the amount of things that each one of those groups needs to take care of was more than any human could take care of people burn out they run out of people how many amazonians only last two or three years and then leave because it is tough I bumped into plenty of friends of mine that have been you know six ten years at Amazon and love it but it is a tough culture and they are driving werner's keynote I thought did look to from a product standpoint you could say tape over some of the seams some of those solutions to bring Beyond just a single product and bring them together and leverage data so there are some signs that they might be able to get past some of those limitations but I still worry structurally culturally there could be some challenges for Amazon to keep the momentum going especially with the global economic impact that we are likely to see in the next year bring us home I think the future side like we could talk about the vendors all day right to serve the community out there I think we should talk about how what's the future of technology consumption from the consumer side so from the supplier side just a quick note I think the only danger AWS has has that that you know Fred's going after them you know too big you know like we will break you up and that can cause some disruption there other than that I think they they have some more steam to go for a few more years at least before we start thinking about like oh this thing is falling apart or anything like that so they have a lot more they have momentum and it's continuing so okay from the I think game is on retail by the way is going to get disrupted before AWS yeah go ahead from the buyer's side I think um the the future of the sort of Technology consumption is based on the paper uh use and they actually are turning all their services to uh they are sort of becoming serverless behind the scenes right all analytics service they had one service left they they did that this year so every service is serverless so that means you pay exactly for the amount you use the compute the iops the the storage so all these three layers of course Network we talked about the egress stuff and that's a problem there because of the network design mainly because Google has a flatter design and they have lower cost so so they are actually squeezing the their their designing this their services in a way that you don't waste any resources as a buyer so for example very simple example when early earlier In This Cloud you will get a VM right in Cloud that's how we started so and you can get 20 use 20 percent of the VM 80 is getting wasted that's not happening now that that has been reduced to the most extent so now your VM grows as you grow the usage and if you go higher than the tier you picked they will charge you otherwise they will not charge you extra so that's why there's still a lot of instances like many different types you have to pick one I think the future is that those instances will go away the the instance will be formed for you on the fly so that is the future serverless all right give us bumper sticker Stu and then Serb G I'll give you my quick one and then we'll wrap yeah so just Dave to play off of sharp G and to wrap it up you actually wrote about it on your preview post for here uh serverless we're talking about how developers think about things um and you know Amazon in many ways you know is the new default server uh you know for the cloud um and containerization fits into the whole serverless Paradigm uh it's the space that I live in uh you know every day here and you know I was happy to see the last few years serverless and containers there's a blurring a line and you know subject we're still going to see VMS for a long time yeah yeah we will see that so give us give us your book Instagram my number six is innovation favorite scale that's my bumper sticker and and Amazon has that but also I I want everybody else to like the viewers to take a look at the the Google Cloud as well as well as IBM with others like maybe you have a better price to Performance there for certain workloads and by the way one vendor cannot do it alone we know that for sure the market is so big there's a lot of room for uh Red Hats of the world and and and Microsoft's the world to innovate so keep an eye on them they we need the competition actually and that's why competition Will Keep Us to a place where Market sets the price one vendor doesn't so the only only danger is if if AWS is a monopoly then I will be worried I think ecosystems are the Hallmark of a great Cloud company and Amazon's got the the biggest and baddest ecosystem and I think the other thing to watch for is Industries building on top of the cloud you mentioned the Goldman Sachs NASDAQ Capital One and Warner media these all these industries are building their own clouds and that's where the real money is going to be made in the latter half of the 2020s all right we're a wrap this is Dave Valente I want to first of all thank thanks to our great sponsors AWS for for having us here this is our 10th year at the cube AMD you know sponsoring as well the the the cube here Accenture sponsor to third set upstairs upstairs on the fifth floor all the ecosystem partners that came on the cube this week and supported our mission for free content our content is always free we try to give more to the community and we we take back so go to thecube.net and you'll see all these videos go to siliconangle com for all the news wikibon.com I publish weekly a breaking analysis series I want to thank our amazing crew here you guys we have probably 30 35 people unbelievable our awesome last session John Walls uh Paul Gillen Lisa Martin Savannah Peterson John Furrier who's on a plane we appreciate Andrew and Leonard in our ear and all of our our crew Palo Alto Boston and across the country thank you so much really appreciate it all right we are a wrap AWS re invent 2022 we'll see you in two weeks we'll see you two weeks at Palo Alto ignite back here in Vegas thanks for watching thecube the leader in Enterprise and emerging Tech coverage [Music]

(upbeat music) >> Hi everybody. Welcome back to theCUBE as to continue our coverage here at AWS re:Invent '22. We're in the Venetian. Out in Las Vegas, it is Wednesday. And the PaaS is still happening. I can guarantee you that. We continue our series of discussions as part of the "AWS Startup Showcase". This is the "Global Startup Program", a part of that showcase. And I'm joined by two gentlemen today who are going to talk about what CoreStack is up to. One of them is Ez Natarajan, who is the Founder and CEO. Good to have you- (simultaneous chatter) with us today. We appreciate it. Thanks, EZ. >> Nice to meet you, John. >> And Brad Winney who is the area Sales Leader for startups at AWS. Brad, good to see you. >> Good to see you, John. >> Thanks for joining us here on The Showcase. So Ez, first off, let's just talk about CoreStack a little bit for people at home who might not be familiar with what you do. It's all about obviously data, governance, giving people peace of mind, but much deeper than that. I'll let you take it from there. >> So CoreStack is a governance platform that helps customers maximize their cloud usage and get governance at scale. When we talk about governance, we instill confidence through three layers: solving the problems of the CIO, solving the problems of the CTO, solving the problems of the CFO, together with a single pin of class,- >> John: Mm-hmm. >> which helps them achieve continuous holistic automated outcomes at any given time. >> John: Mm-hmm. So, Brad, follow up on that a little bit- >> Yeah. because Ez touched on it there that he's got a lot of stakeholders- >> Right. >> with a lot of different needs and a lot of different demands- >> Mm-hmm. >> but the same overriding emotion, right? >> Yeah. >> They all want confidence. >> They all want confidence. And one of the trickiest parts of confidence is the governance issue, which is policy. It's how do we determine who has access to what, how we do that scale. And across not only start been a process. This is a huge concern, especially as we talked a lot about cutting costs as the overriding driver for 2023. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> The economic compression being what it is, you still have to do this in a secure way and as a riskless way as possible. And so companies like CoreStack really offer core, no pun intended, (Ez laughs) function there where you abstract out a lot of the complexity of governance and you make governance a much more simple process. And that's why we're big fans of what they do. >> So we think governance from a three dimensional standpoint, right? (speaks faintly) How do we help customers be more compliant, secure, achieve the best performance and operations with increased availability? >> Jaohn: Mm-hmm. >> At the same time do the right spend from a cost standpoint. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. So when all three dimensions are connected, the business velocity increases and the customer's ability to cater to their customers increase. So our governance tenants come from these three pillars of finance operations, security operations and air operations at cloud operations. >> Yeah. And... Yeah. Please, go ahead. >> Can I (indistinct)? >> Oh, I'm sorry. Just- >> No, that's fine. >> So part of what's going on here, which is critical for AWS, is if you notice a lot of (indistinct) language is at the business value with key stakeholders of the CTO, the CSO and so on. And we're doing a much better job of speaking business value on top of AWS services. But the AWS partners, again, like CoreStack have such great expertise- >> John: Mm-hmm. >> in that level of dialogue. That's why it's such a key part for us, why we're really interested partnering with them. >> How do you wrestle with this, wrestle may not be the right word, but because you do have, as we just went through these litany, these business parts of your business or a business that need access- >> Ez: Mm-hmm. >> and that you need to have policies in place, but they change, right? I mean, and somebody maybe from the financial side should have a window into data and other slices of their business. There's a lot of internal auditing. >> Man: Mm-hmm. >> Obviously, it's got to be done, right? And so just talk about that process a little bit. How you identify the appropriate avenues or the appropriate gateways for people to- >> Sure. >> access data so that you can have that confidence as a CTO or CSO, that it's all right. And we're not going to let too much- >> out to the wrong people. >> Sure. >> Yeah. So there are two dimensions that drive the businesses to look for that kind of confidence building exercise, right? One, there are regulatory external requirements that say that I know if I'm in the financial industry, I maybe need to following NIST, PCI, and sort of compliances. Or if I'm in the healthcare industry, maybe HIPAA and related compliance, I need to follow. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> That's an external pressure. Internally, the organizations based on their geographical presence and the kind of partners and customers they cater to, they may have their own standards. And when they start adopting cloud; A, for each service, how do I make sure the service is secure and it operates at the best level so that we don't violate any of the internal or external requirements. At the same time, we get the outcome that is needed. And that is driven into policies, that is driven into standards which are consumable easily, like AWS offers well-architected framework that helps customers make sure that I know I'm architecting my application workloads in a way that meets the business demands. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And what CoreStack has done is taken that and automated it in such a way it helps the customers simplify that process to get that outcome measured easily so they get that confidence to consume more of the higher order services. >> John: Okay. And I'm wondering about your relationship as far with AWS goes, because, to me, it's like going deep sea fishing and all of a sudden you get this big 4, 500 pound fish. Like, now what? >> Mm-hmm. >> Now what do we do because we got what we wanted? So, talk about the "Now what?" with AWS in terms of that relationship, what they're helping you with, and the kind of services that you're seeking from them as well. >> Oh, thanks to Brad and the entire Global Startup Ecosystem team at AWS. And we have been part of AWS Ecosystem at various levels, starting from Marketplace to ISV Accelerate to APN Partners, Cloud Management Tools Competency Partner, Co-Sell programs. The team provides different leverages to connect to the entire ecosystem of how AWS gets consumed by the customers. Customers may come through channels and partners. And these channels and partners maybe from WAs to MSPs to SIs to how they really want to use each. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> And the ecosystem that AWS provides helps us feed into all these players and provide this higher order capability which instills confidence to the customers end of the day. >> Man: Absolutely. Right. >> And this can be taken through an MSP. This can be taken through a GSI. This can be taken to the customer through a WA. And that's how our play of expansion into larger AWS customer base. >> Brad: Yeah. >> Brad, from your side of the fence. >> Brad: No, its... This is where the commons of scale come to benefit our partners. And AWS has easily the largest ecosystem. >> John: Mm-hmm. >> Whether or not it's partners, customers, and the like. And so... And then, all the respective teams and programs bring all those resources to bear for startups. Your analogy of of catching a big fish off coast, I actually have a house in Florida. I spend a lot of time there. >> Interviewer: Okay. >> I've yet to catch a big 500 pound fish. But... (interviewer laughs) >> But they're out there. >> But they're definitely out there. >> Yeah. >> And so, in addition to the formalized programs like the Global Partner Network Program, the APN and Marketplace, we really break our activities down with the CoreStacks of the world into two major kind of processes: "Sell to" and "Sell with". And when we say "Sell to", what we're really doing is helping them architect for the future. And so, that plays dividends for their customers. So what do we mean by that? We mean helping them take advantage of all the latest serverless technologies: the latest chip sets like Graviton, thing like that. So that has the added benefit of just lowering the overall cost of deployment and expend. And that's... And we focus on that really extensively. So don't ever want to lose that part of the picture of what we do. >> Mm-hmm. >> And the "Sell with" is what he just mentioned, which is, our teams out in the field compliment these programs like APN and Marketplace with person-to-person in relationship development for core key opportunities in things like FinTech and Retail and so on. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> We have significant industry groups and business units- >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> in the enterprise level that our teams work with day in and day out to help foster those relationships. And to help CoreStack continue to develop and grow that business. >> Yeah. We've talked a lot about cost, right? >> Yeah. >> But there's a difference between reducing costs or optimizing your spend, right? I mean there- >> Brad: Right. >> Right. There's a... They're very different prism. So in terms of optimizing and what you're doing in the data governance world, what kind of conversations discussions are you having with your clients? And how is that relationship with AWS allowing you to go with confidence into those discussions and be able to sell optimization of how they're going to spend maybe more money than they had planned on originally? >> So today, because of the extra external micro-market conditions, every single customer that we talk to wanting to take a foster status of, "Hey, where are we today? How are we using the cloud? Are we in an optimized state?" >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> And when it comes to optimization, again, the larger customers that we talk to are really bothered about the business outcome and how their services and ability to cater to their customers, right? >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> They don't want to compromise on that just because they want to optimize on the spend. That conversation trickled down to taking a poster assessment first, and then are you using the right set of services within AWS? Are the right set of services being optimized for various requirements? >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> And AWS help in terms of catering to the segment of customers who need that kind of a play through the patent ecosystem. >> John: Mm-hmm. Yeah. We've talked a lot about confidence too, cloud with confidence. >> Brad: Yeah. Yeah. >> What does that mean to different people, you think? I mean, (Brad laughing) because don't you have to feel them out and say "Okay. What's kind of your tolerance level for certain, not risks, but certain measures that you might need to change"? >> I actually think it's flipped the other way around now. I think the risk factor- >> Okay. >> is more on your on-prem environment. And all that goes with that. 'Cause you... Because the development of the cloud in the last 15 years has been profound. It's gone from... That's been the risky proposition now. With all of the infrastructure, all the security and compliance guardrails we have built into the cloud, it's really more about transition and risk of transition. And that's what we see a lot of. And that's why, again, where governance comes into play here, which is how do I move my business from on-prem in a fairly insecure environment relatively speaking to the secure cloud? >> Interviewer: Sure. >> How do I do that without disrupting business? How do I do that without putting my business at risk? And that's a key piece. I want to come back, if I may, something on cost-cutting. >> Interviewer: Sure. >> We were talking about this on the way up here. Cost-cutting, it's the bonfire of the vanities in that in that everybody is talking about cost-cutting. And so we're in doing that perpetuating the very problem that we kind of want to avoid, which is our big cost-cutting. (laughs) So... And I say that because in the venture capital community, what's happening is two things: One is, everybody's being asked to extend their runways as much as possible, but they are not letting them off the hook on growth. And so what we're seeing a lot of is a more nuanced conversation of where you trim your costs, it's not essential, spend, but reinvest. Especially if you've got good strong product market fit, reinvest that for growth. And so that's... So if I think about our playbook for 2023, it's to help good strong startups. Either tune their market fit or now that they good have have good market fit, really run and develop their business. So growth is not off the hook for 2023. >> And then let me just hit on something- >> Yeah. >> before we say goodbye here that you just touched on too, Brad, about. How we see startups, right? AWS, I mean, obviously there's a company focus on nurturing this environment of innovation and of growth. And for people looking at maybe through different prisms and coming. >> Brad: Yeah. >> So if you would maybe from your side of the fence, Ez from CoreStack, about working as a startup with AWS, I mean, how would you characterize that relationship about the kind of partnership that you have? And I want to hear from Brad too about how he sees AWS in general in the startup world. But go ahead. >> It's kind of a mutually enriching relationship, right? The support that comes from AWS because our combined goal is help the customers maximize the potential of cloud. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> And we talked about confidence. And we talked about all the enablement that we provide. But the partnership helps us get to the reach, right? >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> Reach at scale. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. We are talking about customers from different industry verticals having different set of problems. And how do we solve it together so that like the reimbursement that happens, in fact healthcare customers that we repeatedly talk to, even in the current market conditions, they don't want to save. They want to optimize and re-spend their savings using more cloud. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> So that's the partnership that is mutually enriching. >> Absolutely. >> Yeah. To me, this is easy. I think the reason why a lot of us are here at AWS, especially the startup world, is that our business interests are completely aligned. So I run a pretty significant business unit in a startup neighbor. But a good part of my job and my team's job is to go help cut costs. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> So tell me... Show me a revenue responsibility position where part of your job is to go cut cost. >> Interviewer: Right. >> It's so unique and we're not a non-profit. We just have a very good long-term view, right? Which is, if we help companies reduce costs and conserve capital and really make sure that that capital is being used the right way, then their long-term viability comes into play. And that's where we have a chance to win more of that business over time. >> Interviewer: Mm-hmm. >> And so because those business interests are very congruent and we come in, we earn so much trust in the process. But I think that... That's why I think we being AWS, are uniquely successful startups. Our business interests are completely aligned and there's a lot of trust for that. >> It's a great success story. It really is. And thank you for sharing your little slice of that and growing slice of that too- >> Yeah. Absolutely. >> from all appearances. Thank you both. >> Thank you, John. >> Thank you very much, John. >> Appreciate your time. >> This is part of the AWS Startup Showcase. And I'm John Walls. You're watching theCUBE here at AWS re:Invent '22. And theCUBE, of course, the leader in high tech coverage.

(upbeat music) (logo shimmers) >> Good afternoon everyone, and welcome back to AWS re Invent 2022. We are live here from the show floor in Las Vegas, Nevada, we're theCUBE, my name is Savannah Peterson, joined by John Furrier, John, are you excited for the next segment? >> I love the innovation story, this next segment's going to be really interesting, an example of ecosystem innovation in action, it'll be great. >> Yeah, our next guests are actually award-winning, I am very excited about that, please welcome Alan and Becky from IBM. Thank you both so much for being here, how's the show going for ya? Becky you got a, just a platinum smile, I'm going to go to you first, how's the show so far? >> No, it's going great. There's lots of buzz, lots of excitement this year, of course, three times the number of people, but it's fantastic. >> Three times the number of people- >> (indistinct) for last year. >> That is so exciting, so what is that... Do you know what the total is then? >> I think it's over 55,000. >> Ooh, loving that. >> John: A lot. >> It's a lot, you can tell by the hallways- >> Becky: It's a lot. >> John: It's crowded, right. >> Yeah, you can tell by just the energy and the, honestly the heat in here right now is pretty good. Alan, how are you feeling on the show floor this year? >> Awesome, awesome, we're meeting a lot of partners, talking to a lot of clients. We're really kind of showing them what the new IBM, AWS relationship is all about, so, beautiful time to be here. >> Well Alan, why don't you tell us what that partnership is about, to start us off? >> Sure, sure. So the partnership started with the relationship in our consulting services, and Becky's going to talk more about that, right? And it grew, this year it grew into the IBM software realm where we signed an agreement with AWS around May timeframe this year. >> I love it, so, like you said, you're just getting started- >> Just getting started. >> This is the beginning of something magic. >> We're just scratching the surface with this right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> But it represents a huge move for IBM to meet our clients where they are, right? Meet 'em where they are with IBM technology, enterprise technology they're used to, but with the look and feel and usage model that they're used to with AWS. >> Absolutely and so to build on that, you know, we're really excited to be an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. We've had this relationship for a little over five years with AWS, I'd say it's really gone up a notch over the last year or two as we've been working more and more closely, doubling down on our investments, doubling down on our certifications, we've got over 15,000 people certified now, almost 16,000 actually- >> Savannah: Wow. >> 14 competencies, 16 service deliveries and counting. We cover a mass of information and services from Data Analytics, IoT, AI, all the way to Modernization, SAP, Security Services, right. So it's pretty comprehensive relationship, but in addition to the fantastic clients that we both share, we're doing some really great things around joint industry solutions, which I'll talk about in a few minutes and some of those are being launched at the conference this year, so that's even better. But the most exciting thing to me right now is that we just found out that we won the Global Innovator Partner of the Year award, and a LATAM Partner of the Year award. >> Savannah: Wow. >> John: That's (indistinct) >> So, super excited for IBM Consulting to win this, we're honored and it's just a great, exciting part to the conference. >> The news coming out of this event, we know tomorrow's going to be the big keynote for the new Head of the ecosystem, Ruba. We're hearing that it's going to be all about the ecosystem, enabling value creation, enabling new kinds of solutions. We heard from the CEO of AWS, this nextGen environment's upon us, it's very solution-oriented- >> Becky: Absolutely. >> A lot of technology, it's not an either or, it's an and equation, this is a huge new shift, I won't say shift, a continuation for AWS, and you guys, we've been covering, so you got the and situation going on... Innovation solutions and innovation technology and customers can choose, build a foundation or have it out of the box. What's your reaction to that? Do you think it's going to go well for AWS and IBM? >> I think it fits well into our partnership, right? The the thing you mentioned that I gravitate to the most is the customer gets to choose and the thing that's been most amazing about the partnership, both of these companies are maniacally focused on the customer, right? And so we've seen that come about as we work on ways the customer to access our technology, consume the technology, right? We've sold software on-prem to customers before, right, now we're going to be selling SaaS on AWS because we had customers that were on AWS, we're making it so that they can more easily purchase it by being in the marketplace, making it so they can draw down their committed spin with AWS, their customers like that a lot- [John] Yeah. >> Right. We've even gone further to enable our distributor network and our resellers, 'cause a lot of our customers have those relationships, so they can buy through them. And recently we've enabled the customer to leverage their EDP, their committed spend with AWS against IBM's ELA and structure, right, so you kind of get a double commit value from a customer point of view, so the amazing part is just been all about the customers. >> Well, that's interesting, you got the technology relationship with AWS, you mentioned how they're engaging with the software consumption in marketplace, licensed deals, there's all kinds of new business model innovations on top of the consumption and building. Then you got the consulting piece, which is again, a big part of, Adam calls it "Business transformation," which is the result of digital transformation. So digital transformation is the process, the outcome is the business transformation, that's kind of where it all kind of connects. Becky, what's your thoughts on the Amazon consulting relationships? Obviously the awards are great but- >> They are, no- >> What's the next step? Where does it go from here? >> I think the best way for me to describe it is to give you some rapid flyer client examples, you know, real customer stories and I think that's where it really, rubber meets the road, right? So one of the most recent examples are IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, in his three key results actually mentioned one of our big clients with AWS which is the Department of Veterans Affairs in the US and is an AI solution that's helped automate claims processing. So the veterans are trying to get their benefits, they submit the claims, snail mail, phone calls, you know, some in person, some over email- >> Savannah: Oh, it gives me all the feels hearing you talk about this- >> It's a process that used to take 25 to 30 days depending on the complexity of the claims, we've gotten it down with AWS down to within 24 hours we can get the veterans what they need really quickly so, I mean, that's just huge. And it's an exciting story that includes data analytics, AI and automation, so that's just one example. You know, we've got examples around SAP where we've developed a next generation SAP for HANA Platform for Phillips Carbon Black hosted on AWS, right? For them, it created an integrated, scalable, digital business, that cut out a hundred percent the capital cost from on-prem solutions. We've got security solutions around architectures for telecommunications advisors and of course we have lots of examples of migration and modernization and moving workloads using Red Hat to do that. So there's a lot of great client examples, so to me, this is the heart of what we do, like you said, both companies are really focused on clients, Amazon's customer-obsessed, and doing what we can for our clients together is where we get the impact. >> Yeah, that's one of the things that, it sounds kind of cliche, "Oh we're going to work backwards from the customer," I know Amazon says that, they do, you guys are also very customer-focused but the customers are changing. So I'd love to get your reaction because we're now in that cloud 2.0, I call that 2.0 or you got the Amazon Classic, my word, and then Next Gen Cloud coming, the customers are different, they're transforming because IT's not a department anymore, it's in the DevOps pipeline. The developers are driving a lot of IT but security and on DataOps, it's the structural change happening at the customer, how do you guys see that at IBM? I know we cover a lot of Red Hat and Arvind talks to us all the time, meeting the customer where they are, where are they? Where are the customers? Can you share your perspective on where they are? >> It's an astute observation, right, the customer is changing. We have both of those sets of customers, right, we still have the traditional customer, our relationship with Central IT, right, and driving governance and all of those things. But the folks that are innovating many times they're in the line of business, they're discovering solutions, they're building new things. And so we need our offerings to be available to them. We need them to understand how to use them and be convenient for these guys and take them through that process. So that change in the customer is one that we are embracing by making our offerings easy to consume, easy to use, and easy to build into solutions and then easy to parlay into what central IT needs to do for governance, compliance, and these types of things, it's becoming our new bread and butter. >> And what's really cool is- >> Is that easy button- >> We've been talking about- >> It's the easy button. >> The easy button a lot on the show this week and if you just, you just described it it's exactly what people want, go on Becky. >> Sorry about that, I was going to say, the cool part is that we're co-creating these things with our clients. So we're using things like the Amazon Working Backward that you just mentioned.` We're using the IBM garage methodology to get innovative to do design working, design thinking workshops, and think about where is that end user?, Where is that stakeholder? Where are they, they thinking, feeling, doing, saying how do we make the easier? How do we get the easy button for them so that they can have the right solutions for their businesses. We work mostly with lines of business in my part of the organization, and they're hungry for that. >> You know, we had a quote on theCUBE yesterday, Savannah remember one of our guests said, you know, back in the, you know, 1990s or two 2000s, if you had four production apps, it was considered complex >> Savannah: Yeah. >> You know, now you got hundreds of workloads, thousands of workloads, so, you know, this end-to-end vision that we heard that's playing out is getting more complex, but the easy button is where these abstraction layers and technology could come in. So it's getting more complex because there's more stuff but it's getting easier because- >> Savannah: What is the magnitude? >> You can make it easier. This is a dynamic, share your thoughts on that. >> It's getting more complex because our clients need to move faster, right, they need to be more agile, right, so not only are there thousands of applications there are hundreds of thousands microservices that are composing those applications. So they need capabilities that help them not just build but govern that structure and put the right compliance over that structure. So this relationship- >> Savannah: Lines of governance, yeah- >> This relationship we built with AWS is in our key areas, it's a strategic move, not a small thing for us, it covers things like automation and integration where you need to build that way. It covers things like data and AI where you need to do the analytics, even things like sustainability where we're totally aligned with what AWS is talking about and trying to do, right, so it's really a good match made there. >> John: It really sounds awesome. >> Yeah, it's clear. I want to dig in a little bit, I love the term, and I saw it in my, it stuck out to me in the notes right away, getting ready for you all, "maniacal", maniacal about the customer, maniacal about the community, I think that's really clear when we're talking about 24 days to 24 hours, like the veteran example that you gave right there, which I genuinely felt in my heart. These are the types of collaborations that really impact people's lives, tell me about some of the other trends or maybe a couple other examples you might have because I think sometimes when our head's in the clouds, we talk a lot about the tech and the functionality, we forget it's touching every single person walking around us, probably in a different way right now than we may even be aware- >> I think one of the things that's been, and our clients have been asking us for, is to help coming into this new era, right, so we've come out of a pandemic where a lot of them had to do some really, really basic quick decisions. Okay, "Contact Center, everyone work from home now." Okay, how do we do that? Okay, so we cobbled something together, now we're back, so what do we do? How do we create digital transformation around that so that we are going forward in a really positive way that works for our clients or for our contact center reps who are maybe used to working from home now versus what our clients need, the response times they need, and AWS has all the technology that we're working with like Amazon Connect to be able to pull those things together with some of our software like Watson Assistant. So those types of solutions are coming together out of that need and now we're moving into the trend where economy's getting tougher, right? More cost cutting potentially is coming, right, better efficiencies, how do we leverage our solutions and help our clients and customers do that? So I think that's what the customer obsession's about, is making sure we really understand where their pain points are, and not just solve them but maybe get rid of 'em. >> John: Yeah, great one. >> Yeah. And not developing in a silo, I mean, it's a classic subway problem, you got to be communicating with your community if you want to continue to serve them. And IBM's been serving their community for a very long time, which is super impressive, do you think they're ready for the challenge? >> Let's do it. >> So we have a new thing on theCUBE. >> Becky: Oh boy. >> We didn't warn you about this, but here we go. Although you told, Alan, you've mentioned you're feeling very cool with the microphone on, so I feel like, I'm going to put you in the hot seat first on this one. Not that I don't think Becky's going to smash it, but I feel like you're channeling the power of the microphone. New challenges, treat it like a 32nd Instagram reel-style story, a hot take, your thought leadership, money clip, you know, this is your moment. What is the biggest takeaway, most important thing happening at the show this year? >> Most important thing happening at the show? Well, I'm glad you mentioned it that way, because earlier you said we may have to sing (presenters and guests all laughing) >> So this is much better than- >> That's actually part of the close. >> John: Hey, hey. >> Don't worry, don't worry, I haven't forgotten that, it's your Instagram reel, go. (Savannah laughs) >> Original audio happening here on theCUBE, courtesy of Alan and IBM, I am so here for it. >> So what my takeaway and what I would like for the audience to take away, out of this conversation especially, but even broadly, the IBM AWS relationship is really like a landmark type of relationship, right? It's one of the biggest that we've established on both sides, right- >> Savannah: It seems huge, okay you are too monolith in the world of companies, like, yeah- >> Becky: Totally. >> It's huge. And it represents a strategic change on both sides, right? With that customer- >> Savannah: Fundamentally- >> In the middle right? >> Savannah: Yeah. >> So we're seeing things like, you know, AWS is working with us to make sure we're building products the way that a AWS client likes to consume them, right, so that we have the right integration, so they get that right look and feel, but they still get the enterprise level capabilities they're used to from IBM, right? So the big takeaway I like for people to take, is this is a new IBM, it's a new AWS and IBM relationship, and so expect more of that goodness, more of those new things coming out of it. [John] Excellent, wow. >> That was great, well done, you nailed it. and you're going to finish with some acapella, right? (Alan laughs) >> You got a pitch pipe ready? (everyone laughs) >> All right Becky, what about you? Give us your hot take. >> Well, so for me, the biggest takeaway is just the way this relationship has grown so much, so, like you said, it's the new IBM it's the new AWS, we were here last year, we had some good things, this year we're back at the show with joint solutions, have been jointly funded and co-created by AWS and IBM. This is huge, this is a really big opportunity and a really big deal that these two companies have come together, identified joint customer needs and we're going after 'em together and we're putting 'em in the booth. >> Savannah: So cool. And there's things like smart edge for welding solutions that are out there. >> Savannah: Yes. >> You know, I talked about, and it's, you know you wouldn't think, "Okay, well what's that?" There's a lot to that, a lot of saving when you look at how you do welding and if you apply things like visual AI and auditory AI to make sure a weld is good. I mean, I think these are, these things are cool, I geek out on these things- >> John: Every vertical. >> I'm geeking out with you right now, just geeking- >> Yeah, yeah, yeah, so- >> Every vertical is infected. >> They are and it's so impactful to have AWS just in lockstep with us, doing these solutions, it's so different from, you know, you kind of create something that you think your customers like and then you put it out there. >> Yeah, versus this moment. >> Yeah, they're better together. >> It's strategic partnership- >> It's truly a strategic partnership. and we're really bringing that this year to reinvent and so I'm super excited about that. >> Congratulations. >> Wow, well, congratulations again on your awards, on your new partnership, I can't wait to hear, I mean, we're seven months in, eight months in to this this SaaS side of the partnership, can't wait to see what we're going to be talking about next year when we have you back on theCUBE. >> I know. >> and maybe again in between now and then. Alan, Becky, thank you both so much for being here, this was truly a joy and I'm sure you gave folks a taste of the new IBM, practicing what you preach. >> John: Great momentum. >> And I'm just, I'm so impressed with the two companies collaborating, for those of us OGs in tech, the big companies never collaborated before- >> Yeah. >> John: Yeah. Joint, co-created solutions. >> And you have friction between products and everything else. I mean's it's really, co-collaboration is, it's a big theme for us at all the shows we've been doing this year but it's just nice to see it in practice too, it's an entirely different thing, so well done. >> Well it's what gets me out of the bed in the morning. >> All right, congratulations. >> Very clearly, your energy is contagious and I love it and yeah, this has been great. Thank all of you at home or at work or on the International Space Station or wherever you might be tuning in from today for joining us, here in Las Vegas at AWS re Invent where we are live from the show floor, wall-to-wall coverage for three days with John Furrier. My name is Savannah Peterson, we're theCUBE, the source for high tech coverage. (cheerful upbeat music)

(outro music) >> Hey, I'm John Furrier, here with an exclusive interview with Ali Ghodsi, who's the CEO of Databricks. Ali, great to see you. Preview for reinvent. We're going to launch this story, exclusive Databricks material on the notes, after the keynotes prior to the keynotes and after the keynotes that reinvent. So great to see you. You know, you've been a partner of AWS for a very, very long time. I think five years ago, I think I first interviewed you, you were one of the first to publicly declare that this was a place to build a company on and not just post an application, but refactor capabilities to create, essentially a platform in the cloud, on the cloud. Not just an ISV; Independent Software Vendor, kind of an old term, we're talking about real platform like capability to change the game. Can you talk about your experience as an AWS partner? >> Yeah, look, so we started in 2013. I swiped my personal credit card on AWS and some of my co-founders did the same. And we started building. And we were excited because we just thought this is a much better way to launch a company because you can just much faster get time to market and launch your thing and you can get the end users much quicker access to the thing you're building. So we didn't really talk to anyone at AWS, we just swiped a credit card. And eventually they told us, "Hey, do you want to buy extra support?" "You're asking a lot of advanced questions from us." "Maybe you want to buy our advanced support." And we said, no, no, no, no. We're very advanced ourselves, we know what we're doing. We're not going to buy any advanced support. So, you know, we just built this, you know, startup from nothing on AWS without even talking to anyone there. So at some point, I think around 2017, they suddenly saw this company with maybe a hundred million ARR pop up on their radar and it's driving massive amounts of compute, massive amounts of data. And it took a little bit in the beginning just us to get to know each other because as I said, it's like we were not on their radar and we weren't really looking, we were just doing our thing. And then over the years the partnership has deepened and deepened and deepened and then with, you know, Andy (indistinct) really leaning into the partnership, he mentioned us at Reinvent. And then we sort of figured out a way to really integrate the two service, the Databricks platform with AWS . And today it's an amazing partnership. You know, we directly connected with the general managers for the services. We're connected at the CEO level, you know, the sellers get compensated for pushing Databricks, we're, we have multiple offerings on their marketplace. We have a native offering on AWS. You know, we're prominently always sort of marketed and you know, we're aligned also vision wise in what we're trying to do. So yeah, we've come a very, very long way. >> Do you consider yourself a SaaS app or an ISV or do you see yourself more of a platform company because you have customers. How would you categorize your category as a company? >> Well, it's a data platform, right? And actually the, the strategy of the Databricks is take what's otherwise five, six services in the industry or five, six different startups, but do them as part of one data platform that's integrated. So in one word, the strategy of data bricks is "unification." We call it the data lake house. But really the idea behind the data lake house is that of unification, or in more words it's, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." So you could actually go and buy five, six services out there or actually use five, six services from the cloud vendors, stitch it together and it kind of resembles Databricks. Our power is in doing those integrated, together in a way in which it's really, really easy and simple to use for end users. So yeah, we're a data platform. I wouldn't, you know, ISV that's a old term, you know, Independent Software Vendor. You know, I think, you know, we have actually a whole slew of ISVs on top of Databricks, that integrate with our platform. And you know, in our marketplace as well as in our partner connect, we host those ISVs that then, you know, work on top of the data that we have in the Databricks, data lake house. >> You know, I think one of the things your journey has been great to document and watch from the beginning. I got to give you guys credit over there and props, congratulations. But I think you're the poster child as a company to what we see enterprises doing now. So go back in time when you guys swiped a credit card, you didn't need attending technical support because you guys had brains, you were refactoring, rethinking. It wasn't just banging out software, you had, you were doing some complex things. It wasn't like it was just write some software hosted on server. It was really a lot more. And as a result your business worth billions of dollars. I think 38 billion or something like that, big numbers, big numbers of great revenue growth as well, billions in revenue. You have customers, you have an ecosystem, you have data applications on top of Databricks. So in a way you're a cloud on top of the cloud. So is there a cloud on top of the cloud? So you have ISVs, Amazon has ISVs. Can you take us through what this means and at this point in history, because this seems to be an advanced version of benefits of platforming and refactoring, leveraging say AWS. >> Yeah, so look, when we started, there was really only one game in town. It was AWS. So it was one cloud. And the strategy of the company then was, well Amazon had this beautiful set of services that they're building bottom up, they have storage, compute, networking, and then they have databases and so on. But it's a lot of services. So let us not directly compete with AWS and try to take out one of their services. Let's not do that because frankly we can't. We were not of that size. They had the scale, they had the size and they were the only cloud vendor in town. So our strategy instead was, let's do something else. Let's not compete directly with say, a particular service they're building, let's take a different strategy. What if we had a unified holistic data platform, where it's just one integrated service end to end. So think of it as Microsoft office, which contains PowerPoint, and Word, and Excel and even Access, if you want to use it. What if we build that and AWS has this really amazing knack for releasing things, you know services, lots of them, every reinvent. And they're sort of a DevOps person's dream and you can stitch these together and you know you have to be technical. How do we elevate that and make it simpler and integrate it? That was our original strategy and it resonated with a segment of the market. And the reason it worked with AWS so that we wouldn't butt heads with AWS was because we weren't a direct replacement for this service or for that service, we were taking a different approach. And AWS, because credit goes to them, they're so customer obsessed, they would actually do what's right for the customer. So if the customer said we want this unified thing, their sellers would actually say, okay, so then you should use Databricks. So they truly are customer obsessed in that way. And I really mean it, John. Things have changed over the years. They're not the only cloud anymore. You know, Azure is real, GCP is real, there's also Alibaba. And now over 70% of our customers are on more than one cloud. So now what we hear from them is, not only want, do we want a simplified, unified thing, but we want it also to work across the clouds. Because those of them that are seriously considering multiple clouds, they don't want to use a service on cloud one and then use a similar service on cloud two. But it's a little bit different. And now they have to do twice the work to make it work. You know, John, it's hard enough as it is, like it's this data stuff and analytics. It's not a walk in the park, you know. You hire an administrator in the back office that clicks a button and its just, now you're a data driven digital transformed company. It's hard. If you now have to do it again on the second cloud with different set of services and then again on a third cloud with a different set of services. That's very, very costly. So the strategy then has changed that, how do we take that unified simple approach and make it also the same and standardize across the clouds, but then also integrate it as far down as we can on each of the clouds. So that you're not giving up any of the benefits that the particular cloud has. >> Yeah, I think one of the things that we see, and I want get your reaction to this, is this rise of the super cloud as we call it. I think you were involved in the Sky paper that I saw your position paper came out after we had introduced Super Cloud, which is great. Congratulations to the Berkeley team, wearing the hat here. But you guys are, I think a driver of this because you're creating the need for these things. You're saying, okay, we went on one cloud with AWS and you didn't hide that. And now you're publicly saying there's other clouds too, increased ham for your business. And customers have multiple clouds in their infrastructure for the best of breed that they have. Okay, get that. But there's still a challenge around the innovation, growth that's still around the corner. We still have a supply chain problem, we still have skill gaps. You know, you guys are unique at Databricks as other these big examples of super clouds that are developing. Enterprises don't have the Databricks kind of talent. They need, they need turnkey solutions. So Adam and the team at Amazon are promoting, you know, more solution oriented approaches higher up on the stack. You're starting to see kind of like, I won't say templates, but you know, almost like application specific headless like, low code, no code capability to accelerate clients who are wanting to write code for the modern error. Right, so this kind of, and then now you, as you guys pointed out with these common services, you're pushing the envelope. So you're saying, hey, I need to compete, I don't want to go to my customers and have them to have a staff or this cloud and this cloud and this cloud because they don't have the staff. Or if they do, they're very unique. So what's your reaction? Because this kind is the, it kind of shows your leadership as a partner of AWS and the clouds, but also highlights I think what's coming. But you share your reaction. >> Yeah, look, it's, first of all, you know, I wish I could take credit for this but I can't because it's really the customers that have decided to go on multiple clouds. You know, it's not Databricks that you know, push this or some other vendor, you know, that, Snowflake or someone who pushed this and now enterprises listened to us and they picked two clouds. That's not how it happened. The enterprises picked two clouds or three clouds themselves and we can get into why, but they did that. So this largely just happened in the market. We as data platforms responded to what they're then saying, which is they're saying, "I don't want to redo this again on the other cloud." So I think the writing is on the wall. I think it's super obvious what's going to happen next. They will say, "Any service I'm using, it better work exactly the same on all the clouds." You know, that's what's going to happen. So in the next five years, every enterprise will say, "I'm going to use the service, but you better make sure that this service works equally well on all of the clouds." And obviously the multicloud vendors like us, are there to do that. But I actually think that what you're going to see happening is that you're going to see the cloud vendors changing the existing services that they have to make them work on the other clouds. That's what's goin to happen, I think. >> Yeah, and I think I would add that, first of all, I agree with you. I think that's going to be a forcing function. Because I think you're driving it. You guys are in a way, one, are just an actor in the driving this because you're on the front end of this and there are others and there will be people following. But I think to me, I'm a cloud vendor, I got to differentiate. Adam, If I'm Adam Saleski, I got to say, "Hey, I got to differentiate." So I don't wan to get stuck in the middle, so to speak. Am I just going to innovate on the hardware AKA infrastructure or am I going to innovate at the higher level services? So what we're talking about here is the tail of two clouds within Amazon, for instance. So do I innovate on the silicon and get low level into the physics and squeeze performance out of the hardware and infrastructure? Or do I focus on ease of use at the top of the stack for the developers? So again, there's a channel of two clouds here. So I got to ask you, how do they differentiate? Number one and number two, I never heard a developer ever say, "I want to run my app or workload on the slower cloud." So I mean, you know, back when we had PCs you wanted to go, "I want the fastest processor." So again, you can have common level services, but where is that performance differentiation with the cloud? What do the clouds do in your opinion? >> Yeah, look, I think it's pretty clear. I think that it's, this is, you know, no surprise. Probably 70% or so of the revenue is in the lower infrastructure layers, compute, storage, networking. And they have to win that. They have to be competitive there. As you said, you can say, oh you know, I guess my CPUs are slower than the other cloud, but who cares? I have amazing other services which only work on my cloud by the way, right? That's not going to be a winning recipe. So I think all three are laser focused on, we going to have specialized hardware and the nuts and bolts of the infrastructure, we can do it better than the other clouds for sure. And you can see lots of innovation happening there, right? The Graviton chips, you know, we see huge price performance benefits in those chips. I mean it's real, right? It's basically a 20, 30% free lunch. You know, why wouldn't you, why wouldn't you go for it there? There's no downside. You know, there's no, "got you" or no catch. But we see Azure doing the same thing now, they're also building their own chips and we know that Google builds specialized machine learning chips, TPU, Tenor Processing Units. So their legs are focused on that. I don't think they can give up that or focused on higher levels if they had to pick bets. And I think actually in the next few years, most of us have to make more, we have to be more deliberate and calculated in the picks we do. I think in the last five years, most of us have said, "We'll do all of it." You know. >> Well you made a good bet with Spark, you know, the duke was pretty obvious trend that was, everyone was shut on that bandwagon and you guys picked a big bet with Spark. Look what happened with you guys? So again, I love this betting kind of concept because as the world matures, growth slows down and shifts and that next wave of value coming in, AKA customers, they're going to integrate with a new ecosystem. A new kind of partner network for AWS and the other clouds. But with aws they're going to need to nurture the next Databricks. They're going to need to still provide that SaaS, ISV like experience for, you know, a basic software hosting or some application. But I go to get your thoughts on this idea of multiple clouds because if I'm a developer, the old days was, old days, within our decade, full stack developer- >> It was two years ago, yeah (John laughing) >> This is a decade ago, full stack and then the cloud came in, you kind had the half stack and then you would do some things. It seems like the clouds are trying to say, we want to be the full stack or not. Or is it still going to be, you know, I'm an application like a PC and a Mac, I'm going to write the same application for both hardware. I mean what's your take on this? Are they trying to do full stack and you see them more like- >> Absolutely. I mean look, of course they're going, they have, I mean they have over 300, I think Amazon has over 300 services, right? That's not just compute, storage, networking, it's the whole stack, right? But my key point is, I think they have to nail the core infrastructure storage compute networking because the three clouds that are there competing, they're formidable companies with formidable balance sheets and it doesn't look like any of them is going to throw in the towel and say, we give up. So I think it's going to intensify. And given that they have a 70% revenue on that infrastructure layer, I think they, if they have to pick their bets, I think they'll focus it on that infrastructure layer. I think the layer above where they're also placing bets, they're doing that, the full stack, right? But there I think the demand will be, can you make that work on the other clouds? And therein lies an innovator's dilemma because if I make it work on the other clouds, then I'm foregoing that 70% revenue of the infrastructure. I'm not getting it. The other cloud vendor is going to get it. So should I do that or not? Second, is the other cloud vendor going to be welcoming of me making my service work on their cloud if I am a competing cloud, right? And what kind of terms of service are I giving me? And am I going to really invest in doing that? And I think right now we, you know, most, the vast, vast, vast majority of the services only work on the one cloud that you know, it's built on. It doesn't work on others, but this will shift. >> Yeah, I think the innovators dilemma is also very good point. And also add, it's an integrators dilemma too because now you talk about integration across services. So I believe that the super cloud movement's going to happen before Sky. And I think what explained by that, what you guys did and what other companies are doing by representing advanced, I call platform engineering, refactoring an existing market really fast, time to value and CAPEX is, I mean capital, market cap is going to be really fast. I think there's going to be an opportunity for those to emerge that's going to set the table for global multicloud ultimately in the future. So I think you're going to start to see the same pattern of what you guys did get in, leverage the hell out of it, use it, not in the way just to host, but to refactor and take down territory of markets. So number one, and then ultimately you get into, okay, I want to run some SLA across services, then there's a little bit more complication. I think that's where you guys put that beautiful paper out on Sky Computing. Okay, that makes sense. Now if you go to today's market, okay, I'm betting on Amazon because they're the best, this is the best cloud win scenario, not the most robust cloud. So if I'm a developer, I want the best. How do you look at their bet when it comes to data? Because now they've got machine learning, Swami's got a big keynote on Wednesday, I'm expecting to see a lot of AI and machine learning. I'm expecting to hear an end to end data story. This is what you do, so as a major partner, how do you view the moves Amazon's making and the bets they're making with data and machine learning and AI? >> First I want to lift off my hat to AWS for being customer obsessed. So I know that if a customer wants Databricks, I know that AWS and their sellers will actually help us get that customer deploy Databricks. Now which of the services is the customer going to pick? Are they going to pick ours or the end to end, what Swami is going to present on stage? Right? So that's the question we're getting. But I wanted to start with by just saying, their customer obsessed. So I think they're going to do the right thing for the customer and I see the evidence of it again and again and again. So kudos to them. They're amazing at this actually. Ultimately our bet is, customers want this to be simple, integrated, okay? So yes there are hundreds of services that together give you the end to end experience and they're very customizable that AWS gives you. But if you want just something simply integrated that also works across the clouds, then I think there's a special place for Databricks. And I think the lake house approach that we have, which is an integrated, completely integrated, we integrate data lakes with data warehouses, integrate workflows with machine learning, with real time processing, all these in one platform. I think there's going to be tailwinds because I think the most important thing that's going to happen in the next few years is that every customer is going to now be obsessed, given the recession and the environment we're in. How do I cut my costs? How do I cut my costs? And we learn this from the customers they're adopting the lake house because they're thinking, instead of using five vendors or three vendors, I can simplify it down to one with you and I can cut my cost. So I think that's going to be one of the main drivers of why people bet on the lake house because it helps them lower their TCO; Total Cost of Ownership. And it's as simple as that. Like I have three things right now. If I can get the same job done of those three with one, I'd rather do that. And by the way, if it's three or four across two clouds and I can just use one and it just works across two clouds, I'm going to do that. Because my boss is telling me I need to cut my budget. >> (indistinct) (John laughing) >> Yeah, and I'd rather not to do layoffs and they're asking me to do more. How can I get smaller budgets, not lay people off and do more? I have to cut, I have to optimize. What's happened in the last five, six years is there's been a huge sprawl of services and startups, you know, you know most of them, all these startups, all of them, all the activity, all the VC investments, well those companies sold their software, right? Even if a startup didn't make it big, you know, they still sold their software to some vendors. So the ecosystem is now full of lots and lots and lots and lots of different software. And right now people are looking, how do I consolidate, how do I simplify, how do I cut my costs? >> And you guys have a great solution. You're also an arms dealer and a innovator. So I have to ask this question, because you're a professor of the industry as well as at Berkeley, you've seen a lot of the historical innovations. If you look at the moment we're in right now with the recession, okay we had COVID, okay, it changed how people work, you know, people working at home, provisioning VLAN, all that (indistinct) infrastructure, okay, yeah, technology and cloud health. But we're in a recession. This is the first recession where the Amazon and the other cloud, mainly Amazon Web Services is a major economic puzzle in the piece. So they were never around before, even 2008, they were too small. They're now a major economic enabler, player, they're serving startups, enterprises, they have super clouds like you guys. They're a force and the people, their customers are cutting back but also they can also get faster. So agility is now an equation in the economic recovery. And I want to get your thoughts because you just brought that up. Customers can actually use the cloud and Databricks to actually get out of the recovery because no one's going to say, stop making profit or make more profit. So yeah, cut costs, be more efficient, but agility's also like, let's drive more revenue. So in this digital transformation, if you take this to conclusion, every company transforms, their company is the app. So their revenue is tied directly to their technology deployment. What's your reaction and comment to that because this is a new historical moment where cloud and scale and data, actually could be configured in a way to actually change the nature of a business in such a short time. And with the recession looming, no one's got time to wait. >> Yeah, absolutely. Look, the secular tailwind in the market is that of, you know, 10 years ago it was software is eating the world, now it's AI's going to eat all of software software. So more and more we're going to have, wherever you have software, which is everywhere now because it's eaten the world, it's going to be eaten up by AI and data. You know, AI doesn't exist without data so they're synonymous. You can't do machine learning if you don't have data. So yeah, you're going to see that everywhere and that automation will help people simplify things and cut down the costs and automate more things. And in the cloud you can also do that by changing your CAPEX to OPEX. So instead of I invest, you know, 10 million into a data center that I buy, I'm going to have headcount to manage the software. Why don't we change this to OPEX? And then they are going to optimize it. They want to lower the TCO because okay, it's in the cloud. but I do want the costs to be much lower that what they were in the previous years. Last five years, nobody cared. Who cares? You know what it costs. You know, there's a new brave world out there. Now there's like, no, it has to be efficient. So I think they're going to optimize it. And I think this lake house approach, which is an integration of the lakes and the warehouse, allows you to rationalize the two and simplify them. It allows you to basically rationalize away the data warehouse. So I think much faster we're going to see the, why do I need the data warehouse? If I can get the same thing done with the lake house for fraction of the cost, that's what's going to happen. I think there's going to be focus on that simplification. But I agree with you. Ultimately everyone knows, everybody's a software company. Every company out there is a software company and in the next 10 years, all of them are also going to be AI companies. So that is going to continue. >> (indistinct), dev's going to stop. And right sizing right now is a key economic forcing function. Final question for you and I really appreciate you taking the time. This year Reinvent, what's the bumper sticker in your mind around what's the most important industry dynamic, power dynamic, ecosystem dynamic that people should pay attention to as we move from the brave new world of okay, I see cloud, cloud operations. I need to really make it structurally change my business. How do I, what's the most important story? What's the bumper sticker in your mind for Reinvent? >> Bumper sticker? lake house 24. (John laughing) >> That's data (indistinct) bumper sticker. What's the- >> (indistinct) in the market. No, no, no, no. You know, it's, AWS talks about, you know, all of their services becoming a lake house because they want the center of the gravity to be S3, their lake. And they want all the services to directly work on that, so that's a lake house. We're Bumper see Microsoft with Synapse, modern, you know the modern intelligent data platform. Same thing there. We're going to see the same thing, we already seeing it on GCP with Big Lake and so on. So I actually think it's the how do I reduce my costs and the lake house integrates those two. So that's one of the main ways you can rationalize and simplify. You get in the lake house, which is the name itself is a (indistinct) of two things, right? Lake house, "lake" gives you the AI, "house" give you the database data warehouse. So you get your AI and you get your data warehousing in one place at the lower cost. So for me, the bumper sticker is lake house, you know, 24. >> All right. Awesome Ali, well thanks for the exclusive interview. Appreciate it and get to see you. Congratulations on your success and I know you guys are going to be fine. >> Awesome. Thank you John. It's always a pleasure. >> Always great to chat with you again. >> Likewise. >> You guys are a great team. We're big fans of what you guys have done. We think you're an example of what we call "super cloud." Which is getting the hype up and again your paper speaks to some of the innovation, which I agree with by the way. I think that that approach of not forcing standards is really smart. And I think that's absolutely correct, that having the market still innovate is going to be key. standards with- >> Yeah, I love it. We're big fans too, you know, you're doing awesome work. We'd love to continue the partnership. >> So, great, great Ali, thanks. >> Take care (outro music)

(outro music) >> Hey, I'm John Furrier, here with an exclusive interview with Ali Ghodsi, who's the CEO of Databricks. Ali, great to see you. Preview for reinvent. We're going to launch this story, exclusive Databricks material on the notes, after the keynotes prior to the keynotes and after the keynotes that reinvent. So great to see you. You know, you've been a partner of AWS for a very, very long time. I think five years ago, I think I first interviewed you, you were one of the first to publicly declare that this was a place to build a company on and not just post an application, but refactor capabilities to create, essentially a platform in the cloud, on the cloud. Not just an ISV; Independent Software Vendor, kind of an old term, we're talking about real platform like capability to change the game. Can you talk about your experience as an AWS partner? >> Yeah, look, so we started in 2013. I swiped my personal credit card on AWS and some of my co-founders did the same. And we started building. And we were excited because we just thought this is a much better way to launch a company because you can just much faster get time to market and launch your thing and you can get the end users much quicker access to the thing you're building. So we didn't really talk to anyone at AWS, we just swiped a credit card. And eventually they told us, "Hey, do you want to buy extra support?" "You're asking a lot of advanced questions from us." "Maybe you want to buy our advanced support." And we said, no, no, no, no. We're very advanced ourselves, we know what we're doing. We're not going to buy any advanced support. So, you know, we just built this, you know, startup from nothing on AWS without even talking to anyone there. So at some point, I think around 2017, they suddenly saw this company with maybe a hundred million ARR pop up on their radar and it's driving massive amounts of compute, massive amounts of data. And it took a little bit in the beginning just us to get to know each other because as I said, it's like we were not on their radar and we weren't really looking, we were just doing our thing. And then over the years the partnership has deepened and deepened and deepened and then with, you know, Andy (indistinct) really leaning into the partnership, he mentioned us at Reinvent. And then we sort of figured out a way to really integrate the two service, the Databricks platform with AWS . And today it's an amazing partnership. You know, we directly connected with the general managers for the services. We're connected at the CEO level, you know, the sellers get compensated for pushing Databricks, we're, we have multiple offerings on their marketplace. We have a native offering on AWS. You know, we're prominently always sort of marketed and you know, we're aligned also vision wise in what we're trying to do. So yeah, we've come a very, very long way. >> Do you consider yourself a SaaS app or an ISV or do you see yourself more of a platform company because you have customers. How would you categorize your category as a company? >> Well, it's a data platform, right? And actually the, the strategy of the Databricks is take what's otherwise five, six services in the industry or five, six different startups, but do them as part of one data platform that's integrated. So in one word, the strategy of data bricks is "unification." We call it the data lake house. But really the idea behind the data lake house is that of unification, or in more words it's, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts." So you could actually go and buy five, six services out there or actually use five, six services from the cloud vendors, stitch it together and it kind of resembles Databricks. Our power is in doing those integrated, together in a way in which it's really, really easy and simple to use for end users. So yeah, we're a data platform. I wouldn't, you know, ISV that's a old term, you know, Independent Software Vendor. You know, I think, you know, we have actually a whole slew of ISVs on top of Databricks, that integrate with our platform. And you know, in our marketplace as well as in our partner connect, we host those ISVs that then, you know, work on top of the data that we have in the Databricks, data lake house. >> You know, I think one of the things your journey has been great to document and watch from the beginning. I got to give you guys credit over there and props, congratulations. But I think you're the poster child as a company to what we see enterprises doing now. So go back in time when you guys swiped a credit card, you didn't need attending technical support because you guys had brains, you were refactoring, rethinking. It wasn't just banging out software, you had, you were doing some complex things. It wasn't like it was just write some software hosted on server. It was really a lot more. And as a result your business worth billions of dollars. I think 38 billion or something like that, big numbers, big numbers of great revenue growth as well, billions in revenue. You have customers, you have an ecosystem, you have data applications on top of Databricks. So in a way you're a cloud on top of the cloud. So is there a cloud on top of the cloud? So you have ISVs, Amazon has ISVs. Can you take us through what this means and at this point in history, because this seems to be an advanced version of benefits of platforming and refactoring, leveraging say AWS. >> Yeah, so look, when we started, there was really only one game in town. It was AWS. So it was one cloud. And the strategy of the company then was, well Amazon had this beautiful set of services that they're building bottom up, they have storage, compute, networking, and then they have databases and so on. But it's a lot of services. So let us not directly compete with AWS and try to take out one of their services. Let's not do that because frankly we can't. We were not of that size. They had the scale, they had the size and they were the only cloud vendor in town. So our strategy instead was, let's do something else. Let's not compete directly with say, a particular service they're building, let's take a different strategy. What if we had a unified holistic data platform, where it's just one integrated service end to end. So think of it as Microsoft office, which contains PowerPoint, and Word, and Excel and even Access, if you want to use it. What if we build that and AWS has this really amazing knack for releasing things, you know services, lots of them, every reinvent. And they're sort of a DevOps person's dream and you can stitch these together and you know you have to be technical. How do we elevate that and make it simpler and integrate it? That was our original strategy and it resonated with a segment of the market. And the reason it worked with AWS so that we wouldn't butt heads with AWS was because we weren't a direct replacement for this service or for that service, we were taking a different approach. And AWS, because credit goes to them, they're so customer obsessed, they would actually do what's right for the customer. So if the customer said we want this unified thing, their sellers would actually say, okay, so then you should use Databricks. So they truly are customer obsessed in that way. And I really mean it, John. Things have changed over the years. They're not the only cloud anymore. You know, Azure is real, GCP is real, there's also Alibaba. And now over 70% of our customers are on more than one cloud. So now what we hear from them is, not only want, do we want a simplified, unified thing, but we want it also to work across the clouds. Because those of them that are seriously considering multiple clouds, they don't want to use a service on cloud one and then use a similar service on cloud two. But it's a little bit different. And now they have to do twice the work to make it work. You know, John, it's hard enough as it is, like it's this data stuff and analytics. It's not a walk in the park, you know. You hire an administrator in the back office that clicks a button and its just, now you're a data driven digital transformed company. It's hard. If you now have to do it again on the second cloud with different set of services and then again on a third cloud with a different set of services. That's very, very costly. So the strategy then has changed that, how do we take that unified simple approach and make it also the same and standardize across the clouds, but then also integrate it as far down as we can on each of the clouds. So that you're not giving up any of the benefits that the particular cloud has. >> Yeah, I think one of the things that we see, and I want get your reaction to this, is this rise of the super cloud as we call it. I think you were involved in the Sky paper that I saw your position paper came out after we had introduced Super Cloud, which is great. Congratulations to the Berkeley team, wearing the hat here. But you guys are, I think a driver of this because you're creating the need for these things. You're saying, okay, we went on one cloud with AWS and you didn't hide that. And now you're publicly saying there's other clouds too, increased ham for your business. And customers have multiple clouds in their infrastructure for the best of breed that they have. Okay, get that. But there's still a challenge around the innovation, growth that's still around the corner. We still have a supply chain problem, we still have skill gaps. You know, you guys are unique at Databricks as other these big examples of super clouds that are developing. Enterprises don't have the Databricks kind of talent. They need, they need turnkey solutions. So Adam and the team at Amazon are promoting, you know, more solution oriented approaches higher up on the stack. You're starting to see kind of like, I won't say templates, but you know, almost like application specific headless like, low code, no code capability to accelerate clients who are wanting to write code for the modern error. Right, so this kind of, and then now you, as you guys pointed out with these common services, you're pushing the envelope. So you're saying, hey, I need to compete, I don't want to go to my customers and have them to have a staff or this cloud and this cloud and this cloud because they don't have the staff. Or if they do, they're very unique. So what's your reaction? Because this kind is the, it kind of shows your leadership as a partner of AWS and the clouds, but also highlights I think what's coming. But you share your reaction. >> Yeah, look, it's, first of all, you know, I wish I could take credit for this but I can't because it's really the customers that have decided to go on multiple clouds. You know, it's not Databricks that you know, push this or some other vendor, you know, that, Snowflake or someone who pushed this and now enterprises listened to us and they picked two clouds. That's not how it happened. The enterprises picked two clouds or three clouds themselves and we can get into why, but they did that. So this largely just happened in the market. We as data platforms responded to what they're then saying, which is they're saying, "I don't want to redo this again on the other cloud." So I think the writing is on the wall. I think it's super obvious what's going to happen next. They will say, "Any service I'm using, it better work exactly the same on all the clouds." You know, that's what's going to happen. So in the next five years, every enterprise will say, "I'm going to use the service, but you better make sure that this service works equally well on all of the clouds." And obviously the multicloud vendors like us, are there to do that. But I actually think that what you're going to see happening is that you're going to see the cloud vendors changing the existing services that they have to make them work on the other clouds. That's what's goin to happen, I think. >> Yeah, and I think I would add that, first of all, I agree with you. I think that's going to be a forcing function. Because I think you're driving it. You guys are in a way, one, are just an actor in the driving this because you're on the front end of this and there are others and there will be people following. But I think to me, I'm a cloud vendor, I got to differentiate. Adam, If I'm Adam Saleski, I got to say, "Hey, I got to differentiate." So I don't wan to get stuck in the middle, so to speak. Am I just going to innovate on the hardware AKA infrastructure or am I going to innovate at the higher level services? So what we're talking about here is the tail of two clouds within Amazon, for instance. So do I innovate on the silicon and get low level into the physics and squeeze performance out of the hardware and infrastructure? Or do I focus on ease of use at the top of the stack for the developers? So again, there's a channel of two clouds here. So I got to ask you, how do they differentiate? Number one and number two, I never heard a developer ever say, "I want to run my app or workload on the slower cloud." So I mean, you know, back when we had PCs you wanted to go, "I want the fastest processor." So again, you can have common level services, but where is that performance differentiation with the cloud? What do the clouds do in your opinion? >> Yeah, look, I think it's pretty clear. I think that it's, this is, you know, no surprise. Probably 70% or so of the revenue is in the lower infrastructure layers, compute, storage, networking. And they have to win that. They have to be competitive there. As you said, you can say, oh you know, I guess my CPUs are slower than the other cloud, but who cares? I have amazing other services which only work on my cloud by the way, right? That's not going to be a winning recipe. So I think all three are laser focused on, we going to have specialized hardware and the nuts and bolts of the infrastructure, we can do it better than the other clouds for sure. And you can see lots of innovation happening there, right? The Graviton chips, you know, we see huge price performance benefits in those chips. I mean it's real, right? It's basically a 20, 30% free lunch. You know, why wouldn't you, why wouldn't you go for it there? There's no downside. You know, there's no, "got you" or no catch. But we see Azure doing the same thing now, they're also building their own chips and we know that Google builds specialized machine learning chips, TPU, Tenor Processing Units. So their legs are focused on that. I don't think they can give up that or focused on higher levels if they had to pick bets. And I think actually in the next few years, most of us have to make more, we have to be more deliberate and calculated in the picks we do. I think in the last five years, most of us have said, "We'll do all of it." You know. >> Well you made a good bet with Spark, you know, the duke was pretty obvious trend that was, everyone was shut on that bandwagon and you guys picked a big bet with Spark. Look what happened with you guys? So again, I love this betting kind of concept because as the world matures, growth slows down and shifts and that next wave of value coming in, AKA customers, they're going to integrate with a new ecosystem. A new kind of partner network for AWS and the other clouds. But with aws they're going to need to nurture the next Databricks. They're going to need to still provide that SaaS, ISV like experience for, you know, a basic software hosting or some application. But I go to get your thoughts on this idea of multiple clouds because if I'm a developer, the old days was, old days, within our decade, full stack developer- >> It was two years ago, yeah (John laughing) >> This is a decade ago, full stack and then the cloud came in, you kind had the half stack and then you would do some things. It seems like the clouds are trying to say, we want to be the full stack or not. Or is it still going to be, you know, I'm an application like a PC and a Mac, I'm going to write the same application for both hardware. I mean what's your take on this? Are they trying to do full stack and you see them more like- >> Absolutely. I mean look, of course they're going, they have, I mean they have over 300, I think Amazon has over 300 services, right? That's not just compute, storage, networking, it's the whole stack, right? But my key point is, I think they have to nail the core infrastructure storage compute networking because the three clouds that are there competing, they're formidable companies with formidable balance sheets and it doesn't look like any of them is going to throw in the towel and say, we give up. So I think it's going to intensify. And given that they have a 70% revenue on that infrastructure layer, I think they, if they have to pick their bets, I think they'll focus it on that infrastructure layer. I think the layer above where they're also placing bets, they're doing that, the full stack, right? But there I think the demand will be, can you make that work on the other clouds? And therein lies an innovator's dilemma because if I make it work on the other clouds, then I'm foregoing that 70% revenue of the infrastructure. I'm not getting it. The other cloud vendor is going to get it. So should I do that or not? Second, is the other cloud vendor going to be welcoming of me making my service work on their cloud if I am a competing cloud, right? And what kind of terms of service are I giving me? And am I going to really invest in doing that? And I think right now we, you know, most, the vast, vast, vast majority of the services only work on the one cloud that you know, it's built on. It doesn't work on others, but this will shift. >> Yeah, I think the innovators dilemma is also very good point. And also add, it's an integrators dilemma too because now you talk about integration across services. So I believe that the super cloud movement's going to happen before Sky. And I think what explained by that, what you guys did and what other companies are doing by representing advanced, I call platform engineering, refactoring an existing market really fast, time to value and CAPEX is, I mean capital, market cap is going to be really fast. I think there's going to be an opportunity for those to emerge that's going to set the table for global multicloud ultimately in the future. So I think you're going to start to see the same pattern of what you guys did get in, leverage the hell out of it, use it, not in the way just to host, but to refactor and take down territory of markets. So number one, and then ultimately you get into, okay, I want to run some SLA across services, then there's a little bit more complication. I think that's where you guys put that beautiful paper out on Sky Computing. Okay, that makes sense. Now if you go to today's market, okay, I'm betting on Amazon because they're the best, this is the best cloud win scenario, not the most robust cloud. So if I'm a developer, I want the best. How do you look at their bet when it comes to data? Because now they've got machine learning, Swami's got a big keynote on Wednesday, I'm expecting to see a lot of AI and machine learning. I'm expecting to hear an end to end data story. This is what you do, so as a major partner, how do you view the moves Amazon's making and the bets they're making with data and machine learning and AI? >> First I want to lift off my hat to AWS for being customer obsessed. So I know that if a customer wants Databricks, I know that AWS and their sellers will actually help us get that customer deploy Databricks. Now which of the services is the customer going to pick? Are they going to pick ours or the end to end, what Swami is going to present on stage? Right? So that's the question we're getting. But I wanted to start with by just saying, their customer obsessed. So I think they're going to do the right thing for the customer and I see the evidence of it again and again and again. So kudos to them. They're amazing at this actually. Ultimately our bet is, customers want this to be simple, integrated, okay? So yes there are hundreds of services that together give you the end to end experience and they're very customizable that AWS gives you. But if you want just something simply integrated that also works across the clouds, then I think there's a special place for Databricks. And I think the lake house approach that we have, which is an integrated, completely integrated, we integrate data lakes with data warehouses, integrate workflows with machine learning, with real time processing, all these in one platform. I think there's going to be tailwinds because I think the most important thing that's going to happen in the next few years is that every customer is going to now be obsessed, given the recession and the environment we're in. How do I cut my costs? How do I cut my costs? And we learn this from the customers they're adopting the lake house because they're thinking, instead of using five vendors or three vendors, I can simplify it down to one with you and I can cut my cost. So I think that's going to be one of the main drivers of why people bet on the lake house because it helps them lower their TCO; Total Cost of Ownership. And it's as simple as that. Like I have three things right now. If I can get the same job done of those three with one, I'd rather do that. And by the way, if it's three or four across two clouds and I can just use one and it just works across two clouds, I'm going to do that. Because my boss is telling me I need to cut my budget. >> (indistinct) (John laughing) >> Yeah, and I'd rather not to do layoffs and they're asking me to do more. How can I get smaller budgets, not lay people off and do more? I have to cut, I have to optimize. What's happened in the last five, six years is there's been a huge sprawl of services and startups, you know, you know most of them, all these startups, all of them, all the activity, all the VC investments, well those companies sold their software, right? Even if a startup didn't make it big, you know, they still sold their software to some vendors. So the ecosystem is now full of lots and lots and lots and lots of different software. And right now people are looking, how do I consolidate, how do I simplify, how do I cut my costs? >> And you guys have a great solution. You're also an arms dealer and a innovator. So I have to ask this question, because you're a professor of the industry as well as at Berkeley, you've seen a lot of the historical innovations. If you look at the moment we're in right now with the recession, okay we had COVID, okay, it changed how people work, you know, people working at home, provisioning VLAN, all that (indistinct) infrastructure, okay, yeah, technology and cloud health. But we're in a recession. This is the first recession where the Amazon and the other cloud, mainly Amazon Web Services is a major economic puzzle in the piece. So they were never around before, even 2008, they were too small. They're now a major economic enabler, player, they're serving startups, enterprises, they have super clouds like you guys. They're a force and the people, their customers are cutting back but also they can also get faster. So agility is now an equation in the economic recovery. And I want to get your thoughts because you just brought that up. Customers can actually use the cloud and Databricks to actually get out of the recovery because no one's going to say, stop making profit or make more profit. So yeah, cut costs, be more efficient, but agility's also like, let's drive more revenue. So in this digital transformation, if you take this to conclusion, every company transforms, their company is the app. So their revenue is tied directly to their technology deployment. What's your reaction and comment to that because this is a new historical moment where cloud and scale and data, actually could be configured in a way to actually change the nature of a business in such a short time. And with the recession looming, no one's got time to wait. >> Yeah, absolutely. Look, the secular tailwind in the market is that of, you know, 10 years ago it was software is eating the world, now it's AI's going to eat all of software software. So more and more we're going to have, wherever you have software, which is everywhere now because it's eaten the world, it's going to be eaten up by AI and data. You know, AI doesn't exist without data so they're synonymous. You can't do machine learning if you don't have data. So yeah, you're going to see that everywhere and that automation will help people simplify things and cut down the costs and automate more things. And in the cloud you can also do that by changing your CAPEX to OPEX. So instead of I invest, you know, 10 million into a data center that I buy, I'm going to have headcount to manage the software. Why don't we change this to OPEX? And then they are going to optimize it. They want to lower the TCO because okay, it's in the cloud. but I do want the costs to be much lower that what they were in the previous years. Last five years, nobody cared. Who cares? You know what it costs. You know, there's a new brave world out there. Now there's like, no, it has to be efficient. So I think they're going to optimize it. And I think this lake house approach, which is an integration of the lakes and the warehouse, allows you to rationalize the two and simplify them. It allows you to basically rationalize away the data warehouse. So I think much faster we're going to see the, why do I need the data warehouse? If I can get the same thing done with the lake house for fraction of the cost, that's what's going to happen. I think there's going to be focus on that simplification. But I agree with you. Ultimately everyone knows, everybody's a software company. Every company out there is a software company and in the next 10 years, all of them are also going to be AI companies. So that is going to continue. >> (indistinct), dev's going to stop. And right sizing right now is a key economic forcing function. Final question for you and I really appreciate you taking the time. This year Reinvent, what's the bumper sticker in your mind around what's the most important industry dynamic, power dynamic, ecosystem dynamic that people should pay attention to as we move from the brave new world of okay, I see cloud, cloud operations. I need to really make it structurally change my business. How do I, what's the most important story? What's the bumper sticker in your mind for Reinvent? >> Bumper sticker? lake house 24. (John laughing) >> That's data (indistinct) bumper sticker. What's the- >> (indistinct) in the market. No, no, no, no. You know, it's, AWS talks about, you know, all of their services becoming a lake house because they want the center of the gravity to be S3, their lake. And they want all the services to directly work on that, so that's a lake house. We're Bumper see Microsoft with Synapse, modern, you know the modern intelligent data platform. Same thing there. We're going to see the same thing, we already seeing it on GCP with Big Lake and so on. So I actually think it's the how do I reduce my costs and the lake house integrates those two. So that's one of the main ways you can rationalize and simplify. You get in the lake house, which is the name itself is a (indistinct) of two things, right? Lake house, "lake" gives you the AI, "house" give you the database data warehouse. So you get your AI and you get your data warehousing in one place at the lower cost. So for me, the bumper sticker is lake house, you know, 24. >> All right. Awesome Ali, well thanks for the exclusive interview. Appreciate it and get to see you. Congratulations on your success and I know you guys are going to be fine. >> Awesome. Thank you John. It's always a pleasure. >> Always great to chat with you again. >> Likewise. >> You guys are a great team. We're big fans of what you guys have done. We think you're an example of what we call "super cloud." Which is getting the hype up and again your paper speaks to some of the innovation, which I agree with by the way. I think that that approach of not forcing standards is really smart. And I think that's absolutely correct, that having the market still innovate is going to be key. standards with- >> Yeah, I love it. We're big fans too, you know, you're doing awesome work. We'd love to continue the partnership. >> So, great, great Ali, thanks. >> Take care (outro 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)

>>Hi everyone. Welcome to the Cube special presentation here in Palo Alto, California. I'm John Foer, host of the Cube. We've got two great guests, one for calling in from Germany, our videoing in from Germany, one from Maryland. We've got VMware and aws. This is the customer successes with VMware cloud on AWS showcase, accelerating business transformation here in the showcase with Samir Candu Worldwide. VMware strategic alliance solution, architect leader with AWS Samir. Great to have you and Daniel Re Myer, principal architect global AWS synergy at VMware. Guys, you guys are, are working together. You're the key players in the re relationship as it rolls out and continues to grow. So welcome to the cube. >>Thank you. Greatly appreciate it. >>Great to have you guys both on, As you know, we've been covering this since 2016 when Pat Geling, then CEO and then then CEO AWS at Andy Chasy did this. It kind of got people by surprise, but it really kind of cleaned out the positioning in the enterprise for the success. OFM workloads in the cloud. VMware's had great success with it since, and you guys have the great partnerships. So this has been like a really strategic, successful partnership. Where are we right now? You know, years later we got this whole inflection point coming. You're starting to see, you know, this idea of higher level services, more performance are coming in at the infrastructure side. More automation, more serverless, I mean, and a, I mean it's just getting better and better every year in the cloud. Kinda a whole nother level. Where are we, Samir? Let's start with you on, on the relationship. >>Yeah, totally. So I mean, there's several things to keep in mind, right? So in 2016, right, that's when the partnership between AWS and VMware was announced, and then less than a year later, that's when we officially launched VMware cloud on aws. Years later, we've been driving innovation, working with our customers, jointly engineering this between AWS and VMware day in, day out. As far as advancing VMware cloud on aws. You know, even if you look at the innovation that takes place with a solution, things have modernized, things have changed, there's been advancements, you know, whether it's security focus, whether it's platform focus, whether it's networking focus, there's been modifications along the way, even storage, right? More recently, one of the things to keep in mind is we're looking to deliver value to our customers together. These are our joint customers. So there's hundreds of VMware and AWS engineers working together on this solution. >>And then factor in even our sales teams, right? We have VMware and AWS sales teams interacting with each other on a constant daily basis. We're working together with our customers at the end of the day too. Then we're looking to even offer and develop jointly engineered solutions specific to VMware cloud on aws, and even with VMware's, other platforms as well. Then the other thing comes down to is where we have dedicated teams around this at both AWS and VMware. So even from solutions architects, even to our sales specialists, even to our account teams, even to specific engineering teams within the organizations, they all come together to drive this innovation forward with VMware cloud on AWS and the jointly engineered solution partnership as well. And then I think one of the key things to keep in mind comes down to we have nearly 600 channel partners that have achieved VMware cloud on AWS service competency. So think about it from the standpoint there's 300 certified or validated technology solutions, they're now available to our customers. So that's even innovation right off the top as well. >>Great stuff. Daniel, I wanna get to you in a second. Upon this principal architect position you have in your title, you're the global a synergy person. Synergy means bringing things together, making it work. Take us through the architecture, because we heard a lot of folks at VMware explore this year, formerly world, talking about how the, the workloads on it has been completely transforming into cloud and hybrid, right? This is where the action is. Where are you? Is your customers taking advantage of that new shift? You got AI ops, you got it. Ops changing a lot, you got a lot more automation edges right around the corner. This is like a complete transformation from where we were just five years ago. What's your thoughts on the >>Relationship? So at at, at first, I would like to emphasize that our collaboration is not just that we have dedicated teams to help our customers get the most and the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. We are also enabling US mutually. So AWS learns from us about the VMware technology, where VMware people learn about the AWS technology. We are also enabling our channel partners and we are working together on customer projects. So we have regular assembled globally and also virtually on Slack and the usual suspect tools working together and listening to customers, that's, that's very important. Asking our customers where are their needs? And we are driving the solution into the direction that our customers get the, the best benefits out of VMware cloud on aws. And over the time we, we really have involved the solution. As Samia mentioned, we just added additional storage solutions to VMware cloud on aws. We now have three different instance types that cover a broad range of, of workload. So for example, we just added the I four I host, which is ideally for workloads that require a lot of CPU power, such as you mentioned it, AI workloads. >>Yeah. So I wanna guess just specifically on the customer journey and their transformation. You know, we've been reporting on Silicon angle in the queue in the past couple weeks in a big way that the OPS teams are now the new devs, right? I mean that sounds OP a little bit weird, but operation IT operations is now part of the, a lot more data ops, security writing code composing, you know, with open source, a lot of great things are changing. Can you share specifically what customers are looking for when you say, as you guys come in and assess their needs, what are they doing? What are some of the things that they're doing with VMware on AWS specifically that's a little bit different? Can you share some of and highlights there? >>That, that's a great point because originally VMware and AWS came from very different directions when it comes to speaking people at customers. So for example, aws very developer focused, whereas VMware has a very great footprint in the IT ops area. And usually these are very different, very different teams, groups, different cultures, but it's, it's getting together. However, we always try to address the customers, right? There are customers that want to build up a new application from the scratch and build resiliency, availability, recoverability, scalability into the application. But there are still a lot of customers that say, well we don't have all of the skills to redevelop everything to refactor an application to make it highly available. So we want to have all of that as a service, recoverability as a service, scalability as a service. We want to have this from the infrastructure. That was one of the unique selling points for VMware on premise and now we are bringing this into the cloud. >>Samir, talk about your perspective. I wanna get your thoughts, and not to take a tangent, but we had covered the AWS remar of, actually it was Amazon res machine learning automation, robotics and space. It was really kinda the confluence of industrial IOT software physical. And so when you look at like the IT operations piece becoming more software, you're seeing things about automation, but the skill gap is huge. So you're seeing low code, no code automation, you know, Hey Alexa, deploy a Kubernetes cluster. Yeah, I mean, I mean that's coming, right? So we're seeing this kind of operating automation meets higher level services meets workloads. Can you unpack that and share your opinion on, on what you see there from an Amazon perspective and how it relates to this? >>Yeah, totally. Right. And you know, look at it from the point of view where we said this is a jointly engineered solution, but it's not migrating to one option or the other option, right? It's more or less together. So even with VMware cloud on aws, yes it is utilizing AWS infrastructure, but your environment is connected to that AWS VPC in your AWS account. So if you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services, so any of the 200 plus AWS services, you have that option to do so. So that's gonna give you that power to do certain things, such as, for example, like how you mentioned with iot, even with utilizing Alexa or if there's any other service that you wanna utilize, that's the joining point between both of the offerings. Right off the top though, with digital transformation, right? You, you have to think about where it's not just about the technology, right? There's also where you want to drive growth in the underlying technology. Even in your business leaders are looking to reinvent their business. They're looking to take different steps as far as pursuing a new strategy. Maybe it's a process, maybe it's with the people, the culture, like how you said before, where people are coming in from a different background, right? They may not be used to the cloud, they may not be used to AWS services, but now you have that capability to mesh them together. Okay. Then also, Oh, >>Go ahead, finish >>Your thought. No, no, I was gonna say, what it also comes down to is you need to think about the operating model too, where it is a shift, right? Especially for that VS four admin that's used to their on-premises at environment. Now with VMware cloud on aws, you have that ability to leverage a cloud, but the investment that you made and certain things as far as automation, even with monitoring, even with logging, yeah. You still have that methodology where you can utilize that in VMware cloud on AWS two. >>Danielle, I wanna get your thoughts on this because at at explore and, and, and after the event, now as we prep for Cuban and reinvent coming up the big AWS show, I had a couple conversations with a lot of the VMware customers and operators and it's like hundreds of thousands of, of, of, of users and millions of people talking about and and peaked on VM we're interested in v VMware. The common thread was one's one, one person said, I'm trying to figure out where I'm gonna put my career in the next 10 to 15 years. And they've been very comfortable with VMware in the past, very loyal, and they're kind of talking about, I'm gonna be the next cloud, but there's no like role yet architects, is it Solution architect sre. So you're starting to see the psychology of the operators who now are gonna try to make these career decisions, like how, what am I gonna work on? And it's, and that was kind of fuzzy, but I wanna get your thoughts. How would you talk to that persona about the future of VMware on, say, cloud for instance? What should they be thinking about? What's the opportunity and what's gonna happen? >>So digital transformation definitely is a huge change for many organizations and leaders are perfectly aware of what that means. And that also means in, in to to some extent, concerns with your existing employees. Concerns about do I have to relearn everything? Do I have to acquire new skills? And, and trainings is everything worthless I learned over the last 15 years of my career? And the, the answer is to make digital transformation a success. We need not just to talk about technology, but also about process people and culture. And this is where VMware really can help because if you are applying VMware cloud on a, on AWS to your infrastructure, to your existing on-premise infrastructure, you do not need to change many things. You can use the same tools and skills, you can manage your virtual machines as you did in your on-premise environment. You can use the same managing and monitoring tools. If you have written, and many customers did this, if you have developed hundreds of, of scripts that automate tasks and if you know how to troubleshoot things, then you can use all of that in VMware cloud on aws. And that gives not just leaders, but but also the architects at customers, the operators at customers, the confidence in, in such a complex project, >>The consistency, very key point, gives them the confidence to go and, and then now that once they're confident they can start committing themselves to new things. Samir, you're reacting to this because you know, on your side you've got higher level services, you got more performance at the hardware level. I mean, lot improvement. So, okay, nothing's changed. I can still run my job now I got goodness on the other side. What's the upside? What's in it for the, for the, for the customer there? >>Yeah, so I think what it comes down to is they've already been so used to or entrenched with that VMware admin mentality, right? But now extending that to the cloud, that's where now you have that bridge between VMware cloud on AWS to bridge that VMware knowledge with that AWS knowledge. So I will look at it from the point of view where now one has that capability and that ability to just learn about the cloud, but if they're comfortable with certain aspects, no one's saying you have to change anything. You can still leverage that, right? But now if you wanna utilize any other AWS service in conjunction with that VM that resides maybe on premises or even in VMware cloud on aws, you have that option to do so. So think about it where you have that ability to be someone who's curious and wants to learn. And then if you wanna expand on the skills, you certainly have that capability to do so. >>Great stuff. I love, love that. Now that we're peeking behind the curtain here, I'd love to have you guys explain, cuz people wanna know what's goes on in behind the scenes. How does innovation get happen? How does it happen with the relationship? Can you take us through a day in the life of kind of what goes on to make innovation happen with the joint partnership? You guys just have a zoom meeting, Do you guys fly out, you write go do you ship thing? I mean I'm making it up, but you get the idea, what's the, what's, how does it work? What's going on behind the scenes? >>So we hope to get more frequently together in person, but of course we had some difficulties over the last two to three years. So we are very used to zoom conferences and and Slack meetings. You always have to have the time difference in mind if we are working globally together. But what we try, for example, we have reg regular assembled now also in person geo based. So for emia, for the Americas, for aj. And we are bringing up interesting customer situations, architectural bits and pieces together. We are discussing it always to share and to contribute to our community. >>What's interesting, you know, as, as events are coming back to here, before you get, you weigh in, I'll comment, as the cube's been going back out to events, we are hearing comments like what, what pandemic we were more productive in the pandemic. I mean, developers know how to work remotely and they've been on all the tools there, but then they get in person, they're happy to see people, but there's no one's, no one's really missed the beat. I mean it seems to be very productive, you know, workflow, not a lot of disruption. More if anything, productivity gains. >>Agreed, right? I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, even if you look at AWS's and even Amazon's leadership principles, right? Customer obsession, that's key. VMware is carrying that forward as well. Where we are working with our customers, like how Daniel said met earlier, right? We might have meetings at different time zones, maybe it's in person, maybe it's virtual, but together we're working to listen to our customers. You know, we're taking and capturing that feedback to drive innovation and VMware cloud on AWS as well. But one of the key things to keep in mind is yes, there have been, there has been the pandemic, we might have been disconnected to a certain extent, but together through technology we've been able to still communicate work with our customers. Even with VMware in between, with AWS and whatnot. We had that flexibility to innovate and continue that innovation. So even if you look at it from the point of view, right? VMware cloud on AWS outposts, that was something that customers have been asking for. We've been been able to leverage the feedback and then continue to drive innovation even around VMware cloud on AWS outposts. So even with the on premises environment, if you're looking to handle maybe data sovereignty or compliance needs, maybe you have low latency requirements, that's where certain advancements come into play, right? So the key thing is always to maintain that communication track. >>And our last segment we did here on the, on this showcase, we listed the accomplishments and they were pretty significant. I mean go, you got the global rollouts of the relationship. It's just really been interesting and, and people can reference that. We won't get into it here, but I will ask you guys to comment on, as you guys continue to evolve the relationship, what's in it for the customer? What can they expect next? Cuz again, I think right now we're in at a, an inflection point more than ever. What can people expect from the relationship and what's coming up with reinvent? Can you share a little bit of kind of what's coming down the pike? >>So one of the most important things we have announced this year, and we will continue to evolve into that direction, is independent scale of storage. That absolutely was one of the most important items customer asked us for over the last years. Whenever, whenever you are requiring additional storage to host your virtual machines, you usually in VMware cloud on aws, you have to add additional notes. Now we have three different note types with different ratios of compute, storage and memory. But if you only require additional storage, you always have to get also additional compute and memory and you have to pay. And now with two solutions which offer choice for the customers, like FS six one, NetApp onap, and VMware cloud Flex Storage, you now have two cost effective opportunities to add storage to your virtual machines. And that offers opportunities for other instance types maybe that don't have local storage. We are also very, very keen looking forward to announcements, exciting announcements at the upcoming events. >>Samir, what's your, what's your reaction take on the, on what's coming down on your side? >>Yeah, I think one of the key things to keep in mind is, you know, we're looking to help our customers be agile and even scale with their needs, right? So with VMware cloud on aws, that's one of the key things that comes to mind, right? There are gonna be announcements, innovations and whatnot with outcoming events. But together we're able to leverage that to advance VMware cloud on AWS to Daniel's point storage, for example, even with host offerings. And then even with decoupling storage from compute and memory, right now you have the flexibility where you can do all of that. So to look at it from the standpoint where now with 21 regions where we have VMware cloud on AWS available as well, where customers can utilize that as needed when needed, right? So it comes down to, you know, transformation will be there. Yes, there's gonna be maybe where workloads have to be adapted where they're utilizing certain AWS services, but you have that flexibility and option to do so. And I think with the continuing events that's gonna give us the options to even advance our own services together. >>Well you guys are in the middle of it, you're in the trenches, you're making things happen, you've got a team of people working together. My final question is really more of a kind of a current situation, kind of future evolutionary thing that you haven't seen this before. I wanna get both of your reaction to it. And we've been bringing this up in, in the open conversations on the cube is in the old days it was going back this generation, you had ecosystems, you had VMware had an ecosystem they did best, had an ecosystem. You know, we have a product, you have a product, biz dev deals happen, people sign relationships and they do business together and they, they sell to each other's products or do some stuff. Now it's more about architecture cuz we're now in a distributed large scale environment where the role of ecosystems are intertwining. >>And this, you guys are in the middle of two big ecosystems. You mentioned channel partners, you both have a lot of partners on both sides. They come together. So you have this now almost a three dimensional or multidimensional ecosystem, you know, interplay. What's your thoughts on this? And, and, and because it's about the architecture, integration is a value, not so much. Innovation is only, you gotta do innovation, but when you do innovation, you gotta integrate it, you gotta connect it. So what is, how do you guys see this as a, as an architectural thing, start to see more technical business deals? >>So we are, we are removing dependencies from individual ecosystems and from individual vendors. So a customer no longer has to decide for one vendor and then it is a very expensive and high effort project to move away from that vendor, which ties customers even, even closer to specific vendors. We are removing these obstacles. So with VMware cloud on aws moving to the cloud, firstly it's, it's not a dead end. If you decide at one point in time because of latency requirements or maybe it's some compliance requirements, you need to move back into on-premise. You can do this if you decide you want to stay with some of your services on premise and just run a couple of dedicated services in the cloud, you can do this and you can mana manage it through a single pane of glass. That's quite important. So cloud is no longer a dead and it's no longer a binary decision, whether it's on premise or the cloud. It it is the cloud. And the second thing is you can choose the best of both works, right? If you are migrating virtual machines that have been running in your on-premise environment to VMware cloud on aws, by the way, in a very, very fast cost effective and safe way, then you can enrich later on enrich these virtual machines with services that are offered by aws. More than 200 different services ranging from object based storage, load balancing and so on. So it's an endless, endless possibility. >>We, we call that super cloud in, in a, in a way that we be generically defining it where everyone's innovating, but yet there's some common services. But the differentiation comes from innovation where the lock in is the value, not some spec, right? Samir, this is gonna where cloud is right now, you guys are, are not commodity. Amazon's completely differentiating, but there's some commodity things. Having got storage, you got compute, but then you got now advances in all areas. But partners innovate with you on their terms. Absolutely. And everybody wins. >>Yeah. And a hundred percent agree with you. I think one of the key things, you know, as Daniel mentioned before, is where it it, it's a cross education where there might be someone who's more proficient on the cloud side with aws, maybe more proficient with the viewers technology, but then for partners, right? They bridge that gap as well where they come in and they might have a specific niche or expertise where their background, where they can help our customers go through that transformation. So then that comes down to, hey, maybe I don't know how to connect to the cloud. Maybe I don't know what the networking constructs are. Maybe I can leverage that partner. That's one aspect to go about it. Now maybe you migrated that workload to VMware cloud on aws. Maybe you wanna leverage any of the native AWS services or even just off the top 200 plus AWS services, right? But it comes down to that skill, right? So again, solutions architecture at the back of, back of the day, end of the day, what it comes down to is being able to utilize the best of both worlds. That's what we're giving our customers at the end of the >>Day. I mean, I just think it's, it's a, it's a refactoring and innovation opportunity at all levels. I think now more than ever, you can take advantage of each other's ecosystems and partners and technologies and change how things get done with keeping the consistency. I mean, Daniel, you nailed that, right? I mean, you don't have to do anything. You still run the fear, the way you working on it and now do new things. This is kind of a cultural shift. >>Yeah, absolutely. And if, if you look, not every, not every customer, not every organization has the resources to refactor and re-platform everything. And we gave, we give them a very simple and easy way to move workloads to the cloud. Simply run them and at the same time they can free up resources to develop new innovations and, and grow their business. >>Awesome. Samir, thank you for coming on. Danielle, thank you for coming to Germany, Octoberfest, I know it's evening over there, your weekend's here. And thank you for spending the time. Samir final give you the final word, AWS reinvents coming up. Preparing. We're gonna have an exclusive with Adam, but Fry, we do a curtain raise, a dual preview. What's coming down on your side with the relationship and what can we expect to hear about what you got going on at reinvent this year? The big show? >>Yeah, so I think, you know, Daniel hit upon some of the key points, but what I will say is we do have, for example, specific sessions, both that VMware's driving and then also that AWS is driving. We do have even where we have what I call a chalk talks. So I would say, and then even with workshops, right? So even with the customers, the attendees who are there, whatnot, if they're looking for to sit and listen to a session, yes that's there. But if they wanna be hands on, that is also there too. So personally for me as an IT background, you know, been in CIS admin world and whatnot, being hands on, that's one of the key things that I personally am looking forward. But I think that's one of the key ways just to learn and get familiar with the technology. Yeah, >>Reinvents an amazing show for the in person. You guys nail it every year. We'll have three sets this year at the cube. It's becoming popular. We more and more content. You guys got live streams going on, a lot of content, a lot of media, so thanks, thanks for sharing that. Samir Daniel, thank you for coming on on this part of the showcase episode of really the customer successes with VMware Cloud Ons, really accelerating business transformation withs and VMware. I'm John Fur with the cube, thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to this cube showcase, accelerating business transformation with VMware cloud on it's a solution innovation conversation with two great guests, Fred and VP of commercial services at aws and NA Ryan Bard, who's the VP and general manager of cloud solutions at VMware. Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on this 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 abus 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. It's what's this mean? And depress work were, 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 D and it continues two years later and I want 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 reinvent, which is only a couple weeks away, feels like tomorrow. But you know, as we prepare a lot going on, where are we with the evolution of the solution? >>I mean, first thing I wanna say is, you know, PBO 2016 was a someon moment and the history of it, right? When Pat Gelsinger and Andy Jessey 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 VM Word back when we called it Word, I think we have gone from strength to strength. One of the things that has really mattered to us is we have learned froms also in the processes, this notion of working backwards. So we really, really focused on customer feedback as we build a service offering now five years old, pretty remarkable journey. 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 grade features. We invented this pretty awesome feature called Stretch clusters, where you could stretch a vSphere cluster using VSA and NSX across two AZs in the same region. Pretty phenomenal four nine s 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. You know, along the way, disaster recovery, we punched out two, two new services just focused on that. And then more recently we launched our outposts partnership. We were up on stage at Reinvent, again with Pat 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, and this has kind of been the theme for AWS since I can remember from day one. Fred, you guys do the heavy lifting as as, as you 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, 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 Preem 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. 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, 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 bmc. Yeah, >>That's what great value publish. We've been talking about that in context too. 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 and investment Amazon's made and AWS has made and, and and continues to make in performance IAS 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 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 earlier doctors of AWS Nitro platform, right? The reinvention of E two back five years ago. And so we have been, you know, 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 or compute storage networking on EC two, bare metal across all regions. You can scale that elastically up and down. It's pretty phenomenal just having that consistency globally, right on aws EC two global regions. Now the other thing that's a real differentiator for us that customers tell us about is this whole notion of a managed service, right? 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 batches on top. >>So we took, took away all of that pain as customers transitioned to VMware cloud and aws. In fact, my favorite story from last year when we were all going through the lock for j debacle industry was just going through that, right? Favorite proof point from customers was before they put 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, super thrilled they had to take no action, but a pretty incredible industry challenge that we were all facing. >>Nora, that's a great, so that's a great point. You know, the whole managed service piece brings up the security, you kind of teasing at it, but you know, there's always vulnerabilities that emerge when you are doing complex logic. And as you grow your solutions, there's more bits. You know, Fred, we were commenting before we came on camera, there's more bits than ever before and, and at at the physics layer too, as well as the software. So you never know when there's gonna be a zero day vulnerability out there. Just, it happens. We saw one with fornet this week, this came outta 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, 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 wanna get more clarity on is how do you guys handle 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. And on top of that, we look at where, where we're improving reliability in, in as a first order of, 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 gonna go help the customer resolve. That works really well >>On the VMware side. What's been the feedback there? What's the, what are some of the updates? >>Yeah, I think, look, I mean, VMware owns and operates the service, but we have a phenomenal backend relationship with aws. Customers call VMware for the service for any issues and, and then we have a awesome relationship with AWS on the backend for support issues or any hardware issues. The BASKE management that we jointly do, right? 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 VMware cloud aws, you know, we are 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, I've got a list here, some of the innovations the, you mentioned the stretch clustering, you know, getting the GOs working, Advanced network, disaster recovery, 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 recent innovations are you doing? Are you making investments in what's on the lists this year? What items will be next year? How do you see the, the new things, the list of accomplishments, people wanna know what's next. They don't wanna see stagnant growth here, they wanna see more action, you know, as as 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 C I C D pipe pipelining with with modern apps, put more pressure on the system. What's new, what's the new innovations? >>Absolutely. And I think as a five yearold 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 Explorer. First of all, our new platform i four I dot 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, right? And you know, separate that from compute. So two different storage offerings there. One is with AWS Fsx, with 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 for 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 V C P 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, talk about ransomware. Of course it's a hot topic in 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 Knot star for ability to have layer flow through layer seven, you know, 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 and sort of at the heart of our office, >>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 Drew screen 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 the, 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, right? And 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 their costs 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 customers request for fiber machines, five containers, its 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. It'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 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 of 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 ex, we have some time. I wanna 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 would start consuming higher level services, kind of that adoption next level happens and because it 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 of use cases? >>Sure. 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 bits you need better and better hardware and networking. And we're super excited about the I four 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. 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 Tanu or with any other container and or services within aws. >>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 healthcare or regulatory business is, is allowed to then consume and use things, for example, with tech 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 and saving customers money and building innovative applications on top of their, their current 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, 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. >>Nora, what's your perspective from the VMware sy? So, you know, you guys have now a lot of headroom to offer customers with Amazon's, you know, higher level services and or whatever's homegrown where's being rolled out? Cuz you now have a lot of hybrid too, so, so what's your, what's your take on what, what's happening in with customers? >>I mean, it's been phenomenal, the, 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. S and p Global is one of my favorite examples. Large bank, they merge with IHS market, big sort of conglomeration. Now both customers were using VMware cloud and AWS in different ways. And with the, 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 thousand 1000 workloads to VMware cloud 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 VMware, VMware cloud, and aws. So that's, 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 are seeing rapid expansion across the globe that constantly entering new markets with the limited number of regions and progressing our roadmap there. >>Yeah, 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. One >>Of other, 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, 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 the sustainability. Fred, I'm 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, I remember interviewing Stephen Schmidt with that AWS and many years ago, this is like 2013, and you know, 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 you gotta to stay current on, on the isolation there is is hard. So I think, I think the security and supply chain, Fred is, is another one. Do you agree? >>I I absolutely agree. 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, 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 P one. 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 naron your point earlier about the managed service patching and being on top of things, it's really gonna get better. All right, final question. I really wanna thank you for your time on this showcase. It's really been a great conversation. Fred, you had made a comment earlier. I wanna kind of end with kind of a curve ball and put you eyes 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 with application and open source growth significantly at the app layer. Continue to put a lot of pressure and, 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 the 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, I'll, I'll tackle it. You know, businesses are complex and they're often unique that that's the same. 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 that you don't have to worry about that's elastic. You, 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, 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 gonna continue to accelerate that. That's my take. All right. >>You got a lot of platform to compete on with, got a lot to build on then you're Ryan, your side, What's your, what's your answer to that question? >>I think we are seeing a lot of innovation with new applications that customers are constant. 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, 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, we are seeing, you know, we are at the very start of that sort of of journey. Of course we have invested in Kubernetes the means to an end, but there's 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. >>Yeah. Well gentlemen, I really appreciate that we're seeing the same thing. It's more the same here on, you know, solving these complexities with distractions. Whether it's, you know, higher level services with large scale infrastructure at, at your fingertips. Infrastructures, code, infrastructure to be provisioned, serverless, all the good stuff happen in 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 and we're seeing again, that traction with the VMware customer base and of us getting, getting along great together. So thanks for sharing your perspectives, >>I appreciate it. Thank you so >>Much. Okay, thank you John. Okay, this is the Cube 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 Fur, your host. Thanks for watching. Hello everyone. Welcome to the special cube presentation of accelerating business transformation on vmc on aws. I'm John Furrier, host of the Cube. We have dawan director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on adb. This is a great showcase and should be a lot of fun. Ashish, thanks for coming on. >>Hi John. Thank you so much. >>So VMware cloud on AWS has been well documented as this big success for VMware and aws. As customers move their workloads into the cloud, IT operations of VMware customers has signaling a lot of change. This is changing the landscape globally is on cloud migration and beyond. What's your take on this? Can you open this up with the most important story around VMC on aws? >>Yes, John. The most important thing for our customers today is the how they can safely and swiftly move their ID infrastructure and applications through cloud. Now, VMware cloud AWS is a service that allows all vSphere based workloads to move to cloud safely, swiftly and reliably. Banks can move their core, core banking platforms, insurance companies move their core insurance platforms, telcos move their goss, bss, PLA platforms, government organizations are moving their citizen engagement platforms using VMC on aws because this is one platform that allows you to move it, move their VMware based platforms very fast. Migrations can happen in a matter of days instead of months. Extremely securely. It's a VMware manage service. It's very secure and highly reliably. It gets the, the reliability of the underlyings infrastructure along with it. So win-win from our customers perspective. >>You know, we reported on this big news in 2016 with Andy Chas, the, and Pat Geling at the time, a lot of people said it was a bad deal. It turned out to be a great deal because not only could VMware customers actually have a cloud migrate to the cloud, do it safely, which was their number one concern. They didn't want to have disruption to their operations, but also position themselves for what's beyond just shifting to the cloud. So I have to ask you, since you got the finger on the pulse here, what are we seeing in the market when it comes to migrating and modern modernizing in the cloud? Because that's the next step. They go to the cloud, you guys have done that, doing it, then they go, I gotta modernize, which means kind of upgrading or refactoring. What's your take on that? >>Yeah, absolutely. Look, the first step is to help our customers assess their infrastructure and licensing and entire ID operations. Once we've done the assessment, we then create their migration plans. A lot of our customers are at that inflection point. They're, they're looking at their real estate, ex data center, real estate. They're looking at their contracts with colocation vendors. They really want to exit their data centers, right? And VMware cloud and AWS is a perfect solution for customers who wanna exit their data centers, migrate these applications onto the AWS platform using VMC on aws, get rid of additional real estate overheads, power overheads, be socially and environmentally conscious by doing that as well, right? So that's the migration story, but to your point, it doesn't end there, right? Modernization is a critical aspect of the entire customer journey as as well customers, once they've migrated their ID applications and infrastructure on cloud get access to all the modernization services that AWS has. They can correct easily to our data lake services, to our AIML services, to custom databases, right? They can decide which applications they want to keep and which applications they want to refactor. They want to take decisions on containerization, make decisions on service computing once they've come to the cloud. But the most important thing is to take that first step. You know, exit data centers, come to AWS using vmc or aws, and then a whole host of modernization options available to them. >>Yeah, I gotta say, we had this right on this, on this story, because you just pointed out a big thing, which was first order of business is to make sure to leverage the on-prem investments that those customers made and then migrate to the cloud where they can maintain their applications, their data, their infrastructure operations that they're used to, and then be in position to start getting modern. So I have to ask you, how are you guys specifically, or how is VMware cloud on s addressing these needs of the customers? Because what happens next is something that needs to happen faster. And sometimes the skills might not be there because if they're running old school, IT ops now they gotta come in and jump in. They're gonna use a data cloud, they're gonna want to use all kinds of machine learning, and there's a lot of great goodness going on above the stack there. So as you move with the higher level services, you know, it's a no brainer, obviously, but they're not, it's not yesterday's higher level services in the cloud. So how are, how is this being addressed? >>Absolutely. I think you hit up on a very important point, and that is skills, right? When our customers are operating, some of the most critical applications I just mentioned, core banking, core insurance, et cetera, they're most of the core applications that our customers have across industries, like even, even large scale ERP systems, they're actually sitting on VMware's vSphere platform right now. When the customer wants to migrate these to cloud, one of the key bottlenecks they face is skill sets. They have the trained manpower for these core applications, but for these high level services, they may not, right? So the first order of business is to help them ease this migration pain as much as possible by not wanting them to, to upscale immediately. And we VMware cloud and AWS exactly does that. I mean, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to create new skill set for doing this, right? Their existing skill sets suffice, but at the same time, it gives them that, that leeway to build that skills roadmap for their team. DNS is invested in that, right? Yes. We want to help them build those skills in the high level services, be it aml, be it, be it i t be it data lake and analytics. We want to invest in them, and we help our customers through that. So that ultimately the ultimate goal of making them drop data is, is, is a front and center. >>I wanna get into some of the use cases and success stories, but I want to just reiterate, hit back your point on the skill thing. Because if you look at what you guys have done at aws, you've essentially, and Andy Chassey used to talk about this all the time when I would interview him, and now last year Adam was saying the same thing. You guys do all the heavy lifting, but if you're a VMware customer user or operator, you are used to things. You don't have to be relearn to be a cloud architect. Now you're already in the game. So this is like almost like a instant path to cloud skills for the VMware. There's hundreds of thousands of, of VMware architects and operators that now instantly become cloud architects, literally overnight. Can you respond to that? Do you agree with that? And then give an example. >>Yes, absolutely. You know, if you have skills on the VMware platform, you know, know, migrating to AWS using via by cloud and AWS is absolutely possible. You don't have to really change the skills. The operations are exactly the same. The management systems are exactly the same. So you don't really have to change anything but the advantages that you get access to all the other AWS services. So you are instantly able to integrate with other AWS services and you become a cloud architect immediately, right? You are able to solve some of the critical problems that your underlying IT infrastructure has immediately using this. And I think that's a great value proposition for our customers to use this service. >>And just one more point, I want just get into something that's really kind of inside baseball or nuanced VMC or VMware cloud on AWS means something. Could you take a minute to explain what on AWS means? Just because you're like hosting and using Amazon as a, as a work workload? Being on AWS means something specific in your world, being VMC on AWS mean? >>Yes. This is a great question, by the way, You know, on AWS means that, you know, VMware's vse platform is, is a, is an iconic enterprise virtualization software, you know, a disproportionately high market share across industries. So when we wanted to create a cloud product along with them, obviously our aim was for them, for the, for this platform to have the goodness of the AWS underlying infrastructure, right? And, and therefore, when we created this VMware cloud solution, it it literally use the AWS platform under the eighth, right? And that's why it's called a VMs VMware cloud on AWS using, using the, the, the wide portfolio of our regions across the world and the strength of the underlying infrastructure, the reliability and, and, and sustainability that it offers. And therefore this product is called VMC on aws. >>It's a distinction I think is worth noting, and it does reflect engineering and some levels of integration that go well beyond just having a SaaS app and, and basically platform as a service or past services. So I just wanna make sure that now super cloud, we'll talk about that a little bit in another interview, but I gotta get one more question in before we get into the use cases and customer success stories is in, in most of the VM world, VMware world, in that IT world, it used to, when you heard migration, people would go, Oh my God, that's gonna take months. And when I hear about moving stuff around and doing cloud native, the first reaction people might have is complexity. So two questions for you before we move on to the next talk. Track complexity. How are you addressing the complexity issue and how long these migrations take? Is it easy? Is it it hard? I mean, you know, the knee jerk reaction is month, You're very used to that. If they're dealing with Oracle or other old school vendors, like, they're, like the old guard would be like, takes a year to move stuff around. So can you comment on complexity and speed? >>Yeah. So the first, first thing is complexity. And you know, what makes what makes anything complex is if you're, if you're required to acquire new skill sets or you've gotta, if you're required to manage something differently, and as far as VMware cloud and AWS on both these aspects, you don't have to do anything, right? You don't have to acquire new skill sets. Your existing idea operation skill sets on, on VMware's platforms are absolutely fine and you don't have to manage it any differently like, than what you're managing your, your ID infrastructure today. So in both these aspects, it's exactly the same and therefore it is absolutely not complex as far as, as far as, as far as we cloud and AWS is concerned. And the other thing is speed. This is where the huge differentiation is. You have seen that, you know, large banks and large telcos have now moved their workloads, you know, literally in days instead of months. >>Because because of VMware cloud and aws, a lot of time customers come to us with specific deadlines because they want to exit their data centers on a particular date. And what happens, VMware cloud and AWS is called upon to do that migration, right? So speed is absolutely critical. The reason is also exactly the same because you are using the exactly the same platform, the same management systems, people are available to you, you're able to migrate quickly, right? I would just reference recently we got an award from President Zelensky of Ukraine for, you know, migrating their entire ID digital infrastructure and, and that that happened because they were using VMware cloud database and happened very swiftly. >>That's been a great example. I mean, that's one political, but the economic advantage of getting outta the data center could be national security. You mentioned Ukraine, I mean Oscar see bombing and death over there. So clearly that's a critical crown jewel for their running their operations, which is, you know, you know, world mission critical. So great stuff. I love the speed thing. I think that's a huge one. Let's get into some of the use cases. One of them is, the first one I wanted to talk about was we just hit on data, data center migration. It could be financial reasons on a downturn or our, or market growth. People can make money by shifting to the cloud, either saving money or making money. You win on both sides. It's a, it's a, it's almost a recession proof, if you will. Cloud is so use case for number one data center migration. Take us through what that looks like. Give an example of a success. Take us through a day, day in the life of a data center migration in, in a couple minutes. >>Yeah. You know, I can give you an example of a, of a, of a large bank who decided to migrate, you know, their, all their data centers outside their existing infrastructure. And they had, they had a set timeline, right? They had a set timeline to migrate the, the, they were coming up on a renewal and they wanted to make sure that this set timeline is met. We did a, a complete assessment of their infrastructure. We did a complete assessment of their IT applications, more than 80% of their IT applications, underlying v vSphere platform. And we, we thought that the right solution for them in the timeline that they wanted, right, is VMware cloud ands. And obviously it was a large bank, it wanted to do it safely and securely. It wanted to have it completely managed, and therefore VMware cloud and aws, you know, ticked all the boxes as far as that is concerned. >>I'll be happy to report that the large bank has moved to most of their applications on AWS exiting three of their data centers, and they'll be exiting 12 more very soon. So that's a great example of, of, of the large bank exiting data centers. There's another Corolla to that. Not only did they manage to manage to exit their data centers and of course use and be more agile, but they also met their sustainability goals. Their board of directors had given them goals to be carbon neutral by 2025. They found out that 35% of all their carbon foot footprint was in their data centers. And if they moved their, their ID infrastructure to cloud, they would severely reduce the, the carbon footprint, which is 35% down to 17 to 18%. Right? And that meant their, their, their, their sustainability targets and their commitment to the go to being carbon neutral as well. >>And that they, and they shift that to you guys. Would you guys take that burden? A heavy lifting there and you guys have a sustainability story, which is a whole nother showcase in and of itself. We >>Can Exactly. And, and cause of the scale of our, of our operations, we are able to, we are able to work on that really well as >>Well. All right. So love the data migration. I think that's got real proof points. You got, I can save money, I can, I can then move and position my applications into the cloud for that reason and other reasons as a lot of other reasons to do that. But now it gets into what you mentioned earlier was, okay, data migration, clearly a use case and you laid out some successes. I'm sure there's a zillion others. But then the next step comes, now you got cloud architects becoming minted every, and you got managed services and higher level services. What happens next? Can you give us an example of the use case of the modernization around the NextGen workloads, NextGen applications? We're starting to see, you know, things like data clouds, not data warehouses. We're not gonna data clouds, it's gonna be all kinds of clouds. These NextGen apps are pure digital transformation in action. Take us through a use case of how you guys make that happen with a success story. >>Yes, absolutely. And this is, this is an amazing success story and the customer here is s and p global ratings. As you know, s and p global ratings is, is the world leader as far as global ratings, global credit ratings is concerned. And for them, you know, the last couple of years have been tough as far as hardware procurement is concerned, right? The pandemic has really upended the, the supply chain. And it was taking a lot of time to procure hardware, you know, configure it in time, make sure that that's reliable and then, you know, distribute it in the wide variety of, of, of offices and locations that they have. And they came to us. We, we did, again, a, a, a alar, a fairly large comprehensive assessment of their ID infrastructure and their licensing contracts. And we also found out that VMware cloud and AWS is the right solution for them. >>So we worked there, migrated all their applications, and as soon as we migrated all their applications, they got, they got access to, you know, our high level services be our analytics services, our machine learning services, our, our, our, our artificial intelligence services that have been critical for them, for their growth. And, and that really is helping them, you know, get towards their next level of modern applications. Right Now, obviously going forward, they will have, they will have the choice to, you know, really think about which applications they want to, you know, refactor or which applications they want to go ahead with. That is really a choice in front of them. And, but you know, the, we VMware cloud and AWS really gave them the opportunity to first migrate and then, you know, move towards modernization with speed. >>You know, the speed of a startup is always the kind of the Silicon Valley story where you're, you know, people can make massive changes in 18 months, whether that's a pivot or a new product. You see that in startup world. Now, in the enterprise, you can see the same thing. I noticed behind you on your whiteboard, you got a slogan that says, are you thinking big? I know Amazon likes to think big, but also you work back from the customers and, and I think this modern application thing's a big deal because I think the mindset has always been constrained because back before they moved to the cloud, most IT, and, and, and on-premise data center shops, it's slow. You gotta get the hardware, you gotta configure it, you gotta, you gotta stand it up, make sure all the software is validated on it, and loading a database and loading oss, I mean, mean, yeah, it got easier and with scripting and whatnot, but when you move to the cloud, you have more scale, which means more speed, which means it opens up their capability to think differently and build product. What are you seeing there? Can you share your opinion on that epiphany of, wow, things are going fast, I got more time to actually think about maybe doing a cloud native app or transforming this or that. What's your, what's your reaction to that? Can you share your opinion? >>Well, ultimately we, we want our customers to utilize, you know, most of our modern services, you know, applications should be microservices based. When desired, they should use serverless applic. So list technology, they should not have monolithic, you know, relational database contracts. They should use custom databases, they should use containers when needed, right? So ultimately, we want our customers to use these modern technologies to make sure that their IT infrastructure, their licensing, their, their entire IT spend is completely native to cloud technologies. They work with the speed of a startup, but it's important for them to, to, to get to the first step, right? So that's why we create this journey for our customers, where you help them migrate, give them time to build the skills, they'll help them mo modernize, take our partners along with their, along with us to, to make sure that they can address the need for our customers. That's, that's what our customers need today, and that's what we are working backwards from. >>Yeah, and I think that opens up some big ideas. I'll just say that the, you know, we're joking, I was joking the other night with someone here in, in Palo Alto around serverless, and I said, you know, soon you're gonna hear words like architectural list. And that's a criticism on one hand, but you might say, Hey, you know, if you don't really need an architecture, you know, storage lists, I mean, at the end of the day, infrastructure is code means developers can do all the it in the coding cycles and then make the operations cloud based. And I think this is kind of where I see the dots connecting. Final thought here, take us through what you're thinking around how this new world is evolving. I mean, architecturals kind of a joke, but the point is, you know, you have to some sort of architecture, but you don't have to overthink it. >>Totally. No, that's a great thought, by the way. I know it's a joke, but it's a great thought because at the end of the day, you know, what do the customers really want? They want outcomes, right? Why did service technology come? It was because there was an outcome that they needed. They didn't want to get stuck with, you know, the, the, the real estate of, of a, of a server. They wanted to use compute when they needed to, right? Similarly, what you're talking about is, you know, outcome based, you know, desire of our customers and, and, and that's exactly where the word is going to, Right? Cloud really enforces that, right? We are actually, you know, working backwards from a customer's outcome and using, using our area the breadth and depth of our services to, to deliver those outcomes, right? And, and most of our services are in that path, right? When we use VMware cloud and aws, the outcome is a, to migrate then to modernize, but doesn't stop there, use our native services, you know, get the business outcomes using this. So I think that's, that's exactly what we are going through >>Actually, should actually, you're the director of global sales and go to market for VMware cloud on Aus. I wanna thank you for coming on, but I'll give you the final minute. Give a plug, explain what is the VMware cloud on Aus, Why is it great? Why should people engage with you and, and the team, and what ultimately is this path look like for them going forward? >>Yeah. At the end of the day, we want our customers to have the best paths to the cloud, right? The, the best path to the cloud is making sure that they migrate safely, reliably, and securely as well as with speed, right? And then, you know, use that cloud platform to, to utilize AWS's native services to make sure that they modernize their IT infrastructure and applications, right? We want, ultimately that our customers, customers, customer get the best out of, you know, utilizing the, that whole application experience is enhanced tremendously by using our services. And I think that's, that's exactly what we are working towards VMware cloud AWS is, is helping our customers in that journey towards migrating, modernizing, whether they wanna exit a data center or whether they wanna modernize their applications. It's a essential first step that we wanna help our customers with >>One director of global sales and go to market with VMware cloud on neighbors. He's with aws sharing his thoughts on accelerating business transformation on aws. This is a showcase. We're talking about the future path. We're talking about use cases with success stories from customers as she's thank you for spending time today on this showcase. >>Thank you, John. I appreciate it. >>Okay. This is the cube, special coverage, special presentation of the AWS Showcase. I'm John Furrier, thanks for watching.

>>Set restaurants. And who says TEUs had got a little ass more skin in the game for us, in charge of his destiny? You guys are excited. Robert Worship is Chief Alumni. >>My name is Dave Ante, and I'm a long time industry analyst. So when you're as old as I am, you've seen a lot of transitions. Everybody talks about industry cycles and waves. I've seen many, many waves. Met a lot of industry executives and of a little bit of a, an industry historian. When you interview many thousands of people, probably five or 6,000 people as I have over the last half of a decade, you get to interact with a lot of people's knowledge and you begin to develop patterns. And so that's sort of what I bring is, is an ability to catalyze the conversation and, you know, share that knowledge with others in the community. Our philosophy is everybody's expert at something. Everybody's passionate about something and has real deep knowledge about that's something well, we wanna focus in on that area and extract that knowledge and share it with our communities. This is Dave Ante. Thanks for watching the Cube. >>Hello everyone and welcome back to the Cube where we are streaming live this week from CubeCon. I am Savannah Peterson and I am joined by an absolutely stellar lineup of cube brilliance this afternoon. To my left, a familiar face, Lisa Martin. Lisa, how you feeling? End of day two. >>Excellent. It was so much fun today. The buzz started yesterday, the momentum, the swell, and we only heard even more greatness today. >>Yeah, yeah, abs, absolutely. You know, I, I sometimes think we've hit an energy cliff, but it feels like the energy is just >>Continuous. Well, I think we're gonna, we're gonna slide right into tomorrow. >>Yeah, me too. I love it. And we've got two fantastic analysts with us today, Sarge and Keith. Thank you both for joining us. We feel so lucky today. >>Great being back on. >>Thanks for having us. Yeah, Yeah. It's nice to have you back on the show. We were, had you yesterday, but I miss hosting with you. It's been a while. >>It has been a while. We haven't done anything in since, Since pre >>Pandemic, right? Yeah, I think you're >>Right. Four times there >>Be four times back in the day. >>We, I always enjoy whole thing, Lisa, cuz she's so well prepared. I don't have to do any research when I come >>Home. >>Lisa will bring up some, Oh, sorry. Jeep, I see that in 2008 you won this award for Yeah. Being just excellent and I, I'm like, Oh >>Yeah. All right Keith. So, >>So did you do his analysis? >>Yeah, it's all done. Yeah. Great. He only part, he's not sitting next to me too. We can't see it, so it's gonna be like a magic crystal bell. Right. So a lot of people here. You got some stats in terms of the attendees compared >>To last year? Yeah, Priyanka told us we were double last year up to 8,000. We also got the scoop earlier that 2023 is gonna be in Chicago, which is very exciting. >>Oh, that is, is nice. Yeah, >>We got to break that here. >>Excellent. Keith, talk to us about what some of the things are that you've seen the last couple of days. The momentum. What's the vibe? I saw your tweet about the top three things you were being asked. Kubernetes was not one of them. >>Kubernetes were, was not one of 'em. This conference is starting to, it, it still feels very different than a vendor conference. The keynote is kind of, you know, kind of all over the place talking about projects, but the hallway track has been, you know, I've, this is maybe my fifth or sixth CU con in person. And the hallway track is different. It's less about projects and more about how, how do we adjust to the enterprise? How do we Yes. Actually do enterprise things. And it has been amazing watching this community grow. I'm gonna say grow up and mature. Yes. You know, you know, they're not wearing ties yet, but they are definitely understanding kind of the, the friction of implementing new technology in, in an enterprise. >>Yeah. So ge what's your, what's been your take, We were with you yesterday. What's been the take today to take aways? >>NOMA has changed since yesterday, but a few things I think I, I missed talking about that yesterday were that, first of all, let's just talk about Amazon. Amazon earnings came out, it spooked the market and I think it's relevant in this context as well, because they're number one cloud provider. Yeah. And all, I mean, almost all of these technologies on the back of us here, they are related to cloud, right? So it will have some impact on these. Like we have to analyze that. Like will it make the open source go faster or slower in, in lieu of the fact that the, the cloud growth is slowing. Right? So that's, that's one thing that's put that's put that aside. I've been thinking about the, the future of Kubernetes. What is the future of Kubernetes? And in that context, I was thinking like, you know, I think in, when I put a pointer there, I think in tangents, like, what else is around this thing? So I think CN CNCF has been writing the success of Kubernetes. They are, that was their number one flagship project, if you will. And it was mature enough to stand on its own. It it was Google, it's Google's Borg dub da Kubernetes. It's a genericized version of that. Right? So folks who do tech deep down, they know that, Right. So I think it's easier to stand with a solid, you know, project. But when the newer projects come in, then your medal will get tested at cncf. Right. >>And cncf, I mean they've got over 140 projects Yeah. Right now. So there's definitely much beyond >>Kubernetes. Yeah. So they, I have numbers there. 18 graduated, right, 37 in incubation and then 81 in Sandbox stage. They have three stages, right. So it's, they have a lot to chew on and the more they take on, the less, you know, quality you get goes into it. Who is, who's putting the money behind it? Which vendors are sponsoring like cncf, like how they're getting funded up. I think it >>Something I pay attention to as well. Yeah. Yeah. Lisa, I know you've got >>Some insight. Those are the things I was thinking about today. >>I gotta ask you, what's your take on what Keith said? Are you also seeing the maturation of the enterprise here at at coupon? >>Yes, I am actually, when you say enterprise versus what's the other side? Startups, right? Yeah. So startups start using open source a lot more earlier or lot more than enterprises. The enterprise is what they need. Number one thing is the, for their production workloads, they want a vendor sporting them. I said that yesterday as well, right? So it depend depending on the size of the enterprise. If you're a big shop, definitely if you have one of the 500 or Fortune five hundreds and your tech savvy shop, then you can absorb the open source directly coming from the open source sort of universe right. Coming to you. But if you are the second tier of enterprise, you want to go to a provider which is managed service provider, or it can be cloud service provider in this case. Yep. Most of the cloud service providers have multiple versions of Kubernetes, for example. >>I'm not talking about Kubernetes only, but like, but that is one example, right? So at Amazon you can get five different flavors of Kubernetes, right? Fully manage, have, manage all kind of stuff. So people don't have bandwidth to manage that stuff locally. You have to patch it, you have to roll in the new, you know, updates and all that stuff. Like, it's a lot of work for many. So CNCF actually is formed for that reason. Like the, the charter is to bring the quality to open source. Like in other companies they have the release process and they, the stringent guidelines and QA and all that stuff. So is is something ready for production? That's the question when it comes to any software, right? So they do that kind of work and, and, and they have these buckets defined at high level, but it needs more >>Work. Yeah. So one of the things that, you know, kind of stood out to me, I have good friend in the community, Alex Ellis, who does open Fast. It's a serverless platform, great platform. Two years ago or in 2019, there was a serverless day date. And in serverless day you had K Native, you had Open Pass, you had Ws, which is supported by IBM completely, not CNCF platforms. K native came into the CNCF full when Google donated the project a few months ago or a couple of years ago, now all of a sudden there's a K native day. Yes. Not a serverless day, it's a K native day. And I asked the, the CNCF event folks like, what happened to Serverless Day? I missed having open at serverless day. And you know, they, they came out and said, you know what, K native got big enough. >>They came in and I think Red Hat and Google wanted to sponsor a K native day. So serverless day went away. So I think what what I'm interested in and over the next couple of years is, is they're gonna be pushback from the C against the cncf. Is the CNCF now too big? Is it now the gatekeeper for do I have to be one of those 147 projects, right? In order enough to get my project noticed the open, fast, great project. I don't think Al Alex has any desire to have his project hosted by cncf, but it probably deserves, you know, shoulder left recognition with that. So I'm pushing to happen to say, okay, if this is open community, this is open source. If CNC is the place to have the cloud native conversation, what about the projects that's not cncf? Like how do we have that conversation when we don't have the power of a Google right. Or a, or a Lenox, et cetera, or a Lenox Foundation. So GE what, >>What are your thoughts on that? Is, is CNC too big? >>I don't think it's too big. I think it's too small to handle the, what we are doing in open source, right? So it's a bottle. It can become a bottleneck. Okay. I think too big in a way that yeah, it has, it has, it has power from that point of view. It has that cloud, if you will. The people listen to it. If it's CNCF project or this must be good, it's like in, in incubators. Like if you are y white Combinator, you know, company, it must be good. You know, I mean, may not be >>True, but, >>Oh, I think there's a bold assumption there though. I mean, I think everyone's just trying to do the best they can. And when we're evaluating projects, a very different origin and background, it's incredibly hard. Very c and staff is a staff of 30 people. They've got 180,000 people that are contributing to these projects and a thousand maintainers that they're trying to uphold. I think the challenge is actually really great. And to me, I actually look at events as an illustration of, you know, what's the culture and the health of an organization. If I were to evaluate CNCF based on that, I'd say we're very healthy right now. I would say that we're in a good spot. There's a lot of momentum. >>Yeah. I, I think CNCF is very healthy. I'm, I'm appreciative for it being here. I love coupon. It's becoming the, the facto conference to have this conversation has >>A totally >>Different vibe to other, It's a totally different vibe. Yeah. There needs to be a conduit and truth be told, enterprise buyers, to subject's point, this is something that we do absolutely agree on, on enterprise buyers. We want someone to pick winners and losers. We do, we, we don't want a box of Lego dumped on our, the middle of our table. We want somebody to have sorted that out. So while there may be five or six different service mesh solutions, at least the cncf, I can go there and say, Oh, I'll pick between the three or four that are most popular. And it, it's a place to curate. But I think with that curation comes the other side of it. Of how do we, how, you know, without the big corporate sponsor, how do I get my project pushed up? Right? Elevated. Elevated, Yep. And, and put onto the show floor. You know, another way that projects get noticed is that startups will adopt them, Push them. They may not even be, I don't, my CNCF project may not, my product may not even be based on the CNCF product. But the new stack has a booth, Ford has a booth. Nothing to do with a individual prod up, but promoting open source. What happens when you're not sponsored? >>I gotta ask you guys, what do you disagree on? >>Oh, so what, what do we disagree on? So I'm of the mindset, I can, I can say this, I I believe hybrid infrastructure is the future of it. Bar none. If I built my infrastructure, if I built my application in the cloud 10 years ago and I'm still building net new applications, I have stuff that I built 10 years ago that looks a lot like on-prem, what do I do with it? I can't modernize it cuz I don't have the developers to do it. I need to stick that somewhere. And where I'm going to stick that at is probably a hybrid infrastructure. So colo, I'm not gonna go back to the data center, but I'm, I'm gonna look, pick up something that looks very much like the data center and I'm saying embrace that it's the future. And if you're Boeing and you have, and Boeing is a member, cncf, that's a whole nother topic. If you have as 400 s, hpu X, et cetera, stick that stuff. Colo, build new stuff, but, and, and continue to support OpenStack, et cetera, et cetera. Because that's the future. Hybrid is the future. >>And sub g agree, disagree. >>I okay. Hybrid. Nobody can deny that the hybrid is the reality, not the future. It's a reality right now. It's, it's a necessity right now you can't do without it. Right. And okay, hybrid is very relative term. You can be like 10% here, 90% still hybrid, right? So the data center is shrinking and it will keep shrinking. Right? And >>So if by whole is the data center shrinking? >>This is where >>Quick one quick getting guys for it. How is growing by a clip? Yeah, but there's no data supporting. David Lym just came out for a report I think last year that showed that the data center is holding steady, holding steady, not growing, but not shrinking. >>Who sponsored that study? Wait, hold on. So the, that's a question, right? So more than 1 million data centers have been closed. I have, I can dig that through number through somebody like some organizations we published that maybe they're cloud, you know, people only. So the, when you get these kind of statements like it, it can be very skewed statements, right. But if you have seen the, the scene out there, which you have, I know, but I have also seen a lot of data centers walk the floor of, you know, a hundred thousand servers in a data center. I cannot imagine us consuming the infrastructure the way we were going into the future of co Okay. With, with one caveat actually. I am not big fan of like broad strokes. Like make a blanket statement. Oh no, data center's dead. Or if you are, >>That's how you get those esty headlines now. Yeah, I know. >>I'm all about to >>Put a stake in the ground. >>Actually. The, I think that you get more intelligence from the new end, right? A small little details if you will. If you're golden gold manak or Bank of America, you have so many data centers and you will still have data centers because performance matters to you, right? Your late latency matters for applications. But if you are even a Fortune 500 company on the lower end and or a healthcare vertical, right? That your situation is different. If you are a high, you know, growth startup, your situation is different, right? You will be a hundred percent cloud. So cloud gives you velocity, the, the, the pace of change, the pace of experimentation that actually you are buying innovation through cloud. It's proxy for innovation. And that's how I see it. But if you have, if you're stuck with older applications, I totally understand. >>Yeah. So the >>We need that OnPrem. Yeah, >>Well I think the, the bring your fuel sober, what we agree is that cloud is the place where innovation happens. Okay? At some point innovation becomes legacy debt and you have thus hybrid, you are not going to keep your old applications up to date forever. The, the, the math just doesn't add up. And where I differ in opinion is that not everyone needs innovation to keep moving. They need innovation for a period of time and then they need steady state. So Sergeant, we >>Argue about this. I have a, I >>Love this debate though. I say it's efficiency and stability also plays an important role. I see exactly what you're talking about. No, it's >>Great. I have a counter to that. Let me tell you >>Why. Let's >>Hear it. Because if you look at the storage only, right? Just storage. Just take storage computer network for, for a minute. There three cost reps in, in infrastructure, right? So storage earlier, early on there was one tier of storage. You say pay the same price, then now there are like five storage tiers, right? What I'm trying to say is the market sets the price, the market will tell you where this whole thing will go, but I know their margins are high in cloud, 20 plus percent and margin will shrink as, as we go forward. That means the, the cloud will become cheaper relative to on-prem. It, it, in some cases it's already cheaper. But even if it's a stable workload, even in that case, we will have a lower tier of service. I mean, you, you can't argue with me that the cloud versus your data center, they are on the same tier of services. Like cloud is a better, you know, product than your data center. Hands off. >>I love it. We, we are gonna relish in the debates between the two of you. Mic drops. The energy is great. I love it. Perspective. It's not like any of us can quite see through the crystal ball that we have very informed opinions, which is super exciting. Yeah. Lisa, any last thoughts today? >>Just love, I love the debate as well. That, and that's, that's part of what being in this community is all about. So sharing about, sharing opinions, expressing opinions. That's how it grows. That's how, that's how we innovate. Yeah. Obviously we need the cloud, but that's how we innovate. That's how we grow. Yeah. And we've seen that demonstrated the last couple days and I and your, your takes here on the Cuban on Twitter. Brilliant. >>Thank you. I absolutely love it. I'm gonna close this out with a really important analysis on the swag of the show. Yes. And if you know, yesterday we were looking at what is the weirdest swag or most unique swag We had that bucket hat that took the grand prize. Today we're gonna focus on something that's actually quite cool. A lot of the vendors here have really dedicated their swag to being local to Detroit. Very specific in their sourcing. Sonotype here has COOs. They're beautiful. You can't quite feel this flannel, but it's very legit hand sound here in Michigan. I can't say that I've been to too many conferences, if any, where there was this kind of commitment to localizing and sourcing swag from around the corner. We also see this with the Intel booth. They've got screen printers out here doing custom hoodies on spot. >>Oh fun. They're even like appropriately sized. They had local artists do these designs and if you're like me and you care about what's on your wrist, you're familiar with Shinola. This is one of my favorite swags that's available. There is a contest. Oh going on. Hello here. Yeah, so if you are Atan, make sure that you go and check this out. The we, I talked about this on the show. We've had the founder on the show or the CEO and yeah, I mean Shine is just full of class as since we are in Detroit as well. One of the fun themes is cars. >>Yes. >>And Storm Forge, who are also on the show, is actually giving away an Aston Martin, which is very exciting. Not exactly manufactured in Detroit. However, still very cool on the car front and >>The double oh seven version named the best I >>Know in the sixties. It's love it. It's very cool. Two quick last things. We talk about it a lot on the show. Every company now wants to be a software company. Yep. On that vein, and keeping up with my hat theme, the Home Depot is here because they want everybody to know that they in fact are a technology company, which is very cool. They have over 500,000 employees. You can imagine there's a lot of technology that has to go into keeping Napa. Absolutely. Yep. Wild to think about. And then last, but not at least very quick, rapid fire, best t-shirt contest. If you've ever ran to one of these events, there are a ton of T-shirts out there. I rate them on two things. Wittiest line and softness. If you combine the two, you'll really be our grand champion for the year. I'm just gonna hold these up and set them down for your laughs. Not afraid to commit, which is pretty great. This is another one designed by locals here. Detroit Code City. Oh, love it. This one made me chuckle the most. Kiss my cash. >>Oh, that's >>Good. These are also really nice and soft, which is fantastic. Also high on the softness category is this Op Sarah one. I also like their bird logo. These guys, there's just, you know, just real nice touch. So unfortunately, if you have the fumble, you're not here with us, live in Detroit. At least you're gonna get taste of the swag. I taste of the stories and some smiles hear from those of us on the cube. Thank you both so much for being here with us. Lisa, thanks for another fabulous day. Got it, girl. My name's Savannah Peterson. Thank you for joining us from Detroit. We're the cube and we can't wait to see you tomorrow.

(upbeat techno music) >> Hello, everyone. Welcome to theCUBE here live in Detroit for KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2022. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. This is our seventh consecutive KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. Since inception, theCube's been there every year. And of course, theCUBE continues to grow. So does the community as well as our host roster. I'm here with my co-host, Lisa Martin. Lisa, great to see you. And our new theCube host, Savannah Peterson. Savannah, welcome to theCUBE. >> Thanks, John. >> Welcome. >> Welcome to the team. >> Thanks, team. It's so wonderful to be here. I met you all last KubeCon and to be sitting on this stage in your company is honestly an honor. >> Well, great to have you. Lisa and I have done a lot of shows together and it's great to have more cadence around. You know, more fluid around the content, and also the people. And I would like you to take a minute to tell people your background. You know the community here. What's the roots? You know the Cloud Native world pretty well. >> I know it as well as someone my age can. As we know, the tools and the tech is always changing. So hello, everyone. I'm Savannah Peterson. You can find me on the internet @SavIsSavvy. Would love to hear from you during the show. Big fan of this space and very passionate about DevOps. I've been working in the Silicon Valley and the Silicon Alley for a long time, helping companies scale internationally as a community builder as well as a international public speaker. And honestly, this is just such a fun evolution for my career and I'm grateful to be here with you both. >> We're looking forward to having you on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Lisa? >> Yes. >> KubeCon. Amazing again this year. Just keeps growing bigger and bigger. >> Yes. >> Keynote review, you were in there. >> Yup. >> I had a chance to peek in a little bit, but you were there and got most of the news. What was the action? >> You know, the action was really a big focus around the maintainers, what they're doing, giving them the props and the kudos and the support that they deserve. Not just physically, but mentally as well. That was a really big focus. It was also a big focus on mentoring and really encouraging more people- >> Love that. >> I did, too. I thought that was fantastic to get involved to help others. And then they showed some folks that had great experiences, really kind of growing up within the community. Probably half of the keynote focus this morning was on that. And then looking at some of the other projects that have graduated from CNCF, some of these successful projects, what they're doing, what folks are doing. Cruise, one of the ones that was featured. You've probably seen their driverless cars around San Francisco. So it was great to see that, the successes that they've had and where that's going. >> Yeah. Lisa, we've done how many shows? Hundreds of shows together. When you see a show like this grow and continue to mature, what's your observation? You've seen many shows we've hosted together. What jumps out this year? Is it just that level of maturization? What's your take on this? >> The maturization of the community and the collaboration of the community. I think those two things jumped out at me even more than last year. Last year, obviously a little bit smaller event in North America. It was Los Angeles. This year you got a much stronger sense of the community, the support that they have for each other. There were a lot of standing ovations particularly when the community came out and talked about what they were doing in Ukraine to support fellow community members in Ukraine and also to support other Ukrainians in terms of getting in to tech. Lot of standing ovations. Lot of- >> Savannah: Love that, yeah. >> Real authenticity around the community. >> Yeah, Savannah, we talked on our intro prior to the event about how inclusive this community is. They are really all in on inclusivity. And the Ukraine highlight, this community is together and they're open. They're open to everybody. >> Absolutely. >> And they're also focused on growing the educational knowledge. >> Yeah, I think there's a real celebration of curiosity within this community that we don't find in certain other sectors. And we saw it at dinner last night. I mean, I was struck just like you Lisa walking in today. The energy in that room is palpably different from last year. I saw on Twitter this morning, people are very excited. Many people, their first KubeCon. And I'm sure we're going to be feeding off of that, that kind of energy and that... Just a general enthusiasm and excitement to be here in Detroit all week. It's a treat. >> Yeah, I even saw Stu Miniman earlier, former theCube host. He's at Red Hat. We were talking on the way in and he made an observation I thought was interesting I'll bring up because this show, it's a lot "What is this show? What isn't this show?" And I think this show is about developers. What it isn't is not a business show. It's not about business. It's not about industry kind of posturing or marketing. All the heavy hitters on the dev side are here and you don't see the big execs. I mean, you got the CEOs of startups here but not the CEOs of the big public companies. We see the doers. So, I mean, I think my take is this show's about creating products for builders and creating products that people can consume. And I think that is the Cloud Native lanes that are starting to form. You're either creating something for builders to build stuff with or you're creating stuff that could be consumed. And that seems for applications. So the whole app side and services seem to be huge. >> They also did a great job this morning of showcasing some of the big companies that we all know and love. Spotify. Obviously, I don't think a day goes by where I don't turn on Spotify. And what it's done- >> Me neither. >> What it's done for the community... Same with Intuit, I'm a user of both. Intuit was given an End User Award this morning during the keynote for their contributions, what they're doing. But it was nice to see some just everyday companies, Cloud Native companies that we all know and love, and to understand their contributions to the community and how those contributions are affecting all of us as end users. >> Yeah, and I think those companies like Intuit... Argo's been popular, Arlo now new, seeing those services, and even enterprises are contributing. You know, Lyft is always here, popular with Envoy. The community isn't just vendors and that's the interesting thing. >> I think that's why it works. To me, this event is really about the celebration of developer relations. I mean, every DevRel from every single one of these companies is here. Like you said, in lieu of the executive, that's essentially who we're attracting. And if you look out over the show floor here, I mean, we've probably got, I don't know, three to four extra vendors that we had last year. It totally is a different tone. This community doesn't like to be sold to. This community likes to be collaborative. They like to learn and they like to help. And I think we see that within the ecosystem inside the room today. >> It's not a top down sales pitch. It's really consensus. >> No. >> Do it out in the open transparency. Don't sell me stuff. And I think the other thing I like about this community is that we're starting to see that... And then we've said this in theCube before. We'll say it again. Maybe be more controversial. Digital transformation is about the developer, right? And I think the power is going to shift in every company to the developer because if you take digital transformation to completion, everything happens the way it's happening, the company is the application. It's not IT who serves the organization- >> I love thinking about it like that. That's a great point, John. >> The old phase was IT was a department that served the business. Well, the business is IT now. So that means developer community is going to grow like crazy and they're going to be in the front lines driving all the change. In my opinion, you going to see this developer community grow like crazy and then the business side on industry will match up with that. I think that's what's going to happen. >> So, the developers are becoming the influencers? >> Developers are the power source for all companies. They're in charge. They're going to dictate terms to how businesses will run because that's going to be natural 'cause digital transformation's about the app and the business is the app. So that mean it has to be coded. So I think you're going to see a lot of innovation around app server-like experiences where the the apps are just being developed faster than the infrastructures enabling that completely invisible. And I think you're going to see this kind of architecture-less, I'll put it out there that term architecture-less, environment where you don't need an architecture. It's just you code away. >> Yeah, yeah. We saw GitHub's mentioned in the keynote this morning. And I mean, low code, no code. I think your fingers right on the pulse there. >> Yeah. What did you guys see? Anything else you see? >> I think just the overall... To your point, Savannah, the energy. Definitely higher than last year. When I saw those standing ovations, people really come in together around the sense of community and what they've accomplished especially in the last two plus years of being remote. They did a great job of involving a lot of folks, some of whom are going to be on the program with us this week that did remote parts of the keynote. One of our guests on today from Vitess was talking about the successes and the graduation of their program so that the sense of community, but also not just the sense of it, the actual demonstration of it was also quite palpable this morning, and I think that's something that I'm excited for us to hear about with our guests on the program this week. >> Yeah, and I think the big story coming out so far as the show starts is the developers are in charge. They're going to set the pace for all the ops, data ops, security ops, all operations. And then the co-located events that were held Monday and Tuesday prior to kickoff today. You saw WebAssembly's come out of the woodwork as it got a lot of attention. Two startups got funded heavily on Series A. You're starting to see that project really work well. That's going to be an additional to the container market. So, interesting to see how Docker reacts to that. Red Hat's doing great. ServiceMeshCon was phenomenal. I saw Solo.iOS got massive traction with those guys. So like Service Mesh, WebAssembly, you can start to see the dots connecting. You're starting to see this layer below Kubernetes and then a layer above Kubernetes developing. So I think it's going to be great for applications and great for the infrastructure. I think we'll see how it comes out and all these companies we have on here are all about faster, more integrated, some very, very interesting to see. So far, so good. >> You guys talked about in your highlight session last week or so. Excited to hear about the end users, the customer stories. That's what I'm interested in understanding as well. It's why it resonates with me when I see brands that I recognize. Well, I use it every day. How are they using containers and Kubernetes? How are they actually not just using it to deploy their app, their technologies, that we all expect are going to be up 24/7, but how are they also contributing to the development of it? So I'm really excited to hear those end users. >> We're going to have Lockheed Martin. And we wrote a story on SiliconANGLE, the Red Hat, Lockheed Martin, real innovation on the edge. You're starting to see educate with the edge. It's really the industrial edge coming to be big. It'd be very interesting to see. >> Absolutely, we got Ford Motor Company coming on as well. I always loved stories, Savannah, that are history of companies. Ford's been around since 1903. How is a company that- >> Well, we're in the home of Ford- as well here. >> We are. How they evolved digitally? What are they doing to enable the developers to be those influencers that John says? It's going to be them. >> They're a great example of a company that's always been on the forefront, too. I mean, they had a head of VRs 25 years ago when most people didn't even know what VR was going to stand for. So, I can't wait for that one. You tease the Docker interview coming up very well, John. I'm excited for that one. One last thing I want to bring up that I think is really refreshing and it's reflected right here on this stage is you talked about the inclusion. I think there's a real commitment to diversity here. You can see the diversity stats on CNCF's website. It's right there on KubeCon. At the bottom, there's a link in every email I've gotten highlighting that. We've got two women on this stage all week which is very exciting. And the opening keynote was a woman. So quite frankly, I am happy as a female in this industry to see a bit more representation. And I do appreciate just on the note of being inclusive, it's not just about gender or age, it's also about the way that CNCF thinks about your experience since we're in this kind of pandemic transitional period. They've got little pins. Last year, we had bracelets depending on your level of comfort. Equivocally like a stoplight which is... I just think it's really nice and sensitive and that attention to detail makes people feel comfortable. Which is why we have the community energy that we have. >> Yeah, and being 12 years in the business... With theCUBE, we've been 12 years in the business, seven years with KubeCon and Cloud Native, I really appreciate the Linux Foundation including me as I get older. (Lisa and Savannah laugh) >> Savannah: That's a good point. >> Ageism were, "Hey!" Thank you. >> There was a lot of representation. You talked about females and so often we go to shows and there's very few females. Some companies are excellent at it. But from an optics perspective, to me it stands out. There was great representation across. There was disabled people on stage, people of color, women, men of all ages. It was very well-orchestrated. >> On the demographic- >> And sincere. >> Yeah, yeah. >> And the demographics, too. On the age side, it's lower too. You're starting to see younger... I mean, high school, college representation. I saw a lot of college students last night. I saw on the agenda sessions targeting universities. I mean, I'm telling you this is reaching down. Open source now is so great. It's growing so fast. It's continuing to thunder away. And with success, it's just getting better and better. In fact, we were talking last night about at some point we might not have to write code. Just glue it together. And that's why I think the supply chain and security thing is an issue. But this is why it's so great. Anyone can code and I think there's a lot of learning to have. So, I think we'll continue to do our job to extract the signal from the noise. So, thanks for the kickoff. Good commentary. Thank you. All right. >> Of course. >> Let's get started. Day one of three days of live coverage here at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon. I'm John Furrier with Lisa Martin, and Savannah Peterson. Be back with more coverage starting right now. (gentle upbeat music)